396
A F
RICA
Markets of Africa, beautiful and strange, where one feels,
in
visiting them, that their true function goes beyond mere buying
and
selling and that without them human life in Africa would truly
be
extinguished and would return to the savage level: I visited several
of these markets, and everywhere I always found the same feverish
atmosphere, excited, festive, panicked, like fairs that are, at the same
time, religious reunion, political assembly, magical encounter, cultural
exchange, erotic outburst.
They are found, for the most part, at the center of the cities, in fact,
they form the nucleus of propelling energy; and at first sight, with their
huts and hovels lined up on two sides of very narrow lanes, with their
promiscuous and bawling crowds, their stench and their filth, they form
an almost unbearable contrast with the cities around them, often
constructed in a European or even American style, with houses, large
buildings and small skyscrapers. But after a brief reflection, one is
convinced that the contrast is only apparent. The cities may be, in fact
ought to be, constructed in the European style; this is as it should
be
since black Africa has decided to become modern. But its heart remains
the old African heart, and this also is as it should be, since, while
modernizing itself, Africa also wishes to remain faithful to itself. Now
the heart of the African cities, whether at Lagos or Accra, Ibadon or
Kano, is the market: and the market preserves, in spite of the buildings
that surround it, the character that it had in the time in which instead
of buildings there was only the forest and the savanna: the character
of the only social center of a primitive and embryonic world perpetually
menaced by a pitiless dark nature.
Sometimes the market is not found at the city's center but outside,
far from the inhabited area, perhaps because the city could not contain
within its walls the crowding stalls of the vendors and the torrential
flood of buyers. I remember especially one of these peripheral markets
in
the outskirts of Kano, which is the principal city of northern Nigeria
and one of the Negro cities that has its own beautiful style, a cross
between the barbaric and the Arab: a great inhabited center that,
seen from the tower of the minaret of the Mosque, seems round like a
globe, or like a bowl, in the middle of an endless plain of pale, and
almost blue, green. This globe, this bowl, is a dark brick red; just here
and there, the uniformity of this somber tint is broken by the jade green
of some garden or some basin of municipal water. The houses, all one–
storied and all made with mud mixed with straw and dried in the
sun and painted that color
«terra di Sienna,"
have smooth walls with
an undulating surface as if they were petrified waves; when the mud
