"Emotion is Negro, reason is Greek," Leopold Senghor preached.
Ethnophilosophy involves the recording of the beliefs found in African cultures. Such an approach treats African philosophy as consisting in a set of shared beliefs, values, categories, and assumptions that are implicit in the language, practices, and beliefs of African cultures; in short, the uniquely African world view. As such, it is seen as an item of communal property rather than an activity for the individual.
Leopold Senghor, a proponent of negritude, argued that the distinctly African approach to reality is based on emotion rather than logic, works itself out in participation rather than analysis, and manifests itself through the arts rather than the sciences. Cheikh Anta Diop, on the other hand, while agreeing that African culture is unique, challenged the view of Africans as essentially emotional and artistic, pointing out that Egypt was an African culture whose achievements in science, mathematics, architecture, and philosophy provided a basis for Greek civilization.
A more controversial application of this approach is embodied in the concept of Negritude. With Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas, Senghor created the concept of Négritude, an important philosophical movement that sought to distance African culture from European influences. In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a famous analysis of the négritude movement in an essay called "Orphée Noir" (Black Orpheus) which served as the introduction to a volume of francophone poetry called Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, compiled by Senghor. In this essay, Sartre characterizes négritude as the polar opposite of colonial racism in a Hegelian dialectic. In his view, négritude was an "anti-racist racism" (racisme antiraciste) necessary to the final goal of racial unity.
The term négritude (which most closely means "blackness" in English) was first used in 1935 by Aimé Césaire in the 3rd issue of L'Étudiant noir, a magazine which he had started in Paris with fellow students Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas, as well as Gilbert Gratiant, Leonard Sainville, and Paulette Nardal. L'Étudiant noir also contains Césaire's first published work, "Negreries," which is notable not only for its disavowal of assimilation as a valid strategy for resistance but also for its reclamation of the word "nègre" as a positive term. "Nègre" previously had been almost exclusively used in a pejorative sense, much like the English word "nigger".
The Négritude writers found solidarity in a common black identity as a rejection of French colonial racism. They believed that the shared black heritage of members of the African diaspora was the best tool in fighting against French political and intellectual hegemony and domination. Neither Césaire nor Senghor in Senegal envisaged political independence from France. Négritude would, according to Senghor, enable Blacks under French rule to take a "seat at the give and take [French] table as equals." However, France had other ideas, and it would eventually present Senegal and its other African colonies with independence.
Senghor's tenure as president was characterized by the development of African socialism, which was created as an indigenous alternative to Marxism, drawing heavily from the négritude philosophy. In developing this, he was assisted by Ousmane Tanor Dieng. On December 31, 1980, he retired in favor of his prime minister, Abdou Diouf. Although a socialist, Senghor avoided the Marxist and anti-Western ideology that had become popular in post-colonial Africa, favouring the maintenance of close ties with France and the western world. This is seen by many as a contributing factor to Senegal's political stability- it remains one of the few African nations never to have had a coup, and to have always had a peaceful transfer of power.
The Négritude movement was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, and particularly the works of African-American writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, whose works address the themes of "blackness" and racism. During the 1920s and 1930s, a small group of black students and scholars from France's colonies and territories assembled in Paris where they were introduced to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance by Paulette Nardal and her sister Jane. Paulette Nardal and the Haitian Dr. Leo Sajou founded La revue du Monde Noir (1931-32), a literary journal published in English and French, which attempted to be a mouthpiece for the growing movement of African and Caribbean intellectuals in Paris. This Harlem connection was also shared by the closely parallel development of negrismo in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and it is likely that there were many influences between the movements, which differed in language but were in many ways united in purpose.
Négritude was criticized by some black writers in the 1960s as insufficiently militant. Keorapetse Kgositsile argued that the term was based too much on celebrating blackness by means of a white aesthetic, and was unable to define a new kind of black perception that would free black people and black art from white conceptualizations altogether. Freedom from a constricting white aesthetic sensability and the discovery of the rhythmic experience common to black people of all the world were, for Kgositsile's, two sides of the same struggle. Kgositsile's most influential collection, "My Name is Afrika," was published in this year. The response, including an introduction to the book by Gwendolyn Brooks, established Kgositsile as a leading African-American poet. The Last Poets, a group of revolutionary African-American poets, took their name from one of his poems.
Kgositsile also became active in theater while in New York, founding the Black Arts Theatre in Harlem. The Black Arts Theatre was part of a larger project aimed at the creation of literary black voice unafraid to be militant. He saw black theater as a fundamentally revolutionary activity, whose ambition must be the destruction of the ingrained habits of thought responsible for perceptions of black people both by white people and by themselves. He wrote:
We will be destroying the symbols which have facilitated our captivity. We will be creating and establishing symbols to facilitate our necessary and constant beginning.
Kgositsile argued persistently against the idea of Negritude, a purely aesthetic conception of black culture, on the grounds that it was dependent on white aesthetic models of perception, a process Kgositsile called "fornicating with the white eye."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negritude 
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