By Tirthankar ChandaPosted on 25-12-2019Changed on 25-12-2019 at 14:34
In 1960, six decades ago, 17 African countries gained independence. Writers and intellectuals were the seeds of the movements that led to these emancipations. A look back on a century of African, French-language letters and their complex links with society and politics.
" When we take stock of independence, the only element of pride we can have is our literature ", likes to say the literary critic Boniface Mongo-Mboussa . An observation that is unanimous among the publishers and observers of African letters.
This pride is fully justified, according to Jean-Noël Schifano, director of the prestigious “Black Continents” collection published by Gallimard. "Black Continents" will celebrate in 2020 its 20 years of existence with a wealth of prestigious discoveries to its credit which range from the Mauritian Nathacha Appanah to the Rwandan Scholastic Mukasonga , via Aminata Haïdara, Théo Ananissoh, Ousmane Diarra, Libar Fofana, Kofi Kwawuleh, to name a few.
For Jean-Noël Schifano, African literature is " a diamond tip of universal literature ". The publisher relies on the quality and inventiveness of the authors of its collection to justify its pride in having published 51 authors in the space of two decades. " I will publish the 120th work for the 20 years of the collection: it is an enthusiasm which continues ", he adds.
The decolonization of minds
African literature is today centenary. The age of its tradition is undoubtedly not unrelated to the success of esteem which it knows and to the enthusiasm which it arouses. In 2021, we will celebrate the centenary of the award of the Goncourt Prize to Batouala (Albin Michel) by René Maran, which bore the subtitle " true Negro novel ". This novel, written by a senior French-Guyanese colonial official stationed in Oubangui-Chari, present-day Central Africa, marks the beginning of French-speaking African literature.
Batouala is the first novel which gives Africans the care to speak of Africa. It is a critical word, which denounces colonial exploitation and the sub-humanization of the colonized. This novel prefigures the movement of Negritude. This theoretical and poetic movement was born in the 1930s. By restoring dignity to the black man, He prepared for the independence that had arisen in the 1960s for many countries on the continent.
Now, " this renaissance will be less the result of politicians than of Negro writers and artists ," said Senghor. An affirmation that contextualizes Jacques Chevrier (1) , former professor at the Sorbonne of African literatures: “ This movement of intellectuals and writers has played an important role in the awareness of identity of the African man. The writers took the floor and defined the perspective that was theirs at the time. It was a perspective of material decolonization and especially that of the spirits. "
For the Cameroonian novelist Kidi Bebey (2) , nothing illustrates this work of intellectual undermining of colonization better than the action carried out by Senghor himself. " Senghor has been criticized a lot for the often essentialist content of his texts, " she says. But he was really the forerunner of the intellectual and political liberation movement which started at the end of the colonial period . "
“ It is no coincidence that, having become president of Senegal, one of his first actions consisted in organizing, in Dakar in 1966, the world festival of Negro arts, bringing together black personalities from around the world, from the 'Africa, but also the United States, the Antilles and Guyana, recalls the novelist. It was a question of recalling the filiation, the ancestral links between all these people and showing how the strength of African cultural power had been denied by colonization. For Senghor, African national reconstruction went through the re-establishment of this power in all its truth and its assertion vis-à-vis the whole world. "
The era of suspicion
A tool for political liberation during the colonial period, African literature continued to play, after independence, its critical role, exposing the postcolonial imposture and its procession of infamy, through the magnifying mirror, however faithful, of the 'imaginary.
The post-1960 period was characterized by a veritable explosion of African literary productions. It is not the least of paradoxes that the French-speaking African literature knows its development during the postcolonial period, when France withdraws from the continent as a colonizing power. This is also true for the literatures of English-speaking Africa. The writers have known how to be witnesses of history being written, putting their works in tune with the great questions which cross their nascent nations: the status of women, polygamy, dictatorships, traditions, children -soldiers or migration.
" There is a turning point after independence which marks the end of negritude, and the emergence of new voices denouncing what we can call" colonial imposture " , recalls Jacques Chevrier. This trend is illustrated by L'État honteux (Seuil) by Sony Labou Tansi, undoubtedly one of the most striking African novels of these years. It is this “shameful state” that Ahmadou Kourouma also describes in his novel The Suns of Independence (Threshold) published in 1968. It is a violent and brutal society that Kourouma stages in his opus, which has become a great African classic. The central character of the novel is Fama who is a fallen prince, downgraded, and who understands that independence has been a decoy, that people have been deceived and that ultimately the new society is not better than the previous one . It may be worse. "
Despite this dissident charge, contemporary African literatures cannot be reduced to their dimension of engagement. These are characterized today by their great diversity of inspiration. They draw their themes from the ills of society as well as from individual paths from here and elsewhere. Among the most recent examples, we could cite that of the Djiboutian Abdourahman Waberi whose penultimate novel La Divine chanson (Zulma) is devoted to the life of the black American musician Gil Scott-Héron. The Togolese Sammy Tchak takes us to Latin America with his novel Filles de Mexico (Mercure de France).
African literature has opened up to the world, speaks to the world, while on the aesthetic level, it has endeavored to invent new poetics by freeing itself from Western literary models. She also distanced herself from the political concerns of the founding fathers of African letters who urged writers to assume their responsibilities by making their works " birth attendants of history " and " inventors of souls ".
“ This independence that African writers claim today is the result of a long intellectual and literary journey , notes Kidi Bebey. It was not until the 1980s with authors like Sony Labou Tansi to see the literature out of the reference and the obligatory deference to the French language of France and to Western models. It is to the second and third generations of writers that we owe this freedom that characterizes contemporary African literature. "
A wind of freedom is blowing today on African literature. If independence was the product of literature, the authors were inspired in their turn by the spirit of independence to assert their originality and radically renew their inspiration.
► To read also: African literature of French expression: the boom years
1. Jacques Chevrier is the author of several works presenting African literature: Negro literature (A. Colin, 1st ed. 1974) , L'Arbre à palabres. Essay on traditional tales and stories from black Africa (Hatier) , White people seen by Africans (Favre editions) , Williams Sassine, writer of marginality (editions of the Deer) , French-speaking black African literatures ( Nathan ), French-speaking literatures of black Africa (Edisud)
2. My kingdom for a guitar , by Kidi Bebey. Editions Michel Lafon, 2016 (available in Pocket pocket)
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