In September 1956, dozens of Black writers, artists, scholars, and political thinkers from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States arrived at the Sorbonne in Paris for the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, an unprecedented gathering organized by Présence Africaine at a moment when much of the African continent remained under European colonial rule. Among the delegates were figures who would become central to twentieth-century Black intellectual history, including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Richard Wright, Cheikh Anta Diop, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, and Jacques Stéphen Alexis. Sixty-three official delegates representing 24 countries participated in the Congress, which sought to bring Black intellectuals separated by geography, language, and colonial borders into conversation about culture, racism, colonialism, literature, and political freedom (Fejzula, 2016). (Stanford Humanities Center)
There was, however, a striking contradiction inside a meeting devoted to reclaiming Black intellectual authority. Women helped organize the Congress, corresponded with delegates, raised funds, prepared manuscripts, attended the sessions, and sustained the broader intellectual networks around Présence Africaine, yet they were absent from the podium where the gathering’s most celebrated ideas were presented (Fejzula, 2022). (OUP Academic)
Seventy years later, Paris has returned to the Congress with exhibitions, discussions, archival films, a commemorative plaque, and a symposium at the Sorbonne, while related commemorations are also taking place in Dakar. The anniversary rightly celebrates what happened in 1956, but it also offers an opportunity to look beyond the names most frequently associated with the gathering and ask a question that remains surprisingly unresolved in much of its popular history: where were the women? (Presence Africaine)
A Congress About Who Had the Right to Define Africa
The significance of the 1956 Congress extended well beyond the writers and artists who gathered at the Sorbonne, because it challenged a much older system in which European colonial institutions had positioned themselves as authorities on African history, culture, language, and identity. For centuries, Africans were frequently treated as subjects to be studied and interpreted rather than as intellectual authorities capable of defining their own histories and cultural traditions.
Présence Africaine had been working against that imbalance since its creation in Paris in 1947. Founded by Senegalese intellectual Alioune Diop, the journal and publishing house became an important meeting point for African and diasporic writers whose work crossed literature, philosophy, politics, history, and art. The Congress expanded that intellectual network into a physical gathering, allowing participants from different parts of the Black world to confront questions that colonial governments and institutions had often attempted to answer on their behalf.
The timing was significant. The Congress followed the 1955 Bandung Conference, where Asian and African states and movements had gathered in Indonesia amid accelerating struggles against colonial rule, and scholars have consequently described the Paris meeting as a kind of “cultural Bandung.” The phrase captures the ambition behind the event: if Bandung had created a political space for countries and movements outside the traditional centers of Western power, the Congress attempted to create a comparable space for Black cultural and intellectual life (Fejzula, 2016). (Stanford Humanities Center)
The discussions were wide-ranging rather than ideologically uniform. Frantz Fanon examined racism as a force that reshaped and attacked culture; Aimé Césaire addressed the relationship between colonization and cultural destruction; Léopold Sédar Senghor presented his ideas about Black African civilization; Amadou Hampâté Bâ discussed Fulani culture; while Haitian novelist Jacques Stéphen Alexis explored literature and the cultural reality that informed his theory of réalisme merveilleux. The published proceedings ultimately included contributions touching sociology, literature, poetry, religion, law, politics, and human geography. (Fasso Actu)
The importance of these interventions was not that the participants shared one definition of Blackness or one political program, but that they were asserting the right to debate those questions among themselves. African intellectuals living under colonial governments, Caribbean writers confronting different legacies of empire, and African Americans navigating racial segregation arrived in Paris with experiences that sometimes produced disagreement, but the disagreement itself demonstrated the existence of an international Black intellectual community that did not require Europe to serve as its interpreter.
The Congress therefore deserves its status as a landmark in Black cultural history. What makes its legacy more complicated, rather than less important, is that a gathering attempting to restore Black intellectual subjectivity did not offer women equal access to the platform from which that restoration was being articulated.
Women Were Not Absent. They Were Working
The historical shorthand that women were “absent” from the Congress is therefore incomplete, because women can be found throughout its organization and surrounding networks once the definition of participation expands beyond formal speeches.
Historian Merve Fejzula, whose research has examined gender and labor within the world of Présence Africaine, found archival evidence of women arranging travel, raising money, preparing manuscripts, corresponding with participants, organizing delegations, securing accommodation, and assisting with the publishing work that allowed the Congress to function. Much of that activity occurred in homes, cafés, restaurants, and other informal spaces rather than behind the Sorbonne podium, making it easier for later histories to classify it as logistical support rather than intellectual labor (Fejzula, 2022). (OUP Academic)
That distinction is particularly important because the Congress did not materialize simply because famous intellectuals arrived in Paris. Delegates traveling from Africa needed funding and accommodations, manuscripts required preparation and translation, international delegations had to be coordinated, and an institution with limited resources had to transform an ambitious idea into a functioning international event.
Women were embedded throughout that process.
Christiane Yandé Diop Was Doing Far More Than Supporting Her Husband
Among the most important was Christiane Yandé Diop, whose contribution has often been overshadowed by that of her husband, Présence Africaine founder Alioune Diop.
Archival records examined by Fejzula show Christiane signing planning correspondence, processing manuscripts, communicating with international delegations, helping arrange publication and translation, and taking an active role in the Congress’s preparations. One participant later remembered her as someone who worked quietly but effectively behind the scenes, handling everything from Présence Africaine’s publications to manuscripts brought by visiting writers (Fejzula, 2022). (studylib.net)
Even one of the most recognizable visual objects associated with the Congress contains a trace of her work. Pablo Picasso created the image of a Black man wearing a laurel crown that appeared on the Congress poster, but Fejzula’s research suggests that Christiane was involved in securing Picasso’s contribution. A well-known photograph shows her affixing the poster, an image that becomes more revealing once the organizational labor behind it is understood (Fejzula, 2022). (studylib.net)
After the Congress, her responsibilities within Présence Africaine continued to grow, and following Alioune Diop’s death in 1980, she assumed leadership of the publishing house. At the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration in 2006, Christiane herself observed the greater presence of women compared with 1956 and recalled the women who had contributed intensely to the success of the original event (Fejzula, 2022). (studylib.net)
Her history changes the question from “Why were women absent?” to something more precise: why was work that was essential to Black intellectual production so much less likely to be remembered as intellectual work when women performed it?
Joséphine Baker’s Politics Extended Beyond the Stage
Another familiar name appears in a less familiar role.
Joséphine Baker was one of 19 members of the Congress’s organizing committee. Her involvement may have partly reflected her international celebrity, but her relationship with Présence Africaine was not limited to lending her name to one event. She continued to support initiatives connected to the organization, including the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome in 1959 and the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in 1966 (Fejzula, 2016). (Stanford Humanities Center)
Baker’s participation is useful precisely because she is so often separated into the category of entertainer, even though her public life also included anti-racist activism, political organizing, and international engagement. Within the world surrounding Présence Africaine, celebrity and culture could become part of the infrastructure of political work, particularly when a globally recognizable Black woman could attract attention to projects trying to build connections across Africa and the diaspora.
The Women in the Sorbonne Courtyard Had Names
The archival record becomes even more revealing when we turn from organizers to the younger women who actually attended the Congress.
One photograph shows Aimé Césaire standing in the Sorbonne courtyard alongside three African women who had come to participate in the gathering’s wider intellectual environment. Later research identifies them as Virginie Camara, Marguerite Senghor, and Dienabâ Ba (Fejzula, 2022). Another photograph preserved in Présence Africaine’s archives includes Suzanne Ursule Diop, Christiane Yandé Diop’s sister, alongside Ba, Senghor, and Camara. (studylib.net)
These women were part of an emerging generation of African students in France at a period when student associations had become important spaces for political debate and anti-colonial organizing. Their presence complicates the image of the Congress as a room divided neatly between male intellectuals and female spectators, because women were participating in the broader intellectual and political environments from which postwar Pan-Africanism was being built.
They simply did not have equal access to its most prestigious platform.
Fejzula’s later research is particularly valuable because it identifies some of these women individually, moving beyond the tendency to reproduce historical photographs while naming only the famous men standing within them. (studylib.net)
Dorothy Brooks and the Work Behind an International Congress
The Congress also depended upon women outside Paris. Dorothy Brooks, a British-based African art enthusiast who participated in Pan-African networks in London, played an important role in organizing the London delegation. Delegates George Padmore and Saburi Biobaku later thanked her for that work, with Padmore describing her as an energetic secretary (Fejzula, 2022). (studylib.net)
The title “secretary” can make this contribution sound administrative and therefore secondary, but the historical evidence suggests something considerably more substantial. Brooks participated in cultural organizations concerned with African art, helped connect intellectuals across networks, and was involved in the practical coordination required to move an international delegation from an idea into the Sorbonne.
Her story also demonstrates that the world surrounding Black internationalism was not racially or politically simple. Brooks was White and appears to have been connected to communist political circles, placing her within the complicated network of allies, patrons, organizers, and intermediaries who participated in Black cultural politics during the Cold War (Fejzula, 2022). (studylib.net)
A Group of Black Women Refused to Remain Observers
Women also challenged their marginal position in the Congress directly.
Although no women served as official delegates, the published record includes a written statement submitted by “A Group of Black Women.” The authors declared that they could not remain merely observers at an event of such importance to the Black world and argued that Black women had an important role to play alongside men in constructing the futures of their countries (Fejzula, 2016). (Stanford Humanities Center)
The statement is revealing in several ways. Its authors demanded recognition while also describing women’s political responsibilities partly through motherhood and moral leadership within the family, illustrating how women could push against exclusion while still working within some of the gender expectations of the period.
Even the anonymity is striking. Their intervention survived, but their individual names did not.
Richard Wright Saw the Contradiction in 1956
The absence of women from the platform was noticeable enough that Richard Wright addressed it during the Congress itself, telling the audience that women had not been given a meaningful role in shaping the discussions and arguing that a freedom movement could not afford to exclude half of its collective strength.
He ended the intervention with one of the most pointed statements made during the four-day meeting: “Black men will not be free until their women are free” (Wright, 1956, as discussed in Fejzula, 2016). (Boston University Open.)
There was an irony even within Wright’s criticism, as his reference to women’s contributions as part of the movement’s “manpower” reflected the masculine political language he was attempting to challenge. The moment nevertheless demonstrates that the question of women’s exclusion is not a contemporary critique imposed retrospectively on 1956; at least one participant recognized the contradiction while sitting inside the Congress itself. (Boston University Open.)
Celebrating 1956 Without Freezing It in Time
The Congress went on to influence a much larger Black cultural network, including the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome in 1959 and the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in 1966, while Présence Africaine remained an important publishing institution for African and diasporic literature and political thought.
Its seventieth anniversary in 2026 has appropriately returned many of those questions to the Sorbonne. Présence Africaine and the Communauté Africaine de Culture organized programming around history, art, transmission, media, Afro-diasporic youth, contemporary activism, and the representation of African and Black people, while the Galerie Soufflot is presenting the exhibitions “1956 | Mémoire d’un Congrès” and “2026 | Résonances contemporaines.” The anniversary also included the inauguration of a commemorative plaque at the Sorbonne. (Presence Africaine)
There is something especially fitting about the contemporary program’s attention to intersectional engagement and the question of who gets to carry Black voices into the public sphere, because seventy years separate a Congress in which no woman served as an official delegate from a commemoration in which women scholars, artists, writers, curators, and moderators occupy highly visible roles. (Presence Africaine)
That evolution does not require us to choose between celebration and criticism.
The 1956 Congress remains an extraordinary assertion of Black intellectual independence at a time when colonial governments still controlled much of Africa, and its participants helped establish a cultural vocabulary through which generations of African and diasporic thinkers would debate identity, liberation, and artistic freedom.
At the same time, recovering women such as Christiane Yandé Diop, Joséphine Baker, Virginie Camara, Marguerite Senghor, Dienabâ Ba, Suzanne Ursule Diop, and the unnamed women who addressed the Congress collectively allows us to see the gathering more completely.
Perhaps the most useful way to commemorate 1956, then, is not to place it safely behind glass as a perfect moment of Black unity, but to continue the intellectual work the Congress itself demanded: questioning inherited narratives, examining who has been permitted to speak, and widening the historical record when it proves incomplete.
The men on the podium helped change Black intellectual history.
The women around it were helping build that history too.
References
Fejzula, M. (2016, November 3). Women and the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. African American Intellectual History Society.
Fejzula, M. (2022). Gendered labour, negritude and the Black public sphere. Historical Research, 95(269), 423–446.
Présence Africaine. (2026). 70e anniversaire du Premier Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs/Sorbonne.
Wright, R. (1956). Tradition and industrialization: The plight of the tragic elite in Africa. Présence Africaine, 8–10.