Senegal
Leopold Sedar Senghor http://www.africana.com/Articles/tt_454.htm
Speech and Image An African Tradition of the Surreal, 1965
From Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Ed. Mary Ann Caws
 

Speech seems to be the main instrument of thought, emotion and action. There is no thought or emotion without a verbal image, no free action without first a project in thought. This is even more true among peoples who disdained the written word. The word, the spoken word is the expression par excellance of the life force, of being in its fullness. God created the world through the Word. We shall see how later. For human being, speech is the living and life-giving breath of man at prayer. It possesses a magical virtue realizing the law of participation and, by its intrinsic power, creating the thing named. So that all the other arts are only specialized aspects of the great art of speech. In front of a picture made up of tracery of geometrical forms in white and red representing a chorus of birds or a tree at sunrise, the artist explained: "these are wings, these are songs.These are birds."

The African languages are characterized first of all by the richness of their vocabulary. There are sometimes 20 different words for an object according to its form, weight, volume and colour, and as many for an action according to whether it is single or repeated, weekly or intensely performed, just beginning or coming to an end. In Fulani, nouns are divided into 21 genders which are not related to sex. The classification is based sometimes on the meaning of the words or the phonetic qualities and sometimes on the grammatical category to which they belong. Most signifigant in this respect is the verb. On the same root in Wolof can be constructed more than 20 verbs expressing different shades of meaning, and at least as many derivative nouns while modern Indo-European languages emphasize the abstract notion of time, African languages emphasize the aspect, the concrete way in which the action of the verb takes place. These are essentially concrete languages. In them words are always pregnant with images.Under their value as signs, there sense value shows through.

The African image is not then an image by equation but an image by analogy, a surrealist image. Africans do not like straight lines and false mots justes. Two and two do not make four, but five, as Aime Cesaire has told us. The object does not mean what it represents but what it suggests, what it creates. The Elephant is Strength, the Spider is Prudence; Horns are the Moon and the moon is Fecundity. Every representation is an image, and the image. I repeat, is not an equation but a symbol, an ideogramme. Not only the figuration of the image but also its material...stone, earth, copper, gold, fibre--and also its line and colour. All language which does not tell a story bores them, or rather, Africans do not understand such language. The astonishment of the first Europeans when they found that the "natives" did not understand their pictures or even the logic of their arguments!

I have spoken of the surrealist image. But as you would suppose, African Surrealism is different from European surrealism. European Surrealism is empirical, African Surrealism is mystical and metaphysical. Andre Breton writes in Signe Ascendant: "The poetic analogy (meaning the European Surrealist analogy) differs functionally from the mystical analogy which it does not presuppose, beyond the visible world, an invisible world which is striving to manifest itself. It proceeds in a completely empirical way." In contrast, the African surrealiist analogy presupposes and manifests the hierarchized universe of life-forces.