Poet Aime Cesaire
Poet Aime Cesaire of Martinique passed away last week. He was an iconic co-founder of Black consciousness, long before Steve Biko.

Surprisingly, of all the non-French speaking African heads of state, only South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki sent a message of condolences to the Cesaire family.

Why the silence?

In the realm of ideas, Mbeki has been particularly adept at provoking public debates. He did so in 1996 when, as the country’s vice president, he stood before the South African Parliament and proclaimed: “I am an African“. Shortly thereafter, he launched an equally vibrant discourse on African Renaissance. Two years ago, he raised issues relating to Afrocentricism. It dominated public interest for months.

It would have been ridiculous for any other African president to stand before his Parliament and declare to be African.

In White-ruled SA, however, indoctrination against Africa was so thorough that countless Black South Africans believed that Africanness was something to be scorned. Even after political liberation, it was necessary to keep reminding them that they were indeed Africans – that South Africa is part of Africa. Hence the imperative for Mbeki’s proclamation: “I am an African”.

Evidently, it was part of Mbeki’s unwritten job description to confront the arrogance of Eurocentricism by affirming the validity of Africanness. This preoccupation thrust him into the world of ideas regarding African identity. In this course, it was inevitable to encounter the ideas of Cesaire, hence, Mbeki’s affection for the great poet.

In context of colonialism, English-speaking global Africa was dominated by political means.

British form of colonialism involved actual control, direct or indirect. This systems denigrated Africans, it was perceived as racist and English-speaking Africans transformed their anti-racist sentiments into political movements that revolted and brought about independence to Africa.

Conversely, the French colonial policy was based on assumption of French cultural superiority. Black French colonies responded culturally by questioning the cultural condescension of assimilation. To challenge the arrogance, they embarked upon romanticising blackness and its attributes.

It was at the early stages of this process that Cesaire coined the term negritude. Leopold Senghor, Senegal’s founding-president, later expanded the view intellectually and popularised it.

Assimilated Black French-speaking intellectuals in France in the 1930s encouraged themselves to ask, are we really French? The answer was clear: “We have never been French, we are not French and we shall never be French”.

While at first they had been so proud to be assimilated, they now declared war on the same assimilation policy. By the late 1950s, they were demanding political independence from France in order to safeguard their culture, their negritude.

The bid to enhance Africa as a maker of history, Afro-centricity, has taken two forms. The first is Gloriana Afro-centricity that emphasises the great and proud accomplishments of people of African ancestry. These embrace castle builders, those who built the walls of Zimbabwe or the castles of Gondar in India or the sunken churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia; many would include those who built the pyramids of Egypt as well.

The other is Proletariana Afro-centricity that emphasises the sweat of Africa’s brow, the captured African as a co-builder of modern civilisation - the enslaved as creator, the slave as innovator. Slaves helped build the industrial revolution in the western world and fuelled capitalist transformation of the northern hemisphere.

What about the colonised peoples, as victims and builders of the industrialised modern world? African resources have been used for factories that have transformed the contemporary world. Without those resources today’s global economy would be vastly different.

Negritude is a kind of proletarian Afro-centricity, at least when it indulges in romantic primitivism. Negritude salutes the African cattle herder not the African castle builder. To that extent, it is part of Afro-centricity Proletariana.

About The Author(s): Ali Mazrui and James N Kariuki — Prof. Ali Mazrui is Chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture, Kenya. James N. Kariuki is head of the African Diaspora Unit at the Africa Institute of South Africa in Pretoria.

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