the step beyond HIStory

Surrealism and Black African Art

The surrealist aspects of the African way of life, as well as the African implications of surrealism, have tended to be ignored for reasons already touched on.  Instead of the alienating dualistic intellectualization that usually defines the headlines of European social practice, black Africans enjoyed the presence of the practice of poetry throughout the totality of their traditional social life. In Africa, that is, the living experience of surreality has since prehistoric times enjoyed supremacy over its theoretical justification. In the Western world, however, surrealism is the result of a long philosophical, political, scientific and poetic struggle to recover what the traditional African has never lost.  A gainst all forms of indifference and misery, surrealism and black African art  remain irreducible examples in the development of the complete unfettering of the mind. Surrealism and black African art show that History’s last step—the step beyond History—coincides with a return to first principles, which is also a return to primordial glory, involving nothing less than the systematic and definitive liberation of the whole of human society and of Nature itself.

~Cheikh Tidiane Sylla

Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion, no. 4 (1989) (original emphasis)