New stakes : the Black world today : urbanism and poetics

"Africans are not supposed to think or argue; they just dance." That’s what many westerners thought. Then Black intellectuals in 1956 said “Non” to the hardened colonialists. The opportunity came at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. After centuries of enslavement and abuse of our ancestors, they proved the creativity and genius of Africa and the diaspora in the pages of history. This, they hoped, would secure the Black Presence and future in human civilisations. Little did they know they had touched upon a profound issue--the problem of integrating ex-colonial African and Caribbean people in western societies. Alioune Diop urged scholars to address this problem as early as 1947 in the founding issue of the journal Présence Africaine. This problem of integration, though evident in all imperial Europe, was most dramatically expressed in France, the same belle République that schooled most of the assembled scholars from francophone Africa. The rapid increase in migration was probably a major factor thwarting integration. The renascent vision of Black intellectuals of the 1940s and 1950s would have been based on integrating what was then only a tiny Black population, mainly of French West Indians and West Africans, among them students and “guest workers." But the Black population rapidly changed in the following decades. Postwar France turned to its African colonies for temporary workers to rebuild its war-torn factories, mines, roads, hospitals and schools…