Fesman - Général

Général

BCA RSS Syndicator

Fesman2009

Capturing the spirit of the Nobel Prize
nobelMartin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela...What unites them is not only their skin color but also the message they wanted to convey to the world: peace. The Nobel Prizes granted to numerous black personnalities are a positive response from others to this call for peace.

“I have a dream” pronounced Martin Luther King, in his speech in 1963, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. One year later, his “dream” to have a peaceful world without racial segregation was rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Peace. Several black personalities who had the same dream at different periods of history, Albert John Luthuli in 1960, Desmond Mpilo Tutu in 1984, Nelson Mandela in 1993 and Wangari Muta Maathai in 2004, were finally able to make it real. The Nobel Prizes awarded to them were nothing else than a symbolic concretization of their huge success and passion for peace.

Their literature reinforced this passion even more: surely, the desire for a better world without apartheid, racism, ethnical discrimination and inequalities could not be expressed better than in the novels of Toni Morrison, the first black woman to earn the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993.

Homage to Aimé Césaire, the eminent pacifist without a reward, whose contribution to peace is anyway inestimable. In fact, Césaire did not need the Nobel Prize in order to convey his message for which the following verses seem more than enough: “I speak and I deliver Africa to herself, I speak and I deliver Africa to the world. I speak and, in attack to their basic oppression and slavery, I make possible, for the first time possible, fraternity”.

During one of the great nights of the OFF, FESMAN will pay homage to these exceptionnal personnalities, Nobel Prize winners, politicians, intellectuals, writers or philosophers who, by their reflexions, involvements, actions and writings, contibuted to the vitality and diffusion of a sort of “black thinking”. This gala night organised in the Daniel Sorano Theatre or the Meridien Hotel will allow to these men and women of conviction, whose contribution to universal culture is undeniable, to raise their views.