Wole Soyinka accused Seghor of ‘accept[ing] the dialectical structure of European ideological confrontations but borrowed from the very components of its racist syllogism’. Further: ‘ ... négritude trapped itself in what was primarily a defensive role, even though its accents were strident, its syntax hyperbolic and its strategy aggressive… Négritude stayed within a pre-set system of Eurocentric intellectual analysis of both man and his society, and tried to re-define the African and his society in those externalized terms.’ (Quoted in Edward W. Said in Culture and Imperialism, p. 276-77.)