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Négritude and the Nationalists

In the decades around independence, poets and statesmen asked what African thought was and what it was for: Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), poet and first president of Senegal; Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), first president of Ghana; Julius Nyerere (1922–1999) of Tanzania.

Senghor credited Aimé Césaire with forging the word négritude in 1932–34. His own account of it set two kinds of reason side by side. “Là où la raison discursive, la raison-œil du Blanc s’arrête aux apparences de l’objet, la raison intuitive, la raison-étreinte du Nègre, par-delà le visible, va jusqu’à la sous-réalité de l’objet, pour, au-delà du signe, en saisir le sens”: where the discursive reason, the eye-reason of the white man, stops at the appearance of the object, the intuitive reason, the embrace-reason of the black man, goes beyond the visible as far as the sub-reality of the object, to grasp, beyond the sign, its meaning. “Bien sûr, je simplifie. Il reste que le Blanc européen est, d’abord, discursif; le Négro-Africain, d’abord, intuitif. Il reste que tous les deux sont des hommes de raison, des homines sapientes, mais pas de la même manière”: of course I simplify; still, the European white is first of all discursive, the Negro-African first of all intuitive; both are men of reason, homines sapientes, but not in the same way (“Qu’est-ce que la négritude ?”, 1967). Négritude’s African critics, Towa among them, are on The ethnophilosophy debate.

Nkrumah made philosophy serve the new nations: “philosophy admits of being an instrument of ideology”, “one of the subtle instruments of ideology and social cohesion” (Consciencism, 1964). Philosophical systems, he wrote, lose their force in the universities, “a result of the academic treatment which they are given”, while ordinary Africans “sought knowledge as an instrument of national emancipation and integrity … I was one of this number”. Philosophical consciencism was to give “the theoretical basis for an ideology whose aim shall be to contain the African experience of Islamic and Euro-Christian presence as well as the experience of the traditional African society”, “the map in intellectual terms of the disposition of forces which will enable African society to digest the Western and the Islamic and the Euro-Christian elements in Africa”.

Nyerere put the point politically. Socialism is “an attitude of mind”, and “Africans have no more need of being ‘converted’ to socialism than we have of being ‘taught’ democracy. Both are rooted in our past—in the traditional society which produced us” (“Ujamaa”, 1962, as quoted).

Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986) gave Africa an antiquity of its own: “L’Égypte jouera, dans la culture africaine repensée et rénovée, le même rôle que les antiquités gréco-latines dans la culture occidentale”, Egypt will play in a rethought and renewed African culture the role that Greek and Latin antiquity plays in Western culture (Civilisation ou barbarie, 1981, as quoted). Théophile Obenga carried the programme into a history, African Philosophy: The Pharaonic Period, 2780–330 BC (2004).