David Diop
(1927–1960)

David Diop was one of the central members of the negritude literary movement, a movement that began in the 1930s among French-speaking African and Caribbean writers living in Paris. The movement was a form of protest against French colonial rule, and it also affirmed the cultural heritage of black people and emphasized the value and dignity of black experience and talent.

Diop was born in Bordeaux, France to a Cameroonean mother and a Senegalese father. Although he spent many years in France, he was devoted to Africa, as his poems illustrate. In 1950, Diop married Virginia Kamar, who is the center of many of his poems. In addition to his work in poetry, he taught at a school in Dakar and worked as a secondary school principal in Kindia, Guinea.

Tragically, he and his wife died in a plane crash in 1960 as they returned to France from Dakar. Most of his work, including the manuscript for his second volume of poems, was destroyed in the crash, leaving the world with only one volume of poetry from one of the most promising French West African poets of the 1950s.

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