90 Seconds With: Les Blancs director Yael Farber

[@DrJacquesCOULARDEAU]

LORRAINE HANSBERRY - LES BLANCS - 1970 This play came out in an extra-particular period for the world, and first of all for Africa. In 1970 North Africa, Saharan Africa (apart from Spanish Morocco), and Central Africa including the ex-Belgian Congo were independent. The only colonies that were left then were the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, and of course, Rhodesia and South Africa were in a strange situation, since they became independent under white violent colonial leadership at first imposing some kind of total rejection of the black population, known as apartheid in South Africa. But so, from Angola and Mozambique down to South Africa, everything remained to be conquered, independence, majority rule, Black leadership, equality, etc. The Portuguese Revolution happened in 1974 and Franco died in 1975, and their colonies were finally granted their independence. Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, meaning ruled by the Black majority population. South Africa had to wait some more and in 1990 the transition could start after the liberation of Nelson Mandela. Then, in 1970, this play was speaking very directly either about the last, white-governed, African colonies or semi-colonies, or it was alluding to a slightly older period, like for example, the ex-Belgian Congo liberated in 1960 under Patrice Lumumba with a certain Moise Tshombe being the leader from Katanga, the vasty southern region of the future Democratic Republic of Congo rich in copper. Lumumba was assassinated and the country entered a long history of chaotic political neo-colonial situation with a lot of military upheavals and civil strife if not war. Let’s say that in this play the black country concerned is still entirely colonized and thus the play alludes to a situation that is only marginally true in 1970. Note right away that the two forces referred to in this play are the Whites, divided between the military force that supports a completely white power situation, and the Christian good-doing various personnel in health and education that provide the Blacks with inferior health and school systems. On the side of the Blacks, you have, within one family, slightly enlarged to a village, those who want independence and want to conquer it by military force, then those who accept to live subserviently under total white control, including violence from these Whites, and finally those who believe in the possibility to discuss and negotiate, and are of course the fools of the story, ending up dead or in prison. This is to say that this play has tremendously aged. Africa is no longer this, far from it. The three black stances are represented by the three “brothers” of one family, the Matoseh family. Abioseh Matoseh carries the name of the father of the family and is the one who believes there can be some coexistence and evolution, though as the eldest son carrying the name of the father, he is considered the continuator of his father’s peaceful management of this explosive situation. The second son is Tshembe Matoseh who represents the desire to get out of Africa and move to England where he has married a European wife and has had a child with her. He is only visiting in this play and plans to go back to his European family. The third son is an absolute caricature of the evil effects of colonialism, the foolish hybridization of cultures, languages, and genes, which makes the future necessarily, deeply, and psychologically, if not psychiatrically, sexually perverse - the whites on top and the black underneath satisfying all the desires and impulses of the whites (I will refrain from telling what I saw in Kinshasa’s Ngiri Ngiri secondary, school and the city, in 1968, the same period as the play, though officially in an independent Zaire led by Sese Seko Mobutu). Eric is his first and Christian name. He is not carrying the family name, and he is thus only Eric, even in the list of characters, which is surprising since the mother is the central character, with her elder or eldest brother, in the composition and authority of an African family. Eric is the son of the mother of the family and Major George Rice, the commander of the military unit in the region. This child, this son not carrying the family name, but carrying a Christian European first name, is used as a servant, in fact, a subservient servant, not to say slave. He is a mixed-blood individual. You can imagine the situation of total alienation. He was the result of a non-consensual relationship between the mother and the local military commander, in other words, a plain rape, maybe covered up with the concept of hospitality. He is of course not wearing the good black color like his brothers since he is partly white and can then be used by all Europeans as some kind of intimate valet if the white males so desire. One character is totally missing in this situation. Authority in an African family comes from the brother of the mother, hence the maternal uncle for the children, and this maternal uncle is missing. The official black man who represents independence that has to be attained through negotiation is put in prison, in the capital city. He is Kumalo. The more or less subservient blacks who want a peaceful change, which is no change at all, would like Kumalo to denounce what they call “the terror,” meaning the violent action of the independence supporters. Kumalo refuses because that would reduce his possible negotiating power. In this situation, Eric takes the lead in the insurgency, bringing together his frustration as a black man who wants to control his situation, and that of the country, and on the other hand his deeper frustration and psychological, social, and racial alienation that leads him to the blacks against the whites and not the reverse since as a “white” man he is rejected by the whites and is at most considered as a social toy, not to say sexual toy, an eternal child with whom the whites can play freely as some kind of pleasure dispenser. Of course, today in our globalized world, a third force has developed enough after the failure of the Non-Aligned Movement under the Cold War, and this force is not led by one country or one person, but by a whole set of alliances that only contain China as a main member. BRICS, ASEAN, SCO, BRI, and some others that are more recent and less obvious for Western minds, like the alliance of Turkic-speaking countries under the leadership of Turkey that has managed to bring most of the Turkic-language-speaking Central Asian countries and a few more together. “Turkic languages are distributed over a vast area in eastern Europe and Central and North Asia, ranging, with some interruptions, from the Balkans to the Great Wall of China and from central Iran (Persia) to the Arctic Ocean. The core area, between the 35th and 55th parallels, includes a western section comprising Asia Minor, northern Iran, and Transcaucasia, a central West Turkistan (Russian) section to the east of the Caspian Sea, and an East Turkistan (Chinese) section beyond the Tien Shan. The northern area extends from western Russia to northern Siberia. States in which Turkic languages are spoken include Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, northern Cyprus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, Greece, Romania, Lithuania, and, because of recent industrial migration, several western European countries.” (www.britannica.com/topic/Turkic-languages) We should of course add Estonia, Finland, and Sami land. They speak agglutinative Turkic languages. Hungary is the last country with an official agglutinative Turkic language, but its existence is the result of recent migration in Europe itself. Note the role of Turkey in trying to boost an alliance of Turkic states. “The Organization of Turkic States (OTS), formerly called the Turkic Council or the Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States, is an intergovernmental organization comprising prominent independent Turkic countries: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_Turkic_States#:~:text=The%20Organization%20of%20Turkic%20States,%2C%20Kyrgyzstan%2C%20Turkey%20and%20Uzbekistan.) This leads me to the simple conclusion that this play has aged too much to be in any way really pertinent in the 21st century. It can at best have some pertinence in the USA and for the black community there. The Rest of the world is beyond this vision that is entirely centered on the West and their colonial crimes. Today the world wants to get beyond this retrospective and retrograde approach, even if it has to reject or contain the West. Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

[@eastarising8242]

Wow! Thanks for your time, the detailed and informative comment. Very much appreciated

[@DrJacquesCOULARDEAU]

you're welcome.@@eastarising8242