Undergrounds, Archives, and Epistemes

Dominic Thomas has observed in his study of nation-building in Francophone Africa that “non-official authors,” or dissent writers, expand representations of the postcolonial experience by “producing a literature that remains engaged with the postcolonial reality while nevertheless foregrounding and allowing for newer kinds of aesthetic articulations.”Footnote ¹³ Thomas points out the importance of recognizing the generative potential that comes from giving equal attention to the multitude of discourses that have influenced a particular period. More recently, renewed interest in the Cold War and African literature have given rise to an exciting body of work that challenges received wisdom about the fields of postcolonial and African literatures. Fostering innovative forms of “Global South comparatism,”Footnote ¹⁴ the lenses they have adopted provide correctives to established literary histories and genealogies of influence derived from mainly official literatures.Footnote ¹⁵ In particular, I am interested in building on methods that provide alternative archives of literary and historical texts. In Oxford Street, Accra, Ato Quayson considers the street as “lively expressive archives of urban realities.” Although not limited to the context of the decolonization, his call to read the streets as a series of archives is useful as it presents the street-as-archive not as a “static” institution but instead as offering a “transcript of dynamic discourse ecologies.”Footnote ¹⁶ A similar formulation surfaces again in Emily Callaci’s notion of “street archives” in Dar es Salaam, Ashleigh Harris and Nicklas Hållén’s category of “African street literature,”Footnote ¹⁷ as well as Burleigh Hendrickson’s call for historians of former French colonies to literally “take our research to the streets,” where Hendrickson sees “oral stories” and “underground pamphlet literature” as forming an “alternative archive.”Footnote ¹⁸ More generally, this focus on the street as archives resonates with Bhakti Shringarpure’s reading of the postcolony as a “Cold War ruin.” Expanding on the examination of ruins in relation to the legacies of empire, in the works of Julia Hell, Andreas Schönle, and Ann Laura Stoler, Shringarpure posits that “ruins become sites where alternative histories could be observed.” She posits that viewing the postcolony as a Cold War ruin opens avenues for reevaluating postcolonial historiography. Highlighting the intricate interplay between the “ruinations” caused by colonialism and the Cold War, she describes these as “two long and complicated durations” that are “deeply entangled,” with the Cold War “prolong[ing] and intensify[ing]” the effects of colonialism.Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, the vestiges of African liberation movements, marked by Cold War interference and internationalist solidarities, continue to be apparent in many postcolonies. Shringarpure shows that these historical events have left tangible remnants, such as “an abandoned aircraft” in Asmara Expo Park “riddled with bullets” and cities ruined by conflicts exacerbated by Cold War collusion and depicted in novels. These ruins, encompassing objects, people, texts, and landscapes, compel us to view them as “postcolonial Cold War site[s]” and a “corpus,” which resonates with Peter Kalliney’s argument that “the literatures of decolonization and the literatures of the Cold War” are “tightly conjoined and not to be separated contextually or otherwise.”Footnote ²⁰

The seeking out of alternative texts and voices is therefore underpinned by a desire to not just rewrite history, but to rewrite literary, political, and cultural history otherwise, and apprehend the worldliness of Africa through the street as an epistemological site. Taken together, these scholars’ conjuring of the street as a dynamic palimpsest for understanding the diversity of African literary and discursive forms reveals how limited the criteria have been for perceiving what is literary and worthy of study. It illuminates the economy of exclusion at play in the literary marketplace, along with what has been the erasure of a great many voices in the process.Footnote ²¹ It also calls for a reassessment of Africa’s position in world history while offering different avenues for the ongoing search for new epistemologies and methodologies. The concept of the street-as-archive also extends beyond its physical existence and holds symbolic significance as a realm that represents a collective consciousness separate from official history, national archives, and established literature. Many of the underground texts I will examine in this article belong to a type of literature that has, at best, been described as traces of the influence of Marxist revolutionary thought on popular consciousness and, at worst, dismissed as lesser forms of literature because of their unapologetically militant nature and their mode of publication. Its marginalization has caused two key elements of their form, content, and circulation to be overlooked: first, the very processes of vernacularizing Cold War ideologies, Marxist thought, and decolonization theories and adapting them to local intellectual traditions; and second, the novelty of the epistemes that emerge from such cross-cultural translation of ideas and practices.Footnote ²² Eschewing the labels “postcolonial” and “non-aligned” to describe a variety of internationalist-inflected literatures, Christopher Lee and Anne Garland Mahler understand what they have called, building on Marcel Cornis-Pope, “third way literary imagination” as encompassing “political and cultural self-determination, the revalorisation of local cultural forms and a dynamic engagement with local and international commitments.” These “poetics of analogy,” they argue, are “comprised of an inward focus on building local cultural traditions while simultaneously drawing translational parallels to similar experiences across distant geographies.”Footnote ²³ Texts emerging from the cultural underground of decolonization exhibit many of these characteristics. They articulate the intersection of locality and internationalism thereby offering insight from the underground into how these elements come together to offer other forms of social, cultural, and political organizations.

As a subterranean metaphor, the underground gestures toward that which is produced in secret and circulates through hidden networks. It is a “mythical topography” through which the history-making abilities of countercultural movements are made visible.Footnote ²⁴ Because the underground is the realm of transgressive ideas and forbidden practices, it has historically also been the domain of avant-garde trendiness—a place where ideas are first workshopped before gaining popularity.Footnote ²⁵ Definitions of underground literature differ by literary tradition, region of the world, and political history. For instance, the works of many anti-apartheid South African writers could be described as underground because at the time, they “exist[ed] under an automatic ban,”Footnote ²⁶ while in the People’s Republic of China in the 1970s, the clandestine nature of underground literature (“dixia wenxue”) during the cultural revolution meant that “underground” referred primarily to “privately circulated literature … hidden or at least withheld from the authorities.”Footnote ²⁷ The diverse definitions of underground literature in different contexts prompt the question: How can they be grouped together under a single category? Rather than emphasizing the elusive nature of the term, my focus lies in exploring how different variants of underground literature throughout the world inform literary and social histories of the regions and time periods in which they emerge, offering glimpses into the self-understandings and self-representations of given communities at given times. In India, the state of emergency enforced by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi from 1975 to 1977 led to the circulation of underground literature in multiple languages, ranging in medium from leaflets to cartoons, letters, as well as local and foreign news bulletins with politically conflicting views.Footnote ²⁸ In Turkey, underground literature, or yeraltı edebiyatı, refers to a specific form of counterculture tied to the influence of the Beat generation on the Turkish youth that chiefly emerged with the cultural transformations following the coup d’état of 1980.Footnote ²⁹ In Latin America, the Chilean escena de avanzada of the 1970s and 1980s was an avant-garde art movement, born under the dictatorship of Pinochet, where artists and writers produced anti-dictatorial and anti-establishment art using experimental techniques.Footnote ³⁰ Many of these examples of underground expression illustrate the power of cultural production in shaping people’s daily lives by creating unconventional modes of perception and being, and at times motivating members of a community to speak out against oppressive forces and take action. This challenges the deterministic Marxist base and superstructure framework that continues to be implicit in so much literary engagement with the Global South, where cultural products, which are seen as part of the superstructure, are understood in limited terms as aftereffects, or mere reflections, of the base of economic activity.

In Senegal, as elsewhere, dreams of cultural revolution—including a state of preparedness for the possibility of an armed uprising—led to an increase in underground activities. One notable underground cultural movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s was the Senegalese Cultural Front, or “FC,” as its former members call it. Founded in 1976 by urban intellectuals, many of whom were members of the clandestine Maoist-oriented party And Jëf (“to act together”), the FC was born in a small bedroom at the back of a courtyard house in the quartier populaire of Medina.Footnote ³¹ It was established after the arrest and imprisonment of several members of the party, including its leader, Landing Savané, and the seizure of its underground journal, Xarebi. Footnote ³² As Ibrahima Wane rightly argues, the FC was a “synthesis” of the larger anti-imperial countercultural movement of the Senegalese left, or le movement patriotique (“the patriotic movement”) that emerged in the first decades following independence.Footnote ³³ The movement produced cassette tapes with protest songs; historical narratives of colonial massacres such as Thiaroye (before Ousmane Sembène’s famous 1988 film on the same event, Camp de Thiaroye); and brochures about anti-colonial figures. They translated revolutionary writings, including works by Mao Zedong into Wolof.Footnote ³⁴ Importantly, they also published a cultural manifesto calling for a national “committed literature” that was widely circulated in the African diaspora, as well as three anthologies of poetry—one in Wolof, two in French. The FC saw their movement as “patriotic,” but their operations as clandestine, and therefore they used a mix of underground techniques to print and circulate their texts.Footnote ³⁵ This contrastedwith the public nature of one of their other key literary activities, which was the declamation of poems at cultural events.

Scholars have used a variety of terms and concepts to refer to the underground and clandestine literatures of the cultural Cold War in the context of decolonization and postcolonial nationalism, including “dissent literature,” “non-official literature,” “protest literature,” and “littérature engagée.” I delineate the cultural underground of decolonization as a category that encompasses all of the above, to include a vast array of published and unpublished texts, songs, films, posters, novels, periodicals, pamphlets, cartoons, and memoirs, among other materials. It includes clandestine literature but is not limited to that.Footnote ³⁶ The scope of the cultural underground of decolonization is more properly avant-garde and unofficial literature and art and is not limited to works of protest or dissent or subversive and seditious material. I also see the cultural underground of decolonization as a mode of publishing and circulating cultural products through hidden networks, using self-publishing and other makeshift methods. These are combined with tactics, such as the use of pseudonyms, and involve the smuggling of forbidden materials. In addition, the print network, periodicals, and alternative presses through which underground texts circulated are cultural sites worth exploring, revealing the underground’s strategies for hailing an audience through pseudonymous and anonymous texts, for fashioning committed writers and readers, and for creating an underground imagination.Footnote ³⁷

Importantly, the cultural underground of decolonization is a “poetics of relation,” a cross-pollination of ways of seeing and doing at a time when Marxism was a global form of dissent, and when many articulated their struggle by refracting it through the prism of Marxism and blending it with vernacular forms.Footnote ³⁸ Highlighting this calls attention to cultural agents’ production of literatures in African languages and their translation of political ideas into local terms, seeking to dwell a little longer on attempts to “domesticate” Marxism and other social theories. Such activities may have led to forms of creolization, to use Duncan Yoon’s–Édouard Glissant-inspired term, which results from the blending of various components that can produce unexpected and original outcomes.Footnote ³⁹

My call to consider the cultural underground of decolonization as a category for literary and historical inquiry resonates with Gary Wilder’s argument that decolonization during the post-WWII period for thinkers such as Senghor and Aimé Césaire was not only about ending colonial rule, but also about envisioning alternative forms of political organization that went beyond national sovereignty.Footnote ⁴⁰ Similarly, I posit the cultural underground of decolonization as a space where alternative forms of social and political organizations have been imagined and sometimes enacted. The underground corpus I explore is often produced by marginalized voices; it offers temporal epistemes, revolutionary praxes, and decolonized imaginings that expand more conventional narratives about decolonization. In doing so, it responds to Wilder’s more recent call to take seriously forms of “translocal solidarity,” “heterodox thinking about historical temporality,” and “concrete utopian project(s) refracted through poetic knowledge.”Footnote ⁴¹

One of the temporal possibilities afforded by unearthing traces of the cultural underground is the rediscovery of invitations to turn a failed decolonization into a deferred revolution—a revolution that might take place in the twenty-first century. The FC’s note to the reader, added to the new 2016 edition of their poetry anthology in Wolof, the Téerebtànnu taalifu xare Senegaal, nearly four decades after its first publication in 1977, gestures toward just such an invitation to imagine—and bring to life—the deferred moment of revolution:

The note reads like an anachronistic time capsule, seeking to bridge, after the fact, countercultural movements of the past with those of contemporary youth by inviting twenty-first-century slammers and rappers to continue the work of twentieth-century Senegalese Maoist poets. Just four years before the publication of this note, hip-hop artists rallied the youth to oust Senegal’s third president, Abdoulaye Wade, following his unconstitutional bid for a third mandate.Footnote ⁴³ Such moves to reach from the past into the present, even the future, are not arbitrary. They are conscious efforts to reinvent revolutionary imaginaries by bridging old and new cultural movements in a redefinition of citizenship. As poets of the seventies pass the baton to hip-hop artists of the new millennium, the underground networks where these texts and ideas circulated are being replaced by calls for political organizing on social media and hip-hop concerts in the urban periphery. Messages like that of the FC’s note to the reader are attempts to combat the generational rupture in the transmission of cultural memory, to bridge the gap between the youth of the global sixties and the youth of the twenty-first century. Kerry Bystrom, Monica Popescu, and Katherine Zien have examined how “cultural events and the circulation and reception of objects” served as “temporal and affective sites” or “battlegrounds” of the cultural Cold War in the Global South, emphasizing the ways in which these sites “captur[ed] a sense of futurity.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The FC’s note to the reader is an invitation to consider the cultural underground of decolonization for the epistemes it carries, for the historical and social practices it makes visible, and for the aesthetic and generic features that analyses of its texts and sounds would reveal. As an archive of citizen-making, the cultural underground of decolonization is a repository of forms of civic activism. It inscribes epistemes of temporal realization or frameworks for achieving these dreams and aspirations often emerging from understandings of time that differ from the ones in which traditional histories of decolonization are inscribed.

In the remainder of this article, I explore poems and songs from Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Cameroon, and Senegal to show how they provide avenues for a renewed engagement with the cultural underground of decolonization. My analyses culminate in a more in-depth look at the FC as an underground cultural movement that emerged in Senegal in the 1970s to offer reflections on the stakes of approaching the cultural underground of decolonization as a category for literary and historical inquiry.

Lyrical Time(s): Congolese Poetry and Cameroonian Songs

The poems and songs of the cultural underground expand our repertoire of what we have come to call African literature. They democratize genres usually considered high culture (this applies especially to poetry), disrupting our aesthetic value systems and inviting us to make the work of anonymous or amateur authors our subjects of study. What did such poems and lyrics and their authors try to tell the world? What kinds of imaginaries did these texts, sounds, and aesthetic sensibilities help to create as they were sutured together? I look first to Matala Mukadi’s 1969 collection of poems, Réveil dans un nid de flammes (Awakening in a Nest of Flames). The poems first appeared in L’Eclair, the periodical of an underground Congolese Maoist student organization, before being published in Paris by Seghers and then banned in Zaire under Mobutu’s rule.Footnote ⁴⁵ The collection offers insights into a particular understanding of time, space, and solidarity movements in the cultural underground.

The collection’s peritext is notable for how it builds internationalist and Pan-African bridges with other writers, social movements, and freedom fighters. The dedication page of the collection expresses Matala Mukadi’s sympathies with tricontinentalism and Pan-Africanism, and he goes on to dedicate one of his poems, “Echo du maquisard” (“Echo of the maquisard”) to anti-colonial Cameroonian-Senegalese poet David Mandessi Diop, who was a member of the PAI and died in a plane accident in 1960. Matala Mukadi’s rendering of the struggle of life in the underground in “Echo du maquisard” can be read as a response to Diop’s “Souffre, pauvre Nègre” (“Suffer, Poor Negro”). The latter had been published in the journal Présence Africaine in 1948, and later in Diop’s poetry collection Coups de pilon (1956) translated as Hammer Blows (1973). Appearing to encourage the speaker of Diop’s poetic lament, “Echo du maquisard” is as much a poetic work as it is a transtemporal conversation that uses the printed page as a site for building alliances.

Several verses of Matala Mukadi’s poem resonate eerily with Diop’s poem. David Diop’s “Souffre, pauvre Nègre” renders the suffering of the colonized vividly in short verses linked together by anadiplosis:

Here, Diop’s portrayal of the colonized individual’s impoverished circumstances as a vicious circle appears to be almost inevitable and insurmountable. In response, Matala Mukadi imagines a way to break the cycle of oppression of the colonized as portrayed and aestheticized in Diop’s poem. “Echo du maquisard” is about the suffering of the freedom fighter hidden in the maquis; an echo response from the underground, it is more hopeful than Diop’s “Souffre, pauvre Nègre.”

In “Echo du maquisard,” suffering is not caused by the subjection of the colonized, but is rather the result of the freedom fighter’s resilience, which is described as a necessary evil for bringing about revolution. In response to the resigned lament of Diop’s speaker, Matala Mukadi writes: “Voici venu le déclin de la saison des soumissions anciennes” (“Here comes the fall of the season of old submissiveness”). The Congolese poet seems to be saying to Diop’s “poor negro”: your time for languishing and self-pity is over. Parallels between the two poems push the conversation further. Both Matala Mukadi’s freedom fighter and Diop’s colonized suffer from hunger: for the freedom fighter, “La famine vrillait mon ventre” (“Famine was twisting my belly”), while the speaker of Diop’s poem says of the “poor negro,” “Tes enfants ont faim” (“Your children are hungry”). Unlike the colonized Black man in Diop’s poem, however, whose wife sleeps in his master’s bed, the freedom fighter still has his female partner by his side: “Et toi ma bien aimée sur la natte de nos nuits / T’étires et m’attends” (“And you, my beloved, stretching and waiting for me on the mat of our nights”). Presenting the freedom fighter’s “beloved” as a passive character, waiting on a mat for her lover, Matala Mukadi’s response to Diop enacts a masculinist Pan-African solidarity.Footnote ⁴⁷ Women appear in both poems as objects of desire to be possessed, either by the colonized Black man, the freedom fighter (who appears in the poem as male by default), or the colonizer.

Interestingly, the freedom fighter speaks in the first person, while the speaker of Diop’s poem is not the “poor negro” himself. The speaker of Matala’s poem, as the fighter hidden in the maquis, is “combattant dans la montagne” (“fighting in the mountain”); he is “quête la dignité de mon vin éternel” (“questing for the dignity of my eternal vine”).Footnote ⁴⁸ In its poetic interruption of the vicious circle of oppression, Matala Mukadi’s poem shows, through content and form, the shift from early postwar anti-colonialism to the 1960s anti-imperial revolutionary struggle. The act of redefining the “poor negro” as a maquisard, a symbol of resistance, lies at the heart of the poet’s call to action. By reimagining this figure as a fearless fighter for freedom, Matala Mukadi has created a compelling vision of revolution and renewal. Indeed, “Echo du maquisard,” written in memory of David Diop, is a poem in homage or response to an earlier poem. However, rather than emphasizing the linear progression whereby the consciousness of the oppressed awakens thereby leading to a revolution from the maquis, I submit that the Congolese poet’s forging a new identity for the “poor negro” is a “phenomenology of revolutionary praxis constitutive of the future.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Matala Mukadi’s poem performs revolutionary resistance by responding to Diop’s poem and turns the work of art into a rallying cry for those yearning for decolonization. Rather than the mere epiphenomenon of decolonization, poems of the cultural underground can be read as performing revolution and therefore as inciting acts of revolution.Footnote ⁵⁰ Often turned into songs, they can inspire others to join in the fight and galvanize freedom fighters as was the case with Chimurenga songs or songs of the Zimbabwean liberation movement. These songs and poems are therefore rhetorical acts that may influence perceptions and foster solidarity. For instance, Cameroonian patriotic songs of the 1950s (or tjembi di lon, in the Basaa language) were chanted by peasants in the maquis of Boumnyebel and represented a “popular reappropriation and reformation” of the nationalist movement’s discourse.Footnote ⁵¹ As Mbembe has demonstrated, they challenge the seemingly “monolithic and uniform appearance of nationalist discursive formation” in French, which “enriches itself” when reformulated in African languages.Footnote ⁵² Further, these songs from the maquis offer their own temporal structures for the Cameroonian independence movement. They “formulate political time, periodize and articulate the calendar and seasons, organize memory” but also “recount everyday life occurrences, periodize and structure their cosmic, religious, and epic dimensions.”Footnote ⁵³ These songs resonate with Stephanie Newell and Onokoome Okome’s characterization of popular culture in Africa as “the episteme of the everyday,” while offering, in addition to insights on the everyday, other ways of apprehending the temporalities of decolonization.Footnote ⁵⁴ Indeed, the tjembi di lon encode various temporalities; one song collected by Mbembe describes the colonial enterprise as a form of debt and the time of independence as the moment to collect said debt. “White men took our country from us … Our laws have been abolished until today / Son of Kamerun, creditor of your people / claim back what is owed to you.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Colonial history is narrated in the song as a disturbance of a past order of things, and the call to action as a time of reckoning whereby the collectors, or “sons of Kamerun,” must collect the debt incurred vis à vis the “ancestors” from whom the country was taken.The song portrays the period of the Cameroonian nationalist movement as a temporal window that will soon close, creating a sense of urgency for the “sons of Kamerun” to reclaim what was taken during colonization. The call to action “there is still time, but the time is now” highlights the fleeting nature of this moment and the need to act quickly. The song also gestures toward the ephemerality of this temporal window: “soon, it will be late, and the deadline will be missed,” presenting the period in question as an opportunity that must be taken swiftly.Footnote ⁵⁶ The song tells a story that builds up to a time that was long awaited and has finally arrived but will soon disappear.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, just as in Matala Mukadi’s poem, the idea that time is up for colonialism is poetically encoded in many of these texts; these poems and songs also show how the temporality of freedom-seeking is intertwined with the futurity of the desired victory and a retelling of the colonial past that calls forth the imagined decolonized future they have been awaiting.

Monica Popescu examines the temporalities of “decolonization as revolution” through the concept of “affective temporal structures,” which she defines as “ways of perceiving the present moment … between the present, on the one hand, and the past and the future, on the other.” As Matala Mukadi’s poem demonstrates, through its dedication to David Diop and its reformulation of another horizon of possibilities for the “poor negro” these temporal structures “refer to the desires, aspirations, or disillusionment that we invest in projections of the future.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Furthermore, the poet’s involvement in the Congolese student movement in Belgium reminds us that the overlapping contexts of decolonization in Africa with that of the global student movement expand the category of cultural underground of decolonization to countries that were not colonized, such as Ethiopia, for instance.Footnote ⁵⁹

These different yet interconnected forms of struggle were able to coexist through articulations of solidarity visible in Matala Mukadi’s collection of poems and reference to Diop. Exploring such an intertextual Pan-Africanism and internationalism requires reading across official and underground texts to make salient the intertext of decolonization and its cultural underground’s imaginings of a new global order.Footnote ⁶⁰ It reminds us that beyond—indeed, below—African “street archives,” and sometimes beyond the city, is yet another archive that expands our framework of analysis of African history and literatures and offers models for transoceanic and cross-cultural engagement, as well as other ways of knowing and apprehending revolutionary praxis and aesthetics. Exploring the texts published by the FC allows us to better apprehend such aspects of the cultural underground.

The Senegalese Cultural Front

As an underground movement born in the 1970s, the FC articulated its members’ national struggle in internationalist terms. Although theirs was a cultural rather than armed movement, the FC saw themselves as heirs of the October Revolution, of revolutions in Vietnam and China, and of the independence wars in Mozambique and Angola.Footnote ⁶¹ They traced their genealogy back to the Pan-African, anti-colonial activities of Senegalese communist and WWI veteran Lamine Senghor, who led the anti-colonial struggle in Paris among African and Afro-descended intellectuals during the interwar period.Footnote ⁶² Two of the FC’s primary goals were to create a new Senegalese culture and a new kind of Senegalese citizen. To do so, they drew intellectually from Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, Amílcar Cabral, and Mao Zedong, as well as from Senegal’s literary tradition in both African and European languages. Their manifesto, clandestinely printed in 1977 and circulated via underground methods throughout Senegal and the African diaspora, called for the creation of a littérature engagée (“committed literature”) that would rejuvenate the spirits of their nation’s people, engage their national languages and culture, and carry on the legacies of Mao and Lamine Senghor, among others. The FC’s slogan, Fern̂ent Mënna Taalug Daay (“A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire”)—a Wolof translation of a quote from Mao Zedong’s speech “On Democracy”—was printed at the bottom of the manifesto’s front cover.

In 1977, 1978, and 1980, the FC published three anthologies of poetry that aimed to realize the littérature engagée called for in their manifesto. The 1978 and 1980 anthologies, Anthologie sénégalaise de la poésie de combat (Senegalese Anthology of Combat Poetry) and Les braises rouges qui chantent (The Singing Red Embers), were published in French to speak to a more international audience and devoted entire sections to liberation struggles beyond the boundaries of Senegal, such as in Vietnam, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, among other places. The 1977 anthology in Wolof Téerebtànnu taalifu xare Senegaal (Senegalese Anthology of Combat Poetry) was published in Wolof, primarily for a Wolof-speaking rural and urban audience and with an intent to “produce a readership” in national languages.Footnote ⁶³ Entries from its various anonymous and pseudonymous authors dwelled on the struggles of the peasant, factory worker, ordinary citizen, and female freedom fighter, drawing deeply from the repertoire of Wolof agrarian poetry to experiment with different forms that the poets thought would appeal to local audiences. Even as it is making the national coeval with the international, it is also firmly inscribed in the national temporal framework.

The FC, that defined their movement as “avant-garde,” saw themselves as promoting experimental combat poetry.Footnote ⁶⁴ Just as music was instrumental in struggles against imperialism, which in turn led to a repurposing of “traditional” genres and the emergence of new forms, the omnipresence of poetry in the cultural underground of decolonization is a commentary on the poetic genre itself. My emphasis on the anthologies of the FC is meant as a call to attend to the sheer volume of published and unpublished “combat poetry” and protest songs written by ordinary people in the midst of liberation struggles. The various social groups to which the poets belong, not to mention the mode of delivery of many of these poems often meant to be sung and memorized, indicate that they were meant to symbolize and enact a people-centered form of communication and expression that was written by a vast number of actors, both professional and amateur poets, from freedom fighters to political leaders, disaffected youth, future state officials, and so on. Such a poetry privileges clarity and evocative images, group authorship, or anonymity to appeal to the collective; it promoted an “uncomplicated use of words … designed for educating the masses, raising productivity, informing about the revolution, solidarizing with revolutionary movements in the rest of the world.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Writing about “traditional” African poetry, Lylian Kesteloot calls “la généralisation de l’activité poétique” (“the generalization of the poetic activity”) the fact that, in addition to professional poets, any member of society could create poetry and use it as a tool that would accompany daily activities, as a tool for “self-expression, communication with others.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The example poem I will look at from the Téerebtànnu offers a glimpse into the types of experimentation the anthologies of the FC supported. Categorized under woyu kañ (“songs of praise”) the poem “Ndam” belongs to the genre of the kañ, usually sung to pace peasants’ activities in the fields—to “galvanize the worker” or “accompany” them in their work.Footnote ⁶⁷ The FC’s anthology features a section of woyu kañ along with two other sections featuring woyu mettit (“songs of pain”) and woyu yeete (“songs of awakening”). These last two categories were the creation of the anthology’s compilers and denote the FC’s experimentation with literary genres by drawing on “traditional” forms to convey politically revolutionary ideas.

Woy is a Wolof word that can mean either “song” or “poem,”Footnote ⁶⁸ and traditionally, there are many different subgenres of woy. The subgenre that a woy falls under is often determined by the context in which it is performed (such as life-cycle events, harvest, and ceremonies) and by the type of person who sings it (a griot, farmer, etc.). Importantly, the woy is deeply entangled with gendered and labor activities within Senegalese cultures. As a genre of everyday life, it accompanies a vast range of activities in Wolof agrarian communities, and a woy’s subgenre often determines its performer’s gender and sometimes their caste (for example, the xaxar subgenre is a type of satirical wedding song sung by women).Footnote ⁶⁹

The poem “Ndam,” written by a woman, and later sung by a man is noteworthy for the way it disregards the gender restrictions imposed by its subgenres. It is not unique among the poems in the Téerebtànnu in doing this. The author, Bineta Mané Samb (1953–2016),who would later become a member of Senegal’s first official feminist movement, contributed the poem under the pseudonym Jëmb Mbóoj, the name of a nineteenth-century queen mother of the kingdom of Waalo, which was located on the Senegal River.Footnote ⁷⁰ Mbóoj was a figure of the women’s resistance against colonialism. Notably, she was among the unsung heroes whom the FC helped bring to recognition in the 1970s and 1980s as part of their effort to rehabilitate Senegal’s cast of national heroes.

Promoting self-reliance and hard work, the poem illustrates the FC’s project of self-fashioning, moral reform, and model citizenhood, and is suffused with Maoist and Fanonian theorizations of a peasant revolution. The poem mixes the subgenres of kañ (“praise poem”) with that of kañu (“self-laudatory poem”). This is implied by the poem’s title, which translates to “glory” or “success,” and is enacted by the two speakers in the poem. The first speaker explains what success truly entails, whereas the second exhorts readers and listeners to follow in the first speaker’s footsteps. Samb embodies the first speaker by voicing the thoughts of an exemplary peasant, illustrating what an ideal citizen should strive for, then uses her own voice as the second speaker to exhort others to model themselves after the farmer.Footnote ⁷¹ The second speaker, arguably in the author’s own voice, exhorts readers and listeners to have “faith in one’s own strength,” conveying belief in the generative power of self-reliance as a solid basis for revolutionary action, thus calling for a revolution of the self that is seen as the precursor to a revolution of the country.

The eighteen verses of “Ndam” can be interpreted in a three-part structure, where the first two parts—verses 1 to 5 and 6 to 11, respectively—are spoken entirely in the voice of the peasant. In verses 1 to 5, the peasant establishes the conditions for success, recommending self-fashioning through hard work, determination, and resourcefulness. Verses 6 to 11 describe the actual process of working the land, which comes across as a metaphor for the work of revolution.Footnote ⁷² The third part—verses 12 to 18—presents the work of the farmer as leading to happiness, and at verse 15 switches to the second speaker, who invites the reader or listener to follow the farmer’s example. Although the word denoting the subgenre kañ means “to encourage” and “to list one’s exploits,” the first verse of the poem especially illustrates how this particular kañ is more prescriptive than descriptive:Footnote ⁷³

For the sake of brevity and poetic rendering, this translation does not reflect the conditional mood of the original Wolof. A literal and wordier translation would be “If I were to glorify myself, that would be because exertion is my mother, resourcefulness is my father,” so on and so forth. Samb subverts the genre of the kañ by attaching the success of the peasant to conditionals, establishing a new set of criteria one must meet via hard work before being deserving of praise. The use of mesodiplosis, specifically the repetition of “di sama” in the middle of the verse, serves to highlight the musicality of the poem. This technique aims to instill moral values through short, easily memorizable verses. Such a repetitive syntactic structure also conveys the need to turn these personal qualities into habits—to perfect them via repetition—if one is to be a model citizen.

Like other poems in the FC’s anthologies, “Ndam” mixes realism and revolutionary romanticism to galvanize the masses and fashion the “new (wo)man,” thus meeting the movement’s dual awareness-raising objectives. But, more than that, “Ndam” can be read as an allegory for the way the Senegalese Cultural Front imagined the transformative process of their cultural revolution. As Wane discovered, “Ndam” went on to be turned into a song by male Mbalax singer Omar Pène in the 1980s. It eventually made its way from the FC’s underground publishing and distribution network to the realm of popular music. Although it may be difficult to assess the impact and scale of underground and clandestine writings on the audiences they targeted, “Ndam” is an example of how it was often ultimately through popular culture that the FC’s ideas were able to take hold in Senegalese society.

Samb’s agrarian metaphor for revolution in verse 17 of the poem, “Di fexe naataange law ni sëb” (“to find a way to make prosperity grow by spreading like cowpea roots”), presciently illustrates the gradual cultural transformation the poem itself took part in. Samb’s metaphor of the cowpea root system offers an episteme of cultural revolution. Also known as the black-eyed pea, the cowpea is not only a very important crop originally domesticated in sub-Saharan Africa, but it is also known for growing in harsh environmental conditions, such as regions subject to frequent drought. The metaphor of the cowpea is therefore a succinct way to connote the harsh conditions of clandestine politics, in which the revolution needed to thrive. In addition, the cowpea’s long taproot is supplemented by many smaller lateral roots that spread across the surface layer of the soil.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Wolof verb law, which means “to grow by spreading,” emphasizes the reach of these lateral roots and the depth of its taproot.

Nathan Surh-Systma, building on Dorothy Wang’s Thinking Its Presence, suggests “approaching poems as seeds of knowledge and poets as self-reflective participants in the institutions they help to make.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Wang and Suhr-Sytsma’s call for theories of poetry generated from the form, content, and authors of Asian American and African poetry resonates with Césaire’s concept of “poetic knowledge,” which Wilder understands as “alternative forms of reason” and therefore as epistemes in their own right.Footnote ⁷⁶ Taking my cue from these approaches, I posit Samb’s use of the cowpea root system as a way of apprehending and representing the influence of the FC’s cultural revolution in both time and space, especially in the way it evokes Mao’s image of the spark that can spread like a prairie fire. Indeed, Samb’s metaphor foreshadows this spread, providing a name for the process by which the underground becomes mainstream. Differing from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s rhizome, which emphasizes multiplicity and nonhierarchical models, Samb’s metaphor captures the way that countercultural texts and ideas influenced African youth by spreading far and wide like the roots of the cowpea.Footnote ⁷⁷

There is much to learn from examining the cultural underground of decolonization. Instead of focusing on the contradictions and multiple dissensions inherent in revolutionary movements, my emphasis, in this article, has been on other ways of knowing such as the metaphor of the cowpea and on the underground’s contribution to examinations of overlapping temporalities of decolonization. As these movements and the renewed interest on their histories suggest, the temporality of revolution was a moment that can be resparked at any time. But the temporality of decolonization might be more like the cowpea—clandestine politics, activities, and thoughts, sustained for a long time over harsh conditions.

The Times and Spaces of Anti-Imperial and “Anti-Racist Praxis”

Significant for this article is Robin J. Hayes’s theory of the “diaspora underground,” which she defines as a “geography of anti-racist praxis,” a “transnational space-time that connects Black social movement organizations, activists, and constituencies across national borders through a configuration of spaces, routes that connect these spaces, and a shared understanding of the past, present, and future.” Placing the diaspora underground at the intersection of “African independence and Black power” movements, Hayes advocates for such a diasporic form of underground organizing around antiracism and liberation as a model for future global forms of organizing.Footnote ⁷⁸

The cultural underground of decolonization in Africa encapsulates spaces and times of global antiracist and anti-imperial praxis. Building on Hayes, this article claims the cultural underground of decolonization as an un-institution. It is a category of cultural, social, and political inquiry that pushes against structures of domination and official institutions of state power, while offering insight into social change and the burgeoning consciousness of a generation. My emphasis on the underground as an anti-structure and an anti-systemic and anti-institutional entity, despite the very concrete forms of organizing that constitute it, is due to its nimble rather than rigid shape. Without romanticizing the underground as a category that is not bound by the same constraints as formal institutions, it is able, despite its own set of organizational and restrictive set of constraints, to experiment with new forms of expression and push boundaries in ways that would be difficult or impossible within established systems. This freedom to tinker allows for a rich diversity of voices, styles, strategies, and perspectives to emerge.

To return to the tableau with which I opened this article, the Senegalese-desired revolution, as we know, did not reach its apotheosis, but the African Independence Party left behind multiple cultural traces of its underground activities. These include translations of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto into African languages, as well as periodicals such as La Lutte (“The struggle”), which tackled Pan-African issues; Momsarew (Own your country), which focused on local issues, and was the official party organ; Boksareew (“Share your country”), which proffered satirical readings of Senegalese politics; and Defarsareew (“Fx your country”), which offered economic and political theories from a local perspective.Footnote ⁷⁹ I contend that these traces, like many others, warrant our attention for they encapsulate affects, epistemes, and praxes of an era whose remnants and reverberations are still perceptible today, repurposed in contemporary aesthetics and local and global politics.

As a historical category, the cultural underground of decolonization points to overlooked and silenced historical narratives of revolutionary decolonization that have shaped the landscape and trajectory of formerly colonized countries. Rather than a peaceful linear progress toward self-determination, it emphasizes the efforts and imaginings of ordinary individuals and marginalized communities in making the world a more equitable place. Further, the cultural underground as a literary archive encodes ways in which people understood and experienced time during the decolonization era, showing how colonialism created other temporalities that disrupted but did not erase but rather overlap with ones we have come to consider as conventional. It also contains various affects, ways of knowing, and experimental aesthetics. Finally, as the movement in space and time of underground texts such as the FC’s reedited anthology of poems in Wolof shows, the cultural underground has the potential to challenge narratives of postcolonial disillusionment in African literature, through their creative contemporary repurposing as traces of deferred or suspended revolutions.