Senghor, Léopold Sédar (1906–2001)

Léopold Sédar Senghor was the first president of the Republic of Senegal, co-founder of the Negritude movement, and the first African member of the Académie Française. He attended schools in the capital of Dakar, and went to university in Paris, France. Here he met other African and Caribbean intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas with whom he founded, at the end of the 1920s, the culturally influential Negritude movement. This movement revolved around the theory of Africanity which postulated the universal equality of all peoples, contributed to the fortification of African identity, and claimed the political independence of the colonized countries. He then returned to Senegal where his actual political career started.

In 1948, he founded the Senegalese Democratic Block and the journal La ...