Give me gunpowder and a gun: tomorrow I will leave.
I want to chop off their heads: tomorrow I will leave.
They have women who are pretty: tomorrow I will leave.
They are said to have gold: tomorrow I will leave.
Today I must forge bullets: tomorrow I will leave.
Today I must offer a sacrifice: tomorrow I will leave.
I want to chop off their heads: tomorrow I will leave.
(Donne-moi de la poudre et un fusil: demain je partirai
Je veux leur couper la tête: demain je partirai.
Ils ont des femmes qui sont jolies: demain je partirai.
On dit qu’ils ont de l’or: demain je partirai.
Aujourd’hui il faut que je forge des balles: demain je partirai.
Aujourd’hui il faut que j’offre un sacrifice: demain je partirai.
Je veux leur couper la tête: demain je partirai.)
1This is the first of the six texts that make up the chapter “Warrior Spirit” in Maurice Delafosse’s L’Âme nègre (The Negro Soul), published in 1922. Its title, “Leaving for Battle,” followed by the description “Baoulé war song. Ivory Coast,” is meant to illustrate, along with the other 112 passages of oral literature in the anthology, one of the “emotive feelings” typical of the “mentality” of “the Blacks of Africa,” in this case their fierce fighting spirit (Delafosse 1922, 59, 9, 7). This is not the first nor the last mention of this “war song,” however. Delafosse gives the “original” source at the end of his work, but the reference turns out to be to his own Essai de manuel de la langue agni, parlée dans la moitié orientale de la Côte d’Ivoire (Outline of a Manual of the Agni Language Spoken in the Eastern Part of the Ivory Coast), published by the Librairie africaine et coloniale twenty-two years previously (Delafosse 1900). Later still, respectively twenty-four and twenty-six years after L’Âme nègre, this same song was published in two separate anthologies compiled by the founding “fathers” of the Negritude movement, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas. Although little known, these anthologies can be likened to manifestoes of this movement.
2Redeployments such as these exemplify the malleability of utterances that, once they have been consecrated by the European literati as specimens of African “oral literature,” are liable to be appropriated to all sorts of different ends. Initially invested by colonial discourse and ethnographic studies, some of these texts were “reappropriated” by Black poets as part of a wider ambition to inflect the course of French poetry, or even the definition of world literature. But since they knew nothing of the original context of enunciation, their quest cannot be equated with a return to the origin, as we shall show. In order to explore this further, we will follow the history of this “war song,” from the autumn of 1899 when it was first collected by Delafosse to its inclusion in Damas’s 1948 anthology Poèmes nègres sur des airs africains (Negro Poems on African Melodies). Noting the specificities of each occurrence, we shall attempt to link these to the complex dialogue in the postwar years within what is referred to—with an unconvincing singular—the Negritude movement.
Fig. 1. Portrait of Maurice Delafosse (1870-1926), French colonial administrator, in a garden, holding a pitchfork in front of a wheelbarrow, in 1896. From the album of photographs "B" containing 226 photographs and a photocopy.
Photograph by Georges Thomann (1872 - 1943). Aristotype glued directly onto a numbered board, captioned in ink, inventory number PA000590.37
© musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris.
- 1 According to Fabio Viti, whose expertise has been invaluable to me in preparing this article, and w (...)
- 2 Fabio Viti comments that “the translation seems faithful as it stands,” although it is difficult to (...)
3In 1900, Delafosse published the text of a “war song,” described at the time as Agni,1 in the penultimate part of his Essai de manuel . . ., titled, not without a certain vanity, “Chrestomathy” (a didactic anthology, supposed to make it easier to learn a language by introducing a selection of passages taken from its classical authors). Here he gave the original Baoulé2 text, followed by a translation in French in a single block of text:
Give me gunpowder and guns: I will leave tomorrow. I want to chop off their heads: I will leave tomorrow. They have women who are pretty: I will leave tomorrow. They are said to have gold: I will leave tomorrow. Today I must make bullets: I will leave tomorrow. Today I must offer a sacrifice: I will leave tomorrow. I want to chop off their heads: I will leave tomorrow. Give me gunpowder and guns: I will leave tomorrow.
(Donne-moi de la poudre et des fusils: je partirai demain. Je veux leur couper la tête: je partirai demain. Ils ont des femmes qui sont jolies: je partirai demain. On dit qu’ils ont de l’or: je partirai demain. Aujourd’hui il faut que je fasse des balles: je partirai demain. Aujourd’hui, il faut que j’offre un sacrifice: je partirai demain. Je veux leur couper la tête: je partirai demain. Donne-moi de la poudre et des fusils: je partirai demain.)
- 3 According to a letter to his parents of October 14, 1899, quoted by his daughter (Delafosse L. 1976 (...)
4A short footnote adds that “This song was sung to me by Kouadio Zegbé, the chief of Agba-gnyan-sou near Toumodi, and his warriors, when they came to offer me their cooperation against a rebel chief” (Delafosse 1900, 180–81). Now, as Fabio Viti has shown in a very detailed study that cross-checks the oral sources collected in situ and the many records available, these two lines at the bottom of the page are in fact a euphemistic, or even scotomized, account of a particularly violent episode in the conquest of French West Africa, when the young Delafosse, interim commander of the Baoulé circle at Toumodi, and aged twenty-eight, brutally repressed a revolt in Baoulé territory, which was headed by the chief, Kouadio Okou. On September 8, 1899, Kouadio Okou had indeed set fire to Delafosse’s hut, but not out of an unconditional hostility toward the French presence, as Delafosse would later claim, but actually as a reprisal after Delafosse had himself organized arson against the chief “in order to punish [Kouadio Okou] for having repeatedly pillaged the caravans passing through his village” (Viti 2020, 119). On hearing about the episode later, even his superiors considered Delafosse’s action to be “disproportionate” (ibid., 122) and lacking in a certain “prudence” and “self-control” (Albert Nebout, quoted ibid.). That said, Delafosse only just escaped being burnt to death, and lost “all [his] linguistic and other research,” “all [his] six years of work”3 (most probably an exaggeration). He never forgave Kouadio Okou, nor the Baoulé territory itself, which he considered as his “personal domain, [. . .] his research laboratory,” and whose population had, to his mind, “betrayed” his trust (ibid., 121, 124). Continuing his policy of instrumentalizing local divisions in order to further French domination, he was supported by rival chiefs, including Kouadio Zegbé, when he pursued the “rebel” chief Kouadio Okou in what turned out to be a violent campaign lasting several months (a death toll of some fifty in the rebels’ camp, four among the colonial troops, and dozens of wounded). This was in vain: Delafosse was obliged to publicly “make peace” with Kouadio Okou in February 1904 (but he refused to shake hands with him) (ibid., 136).
Fig. 2. « War song » in Maurice Delafosse, Essai de manuel de la langue agni parlée dans la moitié orientale de la Côte d’Ivoire. J. André, Librairie africaine et coloniale, Paris, 1900, p. 180-181.
Fig. 3. Reception of Governor Clozel in Dabakala, February 29, 1904.
Seated from left to right: 3rd, Nebout; 5th, Clozel; 7th, Delafosse; 8th, Bouvet.
During this reception, Delafosse refused to shake hands with Kouadio Ogbou. From Louise Delafosse’s book Maurice Delafosse, the Berrichon Conquered by Africa. Paris, Société française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 1976, plate 41, p. 226.
Photo Marlingue-Viollet.
- 4 The French administration’s alternate authorization and prohibition of the sale and purchase of arm (...)
5It was during that campaign, either in September or, more plausibly, in November 1899, when a ban on buying and selling weapons was in place,4 that Delafosse first heard and noted down the words said by Kouadio Zegbé. This first written version of what he had heard is thus the product of a massive, but concealed, derealization, which neutralizes the message and integrates it into an even greater lie: that of Delafosse’s supposed “pacification” of the region. For Delafosse was suggesting that Kouadio Zegbé’s words were the sign of his spontaneous allegiance in the context of a minor conflict. By converting them into a simple “war song,” and by presenting them as a pedagogical example, Delafosse manages to strip them of the weight and seriousness they had. In denial, or rather in denegation, of his violent operations of repression—which he persistently refused to acknowledge—the military campaign finds itself transformed into a campaign for collecting examples of language use. For Delafosse cultivated the image of a “backwoodsman,” avowedly strict in his administration, but ultimately well-meaning, an expert on “his” natives, someone who rejected all “militarism” and who intended to raise the esteem for “Negro-African” history and civilization.
- 5 On the structure and performance of Baoulé songs, both masculine and feminine, see Viti 2023, 114–2 (...)
6Twenty-two years later, in L’Âme nègre, Kouadio Zegbé’s statements once again underwent an aestheticizing reworking, in two ways. First, their situated function continued to be neutralized—in this case the solemnity of the sealing of a military alliance between groups pursuing the same ends, as shown in the effects of symmetry and the epiphoric structure of the Baoulé version, which suggests that the language partook of a ritual action or, at the very least, that it obeyed conventions specific to certain circumstances.5 Already called a “war song” (chant de guerre) in the Essai de manuel. . ., but serving essentially as a didactic example—insofar as Agni songs “are generally of little interest from a literary standpoint” (Delafosse’s words)—it has become a chanson de guerre (a chanson is smaller, more popular, and of lighter spirit than a chant) without any identifiable speaker, except for the poem’s “I” of enunciation, which has no concrete referent either. All of this within the covers of a volume that has been compiled with the stated aim of collecting “the people’s” “oral literature” from the African “natives,” for the benefit of the general reader (Delafosse 1922, 9).
Fig.4. Maurice Delafosse, L’Âme nègre. Paris, Payot & Cie, 1922.
- 6 “L’âme nègre” was the title of a colonial narrative by the French journalist and explorer Jean Hess (...)
7It is worth spending a moment on this little book that the administrator-ethnographer Delafosse published in 1922, a few months after publishing his Noirs de l’Afrique (Delafosse 1921) with the same publisher, Payot. At the time, it was four years since Delafosse had left Africa for good. These two short works (180 and 160 pages respectively) had an incomparably larger circulation than his other writings, which were more scholarly and the preserve of specialist publishers. They were mentioned in the generalist press, and gave Delafosse publicity “beyond the colonial circle in which he moved” (Delafosse L. 1976, 369). The many references to the later book, L’Âme nègre, reflect its extremely large readership, including African authors, until the war and beyond—a point we shall come back to. As its title indicates,6 L’Âme nègre was written from the racialist perspective of the psychology of peoples, but also to contest the supposed “barbarian” nature of the Africans; “the warrior spirit,” for Delafosse, went along with hospitality, generosity, obedience, religious sentiment, etc. The “âme nègre” thus had dignity at the same time as it could be characterized by a set of (essentialized) moral tendencies. Delafosse viewed the “warrior spirit” as a psychological constant, detached from any history or context, and he illustrated this variously: by a “maxim in Bambara” that emphasizes the fruitlessness of fear; by a “war song” of the Amazons of Dahomey; and, inversely, by the lamentations of the official women mourners who had been unable to hold back the men of Belogoudou, whose rebellion against their forced enrollment by the colonial authorities in 1915 was crushed by the French army (“Le point de vue des vaincus” (The Viewpoint of the Vanquished), Delafosse 1922, 64–65). Already operative in the Essai de manuel. . ., Delafosse’s enterprise of self-exoneration goes a step further here, in that he attributes all these illustrations to a “spontaneous [. . .] emotive feeling” (ibid., 9), which preexisted the colonial conquest, owes nothing to it, and manifests itself in an identical way whatever the circumstances—wars against rival kingdoms, rebellion against the French authorities or, as here, “civil war” between “factions” (artfully stirred up by the agents of colonization: see Viti 2023).
- 7 Another sign of the wide circulation of this “song” was its inclusion, from a similar perspective, (...)
8The qualifier “Baoulé” works in a similar way. It too has a descriptive value, designating a language, but since it is also associated with a “genre” like war songs (or, elsewhere, love songs) it confirms and reinforces the “substantivist presuppositions” which underpin colonial knowledge, with their implicit “reference to [. . .] a[n ethnic] ‘basic personality structure,’ which is part of a procedure at once of legitimation and delegitimation” (Dozon 2005 [1985], 53, 58). Besides, although the change in descriptor from Agni to Baoulé does indeed correspond to linguistic classifications, it also participates in the policy of dividing up the territory into “ethnic groups,” and making some of these the preferred interlocutors of the colonial authorities. The Baoulé in the east were considered by the colonial powers to be more reliable, less “anarchic” and “libertarian,” than peoples in the west (ibid., 55). Thus, when the “war song” appeared without an ethnic label, at the end of the annual illustrated supplement to the 1930 edition of the Courrier colonial, whose theme that year was “populations and forests of the Ivory Coast,” this suggested that the song epitomized a “spirit” now emanating from the whole of the colony.7
9In refusing description—liable to distorting projections—and in demarcating his work from novelistic or erudite modes, Delafosse sought to “deliver the secrets of the Negro soul” to his readers, exposing them directly to the “tales, [. . .] fables, [. . .] maxims and [. . .] songs into which this soul pours itself without restraint, and reveals itself entirely.” Thus the reader would absorb, as though by impregnation, “the particular reasoning proper to the Black race” (Delafosse 1922, 10, 8). This essentialism, which one could broadly call “romantic”—literature, and above all popular literature, is conceived as revealing the “spirit” of a people, whose unity and homogeneity is supposed—this essentialism, then, has as its logical consequence that the circumstances of the enunciation and the author’s individuality are effaced, as we have seen in the case of the Baoulé “rebellion” and the name of Kouadio Zegbé. Delafosse ended his preface with the words “Now I hand over to the real author, the Black man of the African continent” (Delafosse 1922, 16)—a paradoxical statement given that this author is clearly both a collective entity and anonymous, and that he depends for his existence on the mediation of a collector-prefacer who is the book’s signatory.
- 8 Bullets were hammered not forged (Fabio Viti, Personal communication, April 2024). On the weapons u (...)
10This aestheticization is also apparent in the changes Delafosse makes to the text itself, not least the typographical alterations by which the block of text from 1900 becomes an eight-line poem, in which each line ends with the words “tomorrow I will leave” (demain je partirai). This is an inversion of the original syntax—“I will leave tomorrow” (je partirai demain)—and it unmistakably echoes Victor Hugo’s famous poem from his collection Contemplations: “Demain, dès l’aube . . . / Je partirai” (Tomorrow, at dawn . . . / I will leave). With the Contemplations in mind, then, the reader cannot approach the first syntagm of the first and last lines in Delafosse’s reworked version—lines which, in this light, appear primarily as decasyllables, Donne-moi de la poudre et un fusil—without recalling Victor Hugo’s poetry and his poem “L’Enfant” (The Child) from his collection Les Orientales, specifically the closing words of “the child with blue eyes”: “I want gunpowder and bullets” (Je veux de la poudre et des balles). Additionally, Delafosse adorns the down-to-earth statement “I must make bullets” by replacing it with the more literary—but less precise—“I must forge bullets” (il faut que je forge des balles).8 Lastly, the mention of “gunpowder and guns” (de la poudre et des fusils), which was a reference to the volunteer auxiliary troops who had no access to munitions because of the ban on arms trading, becomes “gunpowder and a gun,” as though the speaker were a single person, and thus the allegorical representative of a homogeneous group, in keeping with the logic that underpins the whole of the Âme nègre anthology.
- 9 Allusion to the cover of the original edition, where a sensationalist question mark encircled the t (...)
Who today can claim to know the Negro soul?
The Negro soul? That is the title, right down to the question mark,9 of a small book by M. Delafosse, the only colonial writer who, as far as I know, really knew the Black people. He suggests that one should “let the Blacks speak for themselves.”
Has that ever been tried? (Sissoko 1953, 78–79)
11These few sentences, published in 1953 by the Malian writer Fily Dabo Sissoko, who at the time had a seat in the French Constitutional Assembly representing the territory then called “Sudan,” reflect the wider opinion of many African authors and intellectuals who, at least until the independence struggles, held the writings of Delafosse in high esteem. In 1939, Senghor qualified Delafosse’s research as that of “the greatest Africanist in France” (Senghor 1939, 297), particularly for his aim of listening to and affirming the voices of the African continent as never before. This modifies a little the idea that the author of Haut-Sénégal-Niger (Upper Senegal – Niger) was forgotten after his death: if his role in the history of Africanist ethnology has indeed been minimized (see Amselle and Sibeud 1998), his memory was not perpetuated solely by nostalgic former “colonizers.” One can find many references to his research in the scholarly publications of African authors, from the 1920s to the 1950s at least. This should come as no surprise, since Delafosse devoted himself as from 1910 to building up an “indigenous cultural elite” that was to be both Francophile and attentive to their own culture, and which would contribute to disseminating knowledge of local languages, history, and local customs, from a perspective combining a “gratuitous” love of learning and thoughtful integration into the French civilizing program (see Jézéquel 1998). And Delafosse’s writings continued to be used massively after his death, in 1926, in the curriculum of the elite training college for teachers, administrators, and some professions, the Ecole normale William-Ponty in Senegal (see Labrune-Badiane and Smith 2018), contributing at times to the construction of local, and later national, identities—for example through his translation of the legend of Queen Pokou in his Essai de manuel . . . of 1900, which gradually transformed into the “myth of the foundation of the Baulé of the Ivory Coast” (Viti 2009, 869). The biography written by his daughter in 1976 has a preface by the first president of the Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, and a postface by Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of Senegal. Unlike Houphouët-Boigny, however, Senghor was not educated at the Ecole William-Ponty, but rather in Paris where, in the 1930s, he discovered with enthusiasm the writings of colonial administrators, not only Delafosse, but also Henri Gaden, Henri Labouret, Robert Delavignette, even before the “thunderclap” of discovering Leo Frobenius in 1936, thanks to his friend Aimé Césaire (Senghor 1979, 142). With the highly prestigious agrégation in grammar under his belt, Senghor began studying ethnology, obtaining his BA (licence) from the Institut d’ethnologie de Paris in June 1939, and embarking on a doctoral thesis (which he never finished) titled “The Verbal Forms of the Senegalo-Guinean Language Group (Serer, Fula, Wolof, and Diola).”
12In 1946, the Marseille-based literary review Cahiers du sud was due to publish the Baoulé “war song” at the head of a special section titled “Le sang noir” (black blood), preceded only by an opening note (anonymous) and a brief foreword signed by Pierre Guerre, one of the key figures of the journal. The table of contents did not mention the issue’s editor, but there can be no doubt that this ensemble was devised by Senghor himself. The issue was deferred time and again, and changed fundamentally between its initial outline and the final version. Already in March 1938, Jean Ballard, the Cahiers du sud’s editor-in-chief, had approached Senghor for a “Negro issue.” The outline of a table of contents, which can today be found in Senghor’s archives (Senghor 1938), and his correspondence with Ballard, show that this issue was intended as a set of articles on “the Negro problem” from a similar perspective to that of Jane and Paulette Nardal’s Revue du monde noir (1931–32). African-American voices predominated: Louis Achille, from Martinique, was allotted an important role; René Maran and Alain Locke were asked to contribute; Jean-Price Mars sent a contribution on Haitian literature; and Senghor himself promised to give a more literary turn to his reflections in Ce que l’homme noir apporte (The Contribution of the Black Man), published a little earlier (see Djian 2005, 165–83). Senghor’s correspondence with Ballard, interrupted by the war and his captivity, resumed in 1944. The two men met in Marseille, in November 1945 and again in September 1946, and so this issue was at last published. Yet it was completely different from the original project. It numbered thirty-odd pages, and contained several Baoulé and Dioula songs collected by Delafosse and Gaden (or borrowed from Carl Einstein’s French translations), Moundang and Fula tales collected by Jean-Paul Lebeuf; a Fula song Senghor himself translated, the “Poem of the will-o’-the-wisp” (Poème du feu follet), and a “Bantu song” which he wrote about several times (see particularly Senghor 1964 [1954]); and, lastly, samples of popular Brazilian, Caribbean, and American literature (blues and spirituals). An unpublished poem by Senghor ended the “Africa” section; and, for the “United States” component, five texts from the Harlem Renaissance (some of them translated by Senghor). The theoretical reflections on the dignity of the Black man in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, envisaged in the original version, had given way to an ethnographic repertory of oral literature from the whole of the African continent and beyond—suggesting that this oral literature is the true source of contemporary Black poetry.
Fig. 5. Table of Contents of Cahiers du Sud, Volume XXV, Second Half of 1946.Geneva Library.
- 10 This qualification, which translates the expression “New Negro,” appears in Senghor around 1945 (se (...)
13This issue of the journal is not well known. Yet since it predates by two years the famous Anthologie de la poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Anthology of Negro and Malagasy Poetry in French), it can be considered the foundational moment of Senghor’s Negritude movement. The approach in this issue is significantly different from the reflections of the 1930s. In 1937 Senghor still only discussed oral literature for its weaknesses: “Where there is no written literature there is no civilization that can go beyond simple ethnographic curiosity.” He added that, lacking a literature “written in an indigenous language,” one could of course imagine a “Black literature in French,” but he was not convinced that this literature could “express our whole soul,” and he considered this idea to be anyway “a bit premature” (Senghor 1937). In the immediate postwar years, however, these two affirmations underwent a spectacular reversal: not only does a néo-nègre10 poetry exist in French—and it has been flourishing since the 1930s—but it has its source in African oral literature, from which it draws its inspiration or which it resembles, most often without even being aware of this. At the time, Senghor had begun teaching at the École nationale de la France d’Outre-mer (where he succeeded Delafosse in the Chair of “Negro-African Languages and Civilizations,” as from 1945) and he had also undertaken an ethnographic survey of “Oral poetry in the Villages of Joal and Fadiouth” (that is, in the Serer lands of his childhood).
Fig. 6. President Houphouët-Boigny, accompanied by Jean Delafosse (on the right), welcomes President Senghor (document provided by Jean-Claude Delafosse). From Louise Delafosse, Maurice Delafosse, the Berrichon Conquered by Africa. Paris, Société française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 1976, plate 22, p. 146.
- 11 While Senghor was in the field in September 1945, Amadou Lamine-Guèye, the General Secretary of the (...)
14Senghor never completed this survey,11 but the idea of a “renaissance” [Senghor’s emphasis] based on “philological and ethnographic studies” (Senghor 1947, 233) was taking shape in Senghor’s writings. This paved the way for a number of editorial projects that valorized and publicized African “oral heritage,” often piloted by former students of the École normale William-Ponty, who had been encouraged to collect folklore and local traditions in the interwar years, and who subsequently viewed themselves as the agents of a “defense and illustration” of “Negro-African” civilization in the form of its tales and legends. The most famous collection was edited by Birago Diop, himself a poet, who published the Contes d’Amadou Koumba (Tales of Adadou Koumba) in the Écrits français d’outre-mer (French Writing from Overseas) series edited by Damas at Fasquelle publishers. One year later, Ousmane Socé republished Karim, his novel from 1935, in a reworked version prefaced by Delavignette and followed by Contes et légendes d’Afrique noire (Tales and Legends from Black Africa). Other works ensued, for instance Le Pagne noir (The Black Loincloth) in 1955, by the Ivoirian Bernard Dadié, another former student of the École William-Ponty. These African oral tales were in fact artificial products forced into “the literary norms of scripturality” to “make them easier to consume and [. . .] more attractive to a Western readership,” to the detriment of “their original personality as regards the morphology of the narrative and its moral” (Derive 2004, 7, 15). But at the time, with the future of the French Empire in the balance, this “pseudo-oral literature,” the product of a “skillful recreation” (Ricard 1995, 38; 2006, 28), was the price to pay for Africa’s oral inventions to become part of a narrative of emancipation and self-expression:
We have had one hundred and fifty years of the Whites being interested in the literature of the Negroes of Africa, holding forth about it, like Abbé Grégoire, or translating it, like Blaise Cendrars. But now Negro-Africans want to reveal this literature themselves [. . .]. (Senghor 1958, 208)
- 12 Here again, the reference is to the Essai de manuel . . ., but the text is the one from L’Âme nègre(...)
- 13 Ronsard is said to have mocked the “shenanigans” of Antoine de Bourbon, the father of Henri IV, who (...)
15It remains for us to examine the act of extracting a text—in this case the “Baoulé war song”—from what is called the “colonial library,” and making it into a poem. Delafosse had already altered the text’s status in moving it from the Essai de manuel. . . to L’Âme nègre; and although the reference in the Cahiers du sud is to the Manual, the typographical layout of the poem on the page is that of the 1922 anthology. Also, why choose this particular text from the 113 passages comprising the collection, and why have it head the section? A plausible reason is that the versified text clearly echoes Hugo’s poetry—Demain. . . / Je partirai, Je veux de la poudre et des balles (Tomorrow. . . / I will leave, I want gunpowder and bullets)—and thus confers the nobility of an immediately recognizable “great literature” on these oral utterances. This seems to be confirmed by some very small changes introduced by Senghor, starting with the deletion of the coordinating conjunction—Donne-moi de la poudre, un fusil (“Give me gunpowder, a gun,” rather than “. . . and a gun”)—such that the sentence falls into three three-syllable units, and the poem comes to have a structure in which the first and last lines, of 9/6 syllables, create the effect of a frame, and recall traditional French prosody. The replacement of Ils ont des femmes qui sont jolies (They have women who are pretty) with an octosyllabic line containing a coupe enjambante—Ils ont des fem//mes qui sont belles (They have women who are beautiful)—produces a similar effect of evoking a traditional French verse form. Our hypothesis would also explain the other borrowing from the Essai de manuel. . . for the 1946 anthology. For immediately after the “war song” one can find a “love song,” as though to show the variety of “Black inspiration” (“Le sang noir” 1946, 178)—which would be fundamentally similar, therefore, to the French “spirit” expressed in literature through the same contradictory passions of love and war. And indeed, this “love song” echoes a French tradition of love poetry, which was both popular and erudite. In it a young woman addressed a “handsome young man” and repeated three times “Take me and let us go [gently] to the Agbagnyan ford.”12 This recalls a famous nursery rhyme, “Good fortune at the ford” (La bonne aventure ô gué), but above all Ronsard (to whom the original rhyme is attributed),13 and Molière. The echoes are not only of the lines themselves, referred to in The Misanthrope, but perhaps also of Alceste’s commentaries on them, which could equally be applied to the Baoulé “love song”:
The rhyme is not rich, the style is old-fashioned;
But don’t you see it is worth so much more
Than all these frills that offend a sound mind,
And that passion speaks out in its purest form? (Act I, scene ii)
La rime n’est pas riche, et le style en est vieux:
Mais ne voyez-vous pas, que cela vaut bien mieux
Que ces colifichets, dont le bon sens murmure,
Et que la passion parle là, toute pure ? (Acte I, scène ii)
16However, this promotion from speech to “poem” implies a set of displacements that are not without their effects. First of all, what occurs when a singular speech event is forced into the categories of European literary culture, here that of “oral literature”? A solemn, if not ritualized, offer of alliance, pronounced in the context of a colonial war during which conflicts are manipulated within a divided political structure, is first transformed into a written text, then translated, and then gradually decontextualized: the circumstances of the utterance, the identity of the speaker—the chief, Kouadio Zegbé—themselves hardly mentioned in the first occurrence, disappear completely in subsequent versions. Pursuing the original meaning of this text, by contrast, would have required a completely different and opposed procedure: to examine its inscription in the history of the conflicts internal to the nvle and between the nvle (the autonomous political formations that constituted what Fabio Viti calls “the Baoulé chessboard,” Viti 2020, 118); to circumscribe the utterance of the Warebo chief in his particular situation, deprived of weapons (Warebo: the same nvle as Kouadio Okou, whom Delafosse was fighting); and to understand the local forms of oral performance so that, through comparison and contrast, it becomes possible to specify what is singular about this case. All of these operations are made impossible by Delafosse’s written reworking at the very start, and they are no less impossible for Senghor and his successors, who knew nothing about the circumstances of the original notation.
Fig. 7. Construction of a roof for a dwelling in Toumodi, Ivory Coast, then a French Colony (1896-1960).
The photograph was taken during the mission of François Clozel and Lieutenant Denisart from Toumodi (Ivory Coast) to Dakar (Senegal) in 1906-1907.
Gelatin silver print on a glass plate, inventory number PV0067796. The plate comes from the projection plate collection of the Musée de l'Homme. Caption on the plate's label: " Côte d’Ivoire. Ivory Coast. Construction of a house in Toumodi. Collection C F Denisart.
© musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris.
- 14 Delafosse explains in his preface that one should “master the language sufficiently to be able to d (...)
- 15 This is how Jean Lartigue, the editorial assistant on the Cahiers du sud, designated it, when askin (...)
17The original decontextualization is justified by the requirements of teaching and learning the foreign language, in this case Agni, that needs to be mastered in order to dominate the Baoulé territories.14 The linguistic illustration later becomes an example of “oral literature” (a category which, it goes without saying, does not exist locally), then a “poem from folklore,”15 and lastly a “properly poetic text” (“Le sang noir” 1946, 178). This series of mediations is denied (it is predicated on its own disappearance, in its last stage), but it is typical of how indigenous speech may be commandeered by a scholarly and then an aesthetic discourse, both of which, through the intermediary of the non-native category of “oral literature,” are directly involved in seizing power, in a process which Kasereka Kavwahirehi (2004) has described very well. Not simply a removal from context, then, but a reorientation of the meaning of the passage in the name of an already constituted discourse which, in this case, for Delafosse as for Senghor, posits a homogeneous “Negro soul.” Through a combination of reduction (situated oral statements become poems) and exemplification (these poems are illustrative), the “mentality” of “the Black man of Africa” comes to light.
- 16 Among Senghor’s sources, one should also mention the Bulletin de l’enseignement de l’AOF and the Gr (...)
18This process is the fatal flaw of the Negritude movement, especially in Senghor’s version. Indeed, the Senegalese poet takes Delafosse’s moves further but, although he gets rid of their racist condescension—which persists in L’Âme nègre despite Delafosse’s aim of rehabilitating “Black civilizations”—he does not fundamentally alter their configuration. He challenges neither the structural opposition to the white person, nor the premise of a homogeneous “Africa” (which Valentin-Yves Mudimbe has rightly identified as a European invention [Mudimbe 1988]), nor the dissolution of individual voices in a unity which goes beyond them and which they unknowingly express: as the prefatory note to “Le sang noir” states, “We wish to give voice to a race more than to individuals” (1946, 178). Senghor certainly overturns the pejorative value attached to the qualification “Negro,” making it into an assertion of dignity, but this reversal remains contaminated by the conceptual configuration it claims to undermine. This is why the Negritude movement remains beset by a conflict of interpretations that one can wager is destined to continue, at least if these terms are maintained. On the one hand, critics identify an objective complicity between the Negritude movement and the primitivism formulated with contempt or enthusiasm by the colonial administrators and the European avant-gardes. In his texts from 1945–1948, Senghor draws on both. He quotes abundantly from Delafosse, Gaden, Labouret, and Frobenius, but also, for his own compilation, from Cendrars’s Anthologie nègre, and the writings of Carl Einstein, which he found in Ivan Goll’s anthology Les Cinq Continents: all of these were produced within the avant-gardes of the 1910s and 1920s, and smacked of the “phony primitivism” of those who had never once set foot in Africa (Denogent 2022).16 There is enough there to fuel afresh the biting criticism of the Negritude movement that emerged in the 1970s, for instance Stanislas Adotevi’s denunciation of Senghor “and his friends” as “trotting out [. . .] the old clichés, coined by a Europe that at the time was still trembling from the screams of the First World War” (Adotevi 1988 [1972], 70). On the other hand, it is arguable that this gesture was not exactly one of appropriation—a charge which could be levelled at the inventors of African oral literature—but rather a reappropriation of an appropriation, which can be read as a sort of “strategic essentialism,” in the famous formula of Gayatri Spivak, adopted by Bachir Diagne. The Negritude movement appears from this perspective as a political construct which was a useful tool at a certain point in history; but behind this apparent submission to the categories of colonial domination, one should look for a concealed “discourse of hybridity” (Diagne 2007, 13–14).
19Given the difficulty of deciding on this last point, which is probably genuinely undecidable (since the object is unstable, and the interpretation is overdetermined by the position of the interpreter), we can attempt to situate Senghor’s procedures not in relation to his predecessors, but in relation to his contemporaries, and particularly the other poets of the Negritude movement. In the 1940s, Senghor was worried that Césaire was moving away from the return to roots and from the prodigious ancestral African civilization described in the writings of Frobenius, which the two men had discovered together in the mid-1930s. In his “Notebook on a Return to My Native Land” (1939), which had been published only in journal form and had passed completely unnoticed, Césaire had qualified these ideas as “childish imaginings” (Césaire 2013 [1939], 38; English translation, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969, 66). They might, he conceded, provide a way out for Black Africans, but certainly not for Black African Americans, whose bonds to the African continent had been irreparably severed by the abject transatlantic slave trade. So Senghor attempted to bring his friend round to what he called (with reference to another Martiniquais writer, René Maran) “his distant Negro-African ancestry” (Senghor 1947, 247), and Senghor’s “Letter to a Poet,” dedicated to Césaire and published in 1945, ended with the prediction that “You will come back / For the feast of first fruits . . .” (Senghor 1990, 12–13; Léopold Sédar Senghor, The Collected Poetry, English translation by Melvin Dixon, University Press of Virginia, 1991, 6). Above all, in his anthologies, Senghor systematically linked Caribbean and African peoples, showing the unity of “French-language New Negro poetry” around the reference to Africa—including, therefore, for descendants of slaves—a conviction he had already expressed in the 1946 issue of the Cahiers du sud, which associated “Baoulé songs,” Fula songs, spirituals, and poems from the Harlem Renaissance. If, for Senghor, the “young Caribbean generation” constituted the “active and marching minority,” at the cutting edge of this new poetry, this was because it “became aware of its personality” thanks to “the discovery of Black Africa, in the Latin Quarter” (of Paris) (Senghor 1947, 256–57).
20Often presented as the “third man” of the Négritude movement, Damas had, according to Senghor, “managed to find the Negro rhythm, that of the tam tams,” in his poetry (Senghor 1947, 257). In their dialogue about Africa’s past and its relevance for new Black literature, it could seem at first sight as though Damas was aligned with Senghor, although he was of Guyanese origin and of mixed ancestry. In 1948 he returned to the Baoulé “war chant” in his Poèmes nègres sur des airs africains, accepted by the same publisher—Guy Lévis Mano—who had published his first collection of poems, Pigments, in 1937 (with a preface by Robert Desnos), generally considered as the inaugural work of the Négritude. A very brief paragraph introduces the volume: “Translated from the Ronge, the Fante, the Basotho, the Toucouleur and the Bambara, these few texts we bring you today reveal the many aspects of Negro poetry, Negro in its language and its inspiration” (Damas 1948, 7). The work, then, appears to support the narrative according to which African oral literature is the mainspring of a renaissance. The epithet “Negro” brings all Blacks together, enjoying a single condition and a single destiny, whatever their particular collective history. This reaffirms what Desnos wrote in the preface to Pigments: “Damas is Negro and is attached to his quality and status of Negro” (Desnos 1937). The specification “with African melodies” recalls the practice Senghor introduced at the end of Chants d’ombre, later systematized in Éthiopiques (1956), namely emphasizing that the poem is originally sung by mentioning its genre in the vernacular, beneath the title, and the traditional musical accompaniment, for example, “guimm for three koras and a balafon.” The work’s composition, divided into four parts—love songs, war songs, songs of lament, and satyr choruses—recalls Delafosse’s anthology and also the special issue of the Cahiers du sud, “Le sang noir.” Last but not least, the collection is dedicated to Senghor.
Fig. 8. View of a Bridge in Tiébissou, Ivory Coast, then a French Colony (1893-1960). Caption on the print: "Baoulé, bridge over the Agbanian River, Road from Toumodi to Tiébissou," 1931-1960. Baryta paper print, inventory number PP0131726.
© musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris.
Fig. 9. Poèmes nègres sur des airs africains, collected by L. G. Damas. GLM, Paris, 1948, p.15
21Yet despite appearances, this new incarnation of the Baoulé “war song” is profoundly different from its predecessors, in its production and its intentions. First, the place of publication itself signals a certain distance taken from Senghor. Guy Lévis Mano—or “GLM” as he was known—had avant-garde tastes, and he began publishing authors influenced by Surrealism as from 1933 (among them Paul Éluard, André Breton, and Michel Leiris), as well as individually numbered small volumes with limited print runs and exquisite page layouts. These were not real poetry books—Poèmes nègres sur des airs africains had only twenty-eight pages—and their purchasers tended to be collectors and bibliophiles steeped in the Surrealist tradition. So the tone was quite different, both ideologically and aesthetically, from the humanist spiritualism of French publisher Seuil’s “Pierres vives” series (which published Senghor’s collections Chants d’ombre in 1945, Hosties noires in 1947, and, later, Éthiopiques) and, more generally, from the personalist Christian spheres in which, as a devout Catholic, Senghor’s thinking took shape in the 1930s. Another notable and even more important difference is that, with the exception of the initial and rather hasty list of “original languages” (Ronge, Basotho, Bambara, etc.), no source is given. The poetic nature of the text jumps off the white page, illustrated by elegant stylized drawings taken from Frobenius (they were originally petroglyphs), but there again, without citing a source.
- 17 This comparison has been made for Tristan Tzara’s “Negro poems,” among others (see Stefan Schawe’s (...)
22For a book that appears to pay homage to “Negro poetry, Negro in its language and its inspiration” (Damas 1948, 7), this casual attitude seems surprising and even contradictory; but that may well be because we impute to Damas intentions he never had. Since the original speakers were unidentifiable, and Damas cannot have been blind to the paradox of acknowledging the work of civil servants and other collectors of “oral literature” instead of the anonymous “authors,” his solution was to displace poetic consecration from the collectors to his own textual orchestration: the front cover states “poèmes nègres. . . recueillis par L. G. Damas” (Negro poems . . . collected by L. G. Damas). Rather than interpreting this as usurpation and imposture, it can be seen as highlighting an operation of selection, recontextualization, and re-signing that resembles the procedures of Marcel Duchamp with his ready-mades.17 Except that the idea was not to emphasize the exhibition value over the use value (since the latter had already been abolished by the category of “oral literature”), but to displace (and politicize) the parameters of exhibition itself: one collection replaces another, and the Black anthologist supplants and effaces the white collector, just as the latter had effaced the Black speaker. The disappearance of typically colonial ethnic “labels” partakes of the same logic. Although Basotho, Bambara, etc., figure in the brief introductory note, they do so only as languages. So the term “Negro” does not have the same value as it does in Senghor, since it does not refer to an essentialized cultural identity that could be illustrated by Serer or Baoulé poetry. Rather, it takes on a programmatic value based on the performativity of the anthological gesture. Besides, and more concretely, Damas wanted to emphasize a truly popular verbal art form generated by circumstance, improvisation, and song, “where the rhyme and the number of syllables do not necessarily play any role” (ibid.). In other words, the collection is neither a self-referential gesture, nor a homage to tradition, but an intervention aimed at reconfiguring poetry in the present.
23Damas’s version of the “war song” confirms this interpretation. Unlike Senghor, he keeps much of the “original” text (Delafosse’s first translation), “depoeticized” by refusing the echoes with traditional French verse. He reinstates the plural (gunpowder and guns), destroying the ternary grouping Senghor had introduced and, above all, he returns to the form “I will leave tomorrow,” thus abolishing the echo with Victor Hugo, and replacing it with the language of current usage (which does not invert subject and verb). On the other hand, however, since the sentence stands out as an isolated line of verse, it takes on the value of a refrain, in a move of “repoeticization”; the whole poem falls into sixteen lines, creating sequences of hexameters and giving it the quality of a song. This suggests the wish for a return to naive forms of expressions, such as poems for children or popular songs, similar to Arthur Rimbaud’s and Paul Verlaine’s decision to abandon the alexandrine in 1872–1873 in favor of short lines, sometimes with even-numbered, sometimes odd-numbered syllables. But the strongest influence was Apollinaire’s free verse, with its prominent first person and its deliberately prosaic character, only compensated for by the repetitions. The initial version’s “aujourd’hui il faut que je fasse des balles” (today I must make bullets), and “aujourd’hui il faut que j’offre un sacrifice” (today I must offer a sacrifice) become isolated lines, “aujourd’hui je suis tout aux balles que je fais” (today I am given over to the bullets I’m making) and “aujourd’hui je suis tout au sacrifice que j’offre” (today I am given over to the sacrifice I’m offering). Likewise, “on dit qu’ils ont de l’or” (they say they have gold) becomes “ils ont aussi de l’or” (they also have gold). These changes give the “I” a certain power, independent of collective pressures or orders from outside. The “I” affirms his decision to be completely absorbed in his actions. In addition to these small changes, the qualification of the song as “Baoulé” disappears, and with it, its claim to exemplify a collective psychology or a “mentality.” It thus tends toward individual lyrical expression, strengthened by attenuating the martial statements of earlier versions: “I want to chop off their heads” becomes “I intend to chop off their heads.”
- 18 On this point Damas saw himself as heir to the Martiniquais poets who had devised the one and only (...)
- 19 See for example Damas's dedication in 1938 on Senghor’s copy of Retour de Guyane: “To Sédar old fru (...)
24It was not due to personal conviction alone that Damas endorsed this poetry that—he insisted—is composed to be “sung,” “for the people to listen to,” and which “will never depart from everyday language” (Damas 1948, 7). At the time, under the influence of Louis Aragon and Pierre Seghers in particular, the memory of the Resistance was taking shape around French poets (and especially René Char). The “poetic” had become associated with “the people.” Damas had begun to oppose the people’s poetry versus erudite poetry already in the 1930s, before the war. In this, he was part of a “playful-ironic current,” to use Michel Murat’s terms, which ran through film, songs, and cabaret (Murat 2022, 19), and in Damas’s case, he inflected them politically: the poems in Pigments were “vulgar” because they were combating the “great” poetic tradition represented, for Damas, by the colonizer and the master.18 Later, by 1948, this project of “restituting” poetry to the people had become even more legitimate. Poèmes nègres sur des airs africains was published by GLM in a series significantly called “Poésie commune” (Common Poetry). It was no. 6 in this series, in which no. 1 was Paul Eluard’s very famous poem “Liberty” (1945), and no. 4 was Jacques Prévert’s Tentative de description d’un dîner de têtes à Paris-France (1947). The works of Eluard and Prévert played a key role in this (re)writing of the history of the Resistance around a humanist poetry that is accessible to all and appropriated by everyone as the leaven for and the manifestation of a society capable of coming together and asserting itself in the face of the enemy Occupier. The Tentative de description . . . is in fact identical to the first poem in the immensely popular Paroles (1945), but republished alone. This was the time when, for Michel Murat, “the Resistance, just like everything in France, ended on a burst of song” and when, for the last time, there was a “massive convergence [. . .] between poetry and public” (Murat 2022, 28). At all events, we are poles apart from Senghor’s legitimation of “Negro poetry” through its similarities with the Greek and Latin traditions (in Serer poetry one can find the figure of the “coryphaeus,” and “gymnic songs”—songs intermeshed with acrobatics); or guimm in Serer and woy in Wolof, which are claimed to be “the exact equivalent of the Greek ôdê” (Senghor 1990, 428–29). Senghor also suggested that there is an authentic prosody in African spoken poetry, which is different from but no less rigorous than its French equivalent (see Senghor 1964 [1954], 1973) and which thus requires a similar precision and scrupulous attention to syntax when transcribed and translated into French—a claim Damas often scoffed at.19
25And something else had changed too. In the immediate postwar period, the supposed “warrior spirit” illustrated by the Baoulé war song had once again become a respected moral virtue. There again, an unspoken dialogue with Senghor was at stake. In 1937, Damas had ended his collection of poetry, Pigments, with a provocative poem that mocked the loyalty of the Senegalese battalions of tirailleurs who had claimed their patriotic attachment to France as Nazism was on the rise. Having wished them to “go get screwed,” and “more besides,” he suggested they “leave ‘the Boche’ in peace,” and “start by invading Senegal” (Damas 1962 [1937], 78). Ten years later, this mixture of anti-nationalism and anti-militarism was no longer acceptable. And Senghor had no qualms reminding Damas of this in dedicating to him the soon-to-be-famous opening poem of his volume Hosties noires, which celebrates the sacrifice of the Senegalese tirailleurs for France in the two world wars. The tone is not patriotic, however. As Sébastien Heiniger has shown, the collection sought to reinvent the French Republic as a federation that would include the colonies, and would at last show itself to be hospitable to cultural specificities (Heiniger 2022). After the formal hesitations of Chants d’ombre, Senghor had found his own voice: neither free verse nor traditional metric forms, but rather the stanza, a synthesis that preserves the idea of African oral expressivity, with echoes of French versification and the nobility of Biblical verses and Greek and Latin poetry. The “war songs” in Damas’s Poèmes nègres sur des airs africains appeal to a different memory. Through the use of typography, the choice of free verse, and the poems’ forms of enunciation, they evoke Apollinaire’s war poetry with its curious combination of international brotherhood and the lyrical glorification of battle. In a context marked not only by the Liberation, but also by the question of what would become of the French colonies after the war, Damas inscribed “negro poetry” in a whole other history, a whole other space, and therefore a different political vision. Contrary to Senghor, this history was essentially modernist; it is the history of the “crisis of verse,” as Mallarmé put it, of the avant-gardes and their break with the classical and humanist heritage. The space was a global and diasporic literary network, where “Black voices,” colonized or descendants of slaves, from Africa or America, come together in a “shared posture [. . .] of open combat” (Damas 1966, 5). The political aspiration was not anti-colonial per se—not yet—but, based on the solidarity between “oppressed peoples and countries” (Damas 1947, 16), it was inspired by a future to be invented and conquered rather than by a return to the origins of “Negro-African civilization.”
* * *
26What are we to retain from this exploration? First, that the sense of Kouadio Zegbé’s proposal of a military alliance—which perhaps never took the form of “war song”—is eminently pliable. As it passed from a “chrestomathy” to a work on folk psychology, and then to a special issue and a collection, its status and meaning changed, depending on its recontextualizations and even on the slightest formal change. However, this pliability did not originate in the utterance itself, but in its categorization as “oral literature,” a shift that rested on the obliteration of an original violence, first minimized, then denied, and finally really forgotten—the bloody campaign that Delafosse led against the “rebellious” Baoulé chief Kouadio Okou.
27Another point is that Senghor’s and Damas’s rewritings of the “war song” cannot be considered “reappropriations,” and even less restitutions. They are of course founded on an identification with the supposed “authors” of the utterances, but in ignorance of the context in which they were first noted down. It was a period, moreover, when the colonial conquest was a historical object only for the victors, and when the idea of differentiated attitudes of colonized people to their colonizers was not envisaged. As such, the rewritings can hardly be considered as “returning to . . .” (an original). We are already familiar with the difficulties raised by a too literal conception of the notion of restitution in the field of African artefacts when these have been transformed into art objects through Western eyes. Strictly speaking, the idea of restitution not only presupposes that one can identify an origin, but also immobilize history and perpetuate spatial separations between here and there. Insisting on the context of use and exhibition is necessary and welcome, but it bears a risk: that of removing all agency from the objects, as though they “counted for nought in their transformation into art objects”; as though they had had no effect on whoever got hold of them, nor on the spaces where they were exhibited and seen; as though, lastly, they received their meaning only from the outside (Diagne 2020, 90). Such an analysis is even more relevant to those immaterial objects called discourses: it would be misguided to adopt an entirely relativist stance, and to entirely predicate the meaning of a “text” on the context of its publication. Certain dimensions of the “Baoulé song” remain immutable. At the very least, we have an address in the first person from a Black man to—we can suppose—a white man (he who possesses gunpowder and guns). It is ceremonial in form, based on repetition and marked by insistence and determination. Colonial violence is concealed, but not the idea of combat, nor the context of contact between “civilizations.” And these are precisely what the interpretative variations were to focus on, namely the position of the speaker, the relation to the addressee and, above all, the meaning and value of the battle to be waged.
28So this is arguably what we can learn from Senghor’s and even more so Damas’s reworkings. They—especially Damas’s—illustrate an awareness of the traps laid by what was not yet called the “colonial library,” and the need to throw it off. Perceiving the potential of oral expressions despite the irretrievable loss of their original meanings, both authors continued to make their words ring out, refusing the seductions of “white death,” the death that buries a memory which is girded round by “a belt of corpses” in the “sterile sea of white sand” (Césaire 1993 [1939], 20–22; English translation, p. 23).