ALBERTO MORAVIA
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less heaths swarming with trees and bushes, along the paths which, like
tunnels, pierce the compact arborescent mass of the rain forest.
Where are these migrant Negroes going? They never have the air
of the vagabond, or of the beggar, whose destination is unknown even
to himself, since wherever he goes he will not find things changed. But
the Negroes seem to know very well where they're going; and, in fact,
they do know. In short, wherever the Negro goes, he is usually motivated
by a concern for business affairs; that is, he moves principally for
economic, mercantile reasons of subsistence. For the most part, the
Negroes go and come from the markets, and when they are not going
to and returning from the markets, they are on their way to the pastures
or the fields, or else they are coming back from them ; they may also
move for family or social or magical reasons, but behind these reasons
there is always the economic factor. Because the Negroes, although in
their way capricious, fanciful, irrational, are one of the most trade–
oriented races in the world, even if their trades are often at the archaic
level of an exchange in kind and of the sale and simple acquisition of
a few products of family manufacture. However, poverty is not enough
to explain the Negroes' frenzy for trading. In reality, the Negro lives
in a primitive, and therefore functional, civilization in which the social
life is fixed at the level of the instinct of conservation.
Seen in this light, black Africa appears to be not the motley group
of states and smaller states copied from the West and more or less cut
along the lines of the old French and English colonies that one sees on
the map, but a single organism in which an integrating and balancing
economic unity is set against the infinite tribal fragmentation. And this
is an affirmation based not on conjectures and illusory observations,
but on the fact that in black Africa the cities where markets are located
are found at the center of territories that do not coincide with, and,
in fact, extend beyond political boundaries. This, you will say, also
occurs in Europe. It is true; but in Europe, linguistic, political, military,
religious, and in short, historical realities have their own concreteness
which confers, so to speak, a sacred character on these boundaries.
In Africa, instead, this concreteness does not exist, it being a question,
as we have pointed out, of nations formed on the pattern of the
colonies which, in their time, had been designed by the absurd will of
the European colonizers. And so the markets with the paths, roads,
land and water routes which join them to the inhabited centers are
still today the only garment that man has known how to throw over the
savage and archaic nudity of black Africa.
