23 years ago to the day, Léopold Sédar Senghor died. On the afternoon of December 20, 2001, at the canonical age of 96, the Senegalese poet-president died in his home in Verson, in Normandy, where he had settled with his wife after leaving voluntarily took power in 1980. A look back at the work and life of a central figure of Senegalese national unity.
The 20th century was only six years old when Léopold Sédar Senghor came into the world. Born in Joal, into a family of Serer ethnicity and Christian faith, Senghor first mobilized during the war, enlisted as a 2nd class infantryman in a colonial infantry regiment, before being arrested in 1940 by the Germans and interned in camps reserved for colonial troops. He was almost shot, along with 3,000 of his fellow inmates, according to the story. Barely saved, he remained a prisoner for two years. He will spend his time writing poems.
1961: First president of independent Senegal
The political career of the future Senegalese head of state began in 1945, when, after the war, he was invited by General de Gaulle to participate in the work of the Monnerville commission, responsible for studying the representation of the colonies in the future Assembly. constituent. During one of his trips to Senegal to research Serer poetry, for which he had obtained a CNRS grant, he was approached by the local leader of the socialists, Lamine Guèye, who offered him the opportunity to present to the deputation. Senghor accepted and was elected deputy for the Senegal-Mauritania constituency in the French National Assembly, where the colonies were now represented.
But he finally broke with the socialists and, in particular, with their local leader Lamine Guèye, to found, with his friend Mamadou Dia, their own party, the Senegalese Democratic Bloc.
In 1958, when General de Gaulle returned to power, Senghor gave him his support by getting the Senegalese to vote in favor of the Franco-African community that the new strong man in Paris wanted to see come to fruition. But under the pressure of events, the federal idea was quickly abandoned, and French West Africa moved, fragmented, towards sovereignty and independence.
Léopold Sédar Senghor was thus elected president of Senegal, which became independent in August 1960, after the breakup of the Mali Federation, formed in 1959 by Senegal and the Sudanese Republic.
Senghor’s creative vitality was now hampered by his responsibilities as a statesman. The poet necessarily suffered from this, but that did not prevent him from taking a liking to politics, leaving his mark on the evolution of his country. He put in place institutions closely inspired by the French Fifth Republic: a strong executive, but monitored by institutional safeguards, guarantors of the rule of law.
He was also at the origin of the organization in Dakar, in 1966, of the World Festival of Negro Arts, which made the thought of negritude triumph and established Dakar as the undisputed African capital of culture and ideas.
1980: First head of state to leave power on his own
It must, however, be remembered that Senghor’s two decades of presidency were marked by both democratic progress and social turbulence. In 1962, the new president was the subject of a “coup d’état” which failed but nevertheless shook Senghor’s confidence in those around him. He accuses his Prime Minister Mamadou Dia, a traveling companion since the 1950s, of having plotted to overthrow him. Dia is arrested and thrown in prison. Senghor took the reins of power and established a strong presidential regime which did not hesitate to resort to muscular means to put an end to student strikes or to combat the maneuvers of his political opponents. It imposes the single party.
The president is, however, elected five times in a row by universal suffrage. Over time, Senghor revealed himself to be a true democrat, by reintroducing the multiparty system on the one hand and by organizing elections regularly. A rare thing in Africa at the time, he voluntarily left power in 1980, before the end of his fifth term, passing power to his successor Abdou Diouf.
1983: First black writer to enter the French Academy
Poetry was already the horizon and the door to salvation for the former professor of Classics. According to Jean-Pierre Langellier, the young Senegalese’s great luck was to have met, during his first years in Paris, the West Indian Aimé Césaire and the Guyanese Léon-Gontran Damas. Together, the trio embarked on an intellectual and poetic adventure around the rediscovery and celebration of negritude, which gives meaning to their lives. Senghor had also completed solid studies: a literature degree, an aggregation of grammar. On the benches of the Louis-le-Grand high school, he also made friends with Georges Pompidou, future head of the French state, a khâgneux like him, who introduced him to French poetry and thought, from Claudel to Bergson. It is this crossbreeding between negritude and Frenchness which is the source of Senghor’s poetics.
But after coming to power, this emblematic figure of the African Francophonie devoted himself to writing and reflection on literature, which he had never really abandoned even during his presidency. In recognition of his contribution to French literature with around ten collections of poetry to his credit and numerous essays on various themes (literature, politics, Africa, cross-breeding), Senghor was elected to the Académie française in 1983 in the 16th chair, where he succeeds the Duke of Lévis-Mirepoix. He was solemnly received under the dome on March 29, 1984. He was the first African to sit among the “Immortals”, the nickname by which French Academicians are designated. Until the last years of his life, despite his failing health, Senghor assiduously attended the weekly sessions of the Academy.
Legacies
political history under the presidencies of Senghor and Diouf. The rapid appointment of Ousmane Tanor Dieng as secretary general in 1996, supported by Diouf, led to internal tensions, partly responsible for the loss of power in 2000. Despite successive electoral failures, Tanor struggled to maintain his authority, but his authoritarian leadership exacerbated divisions within the Party.
After her death in July 2019, Aminata Mbengue Ndiaye took over leadership, but the Party remains in search of renewal. With the fall of his ally Macky Sall and the dissolution of Benno, the formation of the “Greens” of Colobane is in decline.
However, his cultural heritage remains visible in a world of giving and receiving that is so dear to him. Indeed, promoting cultures and artistic creations, wherever they are, requires highlighting national languages, which are both the product and the nourishing sap of the flourishing cultures that African genius has been able to create, had- he always supported. Senghor, the multidimensional man, remained all his life, until he was 95, at the service of the dialogue of cultures, which takes place in all national communities, in States, at the level of continents.
His thinking converges with those of Teilhard de Chardin and Leo Frobenius, among others, but draws heavily on his Serer community culture, as well as on the French culture which deeply marked him. He is indeed the man of all these syntheses. This is why, 23 years after his death, his thoughts remain more relevant than ever, in a world prey to discrimination, community conflicts and terrorism.
The wise words of Senghor, through major texts in his works from the Liberté series, in his sublime poems like Joal, Femme noire or Masques, are still meditated on by new generations. In Joal, Gorée, Saint-Louis, even Martinique or Guadeloupe…, his name remains inscribed in gold letters.
