Negritude

Negritude, literary movement of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s that began among French-speaking African and Caribbean writers living in Paris as a protest against French colonial rule and the policy of assimilation. Its leading figure was Léopold Sédar Senghor (elected first president of the Republic of Senegal in 1960), who, along with Aimé Césaire from Martinique and Léon Damas from French Guiana, began to examine Western values critically and to reassess African culture.

The Negritude movement was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and artistic flowering that emerged among a group of Black thinkers and artists (including novelists and poets) in the United States, in New York City, during the 1920s. The group was determined to throw off the masking (to use the word of critic Houston A. Baker, Jr.) and indirection that had necessarily attended Black expression in a hostile society. The Harlem Renaissance is associated with such writers as poet Langston Hughes, but it was Claude McKay, a somewhat lesser-known figure, who caught the attention of Senghor. The Jamaican-born poet and novelist was one of the Harlem group’s most prominent spokesmen. He believed that a writer should deal with important political subjects, and he himself had much to say about institutionalized racism.

McKay spent a good deal of time in France, where he got to know a West Indian family who held an informal salon attended by writers, musicians, and intellectuals, including visiting Americans. Members of the group that attended the salon began to publish Revue du Monde Noir (“Review of the Black World”) in 1931. Poetry by McKay and Hughes appeared in the review, where Senghor, an occasional visitor to the salon, probably saw their work. Possibly by that time, he had already read McKay’s Banjo, a picaresque novel that affected him deeply; translated into French in 1929, it centres on Black seamen in Marseilles and is notable in part for its portrayal of French treatment of Black colonials. In any case, Senghor called McKay “the true inventor of [the values of] Negritude.” Césaire said of Banjo that in it Blacks were described for the first time “truthfully, without inhibition or prejudice.” The word “Negritude,” however, was coined by Césaire himself, in his 1939 poem “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (“Notebook of a Return to My Native Land”).

The assertion of Black pride by members of the Negritude movement was attended by a cry against assimilation. They felt that although it was theoretically based on a belief in universal equality, it still assumed the superiority of European culture and civilization over that of Africa (or assumed that Africa had no history or culture). They were also disturbed by the world wars, in which they saw their countrymen not only dying for a cause that was not theirs but being treated as inferiors on the battlefield. They became increasingly aware, through their study of history, of the suffering and humiliation of Black people—first under the bondage of slavery and then under colonial rule. These views inspired many of the basic ideas behind Negritude: that the mystic warmth of African life, gaining strength from its closeness to nature and its constant contact with ancestors, should be continually placed in proper perspective against the soullessness and materialism of Western culture; that Africans must look to their own cultural heritage to determine the values and traditions that are most useful in the modern world; that committed writers should use African subject matter and poetic traditions and should excite a desire for political freedom; that Negritude itself encompasses the whole of African cultural, economic, social, and political values; and that, above all, the value and dignity of African traditions and peoples must be asserted.

Senghor treated all of these themes in his poetry and inspired a number of other writers: Birago Diop from Senegal, whose poems explore the mystique of African life; David Diop, writer of revolutionary protest poetry; Jacques Rabemananjara, whose poems and plays glorify the history and culture of Madagascar; Cameroonians Mongo Beti and Ferdinand Oyono, who wrote anticolonialist novels; and the Congolese poet Tchicaya U Tam’si, whose extremely personal poetry does not neglect the sufferings of the African peoples. The movement largely faded in the early 1960s when its political and cultural objectives had been achieved in most African countries.