Sounds of the Trumpet

...East Africa is something else again...

...O Mother of the Great High Priest...

...made a passionate flight from their ancestral heritage smack into the middle of the 20th century, where now they fill the air with trumpet sounds...

...It has no "old great literature" except what it learned from the Arabs through oral tradition...

...against the crass stupidities that breed hatred, fear and inhumanity...

...This is enough...

...For, as Rabemanjara laments, their white. . . brothers Have grown deaf, insensible even to the smell of powder, to the fury of the thunder...

...In a rabbit warren of a Mombasa house Miss Rutherfoord found an aged "blind African musician sitting on the floor of a narrow room, all shuttered and dark, an Egyptian guitar slung across his knees...

...So, very near the end, I come back to the beginning to say again that the sounds of the trumpet are one sound and it is the sound of freedom...

...and "The Story of a Memba Slave Boy...

...Though the young writers represented in African Voices are not a happy company, they are a passionate one...

...What she did do, whether or not by deliberate choice, was select the best work of the foremost Malagasy poets—Rabemanjara, Ranaivo and Rabearivelo—who, inspired by the unweaned imagism of the French symbolists (Rimbaud, Verlaine, et...

...It is not strange that the selections representing Ethiopia in African Voices are pithy moral fables and proverbs that wise Solomon might have taught to Sheba, and soaring hymns of praise from a language eons older than the Greek: "It is not gold and silver I offer unto thee, nor the brilliant pearl, but beautiful praise and the pure glorification which can be offered to thee and thy Majesty, O Queen...

...But, on the quite proper assumption that ritual is for the anthropologists, she did not include them...

...There was much in it of glory...

...Can Themba, the Cape Coloured journalist, is as right as the time of day when in the foreword to African Voices he begins, "This is us," and then goes on to make certain gross distinctions: the "flamboyant" West Africans...

...The Cunning of Suud," by Mbarak Ali Hinawy...

...The Malagasy, however, are neither East Africans nor Arabs, and if Miss Rutherfoord had included in her anthology some of the island's old ritual songs, the distinction would be there for all to see...

...Peggy Ruther-foord's careful choice and careful arrangement of the pieces in the anthology not only make the points of distinction clear, but sharpen the contrast between the (old) traditional and the (new) modern...

...Reading the headnotes in no way spoils the pleasure or lessens the pain or dulls the wit of the tales, the poems, the fables and the apothegms that follow: It only unclouds the fact that the pieces which show up the variety of Africa's peoples are from another and much older time—time in some instances antedating Christ...

...Yet in the minds of many and perhaps of most people Africa, like "Dixie," spins off a picture reel of stereotypes...

...But Kwame Nkrumah sums up the spirit—though not the substance—of the literature of modern Africa (and at the same time suggests the organizing principle Miss Rutherfoord used in editing this important collection) : "Thus may we take pride in the name of Ghana, not out of romanticism, but as an inspiration for the future...

...lovely, lovely bird—bright eyes and crested head...

...It is right and proper that we should know about our past...

...Four of the seven selections in the East Africa section were written by or about Mohammedans—"The Story of Liongo" and "The Monkey Who Left His Heart in a Tree," by Hamisi Wa Kayi...

...If some of the pieces from West Africa's pre-colonial days have a familiar sound to American ears it is because West Africa was the ancestral home of Uncle Remus...

...But if Miss Rutherfoord's fine diligence is really to count, the reader himself must be careful...

...But the legends, myths and folkstuff of older Malagasy poets and storytellers would satisfy them no better, for these works are generally indistinguishable from the old Arabian literature of East Africa, off whose coast the island of Madagascar lies...

...Aesopian time...

...the "strong Arab" cast of mind (and he might have added features) of East Africans...

...As for the rest, one is a Swahili saying ("Much silence has a mighty noise") and the other is a brace of bird songs of such an unsophisticated quality of style, imagery and substance as to seem the delightfully spontaneous outpourings of a child...

...The subjects these stories give crude form to are either paltry or stale, or both...

...It was Arabian...

...Let academic prerogative tempt me to the utmost, I refuse to do more than mention the Ashanti and the Whydahs, the Yoruba and the Hausa, the Ibo, the Bamfumungu...

...Our battles shall be against the old ideas that keep men trammelled in their own greed...

...Nor need we be ashamed of our past...

...They have understood nothing in the tumult of the massacre, in the glowing of the fires...

...anonymous...

...They speak, as D. C. Themba does in "Mob Passion," of the present to the present...

...Not purple robes of honour I offer thee, nor cloths of silk brocade adorned with divers colours: I lay out my soul in place of glorious apparel decorated with gold, and to thee I declare my sin...

...The accents, the forms, the emotional substance of these Ethiopian selections are very different from those of West Africa, where reality is a mystical absolute of ju-ju, spirits, witch doctors and vodunsi, from which, nevertheless, wry humor grins, and sly satire pricks, and grave wisdom becks, and—often—a great violence of passion breaks to "the frenzied rhythm of the tom-tom . . . careless of the morrow...

...They run, these young ones, to politics and race nationalism and race pride...

...Jomo Kenyatta is among them too, and the poet-politician Leopold Sedar Senghor, and the civil servant-novelist Amos Tutuola...

...and as Peter Abrahams does in the epilogue—a short section from his superb book Tell Freedom, which he points up with a quotation from Isaiah: "And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off...

...Folly has galloped whinneying from the entrails of the abyss to the rent summit of space and sky...

...They are tribal peoples, yes...

...Though in this uncertain present they speak with one strident voice, this was not always true and, if the kindlier of man's fates are willing, it will not he true in a settled future...

...Harder than granite their hearts drunk with carnage and death...

...and in themselves, I dare say, variable as people anywhere...

...English and Arab influences meet, with a cultural result still undecided, but with a political result hopefully forecast in Jomo Kenyatta's wry, ironic and admonitory tale of usurpation and revenge, "The Gentlemen of the Jungle...

...Reviewed by Saunders Redding Author, "The Lonesome Road," "They Came in Chains" AFRICA IS A continent, not a country...

...Yet from the four points of the horizon arise the sounds of a trumpet...

...More various than the peoples of 18th-century Europe, the peoples of Africa have their ancient, sacred and separate identities...

...Indeed, it is too much, for though Themba is right, his foreword is gratuitous—except for those who can content themselves with reading only prefatory matter...

...The heroes of our future will be those who can lead our people out of the stifling fog of disintegration through serfdom, into the valley of light where purpose, endeavour and determination will create that brotherhood . . . about which so much is said, but so little done...

...There are many Africas...

...In East Africa...

...Miss Rutherfoord says it with scholarly reserve, but it should be said boldly that that Lokman, the fabulist mentioned in the Koran, was an Ethiopian who became "Aithiops" (Aesop) in Greece when he reached that place and poured his stories into Samian ears...

...Gracefully darting and skimming, what time the rivers are brim-m ing...

...the "grumpy, grousing" blacks of South Africa...

...Nothing from the rest of Africa has quite the composite of mirth, mysticism and rationalism of the story called "Truth and Falsehood," which Birago Diop surely must have adapted from an old Senegalese folk tale...

...Plover, my lover, how lightly you hover The water over...

...Clearing his throat after a pause, he broke into "a good English sea-shanty, 'Blow the Man Down,' filling the air in broken English...

...Nothing from the other peoples of Africa is quite comparable to the amusing irony of the Ashanti "Talk," or the folk-myth substance of "My First Wedding Day in the Bush of Ghosts," or the practical social wisdom of the old and gruesome story of "The Talking Skull...

...The Madagascan poets, who are all young and who are sophisticated because they are voung, would certainlv find this "pretty and pale...

...The words of his song had been many years on the lips of the tall Swahili people," but the song was not theirs and it was not African...

...for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter...

...The singer had been Court Musician to the Sultan of Zanzibar...

...but sundry...

...Kwaca—Uhuru—Mayibuye— Ablode: There are many words for it in Africa and, judging from the contents of this anthology, a growing number of writers, poets and patriots to utter them...

...All night I lie awake till the dawn comes red, Thinking of your white wings, beloved, O Plover...

...the Balunda and the Kru...

...He must be careful, first of all, to admit his ignorance on the subject of African literature, and then if he's substantially to modify this ignorance he must be especially careful to read the editor's headnotes—"About 'The Story of Liongo,' Edward Steere, that great Bishop of Central Africa writes . . . 'No one has any clear notion how long ago . . . ' " and so on...

...What our ancestors achieved in the context of their contemporary society gives us confidence that we can create, out of that past, a glorious future...