FRENCH AFRICAN LITERATURE. The outbreak of the World War brought home to France her need for man power, and she then began to turn her attention towards a race which sent her its men by thousands. In the midst of the madness and destruction that overwhelmed Europe, she was forced to recognize that, in spite of solid, imposing and well-documented volumes, the theories with regard to the natural superiority of the Aryan races, set forth by Count Gobineau in his Essai sur l'inegalite des races humaines (1853-5), had received an unpleasant shock. Moreover, the ideas which Dr. Cureau, a former Governor of French Equatorial Africa, and a follower of Gobineau, expressed in his learned and interesting Societes primitives de l'A f rique equatoriale (1912) have, after much discussion, been strongly attacked, first by Jean Finot, in his widely known work Le prejuge des races (1905), and by Doctor Huot, in L'dnae noire.
The 'soul of the negro, as compared with that of the white man, is emotional, unstable, variable and incomprehensible. It cannot be fathomed either in the tales of the old navigators— they dealt too much in fable and fantasy—or in the journals of contemporary explorers. We cannot number among the initiated either Pierre Loti, impassioned admirer of the exotic, or even Fromentin, whose Un ete dans le Sahara (1874) and Une annee dans le Sahel (1859) conjure up before us burning sand and blinding light ; but we must include Isabelle Eberhardt, the bonne noniade, whose whole work is a glorification of Islam; and a group of other writers of whom the most outstanding are Robert Randau,whose novels Les Colons (1907), Les Algerianistes (1912) and Cassard le Berbere are powerful and vivid; F. Duchene with Au pas lent des caravanes (1922), Thamil'la (1923) and Le roman du Meddah (1924) Maximilienne Heller with La mer rouge (1923) and many others. These works, however, have been inspired less by the influence of Africa than by that of the Medi terranean. In spite of such works as Terres de soleil et de sommeil (1916) and Le voyage du centurion (1916) by Lucien Psichari, Visions congolaises by Louis de Raulin and Les explorateurs (1909) and Le commandant et les Foulbgi (1910) by Robert Ran dau the true African influence has only prevailed since 1919.
Since that time there has been a harvest of such literature, including the remarkable Visage de la Brousse by Pierre Bonardi (1920) and l'isolement by Dominique Combatte, which exude the stifling atmosphere of a tropical forest. Des inconnus chez moi (1920), by Lucie Cousturier, is a work profoundly true, pro foundly human as well as infinitely pathetic. Batolcala (1921) and Djouna, cl ,ien de la Brousse, by Rene Maran, La randonnee de Samba Diouf (1922) by the brothers Tharaud, Koffi (1922) by Gaston Joseph, Diato, a mine of Mandingo folk-lore, by Andre Demaison (1923), IL etempsycose by Madeleine de Valcombe (1923), Pellobelle, gentilhomme soudanais, by Oswald Durand, Ulyse, cafre (1924) by the brothers Marius-Ary Lebland, Les Chansons de Kou-Singa by Jean Marville have also contributed to the researches of such men as Delafosse, Bruel and missionaries of all classes, lay, military, commercial and religious. These works may not perhaps have the lyric character which runs through A travers l'Afrique (1910) by Captain Baratier, nor the humour of that caustic adventurer to whom Pierre Mille, the French Kipling, has given the name Barnavaux. They are, however, a valuable con tribution to the study of the negro mind, and as such increase our knowledge of humanity. Andre Gide has written Le Voyage an Congo (1927), in which he announces the sequel Le Retour, while the works of Jean d'Esme, Thi-Ba (1925) and l'Ame de la Brousse (1925) should also be mentioned. J. F. Boeuf La Sou danaise et son Amant (1924) and Sous le triste Soleil splendide and Cl. Breton's Bilali (1927) are worthy of comment. One of the most remarkable recent works is Paul . Morand's Magie noire (1928) which contains an exhaustive bibliography. (R. MN.)