Africa my africa poem david diop biography
Africa my africa poem david diop biography
Africa poem by maya angelou...
David Léon Mandessi Diop was born in 1927 in Bordeaux, France, to a Senegalese father and a Cameroonian mother. During his literary career, he was a proponent of Negritude. This was a political philosophy/literary movement whose scholars included statesman-poet Leopold Sedar Senghor.
Africa my africa poem david diop biography pdf
Negritude was a reaction to the French colonial administrative policy of assimilation; this policy was predicated on the belief that Africans possessed neither culture nor history and therefore French culture could be used to civilise them.
Negritude desired a deep and almost essentialist re-grounding of Africans in the history, values, cultures of the Black people, while being open to friendship with other civilisations. The poem below by Diop reflects those values.
David Diop died in an airplane crash in 1960. He was 33.
Africa my Africa
Africa of proud warriors in ancestral Savannahs
Africa of whom my grandmother sings
On the banks of the distant river
I have never known you
But your blood f