This is an excerpt from an interview with Souleymane Bachir Diagne, a Senegalese philosopher who is currently Professor in the Department’s of Philosophy, French and Romance Languages at Columbia University in New York. The interview forms part of a larger project to “both archive and to think the present in relation to the lineages and genealogies of critical thought in and about Africa.” The immediate context is debates about the decolonization of knowledge in the South African academy where Pillay is based at the University of the Western Cape and where Fernandes was on a postdoctoral fellowship at the same university. The idea is to make connections to earlier, similar debates in the colonized world. Diagne was an ideal candidate to kick off the series, according to Pillay and Fernandes. Diagne has taught in his native country (at the famed Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar) and the United States and did his higher education in France. Diagne’s field of research includes history of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature.  His book Bergson postcolonial. L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (2011 Paris: Editions du CNRS) was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011.  In that same year he received the Edouard Glissant Prize. In the full interview, Diagne talks about his family history, his studies in France, debates amongst African philosophers over Marx and Marxism, Leopold Senghor and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), where Diagne had a front row seat to academic disputes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the excerpt below, Diagne revisits debates among African, including Muslim, philosophers over Karl Marx’s ideas about religion. The excerpt starts with Pillay asking Daigne about how he came to start the first Islamic philosophy course at Cheikh Anta Diop University. The full interview appears in the latest issue of Social Dynamics, which you can access here (for some, unfortunately, the full article will be behind a paywall)—Sean Jacobs.