Gods and Soldiers (17 page)

This is a fact: Senghor's poetry is made not only of form; it is also made of ideas, of concepts. It is similar to a structure of sand, cement, and water. Let us take identity. Is the fact that Senghor began to write during the triumphal period of racism—that of Nazism combined with colonialism—responsible for the clear grounding of his thought in the concepts of identity and belonging? He too was a son of his times, no doubt, and certainly it is still difficult to represent oneself other than in panegyrics: what it must have meant to be the first black
agrégé
⁵
! Perhaps if one were to take into account what it meant to have been the only Black in the classroom, the only Black in the school, and perhaps even in the whole university, one could get some indication of what separates us from Senghor, we who were born in and grew up in Africa, and in a country where, without wanting it, we were in the majority. One would understand perhaps why a phrase like this one is closer to us in reality than are all the acts of Senghorian intellectual gymnastics: “a drive through the real Africa, among the real populace of the African world would have revealed that these millions had never at any time had cause to question the existence of their—Negritude.”
⁶
Of course the question would be this: what is the “real Africa,” but let us ask another first, for reference: who writes these lines? Soyinka, the mytho-poet of the road, who distinguishes Senghor's theoretical gesture—the product “by and for a tiny elite”
⁷
—from the creative activity of a pulsating Africa whose genius Soyinka himself attempts to grasp through history and myth. And I remember too his smile when I asked him last year in Hanover, in what terms exactly had he put his phrase about the tiger, about how it does not proclaim its tigritude; I remember what he told me—after repeating his phrase and throwing in another reference to the eagle that does not proclaim its eagletude—that such preoccupations are known only to Francophone Africans. Is there a more polite way of saying that it is a non-issue? Notice, however, Soyinka's own reference to the “real Africa”—does this term not raise the same question as Senghor's Negritude? Truth in poetry is illusion, we know; however, is this issue not inscribed in the very logic of Negritude, in the fundamental essentialism of its quest? Too, Senghor speaks of
Wesen,
a concept he borrows from elsewhere, from German metaphysics and especially from ethnology, via his rather close reading of Leo Frobenius.

 

Negritude understood then as the
Wesen
of “the real Africa”? It is true that Senghor tries to escape into theory by creating, in
contre-coup,
the concept of the
“Civilisation de l'universel,”
perhaps most of all in order to counter Sartre's dialectics, set down in
Orphée noir,
that define Negritude as “anti-racist racism,” and annihilates the concept with that same blow. Yet, does Senghor's “universal” abstraction quell the trembling that our era feels faced with any and all essentialisms? The representation of Africa as essentially black—here then is a mind game, the staggering limits of which our era can judge each day and night. And we know that Senghor's fertile mind had them to spare: “francité,” “africanité,” “arabité,” “germanité,” “latinité”—what says it better? By the same logic, we have watched the birth of “créolité,” “antillanité,” at the hands of Glissant, Chamoiseau, and their comrades. Blind in one eye, we are still applauding their creations. Have we not seen the same essentialism manufactured in Zaire, as well as in Togo, an “authenticité” that plunges these countries into diktat? Did we not see it, fraught with neologisms, among Ivorian intellectuals and writers, as Niangoran Porquet forged the “griotique” and then soon after “ivorité,” which put the country into flames and blood?
⁸
As for “congolité,” it has only just begun its macabre dance. We can laugh today at Senghor's famous “negrité,” but we should cry before the numerous offspring of his logic. In reality, we no longer need to criticize his Negritude, as Soyinka does, by opposing it with a so-called “real Africa” (which itself owes much to the logic of Negritude; which is elsewhere now called “neo-negritudiniste,” according to another neologism, this time from Biodun Jeyifo). African history since the independences, our history, that is to say, is a better critic than any of us. Because, fundamentally, was Mugabe not armed with this vision of “negrité” when he took away the right of belonging to Africa from the whites of his country? Is Nadine Gordimer not an African writer? And, what of Coetzee then? We would ask Senghor. Moreover, since it is belonging we are speaking of, is it not for such a concept that the million Tutsis were massacred in Rwanda in 1994, subjected to the insane words “Go back to Egypt!” (the ancestry that Anta Diop had established between them, Ancient Egypt, and ourselves, having been turned against them). “Real Africa”? “Negrité”? A dangerous quest that has nonetheless damaged African intelligence in its essentialist pursuit of Negritude; a labyrinth where the masks of our by-the-kilo dead are dancing; a corridor of vampires in which even our most insightful writers are reeling drunkenly, beside our most cynical politicians! One day we will recognize this simple truth: Rwanda is the grave of Negritude. Until that day, we, children of violence and silence, are already living in this fact.

 

And from this evidence at the end of a long tunnel of night, Negritude appears to be rooted in an épistèmè that defines the African as other, fixing him or her in a binary relation (of conflict or of marriage, what does it matter?), of same and other, of subject and object. That this order of things is a heritage of Western thought, hundreds of contributions have already established; in their readings of Senghor's complex, they have not desisted from suggesting the intellectual falseness of his famous “kingdom of childhood.” For us today, however, following Mudimbe's analysis, the subject/object relationship appears to be directly inherited from the colonial order that created an infinite number of dichotomies, of which Negritude itself as “a discourse of alterity,” as Mudimbe's phrase goes, is one of the most vulgar manifestations. It becomes clear that this relationship, inscribed as it is in all its glory by Sartre in his famous preface,
Orphée noir,
remains canonical. It is not only canonical in its logic (the figure of Narcissus is sufficient for that), but in its structure. It defines an idea's house and thus opens or closes various passageways and their possibilities. “I is an other,” Rimbaud tells us; his phrase captures the paradoxical situation in which Negritude has placed us: I look at myself in the analytical mirror, the weapons Negritude has provided in my hands—and I see myself as the West's other! At the same time as I recognize the distortion of my face, I discover the chains on my ankles that bind me to that familiar dichotomy—same and other. In short, following the lead of colonial discourse, Negritude has Africanized Africa. How does one escape the violence that for Mudimbe is a “panacea” and for me, who was born in Cameroon, is the revelation of a conceptual prison? The lack of movement that has followed this frightening discovery, as much as it stuns me, shows that Negritude, in its épistèmè, has left us in a profound transcendental fall before the zigzags of our history, by erecting ethnology's assumptions inside of us; and leaving us unable, for example, to conceptualize the violence of which we are capable. It is incumbent upon us to create other paths, to see Negritude only as the prelude to a new order of intelligence, and to thus go beyond ethnology's othering dualism; we must open our minds to the “patience of philosophy,” to begin to pay attention, to devote ourselves to the disassembling of our own reflection.

 

A question yet remains: why Senghor's complex, why the épistèmè of Negritude, remains so pervasive for writers today? No one would dare ask Victor Hugo to pay tribute to the classical era which he had rejected! Mudimbe, all the while drawing our attention to Ethiopian sources of knowledge,
Das Buch der weisen Philosophen nach dem Aethiopischen Untersucht
(1950),
Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalum
(1904),
Das Leben und die Sentenzen des Philosophen Secundus des Schweigsamen
(1887), opens a way for thought and imagination that, from Apuleius's Metamorphoses to Saint Augustine's
Confessions,
traces the possibilities of a kind of knowledge that is fixed on African terrain, far from the paradigm of race—but this possibility is not yet taken seriously today, erased as it is under the discursive hegemony of the ethnographic épistèmè. Let us not waste our time analyzing why this path was not taken: the history of ideas is always linked to that of power. Today the face of power in Africa is difficult to imagine without the hand of the West. It is strange, though, that embraced by the dialectic of subject/object, we would have been blind for so long in the face of the teleology of violence which has, since the independences, duped our countries—in Congo, in Bamileké country, and culminating first in Biafra, well before Rwanda, and today in Darfur; fixed in the épistèmè inherited from Negritude, African thought has been absent and asleep for too long, ignoring the explosive root, which, like a dangerous snake, runs through its land, and sporadically distorts its surface with seas of blood and millions of the dead. Conceived in a discursive system which places the African subject opposite the West and which elsewhere makes it into an object (and we would like to say, exonerates itself of any responsibility), African thought would not have suspected that such violence would make an African peasant cut his brother's neck with a machete, or stuff a banana tree branch in the vagina of his African sister, because “to kill is less work than to farm,” as the genocidal peasants said in Hatzfeld's revelatory book; it would not have suspected the profound dehumanization that means the African calls his brother or sister, “cockroach”—or “frog,” “bosnian,” as happens in Cameroon. The Rwandan genocide is more than a warning to the hoax-makers of the “kingdom of childhood.” We have already said it, but let us repeat it: Rwanda is the grave of Negritude.

Today one can no longer think as if the genocide in Rwanda had not occurred. Genocide is, in essence, a State turned against its citizens, whom it annihilates. For us, then, if “Africa does not exist,” as the Togolese Kossi Efoui said so well, it is because we were born in independent states, and our definition of citizen, and therefore of writer, is always situated in relation to this order of things. Our perspective on Senghor is, from this point of view, perhaps similar to the one from which Ludwig Borne viewed Goethe and which prompted him to write: “Goethe was always a servant of despots; his satire only deals skillfully with the small ones, while he wooed the big ones.”
⁹
Harsh words which share the spirit of those Mongo Beti reserves for the poet-president. Their perspective, however, is our own, that of a citizen. It is from this point of view—citizen—that we are able to find Senghor's impossible paradox surprising. Let us clarify that we understand paradox in the purely etymological sense that prompts us to discover the neighbor—doxa, order. Here it is appropriate to remember Njabulo Ndebele's surprise, formulated into a question he posed at a symposium in Lagos in 1987, and which Alain Ricard relays to us: “Why are they so right-wing, these Francophones?
¹⁰
The answer, which Ricard searches for everywhere but in the evidence, is meanwhile inscribed in the terms of the question itself, in the word “Francophone,” which is, as one remembers, a piece of the Senghorian inheritance. But perhaps we should again read Mongo Beti, who was absent from the symposium in question, an event where the Francophone presence was dominated by the dual faces of Ahmadou Kourouma and Sony Labou Tansi: “M. Senghor did not fear, since then, supporting books which presented militants or men of politics. It is true that these works expressed, always more or less hypocritically, approval of the African powers which were themselves favorable to the Western power dear to M. Senghor.”
¹¹
Ndebele, whose thinking was rooted in that of Beti, was surprised at the old relationship between art and politics, and the claim to an apolitical place for the artist which Senghor (who, one forgets too easily, never escaped the realm of politics from the time of his arrival in Paris in 1928) was suspected of having made in his defense of
L'Enfant noir.
In their shared concerns, however, Ndebele and Beti question less the apolitical place of art, because such a place does not exist (and certainly not in the backyard of the poet-president), than they question the ethics of the writer in the political: the writer's choice, and therefore, the morality of her art.

 

The State or the citizen? We would say that, as President, Senghor the poet was de facto the first citizen of his country; but perhaps we would have enough shame to recognize a sophism in this response, because the place of writing, as we saw, even if that writing was black, would always be anchored firmly in the pocket of the State. A verse reveals a vision of the world as much as a grammar, and that of Senghor shows us a symbiotic relationship between the writer and his State. And so the geographies of lost civilizations align themselves appropriately (read: La Civilisation Nègre); and dot our field of vision with their infinite repetitions—“Kingdoms” of “Ancestral Africa” (read: Kingdom of Sine)—and the heroes of a mythical Africa multiply, among which the personage of “Prince” (read: Chaka) illuminates our tragedy, as if he had not committed genocide, this dear Chaka, exonerated by his singular blackness; and now add the face of power, of force: the energy is expressed by the “warrior” and the “athlete,” and the “griot” (read: “Djali”) provides the more enigmatic face. Wrote Senghor: “I say it clearly: I am Djali.”
¹²
The gesture of his celebratory poetry is regal: it does not know self-doubt; it is not attacked by this line which ceaselessly gnaws at the heart of our spirit and makes the stinking garbage cans of our lives crumble before us. On the contrary, we see the Senghorian poem elaborating upon a philosophical tradition that, via ethnophilosophy, like that of Alexis Kagame, searches for the “philosophical Bantu,” but leaves us with no guard against the genocides which torpedo our countries; we see the emergence of a historiography which, in the words of Hampaté Bâ (“when an old man dies, a library burns”), has clearly chosen its camp (that is, between that of the citizen and that of the State), and, in turning towards the Africa of the elders on a continent which is again selling its youth, we see the unfolding of an Africa that, through “Djali,” has chosen to rewrite the continent's history to satisfy the “virile” powerful, this in an Africa that belongs to our mothers, wives, and sisters as well; we see a vision of writing which allows no place for the thousand gangrenes that gnaw the continent's very heart—today in the form of AIDS, which ravages its young people, and condemns its future to malaria. Standing before the expanse of a continent that he wants blackened, faced with the sporadic multiplying of cadavers, and the raging of the virus, the uncontrollable soaring of famine, and the culture of genocidal impunity, “Djali” says “Greatness” and, of necessity, invents it to the satisfaction of his king. The evasion of our history's paradox is a refusal to see an Africa which is obstinately killing itself; and this suicide lies as much a condemnation of the majorities of the population (women, young people, the poor . . .) to powerlessness as it lies in the plunging of the continent's intelligentsia into the “ancestral past,” when the real stakes of the continent—its young people, we say it daily—is its future. The patron of “Djali” is the king, the “Prince”; now his power feeds on violence. “Universities today, particularly in Africa, have become the modern patrons for the artist,”
¹³
Ngūgī wa Thiong'o reminds us. Why, more than the Senghorian doxa, is it the citizen-place of writing that emerges from these words, that nudges our intelligence? Perhaps, because, in the meantime, we learned to see the path to our safety in our empowerment—empowerment which yields all knowledge—and thus, to situate the promise of our recovered dignity less in celebration than in skepticism.