11 - Africanité and Urbanité: The Place of the Urban in Imaginings of African Identity during the Late Colonial Period in French West Africa

Summary

In the 1950s, as France's authority in the federation of French West Africa waned, there was a veritable explosion in literary cultural production from the region. In particular, the last decade of French rule in West Africa witnessed the arrival in force of the African Francophone novel. As Laïla Ibnlfassi and Nicki Hitchcott observe, this was no mere coincidence. They write, “The novel as a genre was . . . the perfect medium to portray life in the French colonies in a more realistic way. The novel,” Ibnlfassi and Hitchcott continue, “became the carrier of a message of protest to the Western world, and a means of communication and solidarity between Africans living under colonial rule.” Authors such as Camara Laye, Ousmane Sembène, and Mongo Beti emerged as important new voices in the world of prose as well as furnishing powerful and enduring images of life in colonial Africa. At the same time those writers offered assessments of imperialism's legacy for the continent as its people moved toward political independence. Consequently, the emergence of the African novel and colonialism were inextricably linked in West Africa, and each left its mark on the other. This made the act of writing—and cultural production in general—political by definition in that period. It also meant that the selection or development of a genre of cultural expression in that context was not a neutral act nor uncontested even among anti-colonialists from the region.

Not all West African anti-colonialists and cultural activists welcomed the advent of prose writing or thought it was “appropriate” for Africans. In fact, the question of africanité, or African identity, became imbricated with the debates over forms of cultural production in West Africa during the last decade of French rule. For one, Léopold Sédar Senghor, at the time a deputy in the French National Assembly and soon-to-be President of Senegal, asserted that the natural mode of expression for Africans was verse; a genre through which Senghor had himself achieved international renown. For Senghor, modern poetry continued the tradition of West African griots, praise-singers who also functioned as archivists for oral cultures and were a crucial element in pre-colonial African societies, as the poets would be in building post-colonial African societies on authentic autochthonous foundations.