| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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a serious obstacle in the education of young Africans. An education in foreign languages was a waste of time, he asserted, because it ‘forced [learners] to make double the effort to assimilate the meaning of words and then, through a second intellectual effort, to capture the reality expressed by the words’ (p. 38).
Many other prominent African intellectuals, including such African Anglophone writers as Wa Thiong’o and Soyinka, did not endorse the Négritude theory. Soyinka (1976), for example, contradicted the philosophy by arguing that ‘[Négritude] stayed within a pre-set system of Eurocentric intellectual analysis both of man and society and tried to redefine the African and his society in those terms’ (p. 136). Soyinka's disagreement with the Négritude tenets was summed up in his famous remark made in 1964 at a conference in Berlin:
Rejection of the Négritude philosophy reached its peak when the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in his preface to Senghor's 1948 Anthologie (Anthology), also vigorously criticised the Négritude ideology on the grounds that it was ‘a weak stage of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis’ (Senghor, 1948, p. 13). Subsequently, to heal the ideological fracture among the Black elite, the opponents of the Négritude ideology called for ‘the need, in nations or groups that have been victims of imperialism, to achieve an identity uncontaminated by universalistic or Eurocentric concepts and images’ (Slemon, 1995, p. 125).
Decolonising the African Mind
In approaches similar to Diop's, other Black militants, such as Wa Thiong’o (1986, 1993), Mazrui (1978), and Fanon (1952), called for