Albert Rutere

ENGL- 571
Dr Ruthe T. Sheffey
November 30th, 2006
Questions and Views about Negritude
1. Did Negritude offer an adequate medium of expressing the aesthetic, cultural
and political values of African race?
Consider the following:
“Blacks are descendants of the greatest and proudest
race who ever peopled the earth.”- Marcus Garvey.

“The Negro poet is the incarnation of his suffering

race, and the fact that the whip and the gun recur so
often in the imagery of his poetry shows how much
his memory was haunted by the fact of slavery.”-
by Abiola Irele.

“Negritude is therefore in the beginning a movement

of black solidarity, sharply differentiated from the
Marxist concept of class solidarity by racial
consciousness.”- by Jean Paul Sartre.

“ The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the

color –line, the relation of the darker world to the
lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America
and the islands of the sea.”- W.E.B Du Bois.

“A Negro is a member of human race, and as one

who, in the light of history, and experience, is
capable to a degree of improvement and culture, is
entitled to have his interests considered according to
his numbers in all conclusions as to the common
weal.”- W.E.B Du Bois.

2. (a) Were the Himalayans of Negritude namely, Aime Cesaire, Sedar Senghor, and
Leon Damas genuinely committed to ideals of the movement?
Or
(b) Was their Negritude an irritating irrelevance or a manifestation of frustration
by asssimilandos rejected by the exclusive French culture?
Consider the following:
“Negritude [is] not a cephalic index, or a plasma, or a
soma, but [is] measured by the compass of
sufferings.”- Aime Cesaire.

"The black soul is an Africa from which

the black ['Negre']
 Rutere 2

Is
exiled amidst the cold buildings of white culture and
tec
hnology.”- Jean Paul Sartre.

“A Jew, a white among whites, can deny that he

is a Jew, declaring himself a man among men.
The black cannot deny that he is black nor claim
for himself an abstract, colorless humanity: he is
black. Thus he is driven to authenticity: insulted,
enslaved, he raises himself up. He picks up the
word "black" ["N*gre"] that they had thrown at
him like a stone, he asserts his blackness, facing
the white man, with pride.”- Jean Paul
Sartre

“ Frantz Fanon critiques Senghor's famous statement "Emotion is

black as Reason is Hellenic," indicting Cesaire and Senghor's
glorification of the irrational as a "regressive process" in his
1952 study Black Skin, White Masks. He then proceeds to attack
Sartre's interpretation of Negritude as what the latter termed an
"antiracist racism." – Nick Nesbitt.

“The black poets were primarily concerned with

projecting a healthier image of their race and not
arbitrarily proclaiming an inherent superiority, their
purpose was one of definition and affirmation and
not one of aggressive confrontation.” – by Abiola
Irele.

“Sartre’s term therefore meant a Negro racial pride

signed to destroy racialism itself and the parallel that
has been drawn with Nazism is quite uncalled for,
since racial consciousness is qualitatively different
from racialism.”- by Abiola Irele.

“Negritude is a protest at a very sophisticated level:

a protest of men largely assimilated into European
culture, but for all that unable to escape from the
color of their skins. This is no mere request for
social equality. These men ask not to be accepted
like other men, but somewhat ironically, be valued
precisely because they are unique and so are in a
position to make a unique contribution to mankind.”
- by Bentley Le Baron.
 Rutere 3

“The greatest and the most immediate danger of

white culture, perhaps least sensed, is its fear of the
truth, its childish belief in the efficacy of lies as a
method of human uplift.” W.E.B Du Bois.

3. How justified was Negritude in fighting colonial oppression?

Consider the following:
“From one end of the earth to the other, the blacks,
separated by language, the politics and the history of
their colonizers, have in common a collective memory.”
- by Jean Paul Sartre.

“The Negro shall search intelligently and carefully and

farsightedly plan for his entrance into the new economic
world, not as a continuing slave but as an intelligent free
man with power in his hands”- W.E.B Du Bois.

Colonial education did more than corrupt the

thinking and sensibilities of the African, it filled
him/her with abnormal complexes which de-
Africanized and alienated him/her from the
needs of his environment. Colonial education
has thus dispossessed and put out the control of
the African intellectual the necessary forces of
directing the life and development of his her
society.” – by Walter Rodney.”

4. To what extent does Negritude compare to Harlem Renaissance?

Consider the following:
“If We Must Die”
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
 Rutere 4

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
-by Claude McKay

5. What influence did Negritude have on the struggle for independence, especially by Pan
African movement in Africa?