ALBERTO MORAVIA
399
Lagos, April
The Negroes dance. Somebody here at Lagos told me that some–
times, at the dockyards, the black workers improvise a dance to the
rhythm of the motor of an excavator or a drill. To those who are familiar
with the simplicity of the music with which the Africans often accompany
their dances, drums played by hand, or clapping of the hands and
snapping of the fingers, this transformation of the bulldozer into a
musical instrument will not seem so unusual. But still the news has
its significance. First of all, it indicates an irresistible inclination to
express in dance not this or that particular moment of life, such as, for
example, agricultural work or sexual initiation, but all of life; and
secondly, the fact that the Negro is the only one among the so-called
primitives who is capable, through the dance itself, of happily becoming
part of modern industrial civilization.
On the second point, just a few words will suffice. There are
primitive peoples in all five continents who translate into dance the
religious and social manifestations of their existence; but only the
Negro has succeeded in becoming a modern man while conserving intact
his traditional dancing ability. The frequent phenomenon of modern
dances invented by the Negroes in America is so well known that it
isn't necessary to demonstrate it in detail.
If
anything, one could say
that the dance is the most striking aspect of the contagious primitive
rhythm that the Negro has introduced into Western civilization. This
rhythm which, by now, seems to us to be indivisible from and deeply
rooted in the civilization of machines, comes, instead, directly from an
archaic pre-historic world- that of the savanna and the forests of
black Africa. That is the most precious gift that Africa has given to
the world; on the other hand, the descendants of the slaves sold on the
markets of Bahia or New Orleans have shown themselves more capable
of assimilating Western civilization than any other primitive, or at any
rate, non-European people.
As for the first point, i.e., translating all of life into dance, one
could say that this is one of those obvious things which for that very
reason escapes attention. And yet the phenomenon is not so simple. I
remember, for example, a day when I was driving along the still
unfinished road that goes from Lagos to Benin: a strip of earth red as
blood between two vertical walls of nearly black foliage. Suddenly in
the distance, we saw a group of Negroes who were walking in the
middle of the road, dressed in the usual fluttering multi-colored gowns.
They were walking calmly, with that tireless, brisk and carefree walk
that the Negroes have when, without apparent goal, they stroll through
