Challenge of Culture in Africa: From Restoration to Integration

The Decline and the Cause

75 The Decline and the Cause Y et not even the most rabid of African nationalists will dispute the fact that present-day Negro culture, in comparison with the pristine glories of Africa, is obviously poor. What was it then that brought a blight on this splendour? The answer is not far to seek. I said before that among the factors conductive towards cultural growth, either through internal evolution, independent invention and creation or through contact with external cultures richer by reason of greater achievement, are freedom, peace and leisure. But from the beginning of the sixteenth century to our own day, without respite, there was to be no freedom, no peace and no leisure for Negro Africa. It was an unbroken period of unrelenting warfare, deluvial destruction and down-grinding slavery. For the conquest of the New World, as everybody knows, took place before the scientific and industrial revolution. Then only brawn could exploit the new and limitless wealth; and the only brawn that was found abundant and suitable was Negro brawn. And so began the devastation, the unprecedented spoliation and the diaspora of the Negro race. For four hundred years the blackman was hunted down like’ a beast throughout Africa; and the flower of Negro manhood was carried off to America; and everywhere the blackman went, he met with nothing but unrelieved tribulation. Four hundred years – just imagine that! Four hundred years of relentless butchery, rapine, wholesale 76 Bernard N. Fonlon destruction, terror, untold cruelty, commotion, chaos, disaster! Can you find anything to parallel this, for vastness and intensity, anywhere in the History of mankind? How could culture survive and grow in such an atmosphere of protracted turbulence? How can society flourish where hell is let loose? Do you still wonder then at the blighted state of present-clay African culture? Rather you should wonder that anything remained at all! Indeed there are serious writers, not Africans, who have argued to the Negro’s superiority from the fact that he was able to survive such unspeakable catastrophes. For where is the Caribbean to-clay? Where the American Indian? The end of slavery, however, did not mean the end of the Negro’s woes; for it yielded place almost immediately to imperialist colonialism and to racial discrimination. The whiteman strove, might and main, to despoil the black on his own continent, of his own continent, strove to keep him down lest he should rise and become a rival. And to make this new implacable thraldom more complete, they decided to enslave his soul, to inculcate into his mind, through raillery and contempt the idea that he was inherently despicable and inferior and that all excellence, all nobility, all that is beautiful and sublime was white. And thus they were able to make him detest himself and the works of his hands. ...