The news broke on 20 December. Senegal’s founding president, poet, philosopher, professor and great statesman, Léopold Sédar Senghor had died at his residence in Verson, northern France, at the age of 95. .

It was Senegal’s current president, Abdoulaye Wade, who first announced the death to a summit of West African nations taking place in Dakar. A wave of eulogies soon followed.
The French president, Jacques Chirac, mourned Senghor as a historic figure for Africa. “Poetry has lost one of its masters, Senegal a statesman, Africa a visionary and France a friend,” Chirac said.
Rightly so. Senghor’s life was a paradoxical blend of African and European experiences.
He was born on 9 October 1906, in the small Senegalese coastal town of Joal. His father was a prosperous peanut planter and trader who had four wives and 20 children. His mother, a Roman Catholic, had him educated at a nearby Catholic seminary and nurtured Senghor’s first ambition — to become, as he recalled many years later, a “teaching priest to work toward the intellectual emancipation of my race”.
When he turned 20, Senghor abandoned the priesthood and transferred to a secondary school in Dakar. In 1928, he won a partial scholarship that permitted him to study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Georges Pompidou, later to become prime minister and then president of France.
At the Sorbonne, Senghor was recognised as one of the most brilliant students, and upon his graduation in 1935, achieved the distinction of the first African “agrégé”, the highest-ranked teacher in the French school system. He taught French to French children in Tours.
In 1939, while teaching at another school near Paris, he was drafted into the French army, serving in an all-African unit until 1940, when he was captured by the Germans. During the two years he spent in Nazi prison camps, he wrote some of his best poems, collected in 1945 into a volume titled Chants d’Ombres (Songs of Shadows).
Senghor returned to teaching and writing after the war, and in 1945 became a deputy in the French Constituent Assembly. A year later, he was elected one of Senegal’s two deputies to the National Assembly in Dakar. Sitting in the legislature for the Socialist Party, he soon decided that only an African party could adequately represent African needs.

Read the full story in the February 2002 edition of New Africa Magazine

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