The Rise and Demise of Black Theology

Alistair Kee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351145503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Black Theology emerged in the 1960s as a response to black consciousness. In South Africa it is a critique of power; in the UK it is a political theology of black culture. The dominant form of Black Theology has been in the USA, originally influenced by Black Power and the critique of white racism. Since then it claims to have broadened its perspective to include oppression on the grounds of race, gender and class. In this book the author contests this claim, especially by Womanist (black women) Theology. Black and Womanist Theologies present inadequate analyses of race and gender and no account at all of class (economic) oppression. With a few notable exceptions Black Theology in the USA repeats the mantras of the 1970s, the discourse of modernity. Content with American capitalism it fails to address the source of the impoverishment of black Americans at home. Content with a romantic imaginaire of Africa, this 'African-American' movement fails to defend contemporary Africa against predatory American global ambitions.

Chapter 1
Assimilation and Alienation: Double Consciousness

Negritude

In 1976 two old friends greeted each other. They had first met in Paris in 1931 as students, one from Senegal in West Africa, the other from the Caribbean island of Martinique. In the meantime Léopold Sédar Senghor had become president of his country, and now he was visiting Aimé Césaire, mayor of Fort-de-France, Martinique. They had both contributed to the revolution in black consciousness which had swept around the world. Césaire recalled their early meeting. ‘For us, it was not a question of metaphysics, but of a life to live, an ethic to create, and communities to save. We tried to answer that question. In the end, our answer was Negritude.’¹ In this case the word itself tells a story. It is negritude, not blackness, for they both grew up in French colonies. But it is nègre, not noir, for they were in dialogue with Americans who called themselves Negroes. The formation of black consciousness has led to a preference for the term black instead of Negro, but all of the early writers on the subject use the term Negro, and we shall do so to avoid anachronism. Negritude was many things, but for Césaire it was a philosophy of life, a system of justice and equity, a cause to which he was committed – the resurrection of black men. (This non-inclusive language is used here because at that time it was used by black men – and black women – and because as we shall see, it was eventually challenged by women.)

The development of negritude as an ideology is associated with Senghor. He was born in Joal, a small coastal town in the French West African territory of Senegal in 1906. As an able student he was subject to the French colonial policy of assimilation. ‘Assimilation had both a political and a social and cultural dimension. In essence, it aimed toward a future when the colony would become an integral part of metropolitan France. The African peoples of Senegal were to become as much like Frenchmen as possible, in language, manners, and political orientation.’² The policy reflected assumptions which were at once liberal and chauvinist – the equality of all men, and the superiority of French culture. In a predominantly Muslim country Senghor’s family were Christian, and he himself wished to become a Catholic priest. However, at the seminary in the capital, Dakar, he encountered the attitude that Africa had no traditions or culture worth preserving. Soon after protesting that Africans had their own civilisation, he was told by Father Lalouse that he would not be allowed to be a priest. Senghor was devastated by this decision, yet reflecting on the outcome some years later he could see that when one career was closed off to him, another opened up that was more significant. As a priest in Senegal he would not have developed the philosophy of negritude. The bitter experience was indeed part of that learning process. ‘I owe to him not the word negritude… but the idea.’³ He continued to be a devout Catholic, he aspired to be a true Frenchman, but already he was experiencing the tension of living in two worlds. He continued his education in Dakar, and in 1928 was the first black student to receive a scholarship to study in France.

It was in Paris that he began to experience the contradictions of the policy of assimilation. On arrival in France he had answered an immigration question by asserting, of course, that he was French. In reality he discovered in Paris that he was not treated as if he were French. But where did that leave him? An existential rather than a metaphysical question. As he enrolled at the Sorbonne to study literature he met Aimé Césaire. It was in dialogue with him over the next few years that Senghor finally formulated his philosophy of life, negritude. The term was coined by Césaire, appearing for the first time in a journal in which they were both involved, L’Etudian Noir. Senghor readily admitted his debt and was always willing ‘to render to Césaire what is Césaire’s’.⁴

In reality Senghor and Césaire were stimulated by the environment in which they found themselves in the Latin Quarter of the city. There are three sources of negritude: the New Negro, of the Harlem Renaissance; West Indians, especially from Martinique; and a small number of Africans. Black Americans do not have the historical or cultural associations with Europe that white Americans do, especially those from old New England families. But at the end of the nineteenth century there emerged the beginnings of a new Negro culture. Some of these writers converged in Paris, notably W.E.B. Du Bois whose The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, opens with the analysis of a particular experience. The experience was precisely that which we observed in the young Senghor, but the subtlety of the analysis is beyond anything of which he was then capable.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.⁵

Du Bois attended the first Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919. In 1921 René Maran, the Martinique writer, published his prize-winning novel Batouala, which included a devastating criticism of the French administration in the colonies. Many years later Senghor wrote a memorial essay entitled ‘René Maran: precursor of Negritude’. In 1925 there appeared The New Negro, an anthology-manifesto. Senghor was particular influenced by the contribution of Alain Locke, a black professor of philosophy at Howard University. Locke was a frequent visitor to the salon of the Martinique writer Paulette Nardal and it was there that Senghor met him, and also at the house of René Maran. Senghor was also impressed by Claude MacKay, the Jamaican writer and author of Banjo, who claimed that ‘to plunge to the roots of our race and to build on our own foundations is not returning to a state of savagery’.⁶ Senghor was to declare that ‘Claude MacKay can be considered… as the veritable inventor of negritude… not of the word… but of the value of negritude.’⁷ And so at last count the originators of negritude are Senghor, Lalouse, Césaire, Du Bois, Maran and MacKay.

What is clear is that at this stage the important axis was West Indians and black Americans, a dialogue promoted through the French/English Revue du Monde Noir. A significant contribution was the essay by Paulette Nardal which appeared in 1932. Hymans declares that ‘this document constitutes tangible evidence of the moment when American Negro ideas first infiltrated to French-speaking Negroes, thus starting the chain of events leading to the theory of negritude’.⁸ (Perhaps Paulette Nardal deserves to be added to the list of originators.) Through their contacts in Paris both groups came to recognise that they belonged together. Both had a history in slavery, of being deprived of their own culture, language and identity. But there was also a significant difference. The West Indians had been provided with a French culture, language and identity, while in America blacks had been despised, discriminated against and prevented from entering the mainstream. It is significant that at that time West Indians did not associate themselves with Africa, which they viewed as being primitive. Franz Fanon, whom we shall meet soon, makes some shrewd observations about the relations of Europeans, West Indians and Africans, relations which we shall encounter in other contexts later in this chapter.

We may say that the West Indian, not satisfied to be superior to the African, despised him, and while the white man could allow himself certain liberties with the native, the West Indian absolutely could not. This is because, between whites and Africans, there was no need of a reminder: the difference stared one in the face. But what a catastrophe if the West Indian should suddenly be taken for an African!⁹

Whether Paulette Nardal shared the view, she does not include Africans as she envisages a future for black people which acknowledges a debt to white civilisation.

We are fully conscious of our debts to the Latin culture and we have no intention of discarding it in order to promote I know not what return to ignorance. Without it, we would have never become conscious of our real selves. But we want to go beyond this culture in order to give our brethren, with the help of white scientists and friends of the Negroes, the pride of being the members of a race which is perhaps the oldest in the world. Once they become aware of their past history, they will no longer despair of the future of their own race, part of which seems, at the present time, to be slow in developing. They will give to their slower brothers a helping hand and try to understand and love them better.¹⁰

Nardal assures us that this project does not involve a ‘return to ignorance’, a sentiment which echoes our earlier quotation from Claude MacKay that to return to black foundations ‘is not returning to a state of savagery’. Neither exhibits that romantic longing for Africa which has so characterised the writings of black Americans. Senghor saw a deeper significance in this attitude. Afro-American poets, he thought, ‘have a completely romantic idea of Africa: it is a refuge from the ugliness and inhumanity of the American world; it is a bath of primitive life cleaning away the sophistication of white culture’.¹¹ However, Nardal in particular seems to view Africans as at a previous stage, unable to catch up. But if this was a widespread prejudice, it was challenged by the presence in their midst of a small number of Africans living at a very different level of culture and consciousness. To the axis for the future Senghor contributed that which neither of the other two groups possessed, a past. As Vaillant notes, ‘the Africans gave West Indians something they had lacked, a sense that it was possible for black men to have a world of their own’.¹² Blacks need not begin with French or English, with European civilisation or the American way of life. They had behind them a very different history, with its own values, its own art, social relations and political structures. Nor was this simply antique, antiquarian voyeurism: influences ran both ways. Jane Nardal was drawn to Surrealism and its disenchantment with the rationality of European life; Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani were influenced by the freshness and power of African art.

The perspectives of the three groupings therefore came together in Senghor’s conception of negritude. Its first stirrings were in his defence of African civilisation against the insistence in the Libermann Seminary that only French culture was of value. His horizons were expanded by his encounter with West Indians and then Americans. Negritude is therefore a philosophy for those who return, not for those who have never left home, who have never known anything else. It is a philosophy for those who have been encouraged to betray their heritage. When Senghor first visited the grave of his father, he composed the poem ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’. Here indeed was a young man who had wasted the substance of his inheritance, who had gone into a far country in forgetfulness of his duty towards his ancestors. In 1937 he delivered an important speech in Dakar, advocating an education system which supplemented French with African traditional languages and culture. This developing position was not without its own contradictions. He advocated a return to African culture – in French. His audience were fellow prodigals. Twenty years later he was to address the Black Artists and Writers conference in Rome on ‘The Constituent Elements of a Civilization of Black African Inspiration’, in which he expounded black personality as it is related to ‘environment, psychology, ontology and religion, society, property and work, ethics, and art’.¹³ Ironically he was encouraged to write on these themes because of his detailed studies of African ethnology carried out by European scholars such as Delafosse, Frobenius and Delavignette.

As it developed negritude took several different forms: ‘the aggressive negritude clamouring for recognition of African values; the conciliatory negritude advocating cultural miscegenation or cross-breeding; and an inventive negritude tending towards a new humanism’.¹⁴ What began as a schoolboy intuition about culture ended as the ideology of a political leader. Vaillant traces the path.

He defined negritude as the sum total of the qualities possessed by all black men everywhere. As his thinking focussed more and more on this concept, he moved away from the realm of fact and individual experience into the realm of abstraction. By the time he had matured as a politician, he had the concept of negritude ready to serve as the keystone of an ideology, designed to describe a new vision of the black man’s place in the world.¹⁵

It was in the political sphere that the ideology attracted criticism, from whites of course, but also from blacks. It developed during a time when fascism wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Beyond the Mantras
• 1 Assimilation and Alienation: Double Consciousness
• 2 Sickness in Babylon: Black Theology in the USA
• 3 The Redemption of the Poor: Black Theology in South Africa
• 4 As Purple is to Lavender: Womanist Theology
• 5 The Concept of Dread: Black Theology in the UK
• 6 Gender, Race and Class: the Closed Circle of Black Theology
• Conclusion: an Obituary
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index