The Black Furrow

The birth of the Sillon Noir movement, on Mission Sunday in 1970, echoes the Message of Pope Paul VI in Kampala, a year earlier: “You Africans are now your own missionaries”. The movement was conceived, from the outset, as a challenge addressed to all African Christians to assume their responsibilities vis-à-vis the culture of their ancestors by making it part of the heritage of Christ. The first to be challenged were the sages, for the most part converted from the Vodun cult, who did not think that in their cultural traditions there could still be found elements compatible with the Gospel message. Since then, these sages have been resolutely engaged in consistent research on all of their cultural traditions.

The missionary dynamic of the Church in Benin has sought, from the outset, to unite the proclamation of the Gospel, the work of culture and the promotion of the human person. Thus, the “Mewihwendo” movement has also been committed, since its birth, to the broad vision of culture carried by the root of the Fon word “Hwendo” (furrow of the fields, culture, worship).
 
Thus, the sages of tradition, who joined the movement, invested themselves on the three fronts of culture:
- in a systematic anthropological research on their ancestral culture of which they brought the results each week for a pooling, confrontation, methodological discussion and analysis;
- alongside their Bishop, in the work of the diocesan farm of Agbon (north of the Diocese), and in training within the many centers for the promotion of women created by the Father of the Diocese;
- as catechists, choristers and parish leaders.

The assumption of the cultural heritage for the inculturation and the integral development of the human person having no future except by becoming intergenerational and intercultural, a group of young students from the National University of Benin has, in 1980 , joined the group of wise men to go to their school and carry out this great missionary project together with them. These young people took the name “ANA” (in the local Fon language), which in French means “Bridge”. They conceived of their mission as that of building bridges: a bridge between tradition and modernity, a bridge between African cultures (they were indeed from various local cultures), a bridge between Africa and the West as well as with other cultures.

Students in various scientific disciplines, they very early on developed an interdisciplinary research protocol. This protocol was inspired by the way the sages worked in an oral regime: cultural works were created and cultural memory managed in a community way. This form of traditional intellectuality has been studied and formalized under the term “community intellectuality”. The wise “community intellectual” is the one who carries culture and cultural innovations with his peers.

Having found themselves in Paris in the 1985-1990 for their doctoral theses, the young members of ANA joined by other African students matured the project not to make their African countries "Latin Quarters" (c was the name that Emmanuel Mounier gave to Dahomey in reference to the "quality" of its intellectual elites), but of the "Districts of the Community Intellectual".

This is how, when they returned to Benin, at the critical moment of the end of the Marxist regime and the advent of the democratic process in Africa, the first members of ANA, with the representatives of the various components of the Mewihwendo, created in 1990 in Cotonou the first Center "Quartier de l'Intellectuel Communautaire"  (Centre Q.I.C.) and its legal sponsor: Association "Quartier de l'Intellectuel Communautaire".