Cruel City. Mongo Beti
It also appears, to the extent that such things can be predicted, that such future literature will necessarily be not only African but even national: by which we mean that the African writer will speak to his co-citizens in the language they are looking for; he will speak to them about aspirations that they all have in common. Perhaps this literature, before it can aspire to a human and international level, will first have to be regionalist. And that will only be Europe’s, and particularly France’s, fault, since France has always been so self-involved that it refuses to see beyond the end of its own nose.
Having made the rounds of African literature in 1955, I wish to present to the readers of this journal two books, one written by a White man and the other by a Black man.
“FRANCE AND THE BLACKS” BY JEAN GUÉHENNO6
This is a tiny little book of 140 pages that appeared in 1954. No pretension. Jean Guéhenno is an intellectual whose responsibilities as an educational inspector have brought him into contact with Black Africa. Mr. Guéhenno is not a journalist: thus his book is not a newspaper article (though it should be noted that his impressions all appeared in serial form in Le Figaro littéraire). Nor is it really an essay. So what is it? This book doesn’t want to belong to any of the traditional categories, and that isn’t a fault; rather the contrary, it is something commendable. To summarize, he reveals a French intellectual’s impressions of Black Africa: the destiny, present and future, suggested to someone with the sort of generous heart occasionally found in our times. In introducing his book, Mr. Guéhenno says in most heartwarming fashion: “One hears a great deal said about the ‘French Union.’ It is a legal, economic, and political fact. One should be willing to admit that it is not yet a human fact since it is not yet in the hearts of men, whether Black or White. I only hope that these notes, as paltry as they may be, help in giving this ‘French Union’ life.”
The author has been through and around a good portion of French West Africa. He has visited many places: Dakar, Bamako, Bobo-Dioulasso, Ouagadougou, Niamey, Lomé, Abidjan. He has observed, he has meditated, and he now gives us the fruits of these meditations on his observations. And, it should be said that it is a very good read. But as I was saying earlier, one should have no illusions about this kind of work, and Guéhenno himself recognizes this fact: “I am under no illusion,” he says on page 56, “about what is artificial in this kind of a voyage. Having completed my day’s work, today in two hours I was able to see, for my amusement, the market, the governmental palace, the river and its port . . . the biggest café where the Whites get married and unmarried and so on and so forth. We fly through the air, we run along the trails. We are now on our ten thousandth kilometer . . . I don’t know what good I will have done for humanity, but I fear that upon my return, though innocent, I will have the Green Cross at my heels.”
It is true that Guéhenno spares neither natives nor Europeans. He’s even honest enough to admit that: “In Dakar one feels no human warmth. Blacks and Whites are brought together there despite themselves, incapable of looking at each other. I can barely breathe. As soon as I am free, I escape . . .” And later: “One becomes obsessed here with the problem of racial confrontation. Perhaps there is no solution to it . . .” But in the final analysis? The colonizer and the bourgeois close the book with a conscience even clearer than before. I, for my part, close this book with rage because I feel I have been duped. The title! . . . And without so much as blinking an eye, the gangsters of colonialism continue their infernal work, assured that if ever their lives or possessions were at risk, the Foreign Legion would parachute from the sky like manna from heaven—and that’s the truth. At no time has the crux of the problem been touched upon.
Let’s not ask for too much from this man of good will and let us forgive him because he wasn’t an economist, a politician, a revolutionary, or a specialist in one thing or another; because he was an amateur simply talking “in abondantia cordis”; and especially because he was writing for Le Figaro littéraire. And yet let’s reread his book, recognizing all the while the gift he has deigned bestow upon us, we Africans whose ingratitude is now proverbial in colonial circles! . . .
L’ENFANT NOIR
This Guinean irresistibly seduces us. His exuberance is overflowing with poetry, a poetry that rises from a spring—this despite, it should be recognized, a few clichés and here and there, a questionable choice of words. It is as if he could barely sit still, carried away again and again by the breathless rhythm of violently colored village and pastoral scenes. He has chosen to move in a world where different modalities confuse themselves at will, for our reading pleasure. If he shows a certain tendency toward garish romanticism and a certain verbosity, it is that he is paying the ransom for an unexpected kinship with . . . Tibulus! I have forgotten to mention his sensibility, a sensibility that is perhaps clumsily exploited, but that is perhaps his greatest asset. Camara Laye is an authentic poet.
Nevertheless, there are people who will be disappointed by his book. And first and foremost, us, of course; we young Africans who have lived the same adventure as Laye, give or take a few details; we, for whom the promising title and the family name of the author made us believe for a second that this would be the great book about our childhood—that we still await! (Despite Camara Laye and his brilliant qualities). Additionally, for those who have read Richard Wright’s pathos-ridden Black Boy, there will be an inevitable comparison between the two books, and the monstrous absence of vision and depth of the Guinean’s book will be evident. Particularly for those who, in the final analysis, believe that the century demands of the writer—believe that it is a categorical imperative—that he refuse gratuitous art, that he reject the idea of art for art’s sake.
To be honest, what is at stake here is much less the book itself than the mentality of which it is the nauseating product. Wright—since the title of Laye’s book also represented a kind of challenge—refuses to make the least concession to the public, presents the problems at hand in all of their crude reality, avoids clichés, anything superfluous, anything naïve. Laye, for his part, is perfectly content to use the most harmless and easiest—which is to say the most lucrative—kind of folklore; he erects the cliché into an artistic approach. Despite appearances, he insists on showing us a stereotyped image—and therefore a false one—of Africa and of Africans: an idyllic universe, the optimism of overgrown children, stupidly interminable festivities, circus-act initiations, circumcisions, excisions, superstitions, Uncle Mamadou, images whose recklessness is only equaled by their unreality. It is true that Laye touches on subjects that might have given his story value; unfortunately, he only does so from a vantage point that is borrowed from some kind of “Tales from the Bush and Forest” or “Mamadou and Binéta Have Grown Up.” One can only pity him when he speaks of the totem, of spells, of genies. In sum, there is nothing in this book that a European petit bourgeois won’t have heard of on the radio, in some article he might run into anywhere, or any tired old program playing on “France Soir.”
On the other hand, Laye closes his eyes to the most crucial realities, precisely those that have always been hidden from the public here. Is this Guinean, my fellow African, who is, or so he suggests, a lively and attentive boy, saying that he never saw anything but a peaceful, beautiful, and maternal Africa? Is it remotely possible that he didn’t once witness the slightest atrocity on the part of the colonial administration?
Finally, Black Boy is not a testimonial—my God! When I think of the conclusions to which some of the people I know will come . . .—despite the ambitious (I mean tantalizing!) title.
Also, an African good sense that condemns a lack of intellectual integrity demands that Camara Laye redeem himself. This should be an easy task for someone so obviously talented. We await him at the next turn, which is to say his next book.
A.B. [MONGO BETI]
NOTES
1. Here I’m especially thinking of a Monsignor Augouard, then a simple priest, who declared to his mother in one of his numerous letters that, now that he was living among the Blacks, he was absolutely certain that they were the descendants of Ham—an ancestry that was apparently highly unfortunate under the pen of this particular