Senegalese literature from its beginnings up to now

Senegalese literature from the beginnings up to now.

When most people use the expression Senegalese literature what they mean is novels, poetry or plays written by Senegalese people in French. They ignore the bulk of works in oral literature (orature) and in Arabic.

This orature exists in the form of tales, myths and epics popularised by the griots and the taletellers. This form of literature is more popular because it is more accessible in so far as no literacy is required and the majority of Senegalese people in villages can read and write Arabic.

However, the literature this paper will focus primarily on is what literary critics sometimes refer to as Euro African literature which is accessible to Europeans and Americans because of the language used and shared recent history.

The introduction of French into Senegal goes back to the 1800s, and the first people to write in French were Senegalese people of French descent, the mulattoes of Saint Louis and Goree. But according to all Senegalese literary critics Senegalese literature was born in Saint Louis. For other critics Senegalese literature in a foreign language started in fact with Phyllis Wheatley’s poetry (1753 – 1784). Wheatley was a young Senegalese woman snatched from her native land and sold as a slave in America.

On the continent the works produced by the mulattoes of Saint Louis or Goree could be considered of little importance indeed as they were for most of them travelogues, anthropological monographs and personal journals.

The first one to have produced any such work is Leopold Panet in 1850 with his Relation de voyage de Saint Louis à Souiera (The Chronicle of a voyage from Saint Louis to Souiera). Panet was an interpreter in the French colonial Army. And as the title of his text indicates his work is about his impressions as he travelled from Saint Louis to Souiera in Mauretania, on a voyage he did in fact as a spy for the French authorities who wanted to find a way  of linking their colonies in Sub Saharan Africa with Algeria. Panet’s work therefore is not a fiction as such. Panet’s text was published in La Revue Coloniale, a magazine which published texts for the European readership who were very fond of exotic literature in those days.

A few years later in 1853, Abbé Boilat, a French clergyman, provided a wealth of information about his era with his Esquisses sénégalaises (Senegalese sketches).

Two years later in 1855, Paul Holle and his writing partner Frédéric Carrière published De la Sénégambie Française.

All these works were more or less historical or anthropological and were produced by French people or people of French descent who were interested in giving their personal description of Senegalese culture and society. From a strictly literary point of view they cannot be considered as works of fiction.

The first work in French by a black African is La Bataille de Guilé by a young Senegalese primary school teacher named Amadou Duguay Clédor; his text was published in 1912 by l’Imprimerie sénégalaise. In 1913 Clédor published another text entitled De Faidherbe à Coppolani. We notice that Clédor’s works like those we’ve already mentioned are more historical than fictional, which is quite understandable as the early Senegalese educated people wanted to show the colonial authorities that their mastery of the French language was as good as their French teachers’.

In 1914 we see the emergence of more literary texts with Hamet Sow Télémaque who was also a school teacher in Saint Louis. That year he published three tales in the Bulletin de l’AOF : Combat des Grenouilles contre les Poissons, Le Lapin devant Dieu, and Le Loup qui se fait passer pour un médecin.

In 1920 another teacher Amadou Mapaté Diagne published what is considered the first novel written in French West Africa, Les Trois volontés de Malic ( Malic’s three Wishes ).

Three years later in 1923, Massylla Diop, yet another teacher published Le Chemin du Soldat and in 1925 he published what critics consider to be the second novel in French by an  African : Le Réprouvé ou Roman d’une Sénégalaise.

The manuscripts of both Diop’s and Diagne’s have today disappeared.

However, we can still find samples of the third novel in French by an African. Its title is Force Bonté and it was written by Bakari Diallo in1926. This book is the very symbol of the success of the French assimilationist policy in Africa in so far as Diallo condones the French colonial policy in West Africa and shows gratitude to the French for the good job they did on the continent. This book has known little success, probably because of its content.

The most productive writer in French West Africa before 1950 is by far the Senegalese Ousmane Socé Diop with two novels Karim ( 1934 ), Mirages de Paris ( 1937 ) and a collection of tales : Contes et Légendes d’Afrique noire ( 1942 ).

It is important to note at this stage the contribution of teachers to the emergence of Senegalese and indeed African literature and also the overall importance of the novel at the beginnings of Senegalese literature. Before 1950 there was almost no poetry collection and Senghor is the one who is going to awaken people’s interest in poetry with the publication of his works from 1945. And it is only after independence that any play will be written.

The importance of poetry as a literary genre is due to the birth of a literary movement called Négritude and the publication by Senghor of two major works: Chants d’Ombre and Hosties noires.

Négritude is a protest movement against colonialism. Many African intellectuals’ attention was attracted to the movement in the 40s and 50s and it helped awake them from the slumber of the long colonial night. Négritude has its origins in the Harlem Renaissance in the early 20s, a movement which was the brainchild of a group of young black writers : Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Claude Mc Kay ( from Jamaica ) whose book Banjo (1929) became the bedtime reading of most African intellectuals in the 30s. These black writers wanted to promote the cultural values of the Negro, but it would also be fair to mention the contribution of some European historians and ethnologists to the rehabilitation of black culture: Leo Frobenius, Maurice Delafosse, Théodore Monod, Robert Delavignette, Georges Hardy, and Marcel Griaule.

A group of black students in France were inspired by the ideas of all of these intellectuals black or white who fought for black cultures to stand high, and in 1932 they published a journal called Légitime Défense and later in 1934 another one called L’Etudiant Noir.

The radicalism of the journal awakened an anti – colonial sentiment in many black intellectuals in the Metropole and played a seminal role in the beginning of the cultural revolution called Négritude.

Négritude was actually founded by three people: Aimé Césaire (Martinique ), Léopold Sédar Senghor ( Sénégal ), Léon Gontran Damas ( French Guyana ). Césaire is believed to have coined the word, but Senghor is the best – known exponent of Négritude.

The movement’s goal was twofold; the political liberation of the Africans from colonisation and the rehabilitation of their culture. Senghor defined Négritude as:

                        The consciousness of being Black,the simple recognition of the fact,

                                implying acceptance and responsibility for one’s own destiny as a

                                Black man, one’s history or one’s culture. It is the refusal to assimi-

                                late, to see oneself in the other. Refusal of the other is affirmation of

                                the self[1]

Négritude advocates the refusal of identification with the dominant colonial culture. Négritude decides that colonialism has painted the African culture too black, too dark and it is its duty to restore the truth by painting the picture too white. By so doing, Négritude has beatified and idealized the African past too much. In other words the Négritude image of Africa is too pristine to be true.

And it is this aspect of Négritude that the Anglophone writers on the continent opposed. Reacting to the idealized depiction of the African past the South African writer Ezekiel Mphahlele states:

                        Who is so stupid as to deny the historical fact of Négritude as both

a protest and a positive assertion of African cultural values ? All this

is valid. What I do not accept is the way in which too much of the

poetry inspired by it romanticises Africa, as a symbol of innocence,

purity and artless primitiveness. I feel insulted when some people

imply that Africa is not also a violent continent. I am a violent person

and proud of it because it is often a healthy state of mind….[2]

     Achebe on his part adds that :

                        any serious African writer who wants to plead the cause of the

                                past must not only be God’s advocate, he must also do duty for

                                the devil[3]

Moreover by insisting too much on the past Négritude tends to blot out the problems of the present. And the Anglophone writers have yet another grief against Senghor’s movement; they dispel its claims that Africa can save the world in general and the West in particular. In his poem Prières aux Masques, Senghor writes :

                        Que nous répondions présents à la renaissance du Monde. Ainsi le

                                levain qui est nécessaire à la farine blanche. Car qui apprendrait

                                le rythme au monde défunt des machines et des canons[4]

Senghor reduces the black man to a locus of emotion; and in the same poem he adds :

                        Nous sommes les hommes de la danse, dont les pieds re-

                                prennent vigueur en frappant le sol dur[5]

The Anglophone writers refuse the “messianic mission” and the catalytic role Senghor wants Africa to play. The continent has too many problems of its own to try and solve other people’s problems. Négritude must talk about Africa’s problems, it must not only be God’s advocate “but it must also do duty for the devil”. In other words it is not shameful for a writer to bring both the good and bad sides of Africa to the world’s knowledge. It is the writer’s role to give an objective picture of his continent thus making his work more credible. The African writer is a torch-bearer lighting his people’s path to freedom. In Achebe’s words, the writer is a teacher whose role is to cure his people’s murdered eyes so they can see the surrounding reality. However, the writer is not a doctor; he doesn’t give prescriptions, he gives headaches instead. This means that “an African writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant”. He will be, in Achebe’s words, “like that absurd man in the proverb who leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames”. The writer’s role is to show his people that the big issue is not the rat fleeing from the flames but the burning house itself. And in this case the burning house can be four different things which are at the very root of present Africa’s unstable situation: the slave trade, colonization, decolonisation, neocolonization.

We all know that Africa has been the most insulted continent in the world. Europeans have, at various times, questioned Africans’ very claim to humanity; their persons have been abused and their intelligence insulted. This was done solely to find a justification to the slave trade and later to colonization. Europe’s attitude to Africa has always been arrogant and contemptuous, and as early as 1789 an ex slave called Olaudah Equiano published his autobiography in which he tried to counter the European discourse about Africa. By so doing he became the first African writer to show the role literature could play in the restoration and rehabilitation of Africa and its past.

The encounter with Europe has undermined the Africans’ self-confidence resulting in their loss of dignity and self-respect, which is the worst thing that can happen to any people. “The writer’s duty [therefore] is to help them regain [their dignity and self-respect] by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost”[6]. For there is a saying in Achebe’s Ibo language that “a man who can’t tell where the rain began to beat him cannot know where he dried his body. [And] the writer can tell the people where the rain began to beat them”[7].

This task of educating his people and re-generation of the continent’s past has been the African writer’s primary role. And the Senegalese writer has been no exception.

We’ve already stated that in Africa the writer is not simply an artist, he is a torch-bearer whose role is to light the path on which his people tread. At the beginning his objective was twofold, firstly to rehabilitate Africa’s past by doing some kind of archaeological work and secondly to lead his people to freedom by restoring their confidence. Because of this heavy role assigned to literature, theme – that is to say content- has to be what Roman Jakobson calls ‘the dominant’ of a work of fiction. The dominant is understood as “ the focusing component of a work of art, it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components”.

It could justly be stated that the ‘focusing component’ of most literary works in African literature is the theme. Due to the nature of art in Africa writers are actually compelled to dwell less on literary effects and more on the theme. In Africa literature has an important message to deliver, therefore, even if literary effects are used, they are determined by the theme, they help in order to better convey the message, they are not here for decoration. The African writer often has no time for the tinselly side of literature.

The first works in Senegalese literature were not written for the local readership because most Senegalese could not read French. The readership the writers had in mind were the Europeans, firstly  because they wanted to show them that Africans could produce works of art much as any other people, secondly they wanted to give a picture of Africa from the inside, that is to say by Africans themselves. Africans writing about their own culture, we could hope the picture could be more objective.

A few years later the Senegalese writer will move from the task of simply depicting his culture to a more politically committed one. This shift will take place after the world wars, especially after the Second World War. A lot of troops (Les Tirailleurs Sénégalais: The Senegalese Infantrymen) were sent to Europe to defend the old continent from the terror of Nazism. There, the Africans discovered the Europeans in their true nature. The white man who has always been a ‘myth’ in the eyes of the African was ‘ de-mythified’. And as Joseph Ki Zerbo writes, the African discovered overnight “ l’homme blanc dans sa vérité, sans masque impérial…’

Many writers were involved in the world conflict and when they came back to Africa their action combined with that of the veterans will help speed up the process of emancipation that actually started in between the two World Wars. “Ethnographic novels” will be superseded by works which express a rebellion against the colonial establishment.

A work such as Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu by Sembène Ousmane (God’s Bits of Wood) will directly and frontally question the colonial system. The book is about the strike of the Dakar-Niger railway workers which took place in 1947 and 1948. Sembène goes beyond just describing the actions of the African workers and embark upon a thorough denunciation of the injustices of the colonial system.

Unlike the first generation of writers who dreamed of the possibility for France to establish a true democracy in Africa and acknowledge the cultural originality of the Africans and their status as fully-fledged French citizens, the younger generation of writers overtly talk about political freedom and separation from the Metropole.

Political freedom will become a reality in the 60s when most African countries became independent. There was a lot of rejoicings, people sang, danced and praised the new black leaders who had ‘cut the captives’ chains’. For most independence would mean democracy, more equality, the elimination of poverty and diseases and the benefits of safe water, education and good health care made available to all.

But very soon independence will taste very bitter in the mouths of those very African masses who fought so hard for it and expected so much of it. The early optimism is indeed followed by bitter disappointment. The vast majority of the people soon “ found that the independence [ their] country was supposed to have won was totally without content. The old white master was still in power. He had got himself a bunch of black stooges to do his dirty work for a commission. [ And] as long as they did what was expected of them they would be praised for their sagacity and their country for stability.”[8]

This period in African history sees the growth of corruption and embezzlement of public funds which became some sort of national sport; the African was indeed a wolf for the other African. This became the time of coups and countercoups, of Presidents for life ready to kill and maim just to remain in power, of tyrants and dictators of all sorts.

The educated African of the city who a few years back talked so much of justice and equality started to shamelessly exploit his fellow countrymen from the rural areas or the shanty towns that mushroomed on the outskirts of the colonial cities.

National resources are used to build luxurious villas and buy expensive cars or dilapidated in family ceremonies. Sembène in his novels Xala, Le Mandat, Le Dernier de l’Empire will attack all these plagues of the new African societies.

Later, a literature mainly produced by women such as Mariama Ba, Nafissatou Diallo, Aminata Sow Fall will focus on the same and other social plagues and vehemently denounce them.

Today most works of fiction are still about the failure of politics and its consequences which in many parts of the continent have resulted in ethnic or religious clashes, political instability, poll rigging, famines, diseases, etc.

The attitude of the young writers of today proves that from the beginnings up to now the writer has always felt he has an important role to play in society. The African writer has no time for art for art’s sake. For him or her art has a social and  political function ; its primary role is not entertainment but education of the masses. Out of this objective any work of fiction is irrelevant and meaningless.

And for the coming years, we think this role of the writer will not change for the problems of Africa are manifold and any writer worth his trade should address them, not to find solutions but to let his people know because as the saying goes when you know what your problem is half of the solution is already in your hands.

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[1]. Senghor, quoted in Art, Rebellion and Redemption, Muoneke R. Okey, pp.60 - 61

[2]. Ezechiel Mphahlele quoted in Chinua Achebe et la tragédie de l’histoire by Thomas Melone, p.17

[3].The Duty and Involvement of the African Writer, Chinua Achebe

[4].Senghor, Poèmes, ed.du Seuil, 1974, p.21

[5]. Senghor, op. cit., p.22

[6]. Chinua Achebe, op. cit.,.

[7]. Ibidem

[8]. Chinua Achebe, op. cit.