By Astrid Wendlandt
Thu Apr 17,
8:52 AM ET PARIS (Reuters) -

French Caribbean poet Aime Cesaire,founding father of the "negritude" movement thatcelebrated black consciousness, died in his native Martinique, the France's Ministry of Culture said on Thursday. Cesaire, 94, who was mayor of the island's main cityFort-de-France for more than half a century, was admitted to hospital last week suffering from heartand other problems. His writings offered insight into how France imposedits culture on its citizens of different origins inthe early part of the 20th Century. The theme still resonates in French politics today, asthe country continues to struggle to integrate many ofits residents of African and North African origin. In 2005, Cesaire refused to meet then French InteriorMinister Nicolas Sarkozy (now French president) overconcerns that Sarkozy's conservative UMP party hadpushed for a law which proposed to recognize thepositive legacy of French colonial rule.

The law waseventually repealed. Cesaire and African intellectual Leopold Senghor --later president of Senegal -- founded "The BlackStudent" in 1934, a journal that encouraged people todevelop black identity. ANTI-COLONIAL VOICE IN THE 1960s The Caribbean writer rose to fame with his "Notebookof a Return to the Native Land," written in the late1930s, in which he says "my negritude is neither towernor cathedral, it plunges into the red flesh of thesoil." His poems expressed the degradation of black people inthe Caribbean and describe the rediscovery of anAfrican sense of self. In his "Discourse onColonialism," first published in 1950, Cesairecompared the relationship between the colonizer andcolonized with the Nazis and their victims.

He was a mentor to fellow Martinican author FrantzFanon, and their anti-colonial writings were a majorinfluence in the heady intellectual climate of the1960s and 1970s in France. The negritude movement was a counterpart to the BlackPride movement in the United States, though it hasbeen criticized for not being radical enough. Cesaire was also a friend of the French surrealistpoet Andre Breton who had encouraged him to become amajor voice of Surrealism. Cesaire's anti-colonial rhetoric did not prevent himfrom having a long-lasting political career. After becoming mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945 at theage of 32, he was elected deputy of parliament a yearlater, a post he held until the early 1990s.

A graduate of the prestigious French Ecole NormaleSuperieure -- unusual for a black Martinican in the1930s -- he remained a member of the French communistparty until the Soviet Hungarian repression of 1956. Cesaire was born in 1913 in the small town ofBasse-Pointe in Martinique. He married Suzanne Roussiin 1937, a gifted writer in her own right, with whomhe had six children.

(Reporting by Astrid Wendlandt; editing by Geert DeClercq and Paul Casciato)