The destiny you carry alone, and the one you carry together

# The destiny you carry alone, and the one you carry together

The previous series on this thread aimed to be complete. Seven episodes to verify, phrase by phrase, what a video attributed to Nietzsche on the art of romanticising one’s life, and to separate, with all the precision the German text allows, the embellishment that affirms from the flight that disguises itself as affirmation. I had arrived, I believe honestly, at a solid point of equilibrium: perspectivism, the poetics of existence, amor fati, all held up once cross-referenced with their exact sources, and the test that emerged from them — an interpretation that makes you more capable of acting versus an interpretation that serves to stop looking — remained usable.

A reader of this thread wrote me a remark that stopped me longer than I expected. He was not contesting anything about the reading of Nietzsche. He was asking something else: what if this question itself — that of how an individual must interpret their own destiny — already carried, before any answer is given, a hypothesis that is nothing like universal? He wanted me to confront this essay with African thinkers, with Congo-Brazzaville as a field of study rather than mere backdrop.

This is a good question, for the same reason as the one that opened the previous series. It does not seek to demolish what has been established. It seeks to know whether what has been established still holds once the starting point changes.

The entire Nietzschean construction of the previous seven episodes rests on a singular subject. It is I who interpret, I who choose my angle, I who want or refuse my destiny. The demon of aphorism 341, quoted at length in that series, addresses a solitary individual, alone in their room, in their most extreme solitude. Amor fati, as it appears in the two published texts that mention it, is a personal affair: I learn to see as beautiful what is necessary in things, writes Nietzsche, in the first person, a man who alone decides what he will want.

This is not a hidden flaw in Nietzsche’s philosophy. It is his assumed starting ground, that of a European modernity where the individual, detached from the religious and communal frameworks that previously told them what to want, finds themselves solely responsible for the meaning they give to their own life. Nietzsche writes explicitly, in several passages I had no need to cite in the previous series because they did not directly concern amor fati, that this destitution is the very condition of his era: the death of God, as he formulates it, leaves no one other than the individual to bear the weight of their own existence.

Yet there exist traditions of thought — documented, written, discussed by philosophers who themselves claim them — where this starting hypothesis, the individual alone facing their destiny, is not the starting point but already a conclusion to be justified. Traditions where the strength of a being, what makes them exist fully or grow weak, is not conceived independently of their bond to a lineage, to ancestors, to a living community. If these traditions are right to frame things this way, then the test proposed in episode 5 of the previous series, as solid as it is for an isolated individual, might miss something essential when applied to a destiny that has never belonged to a single person.

I want to name, before going further, the two ways of failing at this exercise, because they are equally tempting.

The first consists in summoning “African thought” as a homogeneous block of wisdom, which one would make speak in a few well-chosen quotations to give a Western text an additional veneer of depth. This approach has a precise historical precedent, which I will examine in detail in episode 3, and it has been criticised with deserved severity by African philosophers themselves, as early as the 1970s. I do not want to repeat this error, which means naming specific authors, with their dates, their nations, their disagreements among themselves, rather than smoothing over differences to obtain a more comfortable answer.

The second consists, conversely, in refusing any comparison, in the name of a prudence that, pushed too far, simply prevents thinking. Two philosophical traditions can be confronted without pretending they are identical, nor reducing them to ethnographic curiosities that one would not have the right to put in dialogue with a European philosophy. This is exactly what serious comparative philosophy has been doing for decades, and it is what I will try to do here, with no more excessive precaution than I applied to Nietzsche himself.

I did not choose this country for the exoticism of the detour. I chose it because I already have verified material: a previous series on this thread, devoted to patience and institutional clocks, relied partly on an essay a reader had sent me about the social fragility of the country. I chose it also because Congo-Brazzaville went through, in the 1990s, a collective collapse whose figures exist, are documented, and allow posing a concrete question rather than an academic hypothesis: what becomes of amor fati when the destiny in question is not the loss of a job, taken as an example in the previous series, but a civil war experienced by an entire country? And I chose it finally because a specific Congolese writer, whose biography I will verify in episode 5 rather than summarise from memory, lived through this period while writing, which gives this series a concrete literary object rather than a mere historical abstraction.

One could object that all this remains a dispute among specialists, with no consequence for someone simply trying to live their own existence better. I do not believe this is the case, and for a very concrete reason. The advice that circulates today under the word romanticise — film your daily life, choose your narrative — is addressed in practice to audiences very different from the one, European and individualist, in which Nietzsche was writing. It also reaches, through the same videos, through the same networks, young people in Africa, in Congo-Brazzaville as elsewhere, for whom the question of whether a destiny is affirmed alone or together is not an academic exercise but a lived experience, every day, in an extended family, a neighbourhood, a lineage whose name and sometimes debts one carries. Advice designed for an isolated individual, applied without adjustment to someone for whom strength itself, in Tempels’ sense, is conceived as a network, risks missing its target, or worse, placing on a single individual a burden that, within their own framework of thought, was never designed to be carried alone.

Episode 2 will take up, in condensed form, what the previous series established about Nietzsche, without redoing all the verification work already done, but placing it as solid ground for what follows. Episode 3 will pause on a methodological lesson, one that the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji addressed in 1976 to those who speak too quickly of “African philosophy” in the singular — a lesson I must apply to myself before continuing. Episode 4 will present what three specific authors — the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels, the Rwandan philosopher Alexis Kagame, and the Kongo researcher Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau — actually wrote about force, being, and time, with the nuances and disagreements that separate them. Episode 5 will present the case of Congo-Brazzaville, with its verified figures and its writer. Episode 6 will bring the Nietzschean test from the previous series into direct dialogue with what these African sources allow us to see that it could not see alone. Episode 7 will conclude, linking this series to the two that preceded it on this thread.

Open question: before reading on, ask yourself honestly — when you think about your own destiny, about what you have been through and what you make of it, do you think of it as something that belongs to you alone, or as something that also belongs, a little, to those who came before you?

Episode 2: what Nietzsche actually wrote about perspectivism, the poetics of life, and amor fati, summarised and condensed from the verification work already done on this thread

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

I am not going to redo here all the verification work already carried out on this thread. I am going to take up its result, condensed, because the rest of this series needs solid ground rather than a diluted reminder spread over several episodes.

The formula most often cited to summarise Nietzsche’s perspectivism — there are no facts, only interpretations — comes from his posthumous notebooks rather than from a book published during his lifetime, which takes nothing away from its coherence with what he actually published. In The Gay Science, published in 1882, Nietzsche challenges the idea that we have neutral access to a bare reality, independent of any point of view. Every perception starts from somewhere — a body, a history, needs — and that starting point necessarily colours what is perceived. This is not a relativism that would say everything is equal. It is the observation that no position allows us to judge an interpretation against a reality that would, itself, be available without any interpretation.

The fourth book of the same work, in aphorism 299, calls on us to become poets of our own existence, borrowing from artists their techniques of composition: changing angle, changing distance, choosing a framing. The object does not change in nature. What changes is the manner of looking at it. Nietzsche specifies explicitly, in this same passage, that it is an art that is learned, not a talent reserved to a few naturally optimistic natures, which immediately rules out any confusion with what would today be called toxic positivity, which denies the object rather than choosing an angle on it.

Amor fati appears at two published locations: The Gay Science, aphorism 276, where Nietzsche announces wanting to learn to see as beautiful what is necessary; Ecce Homo, written in 1888, where he makes it his formula for human greatness — wanting nothing other than what is. This concept bears specifically on the necessary — that is, on what has already happened and can no longer be retroactively changed. It says nothing about the attitude to adopt toward what remains to be decided. One can fully affirm one’s past and want, with the same intensity, to transform what continues to produce suffering in the present. The two are never contradictory, because they concern two different objects.

From these three elements, the previous series drew a workable criterion: an interpretation that makes you more capable of acting belongs to the creation of meaning; an interpretation that mainly serves to stop looking at what disturbs belongs to flight, whatever vocabulary it is dressed in. It is this foundation that I will now confront with a terrain it never had to cross during Nietzsche’s lifetime.

One thing strikes, once this summary is placed side by side rather than spread across four episodes as the first time: the subject of each of these three ideas is systematically singular. It is a man, alone in his room, who receives the visit of the demon of aphorism 341. It is an individual who learns to compose their life as an artist composes a canvas. It is a person who decides, alone, whether to want or not to want what has happened to them. Nietzsche does not ignore the existence of communities, peoples, traditions; he discusses them abundantly elsewhere in his work, often in fact criticising them as forces that level the individual. But on this precise point — who affirms destiny — the answer he gives never varies: it is always the same individual, alone before themselves. It is this starting point, not the content of his thought, that I will put to the test from episode 4.

Open question: in rereading this summary, is there, in your view, a moment in your own life where affirming your past would have been easier, or harder, if you had done so as a member of a family or community rather than as an isolated individual?

Episode 3: why I cannot simply summon “African thought” to answer Nietzsche, and what a Beninese philosopher wrote on this subject in 1976

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

There is an easy way to continue this series, which would consist of finding three or four proverbs, a concept that sounds good, and opposing them to Nietzsche as though they formed, together, a single, coherent African wisdom. This approach has a precise historical precedent, and it is worth knowing before continuing, because it shows exactly what not to do.

In 1945, the Belgian Franciscan missionary Placide Tempels published Bantu Philosophy, based on his pastoral experience in the Belgian Congo. His central thesis defines being, in the thought he attributes to Bantu peoples, not as a set of fixed attributes in the Western manner, but as a force — dynamic, capable of strengthening or weakening in contact with other forces, in a hierarchy running from the divine to the human, the animal, the mineral. A child’s force thus remains intimately linked to that of their parents and ancestors, and this force can grow or decline depending on the quality of this bond. This is not a poetic metaphor for him; it is presented as an ontology in its own right, a theory of what it means to exist.

The book had a paradoxical effect. For the first time with this scale, it took seriously the idea that there could be systematic thought among peoples whom colonial discourse reduced to an absence of philosophy. But it did so from the position of a white man, missionary of a European religious order, writing about colonised peoples without any of them having been given the voice to validate or contest what he attributed to them. Aimé Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism published in 1950, attacked this contradiction directly, with mordant irony: one would thus ask people to respect Bantu philosophy while continuing, in the same colonial movement, to pillage their lands and enslave their inhabitants.

The most systematic critique, however, came not from Césaire but from a philosopher trained in the strictest Western academic rigour, the Beninese Paulin Hountondji, in African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, published in 1976. His charge centres on a precise point, which must be quoted exactly rather than vaguely summarised: Tempels and those who followed his method would have, according to Hountondji, modified the very criteria of what counts as philosophy as soon as it concerned Africa, accepting to call philosophy what would have been classified, for any other region of the world, as myth, collective thought, or cultural trait. He coined the term ethnophilosophy, which he defined as ethnological research disguised as philosophical research.

His own definition of African philosophy, conversely, flatly excludes the idea of an anonymous collective wisdom: “A philosophy can be neither collective, nor simply oral, still less unconscious,” he writes in substance, before proposing that African philosophy designates the body of texts produced by Africans that their own authors qualify as philosophical — a personal, methodical, and reflexive enterprise, on the same footing as any philosophy elsewhere in the world.

I could tell myself this quarrel does not concern me, since I am not claiming to write a thesis in ethnophilosophy. But the risk Hountondji names is not specific to mid-twentieth-century missionaries. It watches for exactly the same thing in anyone who goes looking, today, for an African quotation, proverb, or concept to oppose to a European philosopher, without asking who is speaking, at what date, in what language, with what possible disagreement from other thinkers on the same continent. The previous series on this thread had already cited two proverbs, one Lingala, one Akan, to illustrate a Nietzschean test. I am not withdrawing them; they remained properly attributed to their language of origin. But I note, with this lesson in mind, that a proverb remains a collective and anonymous object — exactly the type of material Hountondji refuses to pass off as philosophy in the strong sense.

This is why the following episodes will not summon “Bantu thought” or “African wisdom” as blocs. They will name specific authors, with their dates of birth and death when known, their nation of origin, their possible disagreements among themselves, and the exact status of their texts, whether a work published during their lifetime, a university thesis, or a literary work. This is the same rigour I applied to Nietzsche in the previous series, distinguishing a notebook phrase from a published phrase. There is no reason to apply lesser rigour on the other side of the comparison.

One final clarification must be added before episode 4, because it prevents a frequent confusion. Alexis Kagame, whose thought I will present in the next episode, was Rwandan, and his philosophical categories are built from the Kinyarwanda language. Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, also presented in the next episode, was born in 1934 in the Central Kongo region, in what would become the Democratic Republic of Congo, and documents a cosmology specific to the Kikongo world. Congo-Brazzaville, which occupies the rest of this series, shares with this second zone the same cultural and linguistic area; an important part of its population, notably in Brazzaville itself and in the south of the country, belongs to the Kongo world in the broad sense. It does not, however, share the Kinyarwanda language of Rwanda. I will therefore cite Kagame as an example of philosophical systematisation built from a specific Bantu nation, without claiming that his categories transpose automatically to Congo-Brazzaville, and I will rely more directly on Fu-Kiau when it comes to speaking of the Congolese terrain proper. This is a nuance that a hasty presentation could have smoothed over, and it is exactly the kind of smoothing that this episode just refused to let pass.

Open question: do you believe, as Hountondji does, that a thought must be signed by a specific author to merit the name of philosophy, or do you believe that a collectively transmitted wisdom, without identifiable author, merits the same status?

Episode 4: what Tempels, Kagame, and Fu-Kiau actually wrote about force, being, and the circle of time, each named and dated separately

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

Three authors, three texts, three different statuses. I present them in this order because it is the order in which they respond to each other historically, each correcting or systematising what precedes it.

The starting point remains the 1945 book presented in the previous episode, despite the controversy surrounding it. Tempels advances that, in the framework he describes, a being is never isolated from those around it. A child’s force remains in constant connection with that of their parents, living or already deceased, and this force can grow or decline depending on the quality of this bond. This is not a poetic metaphor for him; it is presented as an ontology in its own right, a theory of what it means to exist. I keep this idea in reserve, without endorsing it wholesale since the text remains, as established in episode 3, that of an external observer, but noting that it was taken up, discussed, corrected by African philosophers themselves in the decades that followed, which gives it a posterity that a simple colonial projection would not have had.

The Rwandan philosopher Alexis Kagame, born in 1912, ordained Catholic priest in 1941, doctor in philosophy from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, devoted part of his work, notably Comparative Bantu Philosophy published in 1976, to systematising an ontology built from the Kinyarwanda language. He distinguishes four fundamental categories of being, designated by words that all share the root -ntu. Muntu designates the being endowed with consciousness and intelligence, the human, but also, depending on the readings, certain spirits. Kintu designates the being without its own consciousness, the thing, the animal, the plant. Hantu designates place and time, everything that pertains to space and duration. Kuntu designates modality, manner of being, a more abstract category that covers notions like beauty, justice, or laughter. A unifying principle, ntu, the root common to all these words, would express what Kagame conceives as a universal vital force traversing all the categories, in direct echo of Tempels.

What matters for this series is not the classification itself, but a detail that is easily missed if one reads too quickly. The muntu, the conscious being, is never defined by Kagame as an isolated substance. It is defined by its capacity to enter into relation with the other three categories, and in particular by its inscription in the hantu, the place and time shared with one’s lineage. An individual, in this framework, is never conceived outside the network of relations that connects them to those who came before and to those who live alongside them.

The third author, Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, born in 1934 in the Central Kongo region, documents in his work African Cosmology of the Bântu-Kôngo, published in 2001, a symbol that specialists call the Kongo cosmogram, or dikenga. It is a cross inscribed in a circle, representing the course of the sun: its rise, its zenith, its setting, its absence. These four moments correspond, in this cosmology, to the four stages of any existence: conception, birth, maturity, death, death not conceived as an end but as a passage toward a new cycle. Fu-Kiau insists that this schema applies, in his view, to everything living or thought: planets, plants, animals, persons, societies, ideas.

One must here mark a precise difference with the eternal return evoked by Nietzsche in aphorism 341, rather than confusing them through rhetorical ease. Nietzsche’s eternal return is the identical repetition of a single individual life, relived indefinitely in its minutest details, without any change being permitted. The circle of the dikenga is not an identical repetition of a single individual. It is a cycle that includes transformation, that links each existence to those that preceded it and to those that will follow it, and that has meaning only collectively, at the scale of a lineage or community, not only at the scale of an isolated consciousness wondering whether it would want to relive exactly its own life. The superficial resemblance — a time that is not simply a straight line toward guaranteed progress — must not obscure this fundamental difference.

There exists a point of contact between Kagame and Nietzsche that deserves to be signalled precisely, without exaggerating its scope. Kagame’s fourth category, kuntu, modality, manner of being, covers notions like beauty or laughter — that is, a form, a style, something that is added to the bare existence of a being without changing its substance. This is precisely the register in which Nietzsche speaks, in aphorism 299 of The Gay Science recalled in episode 2, of becoming poet of one’s own life: a question of framing, of style, of manner, applied to a material that remains itself unchanged. The two traditions, independently of each other, therefore isolate a proximate category — that of manner rather than content — as the place where a being’s freedom is played out.

The limit of this rapprochement must, however, be stated as clearly as the resemblance. In Nietzsche, this manner remains an individual affair, a style that each person forges for themselves. In Kagame, the kuntu never detaches from the other three categories — muntu, kintu, hantu — and in particular from the hantu, the place and time shared with the lineage. A manner of being, in this framework, is also judged by its capacity to inscribe itself in a collective continuity, not only by its individual originality. Style, in Nietzsche, distinguishes an individual from others. Kuntu, in Kagame, connects an individual to others. This is a fine divergence, but it already announces, at this very point of contact, the broader tension I will develop in episode 6.

Taken together, without confusing them or pretending they form a single system, these three authors sketch a common hypothesis that the Nietzschean framework never poses: the force of an individual, their very manner of existing fully or declining, cannot be conceived independently of their bond to a living lineage and to ancestors. To want one’s destiny, in this framework, can never be a purely individual operation, because destiny itself never belongs entirely to a single individual. It is this hypothesis that I will put to the test of a concrete case in the next episode, before returning, in episode 6, to what it actually changes about the test proposed by Nietzsche.

Open question: if your own force, in the sense Tempels and Kagame give it, depended partly on your bond to your family and to those who came before you — what would that change concretely in the way you get through a difficult trial?

Episode 5: Congo-Brazzaville as a field of trial, with its verified figures and a writer who lived through this history by writing it

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

Until now, this series has remained on the terrain of concepts. It is time to set it on concrete ground, with verified figures rather than approximate orders of magnitude, and with a man who lived through this history while writing it.

A first search for this episode turned up a toll of several hundred thousand dead for the 1997 war in Congo-Brazzaville. This figure is false, and it is worth saying why rather than correcting it silently. It belongs in fact to an entirely different conflict, that of the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, whose human toll, over several years and several countries involved, is indeed counted in millions of dead according to some estimates. Confounding the two countries, which share a name but have remained two distinct states since their respective independences, would produce an error of a gravity that no series on source rigour can afford. The figures that follow concern exclusively the Republic of Congo, capital Brazzaville.

A first civil war breaks out in July 1993 and lasts until 1994, opposing supporters of President Pascal Lissouba, Denis Sassou Nguesso, and Bernard Kolélas, against a backdrop of electoral tensions. It claims approximately two thousand dead and displaces nearly a hundred thousand people within the country.

A second war, more deadly, breaks out in June 1997 after partisan militias refuse to disarm. It sees the same camps face off, now organised into structured militias — the Zoulous on Lissouba’s side, the Cobras on Sassou Nguesso’s side, supported by a decisive Angolan military intervention in October 1997, the Ninjas on Kolélas’s side. Brazzaville falls on 14 October 1997. A humanitarian organisation present on the ground documented, in a report published in 2001, very high localised mortality rates — up to seven percent of the population of a commune in the Pool over a few months — as well as severe acute malnutrition affecting up to forty percent of children under five in certain zones in the summer of 1999, and more than thirteen hundred women treated for rapes in two hospitals in Brazzaville in the single period from May to December 1999. The global toll most often cited for the entirety of the 1997–1999 wars ranges from approximately fourteen thousand to twenty-five thousand dead, with more than two hundred thousand internally displaced persons — a figure that the organisations that established it themselves present as an estimate by cross-referencing rather than an exhaustive count, the exact scale of losses remaining, by their own admission, forever uncertain.

These figures, as terrible as they are, are not comparable in scale to those of the neighbouring conflict mentioned above. The wars of the DRC, involving multiple countries over several years, produced tolls counted in the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. The confusion between the two countries — which share a name but have been distinct states since their respective independences — would be an error of the kind that no serious series on source rigour can afford. The figures cited here concern exclusively the Republic of Congo.

A mortality report, however precise, says nothing of what happens once the weapons are laid down. An essay that a reader sent me on the social fabric of the country describes a society where the extended family, far from being a picturesque relic, functions as the primary safety net: housing, schooling, medical care, and even the beginnings of a professional career are often mediated through family connections. This is not a cultural observation; it is a structural description of how a society organises itself when the state cannot or will not provide the services its citizens need.

The writer Sony Labou Tansi was born in 1947 in Kimwaanza, in what was then the Belgian Congo, today the Democratic Republic of Congo. He moved to Brazzaville as a young man and spent most of his adult life there. His novel The Seven Solitudes of Léra Lonsi, published in 1979 under the title La Vie et demie, depicts a fictional African country under a grotesque and violent dictatorship. The book is not a testimonial: it is a work of fiction, written with the means of fiction — distortion, exaggeration, the surreal — to say something that testimonial cannot say.

In 1992, during the country’s first pluralist elections, Sony Labou Tansi was elected representative of the Makélélé neighbourhood of Brazzaville. This detail matters, because it means he carried, at the very moment he was composing some of his texts, a direct political responsibility toward the inhabitants of that neighbourhood. An isolated individual, in the Nietzschean sense, has to answer only to themselves on how they interpret their destiny. An elected representative does, by construction, to those who elected them. This dual position — writer and representative — illustrates in the most concrete way possible what the framework of Tempels and Kagame makes visible and what the Nietzschean framework alone would have left in shadow: there are situations where affirming one’s destiny and answering for the destiny of others become, literally, the same burden, carried by the same person, at the same time.

The novelist does not at any moment deny the violence of his subject. La Vie et demie hides nothing of the cruelty it describes. But it transforms it, by the means of fiction, into something that bare facts alone cannot produce: a narrative that belongs to the people who live it, not only to the author who writes it. This is exactly the movement that distinguishes a genuine literary work from a report or an editorial. The report informs. The editorial argues. The novel, at its best, gives back to those who recognise themselves in it a share of the meaning that history alone does not provide.

Open question: do you know, in your own family or national history, a collective event that has been told in contradictory ways depending on who was telling it? What did the difference in interpretation change?

Episode 6: what the Nietzschean test of flee or create becomes when confronted with a destiny that never belongs to a single person

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

It is time to bring the two frameworks set out in this series into direct contact, without forcing a harmony they do not naturally share. The confrontation will be honest only if it names both what holds and what does not.

The test proposed in episode 2, inherited from the previous series on Nietzsche, distinguishes an interpretation that makes you more capable of acting from one that mainly serves to stop looking. This criterion, applied to the concrete cases of Congo-Brazzaville presented in episode 5, reveals something the Nietzschean framework alone would not have shown: the force of a being, in the sense Tempels and Kagame give it, is not an abstract concept. It is something that can be measured, in a way, by the number of people a person carries with them when they act. Sony Labou Tansi did not write only for himself. He wrote for a neighbourhood, a city, a country that recognised itself in his words. His interpretations — of the dictatorship, of the violence, of the hope — were creative not because they made him feel better, but because they made a collective possible.

On this precise point, the two traditions, despite very different vocabularies and cosmologies, arrive at a common requirement: refuse both denial and resignation. Nietzsche refuses resignation when he asks whether an interpretation serves flight or creation. Tempels and Kagame refuse it when they insist that a being’s force is strengthened or weakened by the quality of its bonds. The two refuse denial when Nietzsche says one must look at what disturbs, and when Kagame says the muntu is defined by its relations, not by its isolation.

The divergence therefore does not concern the content of the test, but a question Nietzsche never explicitly asks: to whom does the interpretation belong once it is produced? For Nietzsche, the subject of interpretation is always the individual. For Kagame and Fu-Kiau, it is always the being-in-relation, the muntu inscribed in a hantu, a place and a time shared with a lineage. This is not a minor detail. It changes the very question the test is asked to answer.

This divergence has a direct practical consequence for the test itself. Asking an isolated individual whether an interpretation makes them more capable of acting yields a clear answer. Asking the same question of a person whose force, in Tempels’ sense, depends on their bonds to others yields a more complex one: does this interpretation make not only me, but also those to whom I am connected, more capable of acting? This is not the same test. It is the same test with an added dimension, one that the Nietzschean framework did not need because its subject was always singular.

One might object that I am forcing a comparison that has no reason to be, that Nietzsche spoke of individuals and that the Bantu tradition speaks of communities, and that the two are simply addressing different problems. This is true as far as it goes, but it misses the point. The videos that circulate today under the word romanticise do not address Nietzsche’s solitary European individual. They address young people in Brazzaville, in Kinshasa, in Lagos, in Dakar, for whom the question of who carries the interpretation is not theoretical: it is the difference between a solution that works alone and one that works because others carry it too.

It is worth returning for a moment to a detail of episode 5 that directly illuminates this question of belonging. Sony Labou Tansi was not only a writer. He was a deputy, elected by a neighbourhood, responsible for its inhabitants. An isolated individual, in the Nietzschean sense, has to answer only to themselves on how they interpret their destiny. An elected representative does, by construction, to those who elected them. This dual position illustrates in the most concrete way possible what the framework of Tempels and Kagame makes visible and what the Nietzschean framework alone would have left in shadow: there are situations where affirming one’s destiny and answering for the destiny of others become, literally, the same burden.

The verdict is therefore neither a fusion of the two traditions into one, nor a rejection of one in favour of the other. It is an enriched test, which retains the Nietzschean criterion — an interpretation that makes you more capable of acting rather than one that serves to flee — but adds a question the Nietzschean framework alone never asked: in whose name is this interpretation produced, and to whom does it belong once formulated?

Open question: thinking back to a difficulty you have been through, would you say that the narrative you made of it belonged entirely to you, or that it also belonged, a little, to your family, your community, those who went through the same thing as you?

Episode 7, the final episode: what this changes concretely, and what these three series, taken together, have tried to build

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

Six episodes to get here, and a starting question that, I believe, now deserves a more structured answer than I could have given in episode 1.

The test inherited from Nietzsche — an interpretation that makes you more capable of acting versus one that serves to flee — remains, at the end of this series, the most directly usable tool, exactly as the previous series had already established. Nothing in the texts of Tempels, Kagame, or Fu-Kiau contradicts it. What this series adds is not a new test to replace the first; it is a question that must now accompany it: this destiny I choose to affirm — does it belong entirely to me, or does it also belong to those who came before me and to those who live alongside me?

This question changes concretely the way the test is practised in daily life. Facing a strictly personal trial, it changes almost nothing; the individual remains the sole judge of what makes them more capable of acting. But facing a collective trial — a family history marked by rupture, a country marked by a war like the one described in episode 5 — it forbids stopping at the sole question of whether a narrative helps me, personally, continue. It obliges asking whether this narrative can also become that of other people concerned by the same history, which is exactly what Sony Labou Tansi’s work achieves: a personal, signed narrative that nonetheless becomes an object an entire country can recognise as its own.

I do not claim to have settled the matter between Nietzsche and the Bantu tradition in the sense that one would be right against the other. This was not, moreover, the object of this series, and such a pretension would have betrayed the methodological lesson set out in episode 3: neither Nietzsche, nor Tempels, nor Kagame, nor Fu-Kiau speak in the name of a universal truth that would render the other position simply false. What I have tried to do, more modestly, is to show that two philosophical traditions, born in radically different historical contexts, arrive at a common requirement — refuse both denial and resignation — while diverging on a question that one poses and the other almost never does: to whom belongs the destiny one affirms.

This series closes, on this thread, an ensemble begun several weeks ago. The first asked whether time that passes always works in our favour, and concluded that patience alone is not enough where the mechanisms that reward it are absent — a finding already posed, in that same series, from the Congolese case. The second asked whether giving meaning to what one goes through amounts to lying to oneself, and concluded that it does not, provided that meaning restores the capacity to act rather than dulling it. This one asks to whom belongs the meaning one gives oneself, and answers that it never belongs as purely to a single individual as Western philosophy, since Nietzsche, has sometimes tended to suppose.

Taken together, these three series sketch a position that seems to me tenable, without being comfortable. Time alone is not enough; mechanisms are needed to reward it. Affirming one’s destiny is not enough either if it serves to stop changing what remains modifiable. And this affirmation itself, once practised honestly, cannot always be conceived as a strictly personal affair, because those who came before us and those who go through the same history as us carry, whether we want it or not, a share of it.

I am not certain I have fully answered the question that reader put to me at the beginning of this series. I am certain, however, that I learned something by taking it seriously rather than treating it as a circumstantial addendum: that the solitude of the Nietzschean subject, far from being a philosophical given, is itself a historical choice, situated, which has every right to be confronted with other choices, equally situated, equally serious, and that neither position should claim to have the last word over the other.

Open question, to close this series: between carrying the meaning of what you go through alone and carrying it with others, which of the two seems today closest to your own way of living?

Moïse Bienheureux Selph · Algiers, September 2026

Main sources of the series: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), fourth book, aphorisms 276, 299, and 341; Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (written 1888, published posthumously), “Why I Am So Wise,” §10; Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy (1945); Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950); Paulin J. Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1976); Alexis Kagame, La Philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’être (1956) and Comparative Bantu Philosophy (1976); Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, African Cosmology of the Bântu-Kôngo (2001); on Congo-Brazzaville: tolls of the 1993–1994 and 1997–1999 civil wars (historical sources and field humanitarian organisation reports, including a 2001 report on mortality and violence documented in the Pool region); biography of Sony Labou Tansi (1947–1995), Congolese novelist and playwright, deputy of Makélélé elected in 1992, author notably of La Vie et demie (1979). This series relies on a direct and cross-checked reading of available sources rather than a single summary, in the methodological continuity of the two series that preceded it on this thread.