398
A F
RICA
came and went, turned, moved away and then near. These were the
movements of the traders, and in fact, every once in a while, through
an opening in the crowd, one caught a glimpse of a herd of oxen pushed
one against the other, with myriads of black-nosed muzzles, myriads of
immense crescent horns. Then the crowd closed again and above them,
I could see great black vultures wheeling slowly, as if looking for some
prey, and then they turned and crouched in the branches of the trees.
A dust rose from the crowd that dimmed the air; a festive, gay, ex–
uberant, contagious dust.
Then we approached and en tered the crowd and wandered about
for two or three hours in the inexhaustible human sea that divided
for us in a strange automatic way, forming for us a narrow pathway
among the bodies; the Negroes, however, hadn't seen us, so immersed
were they in their festive hypnosis. It is useless to describe the
merchandise that was laid out there on the ground between the feet
of the squatting buyers. They were the usual products of African
gardens, the few objects of their handicraft, or they were, instead,
merchandise mass-produced in America and in Europe; always what
impressed one the most was not the merchandise so much as the men,
the buyers and sellers. The merchandise was lacking in interest; but what
the men succeeded in doing with this miserable merchandise, what
they derived from it other than money was inexhaustible and always new.
All of Africa, as I have said, is dotted with these markets. The
Negroes leave, let us imagine, from Senegal and then, by land or by
water, reach Onitsha on the Niger, not far from the river mouth.
Look at the map, you will see that it is a question of thousands of
kilometers. These enormous distances overcome in order to sell or to
buy a sack of seeds or ten meters of cotton give a good idea of what
the true Africa is in contrast to the Africa on the maps. One thinks,
rather than of a continent divided into nations like Europe, of a great
apolitical space, thick with tribes but lacking in nationality, a little
like what the oriental territories between Poland and China must have
been during the Middle Ages, with their great fairs and markets and
their migrations from one fair to another. This character of black
Africa, along with others that it is not convenient to describe here, leads
us to predict, not a multitude of large and small nations in the European
style, but a single organism united somewhat in the way large continental
countries are, such as India or China or the United States or the
Soviet Union. The Africans walk; their long tireless legs require space.
