A Piece of German-African Literary History

Janheinz Jahn’s valuable estate is on show at the Humboldt Forum

Letters, books, photos and audio files from the estate of Janheinz Jahn, 1918–73, will form part of the Humboldt-Universität’s inaugural event at the Humboldt Forum, providing insights into a chapter of cultural history shortly before and after the decolonisation of Africa in the 1950s and 1960s.

Who was Jahn? From the 1950s until his death he was the most important German-language collector and mediator of literatures from Africa and the African diaspora. His estate is in the possession of the Humboldt-Universität and is currently being re-archived and prepared for digitisation under the scientific supervision of Susanne Gehrmann, Professor of African Literatures and Cultures at the Department of Asian and African Studies. Jahn corresponded with over 600 African, US Afro-American, Caribbean and Latin American authors. The exhibition, curated by Dr. Ibou Diop under the aegis of Dr. Gorch Pieken, will feature facsimile from this correspondence.

Jahn’s works were global bestsellers

The anthologies Jahn edited, first and foremost the collection of poems The Black Orpheus, and his own monographs, especially Muntu. An Outline of Neo-African Culture, were translated into many languages and were global bestsellers. It was the first time modern poetry from Africa and the African diaspora was made available to a wider German readership “in a country where, after twelve years of Hitler propaganda, cultural accomplishments of non-white peoples are ignored,” as Jahn put it in a letter to the Afro-Caribbean French writer and politician Aimé Césaire. Jahn was inspired to embark on his life’s work by a lecture given by the later President of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, in Frankfurt. Jahn heard for the first time at that event work written in French by poets such as Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, Birago Diop and Paul Niger. He was impressed and went on to dedicate himself to collecting the literature of négritude and other African literatures in European languages.

Césaire, Damas and Senghor were the founders and main representatives of négritude, which was a cultural and political movement against colonised thinking. Césaire explained the principle as follows in an interview recorded by Jahn in 1967: “Negritude is first and foremost the feeling that there is something in common for all black people dispersed around the entire world. A feeling of solidarity between black people in Africa, black people in the West Indies, black people in Brazil and black Americans. The feeling that we all have a home, a common heritage, and the will to accept the entire African cultural heritage and to modernise and enrich it.”

It was Césaire, Senghor, Damas and other black intellectuals who initiated the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956, which was effectively organised by Alioune Diop, founder of Présence Africaine, a diaspora publishing house that remains important to this day. The congress was a clarion call for the self-empowerment of African peoples. Négritude and the cultural and political contribution of Africa and the African diaspora were discussed. Referring to the French Revolution, the participants demanded the same rights as the colonial masters had. Previously unpublished tape-recorded interviews with individual congress participants such as Frantz Fanon, Jacques Rabémananjara and Richard Wright will be available to hear in the exhibition at the former City Palace in Berlin.

Pan-African cultural festivals addressed at the Humboldt Lab

Further milestones in finding African identity were two large pan-African cultural festivals. In April 1966, six years after most colonies had gained independence, President Sédar Senghor invited black artists from all over the world to Dakar for a large “Festival mondial des arts nègres,” the first festival of “black arts” in Africa – and not just young Africans, descendants of slaves from Brazil, the Caribbean and above all the United States were there. They included, for example, Langston Hughes, a major poet, writer and member of the Harlem Renaissance movement, with whom Jahn also corresponded, and the dancer Josephine Baker. Jahn was there too.

Three years later, in summer 1969, the First Pan-African Festival was held in Algiers. The Dakar festival focussed more on reconciliation and rapprochement with négritude as its leitmotiv, whereas in Algeria brasher political notes were sounded in deliberate delimitation from the Western world and oriented toward socialism and the Soviet Union. The Algiers festival, in which, for example, the singer Miriam Makeba took part, offered a platform to such different representatives as the Black Panthers from the United States and the “Palestinian National Liberation Movement El Fatah”. Négritude was marginalised and sidelined. These two significant festivals are addressed at the Humboldt Forum with photos, programme brochures and posters from the Jahn Archive.