Léopold Sédar Senghor
When Leopold Sedar Senghor was born in Joal on October 9, 1906, the alienation characteristic of colonial areas had started to affect the interior of Senegal. Senghor later cried out poetically that it was “white hands that pulled the triggers that destroyed the empires” of traditional Africa, “white hands that cut down the black forest to make railroad ties.”
The advent of the Franco-Senegalese railroad propelled Africans into a world of economic progress and a time of acute social change. Leopold Sedar Senghor’s first seven years, spent in traditional villages, were the only happy ones of his life until he rediscovered traditional Africa in books (in Paris) and developed his theory of Négritude.
Throughout the rest of his life, he wished for “the paradise” of his African childhood, which kept him “innocent of Europe.” Sent to a Catholic mission school by his father so that he might become “civilized,” Senghor later wrote that he was “torn away from the mother tongue, from the ancestor’s skull, from the tom-tom of my soul.” Senghor was, nevertheless, a good student.
When he was 13, Leopold Sedar Senghor felt “the calling” and began preparing to enter the Catholic priesthood; his assimilation of Western culture was well under way. In 1922, at Dakar, the colonial capital of French West Africa, Senghor joined the seminary and plunged into Catholic theology and philosophy. He believed deeply in his calling, but his African pride made him protest against the racism of the Father Superior, who one day called Léopold’s parents “primitives” and “savages.”
Obliged to leave the seminary in 1926, the adolescent Leopold Sedar joined the public secondary school in Dakar. In 1928, he earned his high school degree with honors. Placing his faith in Senghor’s intelligence, his classical languages teacher made much effort to persuade the colonial government to grant Senghor a scholarship to do what no African had previously been allowed to do: pursue literary studies in France.
Leopold Sedar Senghor’s second move began when he started his trip to Paris. He met up with some of France’s smartest students at the Lycée Louis-le Grand. From December 1928 on, Georges Pompidou, who would become president of France in 1969, was his best friend. The French university schooling was the last step in his “Frenchification,” and his biggest goal was to become a “black-skinned Frenchman.”
Not long after, though, he understood that this was not possible. He fought against assimilation and began his search for “Africanness,” or Négritude. In the 1930s, avant-garde Paris fell in love with jazz, the African American singer Josephine Baker, and African art. This style and a very famous Colonial Exhibition in the Parc de Vincennes made Senghor fall in love with Africa again after a long time of putting it off.
He found his “childhood kingdom” and his “pagan sap that mounted, pranced, and danced” again. He begged the “protecting spirits” not to let his blood “fade” like the blood of a completely integrated person, like the blood of a “civilized man.”
Leopold Sedar worked hard to give this emotional trip back to Africa a solid academic base by reading a lot of anthropologists’ and anti-rationalist artists’ and thinkers’ work. He also read a lot of the writings that African Americans made during the Harlem Renaissance. He walked with them as they firmly rejected cultural assimilation and fought for civil rights and political integration at the same time. He wouldn’t really go in a different direction until 1958.
With confidence in his new ideas, Leopold Sedar asked God to forgive “those who have hunted thy children like wild elephants and broken them in with whips, (and) who have given them black hands where white hands were.”
He came up with the idea of a new universal culture in which modern Western society would acknowledge its debt to African music and art and modern black society would use European technology to speed up African progress. “Oh, New York!” I call it New York! If you let the black blood flow into your blood, it will help your steel joints stay in good shape.
This Négritude thing was talked about in a 50-page introduction to Leopold Sedar’s first big book, Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache de Langue Francaise precedee de Orphee Noir by J.-P. Sartre, which came out in 1948. It was called “The Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry in the French Language Following Black Orpheus by Jean-Paul Sartre.”
Three years ago, Senghor added a political element to his academic and writing careers, which were just starting out.
After World War II, Senghor, who had lived in France since 1928, was given the chance to run for a place in the French parliament and return to Senegal. As part of its colonial strategy, France made sure that Africa had some kind of representation, and Senghor joined the African caucus in the Assemblée Nationale. Anticolonialism around the world helped Senghor and other Africans get more and better rights, which led to all Africans living in French overseas regions becoming full French citizens.
He was able to make a small hole in the colonial system’s wall, which he then slowly made bigger. The way Senghor planned to attack the French system wasn’t from the front. Instead, he worked to improve civil rights instead of pushing for freedom. His goal until 1958 was to become a full state, like Hawaii did when it joined the United States.
In contrast to Kwame Nkrumah, who was the leader of the British West African colony of the Gold Coast (which later became Ghana), Senghor did not push for freedom. Senghor did not agree with full integration into France, even though he did not want freedom. Instead, he pushed for a new governmental federation that would make France and Africa equal partners.
Senghor thought of nationalism as “an old weapon… an old hunting gun.” An equals-based union of people from various continents and races was going to take its place. Some European politicians didn’t like how much it would cost to raise African incomes to European levels, and African nationalists who wanted to break away from their old master didn’t like his “Eurafrica” either.
It was impossible to fight the winds of change that brought freedom to dozens of former colonies. At the end of September 1960, Senghor gave in to “micronationalism” and became Senegal’s first president. During his time as president, Senghor worked on his theory of African socialism. It was a mix of socialist and capitalist ideas.
Radical Marxist economists were very critical of Senghor, but he did a good job of making his country’s economy more stable. French funding continued to help him with his development plans. Senghor stepped down as president of Senegal in 1981, after 20 years in office.
He wanted to take people to a “promised land” where there would be no racism, poverty, nationalism, or war.
As part of that work, he was elected as the first black member of the Académie Francaise, a group of France’s most famous intellectuals known as “the Immortals.” The group has been around for almost 400 years. He was 95 years old when he died on December 20, 2001.
Also Read: Dr. Kwame Nkrumah Biography
