A sweet-sour look at an anti-colonial journal

by Susan Owensby

Article published on the 2009-12-18 Latest update 2009-12-18 16:40 TU

Wole Soyinka
(Photo: Chidi Anthony Opara)

Paris’s Quai Branly museum has an exhibition focusing on the first 20 years of Présence Africaine - the literary and cultural journal founded in 1947 by the Senegalese intellectual Alioune Diop, a man often referred to as the “black Socrates”.

In the first issue of the journal, Diop defined its goals: to publish Africanist studies on black culture and civilisation, to publish African texts, and to critique works of art or thought concerning the black world.

Although Diop first insisted that Présence Africaine would not be held to any philosophical or political ideology, by 1955 he clearly redefined the journal's objectives.

“All articles will be published on the condition that they are in good taste, that they concern Africa, that they neither betray our antiracist and anticolonialist will, nor our solidarity with colonised peoples,” he wrote.

Those early years were remarkably fertile.

Within the first two years a publishing house was created, and in 1953 the group produced the radical anticolonial film Statues also die. It was banned in France for ten years.

There  were black writers' and artists' congresses, a cultural association was created, and Diop and his friends were active participants in the organisation of the First Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal, in 1966.

The exhibition at the Quai Branly focuses on the major role played by Présence Africaine in the political and cultural history of black Francophone, English-speaking, and Portuguese-speaking intellectuals. To give you an idea of its importance, among the guests at the opening was Wole Soyinka, the first African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

Soyinka  has been involved with Présence Africaine for decades. Through the encounters organised by the group, intellectuals, writers and artists can meet and exchange notes on the cultures of the black peoples, he told RFI. That helps them become better known and can influence thinking. 

Soyinka describes the impact of Présence Africaine as “diffusive”.

As for the exhibit itself, he says, “There is something both beautiful and sad about it – many of these precursors in the humanities have gone. It’s nostalgic, and a sweet-sour feeling at the same time.”

The exhibition last until the end of January.