The African liberation movements and the early phases of nation-building on the continent, intertwined with the Cold War and the global student movement, left behind an array of textual, visual, and sonic traces that circulated through underground and clandestine networks across Africa and beyond. These cultural products, which include materials in African languages, remain marginalized in studies of African history and arts. This article posits the cultural underground of decolonization in Africa as a productive category for historical and literary inquiry and argues that exploring the literary and aesthetic aspects of this archive offers other ways of knowing and temporal epistemes important for the reconsideration of aesthetics, politics, and histories in and of Africa. I explore poems and songs from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, and Senegal to show how they provide avenues for a renewed engagement with decolonization and revolution.

非洲解放运动和非洲大陆国家建设的早期阶段，与冷战和全球学生运动交织在一起，留下了一系列文字、视觉和声音痕迹，这些痕迹通过地下和秘密网络在非洲内外传播。这些文化产品，包括非洲语言的材料，在非洲历史和艺术研究中仍然处于边缘地位。本文将非洲非殖民化的文化地下视为历史和文学探究的一个富有成效的类别，并认为探索该档案的文学和美学方面提供了其他认识方式和时间认识，这对于重新考虑美学、政治和历史很重要在非洲和非洲。我探索了刚果民主共和国、喀麦隆和塞内加尔的诗歌和歌曲，以展示它们如何为重新参与非殖民化和革命提供途径。