Léopold Sédar Senghor
Poet, first president of Senegal (1906 – 2001)
Family : Place of birth : Joal ; Date of birth : 9 October 1906 ; Mother : Gnilane Ndiémé Bakhoum (Serer, died 1948) ; Father : Basile Diogoye Senghor, a Catholic merchant
Education : He studied with the Spiritan Fathers at Ngazobil, then at the François-Libermann seminary and the Lycée Van-Vollenhoven in Dakar. Arriving in Paris in 1928, he studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the Sorbonne; in 1935 he was the first African to pass the agrégation in grammar.
Action : With Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas he founded the journal L’Étudiant noir in 1934, where his conception of Négritude was expressed. A deputy, he was elected on 5 September 1960 as the first President of the Republic of Senegal. A deputy in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1959.
Trials : A prisoner of war from 1940 to 1942 in several German camps. His presidency went through the December 1962 crisis with the President of the Council Mamadou Dia and the student protests of May–June 1968.
Legacy : He voluntarily left the presidency in December 1980, before the end of his fifth term. Elected to the Académie française on 2 June 1983, he was the first African to sit there. He died on 20 December 2001 at Verson, in Normandy.
Sources
- Persée — Jean-François Sirinelli, « Deux étudiants coloniaux à Paris à l'aube des années trente » (Vingtième Siècle, 1988)
- J. G. Vaillant, Vie de Léopold Sédar Senghor : noir, français et africain (Karthala)
- OpenEdition — E. Bertho, Léopold Sédar Senghor (compte rendu)
- Persée — « La Forza del destino : L. S. Senghor aux mains des hagiographes » (1992)
- Wikipédia — Léopold Sédar Senghor