MOSCOW, NAUKA PUBL., 1983, 280 P. (IN RUSSIAN)

The period between the two World Wars in the history of Tropical and Southern Africa, when open anti-colonial protests were relatively rare, remained out of the field of view of Soviet researchers for a long time. Only recently have they begun to study it in depth, trying to uncover the processes of maturing new social relations and the formation of new forms of social consciousness among the peoples of this region. Although the lack and inaccessibility of sources make this topic one of the most difficult, our African scholars have been paying quite a lot of attention to it for a decade and a half.

The study of social thought in Tropical and Southern Africa was initiated by one of the founders of Soviet African studies, I. I. Potekhin1 . Soviet scientists studied various forms of spiritual decolonization of African peoples and the development of progressive ideology in Africa, 2 the emergence of intellectuals and the formation of social thought in the British colonies of West Africa, 3 characterized a wide range of ideological trends in Africa, religious forms of public consciousness, 4 and the ideological search of the intelligentsia of the French colonies in Africa (the greatest attention was .

1 Potekhin I. I. Afrika vzglyadet v budushchee [Africa looks into the future]. Moscow, 1960; et al.

2 Davidson A. B. South Africa. Formation of protest forces. 1870-1924. Moscow, 1972.

3 Frenkel M. Yu. Public thought of the British West Africa in the second half of the XIX century. Moscow, 1977; Erasov B. S. Tropicheskaya Afrika. Ideologiya i problemy kul'tury [Ideology and Problems of Culture], Moscow, 1972. Socio-cultural traditions and public consciousness in the developing countries of Asia and Africa. M. 1982; et al.

4 Sharevskaya B. I. On the typology of anti-colonial religious and political movements in Tropical Africa. - Peoples of Asia and Africa, 1974, N 4.

5 Potekhina G. I. Ocherki sovremennoi literatury Zapadnoy Afrika [Essays on modern literature in West Africa]. Moscow, 1968; Mo-

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Both of these areas of African studies: the study of problems of the interwar period and the study of the social thought of African peoples are reflected in the book by the head of the section of Modern and Contemporary History of the Institute of Africa of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Candidate of Historical Sciences A. B. Letnev. His work reveals a wide range of views, beliefs, and spiritual pursuits of the intelligentsia of the French colonies of West Africa-from pro-colonial to radical. This is one of the main advantages of the work. Indeed, until now, the study of social thought in African countries has focused mainly on its anti-colonial trends. This approach was, of course, not only justified, but also necessary, since it was precisely these currents of social thought that were least studied and most distorted by pro-colonial bourgeois historiography.

However, the role and significance of anti-colonial ideological trends cannot be correctly presented outside the context of all social thought. For West Africa, this is especially true: unlike many colonies in the eastern and southern parts of the continent, where the public consciousness of Africans was literally permeated with anti-colonialism, ideological trends that were not anti-colonial in nature were developed and quite widespread in West Africa. The author analyzes in detail the religious trends of social thought, various forms of ideological compromise between the African intelligentsia and colonial circles, pro-assimilation, pro-colonialism, etc. And it is precisely this analysis that makes it possible to understand the depth of the identity of the national-democratic views of such representatives of advanced social thought as the Dahomey T. Ouenu and L. Uncanran, the progressiveness of the early Negroes, and the significance of the first contacts of the national liberation movement with the French communists.

The study of the whole variety of ideological trends among the African intelligentsia of the West African French colonies is an extremely difficult task.

Many of the terms commonly used to describe the ideological struggle in developed capitalist countries ("bourgeois nationalism", "petty-bourgeois radicalism", "social reformism" , etc.) are becoming somewhat conventional in relation to the colonial society of the 1920s and 1930s, with its heterogeneous social structure and still unformed social structures. classes of bourgeois society. In addition, some neologisms that appeared in works about developing countries ("pre-bourgeois nationalism"," feudal nationalism", etc.) sometimes seem artificial. A. B. Letnev managed to ensure that his definitions and terms did not turn into frozen labels that lost their connection with the essence of the phenomenon under study. This is achieved by the fact that each of these phenomena is analyzed in stages, in a specific historical setting.

The fate of dianism6 , for example, is traced in the monograph for almost three decades, and its assessment in different periods is far from unambiguous: the reader gets a complete picture of both the contribution of this movement to the ideology of anti-colonialism (pp. 43-47) and its evolution towards compromise. It's the same with negroes. Emphasizing the anti-assimilation (and thus, to some extent, anti-colonial) nature of early Negroity (p. 172, 228), the author rightly noted that "ideological unity under the banner of Negroity was a response not only to the racism of homegrown French reactionaries, but also to the official misanthropic ideology of the "third Reich" (p. 180). At the same time, it also characterizes its reactionary nature, which was already evident in the 1930s (pp. 229-230). Thus, the reader is led to the idea of continuity between the" pro-assimilationist "B. Dian and the" anti-assimilationist " L. Senghor in their role as allies of the French bourgeoisie (pp. 240-241). It is the historicism of the study that gives credibility to the typology of the main directions of social thought proposed by the author (p. 237), and makes it a valuable methodological tool for studying similar phenomena.

This peer-reviewed monograph is one of the few in Soviet African studies that has been published in the Russian Academy of Sciences.-

Seiko A. N. Negritude and modern philosophical-aesthetic and theoretical-literary struggle in the countries of Tropical Africa. In: Theories, Schools, Concepts (critical Analyses). Khudozhestvennyj protsess i ideologicheskaja borba [Artistic process and Ideological struggle]. Moscow, 197'B; Golden L. Negritude, afrikanite... and life. - Foreign literature, 1979, N 1.

6 Blaise Diane (1872-1934) - the most prominent representative of the bourgeois-nationalist trend in West African social thought.

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It is based entirely on archival materials and primary sources, including not only government documents, materials of public organizations, manuscripts and letters of public figures, but also lists of West African subscribers to some newspapers published by Africans in Paris, in particular, "Paria" 7 . Thanks to the good documentation of the work, the history of ideas in it is inextricably linked with the history of specific people, which, unfortunately, is still rare in African studies. Dozens of characters and fates pass before the reader, giving him the opportunity to feel the living reality of the era under study. The influence of communist ideas on the development and course of the national liberation movement in the French colonies of West Africa is also shown concretely. The richness of the source base allows the author to find new aspects of seemingly well-studied topics. This is a detailed analysis of the ideological origins of Negroity (p. 169-181). A. B. Letnev also managed to discover completely new, unexplored aspects of the topic - this is primarily a characteristic of the views of the younger generation of intellectuals, who were to contribute to the anti-colonial struggle after the Second World War.

At the same time, dividing a small period (20 years) studied by the author into five sub-periods creates the impression of excessive fragmentation. A. B. Letnev discusses dianism in four of the five chapters of his work. On Negritude - in three, and the section "Political debut of Negritude" is actually devoted to one, although undoubtedly important, lecture by L. Senghor. The two sections on L. Unkanren are separated by almost 100 pages. This fragmentation complicates the perception of the material. It is a pity that, having paid so much attention to the relations, interaction and mutual influence of public thought in the French colonies and the mother country, the author almost did not compare the nature and specifics of public consciousness in the French and neighboring English colonies.

It also seems that the title of the monograph- "Social Thought in West Africa" - does not fully correspond to its content, since it examines the social thought of only the French colonies located in this region. The term "sub-region" is hardly applicable in this case, since this group of colonies was a political rather than a geographical entity. The monograph describes the spiritual quest of the African intelligentsia of the French colonies of West Africa. The most important problem remains beyond the scope of the study: the mass consciousness of African societies in these colonies and its correlation with ideological trends among the educated elite. At the current level of development of African studies, including in West African countries, it is difficult to analyze mass consciousness, especially in the interwar period. To do this, it is necessary to involve local archives, oral tradition and eyewitness memories, so for now, studying this problem is the task of tomorrow. However, the first approaches to it would already help to present the ideology of the African intelligentsia in the broad context of the environment from which this ideology grew.

The high ideological and creative level of the monograph and the abundance of concrete material make it an important achievement of Soviet African studies. In the future, the author should continue to study the topic: expand its chronological framework, attract new sources, the number of which increases dramatically for the period after the Second World War. It would also be important to study the history of social thought in individual countries in order to trace both the continuity and the origins of the new in its development.

7 The author used, for example, materials from: Archives Nationales (Senegal). Fonds Afrique Occidentale Francaise (AOF) (modern), 17G/56 - 75; Institut Fondamental d'Af-rique Noire (IFAN) (Dakar). Bibliotheque. La manuscripts des anciens de W. Ponty; Archives Nationales (Benin); Archives Nationales (France). Section Outre-Mer. Service de liason avec les originaires des territoi-res de la France d'Outre-Mer (SLOTFOM); National Archives (USA); Library of the Congress, USA, Manuscript Divesion; и др.

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