David Diop

David Diop (born July 9, 1927, Bordeaux, Fr.—died 1960, Dakar, Senegal) was one of the most talented of the younger French West African poets of the 1950s, whose tragic death in an airplane crash cut short a promising career.

Diop’s works in Coups de pilon (1956; “Pounding”), his only surviving collection, are angry poems of protest against European cultural values, enumerating the sufferings of his people first under the slave trade and then under the domination of colonial rule and calling for revolution to lead to a glorious future for Africa. That he was the most extreme of the Negritude writers (who were reacting against the assumption underlying the French policy of “assimilation” that Africa was a deprived land possessing neither culture nor history) can be seen in his rejection of the idea that any good could have come to Africa through the colonial experience and in his belief that political freedom must precede a cultural and economic revival. He wrote during the period when the struggle for independence in many African countries was at its height.

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Poetry: First Lines

Though he himself grew up and lived most of his life in France, his strong opposition to European society was reinforced by time spent living in Africa, teaching school first in Senegal and later in Guinea. The Martinique poet Aimé Césaire was a dominant influence on his verse, which first appeared in the journal Présence Africaine and in Léopold Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache.