The African Personality-Two Views The Importance of Being Black

...If there is any Negroness in it—as there is bound to be if my tone is not false—why should I get excited about it and formulate philosophic statements about the fact...

...THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING BLACK By Ezekiel Mphahlele IT WAS THE discussions on art, social thought, African culture and negritude that I found most absorbing at the third annual conference of the American Society of African Culture, recently held at the University of Pennsylvania...

...Some thought it was vital for a Negro to visit Africa and resuscitate his roots there...

...Although Langston Hughes, the most distinguished Negro writer, exulted in his African ancestry during his literary apprenticeship, his faddism has now been replaced by a healthy and humanitarian sympathy for the African's plight...

...Richard Wright simply could not get across to Africans when he was in Ghana that he found no common ground where he had expected to...

...The paper records the opinions of five Negro writers about their roots...

...Has this no intensity...

...Although this is a commonplace, it should serve as a reminder to the apostles of negritude that they would be more profitably occupied if, in addition to preserving African art, they tried to assist the African artist to negotiate his present dilemma—to help unearth the great amount of potential creative talent in the various arts cooped up in hostile racialist communities and bring it to a larger world audience...

...I had run full-tilt into argument about this last year when I met the Presence Africaine group of French-speaking Africans in Paris...

...Sam Allen, a poet who writes under the name of Paul Vessey, led the discussion...

...Ralph Ellison, the author of The Invisible Man, felt no emotional attachment to Africa: "It is just a part of the bigger world...

...That most insolent and near-fascist South African poet, Roy Campbell, in reasserting his African origin, could say: "My task demands a virgin muse to string / A lyre of savage thunder as I sing...

...These must exercise a tremendous influence on my art...

...Against this concept were Richard Wright...

...Others thought they couldn't share a common medium of expression with Africa...

...Playwright Lorraine Hansberry felt at best an intellectual attachment to Africa and was content with that and a humanitarian attitude toward its peoples...

...He traced the line of argument from Cesaire's negritude which "plunges into the burning flesh of the sky . . . pierces the opaque prostration by its upright patience," through Alioune Diop's idea of negritude as a complete ensemble of values of African culture and the "vindication of the dignity of persons of African descent," and on to Leopold Sedar Senghor's assertion that "the psychic traits of the Negro African are his heightened sensibility and his strong emotional quality" which stem from his ''tropical experience" and the "agricultural nature of his existence...

...If my writing displays an intensity of feeling and therefore of style (Senghor says negritude has less to do with the theme than style), why should I imagine that I have a monopoly over such a trait simply because I am black—even granted that I am much more demonstrative and theatrical than the white man...

...Indians and colored people all my life in South Africa...

...Again, I am a product of cultural cross-impacts, having lived with whites...

...And the American Negro's position in relation to this...

...English-speaking Africans in colonial or ex-colonial situations don't find in negritude something to rave about either...

...The participants in the art discussions were themselves artists: Selby I EZEKIEL MPHAHLELE, a South African writer now living in Nigeria, is the author of Down Second Avenue...

...Five Writers and Their Ancestors," presented by Brown, who himself cannot see negritude helping him out of his dilemma as an artist...

...He is caught between two types of commitment: social, political and economic integration in American society, and the distinctiveness of his cultural contribution, which he does not want to see absorbed by the total mainstream...

...Mvusi, a painter from South Africa, Ben Enwonwu, a sculptor from Nigeria, and 10 American Negro artists...

...Some rea-firmed their love for Africans, so embarrassing to us Africans...

...Are not the moorings of all people of African descent to be found, after all, in Cesaire's negritude...

...Imagine a Chinaman waking up one morning and shouting in the streets that he has discovered something Chinese in his carving or painting or music...

...he took refuge in the brutal fact that this sense of being alien is a general American experience...

...They had taken their cue from Aime Cesaire, the Martinique Negro poet who had first conceived of negritude in relation to poetry...

...This turned out to be the nagging question for the Negro man of culture...

...In his paper, "The Idiom in African Art," Professor J. Newton Hill said: "An artist, by the simple relationship which he bears to the persons and things all about him, can seldom speak absolutely for himself —as if a being in isolation...

...Peter Abrahams and George Lamming, who held that politics and intense rebelliousness as a response to oppression and the West's rejection of black people are the only platform on which Negro traits can be said to have anything in common...

...The other subjects —politics, economics, education— tended to be presented by persons not directly involved in the sweep of events...

...Even though they are Westernized, and some of them are Christianized, there are no roots to recover, as in the case of assimilated French-speaking Africans...

...To writers and artists in multiracial communities like South Africa, of course, negritude is just so much intellectual and philosophic talk...

...The discussion which revealed to me a problem I had hitherto never dreamt of (at least in an American context) was the one on negritude— the Negroness of self-expression, or the importance of being black...

...It was interesting to read Harold Isaac's brilliant paper...

...As Stirling Brown, a poet, put it: "We want to be integrated but not to be assimilated...

...What's so extraordinary about our African traits that there need be a slogan or battle cry about them...

...Novelist James Baldwin felt much more poignantly —after 10 years' self-imposed exile in France—a very local commitment to help his people in the United States, as a "native son...