The First World Festival of Negro Arts

Heavily into African Lit in my International English Lit rubric, I felt it incumbent on me to visit the Darker Continent, and Leopold Senghor’s exercise in Negritude seemed an irresistible opportunity. I made it easier on my increasingly impatient wife by taking my 14 year old son Michael along with me. (She was teaching English at Temple University and finishing a Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr in Renaissance Studies, so dealing with Catherine, 12, and Timothy, 10, was no sinecure.) We flew over on Pan Am, which had not yet had its fiscal comeuppance. It was over Easter 1966, and it was my first encounter with international cultural exchange.

I was as ignorant of Africa, except for a little Anglophone Lit, as Michael. And I remember vividly our first joint epiphany: watching a Muslim in recumbent prayer outside our Dakar hotel. We both went to the Isle of Goree to see where a lot of American black slavery started. It is weird how trivial details caught my attention. For example, the same street that was called Avenue Jean Jaures as it passed the National Assembly morphed in Rue Jean XXIII as it ran by the Catholic Cathedral.

And I’ll never forget overhearing in the hotel bar Langston Hughes telling Wole Soyinka that he should look into the work of LeRoi Jones. (In my glib omniscience I had pegged Hughes as the “Louis Armstrong” of American Lit, meaning by that he was soft on race! And I was teaching African-American Lit!) Unhappily, I also ran into the young Nigerian novelist, Obi Egbuna, whose novel “Wind vs. Polygamy” was dramatized at the Festival.

I talked Marjorie Farmer of the Philadelphia School District into co-sponsoring Egbuna in a series of lectures at Beaver and in the local high schools. I’ll never forget our flight back from Manchester during which I tried without success to summarize the lectures he was scheduled to give on Nigerian fiction and W. African drama. Ha. He was immovable. As it turned out, all he would talk about was his preference for polygamy over straitlaced American monogamy. You can imagine what a hit that made at a women’s college

A more satisfying recollection was the reception for the Duke Ellington and his orchestra at the American Embassy. I passed several heady hours drinking with two of my musical heroes, Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney. Ellington’s concert at Liberty Stadium on Easter Sunday was easily the highpoint of the First World Negro Arts Festival. (And that includes the somewhat disappointing extemporaneous lecture President Leopold Senghor gave us assembled journalists on his favorite theme of Negritude. One chorus of Johnny Hodges eclipsed many polysyllabic paragraphs of the famous poet and literary critic!)

There was one serendipity in my booking the cheapest passage to England to pick up Egbuna via Manchester. In the seat next to me was the music critic of “High Fidelity” magazine who explained he was on his was to a premiere—oddly, he noted, a Catholic Requiem composed by a Jewish dentist for a socialist TV station! The next day was a Saturday and I arrived at Granada Television to find it almost abandoned. I did find out the name of the PR man who might swing me tickets for the premiere that evening.

As I walked across the parking lot I hailed a car leaving and asked the driver if he knew how to contact PR. He didn’t. When I repeated the question to a driver entering the parking lot, he asked me what I wanted to know. I repeated the Catholic Requiem/Jewish Dentist/Socialist TV paradigm, at which he smiled. He told me to appear at the Free Trade Hall (visions of John Bright dancing through my head) a half hour before performance and there would be a ticket there in my name.

Then is when my dumb Irish luck kicked in. I asked him how I could arrange an interview with the legendary managing director. “You’re talking to him!” he shyly and slyly replied! We chatted for a while about the increasingly complex interactions between the BBC and its commercial competitors, of which Granada was the perennial leader. (The Requiem by the way was no aural root canal, but it wasn’t Gregorian Chant either.)