How surprised the psychologists of the French army were when they discovered that Senegalese conscripts were more sensitive to the vicissitudes of the climate, and even to extreme heat, than the soldiers of “metropolitan” France; that they reacted to the least changes in the weather, and even to such barely discernible events as minute inflections of the voice. These warriors who had passed for brutes—these heroes—turned out to have the sensitivity of women. It is often said, and not without reason, that the Negro is a man of Nature. The African negro, whether peasant, fisherman, hunter or herdsman, lives outdoors, both off the earth and with it, on intimate terms with trees and animals and all the elements, and to the rhythm of seasons and days. He keeps his senses open, ready to receive any impulse, and even the very waves of nature, without a screen (which is not to say without relays or transformers) between subject and object. He does, of course, reflect; but what comes first is form and color, sound and rhythm, smell and touch.

Hail to the royal Kaicedrat! Hail to those who have invented nothing, To those who have explored nothing, To those who have subdued nothing, But abandoned themselves to the grip of the essence of every thing, Ignorant of the surface, but gripped by the movement of every thing, Not caring to subdue, but to play the game of the world.

The interest now being manifested in the history of African civilizations (an interest which one may be assured in advance can never be satisfied), raises the question whether the function which, in our societies devolves upon the diffusion of history, has not sometimes been fulfilled on the African continent by activities based on specific functions generally considered devoid of historical significance, as, for example, religion.

Prose is simply defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as “… the ordinary form of written or spoken language without metrical structure” and certainly for a majority of native English speakers this definition serves well enough, though in English, prose is more usually understood to be written rather than spoken. Most people have a more or less clear idea of what they mean by prose, if only because there is a large body of accepted verse with which to contrast it, a contrast not materially affected by the problems posed by modern verse techniques. There is also a pretty wide measure of agreement as to what constitutes literature, again because there is a corpus of material, accumulated over the centuries, which is regarded as such by common consent. This material provides a basis for judgments of value on more recent work, so that one can make some sort of contrast between “Gibbon's History and to-night's evening paper” but there is bound to be futile argument over certain cases, and one can be sure that there will be divergence from the current view with the passage of time. All in all, however, there is likely to be a large area over which one may obtain a fair measure of agreement as to what may be termed the prose literature of English.

If we are to understand the contradictory character of negro poetry in the Portuguese language, we have to be acquainted with the social conditions under which it was written. We are thus led to examine the origin of the creole societies of Cape Verde, Saint Thomas and Prince Island on the one hand, and of the negro societies of Angola and Mozambique on the other, whose evolution was entirely different. On Cape Verde, we can still find a system of agriculture based on small properties. On Saint Thomas and Prince Island, agriculture still predominates, but is based on large properties and shows many features of the capitalistic system. In Angola and Mozambique on the other hand, we encounter many different social and economic forms, ranging from tribal organization to urban concentration and agricultural exploitation of the capitalistic type.

“God the Creator, Amma,” says a Dogon fable, “asked a hyena to bring him the best thing in the world. The hyena brought him a woman. Amma then asked him to go in search of the worst thing in the world. The hyena returned once again with a woman. When Amma wanted to know the reasons for this choice, the hyena replied ‘All the good and all the evil in the world come from woman.’ “ Amma agreed.

It has been asserted that the African family is the “most significant feature of African society” and its “central institution.” (Phillips, 1953, p. ix) It has further been pointed out that African marriage is far more than a contract between two individuals but also represents the establishment of a link between two kinship groups. In this respect the payment of some type of wealth is an important part in the forging of a bond between the two kinship groups. Students of African sociology have paid great attention to the payment of cattle or money or other commodities as, perhaps, the most important aspect of the marriage contract. Not only has there been much discussion as to the best definition of this process but until relatively recently the exact significance of the “bride price” has not been too clearly understood. In part this was due to the fact that the wider implications of this aspect of the marriage contract were not understood. There was a tendency to view the payment of “bride price” as the key to the contractual relationship. We now know that this is not the case: in addition to the “bride price”—which is far more than simple barter-—other and equally important points of contact are established in ritual and economic and social affairs. In other words, marriage in African society is very much an integral part of the functioning of society as a whole. At one and the same time it establishes points of conflict and tension which are ritualized by a wide variety of sanctions, and leads to strengthening of the whole fabric of the society.

It is now almost two centuries since James Cook discovered the oikoumene, and fifty years since explorers planted their flags at the Poles. Clio has marched more cautiously. Historians, those sons of Herodotus, have only slowly rounded off his domain. The textbooks of my childhood remained confined to the Mediterranean and the “little promontory” of Europe, as at the times of Bossuet. I would not swear that they have progressed very much. If La Fontaine required two days to travel from Paris to Clamart, a single day suffices for us to reach the tip of Africa, and soon we will be able to circle the globe several times in eighty minutes. The earth is no more than a house and the antipodes are close neighbors. It is no longer enough, therefore, to know only oneself and one's own history.

The rise of numerous African states to independence and participation in international organizations is only a moment—undoubtedly a very powerful moment—in the extraordinary process of historical acceleration which our epoch has both the misfortune and privilege of witnessing. Future historians will very likely determine that the true revolution of the 20th century was not the Russian revolution or the nuclear revolution. Infinitely more important for the destiny of mankind and civilization is the fact that, for the first time since the beginnings of the human race, the great majority of men have the right and possibility to intervene actively in the consideration of world affairs. This sudden evolutionary leap can only be compared with what happened when our Germanic ancestors, fifteen centuries ago, seized from the Roman empire its hitherto uncontested supremacy. One must go back to the 5th century of our era to find an occurrence equally capable of exercising on the future of the human race and the evolution of civilization, consequences as wide and as deep as those which the events we are witnessing today will undoubtedly have. For these new-risen peoples, if only by force of numbers, are inevitably summoned to take not only their own destiny into their hands, but also—and perhaps sooner than is imagined—the destiny of the globe.