Negritude and the remaking of African personality

Blyden’s work laid a foundation for Negritude because he propounded a revolution that emphasized African values, cultures, and languages without necessarily discarding the realities of the mixing of cultures. In this sense Blyden was also the earliest advocate of the ‘triple heritage’ thesis, which is about how to reworld Africa as a synthesis of indigenous African heritage, Islamic heritage, and European Christian heritage (Blyden 1888). If one is to summarize Blyden’s ideas, they fall into five broad categories.

The first was his strong concern about the common destiny of the Negro race. He shared this concern with Garvey and many other early advocates of Black liberation. The second concern was about the uniqueness of the thinking (mentalities) of the African, and this notion indeed made Blyden a father of Negritude. The third concern was about how religion was an intrinsic part of life for African people. The fourth idea propounded by Blyden was that of the inherent socialist character of African societies. This thinking is a precursor of the ideologies of African socialism that dominated in the 1960s and 1970s pushed forward by such African leaders as Julius Nyerere, Leopold Sedar, and many others. The fifth idea from Blyden’s writings was that of ‘Africa for Africans’, which directly resonated with Garveyist pan-Africanism that privileged Africa as the only seat of African self-determination and self-rule.

The Negritude idea was picked up and further elaborated by Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aime Cesaire. Senghor explained the circumstances that led him and Cesaire to launch the movement noting that between 1933 and 1945 Black students based in France ‘were plunged into panic-stricken despair’ as the promised horizon of assimilation was blocked and ‘the colonizers were justifying our political and economic dependence by the theory of the tabula rasa’, and this provoked them; they believed that in order ‘to establish an effective revolution, our revolution, we had first to divest ourselves of our borrowed attire – that of assimilation – and assert our being, that is to say our negritude’. (Senghor in Ahluwalia 2001: 54).

It is clear from Senghor’s words that the Negritude Movement was part of the broader search for identity within a context of dismemberment. Cheikh Thiam (2014) correctly understood Negritude as part of an early expression of an ‘Afri-centred’ conception of the human that was consistently critical of Western universalization of humanity that however excluded those with black pigmentation. Negritude was propelled by what Cesaire termed the ‘tormenting questions, who am I? Who are we? What are we in this world?’ (Thiam 2014: 2).

To Gary Wilder (2015: 8), Negritude was not a simple ‘affirmative theory of Africanity’, but rather was also ‘a critical theory of modernity’. Senghor articulated that Negritude began as a search for the ‘return to [our] sources and the discovery of the black Grail’ (ghetto-Negritude, as he termed it), tainted by racism, before moving forward to ‘open-Negritude’ (planetary Negritude) (Senghor in Wilder 2015: 52). Building on ‘open-Negritude’, Senghor understood ‘decolonization as a process of global restructuring wherein the fate of humanity and the future of the world were at stake’ (Wilder 2015: 59).

Senghor remained critical of the Cartesian notion of being that privileged reason as a marker of being human. He said this notion reproduced the human as a ‘reasonable animal’ and he proceeded to spell out the gift of Negritude: ‘to remake the unity of man and the World; to link flesh to spirit, man to his fellow man, the pebble to God’ (Senghor in Wilder 2015: 61). Senghor envisaged a postcolonial world as ‘a global mélange to which each civilization contributed its most distinctive and fully realized attributes’ (Wilder 2015: 61). Senghor favoured a democratic union of people irrespective of colour rather than territorial political independence, and this led to him being criticized as an apologist of colonialism in some quarters. Senghor, just like Fanon and Cesaire, emphasized human liberation over sovereignty of states: ‘Man remains our ultimate concern, our measure’ (Senghor in Wilder 2015: 224).

For this to occur, he argued that ‘we must all kill the piece of him [Hitler] that lives within us’ (Senghor in Wilder 2015: 143). To Senghor, for a new humanism to emerge, there was need for a double decolonization involving colonizers abandoning their ‘superiority complex’ so as to recognize the colonized as equal human beings, and the colonized rising up from their imposed ‘inferiority complex’ (Senghor in Wilder 2015: 162). These ideas led Senghor (in Wilder 2015: 162) to present the idea of decolonization as ‘a dialogical and dialectical “gift between partners”’. More profoundly, Senghor understood decolonization as a third revolution ranged against ‘capitalist and communist materialisms’, and aimed at bringing the moral and religious to the centre of the world while at the same time enabling ‘peoples of colour’ to play their role and ‘contribute to the construction of the new planetary civilization’ (Senghor in Wilder 2015: 228).

Senghor (in Wilder 2015: 149) pushed for a combination of Negritude (old African collectivism) with Socialism (scientific socialism) as building blocks in the creation of a better world (better than the colonially created one) and also ‘better than our world before European conquest’. Consequently, Senghor also became a critic of both colonialism and territorial nationalism as he strongly believed that the unitary state was now historically outmoded. He pushed for a common French citizenship not as an ethnicity or race but as a political product of empirical realities of encounters and interactions. His warning to fellow Africans was that even European nations were gravitating towards a larger pan-European community (European Union) and that small colonies would never be ‘truly independent’; rather, independence would be ‘a poison gift’ (Senghor in Wilder 2015: 152).

Senghor (in Wilder 2015: 161) envisaged a world that was not wholly African or European: ‘it will be a Métis world’. Senghor’s version of decolonization did not envision the attainment of national status in the form of independent Senegal as the heaven of liberation, as he predicted that small independent stares were bound to fail (Wilder 2015: 244). This argument by Senghor regarding the limits of territorial nationalism highlighted the planetary quality of his reworlding initiatives. Besides Negritude there was pan-Africanism.