Africa Dances

"The longer you spend travelling and writing about Africa, the more you appreciate that many of today’s problems have colonial roots and that the scarring goes deeper than you once thought. You start to notice the difference in the colonial legacies left by withdrawing powers. This book was first published in 1935 and is about a young anthropologist, Geoffrey Gorer, and an African-American ballet dancer called Feral Benga on a trip across West Africa to study the native dances. They start in Senegal and head east. It’s a kind of road trip, and the dances only play a small part in the book. It’s very much about the conditions Gorer finds as he crosses the various borders, the divide between blacks and the whites, the difference between the English and the French speaking colonies. He finds the subjects in French colonies to be fearful and cowed – farmers in the field stand to salute as they drive past – and he meets French officials who never leave their little areas and are hugely contemptuous and arrogant. He finds, to my surprise and, I think, to his as well, that the British administrators are better informed, more humane, and have a better grasp of the region. It’s very much his own perspective, but it’s a fresh and interesting one, even if the language of the time jars a bit. It’s always difficult reading references to ‘negroes’ without wincing."