The poet of Negritude. (first word).

Leopold Sedar Senghor's unforgettable poems proclaimed a world view that, in his eyes and mind, characterized all the black peoples of Africa and of African descent. When he died last December in Normandy, France, at the age of 96, most of the world had become familiar with his name because of his prominence as the statesman who led Senegal to independence in 1960 and who then, after retiring from the presidency, became the first black man to be elected to the prestigious Academie Francaise. Senghor will also be remembered by many scholars, educators, and art lovers as the Poet of Negritude, together with his life-long friend and fellow traveler, the Martiniquan poet, educator, and political figure Aime Cesaire. Senghor was also a relentless promoter of the arts and the cultures of Africa throughout a multifaceted career which spanned more than seven decades of a long life filled with remarkable achievements. In addition to seven volumes of poetry, some dating from his student days in Paris, in the early 1930s, he also wrote numerous essays, lectures, and speeches which have been collected in three volumes published by Editions du Seuil, Paris.

In Paris Senghor pursued his education begun in his native Senegal. Like other students and young intellectuals from different parts of the French colonial empire, he was involved in a passionate search for his identity and his people's place in the world. This search would lead this group to the elaboration of Negritude, defined initially and reiterated again and again by Senghor as "simply, the values of civilization of the black world taken in their entirety."

For several decades Senghor continued to develop his reflections on the concept of Negritude and its implications for the place and the contributions of black people in an imaginary gathering of the nations and peoples of the universe, "au rendez-vous du donner et du recevoir." However, the central components of his thought are most convincingly expressed, in original images and rhythms, in his early poems collected in volumes entitled Chants d'ombre (1945), Hosties noires (1948), and Ethiopiques (1956). Here he develops themes such as the powerful African belief in the relationship between the dead and the living:

    Woman, light the clear oil lamp, let
    the Ancestors
    come and chat around as parents do,
    with the children in bed.

He contrasts this everyday continuity with the absence of any real remembrance in European cemeteries, even on All Saints Day, when people are supposed to be visiting and paying their respects to the dead. In "Chaka," a poem celebrating the historic Zulu king and warrior as a true hero of Africa, he offers a vivid vision of the colonial invaders with their technological advances:

   They are landing with rulers,
   set-squares, compasses, sextants
   White skin, clear eyes, bare speech
   and thin mouth
   And thunder on their ships.

This same collection includes the frequently anthologized poem "New York," which reads as another statement of the itinerary that led to the concept of Negritude. Here the poet reiterates the initial attraction of the white world with its dazzling skyscrapers and the beauty of its "long-legged golden girls." But quickly oppressed by the absence of real humanity, he calls on white Manhattan to let in the more soulful Black Harlem:

   New York! I say New York, let the
   black blood flow into your blood
   Cleaning the rust from your steel
   articulations, like an oil of life.

Remarkably, Senghor was already sharing these preoccupations with his younger compatriots in Senegal as early as 1937, that is, at the height of colonial domination. Thus, he ended his lecture called "The Cultural Problem in French West Africa," given at the Dakar Chamber of Commerce during a summer visit from metropolitan France, with this quote from "Banjo," by the Harlem Renaissance poet and novelist Claude McKay:

   To immerse oneself in the roots
   of our race
   and build on our deepest foundation
   is not to return to a state of savagery:
   it is to return to our culture.

It is universally accepted that the word Negritude first appeared in print in the initial 1939 publication of Aime Cesaire's "Cahier d'un retour pays natal" in an obscure Parisian periodical. It is also a fact, however, that Senghor's 1948 Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache de langue francaise (introduced by Jean-Paul Sartre's landmark essay "Black Orpheus") was the true manifesto of Negritude. It was followed almost immediately by the appearance of the first issue of the journal Presence Africaine.

Many younger African intellectuals have quarreled with Senghor for what they saw as misguided statements, such as "Emotion is Black, as reason is Hellenic," or "European reason is analytical through utilization, and Black reason intuitive through participation." Senghor would always protest that he never said that Blacks were without reason, but rather that their reason was of a different nature--not discursive but synthetic, not antagonistic but sympathetic. The reservations of African writers and intellectuals of the generation of Wole Soyinka, Stanislas Adotevi, and Chinua Achebe can be summarized in Soyinka's own words. He saw the Negritudinists' response, "I feel, therefore I am," to the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" as only "countering one pernicious Manicheism with another." However, such reservations have not tarnished the respect, inspiration, and intellectual influence Senghor generated throughout the African continent and beyond, and across several generations.

Senghor will undoubtedly also be remembered for his relentless efforts to develop, on the one hand, a better understanding of the nature and significance of African art and culture in all their modes of expression--verbal, visual, plastic--and to encourage the production of high-quality works of art in contemporary Africa. As president of Senegal he personally followed up the historic meetings of black writers and artists in Paris (1956) and Rome (1959) with the landmark Festival of Black Arts in 1966 in Dakar, a testimony to this commitment. The first such event in independent Africa, the festival was attended not only by writers, artists, and scholars from different parts of the African continent but also by their counterparts from the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. It was the spectacular apotheosis of Negritude as the ideology whose paramount contribution was to assert and affirm the important artistic and cultural contributions by black peoples of Africa and the world to what Senghor has always called "la Civilisation de l'Universel." The visibility at this international cultural event of such figures from the Diaspora as the poet Langston Hughes and the musician and composer Duke Ellington was highly significant and beyond the merely symbolic.

As a promoter and sponsor of the arts in Africa and a lover of art and other expressions of culture everywhere, Leopold Senghor will leave an indelible mark on Senegal and many other places on the continent, and beyond. In an article he wrote for the magazine Diogene in 1956, he summarized the itinerary of contemporary "Negro-African Civilization" in the Western experience by alluding to the introduction of African sculpture followed by Europe's discovery of its verbal arts through tales, poetry, music, and also painting and philosophy. In this important piece, entitled "Black African Aesthetics," he asserted that "art is functional" and that "in black Africa, `art for art's sake' does not exist." For Senghor, "image and rhythm are the two fundamental traits of black African style," and rhythm is "the architecture of the being, the internal dynamism which gives it form."

It is a tribute to Leopold Senghor that some of his conclusions are now being echoed--more than half a century later--by an internationally renowned figure in the world of contemporary art, the Nigerian-born Okui Enwezor. Enwezor is the artistic director of Documenta XI, an international exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. In a recent New York Times interview (Feb. 12, 2002), he expressed his impatience with those who continue to argue in favor of the tenacious credo of art for art's sake: "I can't understand how you can sequester art from politics and social upheaval."

EDRIS MAKWARD is an emeritus professor of French and African literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also taught at the Universities of Ibadan and Calabar in Nigeria, and has written and edited several books and numerous chapters and articles on African and Diaspora literature and culture. He is a former president of ASA (African Studies Association), ALA (African Literature Association), and WARA (West African Research Association).