The Senegalese who saw the sculptor Moustapha Dimé emerge, grow, and die, or the Burkinabè who look on as the painter Ferdinand Nonkouni develops should logically be the people who love and understand these artists' output the best. However, when you take a closer look at recent art history in Africa, you realise that things are neither as simple nor as logical as one might think, no matter what the artistic field. During colonialism, the African poets and novelists who claimed to represent their subjugated compatriots as they dealt "pestle blows" to denounce the "cruel towns" and propose "myths that galvanise", were only read and appreciated by the elites whose social and political mores they attacked. After the "rains of independence", the dialogue of the deaf continued between black writers and their peoples who remained illiterate in the languages and art forms in which they conveyed their thoughts and moods.