Leopold Sedar Senghor
Leopold Sedar Senghor was a poet elected to the French parliament, a president for twenty years, and the first African head of state to resign the office voluntarily. He was educated in Paris, taught grammar in French schools, was captured as a French soldier in 1940 and spent two years in prison camps. With Aime Cesaire he developed negritude - the argument that African civilisation had its own aesthetic and philosophical value rather than being a stage on the way to European civilisation - and he wrote poetry in French for the rest of his life. He was a deputy in Paris from 1945 and helped draft the constitution of the Fourth Republic. In 1959 Senegal joined the Mali Federation with Modibo Keita and left it within months, and Senghor became president of an independent Senegal in 1960. His rule was neither the one-party socialism of his neighbours nor a democracy. He survived an attempted coup by his own prime minister in 1962, governed through a dominant party, and then reintroduced multiple parties from 1974 - three, defined by ideology, which is an unusual way to open a system and an unusually cautious one. Negritude was attacked from both directions and he answered both. Younger African writers called it an essentialism invented for a French audience; Sartre read it as a stage that would dissolve into class politics. Senghor held that a culture had to be asserted before it could be transcended. The one war of his presidency began at its end: a separatist insurgency in the Casamance, the region south of Gambia, which started in 1982 and has never entirely stopped. He resigned at the end of 1980 and handed over to his prime minister, and Senegal has never had a coup. He spent his last twenty years in France, was elected to the Academie francaise, and remains the only African member it has had.
- Lived: 1906 CE – 2001 CE
- Nationality: Senegalese
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
