WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.680 Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are 00:00:03.680 --> 00:00:05.459 going to do something a little bit different. 00:00:05.639 --> 00:00:07.980 Yeah, a slightly different approach today. Usually 00:00:07.980 --> 00:00:10.140 we start with a concept, right? Or maybe a piece 00:00:10.140 --> 00:00:13.160 of tech or a trend. But today, I actually want 00:00:13.160 --> 00:00:16.780 to start with a place and a time. Because the 00:00:16.780 --> 00:00:19.640 where and the when are, well, they're almost 00:00:19.640 --> 00:00:21.940 as important as the what. It's basically impossible 00:00:21.940 --> 00:00:24.260 to separate them in this case. The context is 00:00:24.260 --> 00:00:26.579 everything. Exactly. So I want you to just sort 00:00:26.579 --> 00:00:28.320 of close your eyes for a second. We are going 00:00:28.320 --> 00:00:33.359 to Paris. But, uh... Not the shiny romantic Paris 00:00:33.359 --> 00:00:36.520 of Emily in Paris or, you know, a Woody Allen 00:00:36.520 --> 00:00:39.399 movie. Definitely not that. It is late 1947. 00:00:39.780 --> 00:00:41.679 The Second World War has been over for about 00:00:41.679 --> 00:00:44.100 two years, but the city is still really bruised. 00:00:44.179 --> 00:00:46.140 Yeah, it's gray. It's cold. There's still rationing 00:00:46.140 --> 00:00:47.920 going on. The buildings are covered in soot. 00:00:48.079 --> 00:00:50.159 But if you walk down into the Latin Quarter, 00:00:50.340 --> 00:00:53.159 specifically around the Sorbonne, there is a 00:00:53.159 --> 00:00:55.420 completely different kind of energy. It's not 00:00:55.420 --> 00:00:57.579 just the energy of reconstruction. It's the energy 00:00:57.579 --> 00:00:59.719 of revolution. It really is a pressure cooker. 00:01:00.109 --> 00:01:02.649 Because you have thousands of students, intellectuals, 00:01:02.649 --> 00:01:05.670 and soldiers from the colonies, men who had literally 00:01:05.670 --> 00:01:08.469 just fought for France, all converging in this 00:01:08.469 --> 00:01:11.430 one specific neighborhood. And right in the center 00:01:11.430 --> 00:01:14.810 of all this atmospheric pressure, a new journal 00:01:14.810 --> 00:01:17.829 hits the newsstands. It has a very stark cover. 00:01:17.950 --> 00:01:21.129 It's called Presence Africane. African Presence. 00:01:21.129 --> 00:01:23.150 Right. Now, if you just glance at the history 00:01:23.150 --> 00:01:26.069 books, you might see it listed as a quarterly 00:01:26.069 --> 00:01:29.390 literary magazine. And sure, technically, that's 00:01:29.390 --> 00:01:31.810 what it was. But calling Presence Africane a 00:01:31.810 --> 00:01:33.530 magazine is sort of like calling the Manhattan 00:01:33.530 --> 00:01:36.370 Project a, I don't know, a science fair. That 00:01:36.370 --> 00:01:39.599 is actually a very apt analogy. Because the fallout, 00:01:39.640 --> 00:01:41.700 the intellectual fallout from this single publication 00:01:41.700 --> 00:01:45.060 completely reshaped the world map. And that is 00:01:45.060 --> 00:01:46.980 our mission for this deep dive. We are looking 00:01:46.980 --> 00:01:49.819 at our historical records, our encyclopedic overviews 00:01:49.819 --> 00:01:51.540 of the magazine's history and its contributors. 00:01:51.739 --> 00:01:53.799 We aren't just looking at a table of contents 00:01:53.799 --> 00:01:56.500 today. No, we're looking at a machine. Exactly. 00:01:56.840 --> 00:01:59.400 We are looking at how a Senegalese philosophy 00:01:59.400 --> 00:02:02.480 professor named Alion Diop built this machine. 00:02:02.989 --> 00:02:04.969 a magazine, a publishing house, a bookstore, 00:02:05.209 --> 00:02:08.650 and how it became the preeminent voice of the 00:02:08.650 --> 00:02:10.889 negritude movement. Which is a massive cultural 00:02:10.889 --> 00:02:12.949 shift. Massive. We're going to look at how he 00:02:12.949 --> 00:02:15.310 basically assembled the Avengers of the African 00:02:15.310 --> 00:02:18.330 diaspora and why, about 15 years later, this 00:02:18.330 --> 00:02:20.629 literary project was considered dangerous enough 00:02:20.629 --> 00:02:22.909 that terrorists actually tried to blow it up. 00:02:22.990 --> 00:02:25.389 With plastic explosives. Right, which is wild 00:02:25.389 --> 00:02:27.949 to think about. And that violence is key, I think. 00:02:28.129 --> 00:02:30.490 We tend to think of literature as this, you know, 00:02:30.509 --> 00:02:32.590 soft, passive thing. You sit in it. an armchair 00:02:32.590 --> 00:02:35.389 and read poems. But the story of Presence Africaine 00:02:35.389 --> 00:02:37.949 proves that literature, when it's truly effective, 00:02:38.389 --> 00:02:41.150 is a threat. It's a weapon. So let's start with 00:02:41.150 --> 00:02:44.270 the architect, Alain Diop. The Socrates of the 00:02:44.270 --> 00:02:46.210 Black World, as he was later called. That is 00:02:46.210 --> 00:02:49.770 a very heavy title to carry. Who was he in 1947? 00:02:50.370 --> 00:02:53.030 He was essentially a bridge. Diop was born in 00:02:53.030 --> 00:02:55.129 Senegal, he was educated in the French colonial 00:02:55.129 --> 00:02:57.370 system, and he eventually became a professor 00:02:57.370 --> 00:02:59.830 of philosophy living in Paris. He was even a 00:02:59.830 --> 00:03:02.550 senator for a brief period, representing Senegal 00:03:02.550 --> 00:03:05.849 in the French Fourth Republic. But intellectually, 00:03:06.189 --> 00:03:08.509 he was fascinating because he was a devout Catholic 00:03:08.509 --> 00:03:11.810 on one hand, and a deeply rooted African intellectual 00:03:11.810 --> 00:03:14.819 on the other. He moved effortlessly between the 00:03:14.819 --> 00:03:17.520 ancient traditions of his Wolof heritage and 00:03:17.520 --> 00:03:19.699 the high -minded existentialism of those Parisian 00:03:19.699 --> 00:03:22.300 cafes. And that duality seems really crucial 00:03:22.300 --> 00:03:25.979 here, because in 1947, the prevailing wind in 00:03:25.979 --> 00:03:28.860 Europe regarding Africa was, well, let's just 00:03:28.860 --> 00:03:31.319 say dismissive. Dismissive is putting it very 00:03:31.319 --> 00:03:34.280 politely. The prevailing European worldview at 00:03:34.280 --> 00:03:37.240 the time was that Africa essentially had no history, 00:03:37.419 --> 00:03:39.800 no culture, and no philosophy that was worth 00:03:39.800 --> 00:03:42.400 preserving. Wow. The whole goal of the colonial 00:03:42.400 --> 00:03:45.199 project was assimilation. The idea was basically 00:03:45.199 --> 00:03:47.340 we will make you French because being African 00:03:47.340 --> 00:03:50.460 is a void. So Diop decides to launch a journal 00:03:50.460 --> 00:03:52.539 to counter this narrative. But he doesn't just 00:03:52.539 --> 00:03:54.500 gather his friends from Senegal. He does something 00:03:54.500 --> 00:03:57.120 very, very strategic with that first issue in 00:03:57.120 --> 00:03:59.580 November 1947. He builds a coalition. Right. 00:03:59.659 --> 00:04:02.419 A coalition that, frankly, looks impossible on 00:04:02.419 --> 00:04:05.259 paper. It was a strategic masterstroke because 00:04:05.259 --> 00:04:07.280 if he had just published a magazine of African 00:04:07.280 --> 00:04:11.240 writers in 1947. The French establishment probably 00:04:11.240 --> 00:04:12.939 would have just ignored it entirely. They would 00:04:12.939 --> 00:04:14.500 have brushed it off. Exactly. It would have been 00:04:14.500 --> 00:04:17.040 categorized as folklore or just colonial writings. 00:04:17.439 --> 00:04:21.560 So what he does is he enlists the absolute heavyweights 00:04:21.560 --> 00:04:24.779 of the European intelligentsia to serve on his 00:04:24.779 --> 00:04:26.980 patronage committee. The allies. We're talking 00:04:26.980 --> 00:04:29.339 about Jean -Paul Sartre. Albert Camus. André 00:04:29.339 --> 00:04:33.959 Gide. Theodore Monod. Georges Ballandier. Michel 00:04:33.959 --> 00:04:36.980 Léris. These were the gods of French thought 00:04:36.980 --> 00:04:39.160 at the time. Okay, but let's push on this a little 00:04:39.160 --> 00:04:41.560 bit. Isn't there a risk here? You're starting 00:04:41.560 --> 00:04:43.839 a magazine called Presence Africaine, and the 00:04:43.839 --> 00:04:46.019 very first thing you do is put a bunch of prominent 00:04:46.019 --> 00:04:48.839 white European men on the masthead. Was there 00:04:48.839 --> 00:04:51.579 pushback on that? Was the scene as, I don't know, 00:04:51.600 --> 00:04:53.899 seeking validation from the oppressor? That is 00:04:53.899 --> 00:04:57.060 the eternal debate with this period. And yeah, 00:04:57.120 --> 00:04:59.300 looking back now, it might look like centering 00:04:59.300 --> 00:05:01.199 the European perspective, but you really have 00:05:01.199 --> 00:05:04.860 to look at the 1947 chessboard. Diab was a pragmatist 00:05:04.860 --> 00:05:07.339 above all else. He knew what he was doing. Exactly. 00:05:07.769 --> 00:05:09.850 He knew that to get the magazine into the hands 00:05:09.850 --> 00:05:11.470 of the people who actually needed to read it, 00:05:11.550 --> 00:05:13.589 which included the colonial administrators themselves, 00:05:13.949 --> 00:05:16.470 he needed a sort of Trojan horse effect. You 00:05:16.470 --> 00:05:18.870 come for the Sarche, you stay for the Seigneur. 00:05:19.069 --> 00:05:21.149 Precisely. But it was also more than just clever 00:05:21.149 --> 00:05:23.350 marketing. It was a challenge to these thinkers. 00:05:23.589 --> 00:05:26.209 By having André Gide, who had already written 00:05:26.209 --> 00:05:29.540 Voyage au Congo, and... criticize colonial abuses 00:05:29.540 --> 00:05:32.399 or sartre who was the reigning king of existential 00:05:32.399 --> 00:05:35.959 freedom involved diabop was forcing them to put 00:05:35.959 --> 00:05:37.819 their money where their mouth was he was calling 00:05:37.819 --> 00:05:41.240 their bluff yes He was saying, you talk all day 00:05:41.240 --> 00:05:43.399 about freedom. You talk about the human condition. 00:05:43.540 --> 00:05:46.139 OK, look at us. Engage with us directly. And 00:05:46.139 --> 00:05:48.800 they really did engage. Sartre didn't just lend 00:05:48.800 --> 00:05:51.399 his name to a letterhead. He wrote the introduction 00:05:51.399 --> 00:05:53.879 to an anthology connected to the movement, this 00:05:53.879 --> 00:05:57.160 famous essay called Black Orpheus or Orphanuar. 00:05:57.420 --> 00:05:59.600 Which remains one of the most important and controversial 00:05:59.600 --> 00:06:03.060 essays on race ever written by a European. Let's 00:06:03.060 --> 00:06:04.699 break that down for the listener because it's 00:06:04.699 --> 00:06:07.379 a bit complex. What was Sartre actually arguing 00:06:07.379 --> 00:06:10.709 in Black Orpheus? Well. Sartre defined negritude, 00:06:10.889 --> 00:06:13.050 which was the movement the magazine championed 00:06:13.050 --> 00:06:16.430 as anti -racist racism. Anti -racist racism. 00:06:16.430 --> 00:06:18.949 That sounds I mean, that sounds bad on the surface. 00:06:19.009 --> 00:06:20.889 It does sound jarring, but he didn't mean it 00:06:20.889 --> 00:06:22.949 as an insult at all. He meant it dialectically 00:06:22.949 --> 00:06:25.769 in a philosophical sense. He argued that white 00:06:25.769 --> 00:06:29.129 supremacy was the thesis. Negritude, which is 00:06:29.129 --> 00:06:31.509 the strong affirmation of blackness, was the 00:06:31.509 --> 00:06:35.000 antithesis. The necessary, inevitable reaction 00:06:35.000 --> 00:06:37.839 to that supremacy. OK, I follow. And he theorized 00:06:37.839 --> 00:06:40.519 that eventually these two opposing forces would 00:06:40.519 --> 00:06:43.240 merge into a synthesis, a society without race. 00:06:43.480 --> 00:06:46.459 So he saw the celebration of blackness as a necessary 00:06:46.459 --> 00:06:48.959 step, but ultimately a temporary one. Exactly. 00:06:49.180 --> 00:06:51.420 He called it the weak stage of the dialectic. 00:06:51.420 --> 00:06:53.420 And as you can imagine, this did not sit well 00:06:53.420 --> 00:06:55.500 with everyone involved in the movement. I bet. 00:06:55.639 --> 00:06:58.139 Many African thinkers like Leopold Seder -Senghor 00:06:58.139 --> 00:07:01.139 saw negritude not as just some temporary political 00:07:01.139 --> 00:07:03.949 strategy to get. to a race -blind society, but 00:07:03.949 --> 00:07:06.350 as a permanent, essential reality of the African 00:07:06.350 --> 00:07:08.810 soul. So even within that very first foundational 00:07:08.810 --> 00:07:11.889 coalition, you had deep philosophical friction. 00:07:12.129 --> 00:07:14.730 Which honestly makes the magazine so much more 00:07:14.730 --> 00:07:17.209 interesting than if it were just one unanimous, 00:07:17.209 --> 00:07:19.889 echoing voice. It was a battleground of ideas. 00:07:20.209 --> 00:07:23.089 It was a live debate. And that brings us to the 00:07:23.089 --> 00:07:26.269 core contributors, the African and diaspora voices. 00:07:27.169 --> 00:07:29.509 Because while Sartre and Camus kind of held the 00:07:29.509 --> 00:07:31.750 door open, the people who actually walked through 00:07:31.750 --> 00:07:35.310 it were giants like Aimé Césaire, Senghor, Alianz 00:07:35.310 --> 00:07:37.529 Sarr, and Richard Wright. The heavy hitters of 00:07:37.529 --> 00:07:39.670 the early movement. And they were very different 00:07:39.670 --> 00:07:42.430 men with very different approaches. Take Aimé 00:07:42.430 --> 00:07:44.439 Césaire. He was from Martinique in the Caribbean. 00:07:44.740 --> 00:07:47.800 He was a poet deeply influenced by surrealism. 00:07:47.879 --> 00:07:51.199 He was explosive, fiery. He's the one who actually 00:07:51.199 --> 00:07:53.879 coined the term negritude in a previous journal 00:07:53.879 --> 00:07:56.220 he had called Le Tour du Noir. Right, but it 00:07:56.220 --> 00:07:58.560 was Presence Africaine that really became the 00:07:58.560 --> 00:08:00.899 preeminent voice for it. Exactly. Then you have 00:08:00.899 --> 00:08:04.259 Senghor from Senegal. His approach was much more 00:08:04.259 --> 00:08:06.819 traditional, more rhythmic in his poetry. He 00:08:06.819 --> 00:08:09.079 was very focused on this idea of the singleization 00:08:09.079 --> 00:08:11.420 of the universal. And then Richard Wright, the 00:08:11.420 --> 00:08:13.790 American in the group. The outsider, in a sense. 00:08:14.110 --> 00:08:16.649 Wright didn't even speak French very well. And 00:08:16.649 --> 00:08:19.870 he was deeply skeptical of the more mystical, 00:08:20.069 --> 00:08:23.470 poetic aspects of niggertude that Sigmore talked 00:08:23.470 --> 00:08:26.430 about. Wright was a hard -nosed realist. He came 00:08:26.430 --> 00:08:28.810 out of the Jim Crow South in America and the 00:08:28.810 --> 00:08:31.300 Communist Party in Chicago. I find Richard Wright's 00:08:31.300 --> 00:08:34.179 inclusion so fascinating because it signals right 00:08:34.179 --> 00:08:36.639 from the start that Presence African wasn't just 00:08:36.639 --> 00:08:38.679 about the French colonies. I mean, the subtitle 00:08:38.679 --> 00:08:41.320 of the magazine was Review Culturelle du Monde 00:08:41.320 --> 00:08:44.419 Noir Cultural Review of the Negro World. That 00:08:44.419 --> 00:08:47.779 word world is the key to the whole project. Diop 00:08:47.779 --> 00:08:49.600 and his editorial board understood something 00:08:49.600 --> 00:08:52.100 profound, which was that the black experience 00:08:52.100 --> 00:08:55.200 was global, but it was heavily fragmented by 00:08:55.200 --> 00:08:57.279 these colonial languages. Right. The British 00:08:57.279 --> 00:08:58.919 had their colonies speaking English. The French 00:08:58.919 --> 00:09:00.659 had their speaking French. The Portuguese had 00:09:00.659 --> 00:09:02.440 theirs. And then you had the American system 00:09:02.440 --> 00:09:04.779 of segregation. And none of these groups could 00:09:04.779 --> 00:09:06.779 easily talk to each other. They were literally 00:09:06.779 --> 00:09:09.700 walled off by language. Right. If you were a 00:09:09.700 --> 00:09:12.539 brilliant intellectual in Nigeria, you were reading 00:09:12.539 --> 00:09:14.860 and writing in English. If you were in Senegal, 00:09:15.059 --> 00:09:17.879 you were working in French. Presence Africaine 00:09:17.879 --> 00:09:20.419 set out to smash that wall down. They actively 00:09:20.419 --> 00:09:22.759 included English abstracts in the predominantly 00:09:22.759 --> 00:09:25.340 French magazine. That's a huge effort for the 00:09:25.340 --> 00:09:27.700 time. It was. And later, they went even further. 00:09:27.799 --> 00:09:30.779 Between 1955 and 1961, they actually published 00:09:30.779 --> 00:09:34.259 a full English edition of the journal. 60 issues 00:09:34.259 --> 00:09:37.500 of it. That is a massive undertaking for a relatively 00:09:37.500 --> 00:09:40.179 small independent publisher in Paris. But they 00:09:40.179 --> 00:09:42.870 felt it was essential. You simply cannot have 00:09:42.870 --> 00:09:45.490 Pan -Africanism if the Pan -African world can't 00:09:45.490 --> 00:09:48.129 communicate with itself. So we have this magazine 00:09:48.129 --> 00:09:51.110 established in 1947. It quickly becomes the watering 00:09:51.110 --> 00:09:54.190 hole for the Negritude movement. But we should 00:09:54.190 --> 00:09:56.330 probably define Negritude a little bit more clearly 00:09:56.330 --> 00:09:58.309 for the listener because we've used the word 00:09:58.309 --> 00:10:00.470 a few times now. It wasn't just a simple slogan, 00:10:00.570 --> 00:10:03.159 was it? No, not at all. It wasn't just a bumper 00:10:03.159 --> 00:10:06.700 sticker. Negritude was a highly complex intellectual 00:10:06.700 --> 00:10:09.460 response to that French policy of assimilation 00:10:09.460 --> 00:10:11.980 we talked about earlier. The French essentially 00:10:11.980 --> 00:10:14.500 told their colonial subjects, your ancestors 00:10:14.500 --> 00:10:18.039 are the Gauls. Your culture is barbarism. You 00:10:18.039 --> 00:10:20.399 need to evolve and become French. Just erase 00:10:20.399 --> 00:10:23.409 yourself and become us. Exactly. Negritude was 00:10:23.409 --> 00:10:26.110 a flat -out rejection of that premise. It was 00:10:26.110 --> 00:10:28.330 the assertion that African culture, history, 00:10:28.529 --> 00:10:31.409 and identity were valid and vital on a global 00:10:31.409 --> 00:10:33.809 stage. It was essentially saying, we don't want 00:10:33.809 --> 00:10:35.570 to be second -class Frenchmen, we want to be 00:10:35.570 --> 00:10:38.490 first -class Africans. Correct. But as we saw 00:10:38.490 --> 00:10:41.070 with Césaire and Senghor, it had different flavors. 00:10:41.429 --> 00:10:44.769 For Césaire, negritude was a weapon. It was a 00:10:44.769 --> 00:10:47.049 tool to reclaim human dignity in the face of 00:10:47.049 --> 00:10:49.470 just crushing colonial oppression. For Senghor, 00:10:49.529 --> 00:10:51.409 it was more ontological. It was about emotion, 00:10:51.750 --> 00:10:54.029 rhythm, a deep connection to the earth that he 00:10:54.029 --> 00:10:56.370 felt the overly rational European culture had 00:10:56.370 --> 00:10:58.970 entirely lost. And Presence African was the laboratory 00:10:58.970 --> 00:11:01.149 where these differing definitions were tested 00:11:01.149 --> 00:11:03.490 out. It was the only place they could be tested. 00:11:03.769 --> 00:11:06.370 There was quite literally no other journal in 00:11:06.370 --> 00:11:09.169 the world at that time that would publish a dense 00:11:09.169 --> 00:11:12.389 essay on the grammar of the Wolof language right 00:11:12.389 --> 00:11:15.809 next to a surrealist poem about Martinique, right 00:11:15.809 --> 00:11:18.169 next to a blistering critique of American racial 00:11:18.169 --> 00:11:21.230 segregation. And that brings us to the next big 00:11:21.230 --> 00:11:24.590 question. Why does a literary magazine matter 00:11:24.590 --> 00:11:27.389 politically? It's easy to dismiss culture as 00:11:27.389 --> 00:11:30.309 separate from policy, but the historical texts 00:11:30.309 --> 00:11:32.889 show that the editors explicitly saw themselves 00:11:32.889 --> 00:11:35.529 as engaged in the cultural and political struggles 00:11:35.529 --> 00:11:38.149 of Tan Africanism. Because you can't have political 00:11:38.149 --> 00:11:40.309 liberation without cultural liberation first. 00:11:40.769 --> 00:11:43.029 If a people are taught that they have no history 00:11:43.029 --> 00:11:45.389 and no worth, they can't effectively organize 00:11:45.389 --> 00:11:48.370 a political resistance. The magazine provided 00:11:48.370 --> 00:11:50.570 the intellectual scaffolding for the decolonization 00:11:50.570 --> 00:11:52.529 movements that were about to sweep the globe. 00:11:52.669 --> 00:11:55.529 It validated their existence. So the magazine 00:11:55.529 --> 00:11:57.970 is a massive hit in these intellectual circles. 00:11:58.330 --> 00:12:01.889 But Diop is smart. He knows that a quarterly 00:12:01.889 --> 00:12:04.509 journal is somewhat ephemeral. It gets read, 00:12:04.669 --> 00:12:06.409 it gets passed around, but eventually it gets 00:12:06.409 --> 00:12:08.870 discarded. If you want to build a permanent culture, 00:12:09.070 --> 00:12:11.409 you need a physical footprint. You need a home 00:12:11.409 --> 00:12:15.029 base. Right. So in 1949, just two years after 00:12:15.029 --> 00:12:17.509 launching the magazine, they expand. They launch 00:12:17.509 --> 00:12:20.169 Editions Presence Africaine. The publishing house. 00:12:20.470 --> 00:12:23.889 Yes. And alongside that, they open a physical 00:12:23.889 --> 00:12:26.610 bookstore right in the Latin Quarter of Paris 00:12:26.610 --> 00:12:30.440 on Rue des Écoles. Paint that picture for us. 00:12:30.500 --> 00:12:32.720 What did this physical space mean to the community 00:12:32.720 --> 00:12:35.320 at the time? Imagine walking down a street lined 00:12:35.320 --> 00:12:38.059 with these very stiff, very traditional academic 00:12:38.059 --> 00:12:40.379 French bookstores. And then you come across this 00:12:40.379 --> 00:12:42.679 one shop. In the window, you don't see the usual 00:12:42.679 --> 00:12:45.340 texts. You see books by African authors, Caribbean 00:12:45.340 --> 00:12:47.419 authors, African -American authors. In a completely 00:12:47.419 --> 00:12:50.309 different world. And inside, it's cramped. There 00:12:50.309 --> 00:12:52.509 are piles of journals and books absolutely everywhere. 00:12:52.889 --> 00:12:55.730 But the air is just thick with smoke and intense 00:12:55.730 --> 00:12:57.909 conversation. So it wasn't just a place to buy 00:12:57.909 --> 00:12:59.870 a book. It was a hub. Oh, it was a sanctuary. 00:13:00.169 --> 00:13:02.389 If you were a young student arriving in Paris 00:13:02.389 --> 00:13:04.950 from Cameroon or Benin and you feel completely 00:13:04.950 --> 00:13:08.549 isolated in this cold, gray, colonial capital, 00:13:08.730 --> 00:13:11.080 you went straight to Rue des Ecole. You'd find 00:13:11.080 --> 00:13:13.480 Alion Diop sitting in the back office. You'd 00:13:13.480 --> 00:13:16.059 run into Aimé Césaire browsing the shelves. It 00:13:16.059 --> 00:13:18.240 functioned as a post office, a debating society, 00:13:18.519 --> 00:13:21.419 and a crisis center all rolled into one. I love 00:13:21.419 --> 00:13:24.379 that image. And it was from this exact hub that 00:13:24.379 --> 00:13:27.399 they launched the next major phase of their plan. 00:13:27.519 --> 00:13:32.440 The events. Specifically, the massive 1956 Congress. 00:13:32.799 --> 00:13:35.480 The first international congress of black writers 00:13:35.480 --> 00:13:37.870 and artists. Now, I've heard this event described 00:13:37.870 --> 00:13:40.389 by historians as the cultural equivalent to the 00:13:40.389 --> 00:13:43.009 Bandung Conference. That is a brilliant comparison. 00:13:43.210 --> 00:13:46.190 Just as the Bandung Conference in 1955 was the 00:13:46.190 --> 00:13:48.049 political assertion of the third world coming 00:13:48.049 --> 00:13:51.049 together, this Congress in 1956 was the cultural 00:13:51.049 --> 00:13:53.990 assertion of the black diaspora. And the location 00:13:53.990 --> 00:13:55.970 is crucial. It was held at the Sorbonne. The 00:13:55.970 --> 00:13:58.570 absolute belly of the beast. The inner sanctum 00:13:58.570 --> 00:14:02.080 of elite French academia. And look at the guest 00:14:02.080 --> 00:14:04.059 list they pulled together. You had the Americans, 00:14:04.240 --> 00:14:06.559 like Richard Wright. Langston Hughes couldn't 00:14:06.559 --> 00:14:08.919 make it, but he set a paper to be read. You had 00:14:08.919 --> 00:14:11.740 the Caribbean intellectuals, Césaire, Frantz 00:14:11.740 --> 00:14:14.879 Fanon, Jean Pricemars from Haiti. You had Jacques 00:14:14.879 --> 00:14:18.200 -Robin Marara from Madagascar, Czech Anta Diop, 00:14:18.200 --> 00:14:20.580 the brilliant historian from Senegal. Oh, and 00:14:20.580 --> 00:14:22.980 we have to mention the artistic touch. Pablo 00:14:22.980 --> 00:14:25.360 Picasso actually designed the poster for this 00:14:25.360 --> 00:14:28.509 event. Which, again... Signals the immense level 00:14:28.509 --> 00:14:31.009 of global visibility and solidarity this project 00:14:31.009 --> 00:14:33.529 had achieved. But I think it's important to pause 00:14:33.529 --> 00:14:36.789 on the actual atmosphere of this Congress because 00:14:36.789 --> 00:14:38.889 reading the transcripts, it wasn't just a happy 00:14:38.889 --> 00:14:41.389 celebration. It was tense. Very tense. Why was 00:14:41.389 --> 00:14:45.309 that? Well, think about the year, 1956. The Cold 00:14:45.309 --> 00:14:48.149 War is freezing over. The U .S. State Department 00:14:48.149 --> 00:14:50.610 is actively watching Richard Wright and the other 00:14:50.610 --> 00:14:52.860 Americans. Terrified they're going to say something 00:14:52.860 --> 00:14:55.139 pro -communist on stage. The French government 00:14:55.139 --> 00:14:57.740 is sweating watching the Algerians and the Cameroonians. 00:14:57.879 --> 00:15:00.360 So basically, everyone in that room is likely 00:15:00.360 --> 00:15:03.139 under some form of government surveillance. Absolutely. 00:15:03.340 --> 00:15:05.879 The stakes were incredibly high. And there were 00:15:05.879 --> 00:15:09.059 intense internal fights, too. You had the Marxists 00:15:09.059 --> 00:15:11.500 arguing that class struggle was the only thing 00:15:11.500 --> 00:15:13.379 that mattered for liberation. Then you had the 00:15:13.379 --> 00:15:16.100 Negritude traditionalists arguing that reclaiming 00:15:16.100 --> 00:15:18.809 culture was the primary battle. I read that Richard 00:15:18.809 --> 00:15:21.090 Wright gave a speech where he essentially told 00:15:21.090 --> 00:15:23.730 the African delegates, you need to modernize 00:15:23.730 --> 00:15:26.929 and abandon your superstitions, which I imagine 00:15:26.929 --> 00:15:29.490 did not go over smoothly. It went over like a 00:15:29.490 --> 00:15:32.509 lead balloon. It was hugely controversial. But 00:15:32.509 --> 00:15:35.190 that friction is what made the Congress so historically 00:15:35.190 --> 00:15:37.830 important. They weren't performing a unified 00:15:37.830 --> 00:15:40.950 front for a white audience. They were arguing 00:15:40.950 --> 00:15:44.070 intensely with each other about the very future 00:15:44.070 --> 00:15:46.409 of their own civilization. And this really brings 00:15:46.409 --> 00:15:48.950 us to the sharp edge of that future. Because 00:15:48.950 --> 00:15:51.330 while they were debating high culture and philosophy 00:15:51.330 --> 00:15:54.029 in the Sorbonne, the world outside those walls 00:15:54.029 --> 00:15:56.909 was getting very violent. We needed to talk about 00:15:56.909 --> 00:15:58.970 what our notes call the weaponization of words. 00:15:59.190 --> 00:16:02.110 We do. Because Presence Africaine was explicitly 00:16:02.110 --> 00:16:06.269 anti -colonialist. Their stated goal was to denounce 00:16:06.269 --> 00:16:09.049 colonial racism through foundational texts. They 00:16:09.049 --> 00:16:11.029 weren't just publishing lovely poetry about the 00:16:11.029 --> 00:16:13.110 African landscape. They were publishing anti 00:16:13.110 --> 00:16:15.470 -colonial dynamite. And the most famous example 00:16:15.470 --> 00:16:18.529 of that dynamite has to be M .A. Césaire's discours 00:16:18.529 --> 00:16:21.250 sur le colonialisme discourse on colonialism. 00:16:21.549 --> 00:16:23.789 This is a text that everyone listening should 00:16:23.789 --> 00:16:27.230 seek out. It is short, it is punchy, and it is 00:16:27.230 --> 00:16:29.750 absolutely devastating. It was originally published 00:16:29.750 --> 00:16:33.389 by a smaller press in 1950, but the revised definitive 00:16:33.389 --> 00:16:36.090 version was published by Additions Presence Africaine 00:16:36.090 --> 00:16:39.389 in 1955. And it remains their best -selling work 00:16:39.389 --> 00:16:41.889 to this day. Why was the specific book considered 00:16:41.889 --> 00:16:44.230 so dangerous? Because Césaire systematically 00:16:44.230 --> 00:16:46.429 took the moral high ground away from Europe. 00:16:46.629 --> 00:16:48.970 You have to remember the standard European justification 00:16:48.970 --> 00:16:51.190 for colonization was the civilizing mission. 00:16:51.409 --> 00:16:53.789 The narrative was, we are bringing you the light 00:16:53.789 --> 00:16:56.350 of civilization, we are bringing roads, hospitals, 00:16:56.590 --> 00:16:58.870 modernization, we are saving you from yourselves. 00:16:59.350 --> 00:17:01.590 And Césaire looked at that and said what? He 00:17:01.590 --> 00:17:03.730 said, I look around and I see no civilization. 00:17:04.269 --> 00:17:07.210 I see forced labor. I see brutal intimidation. 00:17:07.250 --> 00:17:09.950 I see theft. But then he takes it a step further. 00:17:10.089 --> 00:17:12.789 He argues that colonization actually works like 00:17:12.789 --> 00:17:15.470 a poison on the colonizer himself. The boomerang 00:17:15.470 --> 00:17:18.029 effect. Exactly. He argued that every time a 00:17:18.029 --> 00:17:19.970 French soldier tortures someone in the colonies, 00:17:20.089 --> 00:17:22.549 that soldier becomes a little less human. He 00:17:22.549 --> 00:17:24.829 brutalizes himself. And his most controversial 00:17:24.829 --> 00:17:27.190 point was his argument that Hitler wasn't an 00:17:27.190 --> 00:17:29.250 anomaly in European history. Right. This is the 00:17:29.250 --> 00:17:31.289 part that really shook people. He compared colonialism 00:17:31.289 --> 00:17:35.119 to Nazism in 1955. He did. He essentially said 00:17:35.119 --> 00:17:37.660 that Hitler was just what happened when Europe 00:17:37.660 --> 00:17:40.299 finally applied its colonial methods to other 00:17:40.299 --> 00:17:43.279 white Europeans. Césaire wrote that what the 00:17:43.279 --> 00:17:45.299 West couldn't forgive Hitler for was not the 00:17:45.299 --> 00:17:47.480 crime against humanity itself, but the crime 00:17:47.480 --> 00:17:49.910 against the white man. The fact that Hitler applied 00:17:49.910 --> 00:17:52.609 to Europe the exact same colonialist procedures 00:17:52.609 --> 00:17:54.430 that had previously been reserved exclusively 00:17:54.430 --> 00:17:57.410 for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, 00:17:57.569 --> 00:17:59.730 and the blacks of Africa. That is, I mean, that 00:17:59.730 --> 00:18:02.710 is scorching. It completely dismantled the entire 00:18:02.710 --> 00:18:05.049 moral scaffolding of the West. It was a paradigm 00:18:05.049 --> 00:18:07.390 shift. And then you have thinkers like Frantz 00:18:07.390 --> 00:18:09.730 Fanon. The historical records show that present 00:18:09.730 --> 00:18:11.890 African was practically his primary resource, 00:18:12.069 --> 00:18:14.589 wasn't it? Fanon is the perfect example of the 00:18:14.589 --> 00:18:17.539 intellectual ecosystem that Diop built. When 00:18:17.539 --> 00:18:19.980 Fanon was writing his groundbreaking book, Black 00:18:19.980 --> 00:18:23.930 Skin, White Masks, He heavily used excerpts from 00:18:23.930 --> 00:18:26.390 Presence Africaine to strengthen his arguments. 00:18:26.630 --> 00:18:28.470 He was citing people from the magazine directly. 00:18:28.789 --> 00:18:31.250 Constantly. He cited Aimé Césaire, of course, 00:18:31.369 --> 00:18:34.309 but also Michel Salomon, Abdoulaye Saji, and 00:18:34.309 --> 00:18:36.430 George Moulin, all from the pages of the journal. 00:18:36.589 --> 00:18:39.069 He used the sociological data, the psychological 00:18:39.069 --> 00:18:41.529 observations, and the history that the magazine 00:18:41.529 --> 00:18:43.849 was excavating to build his major theories on 00:18:43.849 --> 00:18:46.130 colonial trauma. So the magazine was essentially 00:18:46.130 --> 00:18:49.589 mining the raw material, and Fanon was the refinery. 00:18:49.829 --> 00:18:51.759 Yes. They provided the... the foundational texts, 00:18:51.880 --> 00:18:54.000 and Fanon built the theories that would go on 00:18:54.000 --> 00:18:56.259 to inspire revolutions worldwide. And when you 00:18:56.259 --> 00:18:58.700 have that much concentrated truth coming out 00:18:58.700 --> 00:19:01.400 of one single building on Rides Ecole, well, 00:19:01.460 --> 00:19:03.319 the empire eventually strikes back. It always 00:19:03.319 --> 00:19:06.609 does. Let's talk about 1962, the attack. To really 00:19:06.609 --> 00:19:08.470 understand the attack, you have to understand 00:19:08.470 --> 00:19:12.569 the atmosphere of Paris in 1961 and 1962. This 00:19:12.569 --> 00:19:15.210 was the absolute height of the Algerian War of 00:19:15.210 --> 00:19:17.210 Independence. And this wasn't just a distant 00:19:17.210 --> 00:19:19.369 war happening across the Mediterranean. It was 00:19:19.369 --> 00:19:21.289 bleeding directly into the streets of Paris. 00:19:21.549 --> 00:19:24.710 Very much so. There were strict curfews specifically 00:19:24.710 --> 00:19:27.869 for Algerians living in France. There were horrific 00:19:27.869 --> 00:19:31.890 police massacres. In October 1961, the Paris 00:19:31.890 --> 00:19:34.589 police actually threw Algerian protesters into 00:19:34.589 --> 00:19:37.569 the Seine River. The entire city was on a knife's 00:19:37.569 --> 00:19:40.269 edge. And the primary antagonist in this domestic 00:19:40.269 --> 00:19:43.349 violence was a group called the OAS. The Organization 00:19:43.349 --> 00:19:46.210 Armée Secrète. Who exactly were they? They were 00:19:46.210 --> 00:19:48.410 a far -right paramilitary terrorist organization. 00:19:49.109 --> 00:19:51.670 They were mostly made up of hardline French military 00:19:51.670 --> 00:19:54.329 personnel and colonial settlers who wanted to 00:19:54.329 --> 00:19:57.460 keep Algeria French at any and all costs. They 00:19:57.460 --> 00:19:59.579 felt deeply betrayed by the French government's 00:19:59.579 --> 00:20:01.920 slow moves toward decolonization. So their response 00:20:01.920 --> 00:20:04.259 was a campaign of terror. They started bombing 00:20:04.259 --> 00:20:06.900 targets in Paris they associated with anti -French 00:20:06.900 --> 00:20:09.180 or anti -colonial sentiment. And Presence Africaine 00:20:09.180 --> 00:20:11.599 was on their radar. It was very high on their 00:20:11.599 --> 00:20:14.359 list. The bookstore wasn't just a symbol. It 00:20:14.359 --> 00:20:16.660 was the intellectual engine of the decolonization 00:20:16.660 --> 00:20:20.660 movement. So in 1962... The OAS planted a plastic 00:20:20.660 --> 00:20:22.720 explosive charge right at the bookstore on Rue 00:20:22.720 --> 00:20:25.619 des Ecole. Plastic explosives? At a bookstore? 00:20:25.960 --> 00:20:29.279 Yes. The explosion blew out the windows. It destroyed 00:20:29.279 --> 00:20:31.680 a massive amount of the stock. It completely 00:20:31.680 --> 00:20:34.519 shattered the peace of the Latin Quarter. I really 00:20:34.519 --> 00:20:36.559 want to pause on the symbolism of that moment. 00:20:36.940 --> 00:20:39.480 Because you don't bomb a bookstore unless you 00:20:39.480 --> 00:20:42.000 are absolutely terrified of what is inside those 00:20:42.000 --> 00:20:44.200 books. That is the ultimate twisted validation 00:20:44.200 --> 00:20:47.660 of Diop's work. The OAS didn't care about, you 00:20:47.660 --> 00:20:50.420 know, flowery poems. They cared about ideas that 00:20:50.420 --> 00:20:53.660 were actively toppling empires. By resorting 00:20:53.660 --> 00:20:56.420 to plastic explosives, they were implicitly admitting 00:20:56.420 --> 00:20:58.920 that Alion Diop had won the intellectual war. 00:20:59.140 --> 00:21:01.740 He had created a weapon powerful enough to threaten 00:21:01.740 --> 00:21:04.019 a military order. Did the bombing stop them? 00:21:04.099 --> 00:21:06.259 Did they shut down? Not for a single day. The 00:21:06.259 --> 00:21:08.460 community rallied immediately. They swept up 00:21:08.460 --> 00:21:10.160 the glass, they boarded up the windows, and they 00:21:10.160 --> 00:21:12.680 just kept publishing. If anything, it underscored 00:21:12.680 --> 00:21:14.299 the power of their ideas and increased their 00:21:14.299 --> 00:21:16.880 resolve. That level of resilience is just incredible. 00:21:17.059 --> 00:21:20.539 So they survived the bombing. The 1960s roll 00:21:20.539 --> 00:21:23.339 on and the wave of independence sweeps across 00:21:23.339 --> 00:21:26.039 the African continent. Senegal becomes independent 00:21:26.039 --> 00:21:29.799 in 1960. And Leopold Siddhar Singh Hoare, the 00:21:29.799 --> 00:21:32.019 poet who was a founding voice in the magazine, 00:21:32.200 --> 00:21:34.779 actually becomes the first president of the country. 00:21:34.980 --> 00:21:37.400 Which is an amazing story in itself. Yeah. Just 00:21:37.400 --> 00:21:40.099 imagine if the editor of a literary poetry journal 00:21:40.099 --> 00:21:42.799 became the head of state. Yeah. That shows the 00:21:42.799 --> 00:21:45.740 immense level of intellectual prestige these 00:21:45.740 --> 00:21:47.859 men held in their newly independent nations. 00:21:48.839 --> 00:21:51.460 Presence African didn't just turn into a state 00:21:51.460 --> 00:21:53.240 mouthpiece for these new governments, right? 00:21:53.279 --> 00:21:54.960 Right. And that is very much to their credit. 00:21:55.000 --> 00:21:57.619 Once the decolonization struggles were largely 00:21:57.619 --> 00:22:00.519 won, they remained a space for rigorous critique. 00:22:00.759 --> 00:22:03.319 But I think their biggest, most enduring legacy 00:22:03.319 --> 00:22:05.680 from this era is what we call the first imprint. 00:22:05.940 --> 00:22:07.779 We've talked a lot about politics and philosophy, 00:22:07.940 --> 00:22:09.759 but we have to talk about the literature itself. 00:22:09.960 --> 00:22:11.940 Right. The novels. Right. Editions, Presence 00:22:11.940 --> 00:22:13.700 African, the publishing house side of things. 00:22:13.839 --> 00:22:16.119 They were the very first. to publish most of 00:22:16.119 --> 00:22:18.240 the 20th century's best -known Francophone African 00:22:18.240 --> 00:22:21.079 writers. It's an unbelievable roster. Run through 00:22:21.079 --> 00:22:23.660 the roll call for us. Well, you have Mongo Bedi. 00:22:24.220 --> 00:22:29.200 Kendugul. Rago Diop. Jibril Tamsir Nian. William 00:22:29.200 --> 00:22:33.039 Sassine. And Ousmane Semben. Yes. Semben is often 00:22:33.039 --> 00:22:35.559 remembered today as the father of African cinema, 00:22:35.700 --> 00:22:39.119 but he was a prolific writer first, and Presence 00:22:39.119 --> 00:22:41.619 Africaine published his early work. And on the 00:22:41.619 --> 00:22:44.759 nonfiction side, they published Cheek and Diop. 00:22:45.119 --> 00:22:48.039 Which was revolutionary. Jay Kandadia published 00:22:48.039 --> 00:22:50.539 his foundational work arguing for the African 00:22:50.539 --> 00:22:54.220 origins of Egyptian civilization with them. When 00:22:54.220 --> 00:22:56.339 he first proposed his theories, the mainstream 00:22:56.339 --> 00:22:59.440 French academy literally laughed at him. They 00:22:59.440 --> 00:23:02.000 refused his doctoral thesis. But Addition's presence 00:23:02.000 --> 00:23:04.700 after Kane published it anyway. They did. And 00:23:04.700 --> 00:23:07.400 today, his work is considered absolutely foundational 00:23:07.400 --> 00:23:10.519 to African historical studies. They gave a platform 00:23:10.519 --> 00:23:13.119 to genius when the establishment shut the door. 00:23:13.400 --> 00:23:15.059 And we also have to circle back to that language 00:23:15.059 --> 00:23:17.279 barrier we mentioned earlier, because they didn't 00:23:17.279 --> 00:23:19.220 just stick to French authors. The translation 00:23:19.220 --> 00:23:21.799 work they did was monumental. This is where they 00:23:21.799 --> 00:23:23.940 did the real heavy lifting for Pan -Africanism. 00:23:24.400 --> 00:23:27.480 They actively brought the titans of Anglophone 00:23:27.480 --> 00:23:29.759 African literature into the Francophone world. 00:23:29.940 --> 00:23:32.039 They were the first to publish French translations 00:23:32.039 --> 00:23:35.640 of Chinua Achebe. And Wolswa Inka. And Gujiwa 00:23:35.640 --> 00:23:38.559 Tiong 'o. Exactly. They also published the political 00:23:38.559 --> 00:23:41.279 works of major Pan -Africanist leaders from the 00:23:41.279 --> 00:23:43.940 English -speaking world, like... Kwame Nkrumah 00:23:43.940 --> 00:23:47.359 of Ghana and Julius Nera of Tanzania. That observation 00:23:47.359 --> 00:23:50.460 just constantly reinforces their core Pan -African 00:23:50.460 --> 00:23:52.799 mission. They were actively breaking down those 00:23:52.799 --> 00:23:55.279 colonial language barriers, English versus French, 00:23:55.440 --> 00:23:58.279 to create a unified, continent -wide dialogue. 00:23:58.720 --> 00:24:01.059 If you were a Francophone student in the 70s, 00:24:01.059 --> 00:24:02.759 the only reason you could engage with Achebe's 00:24:02.759 --> 00:24:04.980 ideas was because Presence Africaine translated 00:24:04.980 --> 00:24:07.710 him. They essentially stitched the intellectual 00:24:07.710 --> 00:24:10.109 life of the continent back together book by book. 00:24:10.250 --> 00:24:12.069 Which brings us to the inevitable transition 00:24:12.069 --> 00:24:15.250 phase of any great institution. Alain Diop, the 00:24:15.250 --> 00:24:17.490 visionary founder who started it all in 1947, 00:24:17.890 --> 00:24:20.869 passed away in 1980. He ran the entire enterprise 00:24:20.869 --> 00:24:23.930 for 33 years. And usually when a founder dies, 00:24:24.170 --> 00:24:27.309 especially a founder with such a singular, massive 00:24:27.309 --> 00:24:30.769 vision. the organization kind of crumbles or 00:24:30.769 --> 00:24:33.269 it splinters or it just gets bought out by a 00:24:33.269 --> 00:24:35.349 larger conglomerate. But that is not what happened 00:24:35.349 --> 00:24:37.990 here. There was incredible continuity. Right. 00:24:38.089 --> 00:24:41.630 His wife, Christiane de Diop, took over the leadership. 00:24:41.849 --> 00:24:43.329 And we really need to highlight her importance 00:24:43.329 --> 00:24:46.309 here because it is one thing to launch a fiery 00:24:46.309 --> 00:24:49.470 revolution in the heat of 1947 when everything 00:24:49.470 --> 00:24:52.140 is changing and everyone is energized. It is 00:24:52.140 --> 00:24:54.220 another thing entirely to keep an independent 00:24:54.220 --> 00:24:57.700 publishing house alive and relevant through the 00:24:57.700 --> 00:25:00.420 1980s and 90s. When the economy is fluctuating. 00:25:00.890 --> 00:25:03.170 And maybe the trendiness of African independence 00:25:03.170 --> 00:25:06.230 has faded in Parisian literary circles. Exactly. 00:25:06.390 --> 00:25:08.230 She was the one who maintained the mission for 00:25:08.230 --> 00:25:10.769 decades. She navigated the lean years and made 00:25:10.769 --> 00:25:12.930 sure the legacy didn't just feed into obscurity. 00:25:13.029 --> 00:25:15.230 And under her leadership, they reached a massive 00:25:15.230 --> 00:25:18.430 milestone in 1997, the 50th anniversary. Yes. 00:25:18.569 --> 00:25:21.369 And they celebrated it at UNESCO in Paris. The 00:25:21.369 --> 00:25:24.009 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural 00:25:24.009 --> 00:25:27.170 Organization. Talk about a shift in status. They 00:25:27.170 --> 00:25:30.319 went from being the radical outsiders. literally 00:25:30.319 --> 00:25:33.140 getting bombed by terrorists, to being officially 00:25:33.140 --> 00:25:36.480 celebrated by UNESCO. The attendees for that 00:25:36.480 --> 00:25:39.400 50th anniversary include major figures like Daniel 00:25:39.400 --> 00:25:42.099 Maximan and the Nobel laureate, Wolf Soyinka. 00:25:42.430 --> 00:25:45.069 It's a huge testament to Christiane Yanday Dieppe's 00:25:45.069 --> 00:25:47.829 stewardship. And the sheer volume of output is 00:25:47.829 --> 00:25:50.170 staggering. Our records show that as of late 00:25:50.170 --> 00:25:53.730 2007, they had released 173 issues of the magazine. 00:25:53.950 --> 00:25:56.650 And over 400 works published by the book division. 00:25:56.849 --> 00:26:00.309 With 322 of those works still actively in print 00:26:00.309 --> 00:26:02.369 at that time. Which is the real achievement for 00:26:02.369 --> 00:26:05.180 a publisher. Keeping the backlist alive, keeping 00:26:05.180 --> 00:26:07.279 those foundational texts available for the next 00:26:07.279 --> 00:26:09.119 generation of students. So let's bring it up 00:26:09.119 --> 00:26:11.359 to the modern era. The publishing house is still 00:26:11.359 --> 00:26:13.660 active today, right? Very much so. It's not just 00:26:13.660 --> 00:26:15.819 a museum piece. They are still publishing contemporary 00:26:15.819 --> 00:26:19.319 works. New novelists like Hamadou Dia, Antoinette 00:26:19.319 --> 00:26:22.440 Tijani -Alu, and Dudeneng Namaku, they are still 00:26:22.440 --> 00:26:24.559 publishing cutting -edge historians like Abukere 00:26:24.559 --> 00:26:27.000 Musalam. And who is steering the ship currently? 00:26:27.299 --> 00:26:30.019 The current publication's director is Romul Fonkua. 00:26:30.380 --> 00:26:32.579 He is a professor of comparative French literature 00:26:32.579 --> 00:26:35.559 at Université Marc Bloch in Strasbourg. So the 00:26:35.559 --> 00:26:38.420 academic rigor is still very much intact. Completely. 00:26:38.519 --> 00:26:41.380 The leadership is still deeply tied to the highest 00:26:41.380 --> 00:26:44.200 levels of scholarship. It's amazing to step back 00:26:44.200 --> 00:26:47.539 and look at the whole arc. From a 1947 startup 00:26:47.539 --> 00:26:50.539 dreamed up by a philosophy professor in a cold 00:26:50.539 --> 00:26:53.759 Parisian winter to a physical target of far -right 00:26:53.759 --> 00:26:57.140 terrorism to a massive literary institution that 00:26:57.140 --> 00:26:59.779 essentially defined the voice of an entire continent. 00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:03.039 It's an unparalleled trajectory in modern publishing. 00:27:03.279 --> 00:27:05.220 So as we wrap up this deep dive, I want to try 00:27:05.220 --> 00:27:07.160 to distill all of this. We've covered philosophy, 00:27:07.339 --> 00:27:10.380 terrorism, poetry, Pan -African politics. For 00:27:10.380 --> 00:27:13.119 you, what is the ultimate takeaway from the story 00:27:13.119 --> 00:27:16.019 of Presence Africaine? For me, boils down to 00:27:16.019 --> 00:27:19.359 the enduring relevance of creating your own platforms. 00:27:19.920 --> 00:27:23.000 Alion Diop and his team didn't wait around for 00:27:23.000 --> 00:27:24.900 the French literary establishment to give them 00:27:24.900 --> 00:27:27.460 a column or validate their worth. They recognized 00:27:27.460 --> 00:27:29.400 that the existing infrastructure was never going 00:27:29.400 --> 00:27:31.579 to serve them fairly. So they built their own 00:27:31.579 --> 00:27:34.640 platform for intellectual discourse. They proved 00:27:34.640 --> 00:27:36.099 that if you want to control the narrative of 00:27:36.099 --> 00:27:38.180 your own history, you have to own the printing 00:27:38.180 --> 00:27:41.019 press. That is so powerful. For me, the takeaway 00:27:41.019 --> 00:27:43.700 is a realization of how fragile history can be. 00:27:43.900 --> 00:27:46.039 I keep thinking about that bomb at the bookstore. 00:27:46.559 --> 00:27:49.160 If that plastic explosive had been a little bigger, 00:27:49.319 --> 00:27:51.880 or if a fire had spread, and wiped out their 00:27:51.880 --> 00:27:55.240 archives. Or honestly, if Diop had just decided 00:27:55.240 --> 00:27:57.839 in 1962 that it was too dangerous for his family 00:27:57.839 --> 00:28:00.880 and quit, we might not have these books. Many 00:28:00.880 --> 00:28:02.819 of the absolute classics of African literature 00:28:02.819 --> 00:28:05.140 might never have reached a global audience. They 00:28:05.140 --> 00:28:06.480 wouldn't have been translated. The intellectual 00:28:06.480 --> 00:28:08.960 history of the 20th century would just have this 00:28:08.960 --> 00:28:12.640 massive gaping hole in it. We would be living 00:28:12.640 --> 00:28:15.640 in a significantly poorer world, intellectually 00:28:15.640 --> 00:28:18.569 speaking. We really would. And I want to leave 00:28:18.569 --> 00:28:21.369 you, the listener, with a final provocative thought 00:28:21.369 --> 00:28:24.609 to mull over. We mentioned earlier that the English 00:28:24.609 --> 00:28:26.849 edition of the magazine ran for only six years, 00:28:26.930 --> 00:28:30.730 from 1955 to 1961. A very brief window in the 00:28:30.730 --> 00:28:33.250 grand scheme of things. Right. It makes you wonder 00:28:33.250 --> 00:28:36.009 what vital conversations were started in those 00:28:36.009 --> 00:28:38.329 English pages that were suddenly cut short or 00:28:38.329 --> 00:28:41.069 interrupted when that specific edition folded. 00:28:41.349 --> 00:28:43.769 What further connections between the African 00:28:43.769 --> 00:28:46.009 -American civil rights movement and the Francophone 00:28:46.009 --> 00:28:48.750 decolonization movement were lost because that 00:28:48.750 --> 00:28:51.089 bridge couldn't be sustained financially? It's 00:28:51.089 --> 00:28:54.039 a haunting historical what if. And taking that 00:28:54.039 --> 00:28:56.420 into today's context, we live in a digital age. 00:28:56.579 --> 00:28:59.559 We have infinite blogs, podcasts, social media 00:28:59.559 --> 00:29:02.160 platforms. The barrier to publishing is basically 00:29:02.160 --> 00:29:05.480 zero. But do we have a modern equivalent of presence 00:29:05.480 --> 00:29:08.960 africaine? Do we have a single centralized space 00:29:08.960 --> 00:29:11.279 that unites culture, politics, and literature 00:29:11.279 --> 00:29:13.839 across international borders with that much weight? 00:29:13.960 --> 00:29:17.200 Or has that powerful centralized voice been fractured 00:29:17.200 --> 00:29:19.339 by the algorithm? We definitely have more noise 00:29:19.339 --> 00:29:21.420 today. I'm just not sure we have a stronger signal. 00:29:21.759 --> 00:29:23.660 Something to really think about. Well, thank 00:29:23.660 --> 00:29:26.700 you for joining us on this journey to the Latin 00:29:26.700 --> 00:29:29.920 Quarter and into the pages of history. My pleasure. 00:29:30.059 --> 00:29:32.380 It was a great discussion. Keep exploring and 00:29:32.380 --> 00:29:34.559 we will see you on the next Deep Dive.