France is developing a new colonial literature for which no allowances and apologies need be made and to which no discounts or correctives need be applied—for she is developing—indeed she has already developed a new point of view in the portrayal of the African native and his life. Colonial fiction has been for generations now a synonym for provincialism and second-rate aesthetic values. Rarely has it even attempted to be fair and humane, scarcely ever has it achieved pure artistry or sterling humanism. And only in the novel of local color has the colonial scene come into the hands of the masters. There was both in England and France a promising flare when the cult of romantic exoticism turned toward the South Seas and the Tropics, but the paths of Pierre Loti and Conrad, unfortunately for the portrayal of African life, turned to farther, more exotic, ports and left Africa to the exploiting charlatans, the incompetent romancers, and the moralistic missionaries. And from these tainted or inartistic sources, what is known as “colonial literature” has sprung.
But in France not only is there developing a new colonial literature that is pure literature, but with it a new attitude in the portrayal in fiction of widely divergent human cultures. In other forms of art and art appreciation, aesthetic cosmopolitanism has been achieved, but fiction has always seemed to reflect the narrower, more stunted values, and to have absorbed the worst provincialisms and prejudices of the Caucasian and European bias. However emancipated the elite, the masses will never respond to the broader view until it expresses itself in the forms of the popular taste and the arts of the masses. Thus the importance, the peculiar social importance, of a broadening view in drama and fiction—the popular arts. When they begin to reflect cosmopolitan humanism, then to the wakeful eye the great day of humanity almost dawns. And whatever else may be said of it, Rene Maran’s “Batouala” and its tremendous vogue are very largely responsible for this change at least with respect to contemporary fiction. Before Maran, it was either landscape with the native incidentally thrown in as a conventionalized figure, or the life of the white colonial with the native life as an artistic foil. Even more so than in the American school of fiction was the native in colonial literature merely a dark note by which the false highlights of the painting were keyed up; or as General Anglonvant aptly puts it—“In most of the novels, the Negro plays but a secondary part—appearing only to enhance the interest of the story by acting as a foil to the European characters described in the romance or drama.” But a revolutionary change has occurred—there is a strong interest in the human portraiture of native life in and for itself, and without the bold realism of “Batouala” this never would have been. For however rife this point of view may have been among artists and authors, without the creation of a new taste in the reading public it could never have come to public expression. But the public mind, with its predilection for fake and, lurid chromos, by this brilliant, daring etching of Maran’s has been, so to speak, resurfaced for a new impression, at once more artistic and true. With the stylistic capacities of a Flaubert or a de Maupassant, Maran seems almost to have chosen to be the Zola of colonial literature, and with cruel realism and cutting irony has sought to drive the lie and hypocrisy out of its traditional point of view. It was heroic work—and required to be done by the Negro himself—this revolutionary change from sentimentality to realism, from caricature to portraiture. And if I am not very mistaken, Maran’s real thrust is more anti-romantic and anti-sentimentalist than anti-imperialist: it is the literary traducers whom he would annihilate. Let us have the unbiased truth and the same angle of vision for all; that is Maran’s literary creed.
Gaston-Joseph’s “Koffi” is written from quite another point of view—more humane, less objective—it is by its sponsor, General Anglonvant, ex-Governor-General of the Colonies, characterized as an antidote for “Batouala.” It is an important book, in itself—as the winner of the Grand Prix de Litterature Coloniale for 1923, and as reflecting the more enlightened official colonial attitude. Not any too well translated in the English version this romance in the original is a smooth, competent, restrained narrative, the work of Gaston-Joseph, a French colonial official whose fifteen years service in Senegal, on the Ivory Coast, in the Cameroons, Gaboon and the Middle Congo and whose authorship of a splendid monograph on “Le Cote d’Ivoire” (1917) guarantee competence and sincerity. Koffi is the outstanding figure. All else, colonial officialdom, wife, natives, nature, are but so much background for this sober, full-length portrait of the man as a lad, a village run-away, at the coast, in turn scullion-apprentice, house-boy, cook, trusted dragonman to M. Lere, colonial administrator, and finally as a climax to a seemingly successful career, through merit and his good offices, interpreter and chief of the Assonefanti. But at the height of his career comes a sudden decline of fortune—caught midway his efforts at tribal reform between reactionary factions of the medicine-men and the inroads of disease, Koffi succumbs to the environment—and passes, a discredited and deported exile, to a docile, resigned end in the Gaboons.
It is an unprofitable life, but not an unprofitable story. Many of the peculiarly difficult forces in the life of the native engaged in government service and living in the penumbra of the two civilizations are for the first time realistically and truthfully depicted. This psychological borderland of civilization has its special types and its peculiar problems, and Koffi is one of the best available ways of exploring it. But we cannot quite share the enthusiasm of General Anglonvant in hailing Koffi as “filling a void in our tropical colonial literature,” for the book seems really to be of greater documentary than artistic interest and worth. Humane, conscientiously attempting to free itself from the attitude of condescension, with a painfully strained realism, it is throughout a laudable effort and in part, a success. Nowhere is the book more successful in breaking through its limitations than in the account of Koffi’s love affair and eventual marriage with Afone, become in the interim of his absence the mistress of Mr. Martin, the white trader. It is a brilliant bit of writing in which French literature excels by virtue of its combined candor and subtlety—the woman, torn between love and gain, facing the certainty of motherhood; the two men, each uncomfortably screened behind his tribal idols, jealousy and respectability, awaiting in concealed but genuine rivalry the riddle of paternity which only Nature could solve. And fate, that was eventually to be so cruel, awards Koffi a son, and it must be said a hereafter faithful spouse. Koffi’s is a life of social but not of moral defeat: in this, I think, it is typical of his unfortunate but inevitable compeers—the buffer-class between the black and white. What a conflict it is, especially for the half-educated mind, to strain between the forces of two powerful but incommensurable cultures, to be forced to live in terms of two compelling but incompatible systems of habit and thought. Koffi’s defeat is not taken lightly by the author, however it may be by the superficial reader, nor by General Anglonvant when he says: “Where our duty and our will combine to try to lead the peoples confided to our guardianship towards higher social conditions, by creating a picked body of natives to act as leaders and cultivating their development, how many powerful secret forces oppose our actions! The description of the new king’s life, a target for the attacks of the witchdoctors, opposed by all the representatives of an ignorant past, is all the more striking because of the enforced restraint of a style which nevertheless evokes so many sights familiar to colonials.”
Another remarkable book, also with a noteworthy preface, is “Samba Diouf’s Adventure” by the popular romancers Jean and Jerome Tharand. Among their popular successes, the brothers Tharand seem to have turned aside to an unusually mature purpose, and for all that their accustomed “purple-patches” turn up occasionally give us a very vivid and accurate and tasteful chronicle of the life of Samba Diouf and his great but unexpected adventure to the battlefields of Europe. This book makes one peculiarly regretful that as yet no artistic narrative of the very peculiar war experience of the American Negro in France has been written. Painful as the contrast might be, such a companion picture must eventually be painted, and for the double purpose of inspiring it and of revealing the French version of the Negro in arms, I have asked permission to translate “La Randonnee de Samba Diouf.” Already in its eleventh edition, the work has promise of very considerable vogue, and it deserves it not merely as the romance of Samba Diouf but because there in the background, not over-obtrusive, but still quite real, looms the epic of the 113th Black Battalion.
The book is dedicated to Andre Demaison in these charming words: “Few have penetrated the psychology of the West African native as yourself. From the Niger to the Coast, from Senegal to Gambia, you have mastered subtle tongues and learned their curious folkways. In their villages, deep in the bush and forest, you have passed years and years, living their life; you have ridden at large with them, navigated their vast rivers; wandered from lake to lake in their long canoes or by motor-launch, hearing their palavers day in and day out—and when they came to fight on our shores, you followed fortune in one of their battalions. And all this vast treasury of the people and ways of Africa you have prodigally shared with us that we might write this story, woven out of the fragments of your talk, and to render it more true to life you have furnished a thousand details, now from the speech of the Ouloof, now from that of the Mandingoes, which are to you as familiar as your native Perigord.
“‘Only—my friend, your blacks talk like academicans,’—we had constantly to be saying to you—to which you always answered—‘Good heavens—what would you have me do? I give you their words as they speak them. If their speech is subtle and rich and full of fine shadings, that simply reveals that these folk of the West Coast are not quite the brutes that a mediocre colonial literature has been pleased to paint them. These blacks could not speak as they do but for a background of civilization, which however simple it is, is nevertheless a civilization.’
“In his true dignity as a man of his people, may Samba Diouf bear favorable witness for his race.”
This is the story of a simple Dakar fisherman, premier craftsman in his calling who, on the verge of a successful courting, sets out through the jungle to bring back from the distant land of his mother the patrimony of cattle left him by his mother’s brother. He reaches a village of the Mandingo just as they are being called upon for their quota of conscripts for the French colonial army, and at the end of a palm-wine debauch recovers himself bound with thongs on the way to Mauso, an unwilling substitute for the scheming chieftain’s son. Here he is enrolled and eventually embarked for France in a heterogenous battalion of all the races of the French coast hinterland and Soudan. We are transported with them in rapid impressionistic word pictures, the best of which, with the possible exception of some brilliant sketches of the jungle, are those of the camp scenes of the black troopers behind the lines. Their native contests, their hardships, their illnesses, their daily chatter are a triumph of descriptive art. And then occurs an incident which, regretably, is exceptionally French. The men—hunters, traders, tillers of the soil, warriors, chafe under the “slave-work” to which they have been assigned. They naively want to see the war and manfully want to bear it. Lamine Cisse, with the corporals of four companions, is commissioned to take their plaints to the adjutant. The adjutant listens—there is logic, there is sincerity, there is courage—he reports to the commandant—the commandant to the colonel, he in turn to the brigadier—and then happens what in the English or American army would have been a miracle—in three days the battalion is ordered to the firing line.
It is Samba Diouf’s fortune to be gallantly wounded in the first assault attack, and then the story follows his fortunes—his hospital experiences, the naive letters from home, one with the disquieting shadow of gossip about the fidelity of his betrothed—his patient, good-natured convalescence, his decoration with the croix de guerre, and finally, after three years in all, his transhipment home by way of the country of his mother where he expects at last to come into possession of the cattle he started out to fetch. There also fate awaits him—in cunning chicanery his uncle palms off on him the oldest and sterile animals of his herd; a hurricane in crossing a river carries off the greater part of the paltry flock, but another ordeal awaits. The feast of the home-coming is spoiled by the suspicious absence of Yanima and her father, and finally comes the disillusioning confirmation of old rumors as he encounters her next day with her nursing infant. And then, robbed of his occupation by his wounds, dependent solely on his government pension, disillusioned—there seems a likelihood of a total breakdown in his life—and the native African stoicism seizes happiness out of the ruins, as he goes to Yanima, he without patrimony, she without honor, but for each the more necessary to the other for all that. There is an Enoch Arden and almost idyllic charm to the story, for all that there is true epic in the background: the night of his home-coming, his battalion and his compatriots go “over the top,” and even a sophisticated reader reads the last lines through a moist, old-fashioned blur which is after all, I suppose, the acid test of romance.
Notable as these books are, they lose something when contrasted with “Batouala,” with which indeed must be contrasted all colonial fiction of this decade. They are, the one condescendingly, the other sentimentally, more favorable—they will both be more liked and preferred by the average man. But they lack the great artistry, the daring objectivity, and more than that they leave the great dilemma or colonial imperialism concealed behind the cloaks of optimism and rhetoric. “Batouala” gains its universality of appeal and interest and its greater artistic validity from the very fact of its candor, its ruthlessness, and its humane but unemotional human portraiture. Instead of re-enforcing that decadent cult of the primitive which is the past-time of the sophisticated, Rene Maran insists upon treating the dilemma of the primitive life of Africa of today as it stands between the stagnant virtues of simplicity and the corrupting half-civilization of exploiting economic imperialism. The message—and there is one, for all that it is not preached into the story, is this: “If you insist upon civilizing, civilize on the pattern of good virtues and not on the scheme of your vices. Do not discredit your civilization at its core; only as it is sound there, is it sound ‘at home.’” There has scarcely been a more forceful indictment of the defects of expansive European civilization than the mute gestures, the sad reproach, and the shrewd commentary of these simple folk of Ubangi-Shari. With this creed, Rene Maran enters the lists neither of the race partisans nor of the colonial apologists and propagandists, but those of the social surgeons, the indicting idealists, if you will—the prophetic reformers. While rendering due praise to others, we can take much satisfaction in the fact that the path to candid portraiture of the colonial system and of native life has been shown by one from whom it was least of all expected, but through whom it comes with the greatest acceptability—an educated Negro colonial official.
But we must not forget that the glory of all these writers, Maran’s as well, is the common glory of the tradition of French culture and the great gift, as yet unaccepted, of the French genius to the western world. One will not say it is exclusively French, exceptional individuals elsewhere have had and still have it—but only of the French can we say that it is characteristic.
But of the three possible angles of literary approach, quite uniquely illustrated by these three novels, which shall prevail, which has the greatest artistic potentialities—the humanitarian, the sentimentally romantic, or the aesthetically objective? We predict the eventual triumph of the non-moralistic and purely aesthetic approach—art for its own sake combined with that stark cult of veracity—the truth, whether it hurts or not, for the sake of eventual peace of human understanding.
We have further encouraging signs of the spread of this point of view in the approach to things African. “Ebony and Ivory” of Llewellyn Powys is an especially welcome work as one of the first English books that carry this point of view consistently. And quite recently, again in French, we have the charming travel sketches of a French woman traveller, artist and educator, Lucie Consturier, whose work, while it is not fiction, exemplifies this new tendency by differing as widely from the average travel sketch as the new colonial novel differs from its predecessors. Her sketches alone show that she has been able to find the common human denominator, through the search for beauty. Her prose text, detailing her trip through Upper Nigeria from Kankan by an unfrequented route through Keronane to Macenta, shows that the eye that sees beauty, sees without bias, and can look at human life as objectively and profitably as at nature herself. She applies to social values the same graceful touch. Of the short-sighted ethnographers and their preconceptions, she has this to say: “I am not over fond of ethnology. I would respect it more if it were merely a science, more or less exact, like the rest. But it is too often an art of calumniating peoples through invidious comparisons—like so much history. To set out the external customs and trappings of the life of a people for the life of the people itself—that is the still more serious fallacy and confusion of ethnography. It exhibits the chain and collar of the dog and says to us, ‘Behold, the dog!’—Shows us the cell and dungeon for the prisoner, the string and binding wrappings, and insists, ‘Here is the garland of fruits and flowers.’”
Throughout she is true to her intention to extricate human values from mere externalities of manners and customs. It is a charming book, born of a sympathetic, but more important still, an emancipated mind. Let us take as an example her purely artistic impressions of a fetish-dance at Zerecore. She found the fantastic pantomime of the Nioumons to have all the complexity and dexterity of a sophisticated ballet-pantomime, with charming conventionalizations, artistic refinement, grotesque, but decorative. “I was aware,” she says, “at hearing the ensemble of the native orchestra of a complexity of rhythm perhaps more subtly than that of any other land, even African, which by default of special musical training I could not record, but which seemed almost to surpass notation…. The phases of the pantomime, making allowances, were essentially those of our own best ballet conventions, which were achieved—a more difficult task, in spite of an excessively grotesque masking of the body which seemed quite to rob it of semblance to the human form.” And a little further on, more interesting still, these observations—“Far from having, as even the Greeks, the cult of nakedness, here we had the aesthetic passion and motive of pure abstractly decorative art. There was in the dance movements that same rigid and precise conventionalization as in the plastre art of the fetishes—it was an evocation of symbolism, profound, but ornamental, a creative artistic representation, not merely a crude imitation, more or less happy, of natural forms. I seem to recall having read in the narratives of travellers, apropos of African dances, that they were gestures and contortions. Such descriptions create a false impression and lead to false expectations. They suggested to me a primitive, almost bestial, character and I expected to see that. On the contrary, I found quite the reverse. Everything among these Negroes was artifice and discipline, and the deeper I advanced into the forest, the more rigorous and conventionalized I found their life and ways. Their art shows crude realism, and for that very reason the dancers I saw were men exclusively, never women.” But, pardon—one should read the book itself.
How far such points of view will upset the stereotyped interpretations and preconceptions, one cannot say, but we can safely predict a great reappraisal when Africa is eventually seen, as it must be, not through the traders’, nor the military surveyors’, nor even through the missionaries’, but with the artists’ eye. Thus we look at our own culture, or we could not endure the sight of it. We know what the conception of Oriental culture was: curious, perverse, childish, sensual, until our eyes were artistically opened and we saw it to be disciplined, profound, aesthetic, ultra-sophisticated; and through the same medium, Africa will ultimately be estimated as a land of its own unique beauty and civilization.
Batouala: René Maran; Prix Goncourt, 1922.
La Randonnée de Samba Diouf: Jerome et Jean Tharand, Paris; Librarie Plan, 1922.
Koffi: The Romance of a Negro: Gaston-Joseph; Grand Prix de Littérature Coloniale, 1923; translated by Elaine Wood; John Bale Sons and Danielson, London.
La Forêt du Haut-Niger: Lucie Consturier; Les Cahiers D’Aujourdhui No. 12; Paris, 1923.
Ebony and Ivory: Llewellyn Powys, 1922.