26 - Tht Great Transition

Summary

THESE SCRAPS FROM A ‘GUERRILLA DIARY’ HAVE A PLACE HERE, perhaps, because the situations they describe make a more than usually clear illustration of certain crucial aspects of change in the 1960s. The Balante age-grade system, certainly of great antiquity, is adapted to a war of national independence. The Balante ancestral charter, undoubtedly no younger, is adjusted to beliefs and attitudes of a kind entirely new to this country.

Positive aspects of resistance, these adjustments pose interesting questions.

By what stages of thought and experience did Yamte N'aga make his journey of discovery from the ways of the past to the ways of the future? How did the crew of the Tres dc Agosto, or those gun teams shooting up at bombers dropping napalm and high-explosive, or the youthful volunteers besieging Portuguese garrisons in the mosquitoladen forests of the south and the tawny grasslands of the north, enlarge their skylines from village boundaries to the limits of a world in radical change? By what routes did the ideas of nationalism and the command of new challenges, but also the perception of a need for new forms of unity between the individual and society, become the essence of their talk and the proof of distance travelled since the old gods failed, and the old ways went down in chaos or defeat? Generalising within a continental context over more than a century, what can be said about this necessary but so difficult transition from ancestral charters to modern ideologies and systems of self-rule?

The following chapters attempt the outline of an answer. This cannot be anything like definitive. For that, much more will have to be understood about the actual experience of Africans during the colonial period. Little enough is known as things are now. If social anthropologists before the 1950s prepared the ground for serious study of African society, most of them did so from a synchronic approach; and much of their work has remained of little value for comprehending historical processes of change. If historians were busy in the field, they were looking at the colonial period from a European rather than an African point of view.