African Socialist Cultural Policy: Senegal under Senghor
2021; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 54; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/afar_a_00597
ISSN1937-2108
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Identity and Heritage
ResumoIn a speech inaugurating the colloquium on art nègre (Black art) at the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (First World Festival of Negro Arts) in Dakar in April 1966, Senegal's first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), made a case for art's centrality to social and economic development. “Black art is more than a technique,” Senghor insisted, more thanThese ideas laid a foundation for Senghor's cultural policy initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s, whose aims were summed up by a phrase, included in the same speech but invented earlier, which became a mantra for Senegal's culture workers: “Culture is the precondition and the ultimate goal of all development” (Malraux and Senghor 1966: 16; see also M'Bengue 1973: 22; Courteille 2006: 64).2What did Senghor mean by this? Why characterize art and culture as necessary for development? It is surely tempting to read this rhetoric as something of a ruse. In presenting a culture-centered vision of national progress, Senghor arguably sought to obscure his creeping authoritarianism and close ties to France, framing his ambitions under the mantle of African socialism, whose pretensions to democracy and equality could be interpreted as constituting little more than “an ideology of rule” (Ferguson 2006: 76). One immediately thinks of the opening scenes of Ousmane Sembène's film Xala (1975), where the country's postindependence business leaders proclaim themselves “sons of the people … leading the people on the people's behalf,” in the name of “the one true socialism, the African path of socialism, socialism on a human scale.”3 Accompanying this narration in Sembène's film, the country's leaders parade before the masses in traditional African garb and make a show of discarding Western, classical-style marble statues and other signs of foreign influence (Fig. 1). Yet the film soon exposes these men as political puppets controlled by French agents from behind the scenes. In Sembène's view, Senghorian state culture was nothing but a smokescreen for a corrupt regime whose allegiances lay mainly with the former colonizers.4Without ruling out this perspective or turning a blind eye to the long-standing French capitalist-imperialist power network now known as “Françafrique” (Verschave 1999), it is possible to explore how the ethos of African socialism yielded heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory cultural policies in Senegal that shaped the country as they manifested among individual and collectivized cultural producers. Given that Senegal was home to one of Africa's best-funded arts-and-culture systems of the 1960s and 1970s, Senghorian cultural policy has held wide interest for scholars, who have nevertheless tended to paint it in broad strokes (M'Bengue 1973; Snipe 1998; Sylla 1998; Toffol 2001; Courteille 2006; Katchka 2008; Benga 2010).5 Building on this previous scholarship, I seek here to elucidate the structures and objectives of postindependence state culture through additional documentation and testimony assembled from archives and interviews. In this article—a cross-disciplinary study rather than a strictly art-historical one relying on visual analysis—I argue that state cultural policy in postindependence Senegal shared recognizable features with parallel testing grounds for socialist cultural policies elsewhere on the African continent—namely, in reserving a major role for the state in promoting the arts and other forms of cultural production; in putting cultural programs to work to achieve economic development and social cohesion; and in seeking to rehabilitate, nationalize, and modernize indigenous heritage and traditions (see Askew 2002; Arnoldi 2006; White 2006; Ivaska 2011; Straker 2009; McGovern 2013; Mew 2016). At the same time, Senghor's policy platform proved unusual in its diversity of initiatives (especially in comparison with other African states that embraced socialism), ranging from development schemes anchored in regional communities, to modern art and globally oriented exhibitions, to the ethnographic archiving of traditional practices, to popular productions of theater and dance. If Senghor linked culture to development, he did so according to the most flexible conceptions of both terms, pursuing local, national, and international ambitions all at once.Leading up to and following the Colloque sur les Politiques de Développement et les Diverses Voies Africaines vers le Socialisme (Colloquium on Policies of Development and Diverse African Approaches to Socialism), convened in Dakar in December 1962 (Colloque1963; Zolberg 1964), exponents of the doctrine of African socialism—including Senghor and Prime Minister Mamadou Dia of Senegal, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania—sought to renovate socialist thinking to account for African realities (Friedland and Rosberg 1964). These African leaders produced discourses and policies around the general aim of “development,” which would involve democratizing, streamlining, and improving regional and national economies. Within this context, African “culture” and “tradition” were often invoked to play important—if also sometimes vague and mystifying—roles in state projects.Not by coincidence, Senghor (1971b) began to articulate his vision of African socialism at the same time he was cofounding a new political party, the Bloc Démocratique Sénégalais (BDS), with Mamadou Dia and Ibrahima Seydou Ndaw. The BDS mission was to repudiate pandering to French party leadership by the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (French Section of the Workers' International, SFIO), which had provided the socialist party framework for Senghor's political debut in 1945 under the tutelage of Amadou Lamine Guèye (1891–1968), one of the early leaders of the Senegalese branch of the SFIO from its founding in 1936.6 Fleeing both the increasing isolation and the top-down structure of the Senegalese Socialist Party (Cooper 2014: 167, 188), Senghor argued in 1948 that Africans could not directly import Marxism because Karl Marx had never properly understood colonial problems. Senghor (1971a; 1962) further asserted that the essence of socialism was already present in African communal societies and humanist values, and thus Africa had much to contribute to world socialism while reciprocally benefiting from Marx's humanism (see also Diagne 2011: 176–81; Wilder 2015: 209–14). Yet Senghor—an intellectual whose Catholic upbringing and Western education were at least as personally defining as his Senegalese political identity and Serer background—derived many of his ideas about African “tradition” from texts authored by Europeans, as he more or less openly acknowledged (e.g., 1962: 67–68). Many years spent in Paris also gave Senghor an international perspective on politics, and in the 1950s he came to advocate for independence not simply as a project aiming to create discrete ex-colonial nation-states but as an opportunity to construct a broader Francophone West African federation that would connect and confer global power and leverage to its autonomous constituents. For Senghor, federalism was a corollary of African socialism because anticolonial struggle, rather than mainly needing to combat class divisions (as in Marx's formula), would strive to end colonially imposed ethnic and racial divisions and restore territorial sovereignty. Senghor believed that federation would be “the system that establishes equality between countries, and consequently, between races” (1971c: 103; emphasis in original).7African socialist policy in Senegal at first had only an oblique connection to cultural policy, as its centerpiece was the development scheme known as Animation Rurale (Rural Mobilization), spearheaded by Prime Minister Dia and premised on establishing agricultural producers' cooperatives. This program originated with ideas articulated not long after Senghor, Dia, and Ndaw had launched the BDS (Senghor 1971d: 138–39; Dia 1957). It then came to be formalized following a 1958 assessment of Senegal's rural economy by the French Dominican Catholic priest and rural development specialist Louis-Joseph Lebret (Goulet 2006). Founder of the Centre Économie et Humanisme (Center of Economy and Humanism) in Lyon in 1941, Lebret argued that social factors should take priority within development initiatives. In Senegal he proposed a socialist restructuring of the cultivation of peanuts, the country's major export crop. The aim of Rural Mobilization was to optimize productivity and lift the peasantry out of poverty through a selective revival of traditional, communal agricultural practices (Diouf 1997). Following independence in 1960, Prime Minister Dia—taking cues from Lebret, François Perroux, and others—proposed to use Rural Mobilization to effectively nationalize the peanut trade. Specifically, Dia sought to draw control of the trade away from wealthy Muslim landowners and foreign trading houses (especially French and Lebanese) through a system of rural cooperatives, price controls, and state intervention to provide low-cost equipment to farmers (Behrman 1970: 106–55; Boone 1992: 91–92).8 The program was thus bound to aggravate, among others, the powerful Mourides who constituted the “bedrock” of Senghor's political power (Boone 1992: 102). It therefore did not take hold in the version Dia championed without compromise. After the prime minister was ousted in 1962, Senghor restructured the government, eliminating Dia's position and with it the biggest check on Senghor's own authority. The poet-president subsequently turned much of his attention toward arts and culture—and away from political and economic reforms—in furthering his efforts to realize African socialism.Many published accounts of Senghorian cultural policy rely on a statement from Senghor himself to quantify his government's support for the arts and culture: “The role of the state as a patron of the arts since independence who has bestowed more than 25% of its budget for education and culture should not be forgotten” (1989: 20).9 Such a role, if it existed, indeed should not be forgotten, but it should also be verified. National budget figures held at the Archives Nationales du Sénégal reveal that Senghor was indulging in loose estimation with his influential “25%” figure.10 While the combined budget for culture and education did tip past 25% in 1977–1978 and again in 1979–1980, that combined budget typically hovered, for most of Senghor's twenty-year presidency, between 18–22%. More important, to imagine culture and education as a combined budget is potentially misleading, since Senegal's ministry of culture, which was detached from education in 1966, received decidedly less funding.11 From 1966 to 1970, for example, culture comprised 0.26–0.78% of the annual budget, and even when the combined culture-education budget surpassed 25% of the overall budget, funding for culture stayed at less than 0.7%. Education thus received the lion's share of support for what was classified in the national budget rubric as “Section III—Action Culturelle et Sociale.”The seeds of Senghor's cultural policy were sown in the early stages of decolonization in the mid-1950s—at least as early as the Bandung Conference of April 1955—when African intellectuals began discussing culture as both an instrument of European colonization and a key set of elements to be reframed and contested. In the words of cultural policy analyst and literary historian Papa Gueye N'Diaye, “The delegates united in Bandoeng evoked the problem of saving African cultures as being the direct consequence, the product of the liberation of Africa and its freedom to assume its own destiny” (1981: 3–4). N'Diaye notes that discourse at the First International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists (organized in Paris in 1956) continued to identify culture as a vital tool for either imperialist conquest or postcolonial liberation. A well-known statement from Senghor published in conjunction with the Second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists (Rome, 1959) illustrates this dual perspective:Senghor defined African writers and artists not as mere accessories to, but influential engines of political struggle. And Senghor believed that selectively recuperating elements of “traditional civilization” would be foundational to the work of these practitioners. Senghor's articulation of art as an affirmation of African identity, which in turn drives sovereignty and solidarity, helps explain his investment in culture as an engine of development.12The specific permutations of Senghorian cultural policy nevertheless require careful documentation. Some policy ideas took hold prior to independence, when the Loi-Cadre (Framework Law, passed in 1956 and enacted in 1957) granted greater autonomy to France's individual African colonies and paved the way for an African-run government in Senegal, with a ministry devoted to education and culture.13 After the dissolution of Senegal's shortlived union with the former French Sudan (the Mali Federation, 1959–1960), the Senegalese government in 1960–1962 included ministries of education, youth, and sports—but not culture (Répertoire1985: 25, 27, 29–30, 32–33). Where “culture” existed institutionally at this time, it was largely subsumed under education.14 The cultural domain gained more prominence in 1962 when Senghor convened a Comité d'Études pour le Développement de la Culture Africaine (Study Committee for the Development of African Culture; in spring) and a Premier Congrès International des Africanistes (First International Congress of Africanists; in early summer).15 By November of that year, Senghor had named Amadou Racine Ndiaye as secretary of state specializing in cultural affairs, Senegal's first de facto minister of culture (Répertoire 1985: 38–39).16 A month later, a political crisis threw Senghor's presidency into momentary tumult as Prime Minister Dia was arrested, executive power was consolidated, and the government was reshuffled.17By late December 1962, culture was again combined with education in a ministry headed by Ibra Wane.18 Another major institutional shift followed in 1964, when the Direction des Arts et Lettres (Directorate of Arts and Letters) was renamed the Commissariat des Arts et Lettres (Commission for Arts and Letters) and moved from Wane's ministry directly into Senghor's office, alongside a new Commissariat à l'Information (Commission for Information) managing the media, “mass education,” and tourism (Répertoire 1985: 66).19 This shift reflected the transformation of Senghor's government after the 1962 crisis from a bicephalous executive into an autocratic one; it also coincided with preparations for the signature cultural event of Senghor's presidency, the First World Festival of Negro Arts, to be held in Dakar in the spring of 1966 (on the festival, see Huchard 2002; Ficquet and Gallimardet 2009; Murphy 2016). Senghor sought full control over the festival and its promotion by moving all relevant government agencies into his own office. During the twenty-four months leading up to the festival, Senghor himself oversaw the nation's cultural affairs.20After the festival closed in May 1966, the Commissariat des Arts et Lettres was discharged from the Présidence and moved to a new Ministère des Affaires Culturelles (Ministry of Cultural Affairs) led by Assane Seck, who became Senegal's first official minister of culture (Répertoire 1985: 71–72). This configuration lasted less than two years, however, as it was disrupted by the student and political protests of May 1968 (Stafford 2009; Blum 2012), which prompted yet another government reshuffle and ultimately led to significant reforms in cultural policy and institutions.21 By June 1968, Amadou Mahtar M'Bow would head a newly combined Ministère de la Culture, de la Jeunesse et des Sports (Ministry of Culture, Youth, and Sports), part of a broader initiative to socialize (or seek to pacify?) the insurgent youth (Répertoire 1985: 85–87).22 Only in 1970 did Senghor arrive at an enduring structure and roster for cultural affairs when he tapped Alioune Sène for minister of culture—a post Sène would hold until 1978, when Assane Seck replaced him (Répertoire 1985: 97, 203). Even as Senegal suffered economically during the 1970s, state culture thrived thanks to the implementation of a diversity of initiatives.Senegalese modern visual art grew out of the national art academy in Dakar, initially founded in 1959, under the Mali Federation, as the Maison des Arts du Mali (Arts Center of Mali), and renamed the École des Arts du Sénégal (School of Arts of Senegal) after the Federation dissolved in August 1960.23 Creative practitioners who studied and taught at the national academy, as well as those who worked at the Manufacture Nationale de la Tapisserie in Thiès (National Tapestry Manufacture, opened 1966, now Manufactures Sénégalaises des Arts Décoratifs [Senegalese Manufacture of Decorative Arts]) subscribed to a range of ideas about art pedagogy and practice (Cohen 2018: 15–16; Rottenburg 2019). Yet they nonetheless came to be known collectively as the “École de Dakar”—a designation encompassing the first generation of modern artists under state patronage.One recurring question related to Senghor's cultural policy in general, and to the École de Dakar in particular, concerns the degree to which state-sponsored art was conceived from the top down as an instrument of nation-building. Many have claimed that Senghor converted his internationalist and racially oriented Négritude philosophy into a nationalist ideology following independence and that this new, territorially nationalist strain of Négritude determined the themes and orientation of state-trained artists, forging a “national aesthetic” (Ebong 1991: 200) and “articulat[ing] a song of nationhood” (Grabski 2013: 288). The École de Dakar undoubtedly reflected the logic of African socialism with its dependence on state funding and accent on recuperating precolonial heritage. Did it also cultivate national consciousness by disseminating a nationalist ideology?Statements by Senegalese artists can help answer this question. For example, the painter Mohamadou “Zulu” Mbaye (b. 1954), who identifies as an artist of the École de Dakar, stated in an interview that criticisms of the school are often leveled byMbaye challenged this equation, contending that, “Senghor was interested in the École de Dakar because he recognized himself in this École de Dakar, because he was also an artist, he was someone who loved the visual arts, and so he also wanted Senegal to have painters.”25 That Senghor maintained relationships with some École de Dakar artists—and occasionally inspired some of their work—is not in question. The painter Ibou Diouf (1941–2017) spoke in a 1967 radio interview about illustrating Nocturnes (1961), a volume of Senghor's verse.26 Likewise, some tapestry titles and cartoons (or maquettes) by the artist Badara Camara (1947–1998) show the inspiration of Négritude poetry (see Camara 1976; Cohen 2020: 186–87). However, interviews with a number of other artists suggest that many members of the École de Dakar did not set out to produce nationalistic imagery.27Statements by Mbaye and other artists of his generation point to a need to look beyond official rhetoric in analyzing relationships between modernism and the state. These artists' articulations reveal an imperative to regard nation-building as a multifaceted project wherein visual art may be mobilized to serve a range of functions. As Elizabeth Harney (2004: 10–11, 52) and Joanna Grabski (2006: 38–39) argue, the art of the École de Dakar was not as didactic or ideologically driven as some have supposed. This was perhaps most evident when École de Dakar artists flirted with abstraction, as Mbaye did in some compositions (Fig. 2).28 Regardless of how one reads these artists' roles within the nation-state, their practices sometimes germinated and/or were destined to circulate beyond national borders. Not only did many École de Dakar artists embrace modernist idioms that placed them in dialogue with contemporaneous artists in Europe and elsewhere, but state-organized exhibitions were geared toward international audiences—from the Tendances et confrontations (Tendencies and Confrontations) exhibition at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966 (Nzewi 2013; Vincent 2017; Underwood 2019), to a smaller exhibition mounted in Stockholm several years later (Dix ans 1970), to a major show that opened at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1974 and toured the world through the early 1980s (Cohen 2018: 20–21; Murphy 2020).Senghor unequivocally endorsed modernism over socialist realism, arguing that autochthonous artistic traditions in Africa and elsewhere had long constituted “the expression of social reality” without depending on formally realistic representations (1971e: 186). According to Senghor's somewhat reductive—and, within a Cold War schema, certainly Western-informed—critique of socialist realism,To say that representation, in order to be “truthful,” must be “historically concrete,” is not to link form and content in a proper way, but [it is] rather to impose a single style on all subjects and on all artists. Worse, it is to demand that style, under the pretext of realism, must in every case be the un-stylized reproduction of life: a photograph (Senghor 1971e: 186).29In rejecting realist modes of art-making, Senghor additionally proposed that politics, which seeks to alter the material world by relying on efficient strategies, be distinguished from art, which promises “to enable us to transcend the appearances of beings and things in order to penetrate their profound reality and to identity with that [deeper reality]” (1971e: 187).30 For Senghor, socialist realism's “‘positive hero’—for whom there are no internal conflicts, only external obstacles—is no longer a flesh-and-blood man, but rather a kind of robot who interests no one because he is located in another world” (1971e: 188).31 By this critique, socialist realism is ultimately unreal in its lofty political idealism and determinism, which together end up rendering the work of art banal and thus creatively empty and socially ineffectual. Aside from generally holding up “traditional civilizations” (1971e: 187) as points of reference for African modernism, Senghor did not offer further prescriptions for artistic production, although he did not hesitate to voice his bias against socialist realism (Diagne 2011: 182–85; Wilder 2015: 216–17).Uses of cultural policy to promote national consciousness seem to have materialized mainly under government ministries devoted to youth and “popular education.” As early as January 1961, the government created a Union Nationale de la Jeunesse du Sénégal (National Youth Union of Senegal, UNJS) composed of sixteen youth-related organizations and dedicated to “work[ing] for the consolidation of the Nation and the development of the country.”32 One of the largest UNJS subgroups, the Mouvement National des Pionniers du Sénégal (National Pioneer Movement of Senegal, MNPS)—affiliated with the youth branch of Senghor's party, the Union Progressiste Sénégalaise (Senegalese Progressive Union, UPS), and established in parallel to communist youth movements in the Soviet bloc, France, and elsewhere—worked to inculcate Senegalese youth with nationalist preoccupations, envisioning a model pioneer who “loves his parents and devotes himself to his country … loves his studies and work … is courageous, loyal, courteous, and disciplined … takes care of national property … loves and protects nature“ (and so on).33 By 1962, the Direction de l'Education Populaire, de la Jeunesse et des Sports (Directorate of Popular Education, Youth and Sports), a division of the Ministère de la Jeunesse et des Sports (Ministry of Youth and Sports), was charged with managing all organizations and movements supporting youth and popular education.34 Its mandate also included the ”moral protection“ of young people in the realms of media and civic life and the management of public institutions that trained youth.Following the cataclysm of the 1968 student protests, the government renewed its commitment to solving youth problems. In June 1968, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Youth and Sports were combined, and one of Senghor's top specialists on culture and education, Amadou Mahtar M'Bow, was tapped to head the new division (Répertoire 1985: 85). In February 1970, youth and sports were accorded a privileged place within the administration with Lamine Diack's selection as secretary of state in charge of youth and sports (Répertoire 1985: 98). A 1970 report overseen by Diack, “Communication sur les problèmes de la jeunesse sénégalais” (Communication on the problems of the Senegalese youth), framed the 1968 protests as a global phenomenon tied to events in France and identified Senegalese youth unrest as a consequence of multiple factors: disillusionment in the wake of unfulfilled expectations accompanying decolonization; a simultaneous belief in “political slogans” and frustration with the political system; the influence of Western media and entertainment; crumbling structures of “traditional” education; national failures in education and civic participation; and growing urbanization and unemployment.35In response to this situation, the government redoubled its efforts to integrate the rebellious youth into the national community. Reforms were implemented in what government officials referred to as national “socio-educational structures.” For example, in December 1968 a specially convened interministerial council made provisions for a working group called Retour à la Terre (Back to the Land), directed by the Ministère du Développement Rural (Ministry of Rural Development) and intended to support young rural populations and to counter the trend of urban migration.36 Further, in early 1970, the government approved official sponsorship of the Semaine Nationale de la Jeunesse du Sénégal (National Week of Senegalese Youth), whose purpose was to “mobilize youth in artistic, cultural and sports activities; increase young people's participation in the life of the nation; inculcate youth with civic and patriotic spirit; [and] to make adults aware of problems facing youth.”37 By 1971, several further initiatives had been launched to redress the problems of youth unemployment and unrest, including through professional training, education, and socialization.38 One key reform in arts and culture at this time involved the transformation of the existing national art school, the École des Arts du Sénégal, into a more professionally oriented arts academy called the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts (ENBA), within a larger institutional complex, the Institut National des Arts (INA) (Cohen 2018: 19, 23n44). In addition to noting the raised admissions standards at the ENBA and INA, Senegalese arts and cultural policy veterans Alioune Badiane and Daouda Diarra each described in interviews how the ENBA's curriculum retained components of academic art education while also offering new training in graphic design, interior design, communications, advertising, and other specializations promising marketable skills (see also N'Diaye 1971).39Two additional sets of state cultural institutions help to illustrate the wide range of programs sponsored by Senghor's administration. The first is the Théâtre National (National Theater), founded around 1960 as a home for Senegal's national dance companies (Fig. 3), national drama company, and national instrumental ensembles, which all had foundations in the performance companies mounted in Paris in the late 1940s—including those directed by Senghor's nephew Maurice Sonar Senghor (Senghor 1959b) and by the Guinean polymath Fodéba Keita (Cohen 2012).40 The second is the Direction des Archives Culturelles (Directorate of Cultural Archives, DAC), an ethnographic archive of photographs (Fig. 4) and sound recordings established around 1968 by French ethnologist Herbert Pepper,41 along with its cousin organization, the more academic and research-driven Centre d'Études des Civilisations (Center for the Study of Civilizations, CEC), which began in 1971 as a private research initiative run by French and Senegalese intellectuals in various professional roles and was then formalized with government support. The CEC's journal Demb ak Tey: Les Cahiers du Mythe (Yesterday and Today: Journal of Myth; Fig. 5) was devoted to integrating indigenous languages and oral traditions into school curricula.42 These two institutional complexes may appear to be poles apart, with the national theater belonging either to entertainment and performing arts or to instructive popular culture (Samb and Senghor 1967) and the DAC and CEC being more specialized, academic, and logocentric. Still, these apparently disparate projects shared common aims of assembling, cataloging, analyzing, and reconstituting the country's diverse ethnic heritage under a national banner.43Senegalese cultural policy under Senghor offers a contrast to other postindependence African socialist initiatives that are well known for their investments in nationalistic and party propaganda, compulsory and indoctrinatory youth programs, repudiation of Western cultural imports, surveillance and censorship, engineering of public spectacle designed to elicit unwavering conformity, idealized representations, and didactic productions privileging conformity, patriotism, moral rectitude, and authenticity (see, especially, Askew 2002: 157–95; White 2006; Straker 2009; Ivaska 2011). Undoubtedly the Senegalese government under Senghor implemented some programs along these lines, such as Rural Mobilization, with its ambition to restructure the agricultural industry around the customs and needs of the peasantry; and the Pioneers and UPS youth movements, geared toward engineering model citizens. Other products of state patronage—notably the École de Dakar, National Theater, DAC, and CEC—provided frameworks for less didactic yet sometimes still popularly rooted forms of expression.In comparison with other African nations embracing socialism, Senegal was unexceptional in making claims to democratic and development ideals for state cultural programs that were, in reality, conceived and put in place by the state. Where Senghor differed from his counterparts was in conceding that national culture would inevitably be cosmopolitan and syncretic. As Senghor wrote in 1950,For Senghor, the form, the style, and the content of Senegalese national culture would all have to be self-consciously devised, appropriated, and assembled.Important objections can surely be voiced against the urban, male-dominated state culture of the postindependence years, which tended to hold up the ethnically marked female as its revered, indigenous, malleable object. Following criticisms of Senghor's politics as disingenuous and his Négritude philosophy as elitist and essentialist, Senghorian state cultural policy could also be read as inauthentically socialist, given its clear differences from socialist policies in other postindependence African states, which increasingly implemented Marxist-Leninist models privileging mass culture and highly accessible (often socialist-realist) forms of artistic expression serving as state and/or party propaganda (Ottaway and Ottaway 1981: 13–35). While these assessments are in some ways fair, an alternative reading—such as the one pursued here—registers tensions and complexities in Senghor's project without dismissing it, by noting how African socialist cultural policy manifested in multiple and diverse arenas, and gave rise to cultural production that was simultaneously socialist and modernist, varyingly “high” and popular. Despite his shortcomings, Senghor at least recognized that the state's approach to culture was not bound to be monolithic, and that it never could be natural.
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