Princes and Powers - James Baldwin's report essay

 

Princes and Powers: 

James Baldwin and the 1956 Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists

On September 19, 1956, the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists opened at the Sorbonne in Paris, in the Amphithéâtre Descartes. Among those gathered were writers, artists, intellectuals, and political thinkers from different parts of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Black world.

James Baldwin later wrote about the conference in his essay Princes and Powers. What strikes me about Baldwin's account is that he did not describe the gathering simply as an intellectual conference. He saw something much larger taking place.

He began by describing Paris itself—the streets, the people walking along the Seine, and the remarkable presence of Black people in the city. Then he entered the conference hall.

At the front of the room was a table where eight Black men were seated. Baldwin identified several of them: Richard Wright, Alioune Diop, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and Dr. Jean Price-Mars.

But the people gathered there came from many different cultures and historical experiences.

That diversity was important.

What did they have in common?

Baldwin asked, in effect, what could possibly unite people whose languages, histories, religions, political situations, and cultures were so different?

His answer was subjugation.

They shared the experience of having their societies interpreted, controlled, and judged through a European vision of the world.

For centuries, European prosperity and political power had been connected to the domination of non-European peoples. Out of that history had developed racism—a system that Black people from different parts of the world experienced in different ways but recognized as part of a larger historical reality.

This brought Baldwin to one of the conference's central questions:

What is the relationship between politics and culture?

For these intellectuals, culture could not be separated from political power.

Black cultures had suffered not because they lacked history, creativity, intelligence, or traditions, but because their political destinies had largely been placed in the hands of others.

Without political sovereignty, the ability of a people to recreate its culture becomes extremely difficult.

Who writes history?

Baldwin also challenged the meaning of history itself.

He spoke about what he called history with a capital H—the history that had been presented as the history of the world.

But this history, he argued, was largely a Western interpretation of human life.

That distinction is important.

There were many cultures represented at the conference, and Baldwin regarded them as genuine cultures—not primitive fragments waiting to be completed by Europe.

The West's ignorance of these cultures was not necessarily evidence that the cultures did not exist.

It could also be a matter of convenience.

If a culture is ignored, its people can be treated as though they have no history.

And if people are treated as though they have no history, someone else can claim the authority to define who they are.

The right to recreate oneself

One of Baldwin's most interesting ideas was that a living culture must continually recreate itself.

A people must be able to look back at its past, interpret that past, and bring it into the present.

This perpetual recreation is part of what makes a culture alive.

Culture is not a museum.

It is not simply a collection of traditions preserved exactly as they once were.

A living people continually asks:

Who were we?
Who are we now?
And who are we becoming?

That question became especially complicated when the conference turned toward the issue of assimilation.

Assimilation

Baldwin described assimilation as a particular kind of human relationship imposed by colonialism.

The problem was not simply that one culture influenced another.

Human cultures have always influenced one another.

The deeper problem was a relationship of unequal power in which a person was separated from the cultural context that had helped give that person an identity.

The colonized individual was then expected to replace his or her habits of feeling, thinking, and acting with those of the people who dominated them.

Baldwin gave the example of certain Black Africans in the Belgian Congo who desired an assimilation so complete that they would no longer be distinguishable from white people.

This revealed something painful.

Alioune Diop pointed toward what Baldwin described as the blind horror that the spiritual heritage of Africa inspired in the breasts of some Africans themselves.

Colonialism had not only controlled political institutions.

It could reach inside the consciousness of the colonized.

A person could come to look upon his or her own history as something embarrassing, backward, or frightening.

But was the answer simply to reject Europe?

Baldwin did not believe the problem could be solved so simply.

The choice was not merely:

Become completely Western

or

Reject everything European and retreat completely into African culture.

Life was more complicated than that.

Baldwin also rejected the idea that intellectuals could simply sit down and decide which African values should be retained and which European values should be adopted.

Cultures do not work like a shopping list.

People live within history.

They inherit languages, religions, political systems, literature, music, memories, wounds, ideas, relationships, and institutions. These things interact with one another.

The question was therefore not simply:

What should we keep?

It was also:

How do we become capable of determining our own cultural future?

Why were they gathered?

This, perhaps, is what Baldwin saw as the deepest purpose of the conference.

These Black intellectuals had come together because their cultures were experiencing a profound crisis.

They had gathered to define and accept their responsibilities.

They had gathered to assess the riches and possibilities contained within their cultures.

And they had gathered to enter into a genuine dialogue with Europe.

That last point is important.

The conference was not simply an act of rejection.

It was an assertion of equality.

The goal was not necessarily to shut Europe out.

It was to make it possible for Africans, Caribbean people, and other Black peoples to enter the conversation as historical peoples with cultures of their own—not as subjects waiting to be interpreted by someone else.

Fifteen years to reach the moment

Baldwin ended his report with a moving reference to the long struggle that had preceded the conference.

The gathering did not happen overnight.

It represented approximately fifteen years of work by Diop and his colleagues to bring Black writers and artists together.

That history itself is worth remembering.

Before there was a conference hall at the Sorbonne, there were conversations.

Before there were organizations, there were relationships.

Before there was a public declaration, there were people thinking, writing, organizing, disagreeing, and imagining something that did not yet exist.

That is what makes the 1956 gathering so significant to me.

It reminds me that cultural transformation is not produced simply by having the right ideas.

Ideas have to become relationships.

Relationships have to become institutions.

Institutions have to become places where people can gather, learn, create, and take responsibility for the knowledge they carry.

And that brings me back to two quotations that I carry with me.

“You cannot plow a field by turning it over in your mind.”

— Anonymous

Booker T. Washington expressed a similar idea in a very different way:

“Our pathway must be up through the soil,
up through swamps,
up through forests,
up through streams and rocks,
up through commerce, education, and religion!”

He continued:

“We cannot begin at the top to build a house.”

That idea resonates with me.

The people gathered in Paris in 1956 were intellectuals, writers, artists, and thinkers. But they were also people trying to build something.

They understood that recovering a culture was not simply an intellectual exercise.

A people must be able to cultivate its own soil.

It must recover its memories.

It must tell its own stories.

It must examine its history.

It must create institutions.

It must educate its children.

And it must continually recreate itself.

Perhaps this is one of the lasting lessons of Baldwin's Princes and Powers.

A living culture cannot simply be remembered. It has to be cultivated.

Sincerely,

(Adjoa) Linda Dabo