Présence Africaine was founded in Paris in 1947 by the Senegalese writer ALIOUNE DIOP, and became the central organ of the négritude movement and of Black intellectual life in the francophone world. From 42, rue Descartes it published the writers who defined the period, convened the Congresses of Black Writers and Artists at the Sorbonne and in Rome, and ran a publishing house whose list included Cheikh Anta Diop and Aimé Césaire.
Thirty of the issues here are from the ENGLISH EDITION, which carried the strapline “Africa’s own literary review” and described itself on its masthead as the “Cultural Journal of the Negro World”. Their Committee page is a roll-call of the movement — Jean Price-Mars, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Mercer Cook, RICHARD WRIGHT, René Maran, Aimé Césaire, George Lamming, Cheikh Anta Diop, Mongo Beti and Édouard Glissant among them. Nine later numbers, 57 and 61–68, are from the nouvelle série of 1966–1968, most of them bilingual, printed in French and English together.
The run reads as a chronicle of decolonisation written as it happened: NNAMDI AZIKIWE on Nigeria in world politics and on the future of Pan-Africanism, KWAME NKRUMAH on Ghana’s cultural history, JULIUS NYERERE on African unity, CHIEF ALBERT LUTULI on Africa and freedom, CHEIKH ANTA DIOP on African sociology, EDUARDO MONDLANE on Mozambique, a homage to FRANTZ FANON months after his death, a memorial to Patrice Lumumba, and a special issue on Angola in the second year of its war. Alongside the politics: AMOS TUTUOLA telling stories, ULLI BEIER on ancient African religions, Immanuel Wallerstein, Melville Herskovits, Basil Davidson and Janheinz Jahn.
THE COLLECTION’S GREATEST ITEMS ARE THE CONGRESS VOLUMES. Nos. 8-9-10 (June–November 1956) is the full account of the FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF NEGRO WRITERS AND ARTISTS at the Sorbonne, 19–22 September 1956 — Alioune Diop’s opening address, Senghor, Césaire on culture and colonisation, FRANTZ FANON on “Racisme et culture”, RICHARD WRIGHT, Cheikh Anta Diop, George Lamming, and two Nigerians: E. L. LASEBIKAN on the tonal structure of Yorùbá poetry and the painter BEN ENWONWU on the problems of the African artist. Nos. 24-25 (February–May 1959) is the SECOND CONGRESS, held in Rome under the theme “The Unity of Negro African Cultures”, closing with the address of Pope John XXIII. And No. 57 (1966) is Nouvelle somme de poésie du monde noir, a 574-page anthology with a liminaire by Césaire and a Nigerian section carrying Okigbo, J. P. Clark, Echeruo and Ṣóyínká.
The single most valuable item is No. 67 (1968), which carries the FIRST PUBLICATION of AIMÉ CÉSAIRE’s Une Tempête — his rewriting of The Tempest with Caliban as a black slave — printed in full before it appeared in book form, alongside a round table on African languages featuring J. H. Kwabena Nketia, and Khadambi Asalache on Wọlẹ Ṣóyínká.
These issues were acquired by OlongoAfrica.
