Senghor, Asilah, and Afro-Arab Civilization

Abstract The Senegalese poet-president Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Martinican psychiatrist-philosopher Frantz Fanon both had a keen interest in North Africa and competing visions of the relationship between “Arab and Negro.” Morocco would play a significant part in their intellectual formation and political trajectories. Starting in the mid-1970s, Senghor would play a growing role in Moroccan political culture, advancing a discourse on the symbiosis of Arabité, Berberité, and Négritude. When historians of Berber/Amazigh culture discuss Senghor's impact on Morocco, the focus tends to be on Senghor's friendship with Berber politicians and, more broadly, on Négritude's influence on the Amazigh cultural movement. For two decades, however, the Senegalese poet-president presided over the annual Afro-Arab Forum in the coastal town of Asilah. In Asilah, a different understanding of Arab Négritude would take shape, with the Moroccan-Senegalese alliance conceived as the foundation of a broader Afro-Arab relationship. The late Moroccan diplomat Mohammed Benaissa, who launched the Afro-Arab Forum in 1980, would envision Asilah—“this little Afro-Arab town,” this “fragment of the Third World”— as a place to cultivate the kind of cultural cross-breeding that Senghor had long called for: le co-naitre—co-birth. This article argues that the prevailing discourse of Afro-convivencia, which locates Morocco as rooted in the Sahel but extending to Iberia, portraying the kingdom as a mirror and extension of both Spain and Senegal, found its modern expression in Asilah as a result of dialogue between Arabophone, Hispanophone, and African intellectuals.