Politics and Post-Colonial Theory

African Inflections

Pal Ahluwalia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415237468
• eBook ISBN: 9781134559053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This groundbreaking book makes sense of the complexities and dynamics of post-colonial politics, illustrating how post-colonial theory has marginalised a huge part of its constituency, namely Africa.
Politics and Post-Colonial Theory traces how African identity has been constituted and reconstituted by examining issues such as:
* negritude
* the rise of nationalism
* decolonisation.
The book also questions how helpful post-colonial analysis can be in understanding the complexities which define institutions including:
* the nation-state
* civil society
* human rights
* citizenship.
Politics and Post-colonial Theory bravely breaks down disciplinary boundaries. Its radical vision will be essential reading for all those engaged in Politics, post-colonial studies and African studies.

1 ‘Negritude and nativism’

In search of identity

Is it not a painful thing that, if I want to go to a court of justice, I must employ the English language as a medium, that when I become a barrister, I may not speak my mother-tongue and that someone else should have to translate to me in my own language? Is not this absolutely absurd? Is it not a sign of slavery? Am I to blame the English for it or myself? It is we, the English-knowing Indians, that have enslaved India. The curse of the nation will rest not upon the English but upon us.

Mahatma Gandhi

Must the educated black from abroad come back to recolonise us? Must he walk about with his mouth open, startled by the beauty of African women, by the black man’s ‘heightened sensitivity’? It’s all so embarrassing.

Ezekiel Mphahlele

It is not culture which binds the peoples who are of partially African origin now scattered throughout the world, but an identity of passions. We share a hatred for the alienation forced upon us by Europeans during the process of colonization and empire, and we are bound by our common suffering more than our pigmentation.

Ralph Ellison

For centuries, Europe has affirmed its identity in relation to ‘others’ based on ‘fears, fantasies and demons’ which have inhabited ‘the Western mind from Herodotus to Pliny, and from St Augustine to Columbus’ (Sardar et al. 1993: 1). The European ‘discovery’ of Africa in the fifteenth century, as well as Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas, meant that these new geographical spaces, and in particular their inhabitants, had to be re-inscribed in European discourse. As Michel de Certeau has noted:

In history, which leads from the subject of mysticism in the sixteenth century to the subject of economics, primitive man lies between the two. As a cultural (or even epistemological) figure, he prepares the second by inverting the first, and by the end of the seventeenth century, he is erased, replaced by the native, the colonized, or by the mentally deficient.

(de Certeau 1982: 227)

The negritude movement of the 1930s was full of contradictions and ambivalence. It was by no means a movement that could be regarded simply as relativist, and one which merely reaffirmed the racial binaries which it sought to dismantle. On the contrary, it was an important moment in the long and arduous struggle for decolonisation. Indeed, it was a formative moment for the African, who had been denigrated over centuries and represented as child-like and unable to be a member of the ‘civilised world’.¹ It was essential to the process which sought to break down the tyranny of the web of representations which had been forged over centuries. This chapter examines the conditions which gave rise to the negritude movement and seeks to trace its evolution in the thought of its founding fathers, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire. It illustrates the centrality of identity and the role it plays within post-colonial discourse.

The ‘curse of the nation’ which Gandhi writes about in his dilemma with regard to the English language is one that was also faced by Africans who had endured the wrath of slavery.² These slaves, displaced from Africa and transported to the New World, were forced to adopt the language of the European oppressor, be it English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and/or undergo a process of creolisation.³ This forced contact between different peoples resulted inevitably in hybridity and transformed existing cultures. It was this amalgamation of influences which became part of the culture of the ‘recaptives’ – those slaves who had been captured and in turn freed by the European naval blockade as well as freed slaves who had returned to settle in Africa. These returning slaves had been converted to Christianity through the missionary zeal of the nineteenth century and, cherishing their freedom, looked to Europe, and in particular Britain, as the bastion of values that needed to be established within Africa. The values and political culture of Europe were inscribed deeply in their imagination. It was through these ‘new’ Africans that European ideas were transplanted on to the African continent (Davidson 1992: 26).

The arrival of ‘new’ Africans coincided with the intensive efforts of the abolition movement in the late eighteenth century, when Africa was reconceptualised as a market rather than as a mere source of labour for the New World. This re-imagining led to the ‘scramble for Africa’ and culminated in its colonisation, producing in its wake ‘new legitimating ideologies: the civilizing mission, scientific racism, and technology-based paradigms of progress and development’ (Pratt 1992: 74). Nevertheless, abolition provided these Africans with a new-found optimism through which they saw the European incursion into the interior of the continent as sincere and humanitarian. Edward Blyden (1832–1912), originally from the Danish island of St Thomas, who settled in West Africa, was an exemplary ‘new’ African who was convinced that, ‘only the Negro will be able to explain the Negro to the rest of mankind’ (1888: 263). He argued for the resettlement of American blacks as the best means of spreading ‘civilization’ in Africa. He wrote:

There are fifteen thousand civilized and Christianized Africans striving to accomplish the twofold work of establishing and maintaining an independent nationality, and of introducing the Gospel among untold millions of evangelized and barbarous men.

(Blyden 1862: 19)

Although Mudimbe has detailed the romanticisms and inconsistencies in Blyden’s work, he points out that his ‘political vision is probably the first proposal by a black man to elaborate the benefits of an independent, modern political structure of the continent’ (1988: 118).

It is not surprising, therefore, that the founding father of the negritude movement, Léopold Senghor, celebrated Blyden as the movement’s ‘foremost precursor’. Although Senghor writes that he and his contemporaries had not read Blyden when they began to formulate the concept of negritude, nevertheless clear resonances are evident in their work. As Irele notes, it was Senghor who refined Blyden’s ‘conceptions of the African mind, to analyse its manner of responding to the world, and to enunciate an African mode of experience’ (Irele 1971: 41).

Because negritude has come under considerable attack for its reaffirmation of racial binaries, its critical role as a predecessor to decolonisation has received cursory attention. At best, particularly in the former British colonies, it is seen as a cultural movement which had little to do with the ‘real’ political struggle which led to independence. A significant amnesia therefore appears to have crept into recent literary and critical theory, where the negritude movement is seen more as an embarrassment than as occupying a central position in the process of decolonising the mind that was an integral part of the struggle for independence.

Negritude as a movement emerged in Paris in the early 1930s, amongst African and West Indian students under the leadership of Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal, Aimé Césaire, a Martiniquian, and the Guyanese Léon Damas. The three established a newspaper, L’Etudiant noir (The Black Student), in which they voiced their problems, stressing commonalties amongst all black people around the world. Negritude needs to be contextualised against the general background of colonisation and the manner in which the African’s very being was denigrated. As Irele has observed, this was ‘not simply a rationalisation of white domination but … a direct and crushing attack upon his subjectivity’ (1971: 26). It is perhaps not surprising that negritude took shape in Paris, given the French system of colonisation. French colonies were seen as an extension of France, and their subjects were considered citizens. In theory, this form of colonialism was based on assimilation, but, in reality, the rights of citizenship were extended to only the white French settlers in the colonies. When these African and West Indian students arrived in Paris, they found that, contrary to the theory of assimilation, they were isolated because of their colour. In France, they discovered that they were not ‘French’. This realisation led them to undertake a journey to rediscover their past, their black roots and African heritage. Through negritude the colonised sought to reverse the representations ascribed to them, to turn those negative identities into positive images.

An important paradox of negritude was that the very people who were urging a return to authenticity and renewal were themselves thoroughly imbued with the values of the coloniser. It was their alienation in both cultures, their sense of not belonging in either their own culture or that of the colonisers, that became problematic. It was their ‘preoccupation with the black experience’ which ‘developed into a passionate exaltation of the black race, associated with a romantic myth of Africa’ (Irele 1981: 91). The negritude writers not only celebrated Africa by paying tribute to the ‘African love of life, the African joy of love and the African dream of death’ (Dathorne 1981: 59) but also challenged the colonisers in a way that they had never before been challenged. Césaire described negritude as ‘the simple recognition of the fact of being black and the acceptance of this fact, of our destiny as black people, of our history and our culture’ (cited in Irele 1981: 87).

Although the term negritude was first coined by Aimé Césaire in L’Etudiant noir, its development was the result of a partnership between Césaire and Senghor. Senghor describes the manner in which they developed the term:

In what circumstances did Aimé Césaire and I launch the word negritude between 1933 and 1935? At that time, along with several other black students we were plunged into a panic-stricken despair. The horizon was blocked. No reform was in sight and the colonizers were justifying our political and economic dependence by the theory of the tabula rasa…. In order to establish an effective revolution, our revolution, we had first to divest ourselves of our borrowed attire – that of assimilation – and assert our being, that is to say our negritude.

(Senghor, cited in Bâ 1973: 12)

L’Etudiant noir folded after a few issues, and, although it was succeeded by several other publications in which the ideas of negritude were elaborated, it was not until the establishment of Présence Africaine that the movement had a permanent voice to propagate its ideas. Nevertheless, the movement’s success in its formative days needs to be attributed to its favourable reception amongst the French intelligentsia. This was helped in part by the American Black Renaissance movement of the 1920s, the impact of which was being felt in Paris, particularly in music and entertainment.⁴ This acceptance was in no small way the result of Senghor being able to persuade Jean-Paul Sartre to write a preface to an anthology of Black writers which he had edited. Sartre’s essay, titled ‘Orphée noir’, not only gave the negritude movement a boost but at the same time embroiled it in controversy which persists until today.

Senghor’s negritude

Negritude from its inception needs to be viewed as a notion which had a strong element of resistance. Senghor claimed that the very act of negating the representations of the black person was liberating. Negritude was at its core about returning to black people a humanity that had been denied to them by centuries of denigration and brutalisation which reached its apex through the colonial process. Senghor’s writings were an affirmation that black people were humans, contrary to the manner in which their identity had been problematised within European discourse.⁵

A key aspect of Senghor’s negritude, for which he and the entire movement has been criticised severely, is the affirmation of racial images celebrating merely blackness. That is, any negative trait that had been attributed to a black person is celebrated as a positive element. For Senghor, negritude is the ‘sum total of African cultural values’. His proclamations of a unique black psychophysiology can be discerned in statements such as ‘emotion is black as reason is Greek’ (Reed and Wake 1965: 30) and in a speech at Oxford, in which he proclaimed:

‘I think, therefore I am’, wrote Descartes, the European par excellence. ‘I feel, I dance the other’ the Negro-African would say. He does not need to think, but to live the other by dancing him.

(Senghor, quoted in Irele 1981: 77)

Abiola Irele sees emotion as the key notion in Senghor’s theory ‘which he virtually erects into a function of knowledge and attributes to the African as a cardinal principle of his racial disposition’ (1996: 18). Senghor has responded to such criticisms, claiming that he has been read out of context, that it was not his intention to suggest that black people were not rational, but, on the contrary, that reason was common to all individuals. Rather, he sought to emphasise the ‘very real differences in personality and temperament that influence the way in which the occidental and the black African relate to the external world’ (Bâ 1973: 76).

Sylvia Washington Bâ has suggested a useful and convenient way to characterise negritude by making a distinction between historical negritude and essential negritude. The former is a recognition of being black in a white world, while the latter is ‘a far more controversial concept, since the idea of a black African personality, a black specificity, is based on the explosive notion of race’ (1973: 160). The distinction between historical and essential negritude is an adaptation of Sartre’s subjective and objective negritude. Essential negritude is what Sartre claimed in ‘Orphée noir’ as ‘neither a state nor a definite ensemble of vices and virtues, of intellectual and moral qualities, but a certain affective attitude toward the world’ (Sartre, cited in Bâ 1973: 166). For Sartre, however, negritude was a contingent phenomenon which would disappear eventually after the resolution of black–white conflict and result in the creation of human society without racism.

Sartre’s primary task in this essay was to demonstrate how negritude was analogous to Marxist theory. For black people, it was important to recognise that race was the key factor in their oppression. Sartre wrote:

A Jew, white among whites, can deny that he is a Jew can declare himself a man among men. The Negro cannot deny that he is a Negro nor claim for himself that abstract colorless humanity: he is black. Therefore he is driven toward authenticity: insulted, enslaved, he stands up, he picks up the word ‘nigger’ that they had thrown at him like a stone, he asserts his rights as black, facing the white man with pride. The final unity that will draw all oppressed people together in the same combat must be preceded by what I call the moment of separation or of negativity: this antiracist racism is the only road that can lead to the abolition of racial differences.

(Sartre, cited in Arnold 1981: 17)

Negritude was to be seen to be synonymous with the proletariat and as having the same potential for social change. But, for Sartre, this was a temporary phenomenon: after the revolution, French racism would disappear, as would its antithesis, negritude, because in the new society race would have no place. This part of Sartre’s essay has been criticised for denying the negritude writers their basic premise. As Janet Vaillant notes, for Sartre ‘it is only after he has ceased to live unreflectively and totally within the world of objective Negritude that he feels the need to express his subjective Negritude’ (Vaillant 1990: 250).

Frantz Fanon in his Black Skin, White Masks also accuses Sartre of blocking the source of negritude. He writes that at the very moment when he was ‘trying to grasp my own being, Sartre, who remained The Other, gave me a name and thus shattered my last illusion’ (1986: 137). This illusion of being able to find yourself by reclaiming your past African heritage, of being black, was shattered, and Fanon writes: ‘Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I was damned. Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man’ (ibid.: 138). Fanon’s relationship to negritude can at best be described as ambivalent (Parry 1994). He was conscious of the essentialised nature of identity which was being advanced by negritude, but at the same time recognised its necessary positive effects. He recognised the need for the affirmation of black identity. In this context negritude was not only necessary but infeasible. It was necessary because it effected ‘a shift between black–white relations’, offering the black person a source of pride, while at the same time a white person ‘recognises in the Negro qualities that he now experiences himself as lacking, such as closeness to nature, spontaneity, simplicity’ (Kruks 1996: 130). In this process, there is finally a sense of recognition. It is through this affirmation of identity that the black person at last gains recognition.

Whilst recognising negritude’s importance and rebuking Sartre, ultimately Fanon adopts a stance akin to Sartre. Fanon documents the alienation entailed in not belonging in either culture and sees that the only way out is, ‘to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and through one human being, to reach out for the universal’ (1986: 197). He criticises negritude’s search for a black identity in some distant African past as irrelevant, because it is not possible to achieve freedom without looking toward the future. In short, Fanon recognised that it was important to celebrate and affirm one’s black identity, but that in itself was not enough to change the course of history – a task to which he was fundamentally committed in the struggle for Algeria.

Fanon’s position on negritude is much like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of ‘strategic essentialism’, in which essentialist forms of native identity a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Negritude and nativism’: in search of identity
• 2 Decolonisation and national liberation
• 3 Modernity and the problem of the nation-state
• 4 Striving for democratisation: the complexities of civil society and human rights
• 5 Citizenship, subjectivity and the crisis of modernity
• 6 Globalisation and post-colonialism: towards the reconstitution of identity
• 7 Afterword
• Notes
• Works cited
• Index