--Léopold Sédar Senghor, from "Négritude: a Humanism of the Twentieth Century" (1970)

1. During the last thirty or so years that we have been proclaiming negritude, it has become customary, especially among English-speaking critics, to accuse of of racialism. This is probably because the word is not of English origin. But, in the language of Shakespeare, is it not iin good company with the words humanism and socialism? Mphapheles [reference to Es'kia Mphaphele, author of "Mrs. Plum," who disagreed with the philosophy of Négritude] have been sent about the world saying: 'Négritude is an inferiority complex'; but the same word cannot mean both 'racialism' and 'inferiority complex' without contradiction. [. . .]

2. [. . . N]égritude is neither racialism nor self-negation. Yet it is not just affirmation; it is rooting oneself in oneself, and self-confirmation: confirmation of one's being. Negritude is nothing more or less than what some English-speaking Africans have called the African personality. It is no different from the 'black personality discovered and proclaimed by the American New Negro movement [Harlem Renaissance]. As the American Negro poet, Langston Hughes, wrote after the first world war: "We, the creators of the new generation, want to give expression to our black personality without shame or fear . . . We know we are handsome. Ugly as well. The drums weep and the drums laugh." Perhaps our [West Africans] only originality, since it was the West Indian poet Aimé Césaire who coined the word Négritude, is to have attempted to define the concept a little more closely; to have developed it as a weapon, as an instrument of liberation and as a contribution to the humanism of the twentieth century.

3. [. . .] What, then, is négritude? It is [. . .] the sum of the cultural values of the black world; that is, a certain active presence in the world, or better, in the universe. [. . .]

4. The paradox [the seeming conflict between heart and mind] is only apparent when I say that négritude, by its ontology (that is, its philosophy of being), its moral law and its aesthetic, is a response to the modern humanism that European philosophers and scientists have been preparing since the end of the nineteenth century [ . . .]

5. Firstly, African ontology. Far back as one may go into his past, from the northern Sudanese to the southern Bantu, the African has always and everywhere presented a concept of the world which is diametrically opposed to the traditional philosophy of Europe. The latter is essentially static, objective, dichotomic; it is, in fact, dualistic, in that it makes an absolute distinction between body and soul, matter and spirit. It is founded on separation and opposition: on analysis and conflict. The African, on the other hand, conceives the world, beyond the diversity of its forms, as a fundamentally mobile, yet unique, reality that seeks synthesis. [. . .]

6. The African is, of course, sensitive to the external world, to the material aspect of beings and things. It is precisely because he is more so than the white european, because he is sensitive to the tangible qualities of things -- shape, color, smell, weight, etc. -- that the African considers these things merely as signs that have to be interpreted and transcended in order to reach the reality of human beings. [. . .] This reality is being in the ontological sense of the word, and it is life force. Thus, the whole universe appears as an infinitely small, and at the same time and infinitely large, network which emanates from God and ends in God. [. . .]

7. As far as African ontology is concerned, too, there is no such thing as dead matter: every being, every thing -- be it only a grain of sand -- radiates a life force, a sort of wave-particle; and sages, priests, kings, doctors and artists all use it to help bring the universe to its fulfilment.

8. For the African, contrary to popular belief, is not passive in the face of the order -- or disorder -- of the world. His attitude is fundamentally ethical. [. . .] In order to explain this morality in action of négritude, I must go back a little. Each of the identifiable life forces of the universe -- from the grain of sand to the ancestor -- is, itself and in its turn, a network of life forces -- as modern physical chemistry confirms: a network of elements that are contradictory in appearance but really complementary. Thus, for the African, man is composed, of course, of matter and spirit, of body and soul; but at the same time he is also composed of a virile and a feminine element: indeed of several 'souls.' Man is therefore a composition of mobile life forces which interlock[. . . .]

9. Ethnologists have often praised the unity, the balance and the harmony of African civilization, of black society, which was based both on the community and on the person, and in which, because it was founded on dialogue and reciprocity, the group had priority over the individual without crushing him, but allowing him to blossom as a person. I would like to emphasize at this point how much these characteristics of négritude enable it to find its place in contemporary humanism, thereby permitting black Africa to make its contribution to the 'Civilization of the Universal' which is so necessary in our divided but interdependent world [. . .] A contribution, first of all, to international cooperation, which must be and which shall be the cornerstone of that civilization. It is through these virtues of negritude that decolonization has been accomplished without too much bloodshed or hatred and that a positive form of cooperation based on 'dialogue and reciprocity' has been established between former colonizers and colonized. It is through these virtues that there has been a new spirit at the United Nations, where the 'no' and the bang of the fist on the table are no longer signs of strength. [. . .]

10. For in black Africa art is not a separate activity, in itself or for itself: it is a social activity, a technique of living, a handicraft in fact. [. . .]

11. [Discussing the performed art of the Dogon people of Mali, Senghor writes] It was declaimed, sung and danced; sculptured and presented in costume. The whole of the Dogon universe was portrayed in this symbiosis of the arts, as is the custom in black Africa. The universe -- heaven and earth -- was therefore represented through the intermediary of Man, whose ideogram is the same of that of the universe. Then the world was re-presented by means of masks [. . . ] The aim of the entertainment was, by means of the symbiosis of the arts -- poetry, song, dances, sculpture and painting, used as techniques of integration -- to re-create the universe and in the contemporary world, but in a more harmonious way[. . . . ]

12. This, then, is Africa's lesson in aesthetics: art does not consist in photographing nature but in taming it, like the hunter when he reproduces the call of the hunted animal; like a separated couple, or two lovers, calling to each other in their desire to be reunited. The call is not the simple reproduction of the cry of the Other; it is a comoplementarity, a song: a call of harmony. [. . . I]f there are images [in African verbal, visual, and performance arts], they are rhythmical. [. . . ] For it is rhythm -- the main virtue, in fact, of négritude -- that gives the work of art its beauty. Rhythm is simply the movement of attraction or repulsion that expressses the life of the cosmic forces; symmetry and asymmetry, repetition or opposition: in short, the lines of force that link the meaningful signs that shapes and colors, timbre and tones, are.