Monday 26 June 2017

104th birthday of Aimé Césaire

(Born 26 June 1913, Basse-Pointe, Martinique)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Poet, playwright, essayist, cofounder (with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontram Damas) of the “negritude” movement in Paris in the 1930s-1940s, one of the preeminent intellectuals of African World affirmation in the wake of 500 years of pan-European enslavement of African peoples, conquest and occupation of Africa, author of classics Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939; English: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1956) Discours sur le colonialisme (1950; English: Discourse on Colonialism, 1953), Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial (1960, study on the Haitian restoration-of-independence revolutionary), Une Saison au Congo (1966; English: A Season in the Congo, 1968 – play on life and times of Patrice Lumumba) and Une Tempête (1969, English: A Tempest, 1986 – a play, African peoples-centred rereading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest), teacher and major influence on Frantz Fanon, fellow Martinican and celebrated liberatory scholar and author of The Wretched of the Earth
(Charles Mingus Quintet, “Pithecanthropus erectus” [personnel: Mingus, bass; Jackie McLean, alto saxophone; JR Monterose, tenor saxophone; Mal Waldron, piano; Willie Jones, drums; recorded: Audio-Video Studios, New York, US, 30 January 1956]) 
Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe


No comments:

Post a Comment