SOURCE: Irele, Abiola. “The Negritude Debate.” In European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Albert S. Gérard, pp. 379-93. Budapest, Hungary: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1986.

[In the following essay, Irele explores the various interpretations of Negritude by writers through the decades, placing it in a historical-political perspective.]

There is a sense in which the development of negritude,¹ both as a movement and as a concept, has been marked by a fundamental irony. This irony stems from the fact that the first extended discussion and systematic formulation of negritude was provided by Jean-Paul Sartre. In many ways, it was Sartre's brilliant analysis in the essay “Orphée noir” that consecrated the term and gave negritude the status of one of the most important ideological concepts of our time. At the same time, it can be argued that his very formulation has been in large measure responsible for the ambiguity that has surrounded the term and generated the controversy that negritude has attracted to itself ever since.

The starting point of Sartre's analysis is the complex of emotions and attitudes expressed in the poetry of the first generation of French-speaking black poets brought together in the 1948 anthology by L. S. Senghor.² These emotions and attitudes, related as they were to a historical experience common to all black people, were subsumed under the term negritude coined by Aimé Césaire and first used by him in the long poem, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. In exploring the universe of feelings of which the poetry was a representation, Sartre was led also to examine the various meanings suggested by the term and to offer a comprehensive interpretation of its significance.

His trenchant summing up of negritude as “the Negro's affective attitude to the world” underlines his understanding of the movement as a response to the specific pressures of a historical situation, as a means for the black man to take his place in history as an active agent rather than as a suffering object. Sartre develops this aspect of the movement as follows:

La situation du noir, sa “déchirure” originelle, l'aliénation qu'une pensée étrangère lui impose sous le nom d'assimilation le mettent dans l'obligation de reconquérir son unité existentielle de nègre ou, si l'on préfère, la pureté originelle de son projet par une ascèse progressive, au-delà de l'univers du discours. La négritude, comme la liberté, est point de départ et terme ultime: il s'agit de la faire passer de l'immédiat au médiat, de la thématiser.

(p. xxiii)

Sartre further discerns in this progression of the black consciousness towards a full awareness of its determining history a positive manner of transcending experience, of living the world in its fullest implications. This leads him to the well-known formulation of negritude, in terms of his existentialist philosophy, as “the-being-in-the-world of the Negro.”

It was perhaps to be expected that Sartre's interpretation would be closely related to his own philosophical and ideological preoccupations at the time he wrote the essay, and generally his discussion refers to an ethical and philosophical tradition of radicalism of which he has been one of the most distinguished contemporary heirs. This radical approach was moreover perfectly suited to any understanding of the actualities of the global experience of the blacks as represented in the poetry Sartre was examining.

However, Sartre deviates from this course for a while, in order to consider other aspects of negritude. Taking his cue from Senghor, he devotes the entire middle section of his essay to an examination of the term as fundamental reference for the black poet in his “existential project.” Thus he writes:

Cette méthode … est la loi dialectique des transformations successives qui conduiront le nègre à la coïncidence avec soi-même dans la négritude. Il ne s'agit pas pour lui de connaître, ni de s'arracher à lui-même dans l'extase mais de découvrir, à la fois et de devenir ce qu'il est.

(p. xxiii)

Sartre goes on to distinguish between what he calls the “objective negritude” which expresses itself in the customs, the arts, the songs and dances of the African populations, and the “subjective negritude” of the black poet, which corresponds to the movement of his sensibility towards the scheme of spiritual values defined by those elements of the African civilization that stand as the objective references of his original identity. And it is precisely Sartre's understanding of this movement that gives point to the title of his essay. As he puts it,

Ainsi sont indissolublement mêlés chez le vates de la négritude le thème du retour au pays natal et celui de la redescente aux Enfers éclatants de l'âme noire. Il s'agit d'une quête, d'un dépouillement systématique et d'une ascèse qu'accompagne un effort continu d'approfondissement. Et je nommerai “orphique” cette poésie parce que cette inlassable descente du nègre en soi-même me fait songer à Orphée allant réclamer Eurydice à Pluton.

(p. xvii)

In this light negritude begins to appear as something more than an active confrontation with history, more than a strategy, so to speak, to meet the demands and vicissitudes of the collective existence, but rather as a term or facet of an original being which gives sanction to the historical gesture of the black poet. Sartre elaborates indeed on this aspect. Analysing the symbolism employed by the poets, as expressive of an original mode of apprehension, he comes to the following conclusion:

Si l'on voulait systématiser, on dirait que le Noir se fond à la Nature entière en tant qu'il est sympathie sexuelle pour la Vie et qu'il se revendique comme l'Homme en tant qu'il est Passion de douleur révoltée.

(p. xxxv)

Although Sartre finds a parallel between this vitalism and the Dionysian cult of ancient Greece as celebrated by Nietzsche, he seems to regard it as a specific endowment of the black and as the essential quality of negritude. And relating this to the poetic expression of the French-speaking black, he asks:

Est-ce une explication systématique de l'âme noire ou un Archétype platonicien qu'on peut indéfiniment approcher sans jamais y atteindre?

(p. xl)

But though Sartre here appears to envisage negritude from an essentialist point of view, it turns out that in fact his emphasis is elsewhere, and it is here that some of the ambiguity in his analysis resides. For negritude is for him, not so much the expression in time of a definite collective personality and mode of understanding peculiar to the black, but a contingent phenomenon, the provisional outcome of the tension between the black man's “situation” on one hand, and on the other, his “freedom”. The sympathy which Sartre appears to exhibit for an idealist notion of a “black soul” proves illusory, as his emphasis on the historical and ideological significance of the concept emerges more clearly towards the end of his essay:

Du coup la notion subjective, existentielle, ethnique de négritude “passe,” comme dit Hegel, dans celle—objective, positive, exacte—de prolétariat.

(p. xl)

And further on he sums up the matter in the following terms:

En fait, la Négritude apparaît comme le temps faible d'une progression dialectique: l'affirmation théorique et pratique de la suprématie du blanc est la thèse; la position de la Négritude comme valeur antithétique est le moment de la négativité. Mais ce moment négatif n'a pas de suffisance par lui-même et les noirs qui en usent le savent fort bien; ils savent qu'il vise à préparer la synthèse ou réalisation de l'humain dans une société sans races.

(p. xli)

In concrete terms, then, Sartre suggests in his essay that the felt intensity of black poetry, related as it is to a specific historical experience, serves indeed to endow that experience with a tragic beauty and symbolic resonance, but that its true direction and meaning reside in its defining for the race a truly historic mission. “Because Negritude is not a state, it is pure surpassing of itself,” writes Sartre; since for him, it is simply the effort to create a new and positive mode of historical existence and consciousness for the black race, in a perpetual tension between the actualities of its collective experience, and the humanizing tendencies of its collective will and intention.

Sartre's essay was to exercise a remarkable influence not only in making known black poetry in the French language, but also in establishing negritude as a significant contemporary ideology. It provided not only the main themes of its later development as a concept notably in the writings of Senghor, but also, arising out of its bristling ambiguities, the lines along which much of the controversy on negritude has run. There is a further paradox involved here, for Senghor's formulation, while representing a further expansion of some of the themes which Sartre's essay threw up in such magnificent profusion, shows in fact a clear divergence from Sartre in its emphasis. In an important respect, Senghor in his essays elaborates on these themes in order to gather them, as it were, into a focus upon what seemed to him, as an African, the essential point: the affirmation of negritude as a concept designating the collective personality of the black race, as a quality essential to the race, and only incidentally involved in a particular history which it transcends.

Thus while Senghor does not lose sight of the historical context of negritude as a movement involving the expression of a new spirit of black assertion relative to the political and sociological conditions of the black experience, he tends rather to a definition of the concept itself in terms that are fundamentally essentialist. For him, negritude represents a mode of being and denotes the cultural and spiritual endowment of the black man, a basic groundwork of the collective personality, deriving from the common African origin. Where Sartre's emphasis falls on the “subjective Negritude” which is historical and contingent, Senghor sees this simply as an inner compulsion, arising from the circumstances of history, towards self-affirmation, and therefore as a purely secondary aspect of negritude. The act of self-affirmation itself is related more importantly, for Senghor, to a common consciousness of shared cultural and moral values, and of psychological traits original to the race—hence his most common definition of negritude as “l'ensemble des valeurs du monde noir.” There is a clear shift therefore from Sartre's understanding of negritude as a phenomenon subject to the laws of a historical dialectic to a view of negritude as a unique endowment of the black soul, with an objective expression in those specific features of the African civilization which make it a distinctive organic whole, and which are the determinants of a special disposition of the black race. Where for Sartre, negritude is pure contingence and becoming, for Senghor it is an irreducible essence of the collective identity.

It is instructive to confront the views of Sartre and of Senghor because their divergence on the essential definition reveals not merely a difference of personal intellectual dispositions but, more fundamentally, of interests and involvement in the subject. The essential motivation of Senghor's efforts was to rehabilitate African civilization and through it the black race. Though Sartre shows some sympathy for this consideration and makes some concession to it, his final emphasis, as we have seen, does not rest on a new appraisal of African culture, to which he was an outsider, but rather on the possible historical role of black men in a political and social revolution whose ideological seeds were sown in Europe. Senghor's interest lay elsewhere, and if he concedes a historical significance to negritude, it is a significance that derives from a unique situation of the race, not to be confounded with any other. This much is made clear in the following lines:

La voix de l'Afrique planant au-dessus de la
                    rage des canons longs
.....Est-ce sa faute si Dieu lui a demandé les prémices
                    de ses moissons
Les plus beaux épis, et les plus beaux corps élus
                    patiemment parmi mille peuples?(3)

This view of the race singled out for a unique historical and moral mission derives from an absolute vision of the race which Senghor expresses in another poem:

Pour tous ceux-là qui sont entrés par les quatre
                    portes sculptées—la marche
Solennelle de mes peuples patients! leurs pas se
                    perdent dans les sables de l'histoire.(4)

In other words, the special experience of the race, the particular character of black history, is merely a facet of a collective being that, in its foundation, remains outside history.

Senghor's theory of negritude, as elaborated in some key essays collected in Liberté I (1964), and diffused throughout his prose works, rests therefore on this essential vision of the race.

The main lines of this theory are now well established, and can be briefly summarized, in order to place them within the context of the controversy that they have aroused. As is well known, Senghor's thinking is based on an emotive theory of the African personality, from which he derives his explication of the modes of apprehension that are original to Africa and characteristic of its culture and societies. Senghor has consistently argued that, by virtue of the traditional African's situation within the organic milieu which determines in him a specific psycho-physiological constitution, he is endowed with a special force of response to the outside world, with a mode of feeling which is involved in a form of sensuous “participation” with nature and which affords him an immediate grasp of the inner quality of reality. This form of experience, proceeding from a faculty which, after Bergson, Senghor has termed “emotion,” establishes a direct and intense relation between the experiencing mind and the object of its experience; it leads therefore to a fuller apprehension of reality than is afforded by the limiting forms of mental operations associated with the discursive method to which, since the ancient Greeks, Western civilization has given an ascendant position in its approach to experience. The following extract is a characteristic statement of this point of view:

Ici, les faits naturels, surtout “les faits sociaux ne sont pas des choses.” Il y a, cachées derrière eux, les forces cosmiques et vitales qui les régissent, animant ces apparences, leur donnant couleur et rythme, vie et sens. C'est cette signification qui s'impose à la conscience et provoque l'émotion. Plus justement encore, l'émotion est la saisie de l'être intégral—conscience et corps—par le monde de l'indéterminé, l'irruption du monde mystique—ou magique—dans le monde de la détermination. Ce qui émeut le Négro-africain, ce n'est pas tant l'aspect extérieur de l'objet que sa réalité profonde, sa sous-réalité, pas tant son signe que son sens.⁵

The whole framework of African sensibility and expression rests on this postulate in Senghor's theory, and determines the African world-view in his formulation. The strong sense of sympathy with the universe which the African's participating relation with nature affords, leads to a conception of the world as a system of vital forces, linked as it were in a hierarchical order within “a great chain of being.” The African's mode of apprehension is thus mystical and is sustained by a sense of the sacred, in which reverence for the dead and a belief in the continuing life of the ancestors also play a significant part. All this in turn informs the moral values of African societies and determines their characteristic form of social organization which rests on a close and intensely spiritual sense of community. The social universe appears therefore as a translation into practical terms of the values that derive from a profound level of spiritual experience.

Senghor's theory of negritude rests on what might be termed an African epistemology, and embraces a distinction long acknowledged, even in Western thought, between two different modes of knowledge: on one hand, the intuitive and symbolic, which Senghor attributes to African civilization as its distinctive mode, and on the other, the rational and scientific, which he ascribes to the West. Hence his famous statement: “L'émotion est nègre, comme la raison hellène.”

But for all the sharpness of this dichotomy, it does not appear that Senghor wishes to postulate an irreconcilable opposition between the two modes. Although in his writings the question is not given the proper clarification that it requires, there is nonetheless the constant suggestion that he sees the two modes as complementary, and their interaction as necessary to the full development of the life of man. His distinction acquires its sharpness from Senghor's insistence on the need to give recognition to certain aspects of African forms of life and expression which had been taken as indications of the African's inherent inferiority to the European, and Senghor points to these as essential in any consideration of human experience that would understand it in its wholeness. He does not hesitate to reinforce his case by reference to those currents in European thought that, in reaction against the dominant rationalism, had attempted to arrive at a more subtle and more complete view of life by resorting to nonrational categories. In this sense, Senghor's exaltation of the mystical and intuitive allies the anti-intellectual protest within Western thought against rationalism and scientism to a specific effort to rehabilitate the traditional civilizations of his native continent.

This point leads us to a consideration of a special character of his theory that has to do with his position as a poet. It is evident that, for all his borrowing of terms and concepts from contemporary psychology and philosophy, Senghor's formulations derive less from a rigorous investigation of the nature of the African personality and its social expressions than from a personal feeling for the native civilization that stands behind him, and they amount to a passionate defence of what he conceives to be its essential values. In his conception of negritude, these values are directed towards a spiritual vision of man and the universe. The need to rehabilitate African civilization meets here with the poet's requirements for a scheme of spiritual reference for his individual poetic expression. The metaphors with which Senghor habitually decks out his theory are indeed only less opaque than those that animate his poetry; in one as in the other, they serve to convey a personal feeling for a world of primary experience, for a mythical intuition of a reality that transcends the material world and the historical process.

Thus, Senghor's theory fulfils a double function—as an ideological revaluation of African civilization and as the intellectual foundation and reference, derived from a living culture, of his poetic thought and mythology. For Senghor, traditional African civilization provides the active model of a significant form of human experience and thus serves as a source of inspiration for his individual spiritual vision. The ideas that go into his theory of negritude spring as much from a desire to understand the nature of that inspiration as from a need to present a new and positive image of Africa to the world.

The concept of negritude has come today to be associated with the name of Senghor. But the first major attack on the concept was directed not at Senghor but at Sartre. This is perhaps not surprising, since Sartre himself was the first to give some encouragement to the systematic elucidation of the notion of “black soul.” At all events, it is in 1953, in a review of “Orphée noir” contributed by an African student, Albert Franklin, to a special issue of Présence Africaine entitled Les Etudiants noirs parlent, that we find the first extended questioning of this notion and of the ideas which Sartre put forward around it.⁶ Franklin developed a series of objections to negritude both as a concept and as a historical force, and attempted a systematic refutation of it as an inherent racial attribute. His objections are framed within an avowedly Marxist viewpoint, and his arguments are based on a rigorous economic and materialist explanation of the differences between African and European civilizations, and varying patterns of social psychology, of personalities and attitudes, which they may be thought to determine. Thus, examining the notion that the African (and by extension the black man) is endowed with a sense of community as a racial inheritance, whereas the European is predisposed in the same way to a morality of individualism, he writes:

Mais il est faux d'y voir les effets d'on ne sait quelle vertu originelle de l'Essence Noire. D'autre part, si le Blanc (Européen ou Américain) est devenu individualiste, ce n'est pas davantage grâce à une vertu originelle de l'Essence Blanche. Dans le premier comme dans le deuxième cas, ce sont les niveaux organiques des deux économies respectives qui sont les causes et le soutien matériel.⁷

In a similar vein, Franklin attacks what he sees as a complaisant idealism in Sartre's essay: it appears to concede the racial character of some of the traits which mark out African civilizations and as a consequence, the personality of the African: a sense of rhythm, an organic sense of life with a strong sexual character, a mystic approach to the natural universe and the cult of the ancestors, all of which are assimilated to the concept of negritude. For Franklin, these traits are merely conditioned by the level of technical competence achieved by the traditional civilizations, destined to be transcended as African societies evolve, and a new modern consciousness emerges within these societies. In particular, Franklin attacks the distinction which Sartre appears to make between the intuitive approach of the black man to reality, and the intellection of the white: he rejects the image of the African civilizations as being essentially non-scientific and non-technical.

But Franklin's overriding concern is political. He is plainly preoccupied with the ideological and political implications of these notions which appear to him to buttress the colonialist myth of the black man and to sanction his continued subjugation by the white. His conclusion is unequivocal in its rejection of negritude as a serviceable concept for the blacks in the colonial struggle:

Dans cette lutte, la Négritude n'est pas faite pour nous aider, puisqu'elle est repos, captation magique du monde, c'est-à-dire abandon, angoisse, déespoir.⁸

Franklin's article holds special interest for any consideration of the negritude controversy. For although, on balance, it reveals a misunderstanding of Sartre's real position, it shows up the ambiguities with which Sartre enveloped the term, and lights up with singular clarity the very paradox of his position. Beyond that, it anticipates with remarkable prescience the very objections which were to be brought against the concept of negritude as it was developed further by Senghor in the two decades or so that followed the appearance of Sartre's essay. From the scattered intimations of the possible lines of the development of the concept in Sartre's essay, it marked out for attack those very points which Senghor himself was to elaborate later into a comprehensive theory. It thus foreshadowed the pattern of the controversy that negritude was later to generate. For while Franklin accepts the necessity of creating a new image of the black man as a psychological reference in the struggle against colonialism and racism, he also indicates that the delineations of such an image, its very character, cannot be a matter of indifference to the reflecting consciousness of the black intellectual caught in the colonial experience. It is this very question that can be considered to be at the heart of the negritude controversy.

In the debate that has attended the development of negritude as a concept, perhaps the most extreme form of the cleavage between adherents and antagonists has been that created by the initial hostility of a significant section of English-speaking intellectuals to the movement as a whole. It seems indeed as if the very degree of elaboration with which Senghor in particular presented his theory has created a climate in which his ideas have been met with incomprehension and indeed a certain scepticism.⁹ This initial reaction of the English-speaking intellectuals seems to have been summed up by Ezekiel Mphahlele when he made the following observation: “For us, Negritude is merely intellectual talk, a cult.” Mphahlele expands on this somewhat laconic view of the movement by stressing the difference between the cultural situation of the French- and English-speaking Africans within the colonial system:

It is significant that it is not the African in British-settled territories—a product of indirect rule and one that has been left in his cultural habitat—who readily reaches out for his traditional past. It is rather the assimilated African, who has absorbed French culture, who is now passionately wanting to recapture his past. In his poetry, he extols his ancestors, ancestral masks, African wood carvings and bronze art, and he tries to recover the moorings of his oral literature; he clearly feels he has come to a dead end in European culture, and is still not really accepted as an organic part of French society, for all the assimilation he has been through.¹⁰

It would not be difficult to show that Mphahlele's division is not only inadequate as an explanation but that it ignores the facts of the historical development of a theory of Africanism as an integral aspect of African nationalism in British-controlled Africa. For although the concept of “African personality” as it emerged in the writings of the English-speaking African intellectuals in the nineteenth century and particularly in the work of Edward Wilmot Blyden, did not receive the same degree of elaboration as that of negritude, it contained the same elements of racial and cultural awareness as negritude was later to express in a more comprehensive form, and was thus a significant precedent.¹¹ It is nonetheless true to say that the cultural problem did not lead to the same kind of self-dramatization among English-speaking Africans as among the adherents of negritude, a situation which inspired the well-known boutade by the Nigerian dramatist, Wole Soyinka: “The tiger has no need to proclaim its tigritude.”

Soyinka has more recently developed his attack on negritude in less elliptical terms. In his book, Myth, Literature and the African World, he reproaches its adherents with their failing to pose the question of African civilization in terms proper to it:

The fundamental error was one of procedure: negritude stayed within a pre-set system of Eurocentric intellectual analysis both of man and society and tried to re-define the African and his society in those externalised terms.¹²

Soyinka argues that this procedure was induced by the defensive attitude of the theoreticians of negritude towards the ideological affirmation of European superiority in the realm of intellectual and technological endeavour, such that they were forced into a romanticism that was essentially a system of counter-values opposed to those impregnably held, as it appeared, by Western civilization. The movement of self-affirmation, which the Nigerian playwright approves in principle, thus coincided in negritude with an over-simplified view of human difference which, in his opinion, does not effect a decisive break with the very structure of European thinking on human and social problems. The result is a curious confirmation, even within its very revolt against Europe, of European judgements and attitudes. Soyinka puts the matter thus:

Negritude trapped itself in what was primarily a defensive role, even though its accents were strident, its syntax hyperbolic and its strategy aggressive. It accepted one of the most commonplace blasphemies of racism, that the black man has nothing between his ears, and proceeded to subvert the power of poetry to glorify this fabricated justification of European cultural domination. Suddenly, we were exhorted to give a cheer for those who never explored the oceans. The truth however is that there isn't any such creature.¹³

It is plain that Soyinka reads into Senghor's texts a meaning that their author could never remotely have intended, and even if the rhetoric which Senghor often employs to express his ideas lays open his thinking to this kind of distortion, it must be said that Soyinka is less than fair to Senghor here. But Soyinka's critique is significant, coming from a writer who shares with Senghor a common interest in restoring to the modern consciousness that primal order of the imagination which they both recognize as a privileged mode of experience within African civilizations.

Soyinka's critique of negritude goes beyond a mere expression of antagonism arising out of a difference of intellectual background, as is the case very largely with Mphahlele, to a questioning of the very theoretical foundations of the concept. In this respect, he is adding his voice and the authority of his position to a chorus of objections that have arisen from all sides and especially among the younger generation of French-speaking African intellectuals since Franklin's essay appeared. These objections in the main take up the points already made by Franklin with a new amplification and are directed specifically at Senghor, whose personality has become intimately associated with the concept.

Perhaps the most important charge against negritude is the one that underlies Soyinka's criticism, namely its apparent acquiescence in the stereotype of the black man as a non-rational creature. This charge had been developed at considerable length in the late sixties by another Nigerian, S. O. Mezu, in his study of Senghor's poetry.¹⁴ In Senghor's ideas concerning the emotive disposition of the black man, this critic discerns a throwback to the thinking of Gobineau, and more generally an uncritical acceptance of the theoretical and ideological discriminations between races by which the notion of white superiority is sustained. The close similarity in both conception and presentation between certain aspects of Senghor's theory of the African personality, with its insistence on the “principle of participation” in its mode of apprehension, and that of “primitive mentality” put forward by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, is seen by Mezu as a form of ideological complicity with the colonial system.¹⁵ Mezu's criticism of the derivative nature of Senghor's theory has been further extended by another commentator, Yenoukoume Enagnon in what amounts to a philosophical critique of Senghor's negritude, as the author denies its value as an original system of thought: “la négritude reste un appendice négrifié de la philosophie idéaliste de Bergson, aménagé par Teilhard de Chardin.” Enagnon's view is further developed in the following observations:

M. Senghor a pratiquement emprunté toute sa terminologie à Bergson et à Teilhard de Chardin. Quant à ses connaissances philosophiques, nous avons vu qu'elles sont très fragmentaires et généralement erronées. En tant qu'africain cependant, a-t-il fait l'effort de dégager une conception du monde qui pourrait valablement porter le nom de philosophie “Senghorienne” et qui, dans l'avenir, pourrait figurer parmi les philosophies africaines, au sens par exemple ou l'on parle de la “philosophie sartrienne” dans le contexte des philosophies européennes? Nous ne le pensons pas. M. Senghor, philosophiquement parlant, est un idéaliste, c'est tout. Mais il n'y a pas “d'idéalisme senghorien.”¹⁶

These objections concern what one might call the fabric from which Senghor's theory of negritude is woven. More important have been the attacks directed against the very content and practical implications of the theory.

The most representative attack on negritude, from this point of view, is that developed by Marcien Towa in his short book, Léopold Sédar Senghor: Négritude ou Servitude, whose title is sufficiently eloquent of its author's intention. Towa's discussion of negritude is based essentially on an interpretation of Senghor's poetry which relates both to his theoretical writings and to the different phases of his political activity. In this way, Towa attempts to establish a congruence between the dominant attitudes that appear to him to underlie Senghor's poetic expression—attitudes of conciliation and accommodation—and the ideological significance of Senghor's theory within the colonial context. For him, this significance amounts to an acceptance of a subservient role for the black man in the scheme of human affairs, and a collaborative attitude to the white man's domination. Towa proceeds from an examination of Senghor's poetical themes to this conclusion regarding those options that have marked the evolution of Senghor the politician. Thus, after considering the volume Ethiopiques, Towa concludes:

L'insistence sur la sensualité du nègre, son émotivité, son incapacité technique etc … coïncide avec l'opposition active du poète contre toute idée d'indépendance, opposition qui marquera toutes ses démarches politiques durant la période qui va de 1947 à 1958.¹⁷

This manner of establishing a correspondence between the themes and ideas of a writer and the events and choices of his real life is of course legitimate, but in the particular instance fails to carry real conviction because Towa's procedure is based on a less than sensitive reading of Senghor's poetry and on a somewhat summary consideration of the details of Senghor's political life and activity during the period he alludes to. Towa is however on firmer ground when, in the last chapter of his book, he turns to a direct analysis of Senghor's ideas as embodied in the theoretical and ideological conception of culture from which the negritude theory draws much of its impulse. Towa's critique is intended primarily to draw out the practical implication of such a conception for contemporary Africa, as it appears to him to arise from Senghor's theory:

Acculé à s'adapter à l'univers technico-scientifique que l'Europe fait surgir autour de lui, le nègre ne trouverait dans son patrimoine biologique aucune ressource lui permettant de relever le défi, ni immédiatement ni à terme. Senghor ne voit d'issue que dans l'acceptation de la tutelle blanche, en attendant que la spécificité biologique du nègre se dilue et disparaisse par métissage dans une humanité sans races.¹⁸

The point of Towa's critique is made with even greater emphasis by Stanislas Adotevi in his frankly polemical book, Négritude et Négrologues, which contains the most comprehensive and the most vigorous attack so far on negritude. Adotevi's objections to the theory are presented with a marked disregard for organization, but with a vehemence that translates a mood of accumulated impatience into open animosity. Like other writers before him, he rejects the notion of an irreducible black soul:

[La Négritude] suppose une essence rigide du nègre que le temps n'atteint pas. A cette permanence s'ajoute une spécificité que ni les déterminations sociologiques ni les variations historiques, ni les réalités géographiques ne confirment. Elle fait des nègres des êtres semblables partout et dans le temps.¹⁹

Beyond the abstract notion of a collective being of the race outside history, Adotevi's attack is directed here against the sociological references of the concept of negritude. The notion of a unified African universe, constituting a moral and spiritual whole distinctive of the race and set apart from other racial wholes is struck at, as it were at the base—the empirical facts revealing the rich diversity of African values and forms of expression are thus adduced as evidence of the fundamental infirmity of the notion. Adotevi proceeds from this to a critical review of negritude's various claims to express the truth of the African personality and situation. He attacks in particular the recourse to traditionalism as an unrealistic regressive appeal to an inheritance that no longer has a value for the contemporary African, and he observes: “C'est dans l'inadéquation de ces notions aux problèmes africains que se trouve la clé des difficultés que soulève la négritude.”

For Adotevi, the criterion of judgement is not only the objective value and coherence of Senghor's theory but also its relevance to the immediate preoccupations of the African populations. He goes further by attributing to negritude and its derivative, African Socialism, a particular significance in the post-colonial context, for he sees both as an elaborate system of mystification, as an ideological construction in the Marxist sense, intended to mask and preserve vested interests:

La négritude doit être le soporifique du nègre. C'est l'opium. C'est la drogue qui permettra à l'heure des grands partages d'avoir de “bons nègres.”²⁰

The various judgements of negritude discussed here represent a fair summary of the reactions that have been provoked by Senghor's efforts to formulate a comprehensive theory of the black personality and to endow such a theory with a meaning for contemporary African life. What seems clear from these reactions is the fact that while the original stance of negritude as a form of black self-affirmation, is accepted, the particular terms of Senghor's formulations in his development of the concept, as well as the practical orientation of the theoretician himself, in his position as a political leader, are viewed with mistrust. This explains the attempt by many critics of negritude to make a distinction between Senghor's form of negritude and what they take to be Césaire's continued adherence to the original project. Thus, René Depestre writes:

La négritude, avec Aimé Césaire, père du concept qu'il a défendu et illustré tout au long d'une œuvre exemplaire, était avant tout une prise de conscience concrète de l'oppression, comme chez Guillén, Fanon, Roumain, Damas, etc., c'est-à-dire une recherche passionnée d'identification de l'homme noir profané par des siècles d'esclavage et de mépris.²¹

Seeking to drive a wedge in this way between Césaire and Senghor is made all the simpler by the fact that Césaire himself has made no attempt to develop a theory, though his poetry draws much of its force from many of the ideas that inform Senghor's theory. This limitation of the Martinican poet's negritude to symbolic expression rather than conceptual formulation has preserved him from the attacks discussed here, all of which reveal a preoccupation with giving to the notion of African personality and culture an active and efficient value, indeed a revolutionary significance. This position was well represented at an early stage in Fanon's statement to the effect that

La culture négro-africaine, c'est autour de la lutte des peuples qu'elle se densifie, et non autour des chants, des poèmes ou du folklore.²²

Fanon's position is the most extreme taken on the question, and is characteristic of his uncompromising insistence on the primacy of political action, in the colonial situation, over the cultural. It represents a reversal of the priorities which Senghor has attempted to establish in his efforts to promote a new consciousness on the part of the black man through a revaluation of African civilization as a condition for his political and social emancipation. In a more general perspective, Fanon's statement also sums up the underlying postulates of nearly all the critics of negritude: they proceed from what one might call a positivist standpoint, involving a materialist view of society. In their concern with achieving an immediate sense of reality, they have little or no sympathy for any theory of African development that does not appear to bear a direct relation to an objective and practical scheme of historical action in the contemporary world. The appeal to a racial consciousness based on a new appraisal of the potential of African civilization to create a new order of life and expression for black peoples appears to them to be too remote from the exigencies of the moment to be of any practical and immediate significance.

Despite the continuing attacks levelled against it, it is undeniable that the concept of negritude has acquired a historical and ideological value of the first importance, and, with the literature associated with it, remains the most comprehensive and coherent effort of reflection upon the African situation. Its impact upon modern African thought has been far-reaching. Indeed, what the debate around the concept has demonstrated is the special power it has exercised in black intellectual circles on both sides of the Atlantic. In a more limited perspective, its significance in the movement towards independence has received a recognition which has more recently been expressed by one of the younger African intellectuals in these terms:

Ce retour aux sources négro-africaines a consacré effectivement les valeurs nègres de civilisation. Et la négritude, par conséquent, a permis de souder les consciences des peuples noirs et les a mobilisés pour les luttes anticoloniales et libératrices.²³

Within a broader perspective, the negritude movement can also be said to have defined the terms of a projection of the African consciousness into a future in which African development is intimately bound up with the conditions of human evolution in the modern world. Senghor's ideas have constantly been oriented towards such a future in which African civilization will play an original and significant role in what he calls “la civilisation de l'Universel.” And the awareness of the necessary integration of modern values into the framework of an original African scheme of life and expression forms an essential part of the intellectual adventure of negritude. That this awareness has become an accepted element of African thinking is well borne out by this statement by another member of the younger generation:

La renaissance africaine, pour exprimer son africanité, son authenticité et la conscience d'elle-même, devra s'assimiler la modernité selon ses propres termes. Cet effort implique sinon une révolution du contenu des cultures africaines, du moins leur transformation profonde, leur actualisation.²⁴

The literature of negritude has given expression to the lived actualities of the black experience. Furthermore, by promoting the concept of an original racial specificity, it has provided the collective consciousness with the fundamental basis for the black man's confrontation of a difficult history and for his determination to create for himself a new mode of historical being.

Notes

1. Although the term “negritude” was first coined and used in print by Aimé Césaire, the concept was most articulately expounded by Léopold Senghor in a number of essays which were later conveniently collected as Liberté I: Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964). The first book-length exegesis was produced by Cameroonian scholar Thomas Melone, De la négritude dans la littérature africaine (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962): this was followed after a few years by Haitian writer René Piquion's Manuel de négritude (Port-au-Prince: Deschamps, 1965). Later books on the topic include: I. Montenegro, A Negritude, dos mitos as realidades (Braga: Pax, 1967); Negritude: Essays and Studies, ed. A. H. Berrian and R. A. Long (Hampton, Va.: Hampton Institute Press, 1967); Lilyan Kesteloot, Négritude et situation coloniale (Yaunde: C.L.E., 1968); Jean-Marie Abanda Ndengue, De la négritude au négrisme: Essais polyphoniques (Yaunde: C.L.E., 1970); Stanislas Adotevi, Négritude et négrologues (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1972); L. S. Senghor, Mercer Cook, et al., Colloque sur la négritude (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1972); Jeanne-Lydie Goré, Les Littératures d'expression française: Négritude africaine, négritude caraïbe (Paris: Université de Paris-Nord, 1973); Rosa Marie Villarello Reza, Negritud y colonialismo cultural en Africa (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma, 1975). Negritude has been a fashionable topic for numberless articles of unequal scholarly value in a great variety of languages. Special mention should be made of Professor Abiola Irele's own contributions: “Negritude or Black Cultural Nationalism,” Journal of Modern African Studies 3 (1965), 321-348; “Negritude, Literature and Ideology,” Ibid., 499-526; “Negritude Revisited,” Odù 5 (1971), 3-26; “Negritude et African Personality,” in Colloque sur la négritude (1972) pp. 151-168; and “Négritude: Philosophy of African Being,” Nigeria Magazine, 122/123 (1977), 1-13. Some of the most cogent discussions of negritude will be found in books dealing with Senghor's poetry and ideas, as for example R. Zastrow, Der negro-afrikanische, existentialistische und lyrische Sozialismus Leopold Senghors (Hannover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen, 1965); Sébastian O. Mezu, Léopold Sédar Senghor et la défense et illustration de la civilisation noire (Paris: Didier, 1968); Ernest Milcent and Monique Sordet, Léopold Sédar Senghor et la naissance de l'Afrique moderne (Paris: Seghers, 1969); Irving Leonard Markovitz, Senghor and the Politics of Negritude (London: Heinemann, 1969); Barend van Niekerk, The African Image in the Work of Senghor (Cape Town: Balkema, 1970); Jacques L. Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh: University Press, 1971); Irmgard Hanf, Leopold Sédar Senghor: Ein afrikanischer Dichter französischer Prägung (Munich: Fink, 1972); and Sylvia Washington Bâ, The Concept of Negritude in the Poetry of Leopold Sédar Senghor (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 1973). For an orthodox Marxist-Leninist approach, see Imre Marton, Contribution à une critique des interprétation des spécificités du Tiers Monde (Budapest: Institut d'Economie Mondiale, 1978), especially pp. 11-32. [Ed.]

2. L. S. Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Paris: P.U.F., 1948). Page references are to the second edition (1969). Sartre's essay was also included in his Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). An English translation by Samuel Allen was published as Black Orpheus (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963).

3. “Chant du Printemps” in Hosties Noires (Paris: Seuil, 1948).

4. “Le Kaya-Magan” in Ethiopiques (Paris: Seuil, 1956).

5. L. S. Senghor, “De la négritude. Psychologie du Négro-africain”, Diogène, No. 37 (1962), 3-16. See p. 15.

6. Albert Franklin, “La Négritude: réalité ou mystification? Réflexions sur ‘Orphée noir’”, Présence Africaine, No. 14 (1953), 287-303. Prior to that, however, a mulatto intellectual born in Mali, Gabriel d'Arboussier (b. 1908), secretary of Houphouet-Boigny's Rassemblement Démocratique Africain before the latter cut its ties with the communist movement, had published an essay entitled “Une dangereuse mystification: La théorie de la négritude,” Nouvelle Critique, (June 1949), 34-47. In 1952 d'Arboussier was expelled from the R.D.A., but after independence, he became minister of justice in Senegal.

7. Ibid., p. 289.

8. Ibid., p. 303.

9. Richard Wright's incredulous dismay as he listened to Senghor's expostulations about negro intuition and surreality at the Paris conference of 1956 were to be expected since his own contribution dealt with “Tradition and Industrialization: The Plight of the Tragic Elite in Africa,” Présence Africaine, 8/9/10 (1956), 347-360. As he had hoped to be faced with what he called “emancipated,” intellectually liberated negroes, his bitter disappointment is conspicuous in the report of the discussions printed in the same special issue of Présence Africaine.

10. Ezekiel Mphahlele, The African Image (London: Faber, 1961), pp. 25-26. That the negritude ideology was on the whole irrelevant had always been Mphahlele's view. Reviewing Jahn's report of the Paris conference he had written: “Whether or not Richard Wright has exorcised his African gods or Senghor finds the inspiration he wants in his African past and present, does not matter to anyone else except the two writers. The African must resolve the ‘conflict’ in himself as an individual. This struggle will make the literary content of his work.” Ibadan, No. 2 (1958), 36-37. And two years later, reviewing South African anthropologist Simon Biesheuvel's Race, Culture and Personality, he pointed obliquely to the inadequacy of the negritude concept and indeed of any all-black generalizations to the South African situation: “Born into oppression as we Africans are in South Africa, we are keen to seize the tools that keep the white man in power; we are at grips with a brutal present. The past has been used against us by the white man and we have no time to sit and brood about it, even though we reject certain European values and cling to certain of our own that we still cherish. But we don't think for 24 hours of the day on which we are going to adopt or throw aside on any occasion. Three hundred years is a long time in terms of cultural cross-breeding and we have been unconsciously taking and throwing away and sifting. Senghor's people haven't had that experience. It is well that Dr. Biesheuvel talks of ‘African personalities’, which phrase has no pretention to a mystical unified whole.” Black Orpheus, No. 7 (June 1960) 57.

11. For a fuller discussion of this point, see the section “Negritude and African Personality” in my book, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (London: Heinemann, 1981), pp. 89-116.

12. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) p. 136.

13. Ibid., p. 129.

14. S. Okechukwu Mezu, Léopold Sédar Senghor et la défense et illustration de la civilisation noire (Paris: Didier, 1968).

15. Op. cit., pp. 173-176. On this point, see S. Okechukwu Mezu, “Senghor, Gobineau et l'inégalité des races humaines,” Abbia, 26 (1972), 121-141.

16. Yenoukoume Enagnon, “De la ‘philosophie senghorienne’ ou du charlatanisme philosophique à l'usage des peuples africains,” Peuples Noirs-Peuples Africains, I, 3 (1978), 11-49.

17. Marcien Towa, Léopold Sédar Senghor: Négritude ou Servitude (Yaunde: C.L.E., 1971), pp. 79-80.

18. Ibid, p. 109.

19. Stanislas Adotevi, Négritude et Négrologues (Paris: Editions 10/18, 1972), p. 45.

20. Ibid., p. 118n. On the anti-negritude movement in francophone Africa, see also Barbara Ischinger, “Negritude: Some Dissident Voices,” Issue, 4, 4 (1974), 23-25.

21. René Depestre, “Haïti ou la Négritude dévoyée,” Afric-Asia, No. 5/6 (January 1970).

22. Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre (Paris: Maspéro, 1961), p. 176.

23. Alpha Sow, “Prolégomènes” in Introduction à la culture africaine, (Paris: Editions 10/18, 1977), pp. 16-17.

24. Pathé Diagne, “Renaissance et problèmes culturels en Afrique,” in Sow, op. cit., p. 291.