In Africa Dances Gorer takes the reader on an odyssey across West Africa, in the company of one of the great black ballet stars of 1930’s Paris, Féral Benga. This new edition features an afterword from Lamont Lindstrom.

Dancing Together – Black and White
 
Interwar Paris of the 1920s and 1930s was a honeypot buzzing with artists, writers, composers and musicians, many of whom arrived from around the world. Among these were dancer Féral (François) Benga, a Wolof migrant from colonial French Senegal, and Geoffrey Gorer (born 1905), a young graduate of Cambridge University and aspiring writer. Benga, a member of a wealthy, acculturated family in Dakar, had come to France in the mid-1920s when he was seventeen. He survived in Paris selling perfumes until he ran into a relative who admired his physique. Recommended as a cabaret performer, Benga found employment with the Folies Bergère where he became a featured dancer. He performed often with Josephine Baker, including in her signature banana dance. Modernism, and its primitivist shadow, powerfully then stimulated the city’s artistic community. Just as Picasso, Matisse and others incorporated African and Oceanic elements in their work, so did Parisian choreographers blend black themes and bodies within their productions. Dance, whether popular, jazz, or contemporary ballet, in those years combined and expressed both modern sophistication and savage vitality.

Africa Dances was published in 1935 and proved both a critical and financial success. It was also one of the most searing criticisms of the bleak reality of French colonialism to have ever been published.

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