"Black Africa is off to a bad start", warned René Dumont in 1962, when the "sun of independence" had just risen on the continent, determined to take its destiny in hand. Forty years later, badly started and never arrived, Africa is dying: 3.3 million victims in the war in Congo-Kinshasa, 800,000 Tutsi massacred during the genocide in Rwanda, 200,000 Hutus killed during their flight through ex-Zaire, 300,000 dead in Burundi, as many in Somalia, not to mention Sudan, Congo-Brazzaville, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d? Ivoire?
 Half of the continent is devastated by "flaying wars"; the other lives on between crisis and corruption, tribalism and anarchy. Illegal emigration, brain drain: the best are leaving. In many countries, civil servants accumulate months, even years, in arrears, hospitals are dying, schools closed. The state is collapsing. Only a few islets emerge in an ocean of misfortune. AIDS strikes everywhere, sweeps away the elites, reduces life expectancy from fifteen to twenty years.
 Why is Africa dying? After being martyred by the slave trade and subjugated by colonialism, Africa, handicapped in international trade, behind on all fronts, commits suicide. Its inhabitants, paralyzed by a present that has no future, lock themselves in an identity autism. Faced with globalization, they capitulate by postulating "the black man" irreducible to the universal.