The African Personality-Two Views The Aspirations of 'Negritude'
COOK, MERCER
The African Personality—Two Views THE ASPIRATIONS OF 'NEGRITUDE' By Mercer Cook THE DEATH OF Rene Maran, on May 9, 1960, 39 years after his Batouala was awarded the Goncourt Prize, marked the...
...A high official in Guinea grudgingly admits the beauty of his compatriot's L'Enjant noir, but regrets that it is not "un livre de combat...
...Thanks to Presence Africaine, a theory, an organization and a publishing house have been developed...
...The African Personality—Two Views THE ASPIRATIONS OF 'NEGRITUDE' By Mercer Cook THE DEATH OF Rene Maran, on May 9, 1960, 39 years after his Batouala was awarded the Goncourt Prize, marked the end of what may justifiably be called the first chapter of the French African novel...
...Le Regard du roi...
...I hesitate to believe this, but when I see certain white chests covered with black hair, something inside me whispers: 'Maybe they're right.' " Still another example is the recently published novel...
...A partial list of those published in France includes: Mongo Beti (Cameroons) : Le pauvre Christ de Bomba...
...Both the artistic and utilitarian preoccupations of the new African writing are implicit in the two preceding quotations...
...Un Negre a Paris...
...Ousmane Soce Diop (Senegal) : Karim...
...Ake Loba (Ivory Coast) : Kocoumbo, l'etudiant noir...
...The same attitude can be seen in Dadie's humorous but penetrating portrait of the Parisian, Un Negre a Paris (1959...
...Working from the premises of such continuity, intellectuals of Africa and African descent will have to make a long, a very severe backward glance, to go in pursuit of the past, at once in an attitude of objectivity and faith...
...Compare this with a statement in Mongo Beti's Mission terminee (1957) : "By its use of the big stick, one colonial system is just like every other...
...Camara Laye (Guinea) : L'Enfant noir...
...Analyzed in essays by Jean-Paul Sartre and others, quoted and translated in magazines, collected in anthologies, their verse has, for various reasons, been more fully explored and exploited than novels by French-speaking Africans...
...Both Hazoume and Senghor have long been associated with Presence Africaine, a magazine which has become a focal point for French Negro authors...
...We may be right, but it is entirely an act of faith which allows us to assert that there is a philosophic continuity in this enormous diversity of peoples separated by distance, language and even custom...
...Maran's impact, both personal and indirect, was felt by several generations of aspiring Negro writers, some of whom—such as Leopold Sedar Senghor (Senegal), Aime Cesaire (Martinique) and L. G. Damas MERCER COOK, former professor of romance languages at Howard University, is an editor of Presence Africaine...
...On the other hand, many of the later writers would endorse Hazoume's warning that certain African traditions should be respected and the good qualities of the black man recognized: "If it [the Dahomean people] has no material wealth to offer, it possesses, despite its seeming barbarity and intellectual barrenness, treasures of soul and mind that its ancestors have accumulated down through the ages: comprehension, the desire for progress, respect for authority and for discipline, keen interest in social welfare, family unity, courage, personal dignity, loyalty in friendship, great honesty, a sense of justice, and deep religious feeling...
...Determined to transcend ideological differences, Alioune Diop included all shades of political opinion—from Catholic priest to extreme leftist— among his patrons and co-workers...
...If the proponents of nigritude are correct, the Negro writer will reflect it, consciously or unconsciously...
...Ferdinand Oyono (Cameroons) : Une Vie de boy...
...This is particularly true of the novel, where the artistry and objectivity of Rene Maran have remained unsurpassed...
...Bernard Dadie (Ivory Coast): Climbie...
...Le Roi miracule...
...Don't act like a monkey!' In other words, don't ape our ancestor, the monkey...
...With Batouala, Le Livre de la brousse, Un Homme pareil aux autres and other volumes, he blazed a new trail, proving that a Negro could write objectively, artistically and successfully about Africa...
...They are so convinced of this simian background, but at the same time so proud of the progress realized, that they quickly tell you: 'Oh...
...Mongo Beti and Bernard Dadie...
...One of the most revealing parts of the book is the description of life in the African Student Center...
...The original source of this African vision may continue to elude us...
...The commission recognized that one of the greatest obstacles facing the African author is that he "is most often cut off from his authentic audience by the use of a language generally inaccessible to...
...Nigritude also presupposes a certain unity between Negroes all over the world...
...Sembene Ousmane (Senegal) : Docker noir...
...Even the aspiring African dramatist is admonished that "the first immediate preoccupation of a modern Negro-African theatre is to participate in the struggle for the emancipation of Black Africa...
...Among its recommendations this commission urged: a campaign to eradicate illiteracy...
...Thanks to Maran, a start has been made...
...translation into African languages of representative works by Negro authors...
...show him the respect to which his age entitles him...
...in establishing peace, freedom and humanity in Dahomey...
...If I may mangle my metaphor, this would almost seem like putting the halo on the other foot but for the fact that Senghor and Hazoume are arguing for something much more human...
...Despite these pressures—to which we should add Moscow's readiness to publish their works in translation and the popularity of Marxism among various young French-speaking Africans in Paris—these novelists have for the most part avoided the temptation to turn out political tracts...
...Mission terminee...
...Denouncing the abuses of colonialism without exaggerating the virtues of his colonized brothers, he furnished the observant reader as early as 1921 with irrefutable evidence of the need for reform which has now culminated in the independence of the former French West and Equatorial Africa...
...Most of his fellow African students are less fortunate and succumb to the various temptations of the big city...
...The note of protest is there, and rightfully so, but it seldom becomes blatant or sentimental...
...By the same token, Senghor, in his preface to Birago Diop's Nou-veaux Contes d''Amadou Koumba (1958), lists as "typical Negro virtues . . . piety, common sense, loyalty, generosity, courage...
...Under its sponsorship, a second Congress of Negro Artists and Writers was held in Rome in March 1959...
...The tomb of the Reverend Father Gilbert is next to that of the daughter that Mr...
...They buried my benefactor," says the African hero of Une Vie de boy, "in the corner of the cemetery reserved for whites...
...The resolution incorporated still another idea Glissant had advocated in a previous issue of Presence Africaine (October-November, 1957) : that the Negro novelist should tend toward the epic...
...Kocoumbo, l'etudiant noir (1960), by Ake Loba, a compatriot of Dadie...
...No halo or stereotype here...
...merely an indication of what education, determination and interracial cooperation can accomplish...
...Later he sinks to the drugs of Pigalle's night-life, only to be rescued by an old white friend of his father...
...Diamond had by his mistress and later recognized...
...Since 1957 the work of Presence Africaine has been reinforced by the creation of the Societe Africaine de Culture...
...Nevertheless, an increasing number of interesting novels by French-speaking Africans has appeared in recent years...
...Le vieux Negre et la medaille...
...Here the reader follows the hero from the African bush to Metropolitan France where, at 21, he has difficulty keeping pace with youngsters of 12 and 13 in the provincial lycee...
...Momentarily he joins the Communist party—not out of conviction, but rather to hold his job as a factory worker...
...At one point the author attributes the Frenchman's love of animals to ancestor worship: "Man's ancestor is supposed to be the monkey...
...And this does not refer to superficial similarities between Docker noir and Native Son which prompted Sembene Ousmane's editor to suggest that this young Senegalese might be "a second Richard Wright...
...Of Guianan parentage, this Martinique-born, Bordeaux-educated Negro served an apprenticeship of more than a decade in French Equatorial Africa, where he found inspiration for most of his prose works...
...government support for writers...
...Cut it out...
...O Pays, mon beau peuple...
...At this meeting, Edouard Glissant, the young Martinican who wrote La Lezarde (translated into English as The Ripening), presided over the panel on literature which attracted, among others, novelists Rene Maran, Mongo Beti, Bernard Dadie, Sembene Ousmane and Joseph Zobel...
...For a time Kocoumbo himself is all but overwhelmed...
...Though disclaiming any intention of infringing on the freedom of the writer, the resolution emphasized his responsibility to contribute "to the advance and progress of the Negro nations and, particularly in countries where this issue arises, to the struggle for their independence, since the existence of a national state favors the flowering of a positive, fruitful culture...
...But African man [George Lamming, British West Indian novelist and secretary of the London Society of African Culture, wrote to me in June] is, in reality, the sum of separate and diverse African peoples whose relations to each other—apart from the common experience of foreign political domination—are still to be worked out...
...This organization, which grew out of a resolution adopted at the First International Congress of Negro Artists and Writers that Diop convened at the Sorbonne in September 1956, has the laudable aim of uniting "by bonds of joint interest and friendship the men of culture of the Negro World...
...the mass of the Negro peoples...
...We should remember Senghor's warning that "what determines the nigritude of a poem is less the theme than the style, the emotional warmth that gives life to the words...
...before long, the review was editing special issues on such subjects as: the Negro world, African art, Haitian poets, African students' views, underdevelopment and Africa seen by American Negroes...
...In one sense, says Samuel Allen, negritude "represents the Negro African poet's endeavor to recover for his race a normal self-pride, a lost confidence in himself, a world in which he again has a sense of identity and a significant role...
...The enterprise prospered...
...Thus far, the second has undoubtedly outweighed the first...
...the establishment of African cultural research centers...
...In Rene Maran's works, the exotic was replaced by the human and the European halo was confronted by the challenge of the black man's misery...
...Mirages de Paris...
...With Price-Mars as its president and Diop as secretary general, it now has branches in a number of African countries, the West Indies, England and the United States...
...In addition, Presence Africaine has published more than 50 volumes to date, covering politics, philosophy, economics, history, sociology, poetry and the novel...
...Even in French, African fiction is far scarcer than works with more obvious political overtones...
...This is understandable in the light of current events and the accident of language which makes a book by South Africa's Peter Abrahams, or Nigeria's Achebe and Tutuola, more readily accessible over here...
...Recent authors include Guinean President Sekou Toure, Senghor, J. Price-Mars (Haiti) and W. E. B. DuBois—a cross-section indicative of Diop's desire to make the venture representative of the entire Negro world...
...The rejection of Western values or the refusal to grant them exclusive and universal priority is, of course, one of the basic tenets of negritude— the controversial theory developed by Cesaire and Senghor, to which most of the Presence Africaine authors subscribe...
...Guiana)—have become prominent in poetry and politics...
...The resolution suggests that writers might develop new literary forms by "breaking with the dominant feature of Occidental literatures, where the individual is too often considered as a necessary and sufficient end in himself...
...Founded in 1947 by a Senegalese intellectual, Alioune Diop, it counted among its first sponsors such prominent figures as Andre Gide, Albert Camus, Mounier, Sartre, Richard Wright and Aime Cesaire...
...Most of these works reflect the realities and aspirations of present-day Africa and often describe conditions that render current political developments more readily intelligible: inadequate educational facilities, economic exploitation, segregated churches and other manifestations of hypocrisy and prejudice...
...Today it would be virtually impossible for an African novel to echo the closing words of Paul Hazoume's Doguicimi (1938): ". . . the French flag was to succeed fully, one half century later...
...Since Batouala, only two or three such works—Camara Laye's The Dark Child and Mongo Beti's Mission Accomplished—have been made available to American readers...
...but the journey back will nevertheless deepen our understanding of that Negro creativity whose force and essential rhythms we name Negritude...
...In short, the future of the African novel in French, like the future of Africa itself, depends on many imponderables...
...Transferring to Paris several years later, Kocoumbo somehow manages to overcome all kinds of obstacles and, at the end of the volume, holds a law degree, a diploma from the School of Oriental Languages, and is about to return home as a magistrate...
...Usually it is buttressed by the skillful use of irony and understatement, especially in the works of Ferdinand Oyono...
...From Senegal to the Cameroons the verdict is pretty much the same: To hell with the white man's halo...
Vol. 44 • October 1960 • No. 41
