African origins
Born in Pointe-à-Pitre on February 11, 1934, to a banker father and a teacher mother, Guadeloupean Maryse Boucolon arrived in Paris in 1953 to attend the Fénelon high school. She didn’t spend more than two years there because of the racism of some of her teachers.
She is hurt by their contempt and condescension. His wound will gradually be healed by the texts of Négritude, including the famous “Discourse on Colonialism” by Aimé Césaire published in 1950 by Présence Africaine by Senegalese Alioune Diop.
Césaire teaches her, among other things, that she must be proud of her African origins. Maryse, who is now enrolled in Literature at the Sorbonne, begins to rub shoulders with the African student community whose powerful movement, the Federation of Black African Students in France (Feanf), openly demands the end of colonization in Africa.
She attends Feanf meetings. It was there that she met the Guinean Mamadou Condé, whom she married for the second time in 1958. The Haitian journalist and agronomist Jean Dominique, her first companion and the father of her son Denis, had left her and returned to Haiti. .
“Jean Dominique had treated me with the contempt and unconsciousness of those who stupidly set themselves up as a privileged caste,” Maryse would later explain in “L’Afrique sans fards” (Paris, J.-C. Lattès, 2012). ).
Barby Detour
In September 1959, she set foot on Ivorian soil. The journey between Marseille and Africa was made at that time by boat. In Dakar, where she made a brief stopover, she was struck by the poverty of the people and the unsanitary conditions of the market.
When she arrives in Abidjan, Uncle Jean, a West Indian, immediately tells her that Africans hate West Indians because some of them served as colonial officials. At Bingerville high school, where she taught French, she noticed that the West Indians lived among themselves and considered themselves French.
Maryse will only spend one year in this high school but she is already asking herself, like Veronica in “Heremakhonon” (Paris, 10/18, 1976), this question: “Isn’t it strange that a black woman teaches the language and French culture to Africans?”
Support for Sékou
In 1960, she joined Condé in Guinea, a country which on September 28, 1958 dared to say “no” to the Franco-African community of General Charles de Gaulle and whose president preferred “freedom in poverty to wealth in slavery” . Unlike the West Indians of Côte d’Ivoire, those of Guinea were anti-colonialist.
They were therefore ready to help Sékou Touré after France asked its cooperators to leave the country in response to Guinea’s refusal to continue living under French tutelage and domination. Maryse Condé renounces French nationality to better contribute to the building of this Guinea jealous of its freedom and sovereignty.
His son is enrolled at the Samory Touré school. Attached to human rights, Maryse is however disappointed by the way in which they are trampled underfoot by the regime and by the latter’s reaction to the plots, real or imaginary, hatched against Sékou Touré. She also does not understand the opulence in which those close to the president live while a large part of the population is dragging the devil by the tail.
But what makes her suffer the most is not being accepted by the Guineans who would have liked to see her dress in a loincloth, braid her hair and learn one of the local languages. Maryse thinks that she would assimilate instead of remaining herself if she had to please the Guineans.
The Ghanaian adventure
It is because of this incomprehension that she leaves Guinea and Mamadou Condé with whom relations had become difficult. Maryse is not abandoning Africa, however. At the end of 1963, she went to Ghana which had already welcomed the African-American Marxists and Pan-Africanists WEB Dubois and Georges Padmore.
She becomes aware of the diversity of the continent while noting that African-Americans live cut off from Ghanaians. From then on, Negritude appeared to him as a “great beautiful dream”.
Accused by Kwame Nkrumah’s successors of spying on behalf of Guinea, she will be expelled from Ghana. London is his new destination. There she meets the lawyer Kwame Aidoo with whom she soon begins to live.
The Senegal
After her breakup with Aidoo, she left her bags in Senegal but was accepted neither by the French community nor by the Senegalese. Only the Englishman Richard Philcox, a teacher like her at the Gaston Berger high school in Kaolack, brought her a little consolation.
She left Senegal in 1970. Re-reading the years spent in Africa, Maryse felt that “Africa never considered her as its daughter but as a cousin with strange behavior” (see “Africa without makeup” ).
The last breath
Céline Labrune-Badiane thinks rather that the Guadeloupean “did not find what she was looking for because what she was looking for did not exist” (C. Labrune-Badiane, “Africa: where are you? The African experience of Maryse Condé).
Maryse Condé died on April 2, 2024 without having quenched her thirst to be understood and accepted by a continent to which she believed she belonged. Perhaps she would have succeeded if she had made the effort to integrate without completely denying herself.
I am one of the people who believe that return and life on the continent are only possible for Afro-West Indians and African-Americans capable of compromise and self-emptying because real Africa has nothing to do with Africa. Idealized Africa.
Jean-Claude DJEREKE
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