Surrealist practice was an ongoing way of life in African cultures

Evidence

The artist Cheikh Tidiane Sylla is even more explicit about how surrealism reveals what is already familiar in African culture. “In the ecologically balanced tribal cultures of Africa,” he writes, “the surrealist spirit is deeply embedded in social tradition. The ‘mysticism’ prevalent in all Black African philosophy presupposes a highly charged psychic world in which every individual agrees to forget himself or herself in order to concentrate on the least known instances of the mind’s movement—a thoroughly emancipatory experience.” He further asserts that in Africa, the practice of poetry was always a way of life, whereas in the West, surrealism was the product of a long philosophical and political struggle “to recover what the traditional African has never lost.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 42

Categorization

• QUESTION: This claim that traditional African cultures never lost surrealist practice is contestable and worth checking against ethnographic sources.