Leopold Sédar Senghor

(1906-2001)

Senegalese poet and statesman, founder of the Senegalese Democratic Bloc. Senghor was elected president of Senegal in the 1960s. He retired from office in 1980. Senghor was one of the originators of the concept of Négritude, defined as the literary and artistic expression of the black African experience. In historical context the term has been seen as an ideological reaction against French colonialism and a defense of African culture. It has deeply influenced the strengthening of African identity in the French-speaking black world.

L'èmotion est nègre, la raision est héllène. (emotion is Negro, reason is Greek). Negritude is the totality of the cultural values of the Black world.

Léopold Sédar Senghor was born in Joal-la-Portugaise, a small fishing village about seventy miles south of Dakar. His father, a wealthy merchant, was of noble descent, who supported a family of some twenty children. Senghor's mother was a Peul, one of a pastoral and nomadic people. Later Senghor wrote: "I grew up in the heartland of Africa, at the crossroads / Of castes and races and roads" The first seven years of his life Senghor spent in Djilor with his mother and maternal uncles and aunts. At the age of twelve, he attended the Catholic mission school of Ngazobil. He then continued his studied at the Libermann Seminary and Lycée Van Vollenhoven, finishing secondary-school education in 1928. Senghor had first intended to enter the priesthood, but abandoned clerical profession after being told that he lacked a religious vocation.

After winning a state scholarship, Senghor moved to Paris and graduated from the Lycée Louis-le-grand in 1931. During these years he read African-American poets of the Harlem Renaissance and such French poets as Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Valéry. Among Senghor's s friends were Aimé Césaire, with whom he would develope the idea of Négritude, and Georges Pompidou, who later elected President of France. In 1932 Senghor was granted French citizenship. He served in a regiment of colonial infantry and in 1935 he obtained the agrégation degree in grammar.

From 1935 Senghor worked as a teacher, notably at Lycée Descartes in Tours, and then in Paris at Lycée Marcelin Berthelot. At the outbreak of World War II, he joined the French army. After being captured by the Germans, he spent eighteen months in a camp as a prisoner of war. During this period he learned German and wrote poems, which were published in Hosties Noires (1948).

In 1944 Senghor was appointed professor of African languages at the École Nationale de la France d'Outre-Mer. Senghor's first collection of poems, Chants D'Ombre (1945), was inspired by the philosopher Henri Bergson. It dealt with the themes of exile and nostalgia.

Tokowaly, uncle, do you remember the nights gone by
When my head weighted heavy on the back of your patience
or
Holding my hand your hand led me by shadows and signs
The fields are flowers of glowworms, stars hang on the
bushes, on the trees
Silence is everywhere

In 1945 and 1946 Senghor was elected to represent Senegal in the French Constituent Assemblies. With Senghor's help Alioune Diop, a Senegalese intellectual living in Paris, created in 1947 Présence Africaine, a cultural journal, which had on the advisory board André Gide, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1948 Senghor became professor at Ecole Nat. de la France d'Outre-Mer. From 1946 to 1958 he was continuously reelected to the French National Assembly.

After breaking with Lamine Guèye, who was allied with the French socialist (SFIO), Senghor created a new political party, BDS (Bloc Démocratique Sénégalais). He married in 1948 Ginette Eboué, the daughter of a prominent Guyanese colonial administrator Félix Eboué. They had two children; the marriage ended in divorce. Senghor's second wife, Colette Hubert, who had been his first wife's secretary, had her family roots in Normandy.

When Senegal joined with the Sudanese Republic to form the Federation of Mali, Senghor became president of the federal assembly. In August 1960 Senegal separated from the federation and Senghor was elected the first president of Senegal. Senghor held the position of Presidency for twenty years without interruption. His old friend and protégé, Prime Minister Mamadou Dia was imprisoned for life in 1962 during a political power struggle but released from jail in 1974. Senghor also survived attempted coups and an unsuccessful assassination. In 1968 the University of Dakar, which Senghor had helped to establish, was faced with student unrest and later in the same year he was the subject of hostile demonstrations in Frankfurt, where he went to receive the 1968 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. After leaving the presidency in 1980, Senghor shared his time between Paris, Normandy, and Dakar. In 1983 Senghor was elected to the Académie française. He died in France on December 20, 2001. In one poem, "Visit", recalling his past, Senghor said of the sky of his own country:

It is the same sun bedewed with illusions,
The same sky unnerved by hidden presences,
The same sky feared by those who have a reckoning with the dead,
And suddenly my dead draw near to me . . .
(tr. from the French by John Reed and Clive Wake, from Global Voices, ed. by Arthur W. Biddle et al., 1995)

Senghor received several international awards as a writer and a major African political opinion leader, among others Dag Hammarskjöld Prize (1965), Peace Prize of German Book Trade, Haile Sellassie African Research Prize (1973), Apollinaire Prize for Poetry (1974). He was appointed in 1969 member of Inst. Français, Acad. des Sciences morales et politiques.

Senghor's poems, written in French, have been translated into several languages: Spanish, English, German, Russian, Swedish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and others. In his poetry Senghor invites the reader to feel the nearly mystical, supersensory world of Africa. His non-fiction includes writings primarily in linguistics, politics and sociology.

His philosophy and the concept of Négritude has received wide critical attention. The concept, which owes a great deal to its French intellectual origin, has been used widely after WW II. It embraces the revolt against colonialist values, glorification of the African past, and nostalgia for the beauty and harmony of traditional African society. Sartre's Introduction to Senghor's Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Négre et Mangache (1948), found in his Orphée noir, defined Négritude in terms of his existentialist philosophy as "a weak stage of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis". Senghor defined the concept in contradistinction to Europe and gave it more positive meaning. According to Senghor, it is "the sum total of the values of the civilization of the African world" — not an antithesis but a fundamentally different culture. Senghor's statement that the Negro is intuitive, whereas the European is more Cartesian, has led to numerous protests, but among others Sartre has declared that Négritude is "an antiracist racism". Senghor has argued that the African mode of experience is far from irrational; the experience that proceeds from intuition is fuller and more comprehensive than that derived from a discursive approach:

Yes, in one way, the Negro today is richer in gifts than in works. But a tree thrusts its roots into the earth. The river runs deep, carrying precious seeds. As the African-American poet, Langston Hughes, says:

       I have known rivers
       ancient dark rivers
       my soul has grown deep
       like the deep rivers.

The very nature of the Negro's emotion, his sensitivity, furthermore, explains his attitude toward the object perceived with such basic intensity. It is an abandon that becomes need, and active state of communion, indeed of identification, however negligible the action — I almost said the personality — of the object. A rhythmic attitude: The adjective should be kept in mind. (from "Ce que l'homme noir apporte," in L'Homme de couleur, ed. by Claude Nordey, 1939)

In the area of political philosophy, Senghor has examined African socialism. For him, socialism is not new to Africans, where communal principles of social life have been central in precolonial times. Senghor sees that scientific socialism expresses in many ways the personal point of view of its inventors, Marx and Engels. He believes that there will be eventually one world civilization, a unique and universal one.

The opposition of Africa and Europe is a central theme is his fiction and non-fiction – the appeal of the humanist ideals of French civilization and his commitment to the African cause. Senghor's Négritude et Civilisation de L'Universel (1977), inspired by the work of Teilhard de Chardin, was an attempt to advocate the fusion of these two halves into a "humanism of the twentieth century." In a poem on the legendary founder of the ancient empire of Ghana, Senghor wrote:

My empire is that of Love, for I am weak for you, woman,
Foreigner with clear eyes, lips of cinnamon apple,
And a sex like a burning bush
For I am both sides of a double door, the binary rhythm of space
And the third beat, I am the movement of drums,
The strength of future Africa.
(from "The Kaya-Magan")