|
Bound to
Violence
By Yambo Ouologuem
The Night of the
Giants
[Or
a Satire on Leo Frobenius]
A year and three months later--July
13, 1910. three foreigners, a family of Germans--Fritz
Shrobenius, his wife Hildegard, and their daughter Sonia--who
had arrived in Nakem five days before, left Vandame in
Krebbi-Katsena and, rifles slung from their shoulders, drove to
Tillabéri-Bentia in a truck chock-full of trunks, crates, baggy
trousers, short-sleeve shirts, and tropical helmets.
Informed first by his agents, then by government emissaries,
that these tourists explorers were anthropologists wishing to
buy three tons of old wood regardless of the cost and a carload
of native masks, Saif ordered a sumptuous welcome.
He sent the learned Moses ben Bez Tubawi, mounted and
accompanied by a large retinue, to meet them outside
Tillabéri-Bentia. At a league from the city three native
delegations, followed by a large body of griots and domestics,
approached the visitors, who had slowed their truck to a crawl.
Magnificent, they advanced in groups caparisoned in gold,
leather, and brass, amidst a tumult of drums, horns, and other
sonorous instruments, prancing in single file in a manner
recalling the processions of olden days in celebration of
victories in battle. Three or four groups on foot chanted verses
from the Koran, and the massed chorus gave the responses. from
time to time a cry rose from the entire crowd, piercing the air
and seeming to fill it with litanies in praise of the governor,
of his Royal Magnificence, Saif ben Isaac al-Heit, and of the
German visitors, "for the exploits with which they have
honored Nakem."
All Saif's men returned to the palace in the order in which
they had left.
Arrived at the palace, Fritz, Hildegard, and Sonia descended
from the truck and went to meet Saif, who was awaiting them in
the great Courtyard of the Acacias. The crowd was so dense that
they had a hard time making their way through it.
Beside his son Madoubo on a high dais Saif enthroned--he
could be seen from far off. His throne, of gold, ivory, and wood
skillfully carved in the manner of the country, harmonized with
his magnificent dashiki of ocher velvet, veined with strips of
silver through which his damask blouse could be glimpsed. On his
head a crown of finely chiseled gold; nonchalantly both he and
his son waved Oriental fans, mounted with mother-of-pearl.
Moorish pantaloons and babouches completed Saif's accouterment.
Stepping before Saif, Shrobenius made a low bow, and his wife
and daughter did the like; the royal personages returned their
greeting and in token of welcome presented them with the
traditional sip of water. then the visitors were bidden to be
seated.
These courtesies completed, the anthropologist, in the
presence of the attentive populace, set forth--with Karim Ba as
his interpreter--the purpose of his visit. he opened the door of
the truck and a domestic unloaded various pieces of cloth, in
addition to which the anthropologist displayed, with all due
reverence and respect, silver coins, garments, and jewels.
With a magnificence gesture Saif ordered that this inventory
should cease and bade the learned Moses ben Bez Tubawi
distribute these treasures among the people. And the crowd on
their knees kissed the ground in a frenzy of faithful gratitude,
while prayers poured from their lips, a quivering litany of
words which died down, then revived from time to time like the
flame of an almost extinguished fire.
Later on, Saif, whose popularity had risen to new heights,
took the German to a place removed from the niggertrash, where,
in the presence only of his wives and his most esteemed
courtiers he examined the remaining gifts--but this time very
slowly.
After displaying numerous offerings intended for the
notables' wives, Shrobenius presented His Royal Magnificence
with five pounds of gold bullion. The bargain was concluded.
Next day the anthropologist began taking down the words of
informants sent by Saif; his wife tripped up and down the
corridors, harassing Karim Ba with interminable questions. or
strolled about between her daughter and Madoubo, who spoke
indefatigably of symbols, as did his father, who spouted myths
for a whole week. "The night of the Nakem civilization and
of African history," droned the prince, "was brought
on by a fatal wind sprung from the will of the Most-High."
Saif nodded gravely. Shrobenius's head teemed with ideas.
Reeling off spirituality by the yard, the men paced the
courtyard with anxious, knit brows. The lean, long-legged
Hildegard tagged after her husband, a large stout man, the type
of the bel Allemand, red side whiskers, florid
complexion, blue eyes, grave and full of feeling, nascent
paunch, wèrèguè wèrèguè!
Saif made up stories and the interpreter translated,
Madoubo
repeated in French, refining on the subtleties to the delight of
Shrobenius, that human crayfish afflicted with a groping mania
for resuscitating an African universe--cultural autonomy, he
called it--which had lost all living reality; dressed with the
flashy elegance of a colonial on holiday, a great laugher, he
was determined to find metaphysical meaning in everything, even
in the shape of the palaver tree under which the notables met to
chat. gesticulating at every word, he displayed his love of
Africa and his tempestuous knowledge with the assurance of a
high school student who had slipped through his final
examinations by the skin of his teeth.
African life, he held, was pure art, intense religious
symbolism, and a civilization once grandiose--but alas a victim
of the white man's vicissitudes. Then, obliged to acknowledge
the spiritual aridity of certain manifestations of social life,
he fell into a somnolent stupor, no longer capable even of
sadness. having run out of inspiration, he consoled himself by
driving down to Yame in the truck and filming the hippopotamus
and crocodiles.
There, during the hot siesta hours, he would lie in wait,
soon relieved by his daughter, an opulently beautiful blonde of
twenty with flashing teeth, who would take his place amid the
tall grass and the foliage. With her exquisite freshness, her
long white neck, her green almond-shaped eyes, her blue lashes
tinted with mascara, her pink, firm lips, she made one think of
the delicately colored nacreous scales of the fish that furrowed
the unknown depths of the Yame.
Madoubo often came to keep her company. He would stand
leaning against the truck, listening to the slow music of her
phonograph or explaining in murmur why Zobo island in the Yame
was interesting for its pieces of ancient art, how these pieces
had been preserved, and roughly from what periods they dated.
And he invented as vividly as if he had been there in person. .
. .
5 Saif . . . shrewd
ideologist that he was, raised . . . the prices on the Negro art
exchange, cooking up, to the sauce of tradition and its
"human values," a stew of pure symbolic religious art
which he sent to Vandame, who passed it on to his correspondents
who (may the Lord bless their innocence) peddled it to the
curiosity seekers, tourists, foreigners, sociologists, and
anthropology-minded colonials who flocked to Nakem. Qualities of
la, sterile, anachronistic redundancies; henceforth Negro art
was baptized "aesthetic" and hawked in the imaginary
universe of "vitalizing exchanges." "Ever
so often," Saif improvised, "the tools used to carve a
mask were blessed seventy-seven times by a priest, who, all the
while flagellating himself, gave blessings until the third day
of the seventh year after the tree to be felled was chosen amid
incantations revealing the genesis of the world." "The
plant," Shrobenius went on, "germinates, bears fruit,
dies, and is reborn when the seed germinates. the moon rises to
fullness, pales, wanes, and vanishes, only to reappear. Such is
the destiny of man, such is the destiny of Negro art: like the
seed and the moon, its symbolic seed is devoured by the earth
and is reborn sanctified--imbued with the power requisite to its
fulfillment--in the sublime heights of the tragic drama of the
cosmic play of the stars." Negro art found its patent of
nobility in the folklore of mercantile intellectualism, oye,
oye, oye. . . . But the audience of the
All-Powerful is infinite; to the vast satisfaction of all
concerned. he inspired Shrobenius to make known--a notion
stamped with the genius of lunacy--the civilization and past of
Nakem: "But these people are
disciplined and civilized to the marrow! On all sides wide,
tranquil avenues where we breathe the grandeur, the human genius
of a people . . . It was only when white imperialism infiltrated
the country with its colonial people fell abruptly into a state
of savagery, that accusations of cannibalism, of primitivism,
were raised, when on the contrary--witness the splendor of its
art--the true face of Africa is the grandiose empires of the
Middle Ages, a society marked by wisdom, beauty, prosperity,
order, nonviolence, and humanism, and it is here that we must
seek the true cradle of Egyptian civilization." Thus
drooling, Shrobenius derived a twofold benefit on his return
home: on the one hand, he mystified the people of his own
country who in their enthusiasm him to a lofty Sorbonnical
chair, while on the other hand he exploited the sentimentality
of the coons, only too pleased to hear from the mouth of a white
man that Africa was "the womb of the world and the cradle
of civilization." In consequence the
niggertrash donated masks and art treasures by the ton to the
acolytes of "Shrobeniusology." O Lord, a tear for the
childlike good nature of the niggertrash! Have pity, O Lord! . .
. Makari! makari! Secreting his own myth,
Shrobenius molded his personality: brilliant but easygoing,
waggish but pessimistic, attentive to his publicity--but
scoffing at a society that had given him everything. This
salesman and manufacturer of ideology assumed the manner of a
sphinx to impose his riddles, to justify his caprices and past
turnabouts. And shrewd anthropologist that he was, he sold more
than thirteen hundred pieces, deriving from the collection he
had purchased from Saif and the carloads his disciples had
obtained in Nakem free of charge, to the following purveyors of
funds: the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, the museums of London,
Basel, Munich, Hamburg, and New York. And on
hundreds of other pieces he collected rental, reproduction, and
exhibition fees. "We often hear," he perorated in the
castle that Negro art had earned him, "of the universe of
this, that, or the other Nakem ethnos. The universe of Nakem is
a familiar setting, the inner landscape which the people bear
constantly within them, in which they find their true selves,
from which they derive new strength. thus the Nakem artist has
no universe. Or rather, his universe is a vast solitude; no: a
series of solitudes. . . ." If anyone
pointed to the contradiction between this solitude and the
cosmological religiosity of the symbols from which Fritz molded
the Negro artist, the anthropologist replied that the other had
"failed to grasp his intention," which, however, he
hastened to transmogrify. . . . An Africanist
school harnessed to the vapors of magico-religious,
cosmological, and mythical symbolism had been born: with the
result that for three years men flocked to Nakem--and what
men!--middlemen, adventurers, apprentice bankers, politicians,
salesmen, conspirators--supposedly "scientists," but
in reality enslaved sentries mounting guard before the "Shrobeniusological"
monument of Negro pseudosymbolism. Already it
had become more than difficult to procure old masks, for
Shrobenius and the missionaries had had the good fortune to snap
them all up. And so Saif--and the practice is still current--had
slapdash copies buried by the hundredweight, or sunk into ponds,
lakes, marshes, and mud holes, to be exhumed later on and sold
at exorbitant prices to unsuspecting curio hunters. These
three-year-old masks were said to be charged with the weight of
four centuries of civilization. To the credulous customer, the
seller pointed out the ravages of time, the malignant worms that
had gnawed at these masterpieces imperiled since time
immemorialist, witness their prefabricated poor condition. Alif
lam! Amba, koubo oumo agoum. Source: The above passages are an excerpt of a satire of the
German anthropologist Leo Frobenius from the chapter "The Night of
the Giants" in
Bound to Violence
by Yambo Ouologuem; translated by
Ralph Manhein. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc. New York, 1971. As is the intent of the novel,
this excerpt undermines the Western romanticizing of Africa and of
African culture, in this instance, African art.
* *
* * *
update 7 July 2008 |
