For an interactive touch, read as you listen to a song by Boubacar Traore, the Malian singer who embodies the soul of African blues below!!! His music perfectly complements the essence of this piece! 

  NEGRITUDE 

We compared skin colours, who was lighter, who was darker. An insult to be dark, an insult to be negro. As children, we stood in the foyer of the school yard, spending our lunch time arguing about race, fighting to be the lightest. When we went home, we saw our aunts bleach their skin and chemicalize their hair. Our uncles spent the afternoon shouting profanities about each other's blackness, and our mothers were enraged by having to comb the unruly and untameable hair. All this to escape being tied to the “forsaken race."

Why? Why did we hate who we were, what God had given us? The answer lies in the enduring legacy of colonialism. We were labelled the Dark Continent, a name deliberately chosen to obscure our light. Social Darwinism created a philosophy to incubate the black man. A social structure that puts us at the bottom of the hierarchy. Humanity was subject to the laws of natural selection, and in this distorted worldview, Africans were deemed the weakest, to be treated as such.

Despite the persistent insults and degradation, African thinkers living in France began to awaken to the realities of their racial identity. The Negritude movement was then born. It was a political, philosophical, and literary movement of the 1930’s centering on black consciousness, cultural pride, and the affirmation of Black creativity. At the heart of this movement were three pivotal figures. Among them was Aimé Césaire, a poet and an intellectual born and raised in the French colony of Martinique; Léopold Sédar Senghor, a philosopher, poet, and future president of Senegal; and Léon-Gontran Damas, a poet of Guyanese origin renowned for his fierce critique of assimilation and cultural erasure. Together, these 3 came together using the French language to assert their cultural identity.

L’Étudiant noir represents one of the first significant projects by the founding intellectuals of the Négritude movement. It was published in 1935 in Paris, the student journal was dedicated to writing about the Black colonial diaspora of the French empire. Originally, the journal was titled L’Étudiant martiniquais and was changed under the editorial leadership of Aimé Césaire. They wanted to discuss matters related to African Francophones, and that they did. The central interest of the journal was the study of Africa, its civilisations, and its cultures, as well as the study of diasporic history and cultures.

Négritude was discussed within the journal L’Étudiant Noir, though few copies of the publication have survived. In one of the recovered texts, Aimé Césaire presents an early vision of the Négritude movement that incorporates elements of Marxist thought, an approach that would later become less central to the movement. Later conceptions of Négritude emphasised the connection of the Black man with a cultural and spiritual change; positive Blackness. Césaire, however, takes a politically charged viewpoint. In discussing racial Conscience, he attempts to assert race as primarily an issue of social revolution by placing it within a Marxist lens. Césaire shifts the focus from class to race and attempts to elaborate how Black colonial subjects have found themselves alienated from their Blackness.

In a lecture he gave, he stated the following:

"Act!, they say to the Negro. But since acting is creating, and since creating is

kneading and leavening your natural substance, our Negro at home will not

take action if he is distracted from himself and if he lives apart from himself.

         A strange disorder, in effect, consumes us in the Antilles: a fear of ourselves, a

         capitulation of being to appearing, a weakness that makes an exploited people

         turn their back on their own nature, because a race of exploiters makes them

         ashamed, with the perfidious purpose of eradicating “the self-consciousness

         of the exploited.”

In this passage, Césaire confronts the psychological effects of colonial domination. How can one act creatively when colonisation has ruptured the very sense of self? Césaire explains that in the Antilles, the colonised suffer from a “fear of ourselves” in a world where their Blackness has been made shameful, and a mask has to be worn. In this critical observation, Césaire makes Négritude a psychological warfare, in having to rewrite the past and endure radical self-return. To re-root an individual's past.

Cahier d’un retour au pays natal- Aimé Césaire (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land)

Aimé Césaire is known to have coined the term Négritude in the poem above. The movement started with the aim of enhancing Black liberation and dignity, a mission he endeavoured to achieve until his death. Being born and raised in Martinique, a French colony, made his struggle particularly interesting. The French, unlike the British, who believed in racial segregation, sought to assimilate the non-French as a tool of colonial domination, believing it would transform colonised peoples into French citizens by adopting French culture and language, thus becoming more civilised. This policy drove the Négritude movement. Africans were told they had to assimilate to a "superior" French culture, a racist and backwards notion.

Being born in an era where global change was amidst, his ideas thrived. The poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) was a surrealist experience that sought to change the ideals of the time.

“My negritude is neither tower nor cathedral

it takes root in the red flesh of the soil

it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky

it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience”

In this passage, Césaire disrupts the traditional adaptation of Western culture as the offset of what is right and wrong. He distances Black identity from colonial architecture and European cultural dominance, which are often rigid and hierarchical, and instead grounds his Négritude in the earth. By rooting it in the "red flesh of the soil" and the "ardent flesh of the sky," Césaire portrays Black identity as something real, raw, and deeply connected to both the physical and spiritual realms. His Négritude becomes a living, organic force, rejecting traditional Western symbols of power and permanence. He finally asserts that his Négritude breaks from submission to others; it's a transformative concept, one that reclaims dignity, instils patience, and ultimately sets him free.

However, to Césaire, Négritude wasn't a philosophy or a metaphysics. To him, it was a way of “living history within history”:-

"It is a way of living history within history: the history of a community whose experience appears to be … unique, with its deportation of populations, its transfer of people from one continent to another, its distant memories of old beliefs, its fragments of murdered cultures. How can we not believe that all this, which has its own coherence, constitutes a heritage?"

In “So Often”, Léon-Gontran Damas delivers a searing, emotionally unfiltered depiction of racial consciousness under colonial oppression. The poem opens with a striking metaphor: “My sense of race frightens me, like a dog barking in the night.” There exists a sense of anxiety and fear rooted in his identity. His blackness was a source of fear, not a source of pride. This piece of work from Damas introduces the importance of the negritude movement.  The poem embodies the dehumanisation of the black man and the anger that it induces; it also creates room for a sinister creation that stems from the prejudice he faces, the joy of blood coming from revolution. It captures the psychological toll of systemic oppression, as well as the yearning for liberation and self-assertion.

Damas’ poetry collection was said to be the manifesto of the movement and would be a point of reference in many more of the works created. It was also significantly influenced by the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance and the rhythms and tunes of African American blues. Important to note that he was the first of the three founders to have published poetry collections. (Although Damas was the first person to publish poetry of the three, I placed him as the second founder because Cesaire was said to have coined the term  :)

Fun fact: The French government banned copies of his poetry collection, ‘Pigments’, after claiming it to be a threat to the security of the state.

Chants d'Ombre- Songs of Shadow

This poem, by far, has to be my favourite (and not simply because I am a Black woman :). Senghor rejects the colonial lens through which beauty has long been distorted.  Senghor rejects the depictions of beauty engrained within the colonial lens, our aunts who walked around with darkened knuckles needed to hear this. Even today, Black beauty is only beginning to be recognised and still, not nearly enough. In “Black Woman,” darkness is not something to be hidden or corrected; it is clothed in life, honoured, and desired. But the poem goes beyond the celebration of the Black woman’s beauty. It becomes a metaphor for Africa itself. His portrayal avoids the colonial trope of Africa as savage or backwards; instead, he frames it as a place of beauty, fertility, and spiritual continuity. Breaking the metanarrative of the darkness ascribed to the beautiful continent. 

Unlike Damas and Cesaire, Senghor was more intent on articulating Négritude as a philosophical idea, an ontology, an epistemology, or a politics. Senghor found himself claiming that a revolt he staged against his teachers in Dakar, who tried imposing Christianity upon him, was a use of negritude before the word was coined. He refused to accept their claim that through their education, they were building Christianity and civilisation in his soul, where there was nothing but paganism and barbarism before.

FUN FACT: In his poetry collection Chants d’Ombre, most of the poems were written while M. Senghor was being held by the Nazis.