African literature is not waiting to be published
There is a stubborn misconception about African literature: it would be a matter of books, prizes, Parisian or London publishing houses that validate it and make it exist. This vision is real, and partial. Beside her, another literature has been circulating for decades in the streets of Lomé, the radios of Dakar, the improvised scenes of the popular districts of Lagos. It cannot be read: it plays, sings, raps, translates between two languages that should never have crossed paths. It is this mapping that the researchers gathered in tribute to Alain Ricard (a central figure in African literary studies) undertook to draw up. And it profoundly redistributes what is meant by “African literature”.
The concert party or parody as a political tool
In the 1970s, Alain Ricard attended a show in Lomé and Lagos that attracted thousands of spectators: the concert party. This popular theater stages everyday situations with a humor that ranges from comical to acerbic. But make no mistake, behind entertainment, it is a social criticism tool of formidable precision. “The concert is the kind of parody,” says Ricard; “it is not the kind of one who celebrates hierarchy, but the one who mocks it.” What Ricard understands, and that research will take years to theorize, is that these popular forms are not the margin of African literature. They are often the living center, the place where society speaks of itself with a freedom that written texts, subject to censorship and the constraints of the editorial market, cannot always allow themselves.
Senegalese rap: an unprecedented political speech
Sophie Moulard-Kouka has spent years studying Dakar rap. What she sees in it is less a musical genre than a literary form in its own right, with its conventions, its poetics, its rhetorical strategies. Senegalese rap appeared in the late 1980s, when youth rebelled against a state that marginalized and silenced them. It is not a cultural import suffered: it is an active appropriation, a response. The literary dimension of these texts is real and claimed. Dakar rappers build their pieces in writing, with careful attention to the language, the alternation of Wolof, French and English is not a coincidence, it is a strategy. Wolof anchors the subject in the local and intimate. The French summons the official speech to better return it. English signals connection with a global black diaspora. Three languages, three registers of power, one voice. What the rappers of Dakar have achieved is what Michel Foucault describes as the emergence of a keynote speech, a speech that escapes the usual control procedures not by confronting them head-on, but by playing spaces between them. Polysemy, metaphor, misappropriation: all tools of a literature that knows that it is monitored and that advances anyway.
Translating between two Africans: the Afri-Frans project
Even more unexpected: the translation of Afrikaans songs into French, led by Malagasy singer Maude Myra and translator Naòmi Morgan. The Afri-Frans project is not anecdotal. He reveals that literary circulation in Africa does not follow the circuits that one would imagine — it does not only go to the European metropolitan centers, it also connects African shores with each other, communities that geography and history have separated. Translating an Afrikaner song into French for a performer of Malagasy and Martinican origin means bringing together post-apartheid South Africa, Madagascar, the West Indies and the world Francophonie in a single artistic gesture. It also shows that “African literature” has no fixed borders — that it is built in the relationship, in the exchange, in the passage from one language to another.
What it changes to read African literatures
These examples converge towards the same conclusion: African literature cannot be read only through the prism of the published book. It exists in forms that have their own coherence, their own sophistication — and often an ability to reach audiences that the book does not. For SUSU Éditions, this conviction is fundamental. A pan-African platform that only focuses on published texts would miss an essential part of what African and diasporic voices have to say. Performance, song, translation between African languages: these spaces are also literary spaces. And they deserve the same attention.
Sources Used
African literatures . Texts and land, Tribute to Alain Ricard, Karthala, 2015
Articles by Sophie Moulard-Kouka and Naòmi Morgan]
- Moulard-Kouka (Senegalese rap and performative cultures)
- Morgan (Afri-Frans project, Afrikaans-French translation),
Introduction of Riesz (work by Alain Ricard, literary epicentres, Lomé/Lagos)
