AfricaIs aCountry

Aimé Césaire is a country

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Aimé Césaire is a country

By
Elliot Ross

Aimé Césaire was one of the greatest poets of the last century. His writing was so good that the person who did the illustrations published alongside his poems was Pablo Picasso. Césaire’s best-known works are Cahier d’un retour au pays natal  (1939) and Discours sur le colonialisme (1955), both of which are available in strong translations.

Césaire (born in Martinique in the French Caribbean in 1913) was interviewed by the radical Haitian poet René Depestre in Havana, Cuba, in 1967. Here is one of his remarks:

I have always recognized that what was happening to my brothers in Algeria and the United States had its repercussions in me. I understood that I could not be indifferent to what was happening in Haiti or Africa. Then, in a way, we slowly came to the idea of a sort of black civilization spread throughout the world. And I have come to the realization that there was a “Negro situation” that existed in different geographical areas, that Africa was also my country.

Further Reading

No one should be surprised we exist

The documentary film, ‘Rolé—Histórias dos Rolezinhos’ by Afro-Brazilian filmmaker Vladimir Seixas uses sharp commentary to expose social, political, and cultural inequalities within Brazilian society.

Reading List: Barbara Boswell

While editing a collection of the writings of South African feminist Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Boswell found inspiration in texts that reflected Ngcobo’s sense that writing is an exercise of freedom.

Kenya’s stalemate

A fundamental contest between two orders is taking place in Kenya. Will its progressives seize the moment to catalyze a vision for social, economic, and political change?

An annual awakening

In the 1980s, the South African arts collective Vakalisa Art Associates reclaimed time as a tool of social control through their subversive calendars.

More than a building

The film ‘No Place But Here’ uses VR or 360 media to immerse a viewer inside a housing occupation in Cape Town. In the process, it wants to challenge gentrification and the capitalist logic of home ownership.