Introduction
From Negritude to Post-Africanism
Denis Ekpo
1.
2.
The death of Negritude has long been virtually on every lip. Such viscerally anti-Negritude texts as Marcien Towas Lopold Sdar Senghor:
Ngritude ou Servitude and Stanislas Adotevis Ngritude et Ngrologues were indeed mocking requiems for Negritude intoned as early as
the 1970s,1 right in the very ears of Senghor who was probably still
convinced that Negritude was in its heyday. Today Negritude is considered so dead and outdated that prominent African/diasporic scholars
such as Abiola Irele, Henry Louis Gates Jr and others, when contacted
for this special issue, could not hide their embarrassment. Irele frankly
confessed that there was nothing new to say or do about or beyond
Negritude or Senghor, everything having already been oversaid and
overdone. Others found less candid excuses to (un)conceal that same
feeling.2
But Rasheed Araeen happened to have chanced on some flickering
spirit, some spark of life still concealed in Negritudes long embalmed
body and drew my attention to it. He had re-read Senghors sociopolitical thoughts and had discovered that despite the racial-ethnic-artistic
fetish that had been made of Negritude, there was still a specifically
Senghorian intellectual life after Negritudes ideological death. Initially I
was sceptical (though I did not let him know it), for I must confess that I
saw Negritude and Senghor the way the grandees saw them: there was
nothing more worth saying about either. But Araeen insisted that there
were sociopolitical gems in Senghor, outside Negritudes parochial
ethno-artistic fads, that deserve to be extracted and brought to the attention and benefit of our time. His persistence triggered in me a fresh curiosity that took me via Negritude to the heart of Senghorism. And there I
discovered that, despite or because of Negritude, many of his signature
sociopolitical, cross-cultural intuitions and daring insights have
remained as misrecognised and under-exploited as they are still germane
to the concerns of so-called postcolonial times. Why were these Senghorian insights, ignored or misrecognised? The reason is that Negritude
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2010)
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DOI: 10.1080/09528821003722108
178
3.
swept them along in its own ideological demise. But our findings show
that, though Negritude is dead and rightly so, Senghor beyond
Negritude is very much still alive. Burying Senghor along with Negritude
came from the error of treating both as one and the same ideological
racial-cultural monolith. In salvaging Senghor from Negritude the first
move to make is, I believe, to unpack Negritude into two distinct but
partially related doctrines. The second move is to fortify the resurrected
Senghor with a new concept called Post-Africanism. This new concept it
is hoped will prove sufficiently robust to bear the intellectual weight of a
more fruitful post-Negritude engagement of Africa with the world
process. But first what are the two doctrines that emerge from the
dismantling of the Negritude monolith?
The first is of course the official Negritude, a movement co-founded
by Senghor but whose most ideologically active agents came not from
Senghor but from Aim Csaire. Although Senghors metaphysical
solemnities on the black soul, African emotion or African participatory
cosmology were seen as the intellectual foundation of this Negritude,
cultural nationalism, which was the performative translation of
Negritude into politics and art, was charged with its most radical Afrocentric voltage such as unconditional race pride by Csaire rather
than Senghor.3 It was Csaire who taught us to rejoice and be glad,
though we had invented nothing, explored nowhere; not to condemn the
cannibalistic past, for it was proof of Africas counter-European manliness. The second Negritude, a crystallisation of Senghors most performative thoughts on politics, culture and modernity, can be distinguished
as a philosophy addressed to Africas modernisation, centred first in a
self-reassuring re-description of Africa and Africans and second in a
politics of friendship and collaboration with the European holders of
modernitys powers and skills. In order not to confuse this Negritude
with the official one, I prefer to call it Senghorism while the term cultural
nationalism can best denote the official Negritude. Although often said
to have been inspired by Senghor, cultural nationalism seems to me
antithetical to Senghorism, for it pilfered from Senghors Negritude
repertoire only those motifs that appeared to chime with a reactionary
anti-modern escape into the past as well as anti-Europe resentments.
Official Negritude or cultural nationalism died partly through the
sheer inanity of its postulations on race, Africanity and emotivity; partly
as result of the grave errors of a purely cultural-nationalistic self-understanding and apprehension of modernity. Those who say that there is
nothing more to say concerning this Negritude are right, except that, in
saying so, they invariably throw out the baby with the bath water. The
reason for this is that the two Negritudes appear organically intertwined
and synonymous with Senghors name. Senghor himself did not help
matters for he, sometimes interchangeably, made noises of both sorts:
cultural nationalistic traditionalism and a purely modernist engagement
with Africa and the world. Nevertheless, although Senghor spoke of
Negritude all his life, Europe, in his concrete engagements with politics
both at home and internationally, superseded Negritude. He spoke
Negritude but acted otherwise. Thus for Senghorism it is no longer
necessary to take seriously Senghors metaphysico-poetic tropes, such as
black soul, black aesthetics and so on, but to re-acquaint ourselves with
what he said and did beyond or despite these obfuscating ideologemes.
179
180
181
POST-AFRICANISM
Let where you are going, not where you are coming from henceforth be
your honor. Your will and your foot that desire to step out beyond you
let this be your honor.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus spoke Zarasthustra
4.
182
183
5.
Friedrich Nietzsche; On
the Advantages and
Disadvantages of History
for Life, quoted in
Malcolm Pasley, ed,
Nietzsche: Imagery and
Thought: A Collection of
Essays, Routledge, London
and New York, 2009,
p 151
6.
Freed from the reactive compulsions of Negritude and postcolonialism, but also from the alien worries of postmodernism, Post-Africanism
can seek new tonics for African thinking and constitutive conditions for
Africas new cultural health. It reasons that over-exposure to debilitating
ideologies of the Africanisation of modernity has unnecessarily complicated the African condition, stunting its growth and hampering its
outlook on the world. It agrees with those who say that Negritude is dead
but insists that saying so means recognising that there can be no African
path to development except the wrong path, no specific African way or
Africanity different from the ways of all pre-literate cultures stuck in a
mythico-magic consciousness and waiting for rational scientific-technological Enlightenment. Post-Africanism conceives that the new cultural
health of Africa must centre on a second African Enlightenment after the
first tentatively colonial one was interrupted by premature decolonisation and the cultural nationalism that followed. It finds that the basic
malady of Africas modernity-consciousness was contracted in the wake
of that interruption and diagnoses it as a chronic cultural overload: too
many historical burdens weighing down on too little rationality and clarity of vision. Nietzsche had warned that an excess of historical or ancestral consciousness damages a living system whether it be a human being,
a people or a culture.5 In Africas case it was not only the tribal past it
was chewing over but anti-European paranoia and vengeful, impotent
anti-imperialism. These antithetical impulses crowded out Africas vision
of modernity, depriving it of clarity and performative efficacy. Post-Africanisms second African Enlightenment concerns a massive disburdening
of mind and vision, so that Africa can embark again on its journey of
modernisation, this time deliberately travelling light.6
An Africa culturally re-disenchanted, redeemed from previous ideological redeemers and from the imperious need for messianic redemption, is the Post-Africanist Africa, no longer the mysterious and
dignified Black Mother who can do no wrong or the Dark Continent
that can do only wrong, but a rationally knowable sociopolitical entity
and laboratory, an economic bloc and a market struggling to emerge.
As an economic bloc or a political laboratory, Africa, to be sure, has
been virtually stranded by globalised capitalist modernity. But the PostAfricanist point is that what it needs now to get back into the swim is
no longer the hypnotising songs of master-griots, the hubristic brews of
racial/ideological spell-binders, the woeful wisdom of Afro-pessimists,
native or foreign, or the importunities of televised post-imperial pity,
but the quiet, patient work of those with new, unencumbered and
courageous knowledge. Post-Africanism moves away from a culture of
anxiety about what the West thinks of us to a pragmatic confidence
that negative images of Africa will be removed not by ideological
blackmail or mimicries of the latest Western fad but by the demonstration of our competence in making modernity work for us here. No a
priori racial dignity or African pride can do better than successfully
manipulate modernitys tools to transform Africa into a liveable, workable human space. Post-Africanism advocates a post-ideological empiricism that will draw the most appropriate inferences for the purposes of
action. The audacity of Post-Africanism is not to invent new theories or
radicalise existing ones but to propose a more modest Wittgensteinian
rescue of the postcolonial subject from the bewitchments of either
184
7.
Organisation of African
Unity (OAU), What kind
of Africa in the Year
2000?, quoted by Ronald
Dore in Technological
Capability in the Third
World, Martin Fransman
and Kenneth King, eds,
Macmillan, London, 1984
8.
Ronald Dore,
Technological Selfreliance: Sturdy Ideal or
Self-Serving Rhetoric?, in
Fransman and King, op cit,
p 67
185
9.
186
for these wise men to recognise this old wisdom of the political sages of
independent Africa? Why did the West in the first place want Africa to
think that becoming democratic was something it had to do as a categorical imperative, irrespective of any tragic consequences that could result
from its forceful imposition? If the minimal conditions for a working
democracy, including stateness first, are simply not there, then we must
go back and reinterpret the negative realities spawned by democratisation, not as evidence of Africas congenital incapacity for political
modernisation but as signals of a deep systemic rejection of its electioneering multi-party form by the current nation-state system in Africa.
187
courage and voluntarism: What does it matter that you have miscarried!
What matters is how much is still possible?14
For todays pseudo-globalising generation, the primacy of democracy
has replaced the Afro-narcissistic obsessions with dignity and pride.
However, for a Post-Africanist epoch, the business of thinking is
premised exclusively on mobilising all of modernitys cultural resources
to put modernity properly to work in an Africa of the future. We should
first seek a functional all-embracing modernisation of Africa so that all
else, including dignity, prosperity and democracy, will be added unto us.
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