Léopold Sédar Senghor

Léopold Sédar Senghor was born in Joal, Senegal, on the ninth of October 1906, the son of a wealthy Serer merchant. He completed his education at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and the Sorbonne — the first West African to do so — and in 1935 became the first African to pass the agrégation, the highest French academic examination, in grammar.

In Paris he met Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas. The three founded Négritude — the cultural and philosophical movement that proposed Black African civilization as a coherent and original contribution to world culture, not a degraded subset of European culture nor a colonial absence. Senghor's poetry, written in French but rooted in Serer cosmology and the rhythms of West African oral tradition, gave the movement its literary embodiment. His collected works span fifty years and remain the most-cited African poetry of the twentieth century.

He served in the French army during the Second World War, was captured by the Germans in 1940, and spent two years in a prisoner-of-war camp where he wrote some of his most important poems. After the war he entered French politics as deputy from Senegal in the French National Assembly. In 1960 he became the first president of independent Senegal.

He governed for twenty years. He pursued a doctrine of African socialism rooted in the African collective tradition rather than imported Marxism; built Dakar into the cultural capital of francophone Africa; convened the World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966 — the largest gathering of African and African-diaspora artists in the twentieth century — and stepped down voluntarily in 1980, the first African head of state to leave office through democratic transition rather than death or coup. He was elected to the Académie française in 1983, the first African ever admitted.

He died in Verson, France, on the twentieth of December 2001, age ninety-five.

He is honored here as the only philosopher-poet to govern a modern republic.