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Senegal: World Pays Tribute to Black Poet
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The Nation (Nairobi)
19 April 2008
Posted to the web 21 April 2008
Hamadou Tidiane Sy
Nairobi
Africa and the Francophone world continue paying tribute to Aimé Césaire, the black poet and political leader from Martinique, who died early on Thursday.
The French Minister for Foreign and European Affaires paid tribute to renowned poet and dramatist of the Negritude Movement. In a press release, Mr Bernard Kouchner said Aimé Césaire illustrated the vocation of France to universalism and to its deep ties with the Caribbean, the Antilles and Africa.
Said Mr Kouchner: "For all the wars he fought for humanity, Aimé Cesaire will always be, like he wished in his book A Book on the Return to the Native Land. We wish that he will remain, for all our Martinique brothers, "an initiator and a sower".
Mr Kouchner also asked French Cultural Institutes worldwide to pay hommage to Césaire in the coming weeks.
Aimé Césaire, born in 1913, came up with the concept of "negritude" together with former Senegalese President Leopold Sédar Senghor and Leon Gontran Damas, the writer form French Guyana.
The three met while studying in Paris in the 1920s. They later developed the concept, then a neologism, into the most influential literary and political movement of their time.
Although a French national born in the Caribbean island of Martinique where he lived and died, Césaire, who was of black descent, felt and acted like an African throughout his life, fighting for African causes and against colonialism.
"Césaire has fought one of the hardest battles for human dignity, especially for the dignity of the black man", Boubacar Boris Diop, a senior Senegalese writer, said in a tribute to the late poet, who combined a rich literary career with an active political life.
It made him so popular in his native Martinique that he was able to head the city council of Fort-de-France for 56 years. He remained the city's mayor and only left office when he was incapacitated by old age.
The man's links to Senegal and the rest of Africa were through another renowned writer and political leader, the former president and poet, Senghor. They were long-time friends although at some point, they disagreed on some issues.
This happened in 1962, for instance, when Senghor jailed his compatriot, former Senegalese Prime Minister Mamadou Dia, in 1962. But they never wholly parted ways and shared the same passion for art and literature.
Both were passionate about the French language, which they mastered, but which they used for their own interests to awaken the black consciousness among the black elite in Paris during the colonial era through their poetry and political writings.
Césaire was a man who "fought for freedom all his life; freedom to think, freedom to act, simply the freedom to be," Idrissa Ouédraogo, a film director from Burkina Faso told Radio France international. Ouédraogo has directed a theatrical production of one of Césaire's works.
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In the Francophone world, particularly in Africa, his poetry and his work remain part of the classics taught in all schools.
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