Aimé Césaire:AIMÉ CÉSAIRE, who has died aged 94, was a pioneer black consciousness activist, an anti-colonialist poet and politician, who was honoured throughout the French-speaking world and was an early proponent of black pride.
Speaking at his funeral in Martinique last Sunday, French president Nicolas Sarkozy described Césaire as a "man of freedom who never ceased to defend the value and equal respect due to every civilisation".
"He will remain for all of us the person who developed our consciousness.
"He will remain the one who, through his combat, sent out his message far beyond the borders of our nation," Sarkozy said.
Césaire helped found the Black Student journal in Paris in the 1930s, which launched the idea of "négritude", urging blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage.
His 1950 Discourse on Colonialism became a classic of French political literature.
Césaire, one of the Caribbean's most celebrated and revered cultural figures, whose works also resonate in Africa, died at a Martinique hospital where he was being treated for heart problems and other ailments.
His death brought tears and spontaneous memorial observances in the Caribbean island. Voters there sent him to the French national assembly for almost half a century and repeatedly elected him mayor of the capital, Fort-de-France.
Césaire was born on June 26th, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, but moved to France to attend secondary school and university.
He returned to Martinique during the second World War and served as mayor from 1945 to 2001, except in 1983-1984.
He helped Martinique shed its colonial status in 1946 to become an "overseas department" of France.
As the years passed, he remained firm in his views about colonialism and black pride.
He rose to fame initially with his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, written in the late 1930s, in which he says "my négritude is neither tower nor cathedral, it plunges into the red flesh of the soil".
His poems expressed the degradation of black people in the Caribbean and described the rediscovery of an African sense of self.
In Discourse, Césaire compared the relationship between the coloniser and colonised with the Nazis and their victims.
He was a mentor to fellow Martinican author Frantz Fanon, and their anti-colonial writings were a major influence in the heady intellectual climate of the 1960s and 1970s in France.
The négritude movement was a counterpart to the Black Pride movement in the United States, though it has been criticised for not being radical enough.
Césaire was also a friend of French surrealist poet André Breton who had encouraged him to become a major voice of Surrealism.
A graduate of the prestigious French École Normale Supérieure - unusual for a black Martinican in the 1930s - he remained a member of the French Communist Party until the Soviet Hungarian repression of 1956. He founded the Martinique Progressive Party in 1958.
He later allied with the Socialist Party in France's national assembly, where he served from 1946-1956 and 1958-1993.
In 2005, the politician-poet refused to meet then interior minister Sarkozy because of his endorsement of a Bill citing the "positive role" of colonialism.
"I remain faithful to my beliefs and remain inflexibly anti-colonialist," Césaire said at the time.
The offending language was struck from the Bill.
Despite the snub, Sarkozy successfully led a campaign last year to change the name of Martinique's airport in honour of Césaire.
Césaire eventually met Sarkozy in March 2006 but endorsed his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, in the 2007 French elections.
Royal called Césaire "an eminent symbol of a mixed-race France" and urged that he be buried in the Pantheon, where French heroes from Victor Hugo to Marie and Pierre Curie are interred.
Aimé Césaire: born June 26th, 1913; died April 17th, 2008