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An excerpt from Pambazuka News.

In a recent speech at the 50th Anniversary of the 1st International Conference of Black Writers & Artists in Paris, Wole Soyinka warned against the neglect of those who remain silent against the crimes against humanity in Darfur: “As the armies of the Sudanese state mass for the final onslaught on its long determined design of race extermination, that future will stigmatise you one and all, will brand you collaborators and acccomplices if you abandon the people of Darfur to this awful fate, one that so blindingly scrawls its name across the supplicating sands and hills of Darfur— Genocide!”

Was it not here, on this same French soil, in this culture-proud nation that sometimes appears to conflate the very notion of civilization with whatever is uniquely French, that a culture warrior once took the bulldozer to a hamburger joint some years ago? His mission was to stem the tide of a neo-barbarism that, for the French, is synonymous with whatever is American. Lost on that-protector of French cultural purity was a thought that must have tickled the collective memory of former French colonials: the Macdonalisationor Disneyisation of French urban landscape was a kind of poetic justice in a reverse play of history. McDonald’s had arrived from the former colony of another European power to challenge the cultural hermeticism of a former colonizer.

The circumstances and action directe of the bulldozer response differed somewhat from the strategy embarked upon by the poet and statesman Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, Diop, Rene Depestre and other “cultural militants”—to adopt Senghor’s own expression—in their own time.

They were also protesting—right on the terrain of their colonizers, and as protagonists of a distant civilisation—the ascendancy of others over their own cultures and civilization. Theirs was, of course, a far-reaching protest, initiated within the enemy camp, against the lop-sided dialogue between France and her possessions, one that had turned the African mind into a mere cultural receptacle of France, indentured it to European identity and values. Thus, Negritude—by a seemingly separatist strategy, one that restated an African cultural matrix in contradistinction to the European.

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