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Biography of Léopold Sédar SenghorName: Léopold Sédar SenghorBirth Date: October 9, 1906 Death Date: N/A Place of Birth: Joal, Senegal Nationality: Senegalese Gender: Male Occupations: president, philosopher, poet Léopold Sédar Senghor Léopold Sédar Senghor (born 1906) was an African poet, philosopher, and president of Senegal. He was one of the originators of "Negritude," a "black is beautiful" doctrine begun in Paris during the 1930s.The map of Africa as it exists today owes something to the efforts of Léopold Senghor who took a leading role in the negotiations that led to independence of France's sub-Saharan colonies. He established relations with the former mother country that endure to this day. While asserting the uniqueness and greatness of black culture, the equal in every respect to that of the Greeks and the French, he held out the promise of an eventual synthesis of diverse peoples' contributions to a coming great "civilization of the universal."Senghor was born on October 9, 1906, at Joal, the son of a wealthy Catholic trader who descended from a Serer royal family. Raised as a …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…tt (1949), Éthiopiques (1956), and Nocturnes (1961).Senghor's major prose works were Nation et voie africaine du socialisme (1961), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin et la politique africaine (1962), Liberté I: Négritude et humanisme (1964), Les Fondements de I'Africanité ou Négritude et Arabité (1967), and Politique, nation et developpement moderne (1968). Further Reading A substantial collection of Senghor's poetry is in Selected Poems, translated and introduced by John Reed and Clive Wake (1964). Several of Senghor's major political writings were translated by Mercer Cook in On African Socialism (1964). Irving Leonard Markovitz, Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Politics of Negritude (1969), which has an exhaustive bibliography, traces the development of Senghor's ideas from 1931 and views them within the changing social, political, and historical scene of French colonialism and African development. See also Michael Crowder, Senegal: A Study in French Assimilation Policy (1962), for a good general treatment of the historical background. |