Early in the Second World War, a young Senegalese officer was sitting in a German prison camp listening to the expatiations of one of his captors, an Austrian who in civilian life was a linguist. The warder had just launched into a lecture on the significance of silence as a metrical ingredient in Austrian poetry when, like Archimedes of old, his interlocutor suddenly threw up his arms and shouted Eureka! How the Austrian reacted we do not know, but for the young Senegalese it was a moment of considerable clarification. What he had discovered was a formula which could explain the underlying order of West African, and more precisely Senegalese–Guinean, oral poetry. The discovery was important: the prisoner was a poet. He was also in search of a style.

Thirty years later that Senegalese poet, now president of the Republic of Senegal, wrote up his conclusions in an essay entitled, in honour of a French writer he much admired, ‘La Parole chez Paul Claudel et chez les négro-africans’. In this essay he tried to make his readers listen to traditional African poetry in a new way. So far, he believed, academic investigators into the structure of vernacular verse had lost themselves in a quagmire of irrelevance.