Negritude and the African Writer of English Expression: Ayi Kwei Armah

In 1967 an article decrying the absence of an ideology which could facilitate Africa\u27s decolonization appeared in the Paris-based influential journal of black studies, Presence Africaine, and its young author Ayi Kwei Annab, then twenty-eight years old, cited Senghor\u27s Negritude as an artistic statement which reflects the political leader\u27s inferiority complexes, his slave mentality. Negritude cannot lead Africa to freedom, he declared, and described it as \u27the flight from the classical Cartesian big white father France into the warm, dark, sensuous embrace of Africa, into the receiving uterus of despised Africa\u27.1 Negritude, Armah added in the same article, is a wooden attempt to perpetuate western assumptions and stereotypes in reverse because \u27the image of Africa available to Senghor is obtained through the agency of white men\u27s eyes, the eyes of anthropologists and ethnologists, the slummers of imperialism\u27. Impatience and youthful exuberance could be discerned in this article but, twenty years after, in 1987, Armah still persisted in his outright condemnation of Negritude, even though in between no less than five novels, six short stories, a poem and a number of essays have poured from his pen, all of which, as I will show, together substantially resembles Senghor\u27s work in tone, intention and achievement