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PLENARY MEETINGS
Adama SAMASSÉKOU,
President, MAAYA Network;
President of the International Council
for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies
(Bamako, Mali)
Developing Institutional and Legal Instruments
to Support Multilingualism Worldwide
The international context is currently characterized by the globalization
of markets, which leads to losing the connection with the Other, the non
acceptance of the Other, with more and more exclusion and violence in the
relation to the Other.
The world crisis today which, far from being financial or economic, is rather a
societal one, a values crisis, leads to the fall of the economic model and system
linked to a profit making culture, the culture of consumption and gain.
Our world basically needs more humanness. Our world needs to develop another
culture, the one of human being that is able to guarantee more humanness in
people’s relations and less mercantilism! There is a saying in Mali: Mogotigiya
ka fisa nin fentigiya ye! (“Human relations are more valuable than money”).
We find the same in the Russian tradition: Не имей сто рублей, а имей сто
друзей! (“Better to have 100 friends than 100 roubles!”)
That’s why there is an urgent need to preserve and promote world cultures that
put human being in the centre of their concerns, to promote those societies
characterised by a vision of the world based on the permanent search of harmony
between human beings and nature, and friendly relations as the cornerstone
of our human existence. That’s what we mean when we refer to linguistic and
cultural diversity: we confront the rampant process of uniformizing cultures,
the development of global common thinking and utopian monolingualism. As a
matter of fact, linguistic diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is
for nature: it is the breath that guarantees its vitality. Nature without biodiversity
is nothing more than a nature morte and to suppress the diversity of the society
is the same as to create soulless robots. ‘The beauty of a carpet lies in its different
colours”, said Amadou Hampâté Bâ, a philosopher, writer and wise man.
Dear friends, this advocacy for diversity is well known; even more, being
militants for social transformation you know quite well that multilingualism
is to culture what multilateralism is to politics: the frame that guarantees an
equitable relation to others and the equilibrium of powers. Our purpose here is
not to convince those present, but rather to turn from advocacy to action, that
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