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Political Ethics of Léopold Sédar Senghor

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Abstract

African leaders such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah, and Julius Kambarage Nyerere struggled against empires to free Africans from European colonization and imperialism. They have seldom been given the credit they deserved for pioneering the arduous transitional journey toward independence. The nationalism they have often been critiqued for is rarely seen or positioned as a critical response to the European colonialism, namely the transfer of values, cultural domination, and exploitation. This chapter is a modest primer—sketching the political ethics of Senghor—ethics that shaped his construction of African Socialism/Communalism and civilization of the universal. His political ethics enshrine a humanism that inspires a call for the exercise of social justice and equity that shuns greed, relinquishes power, and practices conciliation—a much needed model for emergent Africa.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Janet G. Vaillant, Black, French, and African: A Life of Leopold Sedar Senghor (New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, 1990); Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: International Publishers, 1957); Julius K. Nyerere, Uhuru Na Ujamaa: Freedom and Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).

  2. 2.

    Stanley J. Grenz, The Moral Quest: Foundations of Christian Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1997).

  3. 3.

    James Wm. McClendon, Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can Remake Today’s Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Trinity Press International, 1974); idem, Ethics: Systematic Theology Volume 1 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1986); idem, Doctrine: Systematic Theology Volume II (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1986); 1994; idem, Witness: Systematic Theology Volume III (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1986), shows how a person’s theology and ethics are a function of their biography.

  4. 4.

    Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude (trans. Chike Jeffers; New York: Seagull Books, 2011); idem, “Negritude,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; http://plato.stanford.edularchives/spr2014/entries/negritude; idem, “In Praise of the Post-racial Negritude Beyond Negritude,” Third Text 24/2(March 2010): 241–248.

  5. 5.

    Jean Paul Sartre, “Orphée noir,” in Anthologie de la nouvelle poèsie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires Française, 1948), IX. See Léopold Sédar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poèsie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires Française, 1948).

  6. 6.

    Sartre, “Orphée noir,” xl-xli, cf. xiv.

  7. 7.

    Ezekiel Mphahleles, The African Image (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1962).

  8. 8.

    Wole Soyinka, Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  9. 9.

    Reiland Rabaka, The Negritude Movement: W. E. B. Debois, Elon Damas, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and the Evolution of an Insurgent Idea (New York: Lexington Book, 2015).

  10. 10.

    Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberte l: Négritude et Humanisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), 24, originally entitled “Ce que l’homme noir apporte” and published in 1939.

  11. 11.

    Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Hosties Noirs,” in Œuvre Poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964, 1990), 99.

  12. 12.

    Soyinka, Burden of Memory, 93–144.

  13. 13.

    Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure (trans. Katherine Woods; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1962), 48.

  14. 14.

    Kane, Ambiguous Adventure, 38.

  15. 15.

    Kane, Ambiguous Adventure, 46–7.

  16. 16.

    Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Anchor Books, 1959/1994).

  17. 17.

    Kane, Ambiguous Adventure, 34.

  18. 18.

    Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Les Gardiens du Temple (Côte d’Ivoire, Abidjan: Nouvelle Éditions Ivoiriennes, 1997), 48–9, 51–4. Compare with idem, Ambiguous Adventure, 34, 45–7.

  19. 19.

    Léopold Sédar Senghor, “La mort de Léon-Gontran Damas,” in Hommage Posthume à Léon-Gontran Damas-1912–1978 (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1979), 11, “Des ‘trois mousquetaires’ que nous étions, Léon Damas, Aimé Césaire et moi-même, c’est Léon Damas qui, le premier, illustra la Négritude par un recueil de poèmes qui portait, significativement, le titre de Pigments. Car cette poèsie conservait toutes les qualités de l’œuvre nègre: images symboliques et rythmes faits de parallélismes asyndétiques, mais encore humour. Cet humour nègre, le point noir, car reaction et revanche du reel: la vie,” [“Of the ‘three musketeers’ that we were, Léon Damas, Aimé Césaire and myself, it is Léon Damas who, first, illustrated Negritude by a collection of poems which bore, significantly, the title of Pigments. Because this poetry retained all the qualities of the Negro work: symbolic images and rhythms made of asymmetrical parallelisms, but still humor. This black humor, the black point, because reaction and revenge of reality: life”].

  20. 20.

    Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme suivi de Discours sur la Négritude (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955/2004), 23, means by this word colonization.

  21. 21.

    Senghor, “Rapport sur la doctrine,” 14, cited by Lillian Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude (trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy; Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1974), 102–103 also cited by Sylvia W. Bâ, The Concept of Negritude in the Poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 12. Although the rise of Negritude is embedded in the lived experiences of Senghor, Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas, their definitions of it differ as noted by Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 224. Whereas for Senghor, Negritude is “the manner of self-expression of the black character, the black world, the black civilization,” to Césaire it is the “recognition of being black, and the acceptance of that fact, of our destiny of black, of our history and our culture.”

  22. 22.

    Senghor, Liberté 3:Négritude et civilisation de l’universel (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977), 269, 270. See Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 244.

  23. 23.

    Senghor, “What is Negritude?” See also Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 244.

  24. 24.

    Léopold Sédar Senghor, “La Négritude comme culture des peoples noirs, ne saurait être dépassée,” in Hommage à Léopold Sédar Senghor homme de culture (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1976), 49–66, responding to Aimé Césaire, “Césaire reçoit Senghor,” in Hommage à Léopold Sédar Senghor homme de culture (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1976), 41–47.

  25. 25.

    Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 7; 4–8; 330–331; idem, “Orientalism Reconsidered.” Race & Class: A Journal for Black and Third World Liberation 27(1985): 1–15.

  26. 26.

    Extensively discussed in Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 224.

  27. 27.

    Léopold Sédar Senghor, On African Socialism (trans. Mercer Cook; New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publisher, 1964); idem, Liberté 1: Negritude et Humanisme; originally entitled “Ce que l’homme noir apporte” originally published in 1939; idem, “Allocution de Monsieur Léopold Sédar Senghor Président de la république du Sénégal,” Présence Africaine 92/2(1974): 23–30; idem, “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century,” in I am Because We Are: Readings in Black Philosophy (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). The latter is so important that it was reprinted in at least three different volumes: Fred Lee Hord (Mzee Lasana Okpara) and Jonathan Scott Lee, eds., I am Because We are: Readings in Black Philosophy (Elmhurst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Wilfred Cartey and Martin Kilson., The African Reader: Independent Africa (New York: Random House, 1976); Roy Richard Grinker and Christopher B. Steiner, Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).

  28. 28.

    Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberte l: Negritude et Humanisme, 24, originally entitled “Ce que I’homme noir apporte” and published in 1939.

  29. 29.

    Léopold Sédar Senghor, “The Spirit of Civilisation, or the Laws of African Negro Culture,” Presence Africaine: The First International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists 19th–22nd (September 1956): 51–64.

  30. 30.

    Aimé Césaire, “Culture and Colonisation,” The First International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists 19th–22nd (September 1956): 206.

  31. 31.

    Senghor, On African Socialism, 74.

  32. 32.

    Senghor, Liberté 1. 24, 246.

  33. 33.

    Senghor, Liberté 1.246.

  34. 34.

    Senghor, On African Socialism, 73, 93–94. His oft-quoted dictum, “I feel, I dance the Other; I am” is similar to John S. Mbiti’s “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am” published four years after Senghor’s in his African Religions and Philosophy (2nd ed.; Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1969), 106. Senghor and Mbiti agree that the African’s self-understanding hinges on the corporate personality of the group—a counter Cartesian individualized epistemology.

  35. 35.

    Senghor, “On Negrohood: Psychology of the African Negro,” Diogenes 10/ 37(1962): 7–8. Translated by H. Kaal. See the entire in-depth argument in pages 1–15. See Abiola Irele, “Negritude-Literature and Ideology,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 3/4(1965): 499–526.

  36. 36.

    Nadine Dormoy Savage, “Entretien avec Léopold Sédar Senghor,” The French Review 47/6(1974): 1070, 1065–1071.

  37. 37.

    Senghor, “On Negrohood,” 2–3.

  38. 38.

    Joseph de Maistre, Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg ou Entretiens sur le Gouvernement Temporel de la Providence (Tome II; Paris: J. B. Pélagaud, Imprimeur Librairie, 1854), 28–9. “main destructrice n’épargne rien de ce qui vit; il tue pour se nourrir, il tue pour se vêtir, il tue pour se parer, il tue pour attaquer, il tue pour se défendre, il tue pour s’instruire, il tue pour s’amuser, il tue pour tuer: roi superbe et terrible, il a besoin de tout, et rien ne lui résiste.” [My translation].

  39. 39.

    I made a minor language sensitive adaptation from “mankind” to “humanity” in the translation.

  40. 40.

    Wole Soyinka, “Senghor: Lessons in Power,” Research in African Literatures 33/4(2002): 2.

  41. 41.

    Vaillant, Black, French, and African.

  42. 42.

    Leonard Tumaini Chuwa, African Indigenous Ethics in Global Bioethics: Interpreting Ubuntu (New York: Springer, 2014), 40–42, 76, 149. See also Stanley Uche Anozie, “African Esotericism with a Concentration on the Igbos,” in Spiritual and Global Ethics (ed. Mahmoud Masaeli; UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017),163–180.

  43. 43.

    Chuwa, African Indigenous Ethics, 40–42, 76, 149.

  44. 44.

    Léopold Sédar Senghor, Constituent Congress of the P.F.A. (The Party of African Federation) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959), 35, 63–84; idem, On African Socialism, 92–94. See Chuwa, African Indigenous Ethics, 82–83.

  45. 45.

    Senghor, On African Socialism, 92–94.

  46. 46.

    Senghor, “On Negrohood,” 2–3.

  47. 47.

    Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Constructive Elements of a Civilization of African Negro Inspiration,” Présence Africaine 2(26 March–1 April 1959): 285–286.

  48. 48.

    Senghor, “Constructive elements,” 286.

  49. 49.

    Senghor, “Constructive elements,” 286–287.

  50. 50.

    Senghor, “Constructive elements,” 287.

  51. 51.

    Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 214–242.

  52. 52.

    Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 241–242.

  53. 53.

    Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 191–203.

  54. 54.

    Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 206.

  55. 55.

    Harraps’ Shorter Dictionnaire Anglais-Francais/Francais-Anglais, 757. Tirailleur means “sharpshooter” or “skirmisher.” In colonial context it meant “native Algerian” or “Senegalese infantry.” Lexically, the word is made up two terms tire “shoot” and “ailleur” elsewhere and conjures up the idea that Algerian or Senegalese infantry aimed away from their targets, namely the Nazis.

  56. 56.

    Senghor is either called “Apostle,” “ambassador” or priest “manqué.” To me he is a priest-apostle-ambassador inspired to transcend human proclivities, vicissitudes, and ethnocentrism to propose a vision of a world consonant with the much propagandized and less lived French Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité slogan, especially when it comes to French views and treatment of humans in their colonies in Africa and West Indies.

  57. 57.

    Léopold Sédar Senghor, The Foundations of “Africanité” or “Négritude” and “Arabité” (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1971).

  58. 58.

    Senghor, Liberté 3: Négritude et Civilization de l’universel, 58–62; idem, “2nd Pré-Colloquium,” 31–38.

  59. 59.

    David Murphy, ed., The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). Essayists in this volume provide some good but mixed views on the overall significance of the festival for the Africa and the diaspora. Murphy, in particular, notes the renewed interest in this epoch-making event and importance today.

  60. 60.

    Colin Legum, Pan-Africanism A Short Political Guide (rev. ed.; London: Pall Mall Press, 1962, 1965).

  61. 61.

    Senghor, Liberté 3, 62. For details on the making of Francophony, see Papa Alioune Ndao, La francophonie des Pères fondateurs (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2008), who offers a good treatment of the collaboration that shaped this institution that has now outgrown its modest beginnings to include many nations around the world.

  62. 62.

    Since the French Revolution, established during the Third Republic, this slogan was finally written into the French Constitution in 1958.

  63. 63.

    Senghor, On African Socialism, 12–13.

  64. 64.

    Irving Leonard Markovitz, Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Politics of Negritude (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 109, 102–118, has a detailed discussion of Senghorian politics and his prudent thinking as he designed, so to speak, Senegal.

  65. 65.

    Senghor, On African Socialism, 27.

  66. 66.

    Soyinka, “Senghor: Lessons in Power,” 1.

  67. 67.

    Elhadj Abdoul Hamidou Sall, “Mandela et le Senegal, Mon Hommage a Madiba” http://www.leral.net/Mandela-et-le-Senegal-Mon-Hommage-a-Madiba-Par-Hamidou-Sall_a100899.html

  68. 68.

    Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 325.

  69. 69.

    Janet G. Vaillant, “Homage to Léopold Sédar Senghor,” Research in African Literatures 33/4(2002): 17.

  70. 70.

    Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (trans. Charles Lam Markmann; New York: Grove Press, 1967).

  71. 71.

    By initiated generation, I am appealing to the rites of passage to adulthood in both Diola and Serer worlds. These initiation rites are central to individual and corporate construction of reality, self-understanding, and agency.

  72. 72.

    John J. Pilch and Bruce J. Malina, Biblical Social Values and Their Meaning: A Handbook (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1993), 49–52.

  73. 73.

    Markovitz, Léopold Sédar Senghor and his Politics of Negritude, 155.

  74. 74.

    Markovitz, Léopold Sédar Senghor and his Politics of Negritude, 157. Pages 155–187 offer a detailed analysis of Senghorian political ethics drawn from his speech.

  75. 75.

    Markovitz, Léopold Sédar Senghor and his Politics of Negritude, 159.

  76. 76.

    Markovitz, Léopold Sédar Senghor and his Politics of Negritude, 159–160.

  77. 77.

    Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Prayer for Peace,” in Léopold Sédar Senghor Collected Poems (trans. Melvin Dixon; Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1991), 69–72.

  78. 78.

    Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 217.

  79. 79.

    Fanon, Frantz. fa., 35, 63. See Tsenay Serequeberhan, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy: Horizon and Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1994), 79, 55–85.

  80. 80.

    Soyinka, “Senghor: Lessons in Power,” 1–2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Union Theological Seminary, New York, NY, USA

    Aliou Cissé Niang

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  1. Aliou Cissé Niang
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  1. Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Nimi Wariboko

  2. Department of History, University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA

    Toyin Falola

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Niang, A.C. (2020). Political Ethics of Léopold Sédar Senghor. In: Wariboko, N., Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Social Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36490-8_16

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