The literary and intellectual achievements of post-war Africa are recalled at a French exhibition, writes David Tresilian in Paris While the controversy that greeted the opening of the musée du quai Branly in Paris three years ago has hardly gone away -- this is a museum that presents the traditional arts of non-European cultures in a dark and forest-like environment as if to imply that they are both unenlightened and close to nature -- the institution may nevertheless have redeemed itself through the excellent series of temporary exhibitions that it has since put on show. Starting in 2006 with Qu'est-ce que un corps, an investigation of representations of the human body across cultures, and including intriguing dossier exhibitions like those on Berber ceramics and repair-work on works of art in Africa (reviewed in the Weekly in August 2007), this series recently included a rewarding look at the aesthetics of the fetish in Africa and now boasts a further two important and related exhibitions. The first of these is on the Franco-Senegalese review and publishing house Présence africaine, while the second is on the traditional arts of the kingdom of Dahomey, today part of the West African state of Benin. Both are very much worth seeing. Divided into four chronological sections, the museum's Présence africaine exhibition takes visitors from the beginnings of modern black and African consciousness in France in the 1920s and 30s to the Premier festival mondial des arts nègres organised in Dakar by Présence africaine and the government of the newly independent West African state of Senegal in 1966. On the way, it presents the publishing and other work of this Paris-based review and publisher, including the circumstances surrounding its foundation in 1947 by Senegalese intellectual Alioune Diop and its work in encouraging and distributing the writings of many of the most important black and African writers and intellectuals at work in the decades following the end of the Second World War. These included Martiniquan authors Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon and Senegalese intellectuals Léopold Sédar Senghor, first president of independent Senegal, and Cheikh Anta Diop, a pioneering figure of African historiography. As the exhibition explains, Présence africaine was born at a particular historical moment, with its support for research in African history and for African literature and cultures drawing both on pre-war American pan-Africanism, presented here in the work of Garvey and du Bois, and on materials circulating in metropolitan France and the French West African colonies, including the 1930s newspapers La Voix des nègres and Le Cri des nègres. The writers of the American Harlem Renaissance, pre-war reviews such as La Revue du monde noir, and the French Caribbean writers gathered around the journal L'Etudiant noir, in particular Césaire, were also important influences. Together with Présence africaine's interest in developments in the English-speaking world, swiftly translating the works of Nkrumah and Padmore, these showed up the review's commitment to building a trans-national black identity, linking anglophone and francophone worlds, which would bring together Africa and the African diaspora. It was the post-war drive for independence on the part of then European colonies in Africa that provided the real impetus for the review's programme. Before the 1966 Dakar festival, presented here as the high point of this phase of its career, Présence africaine organised two other events in Europe, the first in Paris in 1956 and the second in Rome in 1959, bringing together black artists, writers and intellectuals from Africa, the Caribbean and both sides of the Atlantic against a background of decolonisation and growing political and cultural awareness. The 1956 Congrès des artistes et écrivains noirs, held at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1956, is sometimes considered to be a kind of "cultural Bandung," in a reference to the first meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement held in the Indonesian city of the same name, while the Rome congress built upon networks established earlier in the decade and advanced the review's research programme. According to Alioune Diop writing in the war years, "we were foreign students in Paris who had come together to study our own situation and the features that defined us at a time when Europe was living through a period of suffering and examining its own essence and values." This gave rise "to the establishment of an international network and the circulation of ideas around Présence africaine that brought together the main black intellectual production of the 1950s and 60s," in the words of curator Sarah Frioux- Salgas. Walking through the exhibition, containing a wealth of original documents and archival films, visitors may well be struck by the ramifying implications of Diop's original programme. This, he wrote, was open to "all men of good will able to assist us in defining African identity and its inclusion in the modern world," and it took in literary writings encouraged by Senghor's concept of négritude, as well as historical research that "deconstructed the ideological forms of European historiography," as an essay in a special edition of the review Gradhiva puts it, and provided a foundation for the new Africa that was emerging from European colonisation. For those of a comparative habit of mind, it is especially interesting to compare debates in francophone Africa at the time to those going on in the former British African colonies. Debates on African literature were at least as developed in francophone Africa as they were in anglophone, possibly more so, and Présence africaine was able to use its location in Paris -- at once a "political centre and the centre of world literary consecration" as an essay in Gradhiva puts it -- to publish African authors and introduce them to world audiences. Work by writers such as Sembène Ousmane ( Le Docker noir, 1956) and Ferdinand Oyono ( Une Vie de boy, 1958) began to appear in French editions, giving rise to debates on language, materials and audiences. "If a francophone writer had done in French what [Nigerian writer] Chinua Achebe did in English, as Ahmadou Kourouma did in Les Soleils des indépendances, either he would not have been published in France, which was in fact the case, or he would have been accused of degrading the French language," comments one writer in Gradhiva. Responding to the success of Camara Laye's 1954 novel L'enfant noir, Alexandre Biyidi, the future novelist Mongo Beti, wrote of his revulsion at what he felt was "a pleasant and reassuring negro literature produced by docile intellectuals and written for a European public. This is a literature that contributes nothing new and does not serve as a model for the kind of production that black people need." According to one writer in Gradhiva, Présence africaine adopted "a very French conception of literature, producing an image of the writer and determining the scope of his production," and this could appear formidably abstract, if not unnecessary, to writers of a more pragmatic persuasion. However, given the wealth of fascinating material that this conception in fact encouraged, one might be glad that it did so. In a recent interview with the magazine Jeune Afrique, Christiane Yandé Diop, wife of Alioune Diop and today director of Présence africaine, talked about intellectual decline in Africa since the review's glory days in the 1950s and 60s. Now in her eighties, Mme Diop can still be seen at the review's bookshop in the Rue des Ecoles in Paris surrounded by an urban palimpsest of Tibetan restaurants and Algerian grocery stores all occupying tiny ground-floor premises. "People don't read anymore," she told the magazine, and books are expensive and beyond many people's means. "How can one ever forget the first Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs at the Sorbonne in 1956 and the following in Rome in 1959? It was all wonderful. What is lacking today is a way of bringing people together." However, while many of the hopes of that time may now have fallen by the wayside, even Senghor's flagship Musée dynamique in Dakar having since been closed, Alioune Diop's insistence that African traditional art be given the same consideration as the art of other parts of the world, rather than being seen as a store of motifs for foreign recuperation, as notoriously happened in the case of the European modernists, or as a source of ethnographic information, has since become part of the scholarly consensus. The second of the two quai Branly exhibitions accordingly demonstrates an attention to provenance and function, as well as, unusually for exhibitions of traditional African art, to the names of the artists themselves. Most of the pieces displayed in Artistes d'Abomey, dialogue sur un royaume africain -- textiles, bas reliefs and wooden and metal sculpture -- were brought to France at the end of the 19th century following the French conquest of Dahomey, now in Benin, in 1892-94. In the exhibition, young curator Ga�lle Beaujean-Baltzer has investigated the role such works played in pre- conquest society and the position of artists in it. The word adawunzowato was used for artist, adawun meaning something marvelous and wato meaning work. "Differentiating between 'artist' and 'craftsman' [in this context] is a false debate," writes Joseph Adandé of the University of Abomey- Calavi. "What counts is that the creator should be subject to aziza, an impulse that came to him as he slept and stimulated his creativity." The exhibition is singular not only for the attention it gives to traditional African aesthetic concepts, but also to the names and careers of the artists themselves, with impressive pieces from the 1860s now being attributed to sculptors Ganhu Hountondji and Ekplekendo Akati. While the Présence africaine exhibition ends with film of the 1966 festival mondial des arts nègres, the second exhibition could be seen as a kind of tribute to the review's ideas and research programme.
