Etudiante lisant L’unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire, en 2021. JN Picture

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‘European civilisation has been a long process of epistemicide—the destruction of knowledge, languages, cultures, and the production and distribution of wealth.’

Afrocentrism and Identity Construction

“Mɔgɔ kelen tɛ yɛlɛma kɔni kelen ka kɛ bɛɛ ye.”
A single person cannot become everything all alone.
—Bambara proverb, Mali.

by ISMAËL DIADIÉ HAÏDARA

In Juan Latino Exemplar humanae vitae, I argued that human history is not only a cycle in time but also a succession of spaces that give human time a geographical reality. In a brief, unpublished early work, Le partage des eaux, I showed that historical cycles always have lakes, rivers, seas, or oceans at their center. At the beginning there was the age of the great lakes in East Africa. Humankind appears, along with the oldest tools invented during its development, as studied by André Leroi-Gourhan and various paleontologists. As humans spread to other continents, the center of the world shifted toward the Red Sea and its surroundings: the Nile, where African cultures developed, the Euphrates, and farther off the cultures of the China Sea and the Indian Ocean. The most prominent civilisations would be the Pharaonic and Mesopotamian ones. When the Red Sea died, the Mediterranean was born, bringing with it the birth of the monotheistic religions on the margins of the pagan cultures of Greece and Rome. The center of the world shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic following the collapse of the capitalistic Islamic world in the fifteenth century and the “discovery” of America—an event that my esteemed and cherished friend the Duchess of Medina Sidonia called into question. Africa, she said, had been in contact with America before the arrival of Columbus.

The emergence of the Atlantic as the center of the world came about through the collapse of the caravan-based economy in the face of a new one fed by caravels, as Vitorino Magalhães Godinho (1969) observed in his great work L’économie de l’Empire portugais aux XVe et XVIe siècles. The evolution of techniques and of the cartography of the Catalan school largely enabled the sinking of the inner sea of the Roman world. Fernand Braudel in La Méditerranée et le Monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949) and Huguette and Pierre Chaunu in Séville et l’Atlantique (1955–1960) describe the economic activities that produced the death of the sea and the birth of the ocean.

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The French poet Paul Valéry said in 1919 in his work La Crise de l’Esprit: “Nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles” (We civilisations now know that we are mortal). This is nothing new. Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), the father of modern sociology, spoke in his Muqaddima of ʿaṣabiyya and kaṣabiyya—the cycle that leads to the formation of empires or smaller social cohesions, their rise and their falls, the seeds of which they carry within themselves at their birth. Arnold Toynbee, in his twelve-volume Study of History (1934–1961), commented on by José Ortega y Gasset in “Una interpretación de la historia universal. En torno a Arnold J. Toynbee,” returns to that cyclical reading of history that led Samuel P. Huntington to speak of the Clash of Civilisations.

With the Atlantic a new geopolitics took shape, shifting the centers of demography, knowledge, and large-scale economic enterprise from the coasts of southern Europe to the north of the continent. Coimbra and Salamanca ceased to be great centers of knowledge in the face of Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam…

In this new epistemological world that was being born, Northern Europe became the center of the world and the South was produced as a necessary periphery, thanks to its raw materials and its labor force. Each world center rewrites history to its own measure, and in those new annals of history the “Negro” emerged in nascent sciences—biology and anthropology—that ended up creating a geography of the races.

The construction of the Western vision of Africa and of Black people evolved from the Enlightenment to the Romantics, creating the idea of an inferior race in a savage land that had to be conquered and civilized out of compassion.

“Whites are superior to these Negroes, as Negroes are to monkeys, and as monkeys are to oysters,” said Voltaire (1694–1778) in his Traité de métaphysique in 1734. Ernest Renan (1823–1892), in his Discours sur la Nation of 1882, did not lag behind. The translator of the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, a great stylist and biographer of Marcus Aurelius and his age, observed: “Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race […] a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro […] a race of masters and soldiers, the European race.” Voltaire chartered ships that passed through Cádiz to buy men in Africa and sell them as slaves in America. For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in Reason in History (Paris, Plon, 1965): “What characterizes the Negroes is precisely that their consciousness has not yet attained the contemplation of a solid objectivity, such as God, the law, to which the will of man can adhere and through which he can reach the intuition of his own essence.”

The great Victor Hugo captured the pause of his age and paved the way for colonisation, justifying it and even considering it necessary. One of his texts begins with an observation that is anything but gratuitous: “What a land this Africa is! Asia has its history; Australia itself has its history, going back to its beginnings in human memory; Africa has no history; a kind of vast and dark legend envelops it.” Victor Hugo, who defended justice and freedom for the condemned of his native France, went so far as to say in a speech delivered on 18 May 1879 during a banquet commemorating the abolition of slavery: “This fierce Africa has only two aspects: peopled, it is barbarism; deserted, it is savagery, but it is no longer daunting… In the nineteenth century, the white man made the Negro into a man; in the twentieth century, Europe will make Africa into a world. To remake a new Africa, to make old Africa manageable for civilization, that is the problem.” All that remained for him was to point to an entire continent, virgin and populated by soulless men, and to call for its invasion, for this was something God had reserved for Europe: “Go forth, peoples of Europe! Take this land [Africa]. Take it. From whom? From no one. Take this land of God. God gives the land to humanity. God gives Africa to Europe. Take it.”

Thus the French original: “Au dix-neuvième siècle, le blanc a fait du noir un homme ; au vingtième siècle, l’Europe fera de l’Afrique un monde… Refaire une Afrique nouvelle, rendre la vieille Afrique maniable à la civilisation, tel est le problème. L’Europe le résoudra. […] Dieu offre l’Afrique à l’Europe. Prenez-la.”

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Victor Hugo was a defender and apologist for colonisation. To justify the unjustifiable, contempt had to be added. Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) wrote in the story Marroca, included in the volume Mademoiselle Fifi (1882), at the height of European colonialism and French naturalist literature. The original passage reads: “There is no shortage of girls in Africa; on the contrary, they abound; but, to continue my comparison, they are all as malicious and corrupt as the muddy liquid of the Saharan wells.”

The history of the colonisation of Africa paid no heed to Maupassant. It became a chronicle of rapes, of colonists posing with naked girls and women, of children born and not recognised by their ‘civilised’ fathers. A recent book has set out to expose the facts of those barbarous times, demonstrating that Hugo’s ‘civilized’ men were capable only of savagery.

The archaeology of knowledge is an exercise that allowed Nietzsche to lay bare the foundations of morality, and allowed Foucault (1969), who followed him in method, to show how an episteme is constructed, how an order of discourse makes it possible to build a gaze and a gaze fabricated with facts. The discourse that governs words and things reveals that through the birth of the human sciences in modernity we have a fabrication of objects and sciences that must disclose their truth. Anthropology, and later ethnography, took on the task of understanding this new object, the noble savage, whom Buffon already regarded with suspicion, far removed from the pleadings of a curious Montaigne who saw that distant world as a paradise lost to Europe. Durkheim set about laying the foundations of sociology. Sociology would study (civilised) human societies, while Marcel Mauss (1950) would continue his investigations into the other face of those societies, to a certain extent founding ethnography, the science that would take ethnic groups as its object.

Ethnography made it possible to discover the social structures of so-called primitive societies, their emerging or absent political orders, their modes of production and representation of the world, and to work toward civilizing them. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos pointed out in Epistemologies of the South (2015), European civilisation has been a long process of epistemicide—the destruction of knowledge, languages, cultures, and the production and distribution of wealth. The colonial empire and the Negro they constructed and worked to civilise were erected upon devastated ground. The whole enterprise found its justification in Enlightenment philosophy and in the nascent human sciences. In the political realm, the Social Contract justifies the relationship between the Hegelian totalitarian state and the subjectivities that compose it. But behind the Social Contract of the Enlightenment lies a tacit epistemological truth that Mills (1977) and Pateman (1988) would strive to bring to light.

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Behind the social contract that makes possible the functioning of the institutions of Atlantic societies hides a racial contract that divides the world in two: the one that dominates and the one that suffers, that of white supremacy and the institutionalised inferiority of the rest of the world. As the Jamaican philosopher Charles Wade Mills (1977) shows in his work The Racial Contract, classic contractualist theories such as those of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant were built on the assumption of white domination of the world. The same critique of the Enlightenment social contract, which persists today in the work of Rawls, is upheld by Carole Pateman in The Sexual Contract. She sums it up as follows: “By what strange paradox has the social contract, which was supposed to institute civil freedom and equality, kept women in a state of subordination? Why, in the new social order, have women not been emancipated as ‘individuals’ at the same time as men?” Theories of the social contract, inherited from Locke and Rousseau and renewed since Rawls, cannot ignore the questions of justice raised by gender. In this already classic work, Carole Pateman (1988) demonstrates that the transition from the old order of status to a modern contractual society in no way marks the end of patriarchy. The philosopher brings to light the repressed reverse side of the social contract: the “sexual contract,” which, through the division between the private and public spheres, bases the freedom of men on the domination of women. It is less a matter of exploitation than of subordination, as the author shows by analysing the marriage contract, but also all contracts relating to property in the person, from prostitution to surrogacy, and including slavery and wage labor. From a feminist perspective, this is the starting point for a critique of the very principle of liberal political philosophy: for Carole Pateman, a free social order can never be contractual. She reconstructs the history of the sexual contract and of patriarchal society. The world of the social contract is thus a universe built from a fictive account of the origins of human societies by contracting individuals who are in reality white men, situated in the north of the known world, and who base their domination on the rest of the sexed and racialised world. It is here that the theses of Charles W. Mills intersect with those of Pateman and cast a harsh light on the epistemological domination of the world by the white man, who grants himself control over bodies and their labor power in a universe situated under the rule of liberal democracies and the rule of law. These liberal democracies grant everyone a universalism of rights, but not of fact. Theoretical racism, its essentialisation, and its historical consequence—slavery and colonisation—are ignored. Mills (1977) follows in the footsteps of Baron Antoine-Vincent de Vastey (known as Baron de Vastey), one of the most important intellectual figures of post-revolutionary Haiti. Vastey, who was secretary to King Henri Christophe in the Kingdom of Haiti, wrote a critique of the French and European colonial system at the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially in his work Le Système colonial dévoilé, published in 1814 in Cap-Haïtien (Kingdom of Haiti). He saw colonialism as a “supremacy of the white species.” Behind the Social Contract of Hobbes (1651) and Rousseau (1772) lies, then, a tacit White and Sexual Contract that justifies a hierarchical system influencing the distribution of wealth and the place occupied in the order of discourse by non-whites, whether Blacks from Africa or yellows from Asia. The social contract is a primordial agreement by which each person “puts his person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” From this point on, each individual is supposed to yield part of his “potency,” to use Spinoza’s expression, and to acknowledge beyond himself the society in which he accepts to live. Of course, as Norman Ajari, a reader of Mills, observed: “At the time when Rousseau was developing his political philosophy, the Code Noir, which governed slavery, had been in force for three-quarters of a century. Yet the only slavery mentioned in his writings was the metaphorical slavery that subjected European subjects to the will of a monarch. The philosophy of emancipation was not conceived for the liberation of slaves and the colonised; it envisages whites as the only possible beneficiaries.”

The racial contract underlying the Social Contract imposes a discriminatory universe that can be observed on three levels. The first is political and highlights the agreement on the origins of the state, where colonisation finds its justification. The second is moral, revealing the ethical principles on which the whole of society is based and distinguishing whites from the rest of the world, which does not fit into the established order of values because it is an underworld inhabited by non-persons. Ajari puts it simply: “The non-persons excluded from the benefits of the racial contract are thus caricatured, considered irrational, and assimilated to phantasmic images, which legitimises their subordinate position. The racial contract thus implies white ignorance, which disguises an unjust order as a necessity due to the incapacities of non-white subjects.” The order of the world from the Atlantic has been established in this way down to our own day. It must be said that the social contract of the Enlightenment was not designed with women and non-whites in mind.

Europe falls into the loneliness of the master to which its geopolitical and epistemological provincialism leads it. It adds that loneliness of its provincialism to the other loneliness of the living described by T. S. Eliot (1948), which Henry James (1898) also saw—before James Joyce and his Dubliners—when he wrote in his notebook that he had a good idea for a story, the one that would become The Altar of the Dead. In that work, the central character notes: “He was grieved that the dead were so forgotten, so set apart. He was shocked by the crudeness, the coldness that enveloped their memory.” With its provincialism, Europe has isolated itself with Goodness, Justice, and Beauty on its side. The rest of the world serves it only as a consolation in the form of economic, political, and cultural colonies.

Afrocentrism as a Reaction to Eurocentrism

Nda farka tafa ni, ni tafa ga, wor kur ci a fō.
(If a donkey kicks you and you kick the donkey, you are the same.)
—Songhay proverb.

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One of the consequences of “white” Eurocentrism is the production of Nazism and apartheid, making the racial problem a policy of discrimination founded on biological bases. Jews, women, and the Negro would be the figures of the marginalisation it produces as a center. The Jews would react with Zionism, women with feminism, and Blackness with Afrocentrism.

In 1905, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963)—one of the founders of modern sociology and a central figure of twentieth-century Black thought—and William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934) created the Niagara Movement to abolish all forms of racial discrimination and gain access to the right to vote as guaranteed by the American constitution. Du Bois wished to show the genius and humanity of the Negro by publishing The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of fourteen essays published in 1903. He died in Accra at the age of 94, on 27 August 1963, on the eve of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Indeed, his life and work are expressed through Martin Luther King’s dream and, before that, through another movement that emerged in France: Négritude. For the Belgian specialist Lilyan Kesteloot (1931–2018), this book is the foundation of Négritude thought.

At the dawn of 1921, René Maran published Batouala (1921), a novel that won him the Prix Goncourt that same year, making it the first novel by a Black writer to receive this distinction. Without losing respect for the white man or flattering the Black man, the novel condemned the cruelty of the colonial system. In fact, the book is famous not only for its story centered on African life in Ubangi-Shari (present-day Central African Republic) but above all for its extremely critical anticolonial preface. René Maran (1921) and William Du Bois (1963) are the fathers of that poetic movement that would bear much fruit between the 1930s and the 1960s.

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The publication of the journal Légitime Défense (1932) by Étienne Léro (1910–1936), René Ménil, and other surrealist and Marxist activists opened the way, following the path of W. Du Bois, for Négritude. In its pages, French colonial assimilation was rejected, colonial racism criticised, and a revolutionary Black consciousness claimed. The radical critique of colonialism, Black cultural affirmation, and the politicisation of Antillean and African identity would be found in the following years in the discourse of Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), Léon-Gontran Damas (1912–1978), Félix Éboué (1884–1944), Augusta Savage (1892–1962), Claude McKay (1889–1948)… who met in the salon of Paulette and Jane Nardal, in Clamart, in the Hauts-de-Seine. These two ladies from Martinique are the forgotten godmothers of Négritude.

Négritude is a movement of exaltation of the cultural values of the Black peoples. It is the ideological basis that drove the independence movement in Africa. According to Senghor, Négritude is the totality of the cultural values of Black Africa. For Césaire, the word designates first and foremost rejection. Rejection of cultural assimilation; rejection of a certain image of the unproductive Negro.

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A. The poet as witness, as in Celan.
B. The poet exalts the values of the Black person.
C. A song to freedom.

Parallel to Négritude, Negrismo developed in America and the Caribbean. Negrismo was a cultural movement that emerged in the Hispanic Caribbean in the first decades of the twentieth century, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. It arose in Cuba and Puerto Rico in dialogue with the European avant-gardes (modernism, surrealism, futurism). It was linked to the rise of Afro-descendant cultures in the Caribbean and to an interest in the “popular” and the “African” in art. It developed in parallel, though differently, with the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude. It was characterised by the revaluation of African and Afro-Caribbean cultures, the use of rhythms, musicality, and orality in poetry, the representation of Black characters in literature and art, and an interest in folklore, religion, and Afro-descendant popular life.

Among the most prominent negristas were Emilio Ballagas (1908–1954) and Nicolás Guillén (1902–1989) from Cuba, Manuel del Cabral (1907–1999) from the Dominican Republic, Luis Palés Matos (1898–1959) and Julia de Burgos (1914–1953) from Puerto Rico, and Ildefonso Pereda Valdés from Uruguay. The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier did much to promote Black literature and art. Fernando Ortiz was a leading Cuban promoter of Afro-Cuban culture. The Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, through his writings, drew attention to the culture of Black people and, through his treatment, elaborated a style of Cuban negrismo. In his work, Guillén exposes and showcases the Black culture that emerges through processes of transculturation and mestizaje, creating what he identified as “the Cuban color.”

Among the poets of Négritude, Senghor, Césaire, and Damas stand out. The first president of Senegal, poet, and essayist, Léopold Sédar Senghor was born on 9 October 1906 in the small coastal town of Joal, south of Dakar, and died in Verson (Normandy) on 20 December 2001. He pursued university studies in Paris, where he became involved with the French Socialist Party (SFIO) in 1937. He came into contact with Black poets and activists such as Paulette Nardal, Aimé Césaire, and Léon-Gontran Damas, together with whom he launched the idea of Négritude, which he defines as the expression of the cultural values of the Black world. Through a major poetic oeuvre—Chants d’ombre (1945), Éthiopiques (1956), Nocturnes (1961), Élégies majeures (1979), and Hosties noires—he defends this concept of Négritude. Senghor was elected a member of the Académie française on 2 June 1983.

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NAKED WOMAN

Naked woman, black woman,
Clothed in your color which is life, in your form which is beauty!
I grew up in your shadow; the sweetness of your hands bandaged my eyes
And here in the heart of summer and of noon, I discover you,
Promised land, from the height of a charred hilltop,
And your beauty strikes me to the very heart, like the
blinding birth of an eagle.

Naked woman, dark woman,
Ripe fruit of firm flesh, ecstatic shadows of black
wine, mouth that makes my mouth lyrical,
Savannas of pure horizons, savannas that tremble
at the fervent caresses of the East wind,
Carved tom-tom, taut tom-tom that roars beneath the conqueror’s fingers,
Your deep contralto voice is the spiritual song of the Soul.

Naked woman, dark woman,
Oil that no breath disturbs, oil calm on the
flanks of the athlete, on the flanks of the prince of Mali,
Gazelle fastened to the stars, the pearls are stars
on the night of your skin,
Delights of the mind’s eye, the reflections of red
gold on your shimmering skin,
In the shade of your hair, my anguish lights up
in the approaching suns of your eyes.

Naked woman, black woman,
I sing your passing beauty, form I fix in Eternity,
Before jealous destiny reduces you to ashes
to nourish the roots of life.

Aimé Fernand David Césaire (Basse-Pointe, Martinique, 26 June 1913 – Fort-de-France, Martinique, 17 April 2008) was a French poet and politician. Together with Senghor, he was one of the inventors of Négritude and one of the greatest poets of the surrealist movement as well. His book Cahier d’un retour au pays natal was praised by André Breton in his 1947 preface.

Far from the bygone days
my people
when
far from the bygone days
a well-set head is reborn upon
your shoulders
take up again
the word
dismiss the traitors
and the masters
you will recover the bread and the blessed land
land restored
when
when you cease to be a somber toy
in the carnival of others
or in foreign fields
the discarded scarecrow

tomorrow
when tomorrow my people
the defeat of the mercenary
ends in celebration
the shame of the West will stay
in the heart of the sugarcane
people awake from the evil dream
people of remote abysses
people of domineering nightmares
night-wandering people lover of furious thunder
tomorrow you will be very tall very gentle very grown
and the stormy groundswell of the lands
will be succeeded by the wholesome plow with another tempest

Damas was born in Cayenne (French Guiana). He was the son of Ernest Damas, a mulatto of European and African descent, and Bathilde Damas, a mestiza of Amerindian and African descent. In 1924, Léon-Gontran Damas was sent to Martinique to study at the Lycée Victor-Schoelcher, where he met the poet Aimé Césaire. Together they would continue on to Paris, where, with Senghor, they would launch the Négritude movement.

THE BLACK LAMENT

They filled my life with lead and emptiness
freedom is a horrible pain to me
with my eyes of today I see the past
turning them white with resentment with shame

The inexorable sadness of the days
does not tire of burning in the memory of what was
and my life is not broken

Let the past return then all astonishment
to the stroke of the rope and the harshness of charred bodies
from head to foot charred
of dead flesh of red-hot irons of arms
split by furious whips the whips that make
the plantation walk and water it with blood
the blood of my sugary blood
and defy the gods the slaver’s pipe.

In L’Être et le Néant (1943), Sartre (1905–1980) sets out the principles of an ontology of freedom and alienation. In his Réflexions sur la question juive of 1944, he applies the concepts elaborated in L’Être et le Néant to the situation of the Jew in a historical and social critique of racism and the creation of a Jewish identity. He would continue that work of applying the theories of his philosophical work to historical questions by turning his gaze toward the Black question in Orphée noir. After a trip to the USA in 1945, a year later he wrote La Putain respectueuse. He was a member of the patronage committee of Présence africaine, and his Orphée noir appeared on the occasion of the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery. He wrote the text as a preface to the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française in 1948, at the request of Léopold Sédar Senghor and Alioune Diop. Sartre would continue with other prefaces developing his reading of the Black question: Portrait du colonisé by Albert Memmi, Les Damnés de la terre by Frantz Fanon, La Pensée politique de Lumumba. Texts collected in Situations V, Colonialisme et néo-colonialisme (Paris, Gallimard, 1964). Sartre takes a specific interest in Black African poetry in the introduction to that Senghor anthology.

Sartre’s reading of Black African poetry can be reduced to three points:

1. Anti-racist racism
2. Négritude and communication: the failure
3. The dissolution of Négritude in the cosmopolitanism of a proletarian struggle.

Sartre shows from the outset the situation of the Black person confronted with the white gaze and the difficulty the Black African poet has in emancipating himself from that gaze. Exposed to the white man’s gaze, the body and its color become bearers of meaning. The Black man loses his individuality. The facticity of the body in itself is only what it is for the other. “Negro” is the signification of the self to which the Black man reduces himself. Recognising the white man as the other is to accept his gaze. The Black African poet on the one hand needs to emancipate himself from the reductionist and racist gaze of the white man; on the other hand, he makes use of the white man’s language to express that emancipation. The Black man takes with one hand what he pushes away with the other. As Sartre expressed it in Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, there is an eidetic distinction between prose and poetry. In prose, every word is overdetermined by a component of meaning already given in the language of the white man. Hence the language of the Black man’s manifest expression is his failure. The structure of referentiality from the word to the object makes any project of writing impossible. The Black man saves himself from that failure through poetry. That genre allows for a self-destruction of language and its semantic values.

Only through poetry can the Black African poet free himself from the white gaze by moving toward the universal, cosmopolitan encounter of giving and receiving with his own values. Thus the Black poet attempts to empty the language, the French language, of all its charge of violence and exclusion; for that reason he needs to give birth to a new syntax capable of generating another semantics in which he can dwell. His act of liberation from violence encloses him in violence. It is from within racism that he tries in vain to reach cosmopolitanism.

Beyond the question of language, Sartre returns the Négritude movement to its historicity, showing that it is a historical moment of a broader, more universal revolution—the proletarian one—which he would address later in his Critique de la raison dialectique. The Black African poet attempts to emancipate himself through poetry and through the language in which he is trapped. Négritude is a revolution in language, condemned nonetheless to failure both in language and in history. Sartre’s long shadow continues to weigh on Négritude, as it has on Jean Genet, Baudelaire, or Flaubert.

Cheikh Anta Diop and the Theoretical Foundations of Afrocentrism

Tìɲɛ fɔlɔ té mɔgɔ nɛ filɛ
(He who tells the truth pays no heed to people’s faces.)
—Bambara proverb.

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The thought of Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986) constitutes one of the most important intellectual attempts of the twentieth century to reconstruct African history from an African perspective. Faced with centuries of Eurocentric interpretations that had presented Africa as a continent without history, without philosophy, and without written civilisation, Diop developed a project of historical and cultural rehabilitation aimed at restoring to the continent a centrality denied by colonisation and by the dominant Western epistemology.

Diop’s thought belongs to the continuity of the Négritude movement driven by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas. However, while Négritude privileged a poetic and cultural affirmation of Black identity, Diop sought to provide that affirmation with a scientific and historical basis. To this end he drew on archaeology, comparative linguistics, anthropology, Egyptology, and even the natural sciences. His ambition was to demonstrate that Africa could produce universal knowledge using the same critical tools that the West claimed for itself.

The publication of Nations nègres et culture in 1954 was a major intellectual event in the history of contemporary African thought. In a context still dominated by European colonial narratives, Cheikh Anta Diop undertook a vast enterprise of historical rehabilitation aimed at restoring to Africa a civilisational depth that had been denied for centuries. His work was not merely historical research; it also represented an epistemological and political response to colonial dehumanisation. For Diop, colonialism had not only conquered territories: it had confiscated the historical memory of African peoples.

The central thesis of Nations nègres et culture maintains that ancient Egypt belonged to the cultural and human universe of Black Africa. Against the Eurocentric tradition that presented Egypt as a civilisation separated from Africa or linked exclusively to the eastern Mediterranean, Diop asserted that the pharaonic Egyptians were Black Africans and that the Nilotic civilisation should be regarded as one of the fundamental matrices of African culture. This claim had considerable consequences, for it implied displacing the symbolic center of universal history. If Egypt was African, then Africa ceased to appear as a passive periphery of history and became one of its original focal points.

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To defend this thesis, Diop resorted to a multidisciplinary methodology. He used the testimonies of ancient authors such as Herodotus (c. 484–c. 425 BC), who described the Egyptians as a population with dark skin and frizzy hair. He also drew on anthropological studies, melanin analyses of mummies, and linguistic comparisons between ancient Egyptian and certain contemporary African languages, particularly Wolof. His intention was to demonstrate scientifically the historical and cultural continuity between pharaonic Egypt and the rest of the African continent.

Another important thesis of Diop consisted in asserting the decisive influence of Egypt on Greek civilisation. According to him, numerous Greek thinkers, among them Pythagoras and Plato, had studied in Egypt and inherited mathematical, philosophical, and religious knowledge previously developed by the Egyptians. In this way, Diop challenged the classic representation of Greece as the self-sufficient origin of Western rationality and proposed reintegrating Africa into the genealogy of Mediterranean civilisation.

His reflection went beyond Egypt. Diop also argued for the existence of a profound African cultural unity. Despite the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the continent, he saw in family structures, social forms, religious worldviews, and certain symbolic systems common elements that made it possible to speak of a shared African civilisational substratum. This thesis likewise answered a political concern: rebuilding a Pan-African consciousness capable of resisting the fragmentations inherited from colonisation.

The linguistic question also occupied a central place in his thought. Diop considered that no true cultural emancipation could be achieved without the development of African languages as instruments of science, philosophy, and teaching. Thinking exclusively in colonial languages meant, according to him, remaining intellectually dependent on Europe. Decolonisation also had to be a decolonisation of knowledge.

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Diop’s theses aroused strong controversy in Western academic circles. Many Egyptologists rejected his conclusions or criticised his methods. However, the debate reached a decisive moment in 1974, when UNESCO organised the international colloquium on the peopling of ancient Egypt and the decipherment of the Meroitic script in Cairo. Specialists from Africa, Europe, and America took part in this meeting to discuss scientifically the cultural and human origin of Egyptian civilisation.

During the colloquium, Cheikh Anta Diop and Théophile Obenga (1936) rigorously defended the Africanness of ancient Egypt. Particularly influential was the linguistic work of Obenga, which showed structural affinities between ancient Egyptian and several African languages. Although an absolute consensus was not reached on all the racial or anthropological questions, the colloquium acknowledged the legitimacy of considering Egypt within the African context and admitted the existence of significant cultural and linguistic links between the Nile valley and sub-Saharan Africa.

The Cairo meeting thus represented a historic turning point. For the first time, a major international institution agreed to seriously debate African perspectives on ancient history. The Western epistemological monopoly was beginning to crack. Beyond the technical discussions, Diop’s true triumph consisted in having imposed a fundamental question: who has the right to write the history of civilisations?

The importance of Nations nègres et culture resides precisely in having transformed history into a space of struggle for dignity. Diop understood that no people can fully build its future if it remains exiled from its past. His work opened the way for contemporary Afrocentrist, Pan-Africanist, and postcolonial currents, while forcing a critical reconsideration of the universal narratives produced by Western modernity. More than a simple identitarian claim, his thought constitutes a profound reflection on the relationship between memory, power, and cultural sovereignty.

The Limits of Afrocentrism

Tasi bɛ yɛlɛ kuntan janya
(Reflection prolongs laughter.)
—Bambara proverb, Mali.

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Starting from empirical and scientific data to construct, by inference, a general thesis about the world frequently leads to an abusive generalization. The problem does not reside in inference itself—without which no science would be possible—but in the transformation of partial and revisable hypotheses into closed systems that claim to explain the totality of reality. Where science works on verifiable fragments of experience, certain ideologies extract from those fragments a global and definitive metaphysics.

Intellectual modernity has produced numerous temptations of this kind. From limited historical observations, universal theories about races, civilisations, cultures, or the destiny of humanity are constructed. The risk appears when a provisional interpretation becomes dogma. Inference then ceases to be a critical instrument and becomes a principle of closure.

Karl Popper (1902–1994) was particularly clear on this question. For Popper (1934), no scientific theory can be regarded as definitively true. Every theory remains open to refutation by new facts or new observations. What characterises science is not the possession of absolute truths but precisely its critical vulnerability. A scientific theory holds as long as it withstands the test of falsification; never because it attains final certainty.

In this sense, Popper (1945) criticises the historicist and totalising doctrines that claim to discover inevitable laws of history or of human societies. Dogmatic Marxism, certain racial nationalisms, and certain forms of cultural essentialism share, according to him, the same epistemological structure: they construct systems immunised against refutation. Every contradictory fact is reinterpreted to preserve the theory intact. One thus enters the universe of closed beliefs.

The paradox is that many ideological discourses are born initially from legitimate observations. Colonialism existed; racism existed; cultural domination existed. But recognising verifiable historical facts does not automatically authorise the construction of a total ontology of the world. From a partial truth an absolute fiction can be built. There begins the danger of generalisation.

Every extreme generalisation tends to simplify the irreducible complexity of the human. Cultures, civilisations, and identities then cease to be mobile, contradictory, and multiple realities and become rigid categories. Thought shifts from inquiry toward certainty. And when a theory ceases to accept the possibility of being corrected, it abandons the scientific terrain to enter the domain of ideological metaphysics.

The strength of science resides precisely in its incompleteness, as Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) also showed. Scientific truth is not an immobile monument but a mobile horizon permanently subject to revision. Wherever a claim to total explanation of the world appears, the risk of dogmatism emerges.

Thus the epistemological lesson of Popper teaches that human knowledge progresses less through the accumulation of certainties than through the continuous correction of its errors. An open civilisation is not one that possesses a definitive truth about man but one that accepts that no interpretation of the world can definitively close human debate.

Afrocentrism has turned into a dogma whose immediate consequence is to isolate the peoples called Black in an epistemological ghetto. Voices such as those of Édouard Glissant have risen against that dogma.

The Discourse of Identity and Openness to the Other

Wisdom does not dwell in a single house.
—Proverb from Lesotho.

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In Don Quixote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) shows that the individual invents himself through the stories he produces about his life. Don Quixote is not simply a man who lives; he is a man who narrates himself and who, by narrating himself, transforms the world and transforms himself. Identity thus appears as a creative fiction that organises existence.

This intuition finds a rigorous philosophical formulation in the thought of Paul Ricœur (1913–2005). For Ricœur, identity must be understood as a dynamic process that articulates permanence and change. His celebrated distinction between “idem” identity and “ipse” identity allows us to understand how a person can remain the same over time without ceasing to be transformed. The continuity of the subject does not depend on a fixed substance but on the narrative coherence through which it integrates past, present, and future. Narrative identity is not only temporal; it is also ethical, for it implies the capacity to assume promises, responsibilities, and loyalties in the midst of the metamorphoses of existence.

In the realm of collective identities, the problem acquires a historical and political dimension. Any identity founded on a single narrative runs the risk of reducing the complexity of the world. The affirmation of a strong collective identity can slide toward forms of cultural homogenisation. Africa cannot be reduced to a single tradition or a single memory. It is also the land of André Brink (1935–2015), Breyten Breytenbach (1939–2024), Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014), and J. M. Coetzee (1940)—all from South Africa and “white”; the land of the Berber Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and of the Socratic philosopher from Cyrene in Libya, Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435–c. 356 BC); the land of Mahmud Kati (d. 27 September 1593), considered one of the fathers of sub-Saharan historiography, whose father, Ali b. Ziyad al-Quti (c. 1516), was an Islamised Goth born in Toledo. Africa is likewise a continent of thousands of languages, that is, thousands of imaginaries, proverbs, epics, myths, and poetic forms. Elias Canetti saw in African oral traditions—especially in the literature of the Bushmen—one of the richest poetic reserves in the world, according to Nobel laureate Elias Canetti (1905–1994), referring to the work of Bleek and Lloyd, Specimens of Bushman Folklore, published in London in 1911.

Kamba gande se daabu beene kuru, ni moo diyo na ā daabu har ma si guna ga.
(The palm of your hand does not cover the sky; it can only cover your eyes so you do not see it.)
—Saying of the wise among the Songhay people.

Every one-dimensional reduction of identity contains the germ of a cultural totalitarianism. Wherever a single narrative claims to monopolise the truth of a people or a civilisation, the risk of epistemicide emerges: the destruction of other forms of knowledge, sensibility, and memory.

In response to these tendencies, Édouard Glissant proposes a radically relational conception of identity. In his Poetics of Relation, identity is born not of isolation or purity but of encounter. Cultures transform one another through processes of creolisation that generate unprecedented forms without abolishing differences. Glissant also defends the right to opacity: the other does not need to be completely transparent in order to be recognised. Understanding does not mean reducing the fellow human being to our categories. Identity then becomes openness, circulation, and becoming.

In this same critical perspective, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009) has shown, in her “Danger of a Single Story,” the danger of the single narrative. She denounces how dominant stories simplify individuals and cultures to the point of turning them into caricatures. A single story about Africa produces an abstract continent; a plurality of stories restores human complexity. Narrative diversity thus becomes an ethical and political demand.

These thinkers converge on one essential point: identity is inseparable from narration. But they also show that no identity can be exhausted by a single narrative. The subject, just like cultures, exists at the intersection of multiple histories, memories, and relations. Identity is not a closed fortress but an unfinished, plural, and dynamic construction. Where identitarian discourses seek to erect walls, the diversity of narratives reminds us that every human existence is always built in relation to others.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu
(I am because we are.)
—Proverb among the Zulu, Xhosa, and Nguni of South Africa.

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Faced with the one-dimensional tendencies present both in certain interpretations of Négritude and in some developments of Afrocentrism inspired by Cheikh Anta Diop, the concept of Ubuntu emerges as an ethical and philosophical alternative founded not on the centrality of a single identity but on the relationship between human beings. Where identity politics tend to construct symbolic borders between an “us” and a “them,” Ubuntu proposes an anthropology of interdependence.

Négritude played a fundamental historical role in restoring cultural dignity to Black peoples in a deeply racist colonial context. Likewise, Diop restored to Africa a historical depth that Eurocentrism had denied. However, when identitarian affirmation is transformed into a closed cultural essence, the risk arises of reproducing the same exclusionary logic that characterised colonial thought. Identity then ceases to be historical openness and becomes a totalising definition.

The concept of Ubuntu moves in a different direction. Often expressed by the formula “I am because we are,” Ubuntu does not define the individual on the basis of a racial, national, or cultural essence, but on the basis of the relationship with others. Human existence is conceived not as isolated autonomy but as reciprocal belonging. The human being is fulfilled in mutual recognition and not in exclusion.

This philosophy acquired a concrete political dimension during the South African transition after apartheid. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Mpilo Tutu, Archbishop of Cape Town (1931–2021), and Nelson Mandela, also a Nobel laureate and President of South Africa, had recourse to the spirit of Ubuntu to prevent the end of apartheid from leading to a racial civil war or a politics of historical vengeance. South Africa then found itself faced with a tragic alternative: reproducing the binary logic of racial domination by simply inverting the positions of power, or building a political community based on reciprocal recognition.

The choice made by Mandela and Tutu consisted precisely in rejecting the temptation of an exclusionary Black nationalism. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, promoted by Tutu, embodied this will to replace vengeful justice with restorative justice. The aim was not to erase the crimes of apartheid but to prevent historical suffering from producing a new metaphysics of resentment. Ubuntu made it possible to conceive a coexistence founded on shared memory and not on the supremacy of one identity over another.

In this sense, Ubuntu represents a profound critique of all forms of one-dimensional thought. Where identitarian ideologies seek a pure origin, Ubuntu insists on relationship. Where totalising discourses produce centers and margins, Ubuntu affirms the co-belonging of differences. It is not a matter of denying historical wounds or relations of domination, but of preventing reparation from turning into a new exclusion.

The South African experience thus showed that decolonisation does not consist merely in replacing one power with another but in transforming the very logic of power. A truly plural society cannot be built on the absolutisation of a collective identity. Any closed identity inevitably ends up generating new human peripheries.

Ubuntu thus opens up the possibility of a political philosophy of coexistence. In the face of cultural nationalisms, it proposes an ethics of the bond; in the face of closed identities, a relational humanity; in the face of the logic of exclusion, an ontology of encounter. Therein lies perhaps one of the most universal contributions of contemporary African thought: to recall that no human community can survive if it forgets that the other is not a threat to our identity but a condition of our own humanity.

Bibliography

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2009): Danger of a Single Story, TEDGlobal, Oxford, United Kingdom.

Braudel, Fernand (1949): La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Armand Colin, Paris, in-8º, 1160 pp.

Bleek, Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel and Lloyd, Lucy Catherine (1911): Specimens of Bushman Folklore, George Allen & Company, Ltd., London.

Canetti, Elias (1960): Masse und Macht, Claassen Verlag, Hamburg.

Carole Pateman (1988): The Sexual Contract, Stanford University Press.

Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quijote de la Mancha, I. 1605 and II. 1615, Imprenta de Juan de la Cuesta, Madrid.

Chaunu, Pierre and Chaunu, Huguette: Séville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650), 1955 and 1960, S.E.V.P.E.N. (Paris), Collection “Ports – Routes – Trafics” edited by Fernand Braudel, XII volumes, 4000 pp.

De Sousa Santos, Boaventura and Meneses, Maria Paula (eds., 2015): Epistemologías del Sur (Perspectivas), Akal.

Diop, Cheikh Anta (1954): Nations nègres et culture, Présence Africaine, Paris.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1868–1963): The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago.

Eliot, T. S. (1948): Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Faber and Faber, London.

Foucault, Michel (1969): L’archéologie du savoir, Éditions Gallimard (collection Bibliothèque des sciences humaines).

Gödel, Kurt (1931): “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme,” Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831): Reason in History, Paris, Plon, 1965.

Hobbes, Thomas (1651): Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, Andrew Crooke, London.

Hugo, Victor: “Discours sur l’Afrique,” volume IV of Actes et Paroles.

Ibn Khaldūn (1978): The Muqaddimah, Routledge, Princeton Classics.

James, Henry (1895): The Altar of the Dead, in The Two Magics (1898), Macmillan (London and New York).

Joyce, James (1914): Dubliners, Grant Richards Ltd., London.

Kesteloot, Lilyan (1963): Les écrivains noirs de langue française : naissance d’une littérature, Institut de Sociologie de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Léro, Étienne et al. (1932): Légitime Défense, surrealist and anticolonial manifesto-journal, Paris.

Leroi-Gourhan, André et al. (1980): La Prehistoria, Editorial Labor, Barcelona.

Locke, John (1689): Two Treatises of Government, Cambridge University Press, Collection: Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (2005).

Magalhães Godinho, Vitorino: L’économie de l’empire Portugais aux XVe-XVIe siècles (1958), 1969.
— Os descobrimentos e a economia mundial, 2 vols., 1963–1970 (2nd corrected and expanded ed., 4 vols., Editorial Presença, 1981–1983).

Maran, René (1921): Batouala, Véritable roman nègre, Albin Michel, Paris.

Mauss, Marcel (1950): Sociologie et anthropologie, Presses Universitaires de France (PUF).

Maupassant, Guy de (1882): Marroca, included in the volume Mademoiselle Fifi, Paris, Paul Ollendorff.

Mills, Charles Wade (1977): The Racial Contract, Cornell University Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1887): Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift, C. G. Naumann Verlag, Leipzig.

Obenga, Théophile (1973): L’Afrique dans l’Antiquité, Présence Africaine, Paris.

Ortega y Gasset, José (1966): Una interpretación de la historia universal, Revista de Occidente, Madrid.

Popper, Karl (1934): Logik der Forschung, Julius Springer Verlag, Vienna.
— The Open Society and Its Enemies, Routledge, London, 1945.

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Supplementary Bibliography for the Three Négritude Authors

Aimé Césaire:
Poetry: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Paris, 1939; Les Armes miraculeuses, 1946; Soleil cou coupé, 1947; Corps perdu (engravings by Picasso), Paris, 1950; Ferrements, Paris, 1960; Cadastre, Paris, 1961; Moi, laminaire, Paris, 1982; La Poésie, Paris, 1994.
Theatre: Et les chiens se taisaient, Paris, 1958; La Tragédie du roi Christophe, Paris, 1963; Une saison au Congo, Paris, 1966; Une tempête, d’après ‘La Tempête’ de William Shakespeare : adaptation pour un théâtre nègre, Paris, 1969.
Essays: Esclavage et colonisation, Paris, 1948; Discourse on Colonialism, Paris, 1955; Discours sur la négritude, 1950.
History: Toussaint Louverture, La révolution Française et le problème colonial, Paris, 1962.

Léon-Gontran Damas:
Poetry: Veillées noires (1972); Névralgies (1966); Black-Label (1956); Graffiti (1952); Poèmes nègres sur des airs Africains (1948); Pigments (1937).
Essays: Poèmes Nègres sur des airs africains (1948); Poètes d’expression française (1947); Retour de Guyane (1938).
Stories: Veillées noires, Contes Nègres de Guyane (1943).

Léopold Sédar Senghor:
Poetry: Chants d’ombres (1945); Hosties noires (1948); Chants pour Naëtt (1949); Éthiopiques (1956); Nocturnes (1961); Lettres d’hiver (1973); Élégies majeures (1979); Œuvres poétiques (1990).
Political texts: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin et la politique africaine (1962); Liberté 1 : Négritude et humanisme (1964); Liberté 2 : Nation et voie africaine au socialisme (1971); Liberté 3 : Négritude et civilisation de l’universel (1977); Liberté 4 : Socialisme et planification, discours, conférences (1983); Liberté 5 : Dialogues des cultures (1992); Ce que je crois : Négritude, francophonie et la civilisation de l’universel (1988).

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Exiled in Spain since 2012, ISMAËL DIADIÉ HAÏDARA (Timbuktu, 1957) is a librarian, poet, philosopher, historian, president of the Mahmud Kati Foundation in Spain, and director of the Kati Fund Library in Timbuktu, Mali. Gold medalist of the city of Toledo – Spain and member of Sites of Conscience in New York, he studied drama at the National Institute of Arts (INA) in Bamako and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENSUP) in Bamako, Mali. He is the author of several works and articles, including: Le statut du monde. Nécessité, possibilité et contingence chez Ibn Arabi, Cordoba, 1992 ; Yawdar Pasha y la conquista saudí del Songhay (1591-1599) Instituto de Estudios almerienses, 1993 et Rabat 1996 ; L’Espagne musulmane et l’Afrique subsaharienne, Editions Donniya, Bamako, 1997 ; Les Juifs à Tombouctou, Editions Donniya, Bamako, 1999 ; Los otros Españoles, mr ediciones, Madrid, 2004 ; Los últimos Visigodos, rd editores, Sevilla, 2003 ; Las lamentaciones del viejo Tombo, Maremoto, Málaga, 2006 ; Abana, Rihla, Córdoba, Almuzara, 2006 ; Monólogo del un carnero, Árbol de Poe, Málaga, 2012 ; Zimma, Vaso Roto Mexico, 2014 – Madrid 2015 ; Tombouctou, Andaluces en la ciudad pérdida del Sahara, Almazara, 2015. Une cabane au bord de l’eau, Genal, Málaga, 2016; Tebrae pour ma mère, Málaga, 2017 ; Sahel, Málaga 2017 ; Journal d’un bibliothécaire à Tombouctou, Almuzara, 2017. De Tolède à Tombouctou, Malaga, 2019. De la Sobriedad, Almuzara, 2020 ; Tebrae, Libros del Aire, Serie Mayor, Boo de Pielagos, Cantabria, 2021.