Léopold Sédar Senghor (9 October 1906-20 December 2001) was a Senegalese poet, politician and cultural theorist who, for two decades, served as the first president of Senegal (1960–80).
Ideologically an African socialist, he was the major theoretician of Négritude.
Senghor was also the founder of the Senegalese Democratic Bloc party.
Senghor was the first African elected as a member of the Académie française. He won the 1985 International Nonino Prize in Italy. He is regarded by many as one of the most important African intellectuals of the 20th century.
More information: Poetry Foundation
Léopold Sédar Senghor was born on 9 October 1906 in the city of Joal, some 110 kilometres south of Dakar, capital of Senegal.
At the age of eight, Senghor began his studies in Senegal in the Ngasobil boarding-school of the Fathers of the Holy Spirit.
In 1922, he entered a seminary in Dakar. After being told the religious life was not for him, he attended a secular institution. By then, he was already passionate about French literature. He won distinctions in French, Latin, Greek and Algebra. With his Baccalaureate completed, he was awarded a scholarship to continue his studies in France.
In 1928 Senghor sailed from Senegal for France, beginning, in his words, sixteen years of wandering. Starting his post-secondary studies at the Sorbonne, he quit and went on to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand to finish his prep course for entrance to the École Normale Supérieure, a grande école.
Senghor graduated from the University of Paris, where he received the Agrégation in French Grammar. Subsequently, he was designated professor at the universities of Tours and Paris, where he taught during the period 1935-45.
In 1939, Senghor was enrolled as a French army enlisted man (2e Classe) with the rank of private within the 59th Colonial Infantry division, in spite of his higher education and of his 1932 acquisition of the French Citizenship. A year later in 1940, during the German invasion of France, he was taken prisoner by the Germans in la Charité-sur-Loire. He was interned in different camps, and finally at Front Stalag 230, in Poitiers.
He resumed his teaching career while remaining involved in the resistance during the Nazi occupation.
Once the war was over, Senghor was selected as Dean of the Linguistics Department with the École nationale de la France d'Outre-Mer, a position he would hold until Senegal's independence in 1960.
In 1964, Senghor published the first volume of a series of five, titled Liberté. The book contains a variety of speeches, essays and prefaces.
He supported the creation of la Francophonie and was elected vice-president of the High Council of the Francophonie.
In 1982, he was one of the founders of the Association France and developing countries whose objectives were to bring attention to the problems of developing countries, in the wake of the changes affecting the latter.
More information: All Poetry
Senghor's influence on political thought and poetic form are wide-reaching even through to our modern day.
Senghor's poetry endures as the record of an individual sensibility at a particular moment in history, capturing the spirit of the Négritude movement at its peak, but also marks a definitive place in literary history.
Senghor's thoughts were exceedingly radical for this time, arguing that Africans could only progress if they developed a culture distinct and separate from the colonial powers that oppressed them, pushing against popular thought at the time.
Senghor was deeply influenced by poets from the US like Langston Hughes, and his work in turn resonates among today's young US population despite the generations that have passed.
His poetry was widely acclaimed, and in 1978 he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. His poem A l'appel de la race de Saba, published in 1936, was inspired by the entry of Italian troops in Addis Ababa.
In 1948, Senghor compiled and edited a volume of Francophone poetry called Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache for which Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an introduction, entitled Orphée Noir.
With Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas, Senghor created the concept of Négritude, an important intellectual movement that sought to assert and to valorize what they believed to be distinctive African characteristics, values, and aesthetics.
More information: UTP Journals
cannot be universal except by being a dynamic synthesis
of all the cultural values of all civilizations.
It will be monstrous unless it is seasoned
with the salt of negritude,
for it will be without the savour of humanity.
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