Négritude: The birth of Black humanism

*Originally published on March 8, 2023.

In the early 20th century, Black intellectuals in West Africa were imagining a post-colonial world.

African and Caribbean students in Europe were thinking about what an African future could look like. They were giving shape to a political movement known as Négritude. 

"It's best to think about it as a kind of Black humanism, really an incursion into the idea that Black people have something distinctive to offer to humanist philosophy," said Merve Fejzulas, a historian of modern Africa at the University of Missouri.  

This humanist philosophy fuelled debates over the question: what kind of learning would best serve African children in the future? And can Africans live in a time beyond colonialism but also hold onto tradition and history? 

Fejzula argues that by centring education as a condition for children to be protagonists in their own development, we can build new understandings of both 20th-century West African intellectual life and public spheres.

In November 2022, she delivered a talk on Négritude at the University of Toronto. And subsequently, she joined IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed to discuss how West African school children in the 20th century push us to redefine common conceptions of public spheres.

Here is an excerpt of their conversation.

Can you tell me what Négritude is? 

The term came about initially amongst students in Paris in the 20s and 30s. They were encountering themselves from all these different parts of the French imperial world — students from Africa and the Caribbean. They were one of the few that received scholarships to not only get education in their home territories but to travel to France to get university training. They were a cohort of maybe a dozen. It's an incredibly small group of people that are allowed to travel to France in order to pursue this education.

When they get there, they're encountering people from across the French Empire for the first time. They've written about it as this enormously instructive experience in both empire and in race — comparing their experiences leads them to think about their own understandings of race and self in different ways.

The term itself comes from a student periodical, The Black Student. But that one issue became a legendary issue for [using] this term "Négritude," which was coined by Aimé Césaire, the great Martiniquan intellectual and politician. It wasn't something that was immediately [adopted]. It's when he publishes his great poem, Cahier d'un retour au pays natale, that it becomes something that exposes many more people to the terminology. 

Why is it that this philosophy caught people's imagination?

Sometimes intellectual historians have a tendency to assume that the important ideas that we've come to live with must have been important to begin with and that they are immediately apparent to people that they will be useful or interesting. But in this, I think it's actually useful to know that it's really only by building infrastructure. And this is why I think, to me, 'publics' are so important for the transmission of these sorts of things, that it becomes an important philosophy worth knowing.

One of the central institutions of that transmission and dissemination is Présence Africaine, which is a publishing house that still operates today. It was founded in 1947 simultaneously, both in Paris and Dakar [Senegal], and that became the hub. It collected a lot of Black intellectuals in Paris and in Dakar and organized a lot of these seminars. Then anthologies began to be published after the Second World War, consecrating Négritude, gathering all of these intellectuals in a single volume, for instance, of poetry and writing.

So it's really through that work and then eventually through the work of other academics and intellectuals based outside of France, in the U.S., in Nigeria... that this takes on the resonance that it does because people that are invested in disseminating it really take up the task of doing that.

Let's begin in the 19th century or early 20th century. There's a lot of churn and tension in West Africa in terms of power and intellectual development and education. Can you talk broadly about what's happening there, about the milieu, what were people talking about? 

It's such a period of intense change. And it's important to remember, too, that we tend to think of colonialism as just this endless process that stretches into time. But in previous centuries, this would look different on the continent, and actual contact with Europeans was often limited to coastal areas.

Of course, transformations have been occurring since enslavement which fundamentally changed the way the continent looked. But the real investments in developing and changing intellectual and public culture on the continent itself is a sort of late 19th-century development. And education is really central to this.

Mission schools are a key piece. They provide Western-style education trying to impose, if you're in a British context, Victorian ideals of what that might look like. But on the continent itself, there had already been obviously these vibrant intellectual cultures — manuscript cultures when it came to Islamic cultures, who had long had these traditions of manuscript exchange. And even outside of that, you had these really long-held oral cultures that had preexisted and continued alongside these more printed forms of publics that were key to kind of a real flourishing intellectual life that predated European arrival and continued alongside it. 

So what were the concerns of African intellectuals at that moment in time? 

They shift over time. But I would say between the mid to late 19th century, for the people who are invested, who are being trained in these mission schools and increasingly sometimes in these colonial state schools, they are determined to expand literacy because they see this Western-style education as key to an African future.

I study both Anglophone and Francophone West Africa and in both cases you can find people who call themselves Black Frenchmen and Black Englishmen and they are convinced that education grants them full and complete access to Western culture. They are trying to combat these very racist stereotypes that there is no possibility for African or Black or diasporic intellectuals to ever accede to Western forms of knowledge. So they really aggressively pursue some of these forms of educational expansion because they see it as key to disproving a lot of these racist myths. 

In colonial settings, authenticity is an important tool for power. Can you talk briefly about how Négritude was upending that idea of authenticity? 

Négritude is trying to do multiple things at once. So on the one hand it's claiming for communities of Black people that there is something that is recoverable about Blackness, there is something that Blackness is, and it's a kind of ontological experience — a world view of some kind. So they're offering this in a kind of global Black publics sphere, so to speak. And a Pan-African one.

At the same time, it has this kind of metropolitan imperial valence where they want to lay claim to access things from the state — right to citizenship, to claim that it is possible to be both African and French. Because at the time, in order to accede to French citizenship, what you had to do was just demonstrate complete and full assimilation. So adapted education, as many Négritude intellectuals argued, was just a way of disenfranchising French colonial subjects from accessing citizenship because they still perceive fundamental incompatibility of Africanness, for instance, with Frenchness. They're trying to do all of that simultaneously.

Then at the level of a kind of cosmopolitan humanism, they're also arguing that a humanist project really ought to be a global one. And in order for that to be the case, we have to recognize how everyone, situated from their specific context, has something to contribute to this global concept of humanity. So for them, what they're relying on is more centralized versions, they still are attempting to articulate a common human embeddedness, which was honestly, I mean, for many Black intellectuals up until the mid-20th century, one of the dominant ways of articulating humanist philosophy. It attracted Martin Luther King Jr. just like it did other people. So it was the dominant paradigm for intellectuals globally. It's no accident that Black intellectuals would articulate ways to make their claim on it as well. 

Just as a final question, is there some universal resonance in the anxiety that Black intellectuals had about children's education back then? Do you see that today? 

I think it's fascinating to think about the recent movements to decolonize education, which people I think sometimes forget that the most recent flourishing of it originated in Africa. And it's especially important to think through how those imperial legacies remain because that's what many of the demands of those students, whether they were based at the University of Cape Town or the University of Ghana, made. So many of the curricula still continue to be shaped by these imperial metropoles and just because colonial holdings have diminished, that doesn't mean that this kind of presumption that imperial language doesn't circulate has diminished. So it's really an ongoing struggle to think through what African education can be like and what a truly decolonized education can be like.

I think for Black intellectuals especially, you can see in the public arena how that continues to shape public debate and investments. You can still see disparities in educational outcomes for Black students and for students of colour just globally. In Canada, the Indigenous experience, which is also so particular and so ongoing and the way those debates continue today are enormously instructive for really chastening us in thinking about education simply as a liberatory democratic project. And that's true too in zooming out in education generally. The stakes are high for a reason.
 

*Q&A edited for clairty and length. This episode was produced by Naheed Mustafa and Pauline Holdsworth.