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Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art

History and Visual Culture
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcin20

Rhythms: L.S.Senghor's Negritude as a Philosophy

of African art
Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Northwestern University
Published online: 10 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Souleymane Bachir Diagne (2007) Rhythms: L.S.Senghor's Negritude as a Philosophy
of African art, Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, 1:1, 51-68, DOI:
10.1080/19301944.2007.10781317
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19301944.2007.10781317

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Rhythms: L.S.Senghors Negritude as a Philosophy of African Art

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Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Northwestern University

Summary:

This essay is a reading of Senghors philosophy as, primarily, an answer to the hermeneutical
question: What do African art objects say? What do they mean? In other words, what does it mean
to sculpt the way the African artist did? This is the question Picasso posed at the beginning of the
twentieth century when he visited the ethnographical Muse de lHomme, in Paris, to see the socalled African fetishes. Senghors answer to that question is that the significant forms (Clive
Bell) thus created by African artists of the past are to be read as signs that manifest a metaphysics.
The essay shows in particular how, for Senghor, African art is the expression of an ontology of
rhythms.
Dansaient les forces que rythmait, qui rythmaient la Force
Des forces: la Justice accorde, qui est Beaut Bont. (L.S.Senghor)

At the end of 1906, at the time of Lopold Sdar Senghors birth, Pablo Picasso is twentyfive years old. He is already famous and numerous are those who admire his paintings, drawings
and sculptures. He just came out of his 1901 to 1904 blue period followed by the pink one, that
of harlequins and acrobats. His friend, the poet and art critic Max Jacob knows the depth of his
genius. Another of his friends, Guillaume Apollinaire, dedicated him in 1905 Picasso: peintre et
dessinateur which celebrates his present and future glory. It even seems that his life of bohemia
and poverty is coming to an end when connoisseurs, who not only are rich, but are now paying the
high price that deserves his unsurpassable greatness. Upon visiting his studio, the Americans Leo
and Gertrude Stein give 800 francs in exchange for some paintings which they take, and that year,
1906, the art dealer Ambroise Vollard pays, at once, two thousand gold francs for the acquisition
of several paintings. The American will see her portrait, begun in 1905, finished the next year.
Gertrude Steins Portrait says something grave. But what? Picasso, who was constantly dissatisfied
with the face, had eventually erased it to put in its place a head for eternity: the forehead is smooth
and wide, while the features are impersonal, schematic and regular; rather than a head, it is a
mask which looks towards its own fathomless mystery. The self-portrait of Picasso, again in the
same wonderful year 1906, portrays as a mask head. The features are harsh, and the shape pure,
evoking a sculpture. Picasso painted his own face as if it were a mask write Marie-Laure Bernadac
and Paule du Bouchet, who add: almost as if it belonged to someone other than himself. The
intensity, the almost savage archaism of this self-portrait shows the progression Picasso had made
over the course of several years, even over the previous few months.2 But progression towards
what?

Faces that metamorphose into masks? Picasso does happen to have a rich collection of
masks and statuettes. We know, for example, that among the objects of primitive art that he
possesses, there is a magnificent wooden and vegetable fiber Grebo mask, all in geometrical lines:
two cylindrical protuberances for the eyes, an oblong for the mouth, a triangle for the nose. It would
indeed be most surprising if something of these fetishes, surreptitiously, did not pass into his

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Souleymane Bachir Diagne

art. But so that he really looks at these objects, and so that their magic could work, they have to
acquire a new and strong evidence, and something will have to really draw his attention towards
them. It will be something closely related to the visit he makes to the Muse de lHomme, place du
Trocadro, in Paris, during July of 1907.

Ethnographic museums are a negation of art because they prevent the objects on display
from looking back at us. Because ethnography was constituted at its colonial origin as the science
of radical otherness, it is in its nature to fabricate strangeness, otherness, and separateness. The
object in an ethnographic museum is kept at a distance, prevented from touching us because it is
petrified: it cannot make the movement of what Andr Malraux has called its metamorphosis,
that is, to become a work of art separated from its mainly religious function. In other words, the
effect of the metamorphosis is that art has no other end than itself. The ethnographic museum
claims to maintain the dimension of the religious function, but it is just a claim because the object is
irreparably cut and the gods have withdrawn from it. Prevented with regard to its artistic face from
becoming sheer work of art, what was created to make present the divine has also lost its other face,
that which looked at the god. Here it is exposed as a spoil and doubly deserted.

Reforming the museum of Trocadro has become imperative, the poet Guillaume
Apollinaire wrote, regretting seeing beauty buried in a place abandoned to the ethnic curiosity
of a few rather than offered to the aesthetic sentiment of the public. He explained that it would
be necessary to separate from ethnography the objects whose nature is mainly artistic and which
should be on display in another museum. In fact, for him, it is within Le Louvre that certain
exotic masterpieces should be exhibited whose aspect is not less moving than that of the beautiful
specimens of the western statuary. Because Picasso, like his friend Apollinaire, had the poetic
ability to see beyond the ethnographical fence, he understood during his visit to the Muse de
lHomme how to put on the objects the glance that returns life to things and unchains the force of
the spell. He shared what took place with Malraux, who reports his words in La tte dobsidienne
and also in the foreword which he wrote in August 1974 for the album Masterpieces of Primitive
Art. Here is Picassos humorous account, dating to a conversation at the time when the artist was
finishing Guernica (1937), of his first visit to the Trocadro museum:
The influence of Negroes on me is often evoked. How can I help it? We all like
fetishes. Van Gogh has said: Japanese art, we all share in it. But for us, it is Negroes.
Their forms did not have more influence on me than on Matisse. Or, on Derain.
But for them, masks were sculptures like others. When Matisse showed me his
first Negro head, he spoke to me about Egyptian art. When I went to Trocadro,
I found it disgusting. The thrift market. The smell. I was alone. I wanted to go
away. I did not leave. I stayed. I stayed. I understood that it was very important:
was not something happening to me? The masks, they were not sculptures like
others. Not at all. They were magical. And why not the Egyptians, the Chaldeans?
We had not taken any notice. Primitive, but not magical. The Blacks, they were
intercessors, I know the word in French since then. Against everything; against
unknown, threatening spirits...I too think that anything is unknown, is enemy.
Anything! Not just details: women, children, animals, tobacco, gamebut the
whole! I understood what their sculpture was for, the Blacks, I mean. Why sculpt
like that, and not otherwise. They could not possibly be cubist, could they! Because
Cubism, well, did not exist. Certainly, some people had invented the models, and

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some people had imitated them: tradition, right? But all these fetishes, they had
the same purpose. They were weapons. To enable people not to be the subjects of
the spirits any more, to become independent. Tools. If we give a form to the spirits,
we become independent. The spirits, the unconscious (we did not talk about it
a lot at that time), the emotion, they are all the same thing. I understood why I
was a painter...The Demoiselles dAvignon had to arrive that day, but not at all
because of the forms: rather because it was my first canvas of exorcism, yes! It is
for that reason that later I also did paintings as before, Olgas Portrait, portraits!
We cannot keep being sorcerers all day long! How could we ever live?

Why? Picasso thus asks. For such a question, there is an answer at once lazy, Eurocentric,
and paternalistic that is entirely contained in the expression primitive art. Because African art is
one of the manifestations of primitive art, in other words the prime state of art, it is only natural
that we find its paintings or its sculptures to be like that, the way humanity in its childhood is only
able to paint or to sculpt. This art is therefore premier in that sense. There is another answer with
nothing childish in it and that begins by paying attention to the fact that Picasso asked why sculpt
like that and not otherwise: that he tries to understand how it is that to sculpt like that gives form
to the spirits, makes the unconscious speak, or provokes a strange emotion. And we can note that
emotion is also the word used by Apollinaire when he writes, in commenting on the prediction
made by Baudelaire of the next irruption of the aesthetics of the Savages, that the result produced
by this art is a powerful reality. It is in fact the enigma of this reinforced reality, which the
artist understands to be impossible to domesticate by simply labeling it a curiosity, that is aimed
at in Picassos question. At the end of his foreword to Chefs doeuvre de lart primitif, Malraux
speaks about the savage artists will to create which we refer to as magic only by laziness and
which insures their sculptures of the enigmatic unity which cements the work, even at the edge
of chance.5 And he concludes, while welcoming the entrance of the savage sculptures into the
museum wherefrom they had been kept away, that this major ageless art, so strangely akin to ours,
is that of our next search: the nocturnal face of man.6 Apollinaire, Picasso, Malraux, and some
others agree that behind the African masks and sculptures that take part in the conversation of
art gathered inside the immense range of the invented forms, as Malraux defines the Imaginary
Museum, is outlined the enigma of a way of seeing, thinking and feeling of which these objets
dart are the expression. Senghors Negritude will claim to be the deciphering of this, and to carry
as its most natural content an answer to the questions raised by African art. A major aspect of
Senghors project will be to show that the African artistic forms, considered as aesthetic...can also
be interpreted as philosophic observations about the nature of the world.7

Indeed, far from coming down to the expression of an existential attitude without real
content, this project is, in Senghors mind, the expression of African philosophy itself. That is to
say it is a way of seeing, thinking and feeling that integrate as their raison dtre and as the key to
their knowledge, fields of human activity as different as medicine, law, religion, logic or wisdom.
Among these fields the artistic activity comes first, even before religion, because where orality
reigns, art constitutes the writing through which the metaphysics that it transcribes can be read.8
Art is the proof of African philosophy and, conversely, we reach the full intelligence of African arts
only through the understanding of the metaphysics from which they proceed. This metaphysics, to
present it in one word, is that of rhythm, which according to Senghor is at the heart of the African
thought and experience.

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Souleymane Bachir Diagne

As early as 1939, in Ce que lhomme noir apporte Senghor speaks about a rhythmic attitude. He
underlines the word and asks that we keep it in mind.9 In text after text, he will keep on referring
to it. When he writes this sentence which, under various forms, will be a leitmotiv of his thought:
the ordering force which constitutes Negro style is rhythm, he indicates in a footnote that this
assertion is also central in Primitive Negro Sculpture, a book by Paul Guillaume and Thomas
Munro published in French some ten years earlier.10 While he mentions this book only in passing,
we have here more than a mere reference. When we look at it closely we discover the extent to which
Senghor has read it with great attention, and the point to which his own philosophy of African art
will never cease to be, following this reading, a continued reflection on this book. That is why its
presentation is in order here.

Primitive Negro Sculpture is divided into three parts.12 In the first the authors raise the
question of relations with African life. In the second they conduct a precise analysis of its artistic
qualities. Finally, the third part is a presentation of photographic images of forty-three Negro
sculptures. Are these sculptures and the works of the black continent in general, as they were when
discovered by the ethnologists and the European artists, the expression of African life? Guillaume
and Munros answer is without appeal: no. The Africanity now known in Africa and America is
quite different from the one reflected in the works of art which testify, in their enigmatic way, to
what it once used to be. When considering the African continent, Guillaume and Munro argue,
it is necessary to start with the colonial situation, and for America, to start with the post-slavery
situation. Both created different Africans in the process of civilization, according to the authors,
who insist that it is useless to try to find in these evolved people, as they also said, the state of
mind of the artists who created the older works that we can admire today. It is a mistake to believe
that the transformation of the African world can be seen as the simple addition of new traits from
outside to a substratum that could be exhumed and considered in its pristine state. To pursue
further the question of the relation between African art and identity is like questioning a dumb
mirror. To say it in modern and maybe post-modern terms, there is no essence towards which
masks and sculptures would point, no Africanity to be read behind its avatars on the continent
and in the Diaspora. The consequence of this observation is also straightforwardly asserted by
Guillaume and Munro: by destroying the gods of ancient Africa, civilization has destroyed art
itself and henceforth the Africans have lost their genius for the plastic form.13 The artist, the one
who invented these forms, disappeared with the secret of what it then meant to sculpt like that, and
to try at all costs to establish a continuity with today is for Munro (and for the collector of African
art, Guillaume) to open the way to the counterfeiters and to the poor imitations of occasional
uninspired craftsmen, dully imitating the art of [their] ancestors, chipping wood or ivory into a
stiff, characterless image for the foreign trade.14 That is a good characterization of what we would
call today the art of airports, produced by those who invent nothing anymore and are doomed to
indefinite imitation of their own tradition which has become opaque and silent.15

So if we cannot ask any more what was meant, we remain free to ask what it means for us,
today, to sculpt like that. And that is the only true question. For Munro and Guillaume the good news
contained in the break, between the artist who has created the great works of Negro sculpture and
the African world today, is exactly that it frees us from the concern to reconstitute the Africanity that
was supposed to provide clues for the understanding of African art. We can and we should forget
who made it and to look at it afresh.16 Preconceptions come from two different groups, according to
the authors of Primitive Negro Sculpture. First there is the ethnologists, always keen on producing
abstract metaphysical constructions to explain the African mentality, that interpose between the

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work of art and us a set of considerations--descriptions of ethnic groups, rites, etc.--which hardly
enlighten, but rather obfuscate the art. The second group, that of the European artists whom we
would have expected, because they were the first to recognize that this form of art was at the root
of the modern tendencies, to be more entitled to speak about it. What we notice on the contrary is
that the discourse of this second group does not go beyond making extravagant eulogies. And this
from artists who find themselves almost struck by impotence in front of the forceful reality of the
works, feeling intuitively their qualities but being also inarticulate when it comes to expressing
their feelings, and finally, producing in their comment only vague rhapsodies, flowery, incoherent,
confused.17 We can add to these two types of discourses that of the professional art critic with his
gibberish gossip, who very often only shows his own preferences. He, too, fails to tell us what kinds
of satisfactions are provided by the works of African art.

Contrary to all these discourses it is necessary to find our ground, not on what we think to
be its necessary context, but on what is in the very work of art, here and now, in the present moment
when it offers itself to us. By so dismissing the concern for the context, to return to the artistic matter
Munro and Guillaume require from us that we learn how to read African art by forgetting everything
that it is not, and everything besides its artistic qualities. They thus inaugurate a phenomenological
approach, consisting in focussing on the art object the way it gives itself, in describing it by putting
in brackets those who created it, and without any preconception. This approach is thus defined:
[It tries] to avoid subjective reverie and the unverifiable generalization, and
[makes a] systematic attempt to see instead, as clearly and objectively as possible,
the demonstrable qualities in the works of art themselves, and their relation to the
conscious processes of the observer. An attempt is made to consider the plastic
qualities of the figures--their effects of line, plan, mass, and color--apart from all
associated facts.18

In order to keep away any outside consideration, it is necessary to dismiss the context but
also, on the side of the looking subject, certain expectations created in him by his own history and
his taste as constituted in and by this history. At first the subject has to be informed about what
is not in the work and what, unconsciously he expects to find there, because he learned to find
enjoyment in the Venus of Milo or the Apollo Belvedere. In order to discuss an African art that has
not been flattened in its sheer value by testifying for Africanity, Munro and Guillaume begin by
opposing it to classical art. To learn better how to enjoy the plastic qualities of African sculpture,
it is necessary to understand at first the nature of the enjoyment that is provided by the GrecoRoman statuary, since this is the reference for European art. The question becomes then that of
the erotic, in the Greek statuary and in the African sculpture. This is what accounts for the choice
of those canonical works such as the representations of Venus-Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, and
Apollo, her male equivalent. The goddess and the god in the representations given to them in GrecoRoman statuary express the ideal of the human figure, its perfection. The erotic here belongs to the
category of the pleasant to look upon, which translates as what we wish to look like ourselves and
what we wish to lovingly possess. The enjoyment the work of art brings results from the caress of
the glance, and maybe of the hand, when the body puts itself mentally in the posture of imitating or
embracing. Other works, without having so explicit a link with love or the ideal of physical beauty,
belong nevertheless to this category of mimetic pleasure. We smile mentally, mimicking the fine
and enigmatic smile of Voltaire in front of the bust of the philosopher (1778) by the neo-classical

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artist Jean-Antoine Houdon; and we break loose towards freedom with Michelangelos Rebel Slave,
by feeling in our body, so frail in comparison, all the energy of his powerful musculature.20

To get into African sculpture without prejudice is to not expect to see this category of
mimesis work in it. It is to learn, by opening up to it, to see a different erotic register activated.
Does the African, too, feel like kissing the Venus? Well, yes! Does he want to embrace the symbol
of maternity from Guinea that is represented (as number 35) among the illustrations in Munro
and Guillaumes book? Certainly not! When considered through the category of the pleasant to
look upon, this work and the others, where the natural figure of the human body is deformed or
disrupted are, for any viewing subject, a freakish monstrosity.21 Under such a category, these
works would only be seen as ontologically lacking, or as expressing some demonic inversion, which
is precisely what the missionaries of the different revealed monotheisms asserted when attacking
them as fetishes. How then are we moved by this kind of art and how is it that with experience,
on further acquaintance, and with determined open-mindedness to new sensations we come to
find enjoyment in the African statue?22 We could be satisfied with evoking habit, in explaining why
things which first seem ugly come to be pleasing on further acquaintance, just as one becomes
accustomed to eating spicy food.23 But we could understand what Guillaume and Munro are saying
in a different, more positive way too. It is not that custom makes the truth of art, but that this truth
is grasped in the very first experience of the eidetic reduction when intentional analysis makes
visible, in the plastic qualities of the art object, that what at first seemed a distorted copy of a
human body is in fact a new creation in its own right.24 It is this other truth that is going to be
become more and more manifest as we grow accustomed to the object.

What is the truth of African art for Guillaume and Munro? What is the nature of the pleasure
that we get from an African sculpture?
[It] is apt to be unmeaning or even disagreeable to civilized people. But in shapes
and designs of line, plane and mass, it has achieved a variety of striking effects that
few if any other types of sculpture have equaled. These effects would be impossible
in a representation of the human figure, if natural proportions were strictly adhered
to. They would be impossible in an ideal figure, conceived, like the Greek ones
mentioned, on the basis of what would be humanly desirable in flesh and blood.26

Again, we find the register of the power of the effects rising from immoderation, from the
absence of proportion, in the name of another logic internal to the work. This logic does not seek
pleasure from the beautiful reality consonant with our usual faculty of desire for what is in flesh
and blood, but rather from the shock obtained from a free play of the impulsive feelings in the
face of the figure dissociated into its parts, regarded as an aggregate of distinct units.27 Enjoyment
here comes from an experience of the limit, from the transmutation of the fear of seeing the unity
disappear, of seeing the whole piece fall apart and become confusingly unrelated into surprise
at the works means to weld the contrasting themes together by some note common to both.28
It is by a music to be composed at will, say the authors of Primitive Negro Sculpture, that we are
possessed when we walk around an African statue, seeing its lines and masses flow constantly and
infinitely into new designs and equilibria with no hiatus or weak interval between.29 Here music is
more than a metaphor. The plastic work is a complete visual music wherein,
...contrasting rhythms affect the sensitive eye and brain as a series of powerful

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reiterated shocks in line, ridge and roughened hollow, alternated with smoother
intervals, like recurring bursts of drums and brasses in music. Distributed, spaced,
contrasted, welded firmly together by repetition of theme, each shape is given its
maximum aesthetic effectiveness, and the power of the whole is made cumulative,
brought to a focus by the unity of design.30

The phenomenological approach of Munro and Guillaume invites us to place ourselves
in an ontology of rhythms, so as to fully grasp the nature of the world we are led into by African
sculpture and the emotion that it provokes, as an effect of powerful and violent stimulants. Creation
consists here in a composition of rhythms, in building a rhythm from units which are themselves
rhythms by repeating them without repeating them exactly, by making them respond to each other
under the figure of contrast, of inversion.31 That is indeed what Senghor will also do, and Munro
and Guillaumes text will always continue to show through his writings on African art, that is on
rhythm, vital force, and the oxymoron he coined as the best expression of what gives it its most
distinctive characteristics: asymmetric parallelism.

It is in Ce que lhomme noir apporte that Senghor writes this formula to which his thought is
too often reduced in order to reject it in one single gesture: emotion is Black as reason is Hellenic.32
Not enough attention was paid, in the numerous comments that it aroused, to certain important
elements. The first is the choice of words. Senghor did not say European or albo-European, but
Hellenic.33 Is this the simple coquetry of a scholar fed on the Classics? Is it the choice of a poet
who is fond of the rhythm of the alexandrine, because it is true that as far as euphony is concerned,
Hellenic sounds evident and necessary? These are all valid reasons, certainly, but this formula
also refers to the opposition that the authors of Primitive Negro Sculpture claimed between Greek
statuary and African plastic art. The second important element is that of the context. Senghors text
is truly oriented towards the topic of its last part, which is the major contribution, according to him,
of Africans to the world of the twentieth century: Art. Moreover, in the lines immediately following
the famous formula, Senghor explains the concept of emotion by that of rhythmic attitude,
thus announcing his considerations on art. Emotion is Black as reason is Hellenic can thus be
understood, in the context where this formula appears, as meaning: emotion is to African works
of art what reason is to Hellenic statuary. In my view it is at first and essentially in the aesthetic
reflections of Senghor that what is primarily and above all an analogy found its meaning before it
was transferred, with less fortune certainly, to the field of epistemology.34 Because his readings on
African art, and in particular of Munro and Guillaume, had placed his approach in the frame of an
opposition between sculpture from Hellenic and African traditions, Senghor, too, installed himself
within that polarity.

When trying to establish, in the context of colonial France, what the black man contributes,
Senghor would obviously not agree with the way in which Munro and Guillaumes book invites
the reader to forget about the Africans so as to better understand and enjoy the art that their
continent has given to the world. One can easily imagine that he wrote in response to the quiet
and normal racism in the colonial situation of the authors, who declared that, except for some
definite traditions like the one which says that, as early as the third century A.D. the empire
of Ghana was flourishing in the Western Sudan, and that its probable capital ruins have lately
been discovered, the negroes are a people without history and their past can be described only
in terms of general racial intermixtures.35

Already three years before the publication of Ce que lhomme noir apporte, Senghor

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himself claimed that the most important author for him and his companions in Negritude was Lo
Frobnius.36 It became a need, for Senghor, to bring back to African art the Africanity that Munro
and Guillaume had evacuated from it. His studies of the works of Africanists at the Institute of
Ethnology in Paris and at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, had prepared him to restore the link
between the sculpture and the African ethnos, to re-ethnologize art. He did so mainly by following
the meditation of Lo Frobenius on African civilization, but without fully giving up the approach of
the authors of Primitive Negro Sculpture that consisted in focussing on the plastic qualities of art
objects. In the work of Frobenius, Senghor found support for his strategic essentialism.37 We can
guess to what extent he agreed with the following lines when he read them in Frobeniuss History
of African Civilization:
And wherever we can still find evidence of this ancient [African] culture it bears the
same stamp. When we walk through the great museums of Europe, The Trocadero,
the British Museum, the museums in Belgium, Italy, Holland and Germany--in
all of them we encounter the same spirit, a similar character and nature. From
whatever part of this continent the various articles may have come, they always get
united in speaking the same language.38

And, further, in the same text:

This is the character of the African style. Anyone who has come close to it enough
to get a real understanding of it will recognize that it prevails throughout Africa
as the very expression its being. It manifests itself in the movements of all Negro
peoples as much as in their plastic art; it speaks in their dances and in their masks,
in their religious sentiment as well as in their ways of living, the nature of their State
and their destiny as a people. It lives in their fables, fairy tales, sagas, myths.39

What Senghor wanted to assert against the grain of Munro and Guillaume is that there is an
African style which makes the unity of the continent and that in it, being is expressed, meaning this
spirit that crosses ages and this language that continues to be spoken in all the aspects and gestures
of African life. If we do not take ethnographic knowledge as a starting point to read the art because
that it would only obscure our understanding, it still remains that this understanding has to bring
us back to an African way of seeing things and to African life in general. It is true that the authors of
Primitive Negro Sculpture admitted that art by the ancestral artists of the African continent could
constitute a source, the most revealing that we can find, for understanding the primitive Negro
mind. But Senghor was also interested in establishing an organic continuity with the African life
of today, however altered it may be, as well as with life in the black Diaspora, however alienated
it is. It is for the sake of continuity that he placed ethnology at the center of his philosophy, thus
maing African people visible too, after their art has become visible. The one Senghor always called
his master, Lo Frobenius, had proposed had also proposed this: to take Africans out of their
invisibility and make them seem like real antagonists, that is to say interlocutors.40 While
it is this master that Senghor evokes in order to restore the link between African life and the
sculpture to which it gave birth, it is the strictly plastic approach of Munro and Guillaume that is
the determining factor for his philosophy of African art. It is determining first for the elaboration of
Senghors notion of rhythm. Here is how he speaks about it in 1939, in his first article:

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The ordering force that constitutes Negro style is rhythm. It is the most sensible
and the least material thing. It is the vital element par excellence. It is the first
condition and the sign of art, like the breath of life; the breath which rushes or
slows down, becomes regular or spasmodic, following the tension of being, the
degree and the quality of the emotion. Such is rhythm primitively, in its purity, so
it appears in the masterpieces of Negro art, particularly in sculpture. It is made
up of a theme--sculptural shape--which is opposed to a kindred theme, the way
inspiration is opposed to expiration, and it resumes itself. It is not symmetry
which generates monotony; the rhythm is vivid, it is free. Because resumption is
not repetition, nor is it duplication. The theme is resumed in another place, on
another plane, in another combination, in a variation; and it produces another
intonation, another tone, another accent. And the whole effect is intensified, but
not without nuances. And so the rhythm acts upon what is the least intellectual in
us, despotically, to make us penetrate into the spirituality of the object; and this
attitude of surrender that we have, is in itself rhythmic.41

This reflection on the meaning of rhythm is echoed by the following lines, written seventeen
years later:
What is rhythm? It is the architecture of being, the internal dynamic confers
form, the system of waves given off towards the Others, the pure expression of the
life-force. It is the vibrating shock, the power which, through the sense, seizes at
the roots of our being. It finds expression through the most material and sensual
media: line, surface, colour, volume in architecture, sculpture and painting; accent
in poetry and music; movement in the dance. But, in doing this, it directs all this
concrete material towards the light of the Spirit. For the Negro-African, it is only
insofar as it is incarnate in sensuality that rhythm illuminates the Spirit.

And when he speaks once more of repetition, it is to clarify that there is almost always the
introduction of a new element, variation in the repetition, unity in diversity.42

Let us consider first the passage on rhythm in the article of 1939. If the center of Senghors
text is his consideration of African art, the center of this latter is in this paragraph on rhythm. We
see in it the way Senghor goes over and reworks the remarks of Munro and Paul Guillaume. What
he says about rhythm as a condition of African art at the beginning of the citation answers the
way that, in Primitive Negro Sculpture, the artist in front of the work to be created is described as
taken away by the rhythm which imposed itself upon his imagination--he is said to be obsessed
with it--and that he will enter matter. According to Munro and Guillaume, at the beginning of
creation is rhythm that will capture matter and whose primary figure is repetition. The work is
made of plastic rhythms responding to one another in repetition and contrast. This is shown in
the following analysis of a mask that we can imagine Senghor reading with the greatest attention:
The mask has a direct aesthetic effect, independent of all associations, by the
shapes and combinations of its parts. The eyes are rough, irregular circles, boldly

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outlined; the huge upper lip, as a semicircle relates the mouth to them and joins in
a rhythmic series that is continued above the eyes. The lower lip, a stiff contrasting
horizontal relates the mouth to the base of the nose and to the horizontal lines
of the forehead, and thus sets another rhythmic series. The nose, a sharp-edged
pyramid, is echoed in the line of rough, ribbed cones of hair that march across
the forehead. The vertical ridge above the nose connects it with the hair bridging
an otherwise blank expanse, and helps to balance the heavy massing of features
at the bottom. It joins with nose and mouth to form a wedge-shaped subordinate
pattern; to right and left of this wedge, as a result, are two shield-shaped planes;
each pierced by an eye and each a smaller version of the faces total contour. These
contrasting rhythms affect the sensitive eye and brain as a series of powerful
reiterated shocks in line, ridge and roughened hollow, alternated with smoothed
intervals, like recurring bursts of drums and brasses in music. Distributed, spaced,
contrasted, welded firmly together repetitions of theme, each shape is given its
maximum aesthetic effectiveness, and the power of the whole is made cumulative,
brought to a focus by the unity of design.44

Senghor will keep this approach of the African art object as combination and unity of
rejoining rhythmic series from his reading of Munro and Guillaume. The crucial addition he makes
is to turn it into the language of African ontology, understood as ontology of vital force.45 Before he
reads, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Placide Tempels Bantu philosophy, the idea
that African art is an expression of the ontology of vital force is already present in his thought.46 He
speaks of an ordering force which is the vital element par excellence, thus inviting us to think
together sculpture and ontology. The discovery of Father Tempels work, which he greeted with
an overflowing enthusiasm, allowed him afterward to be more precise in his presentation of the
universe of the artist as the true reality. The vital forces are, as he says, the stuff art is made of.47
The thesis of Father Tempels can be thus summarized: to understand African life in its multiple
manifestations, whether it is religion, art, ethics, medicine, law, or government, is to go beyond
ethnographic description and to reach the knowledge of the ontology that is the ratio essendi and
the ratio cognoscendi of what these descriptions present without a clue about how to grasp their
true meaning. And this ontology which gives sense to everything is all in the following equation:
being is force. Not that force is an attribute, even an essential one, of what is; what is meant rather
is ens sive robur: being, in other words force. True reality, the forceful reality about which Picasso
spoke and that Senghor prefers to call sub-reality rather than surreality--to better indicate what
is under appearance, the energy under the thing--is thus that of a pluralistic energetism as it was
designated by the Belgian philosopher Lo Apostel.48 Apostel summarized Bantu Philosophy in the
following seven theses:
1. Something exists means that something exercises a certain specific force.
2. Every force is specific. Against some pantheistic interpretation, this is a question
of asserting the existence of monadic, individual forces.
3. Various types of beings are characterized by various intensities and types of
forces.
4. Each force can be increased or decreased. As Senghor puts it, any force can be
rein-forced or de-forced.

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5. Forces can influence and act on each other by virtue of their internal natures.
(All forces are radically interdependent in an internal way. The actions thus have
nothing magic about them.)
6. The universe is a hierarchy of forces set according to their power, starting from
God and going all the way down to the mineral through the founding Ancestors,
the grand Dead, living humans, animals and plants.
7. The direct causal action goes from a plus being, the bigger force, to a less
being, the weaker force. (The action can be indirect and use beings of lower rank
to act on an equal.)

Is this universe of forces the one Africans live in? Anyway, it is the one to which, as the true
reality, the Initiated, the Sages have access; and therefore the artists too, who know better than
anybody else how to find the door to this world. If the hierarchical and pluralistic energetism that
is described as Africas most original contribution to philosophy is no myth, Lo Apostel writes,
then it should find its expression in African art. He adds: and we believe that this is indeed the
fact.51 For Senghor, Negro art is certainly the proof of Negritude. As a matter of fact, if the work
of art gives access to the ontology that we characterize as pluralistic energetism, that is because
it constitutes its language. Senghor could add to the seven theses on which Bantu philosophy is
founded the following:
a. What constitutes the individuality of a given force is its rhythm.
b. We open up ourselves to the object, the art object in particular, through a
rhythmic attitude which makes us be in phase with it, with its own rhythm. That is
what is meant by being in touch with its spirituality.
c. The harmonious combination of rhythms in a work of art depends on a forcerhythm that orders the whole into an indivisible organic unity.


In other words, the whole precedes the parts that are ordered, just as the music or the
lyric comes before the words that constitutes it. It is not surprising, then, that Senghor, the poet,
developed a philosophy of art that was a philosophy of inspiration, nor that he also met, on this
point, Henri Bergsons thought. Senghor defined himself first of all as an auditive, and like all the
poets of the Anthology, as a singer, tyrannically subjected to the inner music, and primarily to
rhythm.52 To what Sartre writes referring to Csaires poetry, when he notes that the words of
the latter are huddled together and the cemented by his almighty passion,53 Senghor gives an
explanation in the following lines: when [the poet] writes a poem, he does not calculate, he does
not measure, he does not count. He does not look either for the ideas or for the images. He is, in
front of his vision, like the Great black Priestess of Tanit, in Carthage. He says his vision, is in a
rhythmical movement, because he is furious with a sacred fury. And even his song, the melody and
rhythm of his song are dictated to him.54 The rhythmical movement is a whole, it is indivisible.
And it expresses the ideal of creation, from which only joy can spring: the sentiment that informs us
that the destination is reached when the inner rhythm is in perfect symbiosis with the transcribed
rhythm.55 If African sculpture can be said Cubist, it is not because it would analyze the object into
separated elements, partes extra partes, before reorganizing them. On the contrary, it is because
it insists on the indivisibility of the whole, on the total effect towards which all the rhythms which
melt into it converge.

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Once again, it is important to emphasize that Senghor has a plastic understanding of
rhythm. It is in sculpture that he first came across the notion of rhythm as a principle of creation and
as the supreme aesthetic value, before he spoke about it in relation to those areas which are usually
more immediately associated with it, such as poetry, music or dance.56 Reading a feminine Baoul
statuette in the same manner Munro and Guillaume described a Fan mask, Senghor makes it speak
in music in the following way: [In] it an alternated song is sung by two themes of sweetness. Ripe
fruits of the breasts. The chin and the knees, the croup and the calves are also fruits or breasts. The
neck, the arms and the thighs represent columns of black honey.57 What in the language of Munro
and Guillaume we would call the rhythmic series of fruits / breasts, is here referred to by Senghor
as a song or a theme of sweetness, which alternates with (Senghor), or opposes (Munro and
Guillaume), the rhythmic series of the columns of black honey. So if we can move from the plastic
language to the musical language it is because the ontology that finds its expression in sculpture or
in poetic song is one: that of rhythms.

Senghor was obsessed by the Negritude once claimed by Arthur Rimbaud, and very
often he quoted the latters famous words from Une Saison en enfer which mark Rimbauds break
with the European world: Yes, I have closed my eyes to your light. I am a beast, a Negro...The
smart thing to do is to leave this continent, where madness roams to provide with hostages these
scoundrels. I enter the real kingdom of the children of Cham.58 In a text entitled, Lettre trois
potes de lHexagone, Senghor, more than quoting him, proceeds to a real collage of the sentences
of Rimbaud, taking them from different places in the original text to achieve what he declares to be
a Negro-African re-reading of the author of The Illuminations. Here is the re-reading:
I am an animal, a Negro but I may be saved. You are fake NegroesI invented the
colour of vowels! I adjusted the shape and movement of every consonant, and,
with primitive rhythms, I took pride in inventing a poetic verb, accessible, some
day, to all senses.59

It is not only the collage which translates such a re-reading, but also the choice to underscore
such or such word, such or such expression. What this re-reading indicates then is what Senghor
in his comment presents as the suggestion of a radiant symbolism where all the senses--sounds,
smells, flavors, touches, forms, colors, movements--maintain mysterious correspondences and give
birth to the analogical images.60 An ontology of rhythms again. Rimbaud went as far as to the
sub-reality, what reality is made of, to find that it is constituted by primary, instinctive rhythms.
Under the language and the words with which it is made, he went down to the vowels that are the
primary colors, and to the forms and prime movements that are the consonants. Like an alchemist
witnessing the creation from the primal elements, he then saw and also heard how these rhythms
combine together to make a poetic verb which is in phase with all the senses.

So here is Rimbauld alchemy of the verb pointing towards the same pluralistic energetism,
towards the same ontology Father Tempels described as being at the root of Bantu philosophy. Is
it necessary to consider seriously the Negritude of Rimbaud, this word which he claimed because
it meant in his eyes the radical alteration, the most complete achievement of I as an other?
Why, after him, consider as Negro poets like Paul Claudel or Charles Pguy, or even Saint John
Perse?61 Senghor was tempted to take as Negro whatever evoked for him the ontology of vital
force. This racializing approach, consisting of tracking down influences, that is, traces of black
blood or characterological affinities often to the point of absurdity, is definitely irritating.62 But in

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fact, ultimately, this racialization eventually neutralizes and destroys itself. If there is a Negro
style that expresses itself in the juxtaposition of rhythmic series which rejoin in an asymmetric
parallelism, we can then see things this way: this style is not the natural emanation of something
like a race, but the choice, the preference--and maybe the religious and aesthetic obsession--for a
particular figure, that of paratax, which Senghor opposes to syntax. Thus, in Tristan Tzara, he and
Aim Csaire recognized themselves, he says, in the taste of the surrealist poet for paratax, that is
juxtaposition or coordination replacing syntax, and [when] melody is made of natures noises and
sounds.63 This way of reading Senghor, by paying attention to the point when racialism eventually
negates itself, is explicitly required by the author himself. Let us consider the following passage, a
part of Senghors conclusion to his article of 1956 on The aesthetics of the Negro-African:
People will say that the spirit of the Civilization and the laws of Negro-Africans
Culture, as I have exposed them, are not exclusively valid for the Negro-African,
but are shared by other peoples. I do not deny it. Every people unites on its face the
various features of the human condition. But what I say is that we find nowhere
these features together united in this equilibrium, under this light; nowhere has
rhythm reigned so despotically. Nature did well making sure that each people,
each race, each continent has cultivated, with a particular dilection, certain virtues
of Man; which is what constitutes its originality. And if we add that this NegroAfrican Culture is very much alike that of ancient Egypt, of Dravidian and Oceanian
peoples, I shall answer that ancient Egypt was African, that some black blood flows
in passionate streams through the veins of Dravidians and Oceanians.64

This is certainly racialism, when the essential negritude of Dravidians and Oceanic people
is decided by their epidermis. But this is also a definition of what constitutes difference, specificity,
what is called here originality. And according to Senghor, this is not a specific feature that would
belong solely and exclusively to one race, but rather a certain balance, let us say a certain ratio,
between different features that are identical everywhere because they make up together the human
condition. Different cultures will be characterized then by different ratios between the same features
that they will emphasize in differentiated manners.

No mystery would need to be explicated by scrutinizing influences, biology, or ethnic
characterology, if given cultural practices, breaking or revolting against the customs and traditions
of the context of their birth, can sometimes recognize themselves in the mirror that they are offered
by another way of establishing a ratio between the features that define the human condition. At the
Trocadro museum Picasso would never have encountered those other answers to the problem of
the artistic representation that he saw embodied in the African masks, had he not brought with him
those other questions that were haunting him. Paraphrasing Boris Vian, we may say that his notion
of lart ngre, African art, was true only because he entirely invented it.

This theory of fluid cultural sets is very present in Senghors texts, and it appears here and
there under his generally essentialist discourse, allowing us to bring some nuance to his racialism-or even to de-racialize his thought. After all, he was the philosopher of mtissage at least as much as
of Negritude. When he praises the mtis, he does not see them as derived beings--as the sheer effect
of the meeting between already-constituted essences--but as the first, the primal affirmation of the
freedom to create, which is culture itself. For Senghor, indeed, any truly alive culture is mtissse,
and the mtis is a creator of culture because he stands for the liberty to make, from reconciled

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elements, a work exquisite and powerful.65 Nimrod quite rightly opposes this affirmative word
which is the mtissage thus eulogized by Senghor, to the succession of refusals and negations
by which the praise of creoleness begins.66 We can re-read Senghor from this perspective, too,
understanding that under the massive, biological, essentialist discourse of Negritude filters the
fluid, cultural, hybrid notion of a devenir ngre (becoming Negro) to use the language of Gilles
Deleuze.

Senghors writing allows the language of becoming and movement, rather than essence
and permanence. Such a language permits-- without any problem or paradox-- the evocation of
a devenir ngre of Rimbaud, Picasso or Claudel, or even of French, or German, or Dutch culture
at such and such a period, in such and such a place. It also permits us to speak for the past and to
evoke the existence of a black Greece, without any racialist obsession.

In a footnote to their book, Munro and Guillaume, after they have affirmed that Greek
statuary, in contrast with African sculpture, appeals to the category of what would be humanly
desirable in the flesh, claim that this does not apply to the whole of Greek sculpture. In particular,
they note that considerable distortion for plastic purposes can be found in more archaic works of
art.67 Senghor, in various passages, also insists on the existence of Negritude in ancient Greece. To
speak rather of devenir ngre, in a civilization of mtissage such as that of ancient Greece, would
have the merit of saying that the same world has known a creative tension between a principle
subjected to the ideal of the beautiful shape and an another one that drew from the deep sources
of emotion. It would then be appropriate, along with Nietzsche, to call the first one Apollonian
and the second Dionysian. Senghor himself made such a reference in a lecture he gave in May of
1983 at the University of Tbingen, upon the occasion of the conferral of a doctorate honoris causa.
Presenting Nietzsche, along with Bergson, as an agent of the radical change in the history of ideas
that he called the 1889 Revolution, Senghor declared: For Nietzsche, the vocation of Man...is less
in truth than in life: in the free will of man who makes himself a superman, inventing new values,
pulled out of the will, certainly, but also and deeply out of intuitions, sensibility. He too preaches
the eternal return to the symbiosis of Apollonian spirit with Dionysian soul, but with an emphasis
on the latter. The 1889 Revolution was ripe. Let us not forget that it is in 1883-1885 that Thus Spoke
Zarathustra is published.

As a conclusion, two points need to be emphasized. First, that African art of yesterday, as
Leo Apostel affirms, does provide convincing evidence for an African philosophy considered as
pluralistic energetism, in particular for Senghors thought. Such an ontology of life forces gives a
good enough account of that art, both in the differences of styles and the unity that characterizes
it. That said, the following second point needs to be underlined too: that African artists in the past
could access that ontology as the driving force behind their creativity does not make it a specific and
exclusive difference defining Africans as bound together by an unconscious collective metaphysics.
Therefore, todays African artists do not need, in order to be themselves and to be true to their
history, to find the same access to a metaphysics that has mostly disappeared. Senghor celebrated
an African creation that has, in many different ways, helped shape and color the artistic twentieth
century, in particular when he made the World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in 1966 one of the
highlights of his presidency. He also wished for a School of Dakar in art that would define and
illustrate for today the aesthetics of rhythm and asymmetrical parallelisms. That endeavor was

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bound to be useless, because it was not necessary. That is being demonstrated by contemporary
African artists, the Senegalese among them in particular: Africanity, for them, is a question and an
open one, to be ceaselessly explored.



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Marie-Laure Bernadac and Paule du Bouchet, Picasso Master of the New Idea (London: Harry Abrams, 1993), 41.
Ibid., 42.
See Andr Malraux, Introduction gnrale la mtamorphose des dieux, in Ecrits sur lart. Oeuvres Compltes V
(Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 7-37.
From 1909 until his death in 1918, Apollinaire repeatedly called for such a reform and for lart ngre (Negro art) to
get the recognition it deserves. See Guillaume Apollinaire, A propos dart ngre 1909-1918 (Toulouse: Toguna, 1999),
11 et passim. Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise noted, all translations from French to English are the authors.
Ibid., 6
Andr Malraux, Ouevres Compltes. Vol.III (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 696-697. In his book Ce que je crois (Paris,
Grasset, 1988; p. 221), Senghor speaks about his encounters, back in the 30s, with the artists of the School of Paris,
or, if one prefers, of Cubism when they had their headquarters at the Caf de Flore. Sometimes, he says, one of
them would suggest: why dont we go to Picassos? He used to live not very far, two or three blocks from there. I still
remember Pablo Picasso walking me friendly to the door, as I was taking my leave of him, and saying to me, eyes in
eyes: We must remain savages. And I would answer: We must remain Negroes. And he would break into laughter.
The word, savage, closer to untamed than primitive, is to be understood as what grants the artist this right that
Malraux claimed Picasso had read in the African forms: the right to the arbitrary and the right to freedom. See Malraux,
Chefs doeuvre de lart primitif, in Oeuvres Compltes, V , 1215, 1217.
Ibid.
Douglas Fraser, presenting an exhibition of photos of African art organized by the Department of Art History and
Archaeology of the University of Columbia; in Fraser, African Art as Philosophy (New York: Interbook, 1974), 1.
Leo Apostel quotes W. E. Abraham speaking of the Akan people: Akans unable to write expressed their philosophical
and religious ideas through art, through the timeless, age-old, silent and elementary power so characteristic of the
traditional African art. Leo Apostel, African Philosophy Myth or Reality (Gent: Story-Scientia, 1981), 390. Apostels
book is characterized by a precise, analytical approach, and proves that Placide Tempels was right to see (in Bantu
Philosophy ) a pluralist energetism as the characteristic feature of African ontology. See also Abraham, The Mind of
Africa (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), 111.
Lopold Sdar Senghor, Libert I: Ngritude et humanisime (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1964), 24.
Ibid., Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro, La sculpture ngre primitive (Paris: Crs et Cie, 1929). The work was first
published in English as Primitive Negro Sculpture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926).
When it was published in English, it contained a supplementary final chapter on the relation between primitive Negro
sculpture and contemporary art. In this conclusion, after having quoted from numerous modern writers whose works
owed something to Negro art, the authors write: These [modern works] exemplify the power which the anonymous
artists of the jungle are exercising upon the mind of a race widely separated from them in blood, civilization, geography
and time. The modern works are not, of course, a basis for judging the merit of the ancient sources themselves.
Primitive negro art, like most great originations, is essentially inimitable, and some of its power is apt to be lost in
modern versions. Ibid., 133.
Guillaume and Munro, Primitive Negro Sculpture, 10.
Ibid., 13. Along the same lines, in an interview given in 1967, Michel Leiris declared that the concern of sounding
African, for the artist, only ends in artificial stuff and he added: What is to be done? I cannot make any more
masks or statues which refer to the things in which I do not believe any more or which are very distant from me
...African painters who will not give a thought about what it means to be African will create works in the presence of
which we shall say to ourselves that only an African could have realized them. They will have unintentionally found an
Africanism of their art. But to look for it deliberately, is like socialist realism... Michel Leiris and Paul Lebeer, Au-del
dun regard Entretien sur lart africain (Lausanne: La Bibliothque des Arts, 1994), 91.
Jean-Godefroy Bidima explains this strange reversal created by the logic of trade, in which the foreign consumer
defines what African art is and its local fabricators therefore define their own identity accordingly. African art? he
writes, thats the art of the Africans, reviewed, edited, sold and presented by White people. Jean-Godefroy Bidima,
Lart ngro-africain (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, QSJ, 1997), 6.
Guillaume and Munro, Primitive Negro Sculpture, 11.
Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 30
Ibid.
Ibid., 33
Ibid.
Ibid.



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Ibid., 32.
Ibid., 35.
Ibid., 37.
Ibid., 37-38.
Ibid., 76.
Describing a mask they write (52): ...the eyes are rough, irregular circles, boldly outlined; the upper lip, as a semicircle
relates the mouth to them and joins in a rhythmic series that is continued above the eyes. The lower lip, a stiff contrasting
horizontal, relates the mouth to the base of the nose and to the horizontal lines of the forehead, and thus sets another
rhythmic series in motion.
Senghor, Libert I, 24. Later he will explain his choice of this very provocative formula by his youth. This is what
he declared in 1967 in Dakar, in a speech he delivered at the second session of the international Congress of the
Africanists: some thirty years ago, schematizing with the inflexible passion of youth, I wrote: emotion is Black, as
reason is Hellenic. Senghor, Libert III: Ngritude et civilisation de luniversel (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1977),
168.
See, for example, this formulation that we find in his text on Lesthtique ngro-africaine which he published in the
journal Diogne in 1956: European reason is analytical by use, Negro reason is intuitive by participation. This reprise
is not a simple variant of the formula of 1939, which remains an analogy. Senghor, Libert I, 203.
About what he calls the sentence which brought the scandal, Nimrod, who also regrets the way in which it is often
used against Senghor, writes that this sentence in the form of an aphorism is one of those intellectual games which,
in spite of their predictable consequences, give their authors a great pleasure. And he adds that with that formula,
ultimately, Senghor has trapped himself with panache. Nimrod, Tombeau de Lopold Sdar Senghor (Paris: Le
temps quil fait), 37 and 39.
Munro and Guillaume, Primitive Negro Sculpture, 16.
This is how Senghor presented the encounter with Frobenius books, (Libert III, 13): I cannot do better than to speak
here of the lessons we have learned from reading the work of Frobnius, and above all his two fundamental works,
which have also been translated into French: Histoire de la civilisation africaine and Le Destin des Civilisations.
When I say we, I refer to the handful of black students who launched the Negritude movement in the 1930s in the
Latin Quarter, in Paris, with Aim Csaire from the Antilles and Leon Damas from Guyana. I still have before me, in
my possession, the copy of Histoire de la civilisation africaine on the third page of which Csaire wrote: dcembre
1936. A year earlier, when I was teaching at the Tours Lyce while preparing my doctors thesis on Verbal forms in
Languages of the Senegal-Guinea Group ...I had started to attend courses at the Paris Institute of Ethnology and at the
cole Pratique des Hautes tudes. So I was intellectually on familiar terms with the greatest Africanists and above all
the ethnologists and linguists. But suddenly, like a thunderclap--Frobenius! All the history and pre-history of Africa
were illuminated, to their very depths. And we still carry the mark of the master in our minds and spirits, like a form of
tattooing carried out in the initiation ceremonies in the sacred grove. See, Senghor, The lessons of Leo Frobenius,
a Foreword to Leo Frobenius 1873-1973 An Anthology, ed. Eike Haberland (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GmbH,
1973), vii.
Here I use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks expression. Spivak, in an interview, declared that if we should oppose
essentialism and universalism because of their link with domination, strategically, we cannot be totally exempt
from them. From time to time, and in the name of the fight against domination, it is necessary to choose a strategic
essentialism. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah
Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 11-12.
Lo Frobenius, Histoire de la Civilisation africaine, (4th ed.) trans. H. Back and D. Ermont (Paris: Gallimard, 1936),
16.
Ibid., 17-18. The emphasis is the authors. Munro and Guillaume, Primitive Negro Sculpture, 11.
While the Greeks of Homer, he writes, knew how to look at the life of the Ethiopians (for Frobenius, as for the
Ancients,the word is a synecdoche for Africans) the distinction between Romans and Barbarians will establish
the European custom of taking strangers out of representation. The division between Christians and Pagans, and then
between Civilized and Savages will strengthen this custom. At first, it was necessary for these human beings to be
completely eliminated from our European concerns to spring again in front of our eyes, coming suddenly out of their
invisibility, and appearing to us as our antagonists. Frobenius, Histoire de la civilisation africaine, 29.
Senghor, Libert I, 35. The emphasis is Senghors.
Senghor, Libert I, 211-212. I use here John Reed and Clive Wakes translation but correcting it on some points. See
Lopold Sdar Senghor, Prose and Poetry. Selected and translated by John Reed and Clive Wake (London: Heinemann,
1976), 87.
Senghor, Libert I, 211-212 and 213. These lines are excerpted from the article, Lesthtique ngro-africaine,


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published by Senghor in the journal Diogne in October 1956. My emphasis.

Munro and Guillaume, Primitive Negro sculpture, 51-52. My emphasis.
Indeed, he insists on meta-aesthetics: the painters and the sculptors of the School have seen [in Black sculpture]
essentially an aesthetics while, beyond the laws of the beautiful, it also expressed a meta-physics, I mean an ontology,
and an ethics. Senghor, Lettre trois potes de lHexagone, in Oeuvre potique (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1990),
371.
Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy (Paris: Prsence africaine, 1947).
Senghor, Libert III, 66.
Leo Apostel, African Philosophy: Myth or Reality? (Gent: Story-Scientia, 1981), 26-29.
Ibid., 325.
Senghor, Libert I, 222.
See Jean-Paul Sartre, LOrphe noir, Preface to LAnthologie de la novelle posie ngre et malagache de langue
francaise, ed. Lopold Sdar Senghor (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).
Senghor, Libert III, 396-397. The text is from Senghors foreword to The Concept of Negritude in the Poetry of
Lopold Sdar Senghor, by Sylvia Washington.
Here I use the concept of Rene Tillot, who calls primitive or inner rhythm the rhythmical movement as it exists out
there as it resonates on the sensibility of the artist, and transcribed rhythm as what is re-created by the artist. Rene
Tillot, Rhythm in the Poetry of Lopold Sdar Senghor (Dakar: Les Nouvelles ditions Africaines, 1979).
See Senghor, Libert I, 215. Here he analyzes African murals reproduced in Parades pintadas da Luanda, by stressing
the rhythmic series created by colors: always flat, without shade effects, and he writes, with obvious care for the
paradoxical formula that rhythm is even more obvious in the Negro-African painting. The novelist and poet Nimrod
comments astutely that, Senghor is not a poet of the tom-tom, meaning that he does not fall with ease into the effects
of drumming in his poetry. See Nimrod, Le tombeau, 62.
Senghor, Libert I, 214.
Arthur Rimbaud, Posie. Une saison en enfer. Illuminations (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 182.
Senghor, Oeuvre potique, 372. Senghor quotes here from Mauvais sang(182), and Alchimie du verbe (192) in
Rimbaud, Posie.
Ibid., 375. The analogical image is not one fixated in immobility to just portray (that is called an image-equation by
Senghor) but the one to which rhythm is consubstantial and which is thus power.
Senghor writes (in Oeuvre potique, 377): Why, in the 1930s, we the militants of Negritude, did we use to call Claudel
and Pguy: our Negro poets. Along with the surrealists, they influenced us--in fact less than was said--as they wrote
in French but because of their style, they looked like our popular poets.
Here too, Frobenius, who saw a deep affinity between Africanity (which he called, following the Ancients, Ethiopianity)
and a German mystical spirit (which Senghor will baptize as Germanity) had a deep influence on his approach.
Senghor, Ce que je crois (Paris: Grasset, 1988), 218.
Senghor, Libert I, 216.
Senghor, Libert I, 103.
Nimrod, Tombeau, 30-31. See also In Praise of Creoleness, which begins as follows: Neither Europeans, nor Africans,
nor Asians, we claim to be Creole. Jean Bernab, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphal Confiant, Eloge de la crolit/ In
praise of creoleness (Paris, Gallimard, 1989).
Munro and Guillaume, Primitive Negro Sculpture, 51-52.