A REMARKABLE NOVEL BY A NEGRO.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18753, 5 January 1923, Page 6

A REMARKABLE NOVEL BY A NEGRO.

“Are the French going to bring Eujopa into Africa or Afnca into' Europe? If either happens, their still-spreading conquests will have a far greater significance in history than all that England ever did in India. In any case, conquest will go on: for France there can be no looking back. , Various forces and motives pushed her forward in the sudden career of expansion from 1880 onwards; but now one fact dominates the whole. Victorious France knows that even after her victory the Germans are six to four against her and will soon be two to one ; she knows also that one of the'chief aids to her Pyrrhic victory was the unexpected resource found in her African soldiers.” Stephen Gwynn calls attention in the Edinburgh Review to the high significance of the French novel “Batouala”—written by a negro in the French service—Rene Maran, and published by Jonathan Cape. French Coloured Troops.— “Ludendorlf’s saying, ‘ France , waged the war, especially in 1918, largely with coloured troops,’ is quoted with acceptance by General Mangin in hfs “Comment Finit la Guerre,” writes Mr Gwynn. “The chapter of that work dealing with the colonial contingents has gone straight home to the French mind. In addition to 220,000 men enrolled for labour under military conditions, France used '545,000 dark-skinned fighters, of whom one in every five fell. “They came from all her possessions— Indo-China, Madagascar, the Pacific Islands, Guiana; but the vast majority were African. ‘ The military annexation of our colonies is a fact,’ says General Mangin, ‘we must lace it and give effect to aft that follows from it.’ France of overseas ’ has a population of 50,000,U/j, and a growing population. 'We must contemplate an army in which there will be as many coloured Frenchmen (Francais d© couleur) as white Frenchmen. Can They Be Frenchmen.? — “The burden of miltiary seryice must, in his judgment, be equally distributed wherever France bears rule; but it must carry with it the advantages and opportunities of citizenship, chief among .which is education. Forms of government must vary according to the needs and traditions of the varying countries and peoples. But the end is clear: the creation of ‘ a Greater France, placing at the disposal of civilisation the weight of 100,000,000 men.’ “If one asks whether France can conceivably make Frenchmen out of her African subjects, M. Rene Maran a ‘Batouala’ is in the strangest way a document to support either answer. For the author of the book is by race a pure African negro, but by position an official serving the ■ French Government in Equatorial Africa, and the book which, he has written was last December awarded the'Prix Goncourt. X)n the other hand,' ‘Batouala’ is the picture of a race so unfit for European civilisation that mere contact with that civilisation has so far only tended to ruin and destroy it. “Controversy about such a work was inevitable, and has been violent. Even the literary merit is denied. A foreigner’s judgment must count for little, yet a foreigner, even if he did not happen to know that M. Maran’s first work was in verse, could see that ‘ Batouala ’ lies much nearer to ' poetry than to prose; it is the prose of a poet, and a poet whoso language may be French, but whose temperament is tropical. This story of some few days in the life of a petty negro chief, ending with his death, is an African idyll; hot, savage, violent, ugly, having rhythm and having vitality; blit .a rhythm and a life that are not ours. All through seems to run the pulsation of that drumming which is articulate language for the African bush, but for European ears mere frenzy. The Negro Novelist.— “The life depicted has nothing ip common with ours but the sun and the moon. Through this sole link is conveyed what we can recognise as oeauty; yet at the same time we are made to feel that it is not our sun or our moon. There are many books about tropical Africa, but this story in its few concentrated chapters seems actually to give the sensations which the other hooks endeavour to describe. Its literary value has nothing to do with its value as a except this, that M. Maran has created literature for France. ■ “But it was not in Africa that M. Maran became French. The ‘petite patrie adoptive ’ which he invoked when news of the war reached him, far south of Lakp Tchad, was Bordeaux. Thirteen, or fourteen years ago, ho was one of a student group there, who played football together and together talked literature. From Bordeaux he sent his first attempt in vers© to the Beffroi, a review published in Lille, whose editor, M. Leon Bocquet, wrote for the Monde Nouveau of last February an article from which these details are derived. In 1910 the young ‘Prancais de couleur ’ went out to take up an administrative post in the country from which he came, and which was to him native, yet alien. ‘ For now, he wrote to M. Bocquet, ‘ though French at heart, I feel myself on the soil of my ancestors —ancestors whom I reject because I have neither their primitive mentality nor their tastes, but they are my ancestors for all that.’ The Problem.— “The people he chooses to describe, because they are the only native Africans whose way of life he has seen intimately, are, as one of his assailants justly says, ‘one of the most backward races in Africa.’ They are pagans, in no way, touched by the Mohammedan influence. All their life is ruled by instinct and by tradition. All they know of the European is that he lias supernatural power and does not let them live their lives according to their custom. They must obey his orders—orders harshly given, enforced by heavy penalties. In return they get "nothing. So at least Batouala thinks, for Batouala is the chief, the man in power, whose power is only limited by the presence of white men. “We must not take M. Hagan as proposing that France should go out’ of Africa, or as desiring to maintain for ever the type of existence lived by Batouala and his tribesmen. The preface make* its indictment directly, not by implication. M. Maxan appeals as a French* men to Frenchmen; he cries to bis ‘ brother writers of France ’ for support against the methods of colonial rule and the type of men employed in it. Administration by white men who are drunken, who are ignorant, who understand neither the language nor the customs of those whom they rule, may indeed be a worse oppression than even the most barbarous native customs. It may exterminate the native Africans; it cannot make Frenchmen of them. “M. Maran is in revolt against the idea of sending: these unfortunate people to be butchered in defence of a civilisation to which they do not belong, which is to them of no value. A Notable Interpreter.— The book is written by a negro, carrying out laboriously the duties of a French administrator, and as passionately concerned for the fate of France as any other Frenchman. It is doubtful whether England has so completely assimilated any British Indian. Certainly no negro has ever created artistic work of the first importance in the English tongue. M. Maran’s indictment cannot be disregarded; it has too much authority. Yet in the great task to which France is committed nothing is needed so much, as an interpreter between the peoples. M. Maran is ,an interpreter; the existence of him and of his book is of more hopeful augury than anything to be found in other studies of France's work among the negro race*.”