  Point 6 in particular constitutes a good summary of the view shared by many African religions characterized as “animism” while the other points help understand the particular type of causality that has been labeled magical thinking. As early as in 1939, at a time when Leon Damas had already published his first collection of poems, Pigments (1937) and Césaire had just finished a version of his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (“Notebook of a return to my Native Land” (Césaire 2000a)), Senghor had published an essay on the philosophy of Négritude entitled “Ce que l’homme noir apporte” (“What the Black Man Contributes”). As he explored in that essay the notion of rhythm as constitutive of what he called “the negro style”, Senghor was trying to say that the productions of African art were to be understood first and foremost as the language of an ontology of vital forces.