Senegal's first president was also a poet in the Académie française
Léopold Sédar Senghor led Senegal for twenty years after independence, yet he was just as famous for his verse and for helping invent Négritude, a movement that turned a French racial slur into a celebration of African culture. He became the first African elected to the Académie française.
Senghor was born in 1906 in Joal, about 110 kilometres south of Dakar, to a wealthy Serer peanut merchant. His middle name, Sédar, is Serer for one who cannot be humiliated. Educated first by Catholic missionaries and then briefly at a seminary before being told religious life was not for him, he excelled in French, Latin and Greek and won a scholarship to France in 1928, beginning what he called sixteen years of wandering. At the Lycée Louis-le-Grand his classmates included Georges Pompidou, and in 1935, on his second attempt, he earned the demanding agrégation in French grammar.
In Paris he and other students from Africa and its diaspora developed Négritude in response to the racism they met in France, and the idea shaped both his poetry and his politics. When war came in 1939 he served as a private in a colonial infantry regiment and was captured in June 1940. He later said that German soldiers intended to shoot him and fellow African prisoners until they shouted their loyalty to France and Black Africa. In the camps he wrote poems and taught himself enough German to read Goethe. Released on medical grounds in 1942, he returned to teaching and joined the resistance.
After the war he entered the French National Assembly and won popularity by backing striking railway workers on the Dakar-Niger line. He founded the Senegalese Democratic Bloc in 1948 and long argued that Africans would fare better inside a federal French structure than as small independent states.
Senegal nevertheless became independent in 1960 with Senghor as president. His record there was mixed: in 1962 he had his prime minister, Mamadou Dia, arrested on suspicion of plotting a coup and jailed for 12 years, and he ran a one-party state until reopening politics to rivals in 1976. He stepped down in 1980, handing power to Abdou Diouf.
Source: Léopold Sédar Senghor
