Obituary

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
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