PIGMENTS

Léon-Gontran Damas was the first published author of the three Négritude founders. Pigments, a book of poems, was published in 1937 with a preface by Robert Desnos, a renowned French surrealist poet. Pigments is considered the Négritude manifesto. It passionately condemns racism, slavery, and assimilation.

Flemish artist Franz Masereel's woodcut for the first edition of Pigments depicts a black man in a city bursting forth from a tuxedo, a symbol of the constraining pomp and elitism of Western culture. His nakedness, the palm trees, and the black figures are meant to represent the essence of blackness, or Négritude. They can also be seen as reinforcing the stereotype of primitivism associated with Africans.

Sisters Paulette and Jane Nardal, born in Martinique, played a fundamental role in Négritude and also served as a bridge between French- and English-speaking black writers who met every Sunday in their salon. In 1931 the Nardal sisters and the Haitian Leo Sajous published La revue du monde noir (The Review of the Black World), a bilingual literary journal.

Born in Senegal, Alioune Diop (1910–1980) taught in 1945 at Louis le Grand, the most prestigious French high school; he was then named chief of staff of the governor of French western Africa and was elected socialist senator of the French Republic. While a senator, he launched Présence africaine, a quarterly review to reveal and affirm the African presence in the world not only in history, but also in literature, linguistics, religion, philosophy, anthropology, visual arts, and politics. He is on the left, with Damas.

Présence africaine's first issue was published in the fall of 1947, and the most prestigious African, African Diasporan, and European authors have written articles for the review, which is still in existence. In 1949 Diop founded Les Editions Présence Africaine, which has published more than four hundred books by francophone authors and was the first to publish the translated works of anglophone Africans such as Kwame Nkrumah, Chinua Achebe, Julius Nyerere, and Wole Soyinka.

Numerous francophone African and Caribbean writers contributed to Négritude literature as they produced works focused on the plight of their people. Among them are the Haitians Jacques Roumain and René Depestre; the Malagasy Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, the Senegalese Senghor, Birago Diop, and David Diop; the Congolese Tchicaya U Tam'si; Edouard Glissant from Martinique; and René Maran and Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana.

Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), known as Sembène Ousmane, a Senegalese author and film director, published nine novels and directed a dozen movies. A Marxist, he studied cinematography in Moscow and, whether in literature or in film, denounced colonialism, neo-colonialism, religion, and the African bourgeoisie. Like the Négritude writers, Sembène looked at Africa and Africans from an African perspective, but he rejected Négritude as fundamentally elitist, believing the most urgent problem facing African people was economic, not cultural, oppression.