A changed african revisits a changed Africa

Author: By Emmanuel Akyeampong

Date: SUNDAY, January 17, 1999

Page: E2

Section: Books

"In Search of Africa'' is a thought-provoking chronicle of Manthia Diawara'a 1996 return to Guinea, the land of his birth, for the first time since his family went into exile in 1964. Now a professor of comparative literature and film at New York University, Diawara returned to Guinea to conduct research for a documentary film on Sekou Toure, president of that country after its separation from France in 1958. He also nursed the hope of reuniting with his childhood friend and role model, Sidime Laye.

The narrative of the return to Guinea is offered in eight chapters, while four further segments -- styled ``Situations'' -- present theoretical reflections on the African and African-American past, present, and future. In this interface of autobiography and discourse, Diawara breathes new life into the spirit of Pan-Africanism, and effectively guides the reader through a complex discussion of societies and economies in West Africa and an examination of black culture. Written in a vivid and engaging manner, the book is rich in its insights on the African and African-American condition, and often depressing in its candor.

It was Sekou Toure's 1958 revolution, and the subsequent drive for mass education, that thrust Diawara as a boy (he was born in 1953) into modernity and won for the national leader a special place in Diawara's heart. However, when an increasingly dictatorial Sekou Toure nationalized the economy and expelled aliens in 1964, Diawara's parents (who were of Malian extraction) returned to Mali with their young son. Eventually, Diawara became a filmmaker and moved to the United States.

On his return to Guinea, Diawara's initial impressions of Conakry, the capital, are unfavorable: pitch-blackness in the night, no traffic lights, rationed electricity, potholed roads, and foul scents. A modern man, he finds some comfort in his room at the Hotel Camayenne, and in the modern appurtenances of CNN and an international telephone system. His cab driver hears about a Sidime Laye, who owns an African art shop in the downtown area. When they arrive at the shop, Diawara is saddened to find himself treated as an outsider. He is told to leave his address and Sidime Laye will contact him. Diawara is plagued with feelings of loneliness akin to what he experiences amid the identity politics of New York.

Two days pass and Sidime Laye has not contacted Diawara. So Diawara turns to his research for the Sekou Toure project, interviewing the Guinean writer Williams Sassine, who had lived in exile during the repressive tenure of Toure. Sassine's novels are a classic example of what Diawara describes as Afro-pessimism, a fatalistic attitude toward Africa's economic and social crisis. Diawara meets Mrs. Niane, who makes a profound impression on him with her traditional dignity and impeccable French.

In his ``situations,'' Diawara analyzes the hold of tradition on contemporary Mande society through the continuing influence of griot praise songs in the definition of the hero, the leader, and identity. In celebrating traditional cultural values through return narratives, griots perpetuate archaic customs, in Diawara's view, and act as a stumbling block to modernity.

Diawara offers a blueprint for a future West Africa. He discusses economic structures, the need to connect traditional markets to the state-controlled sphere, the adverse impact on African countries of the World Bank's Structural Adjustment Program, and the need for political democracy. He advocates economic and cultural regionalism in West Africa, and hints at the need for an African model of development.

One day, as he is reading by the hotel pool, Diawara is paged and informed that Sidime Laye is looking for him. Looking around the crowded hotel lobby, he heads confidently for the best-dressed man. He is accosted by Sidime Laye, looking more like a hotel employee, clad in a red Lacoste T-Shirt and black jeans. Diawara is astounded. His old friend turns out to be a carver of wooden masks and statues, not the lawyer or doctor Diawara expected.

Ironically, Diawara's return to Guinea is very much in the vein of the Mande return narratives he disparages. He returned, successful, hoping to join, reminisce, and celebrate with equally successful childhood friends. He was disappointed that Laye had become a wood carver, after the tradition of his clan. This reaction parallels the resentment of tradition (caste, clan, and oral) that runs through the book: Tradition and the viciousness of Sekou Toure's reign seemed to have marred the future of the brilliant Sidime Laye.

Yet the encounter raises important questions about which Africa Diawara went in search of and who had changed: Diawara or Africa? Much of African art had an original ritual function, and masks and statues were symbols of clan and religion. Today, masks have entered global political conflicts as organizers of markets, ethnic identities, and cultures against the nation-states and African unity. Artists like Sidime Laye deploy masks against totalitarian regimes like that of Sekou Toure.

In August 1997, Diawara paid another visit to Guinea and met a happier Sidime Laye. Diawara and his associate filmed Sidime Laye at work carving a mask, while interviewing his highly informed cousin, artist, and business partner, Sidime Nkai. Diawara gained a new appreciation of Sidime Laye's artistry and creativity. The setting was relaxed and intimate. Diawara had found the Sidime Laye he came in search of.

The central theme in the book is modernity, and the urgent need for Africa to modernize and not be left behind by the rest of the world. In opposition stands tradition and its immobilizing weight. And unlike Kwame Anthony Appiah's ``In My Father's House'' (1992), Diawara rejects multiple identities in favor of a single rational, modern identity. His modernity remains vaguely defined aside from his endorsement of industrialization and a political and cognitive freedom that comes from unfettered market consumption. The multiple sources of modernity, and the shifting configurations of modernity in space and time, are unexamined.

However, Diawara underscores the need for new mentalities. He cites as modernity's true mission the transcending of race and the forging of liberty. His rereading of Negritude literature supports this larger goal, and advocates inclusion and not exclusion. Diawara advocates an encompassing, fluid definition of black culture and a move away from purist versions.

Diawara makes a case for a broad definition of African-American culture that includes popular cultural creations, such as hip-hop music. These creations demonstrate resourcefulness in circumventing institutions created to contain African-American expression. They are as legitimate as the experience of the black church. Diawara argues that African-American leadership must incorporate these vibrant constituencies.

``In Search of Africa'' is refreshing in its honest discussion of Diawara's perception of Africa and its future, black culture and race relations in America, and relations between Africans and African-Africans. Africans who live in the West are impatient with Africa's slowness to modernize and develop. A spirit of restlessness plagues Africans abroad: Racism nurtures a nostalgia for home, but a visit to Africa quickly reminds them of the modern amenities they have become used to.

For African-Americans, Africa remains a powerful ideological force in spite of media portraits of a war-torn and starving continent and unresolved emotions about the African participation in the Atlantic slave trade. The result has been a selective engagement with the African past, and the construction of an appealing image of Africa that is unhistorical. In this autobiographical presentation of Pan-Africanism as a lived experience and not as an abstraction, Manthia Diawara nudges us away from a selective engagement with the African past, as well as a fatalistic view of the African present.