Café Littéraire

... what I want
it's for universal hunger
for universal thirst
the free revive finally
to produce close intimacy
the succulence of the fruits

- Présence Africaine (1947)

Café Littéraire AITP was born in Amsterdam under the auspices of our AITP Director Oumar Mbengue Atakosso.

Café Littéraire AITP is a 99-minute literary and arts program every month created by AITP and presented at rotating host locations in Amsterdam or elsewhere.

The Café Littéraire AITP will be broadcast live on the internet. The audience will find us on the Café Littéraire webpage and AITP social media channels.

Café Littéraire AITP is a program that focuses on Africa and her diaspora in the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania. All cultural fields are combined, such as literature, cinema, contemporary art, music, and theatre.

AITP nurtures her storytellers and raconteurs and invites them to inspire, challenge, inform, and
educate the public with their experiences and perspectives. AITP believes in the depth and power of literature and art as an essential contribution to the well being of people.

Each month, Café Littéraire AITP follows the literary news, books, urgent issues, current discusses, and new global concepts in Africa and her Diaspora by inviting a writer or an essayist, an anthropologist, a historian, and an artist, known or unknown, to talk about their work. AITP is not intrigued by the question of how writers write, but it also wants to know what makes them write.

AITP believes that society must be informed according to three principles of existence: the past to inform, the
present to interest, and the future to base its hope. The programs will be devoted to the literature and arts that have marked their time, their present and have placed great emphasis on the avant-garde.

Café Littéraire AITP will address many of the economic, political, intellectual, moral, artistic and social values of the peoples of Africa and the black minorities in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania.

AITP declares that Café Littéraire AITP is not under the obedience of any ideology, political party or form of activism. It wants to open itself up to all men of goodwill (white, yellow or black), and collaborate to define the contemporary spaces of an inclusive and universal civilization.

Synopsis

For at least a century, we have witnessed the birth of great African and Caribbean writers who have written in various forms, styles, and languages. Their works widely published in Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia, remain, despite everything, still too little known to the general public.

“Café Littétraire (AITP)“ is an in-situ project which vocation is to offer authors a wider space of expression, thus enabling a large number of spectators to discover men and women of letters, who are undeniably the pillars
of contemporary literature.

Café Littéraire is withal a multi-manifesto focused on culture. Culture in all its aspects and with connoisseurs, aesthetes and aesthetic to reach everything we can, with special attention to literature, music, and performing
Arts.

The interview is the heart of the program, an opportunity to get up close and personal with the main protagonists of our cultural scene.

A one-to-one conversation between a presenter and the women and men that pass through our set

All of those we have chosen to portray are living symbols of an expression rooted in universal values, which claims a stronger and more just humanity.

The abundance, the power and also the originality of their works come from this double vocation of a writer and, in one way or another, of political thinker, which goes beyond the simple linguistic and national dispute.

Faced with the major problems of our time: globalization, environment, awakening peoples to democracy, the quest for identity and massive emigration, these writers play their role of guardian and awakener.

Moi, le maitre de-langue,
Ma tache est d’éveiller mon peuple aux futurs flamboyants,
Ma joie de créer des images pour le nourrir, Ô lumières rythmées de la parole

Expressed by Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Senegalese president-poet.