{"id":5178,"date":"2025-06-26T14:00:51","date_gmt":"2025-06-26T21:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/miceregithaemugofoundation.org\/?p=5178"},"modified":"2025-10-07T12:02:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T19:02:37","slug":"negritude-is-omnipresent-in-african-writing-on-its-birth-rebellion-perceived-disappearance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miceregithaemugofoundation.fluid22.dev\/?p=5178","title":{"rendered":"Negritude Is Omnipresent in African Writing: On Its Birth, Rebellion, & Perceived Disappearance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Earlier this year, in the context of an English-language debate on race consciousness in Africa, the topic of the Negritude movement came up briefly. The Zimbabwean-South African writer Panashe Chigumadzi wrote in her finely-argued essay, \u201cWhy I\u2019m No Longer Talking to Nigerians About Race<\/a>,\u201d published in Africa Is a Country<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cW\u1ecdl\u00e9 S\u00f3yink\u00e1 had been so unimpressed and impatient with the Negritude movement spearheaded by the Francophone writers of African descent that he famously dismissed them at the 1962 African Writers Conference held at Makerere University, quipping: \u201cA tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.\u201d At a conference in Berlin two years later, S\u00f3yink\u00e1 elaborated this: \u201ca tiger does not stand in the forest and say: \u2018I am a tiger.\u2019 When you pass where the tiger has walked before you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not that S\u00f3yink\u00e1 was the only one to critique the Negritude movement. It was just that he was the loudest, and perhaps the most flippant, in his response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While it might not shed light on the question of race-consciousness in parts of Africa, a discussion of what Negritude was and how it garnered such a strident response from Soyinka, is valuable in its own right, especially for non-Francophone audiences interested in African literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Negritude movement was born in Paris in the 1930s, as three students from different parts of France\u2019s empire reacted against one idea, building their own framework on a three-part foundation. The students were Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire of Martinique, L\u00e9on Damas of French Guyana, and Leopold Senghor of Senegal. All were poets, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The three would meet in a salon owned by Paulette Nardal, a journalist born in Martinique and formerly the first black female student at the Sorbonne, who was excellent at bringing people together. They were reacting in part against the idea of francit\u00e9<\/em>, or Frenchness, an idea that permeated the French colonial project: that all history was part of a civilizational effort, informed and illuminated by the European enlightenment, the French authors who partook in it, and, above all, the Academie Fran\u00e7aise, whose members were the linguistic, literary, and cultural keepers of the faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To participate in this project, it was necessary to become a citizen, reach the highest level of (Paris-designed) education possible, and help in the building of a culturally unified and putatively race- and ethnicity-blind civilization. For colonized people, the demand to leave aside any acknowledgement of the values of your own society was a difficult one, and C\u00e9saire, Damas, and Senghor were key in constructing an aesthetic and intellectual response. The three had core inspirations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren\u00e9 Maran, a French civil servant from Guyane who worked for years in Cameroon, had published Batouala<\/em>, a novel that beautifully passes an African Bechdel Test: though it has some white characters, the story is fundamentally one of the day-to-day concerns of two Banda men, doing things whose interest derives from their characters and their milieu, rather than the gaze of the colonizer. In the end, a character who in the moment leans particularly heavy on ritualized knowledge meets a fate that awaits him with very French irony, but this doesn\u2019t mask the quality of the narrative, or the seriousness with which Maran took his characters. In 1921, he\u2019d won the Prix Goncourt for the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1928, Jean Price-Mars, already well on his way to being the dean of Haitian ethnography, and having already served in the Haitian senate, had published Ainsi Parla l\u2019Oncle<\/em>, clearly arguing that the things that up to that point were often denigrated by intellectuals as inferior parts of Haitian popular culture, including vaudou and folk tales, were the very things that illustrated its richness, worth, and diversity. In the following decade, Price-Mars would be in close contact with the three founders of the negritude movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, the black American writers of the Harlem Renaissance, many of whom spent part of the 1930s and the years following in Paris, were a major touchstone with their intensely readable poetry and prose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With these and other influences, C\u00e9saire, Damas, and Senghor founded the magazine L\u2019Etudiant Noir<\/em>. The latter two eventually became editors at Presence Africaine, establishing it as the premier publishing house for Africa and its diaspora, decades before Heinemann\u2019s African Writer Series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their movement, dedicated to publishing books illustrating the relativist value of black stories and societies, grew in leaps and bounds, including poets, novelists, philosophers, historians, essayists, playwrights, and folklorists, and it was perhaps unique among literary movements born in Paris salons in that, for decades, it was not particularly fractious. The three founders, all willing to take the ideas of Batouala<\/em> farther than its own author had been, were notably nonetheless also largely gradualists when it came to independence movements. But when a younger generation of writers came up, including Frantz Fanon, a former student of C\u00e9saire\u2019s who advocated for and participated in armed revolt, there was room for them. C\u00e9saire was also a mentor to the philosopher, cultural critic, and novelist Edouard Glissant, who in the 1950s advocated for antillanit\u00e9<\/em>, a philosophy that argued that the Martinican experience was best captured by something even more local and particular than Negritude itself offered. Ren\u00e9 Depestre, a Haitian poet and friend of C\u00e9saire\u2019s, had a decades-long relationship with him where they never stopped prodding and questioning each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through all these, the books, from the histories to the novels to the poetry, were intensely readable, with characters that shone and plots that drove, as attested by their continued presence on Francophone school reading lists. We\u2019re talking books with big ideas that are impossible to put down. There may often be a touch, as in Cheikh Hamidou Kane\u2019s L\u2019Adventure Ambigu\u00eb<\/em>, of salon-inspired pensiveness, but these writers were far from disengaged. Guinea-Conakry gained its independence in 1958, several, including many from other parts of Africa, flocked to join the government there, eventually leaving to return to writing, or to join their own newly-independent countries\u2019 governments and legislatures. C\u00e9saire and Damas, both from places that would never gain independence, served in the French Assembly, while Senghor became the first president of Senegal, helping establish it as a beacon of democracy and plurality, and Dakar, with its university renamed after the historian Cheikh Anta Diop, as an intellectual magnet for West Africa. Amadou Moktar Mbow and Amadou Hamp\u00e2t\u00e9 B\u00e2 helped build respect and support for African intellectual heritage into the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was in this context that Soyinka made his comment about tigritude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the one hand, it would seem to make no sense: if there was room for Richard Wright in Nardal\u2019s salons, and for Fanon at Presence Africaine, there was certainly room for Soyinka in the Negritude movement. But his statement wasn\u2019t really about protesting a lack of conceptual space. It was about announcing the young generation of African-born Anglophone writers as a leading force to be reckoned with, a force to be associated with independence and fierceness. It\u2019s worth noting that his statement didn\u2019t seem to have made much of a splash in 1962; it was only as his own significant literary talent became apparent as a result of his impressively growing body of work that his tigritude quote began to achieve a measure of fame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If \u201ctigritude\u201d didn\u2019t make an immediate splash, perhaps a more important outcome of that literary congress was the decision to treat as an open question whether literature by members of the diaspora was actually African literature. Insofar as it was an open question, it was also a new one, and one that would have been very difficult to broach in the framework of Negritude. Who would stand in front of Langston Hughes, Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, Zora Neale Hurston, and Frantz Fanon, and say: I\u2019m sorry, but should you wish to be considered part of the world\u2019s black literary establishment, please stand there on the stoop and keep knocking\u2014see if you can\u2019t come in<\/em>? From the perspective of Negritude, these names were already in the house, for they\u2019d helped build it. (Decades later, authors like Marlon James or Tiphanie Yanique would not, seen from a perspective of Negritude, need to wait to have crossed some bar before they became \u201cAfrican writers\u201d\u2014their status inheres in the very first promising sentences they put between two covers.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But before Makerere, while individual writers were thinking about ways to shine a brighter light on the young generation of Anglophone writers chafing at the prospect of elder gatekeepers, Chinua Achebe provided an elegant solution. The opening pages of Things Fall Apart<\/em>, while talking about a longstanding, rich, and engaging society, also give readers the sensation of being present at a literary Big Bang: these passages pause for no antecedents, and it is no exaggeration to say that almost every fiction book written thereafter in Anglophone Africa was published by Achebe through the African Writers Series or interpreted in part as a response to his monumental works. From a certain perspective, the aptness of an out-of-Achebe conceptual model of African literature ought not be gainsaid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contrast Ousmane Sembene\u2019s intense yet sprawling Les Bouts de Bois de Dieux<\/em>, published just two years after Things Fall Apart<\/em>. From the opening scene in a barracks through innumerable other settings throughout the book, a reader feels hurled immediately into the middle of ongoing, grab-you-by-the throat conversations of proverbs, economics, history, and gender dynamics; you can hear the author of this novel talking with those of other novels. Almost anywhere you start in Negritude, you feel like you\u2019re immersed in a vast ocean of such conversations flowing into and through one another, but with each still localized, particularized, and beautiful, and with the totality impossible for any one person to fully explore it all in a lifetime. If you start reading in French, soon enough you will be aware of a need to go over to English, and then perhaps Kreyol, Patwa, Wolof, Pulaar, Bambara, Hausa, and Arabic. Soon Lingala, Portuguese, Swahili, Dutch, and Xhosa, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the project of the Conference of African Writers of English Expression at Makerere University was one of boundary-defining; in this, its effect has been far-reaching. In rejecting Negritude, it also rejected Negritude\u2019s interest in folklore and ethnography. \u201cAnthropology\u201d became, and has largely remained, a pejorative term in Anglophone literary criticism, being associated not with black writers like Hurston, Price-Mars, and Hamp\u00e2t\u00e9 B\u00e2, but rather with the colonializing project of Europeans (in the event, both facets were there).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whereas Negritude had room for Birago Diop, who became one of Senegal\u2019s most beloved writers for his collections of folktales, the Anglophone literary establishment was busy distancing itself from Amos Tutuola and his folklore-influenced works. While Negritude positioned itself in opposition to the linguistic purists of the Academie Fran\u00e7aise, Anglophone authors, not faced with a similar institution, categorized Pidgin Englishes and local languages as non-literary. Indeed, the theoretical and literary-critical later career of Ngugi wa Thiong\u2019o, who\u2019d attended the Makerere Conference as James Ngugi, can partly be seen as an attempt to bring back into the Anglo-African literary universe influences that it had ejected with its rejection of Negritude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IV<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Francophone literature, constantly integrating folklore and its logics, was able to move earlier and deeper into magical realism and fantastic realms than its Anglophone cousin, which, for more than a generation, remained comparatively focused on the Romantic author, rather than popular or demotic tradition, as the fount of literary meaning. Sony Labou Tansi\u2019s hypnotic 1979 magical-realist-turned-techno-futurist debut novel La Vie et Demie<\/em> can be seen as an early apotheosis of the Francophone trend. An Anglophone reader, or one familiar with the argument David Diop advanced in the lecture published with his poetry collection Coups de Pilon<\/em>\u2014that African writers have to constantly balance between seeming too African, too ethnic, and seeming too European\u2014is in for a shock in the novel\u2019s first pages, as Tansi seems to be playing with some very dangerous tropes. It soon becomes clear that Tansi isn\u2019t interested in tropes at all, as he builds out a propulsive narrative space with a logic and ethics that is simultaneously fantastic and very Congolese. Sometimes an author succeeds so far as to end up in a place all his own, and Tansi\u2019s novel has ended up being sui generis<\/em>, and was never translated into English, though its denouement, in which a multigenerational story with country-level sweep is wrenched by scientifically engineered mosquitoes, wound up with an unexpected, beautiful echo forty years later in The Old Drift<\/em>, Namwali Serpell\u2019s mesmerizing debut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, contemporary trends in Anglophone African literature are letting the demotic back in, whether through Pidgin Englishes, local languages, or the contemporary version of demotic influence: less folklore, and more genre\u2014science fiction, fantasy, and alternate formats like comic books, including comic books building on folklore. Thus, a generational shift in African literature sees today\u2019s Anglophone writers and readers aggressively questioning many of the points on which their predecessors had insisted. If Soyinka and the attendees of the Makerere Conference can be seen as having constructed a gorgeous walled garden in a portion of the territory Negritude once carved out, today\u2019s writers and readers are tearing down many of those walls, and venturing further afield, without denying the value of what has been raised within the garden itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

V<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would be easy to over-emphasize a distinction between the authorial focus of 1960s Anglophone writers and their contemporaries and forebearers in the Negritude movement. That movement\u2019s leaders maintained a functional emphasis on ensuring that there would always be material space and support for writing to be produced and preserved. Some of this may have come from the salon atmosphere at the movement\u2019s birth; some from the roles of Presence Africaine, the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). To a certain extent it was this establishmentarianism that led Es\u2019kia Mphahlele to criticize Negritude, as Chigumadzi notes in her essay, as a bourgeois, evolu\u00e9<\/em> philosophy. This may be a bit unfair, given that historical evolu\u00e9s<\/em>, while they may have ended up as members of a middle class, largely did so by shedding connections to local experience and embracing, among other things, the universals afforded by European forms of education and religion. Negritude, by contrast, informed by Price-Mars\u2019 folklorism and the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, saw the literary traditions of the middle class as being impoverished by higher abstractions and enriched when they were firmly rooted in particular times, places, experiences, and traditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nonetheless, Negritude\u2019s own openness to fostering new ideas and new logics can be seen as having engendered its own down fall. It contained sufficient multitudes that there was always something\u2014like Senghor\u2019s political gradualism\u2014that an opponent could well argue against. The emphasis on local detail itself enabled successor philosophies to spring up. In 1980, Depestre wrote the essay, \u201cBonjour et Adieu \u00e0 la N\u00e9gritude.<\/em>\u201d Glissant and others built on the ideas in that work, moving beyond antillanit\u00e9<\/em> to a philosophy of creolit\u00e9<\/em>, emphasizing that the Caribbean experience was best understood not as universal, in the mode of francit\u00e9<\/em>, nor even as black, like Negritude, but as a mix of many different things. Depestre\u2019s triumphant 1988 novel Hadriana Dans Tous Mes R\u00eaves<\/em>\u2014about a French \u201cCreole Fairy\u201d who, on the eve of marrying into an elite Jacmelian family, died, was mourned during a play that had \u201cbrought together three centuries of human history,\u201d and became a zombie\u2014embodied the spirit of creolit\u00e9<\/em> and became his best-known work. While the Caribbean would still produce authors like the incomparable Maryse Conde, who is equally at home writing about Martinique and Mali, Negritude-as-such ceased to be a dominant movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, in the African academy, the lack of resources available to universities outside of Europe and North America played its own role in negritude\u2019s decline. While the early social science work coming out of the movement was cutting-edge and challenging to existing discourses (which did their best at the time to ignore its lessons), the universities and institutes where many of these academics settled did not have the resources in the 1970s and \u201980s to properly bring up a generation of prot\u00e9g\u00e9s, and by the time the academic world at large was ready to engage with academic Negritude, many of the relevant works were in some ways decades out of date (C\u00e9saire and Fanon\u2019s essays, needless to say, have met a different fate than the work of Negritude\u2019s tenured social scientists).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all that, negritude\u2019s success was precisely in establishing a multinational black discourse that was so solid that it spurred young revolutionary authors like Fanon, Glissant, Mphahlele, and Soyinka to press back against it in part or in whole while honing their own literary tools. Today, even as Negritude may appear to be nowhere, it is everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Negritude is in Panashe Chigumadzi\u2019s awareness with and engagement of how her literature and philosophy draws on very particular South African histories dating back to 1652. It is in Eniola Soyemi\u2019s spirited and closely-argued \u201cAre Nigerians \u2018Black\u2019 Enough To Talk About Race<\/a>,\u201d a response to Chigumadzi that appeared in The Republic<\/em>. Taking issue with a criticism of Ol\u00fam\u1ecd Rock that appeared in Chigumadzi\u2019s article, Soyemi says the formation\u2019s beauty, so influential to Soyinka and the most local members of his audience, lies not in its approach to some abstraction of what sublime geology should<\/em> look like but in the role this place played in centuries of history, and the stories told about that role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Negritude can be found in the precise transatlanticism of Jos\u00e9 Eduardo Agualusa\u2019s A Rainha Ginga<\/em>, in the carefully built textual and comicbook worlds of Nnedi Okorafor, and in Marlon James\u2019 The Book of Night Women<\/em> and Black Leopard, Red Wolf<\/em>. It is woven warp and woof through Henry Louis Gates, Jr.\u2019s compendious Annotated African-American Folktales<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can feel Negritude in Marguerite Abouet\u2019s carefully re-imagined 1978 exurbs of Aya de Yopougon<\/em>, in the Haitian-American wunderkind Greg Anderson Elysee\u2019s Is\u2019nana the Were-Spider<\/em>, and in the simultaneously homegrown and globally ambitious series created by Nigeria\u2019s Vortex Comics and its alumni. It is in the addictively demotic genre fiction of Nigeria\u2019s Cassava Republic Press (a publishing house named for the tuber of South American
and Caribbean origin that has become an inalienable African staple).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Negritude pervades the eighty-seven different language-versions of of Ng\u0169g\u0129\u2019s \u201cItu\u0129ka R\u0129a M\u0169r\u0169ngar\u0169: Kana K\u0129r\u0129a G\u0129t\u0169maga And\u0169 Mathi\u0129 Mar\u0169ngi\u0129\u201d in the first volume of Jalada Africa\u2019s Translation<\/em> issue, and it weighs on the sonorously groaning shelves of local-language books (both translations and originals) that grow month-on-month in bookstores from Dakar to Durban. It is in the spatially aware lyricism of Fatou Diome, and in the fiery imagination of Leonora Miano, both of whose works remain almost entire out of the reach of English audiences; indeed, it is in all literature that speaks rootedly to any part of Africa or its diaspora, whether or not it has yet had the translation-facilitated opportunity to reach the broadest audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The movement founded by C\u00e9saire, Damas, and Senghor survived the criticisms of Fanon and Glissant in part by incorporating and being adapted by them, and now, even if it\u2019s not possible to talk about Negritude as a school whose tenets are being actively managed by a core of adherents, its effects have never stopped rippling outward. Negritude is everywhere in African and diaspora literature and criticism; it is the water in their creeks and rivers and seas, and each creek, each bay and deep, has its own particular version of the flavor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

__________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n

D. S. Battistoli is a writer and international development expert in Senegal, with more than 10 years’ experience around West and Central Africa and the Caribbean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article was originally published here<\/a> on Brittle Paper<\/em> and is republished here with permission from the author.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year, in the context of an English-language debate on race consciousness in Africa, the topic of the Negritude movement came up briefly. The Zimbabwean-South African writer Panashe Chigumadzi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5187,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-voices-of-change"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miceregithaemugofoundation.fluid22.dev\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miceregithaemugofoundation.fluid22.dev\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miceregithaemugofoundation.fluid22.dev\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miceregithaemugofoundation.fluid22.dev\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miceregithaemugofoundation.fluid22.dev\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5178"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/miceregithaemugofoundation.fluid22.dev\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5465,"href":"https:\/\/miceregithaemugofoundation.fluid22.dev\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5178\/revisions\/5465"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miceregithaemugofoundation.fluid22.dev\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miceregithaemugofoundation.fluid22.dev\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miceregithaemugofoundation.fluid22.dev\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miceregithaemugofoundation.fluid22.dev\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}