African Meditations is a book of aphorisms and wisdoms. A series of brief and concise forms that invites us to read and think about the world from Africa. Near the river of Saint-Louis in Senegal, a being thinks slowly along the water. It is to this exercise of meditation that Felwine Sarr invites us.

The flowering of a tree is sustained by the constancy of the trunk, the gushing of a torrent by that of the rock. We are not only useful where we feel best, that would be to reduce our potentialities to our tastes; to open all one's arms is what all (self) discipline allows.

"Felwine Sarr offers us here thoughts that are "for himself" and therefore for any man "to whom nothing human is foreign". They have no fixed form, presenting themselves sometimes as a narrative, sometimes as the rapid drawing of a character (an "archetype", says Felwine, of a tasty portrait that he sketches with the caustic humor of a La Bruyère), most often as an aphorism, a concentrate of meaning, which asks the reader to stop, to recite these sentences to himself (they are, from time to time, real promises of poems), to open them slowly to make them unfold like petals the meanings with which they are rich. To make them come back again and again to the mind. In a word: to ruminate on them. It is again Nietzsche who teaches us that meditation requires learning first from the cows of this supreme art which is that of rumination."