EMBRACING SENGHOR'S NEGRITUDE FOR AFRICAN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
The contemporary values and demands for the pragmatic African ideologies as basis of African sustainable development, even beyond the shores of African developmental landscapes, call for the re-visitation of one's local and national identities and cultural values in understanding the trending global waves of development. That of the quest for African sustainable development requires the re-embracing the characteristics that make us African as a people, and that is, the African blackness mainly. With this, we recount the effort of Leopold Senghor with the philosophy of Negritude, with which he academically, social and politically initiated and projected the courses of black consciousness towards the values of their blackness for the self-development, self-reliance and self-dynamism. Negritude as a philosophy of liberation, as against the imperialistic influences of the philosophy of domination by the Whiteness of History, brings to the fore, the needs for the Africans to value themselves through the proclamation of their identity and personality as blacks. Therefore, the essay tries to awake further the consciousness of the blacks on the values of being blacks as a people through the re-embrace of the thought of Senghor's negro-family, towards achieving African sustainable development in the midst of other continental consciousnesses as global challenges and limitations, by positively and reasonably exacting themselves in the contribution of global growth and development.
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