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Français 232: Le Polycopié: P. 69-70 - L’Afrique noire et lalittérature post-coloniale

Black Africa and post colonial literature

From the end of the 1930s, a new literature of Black Africa appears, demanding thenotion of cultural identity. The movement of "negritude" is then thrown around Aimé Césaire

(Antillean) and about Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegalese) in the 1930s. This movement marksa will to give back the word to the black world. The word “negritude” expresses refusal to becomparable to a foreign culture and negritude presents itself as a rehabilitation of the black manand of its stocks via the desire to find a racial authenticity and the rejection of racism.Déploration of the suffering of black people, the call to uprising and the thrill of precolonialAfrica are themes developed at the heart of this literature.

Senghor (Léopard Sédar)

Born in Joal (Senegal), on October 9th, 1906. After studies in Dakar, he goes to Paris in1928. He strikes up a friendship with Aimé Césaire and starts the magazine “Black Student”

with him where the term “negritude” appears for the first time.Up to World War II, he is a professor in secondary education in different cities of France.He is mobilized in 1939, then in 1940 taken prisoner in Germany where he comes back 

from in 1942, liberated for health reasons. In 1945, he is elected Representative of Senegal, thenconstantly reelected until 1960, where he becomes the first president of the Republic of theSenegal. After some conflicts with his council president, Mamadou Dia, Senghor institutes apresidential regime. So, he will stay in management of Senegal until December 31st, 1979.

At the same time as his political career, L.S. Senghor never ceased being a poet. Senghor:“I write for my people first. And this one knows that a kôra is not a harp nomore than a balafong a piano. Besides, while touching the Africans of Frenchlanguage we will touch the French better and, beyond seas and borders,

other men.”

“Negritude is the simple recognition of being black, and the approval of thisfact, of our black destiny, of our history and of our culture.” (1934 in themagazine “Black Student.”)

Black French Africa

5. Senghor (born in 1906)

Born in 1906 in Senegal, into a Catholic family of easy dealers, Léopold Sédar Senghor is sent to France to study. He achieves the competition of the conglomeration of grammar.Author of an important poetic work in French, he celebrates in its poems the greatness of thecivilization of the Black Africa which he calls “negritude” and the hope of a reconciliation of civilizations. Impregnated with western, francophile thought, Senghor does not wish a break with France. He is Representative of the French National Assembly and starts the SenegaleseProgressive Union with Mamadou Dia.

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Français 232: Le Polycopié: P. 69-70 - L’Afrique noire et lalittérature post-coloniale

In 1960, Senghor becomes President of the new Republic of Senegal. Up to his voluntarycollection in 1980, he supports links of collaboration with France.

6. Leopold Sédar Senghor, new President, and Mamadou Dia, PrimeMinister, in 1960

“All of a sudden Africa dies from the empires, it is the agony of apitiable princess (...) we are the men of the dance whose feet take back vigorby hitting the hard soil.” (Senghor, Request to the Masks)

7. “Equality in the city”

The “Good Negro” is dead; the paternalists have to kiss him goodbye. It is the hen to thegold eggs that they killed. Three centuries of milking, a century of occupation could not demeanus, all the catechisms taught could not make us believe in our baseness. We want a collaborationin respectability and honor, without what it would only be “Kollaboration,” in the vichyssoise.We are sated with words of God (up to nausea), of disdainful sympathy; what we need, these areacts of justice. Like a Senegalese newspaper said it: “We are not separatists, but we wantequality in the city.” We say well: EQUALITY.

In practice, we want, among other things:1) That the Constituent Assembly completes the declaration of human rights by adding tofreedom and equality to that of people and of races (...)3) That a serious effort of teaching and education is undertaken.4) That the natives can, in equal title, achieve all administrative functions.5) That justice is the same for the natives as for the Europeans.

6) That the forced job, under some name that one dresses it up as, is abolished.

8. The beginnings of collaboration (October 1961)

De Gaulle, President of the French Republic, greets President Léopold Sédar Senghor onhis visit to Paris, on the flight of steps of Élysée.