Léopold Sédar Senghor

Léopold Sédar Senghor was born on the ninth of October 1906 in the fishing town of Joal, on the coast of Senegal, into the Christian Serer community. His father, Basile Diogoye Senghor, was a prosperous peanut merchant, and the boy grew up between the rhythms of his people's land and the discipline of French colonial schooling.

Sent to Paris in 1928, Senghor studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and then at the Sorbonne. In 1935 he became the first African to pass the agrégation in French grammar, one of France's most demanding examinations. In the cafés and journals of Paris, alongside Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Léon Damas of French Guiana, he helped forge Négritude — a movement that reclaimed the dignity, values, and aesthetics of Black civilization against the erasures of empire.

A soldier taken prisoner in the Second World War, a poet in the French language, and a deputy in the French Assembly, Senghor carried his people toward independence. When Senegal became sovereign, he was elected its first president in 1960, governing until he stepped down freely in 1980 — a rare peaceful surrender of power on the continent. In 1983 he became the first African elected to the Académie française.

He died on the twentieth of December 2001. Léopold Sédar Senghor remains the philosopher-poet who taught the world that a people could govern with a book of verse in hand, and that Blackness itself is a light to be honored. May his name be spoken with reverence.