Aimé Césaire

Césaire came from a poor family in Martinique, won a scholarship to Paris, and there, with Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Léon Damas of Guiana, worked out the idea they called négritude: that the answer to a colonial education which taught you to be ashamed of your ancestors was not to imitate the coloniser better, but to claim what had been made shameful. His Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, published in 1939, is the founding poem of that argument.

His Discourse on Colonialism of 1950 made the case that Europe had practised in the colonies, for centuries and without objection, the methods it was shocked by when they were finally applied in Europe itself. He was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945 and held the office until 2001, and sat in the National Assembly for most of that time; he wrote the 1946 law that turned the old colonies into French departments, and spent decades afterwards arguing about what that had and had not achieved. Frantz Fanon was his pupil. Martinique gave him a state funeral, and he is buried in the town he governed.