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Setting aside books written by explorers and missionaries, books where the thinking motivating their authors is so outdated that they are useless,¹ there is to my knowledge, not one quality literary work inspired by Black Africa and written in French. When I say a quality work, what I mean is something received, known, seen as such, by the public at large—because from the perspective of effectiveness, what might be the point of a masterpiece published in 1955 that will only be read and appreciated in the year 2000? It goes without saying that, for the purposes of my presentation, it wouldn’t matter if the writer of such a work were Black or White. So, digressions aside, there is a complete absence of quality literary works in French inspired by Black Africa. Given the extensive research I have done, one would be hard pressed to contradict me on this last observation.

During the interwar years, it would have been easy to explain this dearth by the general lack of interest that Europe, and especially France, then had in Africa, and by Africans’ inability to write in French due to a lack of training; in 1955, however, now that Africa is increasingly on Europe’s mind and an ever greater number of Africans not only can but want to write, this absence of quality works is harder to fathom. Or so it might appear.

Look more closely and everything makes sense. To begin with, what kind of writer is interested in Black Africa?

You have the journalists, who are always stalking a new topic, and who, when they have located it, treat it for its novelty effect. The news stories written on Africa since the last war are particularly objectionable. It is difficult for journalists to write masterpieces on Africa.

You also have the intellectuals looking for a solution to the world of the future; they generally write semi-political, semi-philosophical, semi-literary narratives. This generates such works as “Naked People,” by M[ax].-P[ol]. Fouchet, or again: “France and the Blacks,” by Jean Guéhenno, to whom I will return shortly. Let me say up front that nobody is waiting for a masterpiece from this category of writer.

Then there are the industrialists, the politicians, the economists, and similar specialists. It would be best not to speak of them.

There are also the poets, some of whom are excellent: A[imé]. Césaire, D[avid]. Diop, Paul Nige, J[acques]. Rou-main, etc. They are found most commonly among men of color, that is to say the colonized. These are generally highly aware, honest intellectuals, hence completely incapable of any sort of compromise with the colonial order; the result of this situation is that their voice isn’t heard. Thus, in keeping with our idea of the masterpiece, I cannot accept what they are producing as quality works; as already noted, one cannot designate as a masterpiece, in terms of its present effectiveness, a work that nobody reads or knows about. I can only hope that the future will rehabilitate these poètes maudits [cursed poets]; but that’s another story.

In fact, the category of writers from whom we expect the most are the novelists. I should note right off the interest generated by the publication of an African novel—assuming, of course, that the press is willing to talk about it. It is therefore specifically the case of African fiction that I will do my best to elucidate.

It so happens that, since the end of the last war, the novelists inspired by Black Africa are as often Whites as Blacks. This particular observation will turn out to be completely unimportant, as we will see shortly.

Instead, let’s go straight to the heart of the problem and ask the essential questions.

First of all, what will be the overriding tone of the African novel, realistic or non-realistic? This will depend primarily on the temperament of each author, on his concern for the public’s attitude. If the writer has no backbone, he will do what the public is asking for. If he has a backbone, he’ll write according to his own taste and his own ideas. Figuring out what the French public wants from an African author is another question, one I will deal with a little later.

Next, what will be the central quality of this novel? It will depend primarily on its tone. Given modern conceptions of the beautiful in literature, at least what is essential in these considerations, if a work is realistic, it has an excellent likelihood of being good; otherwise, even assuming it has formal qualities, there is a high risk that it will lack resonance, depth, and most of all what great literature most pressingly needs: the human—from which we can surmise that it is far less likely to be good than a realistic work, if indeed there is any such likelihood at all.

As already mentioned, what will distinguish the African novelists is less their ethnic origin than their distinctive temperaments, their personalities. Indeed, it would seem, in theory at least, that only White writers would explore the folkloric side of Black Africa, whereas Black writers, more aware of their native continent’s serious problems, would use folklore only as a way of underscoring Africa’s deeper reality; but upon a close examination of the small number of authors writing on Africa, it becomes apparent that the folklorists can be found equally in both groups.

Among the Whites: Knives At Play, Stick to Your Own Kind, etc. . . .

Among the Blacks: Black Child, The Gaze of the King, Karim,² Batouala, etc. . . .

When I say “etc. . . .” that’s actually just a figure of speech, for, though I was only going to cite those African authors specializing in folklore, I suddenly realize that I have named all the African authors to whom the French public and its critics have deigned pay attention in the last ten years.

Could it be that the French public asks for folklore, nothing but folklore, from the African author?

Besides, when I speak of the French public, of whom am I thinking exactly? Certainly not of the Africans, whose consumption of this foodstuff called literature is statistically negligible, at least for now, and this for reasons too complicated to explain in a journal article. I’ll simply say that this illustrates the infamous drama of the uprooting of the African elite: African writers can’t even write for a Black audience!

What remains is the Europeans’ audience. Indeed, one has to admit that the African novelist, whether White or Black, writes primarily for the French reader of the Métro-pole, which explains an awful lot. But before going there, it’s important to define the attitude of this public with respect to the African author.

The French-person-who-reads-novels—that is, in truth, the bourgeois, whether petit or grand—is not only a citizen but the pillar of a country that was, not long ago, a great nation, a nation that aspires to remain great, that hopes to regain that status, and a nation whose pride has been wounded daily since the war, something that happens to once-great nations. One doesn’t need to be an expert on international affairs to realize that the properly European factors determining France’s prestige are more irrevocably eroded each day.

Nevertheless, if this country refuses to cede its past greatness, what desperate measures will it employ, not only to achieve its hallowed rank among nations but to remain there? Why, the colonies, by God! The Empire! The French Union! Call it what you will. Never has the French bourgeoisie gambled so heavily on the colonies as at the present time.

But the colonies themselves—because of those little jokers the writers, the press, the educational system; because of those who, in certain spheres, are called the specialists of subversion—the colonies themselves, as I said, have learned and repeat to themselves [Pierre Victurnien] Vergniaud’s famous call: “The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise.”³ And the desire for autonomy and even separation in the French Empire only increases. Something previously unheard of has happened: one of the most prized countries in the Empire has waged a sustained war against the Métropole. That’s not the end of it: another gem, the entire Maghreb, is facing a critical situation; and the truth is that nobody has a clue as to what is going to happen to this piece of the French Empire. Are we going to lose everything? Ask the colonizers and the French bourgeois, more worried than ever. “No, by God! Don’t we still have Black Africa?”

For the colonizer and the French bourgeois, what is Africa? “An inexhaustible reserve of men and primary resources.” (Here I am citing A[lfred]. Coste-Floret, Minister of the Colonies in one of the numerous governments of the first legislature of the Fourth Republic). We know the slogans: “Black Africa, our last chance!,” “Black Africa, the card we should be playing!,” “Eurafrica . . .,” etc. . . . The French bourgeois therefore thinks of Africa as his last remaining hunting grounds: a territory to be guarded jealously against the desires of so-called “revolutionary imperialisms.” It goes without saying that behind all of the bourgeois press’s well phrased liberal, generous, fraternal, and republican formulas there lies the same secular, intangible reality that is eternal cupidity: exploit man where and when you can without risk.

Yes, I said without risk! One can venture that these ladies and gents would not appreciate a realistic African literature, for what greater risk could there be that their operations should be denounced, dismantled, exposed in the popular press? They will therefore do everything to nip any realistic African literature in the bud. For the reality of Black Africa, its only true reality is before all else colonization and its crimes.⁴

Again, for those who aren’t metaphysicians, the first reality of Black Africa, its only true reality, is colonization and what comes after it. Colonization, which today saturates every last inch of the African body and poisons its blood, suppresses every challenge. It follows that writing on Black Africa means being for or against colonialism. It’s impossible to escape this equation. Even if one wanted to, one could not. Friend or enemy is the question at hand. Anybody who wants to escape this bind is forced to cheat.

It turns out that the bourgeois and the colonizers ask their scribes to cheat, to write in the name of their glory, to sing their praises. What happens then? If the scribe is a White man, he won’t have the least compunction about writing the reactionary and racist books to which bookstores have habituated us: “Stick to your own kind [Va-t-en avec les tiens],” “Knives were drawn [Les couteaux sont de la fête],” etc.

If the scribe is Black, the operation becomes a little more difficult, since this Black person has to take into account the world from which he comes, his friends, his family. Besides, there resides in a Black person a kind of demureness; he’s always loath to take a path that leads to prostitution; it’s only once he has finally set out on that path that everything goes smoothly. Besides, one never knows; one day there could be a little revolution in his native country. And if he were there, even accidentally, might some not hold against him the fact that he had collaborated with the colonial enterprise?

The Black scribe will therefore pretend to not take sides. He will take refuge among the sorcerers, his grandfather’s snakes, initiations at nightfall, fish-women, and the whole gamut of the two-bit picturesque. He will ignore all that might get him in trouble and particularly colonial reality. That’s why, paradoxically, he will make himself even less realistic than the White scribe whose own position is without the least ambiguity. It turns out, however, that in the realm of the non-realistic, the Black scribe is better placed than the White scribe, because the ignorant bourgeois is more likely to pay attention to him. You see, when the Black scribe claims to have been initiated by moonlight, to have belonged to the brotherhood of lions, to have petted a sacred crocodile, etc., the bourgeois can receive these claims only with enthusiasm. “Now that’s a guy who clearly knows what he’s talking about! . . .” And that’s the last word! All of this serves to further entrap the Black scribe in the quicksand of the folkloric, a mess from which it is difficult to extricate oneself. Under these circumstances the White scribe finds himself relegated to a secondary status.

If we refer to contemporary American literature, we discover what happens to a conformist writer, a friend of the high functionaries of those in power, who aspires to large print-runs. Ever since F. D. Roosevelt left power, Steinbeck has more or less stopped writing, Faulkner paraphrases the Bible (it’s true that he’s a special case), Hemingway has been content to develop a predictable myth in a little book received as his masterpiece, while a newcomer like Truman Capote, more logical than those who came before him, has deliberately chosen to go in the direction of the fantastic. In the same way, it would seem likely that an African writer, if he insists on dedicating his books to the great colonizers, will end up in the realm of the fantastic, assuming that’s not where he starts.

Therefore, we are not in a time that is suited to an authentic African literature. This is because either the author writes realistically, in which case not only is he unlikely to be published, but even if he were, critics would ignore him, as would the public. Or he is a conformist, in which case he risks giving in to easy folklore and even to the fantastic, which will impel him to write mostly nonsense. As I have already said, I believe that in this particular case, race is of little importance—what counts is the temperament of the writer.

Still, another question needs to be asked: given the literary journals that exist in France, are there not two distinct and even opposed reading publics? More simply, aren’t there on the one hand the readers of Lettres françaises, and on the other those of Le Figaro littéraire? Shouldn’t the readers of Lettres françaises enthusiastically welcome a realistic African literature?⁵

It would appear that way, but only at first glance. On closer examination, things are far more complicated. In 1955, the world is divided into two powerful blocks, set against each in such severe antagonism that there is no room for those who refuse to take sides. Here, the dilemma that says: “He who is not with you works against you: friend or enemy, useful or harmful” is truer than ever. This century is constructed such that sectarian thinking has unapologetically taken over; people prefer their worst enemy to those among their friends who don’t exactly replicate themselves.

Therefore, if, in the Metropolitan context an African writer is engaged neither totally on the Left nor totally on the Right, then he better keep quiet. Of course, it can happen that here or there, an individual succeeds in breaking down all the traditional barriers, in imposing himself against all odds, but it will nevertheless be the exception. So the France of 1955 suggests that the African author just keep quiet. Unless he should decide, not without a certain heroism, to write for that distant time when education will have sufficiently developed the taste for reading among his people, Africans. It seems that before then, it is impossible to speak of an authentic African literature. 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.