Senghor, Léopold (Sédar)

Léopold Senghor addressing the United Nations General Assembly, 1961.

(credit: United Nations Photograph)

(born Oct. 9, 1906, Joal, Senegal, French West Africa—died Dec. 20, 2001, Verson, France) Poet, president of Senegal (1960–80), and cofounder of the Negritude movement in African art and literature. He completed his studies in Paris and became a teacher there. Drafted into the French army in 1939, he was captured and spent two years in Nazi concentration camps, where he wrote some of his finest poems. He was elected to the French National Assembly in 1945. In 1948 he edited Hosties noires, an anthology of French-language African poetry that became a seminal Negritude text. That same year he founded the Senegalese Democratic Bloc, which merged with another political party in 1958 to become the Senegalese Progressive Union (known as the Socialist Party since 1976). When Senegal gained independence in 1960, he was unanimously elected president. Advocating a moderate “African socialism,” free of atheism and excessive materialism, he became an internationally respected spokesman for Africa and the Third World. In 1984 he became the first black inducted into the French Academy.