Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

THE LION, THE BULL, AND THE TREE

Léopold Sédar Senghor’s life almost spans the twentieth century; but he is a man of the century in a way more important than longevity. He embodies the entire black experience, for slavery was still in the living memory of old Africans when he was born, and by the time of his ninetieth birthday the freedom cry from South Africa, mayibuye—Come back, Africa, return from colonisation to possess your African self — had been realized over the whole continent, including the final arsenal of white racist rule, South Africa itself.

Africa has many heroes to name, but surely none has quite the relevance to the present, in synergistic terms, that Senghor has. He made of himself a great poet and a powerful political leader; a feat that would seem impossible, for the pragmatic compromises that presidential leadership demands invariably sacrifice and plummet to earth, wounded, the creative imagination of the poet. (Look at the silence that has fallen upon the poet in President Václav Hável.) Senghor created, with Aimé Césaire, the separatist movement of négritude, drawing from the then youthful Wole Soyinka the cheeky riposte, ‘A tiger doesn’t have to proclaim his tigritude.’ Senghor became a distinguished scholar, extolling the language of the coloniser, lecturing on their own literature to the conquerors of his own country, the French. He was a Deputy in France’s Assemblee Nationale, and an African socialist in the movement of liberation for his country from French rule; he is a devout Catholic and a brilliantly eloquent expositor of traditional African beliefs and philosophy, the power of the African ethos versus Christianity.

He has made of these apparent irreconcilables a new man; the new African, a prototype that most of the rest of the continent hasn’t caught up with yet.

It is fascinating to follow this extraordinary adventure of the human spirit. Senghor has never spared himself exploration of the fundaments which underlie human divergences; secondary causes were not the easy choices he would take: the established categories of racism — prejudice explained by white primitivism, reaction to black skin. For me, his most profound piece of philosophical thinking is ‘The African Apprehension of Reality’, which is also a daring foray into its concommitant, the white apprehension of reality. For apprehension is no less than the first principle of consciousness, the beginning of everything, our place in relation to nature and our perceptions of fellow human beings. Ironically — perhaps because that was the moral hierarchy established by the colonial milieu into which he was born — he commences with the white apprehension, as a measure set up. ‘Let us consider first the European as he faces an object. . He first distinguishes the object from himself. He keeps it at a distance. He freezes it out of time and, in a way, out of space. . He makes a means of it. He destroys it by devouring it. “White men are cannibals”, an old sage in my own country told me. . “It is this process of devouring which they call humanizing nature or more exactly domesticating nature. . they don’t take into account that life cannot be domesticated.” ’

To this Senghor opposes: ‘The African is as it were shut up inside his black skin. He lives in primordial night. He does not begin by distinguishing himself from the object, the tree or stone, the man or animal or social event. He does not keep it at a distance. He does not analyse it. . He turns it over and over in his supple hands, he fingers it, he feels it. The African is. . a pure sensory field. Subjectively, at the end of his antennae, like an insect, he discovers the Other.’

These existential dicta could and do rouse hackles of accusation: the apprehension attributed to the whites is racist and derogatory, and that attributed to the blacks is obeisance to a romantic primitivism that so easily can be used by whites to ‘prove’ that blacks are childish and backward. Of course, Senghor’s thesis is that in order to free him or herself from alienation, the human must not lose in the isolation of cerebration his/her invaluable sensuous connections with all creation. As for the charge of slavish romanticising of black sensibilities, the existential state he claims for these is strikingly similar to the concept of living in tune with universal energy extolled in a great philosophy-cum-way-of-life, at the other side of the world, the Vedanta.

Senghor goes beyond what most analysts of the human condition do in identifying the divisions separating one form of apprehension of existence from another. He not only posits a dilemma, asks a question; he proceeds to solve it in himself, to provide an answer. Sometimes in surprisingly curious ways, unafraid, as always, of inevitable criticism from his own people — the hardest to bear. Having characterised Europeans as ‘white cannibals’ who devour life instead of celebrating their place and shared purpose in it with all living things, he asks, in a poem dedicated to a president of France, no less than Georges Pompidou:

Lord God, forgive white Europe.

It is true, Lord, that for four enlightened centuries, she has

scattered the baying and slaver of her mastiffs over my land

and opened my heavy eyelids to the light of faith;

who opened my heart to the understanding of the world,

showing me the rainbow of fresh faces that are my brothers’.

More contradictions brought boldly together.

John Reed and Clive Wake write of the ‘fulness of his [Senghor’s] cultural position, just as his theoretic writing on négritude postulates an ultimate all-inclusiveness in the concept of the Culture of the Universal’. Within the confidence of this position, which was hard-won for a black man between two worlds, Senghor could write a poem like the one I have quoted. He fought in the French Army and was imprisoned by the Germans in the war against the Nazis. The discriminatory treatment by the French of his fellow Senegalese soldiers inspired some of his best poetry; at the same time, as Reed and Wake write, ‘War confirms Senghor’s loyalty to France’; and his spirit is able to make of that a finding of a ‘new solidarity with his own people and also with the common people of France’. He made no excuses for his attachment to Europe and a European religion, and did not allow these to become a threat to his commitment to Africa. This remarkable ability to synergise has served in extension to his personal and particular conversion to Marxism. As Claude Wauthier remarks, Senghor reconciled ‘the humanist aspect of Marx’s thinking with his own religious convictions’. And, I would add, with the needs of the African ethos to consider ways to appropriate the industrialised world.

As a South African, I naturally have a particular interest in Senghor’s play, Chaka, based on one of the earliest imaginative interpretations of African history and heroes to be written by a black, a kind of founding document, certainly, of our South African literature — Thomas Mofolo’s novel Chaka. Chaka is a towering figure whose shadow will continue to fall many ways over the struggle against colonialism, from its beginnings as military conquest resisted in the era of Chaka, to the tactics of modern guerrilla armies such as South Africa’s Umkhonto weSizwe and civilian mass action. Chaka was a cruel despot, he even killed his own wife, Noliwe: Senghor has been accused of not condemning, in his play, Chaka’s brutality, but his interpretation of Chaka’s killing of his beloved wife may also be understood as symbolic of the terrible ultimate sacrifice of all that is personal demanded by a struggle for freedom. Claude Wauthier says, ‘Senghor sees Chaka as a forerunner of African unity, a visionary who wanted to prepare for the fight against the white invader.’

Senghor’s writing, for those of us who lived far from his complementary political life, was a source in the cultural struggle that contributed, with an essential spirit, to the liberation struggle in South Africa. Now there is a new phase of liberation to be sought in our country. The need for reconciliation of cultures. Here, in his life and writings, Senghor is a pioneer. At the first Congress of African Writers and Artists in 1956 he said, ‘We are all cultural half-castes’. But his life has revised and refuted that definition. ‘Half-caste’ posits a diminution of one blood, one identity, its dilution by another. He proves that it is possible to keep your own culture and identity intact while fully appropriating another; while participating widely, opening yourself to thought-systems, ideas, mores, of other peoples. He is not a black Frenchman. He is perhaps the most successful example of cultural wholeness achieved in Africa in a single individual. It is surely something to be celebrated; for Africa cannot cast off the world culturally, economically, ecologically, any more than Europe, the Americas and Asia can cast off Africa in any of these ways. It is an ideal that underlies the extraordinary political and social initiative headed by that other man of the century, Nelson Mandela, in our own country: in its generalized, pragmatic form it is the determination to achieve a nonracial democracy in the not-so-easy circumstances of an African country that has a sizeable population of people who have been given the right to declare themselves as nothing other than White Africans.

Senghor has come all the way; we others have the cultural synthesis still to make. None expresses the ideal fulfilment of it better than he:

. . unity is rediscovered, the reconciliation of

the Lion the Bull and the Tree,

the idea is linked to the act, the ear to the

heart, the sign to the sense.