BANANA ALLEGORY

"If Josephine Baker became a chic sex-symbol of Africa in the Paris of the 1920s, it was not because she was the only “African” in this city. Paris has always known the black communities of Africa and the Caribbean. But Josephine was the black woman who was there, at the right time and in the right place, at the crossroads of the great socio-cultural contradictions of french society between the wars : colonialism, ethnology, fascism, surrealism, primitivism, art nègre, charleston and short dresses. She was the American tree that hid the African forest."

- Hassan Musa