SOURCE: “Pornography, Philosophy, and African History,” in Tell Me Africa: An Approach to African Literature, Princeton University Press, 1973, pp. 204-47.

In the following essay, Olney analyzes the perceptions of “blackness” and “négritude” in the works of Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Yambo Ouologuem.

They order this matter differently in Francophone Africa. Whether one judges that they order it better, as Laurence Sterne declares is the case in France herself, or order it worse, will depend no doubt on the observer's sensibilities; that they order it differently, however, is beyond dispute. The fiction that borders on sociology and anthropology, the novel that describes for us a people, their traditions and their culture, and recreates the traditional, coherent community for us in representative figures—as Chinua Achebe does for the Ibo and James Ngugi for the Gikuyu, even as Ezekiel Mphahlele does for the alienated and exiled South...