The personal library of the former President of the Republic Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001), recently put up for auction in France, was completely bought by the State of Senegal, revealed to the APS, the director of Books and Reading, Ibrahima Lo, welcoming the “varied and very valuable volumes”.
The announcement of the auction of the library of president-poet Léopold Sédar Senghor was made on February 16.
The government of Senegal, fearing a dispersion of the former head of state’s book collection, had requested the suspension of this operation.
The Senegalese state then began negotiations with the auction house to acquire the personal library of President Senghor who spent the last years of his life in Verson, France.
Following the instructions of the Head of State, a mission from the Ministry of Culture led by the Secretary of State in charge of heritage and creative industries went to Caen, in France.
In this city, she met the auctioneer with whom she concluded the purchase of this library by the State of Senegal, recalled Ibrahima Lo in an interview with APS.
“This personal library of President Senghor, already transported to the Senegalese embassy in Paris, should come to Dakar shortly,” announced Mr. Lo, without giving details on the amount of the transaction.
Varied volumes and very high value
“It is made up of three boxes of books, almost 1200 units, with varied volumes, but of very high value. These are autographed works offered to Senghor, on which he personally worked (…),” he clarified.
This library also includes works which have not been signed, which “the poet-president acquired himself in relation to the attention he paid to certain issues”, he added.
He announced that “the final destination of these works” should be the future national library. “The latter not having yet emerged from the ground, there are a certain number of infrastructures belonging to the Ministry of Culture which can validly receive these documentary funds while waiting for them to be directed towards the final destination”, indicated Mr. .
According to him, the construction of this library is placed by the new authorities among the priorities of the Senegalese state, to make it “a space for documentation, research and information”.
“The national library will also be a memorial space, which will have the mission of reorganizing the heritage of the State and making them available and accessible, mainly to citizens first and to all those who, for one reason or another , may want to work on our documentary collections”, further argued the director of Books and Reading.
Ibrahima Lo also recalled that “this is the third time that an auction of Senghor’s heritage has been agitated, the first time dating back to the sale, in 2021, of a painting by the French painter Pierre Soulages , nicknamed +The master of black+”.
This painting, acquired by the poet-president in 1956, sealed the friendship between Senghor and the French painter. It was sold for 1.5 million euros, or 983 million CFA francs, according to French media.
There was then the sale of the former president’s jewelry and military decorations, which Senegal acquired for 244 thousand euros, or approximately 160.064 million CFA francs, after obtaining the suspension of their auction.
Exercising pre-emption or invoking French law
So that this situation does not happen again, he proposes to the Senegalese State to “exercise, a sort of pre-emption for most of President Senghor’s property […]or more radically invoke French law which establishes the need to return looted cultural property to its origins.”
“And if we manage, within the framework of negotiations between States, to put forward these measures, I believe that this would help to secure these heritages and over time to make them available to Senegal,” he said. .
He recalled that the delegation which stayed in France had also given itself the mission, alongside the purchase of the Senghor library, to “take an interest in all these remarkable identities which contributed to the creation of the Senegalese nation”.
These are “heads of state, and subsidiarily all heads of institutions who are ideally alive and whose archives and documentation may be of interest to our country.”
For these resource people, he said, “we met President Abdou Diouf who […] expressed its availability to make available to Senegal any documents which may belong to it and which could be of interest for the history of our country.”
“We spoke with another interesting personality for the mission, Gérard Bosio, an art collector who worked in Senghor’s shadow for a good thirty years having been his cultural attaché […]”, informed the Director of Books and Reading.
“This gentleman, who was very close to Senghor and who continued the collaboration with him, from his admission to the French Academy until his death”, according to him “a remarkable collection of works”, which, from his point of view, “deserves to be preserved in a museum dedicated to Senghor.”
