e. I say that the culture of these people controls me—but they can scarcely be held responsible
for European culture. America comes out of Europe, but these people have
never seen America, nor have most of them seen more of Europe than the
hamlet at the foot of their mountain. Yet they move with an authority which I
shall never have; and they regard me, quite rightly, not only as a stranger in
their village but as a suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials, to everything
they have—however unconsciously—inherited.
For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly
more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely
grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers
anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if
they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I
am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it
cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should
anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and
Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in
Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.
