Black Americans, Paris Has a Surprise for You

It was an evening like any other. My uncle Simplice gathered my brother, my two cousins and me around the fire that he often had us light after dark in the courtyard of his house. It was in August, during the school vacation period. I was about 8 or 9 years old, my cousin Vieux was the same age, while my little brother and my other cousin Papi were 5 or 6 years old. We had finished dinner and, as was often the case in many villages in Cameroon, the boys were invited to join the men to listen to tales full of wisdom and stories about the history of our ancestors, while the girls often stayed with the women. This separation, which was in no way reflective of the social hierarchy, dated back centuries. It was through these evenings that the wise men passed on their knowledge. Africa, for centuries, was a continent giving priority to oral culture, hence the importance of a griot, a word used for an older African tribal storyteller.

That evening, my uncle Simplice had shed his relaxed side that made him our favorite uncle. We all loved his dilettante side which made him one of the fiercest hunters in the village. He knew how to put you at ease when you had your baptism of fire in the initiation to hunting in the forest at night. That evening, we all looked at each other, as his serious and almost solemn appearance was so disconcerting. We weren’t used to seeing him like this. He opened the session as he often did with his singular cry.

 “Audience,” he urged.
 “Silence,” we responded in unison.

The custom was for this ritual to be performed three times. It concluded with “Do tell.” Only after that could the wise man start the story. That evening would not be like any other, my uncle warned us.

 “We are going to talk about the history of all Cameroonians, regardless of their tribe. It’s a common history that binds us,” said my uncle, who spoke in a Bantu dialect.

He had married my mother’s older sister and his village, Ekali II, was located about thirty kilometers from Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon.

My uncle, who was a teacher at the local high school, then spoke to us about colonization. The story was devoid of moral teachings, which often flooded the stories he had told us in the past. He used the word “white” to refer to the colonists. He explained to us that, for a long time, our ancestors had lived with the idea that white people were immortal. This was what the settlers had propagated, he said.

 “They said that their God had made them immortal. They had guns to kill us, while we had nothing. We ended up believing them. Guns were believed to be divine weapons to punish anyone who dared to rebel against them.”

 “And how did you discover that they were mortal?” I dared to ask.

 “At the end of the First World War,” he replied. “What happened was that some of our brave men were taken to Europe to fight in the war alongside white men. They saw them die. They then said to themselves that the white man could also die. The survivors came to tell what they had seen. Little by little, the way we looked at white people changed, but we had to wait until the end of the Second World War for the myth of the white immortal colonist man to finally evaporate.”

This awakening, which dates to the end of the 1940s, coincides with the exacerbated aspirations for independence in the colonies. One of the very first colonies to become an independent country was Ghana in 1957, followed by Guinea in 1958. The rest had to wait until the 1960s. Until today, we even speak of neocolonialism in certain countries, because the former colonial powers continue to pull the strings behind the scenes to put in power the president of their choice and to exploit the continent’s resources with the help of corrupt local elites.

For more than 30 years, I buried deep inside me the words from my uncle about the immortal colonist, as this image had horrible consequences for millions of Africans and for Africa in general, because it was a weapon to subjugate and enslave us. I preferred to look forward. But the past and its images caught up with me a few days ago during the exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The Harlem Renaissance is undoubtedly the artistic expression of the chronicling of the modern daily life of black Americans by black Americans in the midst of the Great Migration, which corresponds to the period from the 1920s to the 1940s. During this period, many black Americans were leaving the rural, racist and segregated South for the North. The exhibition, which is a dive into the New Negro artistic movement, introduces us to painters, artists and intellectuals both known and unknown. Among these artists is the painter Archibald Motley, who lived, for a short period of time in Paris and in the south of France. In the text which accompanies Motley’s paintings, created during his French period, it is recounted that many Harlem Renaissance artists often stayed in Europe and more particularly in France, which was one of the European artistic centers of the time. This European passage was seen as “an essential part of their artistic training.”

The text also raises one of the biggest dichotomies between black Americans and black Africans. This sticking point is at the center of the discord that has fueled our disagreement for decades: “The artists associated with the New Negro movement also described feeling a sense of greater personal freedom in countries that, despite oppressive rule in overseas colonies, did not have legalized racial segregation within their own borders,” one of the texts reads.

This sentence suggests that the United States was, at the time, more racist than Europe, and particularly France. This is still repeated today by black Americans who visit Europe or live in France, let alone Paris. For them, France, like certain European countries, is less racist. This is entirely contrary to the daily experience of black Africans and other minorities, particularly Arabs, living in Europe.

I understand well that this sentence aims to summarize the experience of black Americans in France and beyond in Europe, where they were better received and, above all, seen as full human beings, whereas in their own country, they were perceived as subhuman.

Racial segregation was legalized and took the form of the Jim Crow laws which separated blacks from whites in transportation, housing, employment, education, bathrooms, hospitals, churches, prisons, funeral homes, cemeteries, etc. This “inferiorization” of black Americans was legitimized and made official by a decision of the Supreme Court in 1896. The famous decision of May 18, 1896 on Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that the State of Louisiana was entitled to classify Mr. Plessy among the “people of color” because of his one-eighth black blood and that Judge Ferguson could consequently prohibit him from accessing the wagons reserved for whites!

There was certainly no law rendering blacks and other minorities inferior in Europe, but in fact (and this is the European particularity) the racial hierarchy was omnipresent and still is today in a very subtle way. In the 1920s to 1940s, to which the Harlem Renaissance exhibition is focused, almost no country in sub-Saharan Africa was independent. Very few blacks lived in Europe and in France. France did and continues to do everything to hide the horrors of colonization. Just a small example that took place during the Harlem Renaissance period was the Thiaroye massacre, which took place in Senegal in December 1944.

In November 1944, France was being gradually liberated from the Nazi occupiers. After four years of war, 1,300 West African riflemen (Tirailleurs as they are often referred to) were repatriated by the French army to Thiaroye, in a military camp in the suburbs of Dakar. They were demanding payment of their captivity balances, as well as various bonuses which had not been paid to them. At dawn on December 1, gunfire broke out in the camp. The French army said it was a mutiny that it had to repress bloodily. However, many gray areas remain.

For several years, the official French position was that the “Thiaroye affair” was a “heavily armed rebellion and a hostage-taking” requiring a “response” with disastrous results. But in November 2014, the French President François Hollande on a visit to this Dakar suburb, said that France must “repair an injustice and salute the memory of men who wore the French uniform and on whom the French had returned their rifle.”

The Thiaroye massacre, according to historians, was the consequence of France’s decision to “whitewash” its troops by replacing riflemen from Senegal, Dahomey (present-day Benin), French Sudan (present-day Mali), Côte d’Ivoire, Oubangui-Chari (present-day Central Africa), Niger, Chad, Gabon and Togo, by ethnic French soldiers.

The Harlem Renaissance exhibition also celebrates artists like Joséphine Baker who became a superstar in France. The success of one black individual in no way erases the treatment received by many others. At the same time as Paris celebrated Baker, the remains of Saatje Baartman, a South African slave whose body had been dissected and cast, her brain, her genitals and her posterior preserved in formalin, were exhibited at the Musee de l’Homme in the same city of light.

Born in South Africa in 1789, Baartman was exhibited as a human monster in Europe, notably in London and Paris. She was the first modern freak. She had been nicknamed the “Hottentot Venus” for her atypical physique. The name already constitutes a testimony to the way Europeans viewed black Africans. Venus refers to the Greek goddess of beauty, but was used here to mock her body which Europeans found disproportionate due to its exuberant forms which visitors fiddled with like an animal. “Hottentot” refers to her origin (she was from the Khoikhoi or Hottentot tribe).

The famous French zoologist Georges Cuvier, who was responsible for dissecting her body after her death in Paris in 1815, had concluded that she belonged to the same species as the white race, but that did not prevent him from classifying her at the very bottom of the human scale, barely above the chimpanzee and the orangutan. A place that the Hottentots shared with the Bushmen, the Pygmies, the “Caribbeans” and the Australian Aborigines.

What is striking in Motley’s paintings in Paris, is that the bars and cafés are full of white people, an indication of the place of black people in French society. That hasn’t changed much today. We are considered second-class French citizens. Racial discrimination is subtle but pervasive. Renting an apartment in a large French city is a challenge when you are black African or Arab; finding work that matches your level of education and abilities is also a challenge. No minority is running a large French company. Young minority graduates are forced to go into exile to find work that matches their level of education and skills.

How many blacks and Arabs live in Paris? The presence of black Africans and Arabs in tourist places and neighborhoods is an illusion. They don’t live there. For a long time, part of the 18th arrondissement of Paris, towards Barbès-Château Rouge, was the landmark and meeting point for black Africans. Black Africans could buy products imported from Africa there. While the market remains and black Africans are still present, almost none live there because of gentrification.

Before declaring Paris and France as less racist, black Americans would benefit from taking a quick trip to the suburbs around Paris, where minorities are segregated. Seine Saint Denis, which is one train stop from Paris, would give you an example of the true living conditions of blacks and Arabs in France. Basically, ten minutes by train, getting off at Stade de France, will allow you to really see France in its true light. When you are a black African or Arab, police checks are part of your daily life, as are racist clichés.

The latest controversy in France: French pop star Aya Nakamura, who is of Malian origin but grew up in the Paris suburbs, doesn’t really speak French to sing at the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, say the right and the far-right. A rumor spread that the singer, currently the best known outside French borders, would sing in the ceremony. She immediately received numerous racist insults, simply because she mixes dialects, from foreign languages, with French in her music.

 “You can be racist but not deaf,” Nakamura responded on Twitter on March 10. “What do I really owe you?”

73% of French people think that Nakamura does not represent “French” music, according to a poll, while 63% oppose the idea of her headlining at the opening ceremony. This says a lot about the state of racism in France.

For black Africans, north Africans (Algerians, Tunisians, Moroccans) and other minorities, racism is our reality in France and Paris. Black Americans are seen as American visitors. White France’s relationship with them is different from what it is with us. It goes back to General Charles de Gaulle, the French hero of the Second World War, who always wanted to distinguish France from the United States, by offering an alternative to the American model in the world stage. Seen from this angle, welcoming black Americans who are ostracized in their country is a form of affront to the American rival. Except that, in reality, France does not treat its blacks and minorities very differently.

I asked some of my black American friends why they had this impression that France was less racist.

 “The only thing that comes to mind is that many [African Americans] are just unfamiliar with French history,” my black American friend Bruce replied.