When you research topics under African fiction, you’re bound to come across the term ‘Negritude’. After a few brushes with this term, I decided to delve into it fully and I enjoyed what I found so here’s a short post dedicated to sharing everything I’ve learnt.
What Is Negritude?
Negritude is a philosophical and literary movement meant to create pride in being black, in being African. The negritude movement involves exhibitions, congresses and publications meant to challenge the idea of black inferiority and place black people firmly within racial discusses as equals.
It is also an ideology meant to help black people, originally black Francophone intellectuals in the 1930s, reclaim or form pride in their identity. It was first coined by Aimé Césaire, who defined it as the recognition that one is black, the acceptance of the fact, and the appreciation of our history and culture as black people.
The movement was created by the triumvirate, Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Léopold Senghor from Senegal and Leon Gontran Damas from Guyana. These men, students living in France at the time, were tired of the injustice they faced as black people in a European country and were especially against French assimilation.
Assimi-what?
The French assimilation was a colonial policy aimed at making Frenchmen out of Africans. This was done through ‘education’ where Africans were taught French, its culture and customs. Assimilation was a systemic disintegration of whatever culture the African boasted of and instead an imposition of French ideals and behaviours. This policy was promoted with the promise to give full citizenship rights to those who assimilated—those who shed their identity and instead took on that of the French. Like with sweet-tongued politicians, even this was just a farce.
Besides, the offer, tempting as it may have seemed to some Africans who had tasted the rancid juice of racism, was another form of subjugation—a stripping away of the culture of the black man for a ‘better’ culture and amazing prospects. You can imagine that when Africans scrambled for this promise of ‘elevation’, they simultaneously believed, even if unconsciously, that their own culture was inferior.
In response to this belief, and the injustice of this offer, negritude was born.
Though Leon Gontran Damas was said to have demonstrated Negritude in his 1937 poetry collection, Pigments, years before the first use of the word, the coining of the term is attributed to Aimé Césaire who used it first in his 1939 poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. The term was coined from the derogatory French word for black people ‘nègre’ in a bold step of reappropriation.
Okay, so is Negritude dead?
I mean, it was a movement in the 1930s in far off France by students who have gone on to do more things with their lives.
Well, yes, Negritude did start in the 1930s and it could be interpreted as a movement for a specific cause–the dismantling of French assimilation–but it is more than just that.
Although Negritude began in a salon in Paris, where these students met and discussed, it has permeated different parts of the world and has influenced many works by African authors. Negritude may as well have been a forerunner for protest literature, in its stance to reject stereotypes and affirm black experience and peoples. Negritude walked so African literature today could run.
Literature, because yes, the movement also had political underpinnings, but it was rooted in literature and artistic expressions influenced by surrealism (artistic movement which used fantastical images to explore the unconscious). Literature carried the movement on its back. This was expressed in anthologies (Leon Dama’s Poètes d’expression française and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et Malgache), in fiction, in poetry, and in paintings where the black identity (whatever that meant for the different black people who joined the movement) was celebrated and subjectively defined.
There was no one definition of the term, although all definitions were similar and served a common goal: the emancipation of black identity.
Aimé Césaire defined it as the recognition that one is black, the acceptance of the fact, and the appreciation of our history and culture as black people.
Léopold Senghor (who later became Senegal’s first president) defined it as the collection of cultural values of Africans. To Senghor negritude wasn’t just an artistic movement, but a cultural reappropriation and one that included all blacks no matter their country of residence or origin.
Maybe this flexibility and its ability to be defined in whatever way is the reason the term has had many more definitions by scholars over the years. And maybe this is a good thing. With each definition and each new acceptance, the term has coalesced in its fundamental aim while permeating numerous literary spaces where new definitions ensure it remains fresh and accepted.
It’s safe to say that though the Negritude movement was the predecessor of protest literature, because of their shared aim, it is still palpable within the pages of these literary works and is therefore still alive.
