Books from Chad
Nimrod: Selected Writings
Nimrod is the pen name of the Chadian writer Nimrod Bena Djangrang, who works in French. Selected and translated by Frieda Ekotto, this volume gathers essays and other prose that show his interests in aesthetics, philosophy, and linguistics where they meet African literature. The selection is arranged to bring an English-reading audience into a body of work that has circulated mainly in French.
A central thread is Nimrod's engagement with Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Senegalese poet who became his country's president and a leading figure in the Négritude movement of the 1930s. Négritude framed ideas about blackness as a way to bridge divisions across a Black diaspora living under French colonial rule. Recent critics have often set Senghor aside as essentialist, meaning that they read him as treating blackness as a fixed inborn quality. Nimrod instead works through the philosophy in detail, tracing how race and colonialism function in French-speaking spaces.
Alongside the Senghor material, the collection follows Nimrod across literary criticism, questions of language, and philosophical reflection, subjects that sit close together in his writing. Because the essays were composed in French and appear here in translation, the book also shows how arguments about African aesthetics move between languages, and where a translator has to make choices.
Plot
At the heart of this volume are Nimrod’s essays on Léopold Sédar Senghor, a key figure in the literary and aesthetic Négritude movement of the 1930s and president of Senegal from 1945 through 1980. Widely dismissed in recent decades as problematically essentialist, Senghorian Negritude articulated notions of “blackness” as a way of transcending deep divisions across a Black Diaspora under French colonial rule. Nimrod offers a nuanced reading of Senghor, drawing out the full complexities of Senghor’s philosophy and reevaluating how race and colonialism function in a French-speaking space.
