The Literature of Hope and Oppression

Africans found colonialism dispiriting and repugnant because so much of it was predicated on the assumption of black inferiority. Colonialism’s message, stated or unstated, was that Africans were incapable of governing themselves, or at least incapable of governing themselves effectively; nor were they capable of managing a modern economy or even creating a viable culture and social order. For all these tasks they needed Europeans, who justified their authority by asserting their moral and intellectual superiority. Furthermore, Africans were told that in order to succeed under colonialism—to become clerks or civil servants in the colonial administration or to become “assimilated” (an evolué, or “evolved one”) in French Africa—they would have to shed their African identity and adopt the ideas, views, work habits, dress, and customs of Europeans. This was the price Africans would have to pay to overcome their backwardness.

When organized African nationalist movements finally began to take shape after World War II, many African political leaders denounced the corrosive effect of colonialism on African tradition and on the Africans’ sense of identity. Well before then, however, African poets, novelists, and short story writers, as well as black authors living outside of Africa, had explored these issues with great power and insight. These authors were for the most part European educated, wrote mainly in English or French, and brought to their work a familiarity with contemporary European literary trends. Their themes and emotions, however, centered on what it meant to be black after centuries of enslavement and years of colonial rule. Many French-language writers came to be identified with the Paris-centered literary movement known as Négritude, which, beginning in the 1930s, affirmed the worth of African tradition, emphasized the spiritual unity black people everywhere, and explored black people’s unique historical experience. English-speaking writers tended to focus less on the commonalities of blacks’ oppression and more on ways colonialism affected specific groups and individuals. Both groups expressed pride in Africa’s spiritual, physical, and cultural heritage and mourned the wounds inflicted on it by slavery, colonialism, underdevelopment, and prejudice.

I would like you to read four short documents (by clicking here) that each offer a different African perspective on the experience of colonialism. “Parable of the Eagle” was written by James Aggrey, who was born in 1875 in the Gold Coast, a British colony. Educated in a Protestant mission school and a convert to Christianity, at age twenty-three he traveled to the United States to study for the ministry. He remained in the United States for twenty years, studying economics and agriculture, speaking out against racial prejudice, and working among poor African-Americans in South Carolina. He returned to Africa in 1918 and died in 1927.

The author of the second work, “Limbo,” is Léon G. Damas, one of several black writers of the 1930s and 1940s who was born outside of Africa but who nonetheless identified with Africa and wrote eloquently about the damage caused by colonialism. Born in 1912 in French Guyana, a colony in South America, Damas was educated in Martinique, a French Caribbean island, before beginning studies at the University of Paris. At Paris, Damas, with fellow students Léopold Senghor from Senegal and Aimé Césaire from Martinique, founded the literary journal L’étudiant noir (The Black Student), which many see as the beginning of the Négritude movement. Damas’ poem “Limbo” was one of thirty-one poems published in the anthology Pigments in 1937. According to Christian tradition, Limbo refers to the abode of souls who are barred from Heaven because they have been unbaptized, hence a place of neglect and oblivion. After World War II, in which Damas fought for the French, he worked for the United Nations in Africa and then emigrated to the United States, where he taught black literature at Federal City University and Howard University in Washington, D.C.

The second poem, “Prayer for Peace,” is the work of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the most famous French-speaking poet of Africa. Born in Senegal, Senghor was raised a Catholic and educated in Catholic schools. At age twenty-two he went to Paris, where he studied and taught literature and helped inspire the Négritude movement. After World War II, in which he fought for France and was taken prisoner by the Germans, he entered politics and was elected to the French Chamber of Deputies. When Senegal became an independent state in 1960, he was elected president, an office held until he retired in 1981. His “Prayer for Peace” was the concluding poem of his collection Hosties Noires, which can be translated either as Black Victims or Black Hosts. It is set in January 1945, after France had been liberated and the final defeat of the Nazis was imminent. In the poem he enumerates the sins of colonialism but combines his condemnation with a plea for forgiveness and universal brotherhood. It is a powerful expression of the poet’s ambivalence toward France, both the oppressor of Africa and a beacon of enlightenment.

The final poem, “Vultures,” is by David Diop, who flourished as a poet at the end of the colonial period. Born in France to a Senegalese father and a Cameroonian mother, in his twenties he left medical school to study literature and write poetry. Acclaimed in French-speaking Africa for his denunciations of colonialism, he moved to Senegal in 1958 after French rule ended. He died in 1960 in a plane crash. “Vultures” was published in 1956 in the anthology Coups de Pilon, or Hammer Blows.

After reading the documents, I would like you to reflect on and discuss the following: What specific features of colonialism does each author condemn? How are their views of colonialism similar? How are they different? How do the four authors view Africans and African culture? In what ways do they find positive value in African practices and traditions? What specific criticisms do the authors make of European values and characteristics? In what ways do they believe that African ways are superior to those of Europe? To what degree do the four works offer a message of hope to Africa? Your thoughts…