In the Daily Beast:
More here...The bicentenary of Livingstone’s birth, on March 19, arrives on the heels of a groundbreaking and eye-opening festival in Brazzaville that made manifest what many early European explorers failed to see: the culture of the people whose lands they “opened up” for commerce and Christianity. Even the relatively benign anti-slavery Livingstone shared the prejudices of his day. And, as Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe pointed out, Joseph Conrad, who piloted a steamship up the Congo in 1890 and hinted at the brutality of colonial rule in his most famous novel, merely portrayed the Congolese people as a mute or jabbering backdrop. But as the novelist Henri Lopes, now Congo-Brazzaville’s ambassador to Paris, told 90 writers and artists from around the world: “You’re not in the heart of darkness, but the beating heart of the continent.”
Art students paint a fresco at Brazzaville’s Palais de Congrès. (Gael Le Ny/Etonnnants Voyageurs)
The linchpin of the festival, called Africa Rising, was its co-director Alain Mabanckou, a youthful and iconoclastic novelist born in the coastal Congolese city of Pointe-Noire, who has both a French knighthood and a professorship at UCLA. “When Europeans came here and tried to spread their culture,” he told me, “they came with their exotic eye, seeing everything from a distance ... They underestimated African culture.”
Via Dynamic Africa & Bsama