Front Page
Politics
Economy
International
Sports
Society
Culture
Videos
Newspapers
Ahram Online
Al-Ahram Weekly
Albawaba
Almasry Alyoum
Amwal Al Ghad
Arab News Agency
Bikya Masr
Daily News Egypt
FilGoal
The Egyptian Gazette
Youm7
Subject
Author
Region
f
t
مصرس
NDB expands to 11 members, raises $16.1bn in 2024, says Rousseff
Egypt, Somalia leaders discuss strategic partnership, counterterrorism in New Alamein
Egypt, UNDP discuss expanded cooperation on medical waste management, human development
CIB finances Giza Pyramids Sound and Light Show redevelopment with EGP 963m loan
EGX closes mixed on July 7th
Gold retreats as investors await tariff clarity
Egypt, UNDP discuss future health projects – Cabinet
Egypt calls for stronger central bank cooperation, local currency use at BRICS summit
Egypt's PM, Uruguay's president discuss Gaza, trade at BRICS summit
Egypt's Talaat Moustafa Group H1 sales jump 59% to EGP 211bn
Egypt, Uruguay eager to expand trade across key sectors
Egypt accelerates coastal protection projects amid rising climate threats
Deadly Israeli airstrikes pound Gaza as Doha talks raise hopes for ceasefire
Egypt, Norway hold informal talks ahead of global plastic treaty negotiations
Greco-Roman tombs with hieroglyphic inscriptions discovered in Aswan
Global tour for Korean 'K-Comics' launches in Cairo with 'Hellbound' exhibition
Egypt teams up with private sector to boost university rankings
Egypt reveals heritage e-training portal
Three ancient rock-cut tombs discovered in Aswan
Egypt condemns deadly terrorist attack in Niger
Egypt's EHA, Schneider Electric sign MoU on sustainable infrastructure
Sisi launches new support initiative for families of war, terrorism victims
Egypt expands e-ticketing to 110 heritage sites, adds self-service kiosks at Saqqara
Egypt's EDA joins high-level Africa-Europe medicines regulatory talks
Egypt's Irrigation Minister urges scientific cooperation to tackle water scarcity
Palm Hills Squash Open debuts with 48 international stars, $250,000 prize pool
Egypt's Democratic Generation Party Evaluates 84 Candidates Ahead of Parliamentary Vote
On Sport to broadcast Pan Arab Golf Championship for Juniors and Ladies in Egypt
Golf Festival in Cairo to mark Arab Golf Federation's 50th anniversary
Germany among EU's priciest labour markets – official data
Cabinet approves establishment of national medical tourism council to boost healthcare sector
Egypt's PM follows up on Julius Nyerere dam project in Tanzania
Egypt's FM inspects Julius Nyerere Dam project in Tanzania
Paris Olympic gold '24 medals hit record value
A minute of silence for Egyptian sports
Russia says it's in sync with US, China, Pakistan on Taliban
It's a bit frustrating to draw at home: Real Madrid keeper after Villarreal game
Shoukry reviews with Guterres Egypt's efforts to achieve SDGs, promote human rights
Sudan says countries must cooperate on vaccines
Johnson & Johnson: Second shot boosts antibodies and protection against COVID-19
Egypt to tax bloggers, YouTubers
Egypt's FM asserts importance of stability in Libya, holding elections as scheduled
We mustn't lose touch: Muller after Bayern win in Bundesliga
Egypt records 36 new deaths from Covid-19, highest since mid June
Egypt sells $3 bln US-dollar dominated eurobonds
Gamal Hanafy's ceramic exhibition at Gezira Arts Centre is a must go
Italian Institute Director Davide Scalmani presents activities of the Cairo Institute for ITALIANA.IT platform
Thank you for reporting!
This image will be automatically disabled when it gets reported by several people.
OK
Obituary
Leopold Sedar Senghor
Published in
Al-Ahram Weekly
on 27 - 12 - 2001
Obituary
Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906-2001)
Leopold Sedar Senghor
A darling of French literary salons, Senegal's first president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, was much admired for his poetic output. His detractors, however, saw in him the archetypal neo-colonial stooge -- a protégé of the French political establishment. His admirers appreciated that he stepped down from office to concentrate on his poetry and art. He himself wanted to be remembered as a poet, not a politician.
Is it possible to separate poetry from politics? Senghor was the poet-president par excellence. His public life and persona were pointedly African-oriented, but in his private life, Senghor's feet were firmly rooted in French soil. In 1983 he became the first African member of the prestigious Académie Française,
France
's premier intellectual association. In sharp contrast to many of his contemporaries in African politics, Senghor eschewed writing a biography. "I prefer to dream than to hark back into the past, to turn my dreams into works of art," he explained. Critics argue that he preferred not to deal with the skeletons in his closet.
Senghor was at once a literary giant and a shrewd politician, but he harboured no illusions of grandeur. Though he never took the coveted Nobel, he was internationally acclaimed on both fronts and awarded numerous prizes, including the Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize in 1965.
Born in 1906 in the humble fishing village of Joal-la-Portugaise, on Senegal's Atlantic Ocean coast some 70 kilometres south of the Senegalese capital
Dakar
, Senghor was enrolled in the Catholic mission school in Ngazobil -- even though his mother was an ethnic Fulani, who are known for their strong Muslim culture. The young Senghor excelled academically and was soon accepted at the Collège Libermann, a Roman Catholic Seminary in
Dakar
, where he intended to prepare for the priesthood. When he later withdrew from the seminary he enrolled at the secular Lycée Van Vollenhoven. In 1928, he won a scholarship to study in
France
-- a move that was to irrevocably change the course of his life.
Barely a year after his graduation from the Lycée Louis Le Grand in 1931, Senghor was granted French citizenship. By then he was thoroughly assimilated into French culture. His determined struggle to become a "black- skinned Frenchman" won him many accolades in his adopted homeland. He fought for
France
during World War II, was captured by the Germans and spent 18 months as a prisoner of war. He joined the French Resistance in 1941.
And yet, with his friend and fellow assimilé from Martinique, Aimé Cesaire, Senghor outlined the philosophy of Negritude, controversially defined by its authors as "the whole of the values of the Black world."
Senghor was instrumental in having his compatriot Alioune Diop establish the now legendary Présence Africaine -- the celebrated black cultural journal whose influence was to span several generations -- in
Paris
in 1947. André Gide, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were members of its advisory board.
At the turn of last century, the French colonial authorities adopted a deliberate policy of "assimilation" in its African colonies. The African social elite were creamed off and lavishly bestowed many of the advantages and prize trappings of French citizenship that were denied the vast majority of African colonial subjects. Senghor, something of a social climber, happily obliged. He married Ginette Eboné, the daughter of a prominent Guyanese colonial official, but the ill-fated marriage, did not last long. He then married Colette Hubert -- a white French woman -- who had strong roots in Normandy, the northern French province where he spent much of his retirement and where he chose to die.
Senghor's poetry endeared him to his French patrons and he secured the Senegalese presidency at the height of his powers as a poet. In his Prayer to the Masks he spoke of the "Europe to whose navel we are bound." Poetry was his principal medium and he rarely sought alternative forms of artistic expression. Senghor's prose tended to be academic and political in nature. "My inner life was split early between the call of the Ancestors and the call of Europe, between the exigencies of black African culture and those of modern life," Senghor explained later.
Senghor's critics argued that Negritude reduced the rich Black African cultural experience to the colour of people's skin. Senghor popularised preposterous ideas like the notion that the Black African was a "pure field of sensations," which fast gained currency in Europe. "Analysis, system and logic" he said, "belong to the white race." Accordingly, "emotion, intuition, sensuality and spirituality belong to the black race."
"Emotion is Negro, reason is Greek [read: European]," Senghor preached. Small wonder he became the first African agrégé , member of
France
's elite teaching corps. Senghor was a professor at the Ecole Nationale de la
France
Outre-Mer before he was elected to the French National Assembly, or parliament. He read Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Valéry. He insisted that he was also influenced by Black America's Harlem Renaissance.
For all his poetic praise of the black woman -- also the title of perhaps his most celebrated poem -- Senghor married a white European. In Black Woman, he eulogised the image of the black woman "moaning under the hands of the conqueror." Worse: "Naked woman, dark woman ... Ripe fruit with firm flesh ... sculptured tom-tom, stretched drumskin." Poetic licence, perhaps.
Senghor, a self-professed devout Christian, was for two decades the president of a predominantly Muslim country. His father was an ethnic Serer, a minority group in a country overwhelmingly Wolof. But Senghor never permitted his religion or his ethnic affiliation to limit his political achievement. He took care to cultivate the friendship and trust of Muslim marabouts, holy men, and his widely publicised private consultations with the leaders of Senegal's numerous Sufi orders were a calculated move to win the hearts and minds of the masses in a largely conservative Muslim society.
Senghor wasted precious little time on the Algerian liberation struggle. Indeed, he distanced himself from Arab causes generally. The Africa he conjured up in his poems and political speeches had no room for the Arabs, whom he saw as historical oppressors of Africans and the first despoilers of pure, unadulterated Black African culture.
This is the same Senghor, however, who proposed that a key component of the personality and cultural make-up of the "Negro-African" is his eagerness to adopt the manners and cultural values of his oppressors -- what he euphemistically calls the "Other." "Thus the Negro-African sympathises; abandons his personality to become identified with the Other, dies to be reborn in the Other. He does not assimilate; he is assimilated. He lives a common life with the Other; he lives in a symbiosis."
To many, Senghor's ideas were instantly persuasive. He was a champion and key formulator of "African socialism," but he was distrustful of "Western scientific materialism." He suspiciously eyed the activities of
Cuba
and the former Soviet Union in Africa.
The watering down of the originally expeditious concept of the Organisation of African Unity to adopt a "gradualist" approach to African unity owes much to Senghor's prominence in decision-making at African summits. Senghor, to the chagrin of his revolutionary peers Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sekou Toure and Patrice Lumumba, urged Francophone African leaders to opt for close ties with
Paris
and associate membership of the then European Economic Community.
Senghor was not the democrat his Western admirers claimed he was. He abolished all opposition parties in 1962 and imprisoned his own prime minister. Armed with French approval, Senghor created a one-party state, even imprisoning one prominent political opponent for 12 years. Nevertheless, Senghor left the presidency in 1980 -- one of a handful of African leaders to step down from office voluntarily. He never departed from the political arena entirely, however, and continued to play a critical role from behind the scenes.
Gamal Nkrumah
Recommend this page
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
[email protected]
Clic
here
to read the story from its source.
Related stories
Democracy versus oil
Arab quartet cruise to final phase, Senegal out
Arab quartet cruise to final phase, Senegal out
Sartre at the Bibliothèque Nationale
Alexandria of the heart's mind
Report inappropriate advertisement