402
A F
RICA
perspiration, with a vast flowing motion returned to the open space
and there spontaneously re-formed the circle around the dancers. While
we were getting back into the car, we could see at a distance some
diabolic masks hopping and shaking and all around, a stormy sea of
black woolly heads that swayed rhythmically.
For the Negroes, the dance still has the value of a purely individual
display ; and anyone can verify this fact by entering one of the many
nightclubs that explode with their violent neon lights in the sweltering
murky night on the Gulf of Guinea, deep in the lower-class sections
of Lagos. They are for the most part located outdoors; their cement
platforms open into the midst of a multitude of rickety peeling tables
and tubular chairs; their orchestras are on a raised platform close to a
confused, ragged background of slums and hovels. And yet when the
music passionately and authoritatively attacks a twist or a high-life, the
spectator immediately forgets the poverty of the setting and cannot help
but be fascinated by the grace, the elegance, the unself-consciousness,
the rhythm, the intense expressiveness of the dancers. When these tall
lean Negroes, smothered in jackets and immense trousers, have caught
hold of the streamer of the dance, they do not let
go;
and they move
around the platform with the careless lightness of a leopard that tracks
its prey among the grasses of the bush. Their partners, incredibly
slender, fluid, and long-limbed, with ankles and wrists of a marvelous
elegance, and heads impressively elongated, lengthened even more by
solid cone-shaped hair styles, writhe before them in a manner that
succeeds in being both completely chaste and utterly sensual.
Where have I seen them before, those slender figures, black and
elegant, those heads all eyes and mouth, that skin with the oiliness, the
roughness, the sheen and the dark color of bronze? But, of course, at
the museum in whose glass cases the mysterious sculpture of the artists
of Benin is displayed. In Europe that sculpture sometimes gives the
impression of being almost a caricature. But here in the night clubs of
Lagos, one realizes that they are realistic, in fact, almost photographic.
It is nature that, in the gulf of Guinea, is expressionistic, subjective,
delirious, unrestrained, caricature-like; not men. The men dance, and
through the dance, express the madness of nature.
Lagos, March
Sometimes, I've asked myself the question : is black Africa older
or younger, historically, than Europe? Considering it carefully, com–
pared with Africa, which is primitive in the sense of being still wrapped
in the cocoon of Nature, Europe, which shed that cocoon a long time
