Leopold Sedar Senghor

Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906-2001) was a Senegalese political leader an writer, who is also known as poet and essayist. He was elected president of Senegal in 1960. He was founder of political group Bloc Democratique Sengalais.

Wisdom & Quotes

• I must hide him in my inmost veins

The Ancestor...
He is my faithful blood that demands fidelity
Protecting my naked pride against
Myself and the scorn of luckier races.
- Totem

• Let us listen to the voices of our

Forebears...
In the smoky cabin, souls that wish us well are murmuring.
- Nuit de Sine

• Why should there not be "African humanities"? Every language, which means every civilisation, can provide material for the humanities,because every civilisation is the expression, with its own peculiar emphasis, of certain characteristics of humanity.

• What if this were Hell, this absence of sleep,

this poet's desert,
this pain of living, this dying of not dying,
this anguish of shadows, this passion over the death and light.
- "Midnight Elegy", Ethiopics

• Recognise your son by the look in his eyes, the authenticity

of his heart his lineage.
Recognise his comrades recognise the fighter and salute in
the red evening of your age.
The bright dawn of a new day.
- On Appeal from the Race of Sheba - VII

• The civilisation of the twentieth century cannot be universal except by being a dynamic synthesis of all the cultural values of all civilisations. It will be monstrous unless it is seasoned with the salt of negritude, for it will be without the saviour of humanity.

B W Vilakazi