Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
Negro Digest - Freedom Archives
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A Cult?<br />
A Fraternity?<br />
A Way of Life?<br />
What Is This ~T'hinc~<br />
Called Negritude`s<br />
For Africa in particular-and for much of the<br />
rest of the world in general-the era of Western<br />
discovery, exploration and occupation constituted<br />
a long night of exploitation and domination<br />
. And while Colonialism scourged most of<br />
the non-white world, only the black men from<br />
Africa were massively enslaved, corralled by the<br />
millions and transported in chains across the seas<br />
to alien lands. Torn from their roots, forbidden<br />
access to their cultural sustenance, assigned roles<br />
as eternal drones, the black men from Africa,<br />
drawing from some uncommon racial reservoir,<br />
nonetheless found the strength and the strategy to endure . The long night is now receding<br />
before a new dawn, but the coming light alone cannot heal the deep affliction induced<br />
by the prolonged darkness . Strong medicine is required to cure the disease of degradation,<br />
and Negritude has been offered as antidote to the ancient evil of anti-black racism .<br />
It was a group of black intellectuals in Paris who first advanced the idea of Negritude<br />
-Cesaire Aime, a poet from the French Antilles, and Leopold Sedor Senghor, a poetstatesman<br />
from Senegal, chief among Them . Senghor, now President of the Republic of<br />
Senegal, remains the principal proponent of Negritude, and he sums it up in these<br />
words : "Negritude is the whole complex of civilized values-cultural, economic, social<br />
and political-which characterize The black peoples, or, more precisely, the <strong>Negro</strong>-<br />
African world . . . In other words, the sense of communion, the gift of myth-making, the<br />
gift of rhythm . . . a myth which evolves with its circumstances into a form of humanism . . ."<br />
United Nations President Alex Ctuaison-Sackey of Ghana defines Negritude as "an<br />
acceptance and affirmation of the quality of 'blackness' . . . a psychological gathering<br />
together of all black peoples in the spiritual bonds of brotherhood ." And American<br />
professor St. Clair Drake terms Negritude "a soft and resilient rather than a hard and<br />
mechanical approach to life . . . a deep resentment over subordination to white people<br />
during the 400 years of slave trade and the subsequent structuring of caste relations<br />
here and in Africa :'<br />
Negritude, then, is also a form of racialism-Yes, but in the words of French philosopher<br />
Jean-Paul Sartre, "anti racial racialism ." Therein lies the difference . And Dr . Drake<br />
explains : "Anti-racist racialism was brought into view by its opposite, which is aggressive,<br />
exploitative racism . And the whole concept of Negritude assumes in its dialectic that<br />
anti-racist racialism is destined to disappear: `<br />
Knowledge is the Key to a Better Tomorrow<br />
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