Léopold Sédar Senghor

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Negritude and Utopianism

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SOURCE: “Negritude and Utopianism,” in African Literature Today: A Review, No. 7, edited by Eldred Durosimi Jones, Heinemann, 1975, pp. 65-75.

[In the following excerpt, Case discusses elements of intellectual alienation and false idealization in the negritude of Senghor and Aimé Césaire. Negritude, as a product of European acculturation, Case contends, “has nothing to do with the existential reality of the mass of black men.”]

Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor are indisputably the two great leaders of the Négritude movement which was born in France in the late 1930s. It is significant that both men are now politicians of some stature and that Senghor is generally considered as one of the greatest supporters of the concept of Francophonie. He has made use of his position as President of Senegal to promote the recognition of African cultural values throughout the world and is an international figure whose reputation has spread beyond the French-speaking nations. …

One of the principal characteristics of any racism is its negative basis. It is, essentially, the negation of the humanity of a racial group and the denial of all the values of that group. Césaire's Négritude, and Senghor's also, is the affirmation of African cultural values. It is a positive expression of human dignity and pride which, of necessity, has to be preceded by a ‘purification’ of the harmful aspects of the Western European conditioning of the Black which has made him turn against himself. Césaire's repudiation of this conditioning is the recognition that cultural and religious values are not absolute but entirely relative. As Senghor declared in a speech before the Ghanaian Parliament in 1962:

Négritude is not even attachment to a particular race, our own, although such attachment is legitimate. Négritude is the awareness, defence and development of African cultural values. …

However, the struggle for négritude must not be negation but affirmation.

Césaire recognises in his essay, Discours sur le Colonialisme, that the principal error of the European lies in the equations:

Christianity = Civilisation


Paganism = Barbarity

Everything and everyone is judged in relation to these values.

One certainly could not accuse Senghor of racism. Whilst Césaire was once a member of the French Communist Party and is still a Marxist, Senghor has been Catholic for most of his life. Born in 1906, he also left his native land to further his academic education in France and was also a student at the Ecole Normale Sup‚rieure.

Senghor's greatest contribution to the Négritude movement appears to have been his personal influence on Caribbean writers, the sons of a people who had for centuries been humiliated, enslaved and alienated from their culture and from themselves in the name of Western European Christianity.

Senghor's poetic work is characterised by a quiet dignity and pride, his richest verse, mostly composed to be set to traditional West African instruments, expresses his desire to return to the native village that he has left so very far behind:

Toko'Waly my uncle, do you remember those distant nights
when my head grew heavy against the patience of your back?
Or holding me by the hand, your hand led me through the shadows and
signs?
The fields are flowers of glowworms; the stars come to rest on the grass,
on the trees.
All around is silence.
Only the droning scents of the bush, hives of red bees drowning the
stridulation of the crickets
And the muffled tom-tom, the far-off breathing of the night.

(‘For Koras and Balafong’ in Chants d'Ombre

Then at the end of that very beautiful poem ‘Joal’ which is also in the collection Chants d'Ombre we read this striking stanza:

I remember, I remember …
In my head the rhythm of the tramp tramp
So wearily down the days of Europe where there comes,
Now and then a little orphaned jazz that goes sobbing, sobbing, sobbing.

It is particularly in this first collection of his poems that the nostalgic note is struck although it is also evident in the later collections of verse.

Senghor also condemns the savagery of the European rape of Africa but acknowledges a great debt to French humanism and to the French language. His speeches and essays are of great importance and interest to the student of Negro-African cultures.

What is very striking indeed in Senghor's writings is the passionate love of Africa and of France which never seem to enter into conflict. Speaking of Africa he says:

What is forgotten is that this land was abandoned for three centuries to the bloody cupidity of slave traders; that through the murderous actions of the Whites, twenty millions of its children were deported to the West Indies and to the Americas, that two hundred million died in man hunts. What is generally forgotten is that each ‘benefit of colonisation’ has had its reverse.

Négritude et Humanisme

In the same article, which appeared in Présence Africaine in 1950, he goes on to say that the West's technological contribution to Africa is of value only if the soul of the African is not altogether altered by the new exterior forces that threaten its tranquil homogeneity.

In a very famous article entitled ‘French as a Language of Culture’ which appeared in the November 1962 number of Esprit, Senghor gives five reasons why the French language is of such great importance to African writers. Firstly, he says, many of the elite think in French and speak it better than their mother tongue. Secondly, there is the richness of the French vocabulary. Thirdly, French, through its syntax, is a concise language:

To the syntax of juxtaposition of Negro-African languages is opposed the syntax of subordination of French; to the syntax of concrete reality, that of abstract thought: in point of fact, the syntax of reason to that of emotion.

Négritude et Humanisme

Fourthly, the stylistic demands of the French language open new universal dimensions to the reader. It is the fifth reason that is of particular concern here, and I will quote the entire paragraph that explains it.

Fifth reason: French Humanism. It is precisely in this elucidation, in this re-creation, that French Humanism consists. For man is the object of its activity. Whether it be in the case of Law, of Literature, of Art, even of Science, the distinguishing mark of French genius lies in this concern with Man. French always expresses a moral. This gives it its character of universality which counterbalances its tendency to individualism.

In the poem ‘Prayer for Peace’ dedicated to Georges and Claude Pompidou, Senghor prays for France:

O Lord, take from my memory the France which is not France, mask
of smallness and hatred upon the face of France
That mask of smallness and hatred for which I have hatred … yet
I may well hate Evil
For I have a great weakness for France.
Bless this people who were tied and twice able to free their hands and
proclaim the coming of the poor into the kingdom
Who turned the slaves of the day into men free equal fraternal
Bless these people who brought me Thy Good News, Lord, and opened my
heavy eyelids to the light of faith.

(‘Prayer for Peace’ in Hosties Noires

This poem was written in 1945 and it hardly seems that Senghor's love of France and his gratitude have altered.

Though Césaire does not insist on his love of France in his work, both he and Senghor, the Marxist and the Catholic, look forward to the day when all peoples will recognise and respect differences in culture and when all the oppressed of the world will join hands in brotherhood.

In his play Et les Chiens se taisaient, Césaire's hero illustrates universal tolerance:

Suppose that the world were a forest. Good!
There are baobabs, flourishing oaks, black pines and white walnuts;
I would like them all to grow, firm and strong,
different in wood, in bearing, in colour,
but equally full of sap and without one encroaching on the other's
space,
different at the base
but oh!
                                                                                (Ecstatically)
may their heads join high, very high, in the ether so as to form for
all
a single roof
                                        I say the only protective roof!

Et les Chiens … Acte II)

It would be superfluous to quote similar sentiments expressed by Senghor since they are easily to be found in his speeches and essays.

What seems to characterise Négritude then is an assertion of African dignity, a desire to return to the cultural values which are deeply rooted in traditional religion, and the future hope of a universal brotherhood in a universal civilisation.

I will now attempt to analyse this black ideology through the application of certain concepts on African ontology discussed by Professor John Mbiti in his book African Religions and Philosophy.

John Mbiti defines two dimensions of African reality which he calls the Sasa period and the Zamani. The Sasa is the now, the immediate future, the near period of time in the past, present, and future. Zamani is the period beyond which nothing can go. It is the past incorporating the present. …

Mbiti sets out to show that existence is apprehended by the African in traditional society in such a way that the immediate future is the only future perspective that exists. Consequently, in traditional religions there is no prophetism and no future paradise. For time—to use Western terms—recedes rather than progresses and the Golden Age—that era of the black man's greatness—the era of Timbuctoo and Benin, the era of the Yoruba and the Zulu, of Shango and Chaka, lies in the Zamani period. The Sasa is an ever-constant construction of the past and not of the future. Utopia exists in the past.

It is interesting that if one examines the works of Senghor and Césaire it becomes evident that they are characterised by elements peculiar to the Zamani period. The revalorisation of African artistic and humanistic values coincides inevitably with the creation of a myth superimposed on African history. It is difficult to say which comes first since revalorisation and myth are interwoven to the point of identification, one with the other. …

Senghor's poems convey an attitude and an atmosphere that are different. But this normalien living in Paris and writing of a traditional African society is in fact looking back to what is another age and another place in terms of his evolution within the Western European world. Like so many African and Caribbean writers he is at a great distance in terms of space and time from his subject.

This brings to mind the story of Camara Laye and the composition of L'Enfant Noir, translated variously as The African Child and The Black Child. At the time of writing, Laye was experiencing the solitude and misery of the black worker in France. He would work in the factory during the day and return alone to the Africa he was trying to recreate for himself in his cold, barren room. The result is stunning in its stark simplicity but it is the fruit of a very painful period of parturition.

Senghor, the intellectual, has long left this stage behind him. He does not battle against being an assimilado and accepts his cultural métissage and is proud of it. In an article entitled ‘On the Freedom of the Soul or the Praises of Métissage’ which appeared in the October 1950 issue of Liberté de l'Esprit, Senghor reminds us that most great civilisations have depended on the grafting of culture on culture to reach their high stage of development. Africans should therefore take advantage of this opportunity in cultural development being offered by the European colonisation of their native land. The same idea is repeated several times in his essays and speeches. In the 1956 Conference of Black Writers and Artists, held at the Sorbonne, a lively discussion developed between the Afro-Americans and Antilleans on the one hand and the Africans on the other. Here is part of Senghor's contribution to the discussion:

So we, too, are objectively half-castes. And this is where I would quarrel with Césaire while agreeing with him. Today we are objectively half-castes … much of the reasoning of French Africans derives from Descartes. This is why, quite often, you don't follow us, as we don't altogether follow you, because you, like the Anglo-Saxons, are pragmatists.

Prose and Poetry

However, since Senghor can declare:

I think in French; I express myself in French better than in my mother tongue.

Négritude et Humanisme

in that famous essay published in Esprit, he has evidently been a victim of the acculturation which appears to have been the aim of the French educational system in Africa. This cultural imperialism serves to make the victim nostalgic and sentimental about a past that still exists in the present reality of the mass of his brothers’.

In terms of space and time the writer is so far removed from the reality of his people that having lived in Western society and having been assimilated by its values, the African has moved out of his traditional ecological milieu, out of the socio-cultural structure of his people and he has begun to move forward in time. …

What I am attempting to show is that the concept of Négritude is the direct product of a successful process of acculturation undertaken by the European in Africa. It is an intellectual concept that has nothing to do with the existential reality of the mass of black men. It is the means of integrating alienated man in the security of a myth that he has created for his own benefit and for that of his social class.

The individualism peculiar to the exercise is the antithesis of the authentic cultural values of Africa where art is for the largest possible group but yet not vulgarised. The oral tradition in literature is a community participatory exercise. Dance and sculpture, by their very nature, are community-oriented activities. Aesthetics for its own sake is a nonsense and absurd since man as a collective being is forever at the centre of artistic expression. The esoteric nature of Césaire's writings leaves no doubt about the individualism of his work. His intellectualisation and mythification of the black man's reality further alienate him from his brothers with whom he can feel only an intellectual solidarity.

The black man in the tramway, shunned by Césaire, serves as a catalyst in Return to my Native Land. Césaire awakens to the reality of his blackness and to the universality of his Négritude. However, his predilection for the fine French phrase, the obscure word that frequently sends even the educated reader vainly searching in his dictionary, this parade of Western European erudition that Frantz Fanon analyses so well in Black Skin, White Masks, serves only to remove him yet further from his people. Indeed he appears to be writing not for them but for a white public. …

Both Césaire and Senghor project themselves in another country and at another period which is no longer theirs. For Senghor thinks of a way of life now lost for him among his Serere people. Césaire looks towards a traditional African life that he cannot know and towards periods of the past when Africans governed Africa and when Africans liberated themselves of a foreign yoke in Haiti. Both men are looking towards a utopian state.

I am not trying to say that Senghor and Césaire are completely oblivious to every aspect of the black man's reality. But as a map is an abstraction of a city, province or country, the economic and political awareness of problems is an intellectualisation and institutionalisation of social reality.

Négritude is then a new religion of the middle-class black intellectual and as such it dulls his sense of reality. His eyes are firmly fixed on a utopian period although he can hear the cries of anguish of his brothers struggling through their present reality. But the Western-educated intellectual is also future-oriented and yet another myth is the implication that the Zamani Utopia may return, and the Utopia is the myth that the humanistic values of Négritude will prevail and that eventually, a harmonious universal civilisation will evolve, deeply impregnated with the sap of African cultural and moral values. Western philosophies—Marxist as well as Christian—have led black intellectuals to these conclusions. Angela Davis and Martin Luther King have very much in common.

Western religious philosophy has ensnared the black man into a belief in dialectical or evolutionary processes towards universal harmony where eventually he will be assimilated or integrated. But assimilated and integrated into what? If the black man does become integrated into Western European thought patterns and humanistic values, as Césaire and Senghor have been, then he becomes alienated or a man divided against himself—whichever terminology one prefers.

The concept of Négritude cannot be the answer to any situation pertaining to the reality of the black masses. It is a fine idea, useful and necessary to the cultural development of a Western-educated elite. It is also perhaps a necessary stage in a true renaissance of African culture so long devastated or bastardised by ignorance and prejudice. But at best today Négritude seems no more than yet another of Western Europe's philosophic aberrations.

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