As far back as I can remember, Europe has always been part of my world. Not as a separate entity, not as a foreign element, but as something that my whole life was directed to. As soon as I knew how to speak, my father accustomed me, at home in Dakar, Senegal, to the image he had of France after spending a number of years at the Military Academy of Saint-Cyr. He never tired of reminding me how much better things were in a developed country, and how I should try hard to go there later if I wanted to achieve anything worthy. The trouble is that the picture he painted of France remained the same over the years, while the country itself went through a myriad social and political metamorphoses.
The second image I received of Europe was from the numerous books I read on that continent. From novels to documentaries, I was exposed to a wide array of European ideas and culture. At school, the learning of European history, along with African, Asian and American history, led me to put all this knowledge into perspective. Needless to say, when television appeared, and with ninety percent of programs being imported, more images of Europe filtered through into our homes.
These two preliminary observations are important, because it has to be pointed out that my contact with Europe came about as a slow process, filled with sometimes inaccurate impressions, but, nevertheless, insidious and persistent, until I actually undertook the great voyage myself. I did not go from one culture to the other, as is often portrayed in novels that deal with the colonial situation (witness Okonkwo's son in Things fall apart). There were already many elements of the European culture in the one I was living in.
However, in spite of this hybrid upbringing, nothing prepared me for what I was going to encounter while in Europe. In this article, I would like to browse through the literature, produced in the past thirty years, which chronicles the African's fascination for, and then the voyage to, Europe, as well as the aftermath of these experiences. I will attempt to establish what links, if any, exist between fiction and reality as far as the perception of the experience of Europe by an African is concerned, in other words, if there exists a similarity between my personal experience and that of the characters depicted in literature.
To start with, let us examine the reasons that drove the Senegalese, or other African people, to place their hopes on Europe. Why did my father encourage me so strongly to go to Europe only about ten years after our country became independent? One of the answers can be found in the language. Along with a military and rather brutal conquest of most of West Africa, the French introduced their schooling system as a scheme to ensure that while there, they would set up a basis through which their culture would propagate in our society and even after they left, it continued to perpetuate itself. Many West-African novelists demonstrate how the fascination for the French language nearly always translates into an irresistible attraction towards France. In Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'Aventure ambiguë [1] the young hero, Samba Diallo, explains to his lover in France how the switch was operated from the learning of Arabic to that of French. As a young boy, he was taught Arabic as part of a religious training. The immediate use of Arabic was to read and remember the verses of the Holy Qur'an. The apprenticeship of a difficult language is allied to a very rigorous, near dictatorial method of teaching by the Maître: intent on obtaining the most accurate pronunciation of the sacred text from his pupil, he resorts to corporal punishment on a daily basis. Furthermore, the children do not acquire an understanding of what they are learning. Indeed, the process of religious training at the time - we are in the early sixties - was to learn first the text, and then be exposed to the meaning of its verses. On the other hand, Samba Diallo is fascinated by the power of communication and understanding that the French language offers him:
Dès que je sus écrire, je me mis à inonder mon père de lettres que je lui écrivais et lui remettais en main propre, afin d'éprouver mon savoir nouveau, et de vérifier, le regard fixé sur son visage pendant qu'il lisait, qu'avec mon nouvel outil, je pouvais lui transmettre ma pensée sans ouvrir la bouche. (p. 173)[As soon as I knew how to write, I started flooding my father with letters which I wrote and handed to him in person, in order to test my new skill, and, stared at his face, to make sure that with my new tool, I could express my thoughts to him without uttering a single word.]
The French language is associated with free learning, as Samba does not feel that he is forced to go to the French school, and with lucidity and insight, he declares:
Voilà que, subitement, j'entrais de plain-pied dans un univers où tout était, de prime abord, compréhension merveilleuse et communion totale. (p. 173)[And suddenly there I was, entering a world where everything, at first glance, was wonderful understanding and total communion.]
In the case of my father, there was something else that prompted him to choose to expose us to French culture through its language as early as possible. Indeed, in the aftermath of independence, many felt that our culture, characterized by orality, would not survive the clash with the foreign culture. They realised early on that the only tool that would allow us to join the race of the great civilisations was the acquisition of the French language. Children were reluctantly sent to French schools by their parents to learn the magic invention. The written status of French gave it immortality and weight:
La perception intuitive par les peuples sénégalais de cette fragilité mortelle d'une civilisation privée de l'outil qu'est l'écriture fournit une des explications de l'attrait que le français, langue écrite, a exercé sur eux [2].[The intuitive understanding that the Senegalese people had of the fatal frailty of a civilisation deprived of the tool provided by writing is one of the ways to explain the attraction that French, a written language, exerted on them.]
Interestingly enough, French comes as most people's second language in Senegal. Even today, with French having established itself as the lingua franca of most of West-Africa, children speak their mother's tongue before learning French at school. In very rare instances, as is the case with me, French is acquired as a mother tongue. This implies two things: first of all, I was deprived of the sense of novelty that Samba Diallo felt when first going to school. There was no disruption between what was spoken at home and at school. Secondly, the attraction to Europe, and France in particular, was always there. Which means that it felt less like an upheaval than it appears in the literature of exile.
The reason most often cited by novelists as the main cause for young people to want to go, or to be sent to Europe, is for the acquisition of knowledge. Just like children were sent to school in the early days so as to learn the ways of the white man, Europe is seen as the place where the most appropriate and sophisticated knowledge can be obtained. Studying in the cities is a great asset and a guarantee to be able to stand one day among the learned, but pursuing one's education in Europe is the icing on the cake. For Barnabas, the young hero of Ferdinand Oyono's Chemin d'Europe, nothing is as important as going to France. Having dropped out of school and being penniless, the young man sees no hope of being awarded a scholarship. Yet, he says in front of a highly sceptical French official:
Monsieur! [...] Je me suis peut-être mal exprimé, mais je veux aller en France, je ne vis que pour ça![3][Sir ... I may not have made my point clearly, but I want to go to France, that is the only thing I live for.]
His unfavourable circumstances do not prevent him from going to the land of his dreams where he soon faces an awful disenchantment.
The picture that people have of France before they get there is often - as one might imagine - an embellished, idealised representation of a land they have only seen through television, film, or accounts from people who have been there. At school, the Motherland, as it were, has been made to symbolise the heart of the universe, especially in cultural terms, and the young African student feels that it is only through staying there that he can lift himself on to the pedestal of Knowledge:
Paris lui ayant été présenté comme la capitale de la Culture universelle, le voyage à Paris devient une sorte de Bayreuth négro-africain, un pélerinage qui agrandit et embellit quiconque l'effectue.[4][Paris, having been presented to him as the world capital of Culture, going to Paris becomes a sort of Negro-African Bayreuth, and a pilgrimage there elevates and embellishes whoever performs it.]
This was very much the case for me. I was led to believe that only in Europe could I bring to perfection the knowledge I had acquired in my own country. And I had gone on to believe that I would naturally go to France to pursue my studies. In the same way that I had never questioned the fact of going to school in the first place, I did not see any reason why this would not be, even though, as with all the things that one desires most, it felt like an unattainable dream to me. But how was I to know that this dream would be realised much sooner than I had thought?
I was only sixteen when I first left my home and my country to go to an international school in Britain. The usual path would have been to go to France after my baccalauréat, then spend three to four years in a university before returning to my country. But chance knocked on my door a bit earlier than planned, and off I was, having never even been to remote parts of my own country, about to cross deserts and oceans to a faraway land. Of course, I was delighted. I did not understand my mother's dismay. For me it was going to be the greatest adventure of my life. I had no apprehensions whatsoever about what was awaiting me, only curiosity and delight.
My first impressions of Europe, from the plane, were of a grey and rainy sky over Switzerland, and, when arriving in England, of the cold. I felt like being in the freezer compartment of a fridge. But I felt nothing of the immediate kind of disenchantment so often expressed by newly arrived Black students in Paris. Kocoumbo's disappointment at the gloom that covers the city is in high contrast with the beautiful dreams he had of France:
Pourquoi les maisons n'avaient-elles aucun éclat? L'atmosphère était de plus en plus sombre. Le ciel, d'un gris sale, semblait souiller la rue et les gens [...] Alors, c'est ça Paris?... Bon![5][Why were the houses lacklustre? The atmosphere grew darker and darker. The sky had a dirty grey colour and seemed to tarnish the street and the people ... So this was Paris? ... Well!]
His initial distress turns into downright sorrow when he is left alone at the boarding school during the Christmas holidays. His solitude makes him all the more aware of the distance that separates him from his homeland. And he fears that he is in fact dead, and that he is a wandering spirit [un esprit errant] which cannot reach the kingdom of the ancestors because the proper ceremonials have not been performed. His plea to be acknowledged, whether as a person or a spirit, betrays a deep feeling of isolation and alienation:
Mes parents m'ont-ils oublié? Vais-je rester éternellement seul? Dois-je aller troubler les vivants pour qu'ils se souviennent de moi? Mais qui donc m'a tué? [6][Have my parents forgotten me? Will I remain forever alone? Do I have to go and disturb the living to remind them of me? Who is it that has killed me?]
Kocoumbo's situation is not an exaggeration nor an exception. Loneliness, or rather isolation, seems to be a relatively common instance for newly arrived immigrants. It is seclusion which turns a lively and optimistic young girl into the shadow of her former self in Ousmane Sembène's acclaimed short story, La noire de.... After a few days of serving as a maid for a French couple, she quickly realises that the dream she had of life in France and the reality of it are poles apart, and that it has changed her deeply:
Te rappelles-tu comme j'étais vivante, débordante de vitalité? Tout le monde en parlait de mon débordement. Maintenant, je suis toute ratatinée, pareille à une tranche de viande au soleil.[7][Do you remember how lively I used to be and how full of life? Everyone talked about my vitality. Now I am all shrivelled, like a slice of meat in the sun.]
Her verdict on the new world that she finds herself in is uncompromising, and considering that she ends up taking her own life, hardly an exaggeration:
Je suis dans un autre monde. Un monde maussade, lugubre, qui m'oppresse, m'assassine à petits coups, jour après jour. [8][I find myself in another world. A dull and gloomy world which is oppressing and killing me little by little, day after day.]
Nafi is not only dehumanized by her employers, she is also unable to find a place in this new world and to find a justification for her life. It is only in France that the things she used to take for granted in her own country begin to make sense and to have some importance.
One of the things that being in a foreign country does to one is to make one aware of one's origin and sense of belonging somewhere. It is only after having left her country that Nafi's sense of belonging to it becomes a concrete reality. She knows she belongs to Senegal because she sees that she does not belong to France. Her desire to be acknowledged and seen as a full human being translates into a longing for her home country where she was loved, desired, where she was not marginalized or an object of prejudice. There is, of course, a process of idealization which arises from a need to draw some comfort from something, even if it is just memories. This process of internalisation of her feelings shuts her off more and more from her surroundings and leads her to a psychological then physical death. A hightened feeling of alienation does not always lead the immigrant to death, but it always prompts a greater self-awareness. Although unhappy with his experience in England as a student, Obi Okonkwo gives due credit to his sense of estrangement:
'It was in England that Nigeria became more than just a name for him. That was the first great thing that England did for him.' [9]
Once one begins to question or simply reflect upon one's origin, one is led to an important questioning of one's identity. In my case, and because I was meant to represent my country in my school, the process of trying to define who I was became all the more crucial and slightly unsettling, to say the least, since I felt that I was definitely not who people around me thought I was. The feeling of alienation became a reality both abroad and back home, as my countrymen began to see me more and more as a foreigner. This is where my experience differed so radically from those often portrayed in works of fiction. The heroes of many novels and short stories are aware that they do not belong in Europe, but they know where they are coming from and they find a place back in their society on their return. My situation was not unlike those main characters, such as Oumar Faye in Sembène's O Pays, mon beau peuple, who on his return from France finds himself rejected by his own people on account of his new and radical ideas, but mainly because he has brought back with him a French wife. Just like one would introduce a wolf amongst the sheep, she is seen as the enemy, and so is he. After coming back from England, Obi Okonkwo also feels a certain inadequacy as a member of his community and knows not which is his place. Which leads him to a quest for his identity.
Immigrants are almost always confronted with racism and rejection in one form or another. It starts with the degrading images of Africans that are reinforced by stereotypes. Léopold Sédar Senghor denounces the posters for cocoa adverts showing a Black tirailleur [10] flashing a white, completely puerile smile, emphasizing the childishness and lack of sophistication which, in the Western subconscious of the beginning of the century, was a characteristic of all Africans. The immigrant is enticed to rebel against this cliché and try to prove his worth. This is done either through writing, as Senghor did, or through direct action, as Diaw Falla does in Sembène's Le docker noir, in which, the main protagonist is forced to kill in an attempt to assert his individuality and ascertain his value. Seldom so drastic in real life, the experience of racism is nevertheless always a disturbing element. Countless instances occur in works of fiction where the characters undergo overt racial prejudices, but I feel that the worst ones are those carried out by people who claim to be non racist and open-minded, and who are often the ones most moulded in bigotry. A good example is given by Chinua Achebe in No longer at ease. On the boat back to Nigeria, he meets a fellow passenger, an Englishman, who asks him all sorts of questions which do not seem to stem from genuine intellectual curiosity, but are more like a cynical attempt to confirm the pre-conceived ideas he had about Africa. He asks him about the meaning of names in Africa, no doubt hoping that Obi will embark on an exotic explanation of African names (p. 195). But the latter does not fall into the trap. He immediately realises the dangers of first of all, perpetuating hasty generalizations about Africa as if it was just one society with one culture and civilisation, and secondly, narrowing down the identity of Africans to their names or to the outer signs of their culture. As a result, every African in Europe finds himself in danger of being constantly defensive about his identity as a bid to overcome the wall of racial prejudices that has taken several centuries to be erected. This attitude of always having to justify one's whole being thwarts the attempts at finding out who one is.
One thing is certain: one is not born feeling black or white or whatever. The first elements of the definition of one's identity come from the family and the immediate surroundings. Notions such as those of culture, race, and identity are often forced upon the individual when there is a discrepancy between how he feels and how he is treated. If people see and treat me as a Black person, i.e. as different, then I will start wondering where my difference is and who I really am. The result of being constantly scrutinized by foreign eyes makes one want to conform to the image that people around you have, even if one does not match this image. The young hero of Rémy-Médou-Mvomo finds himself obliged to conform to the image of the bon sauvage [noble savage] that the French have of him. If he does not, he fears he will be loathed even more. So, reluctantly, he accepts to play the role that is expected of him in a bid to avoid confrontation, even if that means degrading himself:
A tout bout de champ, je devais me soumettre à la volonté des gens qui voulaient tâter ma chevelure 'douce comme le mouton'. Sous cette chevelure moutonneuse ne pouvait loger qu'un esprit bon enfant. Je tâchais donc aussi d'être bon enfant. Bon enfant? Cela voulait dire avaler des couleuvres avec le sourire. [11][I constantly had to submit to the will of people who wanted to feel my hair, which they found 'soft as sheep's'. Under this fluffy hair there could only be a childish mind. Childish? That meant being able to take all kinds of silly comments with a smile.]
I have experienced such a behaviour myself, and one is tempted, in such instances, to be prepared either to counterattack, or to play the game and let it pass. But even though this form of racism can be attributed to curiosity, and to a natural, instinctive reaction towards something strange or new, I cannot help feeling that such a behaviour betrays a serious lack of consideration and a deep-rooted idea that the African is more like an object than like a full human being. Also, the effects of this constant intrusiveness on the immigrant can be quite disastrous: it makes one behave in a manner which is not akin to one's true personality, and it also strengthens the feeling of inferiority that may or may not exist already. As a result of feeling spied upon continuously by his white entourage, our hero admits:
Et ça n'était pas drôle du tout. Ça l'était d'autant moins que cela faisait ressurgir mes complexes, mes appréhensions.[12][And that was not funny at all. It was all the less funny since it made my complexes and fears reappear.]
Furthermore, it leads one to want to disappear in order to avoid being noticed and treated like a puppy. Here we are covering the same ground as Ralph Ellison with his Invisible man - one feels motivated to assimilate oneself even more with the ambient culture, to try and behave as a white person so as to be treated like one.If I am seen as just another individual, then I will only see differences with other people in terms of personalities and sensibilities. The case of people born say in Britain from foreign parents are ample evidence of this. Are they British? Do they belong to their parents' country even if they have never been there? The conflict comes when they are seen by the British as foreigners, whereas they have no firsthand experience of their parents' culture. In these cases, there is no possibility to return to one's sources, since there are no well defined, identifiable sources. One has no choice.
Often, a feeling of rejection induces a strengthening of one's attachment to one's culture of origin. Cultural alienation inspired Senghor to write some of his most memorable poems on his culture and race. Other writers have revived the past in an attempt to regain some of the dignity that had been denied them by their former colonisers. Although a long way has gone since the advent of colonization, the situation of Africans in Europe still offers many of the contradictions and shortcomings that it did fifty years ago. There has been some progress, as my presence and function in Britain show. But many of the things that were described in the early fiction on the temptations of Europe mirror the reality that many Africans experience in Europe today.
So how does my own experience parallel that of the fictional heroes? It would appear from what I have said so far that my experience is different in many ways from that of Kocumbo or Nafi, for example. It differs mainly in the way that I was brought into contact with Western culture. I have shown how the transition was less brutal for me - also, perhaps, I encountered the problems much later that the fictional characters. Nevertheless, the problems were there and occurred often in very similar ways. What has to be emphasied is that these characters are fictional and, as such, they are representative of a situation and a reaction that many real people may have lived differently, and which sum up rather well the experience of an African in Europe. Yet the authors of these literary works focus on the vision that Africans have of Europe and on how their first-hand experience of it differs. There is thus an emphasis on the issues of racism, of acculturation and loss of identity; an emphasis which may give a harsh and bleak overtone to the whole situation.
Were my own expectations fulfilled? I can safely say, 'yes'. I found what I came for, namely, good opportunities for furthering my education. But the attainment of that goal does not overshadow the fact that, just like several fictional counterparts, I have been marked by these negative experiences. Fictional characters evolve within a narrative context, and whatever their situation, the narration has to be concluded, so their plight must be resolved in one way or another, either tragically - as with Nafi in La noire de..., or Samba Diallo in L'aventure ambiguë - or in a more fortunate, even if it is a downbeat way - as in the case of Diaw Falla's friends in Le docker noir who recreate in Marseilles a community similar to that of their homeland. In real life, however, one is never able to make a final analysis of one's journey. The focus is directed towards several aspects of life, and not just towards one's predicament as a foreigner in Europe.
1.
Cheikh Hamidou Kane, L'Aventure ambiguë, Julliard, Paris,
1961, p. 171.
2.
Cheikh Hamidou Kane, 'Langue française et identité
culturelle sénégalaise', paper read at the
Septième Biennale de la Langue française, à
Moncton (Canada), 17-31 August 1977. Published in Soleil, in
the section, Arts et Lettres, 14 and 21 October 1977.
3.
Ferdinand Oyono, Chemin d'Europe, Julliard, U.G.E., coll.
10/18, Paris, 1960, p. 171.
4.
Thomas Melone, 'De la négritude dans la littérature
négro-africaine', Présence Africaine, Paris,
1962, p.33.
5.
Ake Loba, Kocoumbo, l'étudiant noir, Flammarion, Paris,
1960, p. 91.
6.
Ibid. p. 110.
7.
Ousmane Sembène, Voltaïque, Présence
Africaine, Paris, 1962, p. 72.
8.
Ibid. p. 74.
9.
Chinua Achebe The African trilogy, H.E.B., London, 1990,
p.183.
10.
tirailleur: a member of the French West African Armed Forces.
They were essentially made up of Senegalese (hence the frequent
reference to tirailleurs sénégalais ), and took
part in both the First and the Second World Wars.
11.
Rémy Médou-Mvomo, Mon amour en noir et blanc,
Clé, Yaoundé, 1971,p.23.
12.
Ibidem.