More than 20 years after the death of Léopold Sédar Senghor — the writer, poet and first president of Senegal after the country’s independence from France — his name is still generating headlines.
In April, a beneficiary of his sister-in-law’s estate in Paris auctioned Senghor’s private library of over 800 works, including 343 signed books. Worried about preserving his cultural legacy, the Senegalese government stepped in to halt the sale and bought the entire collection last month. Weeks after the deal was finalized, the volumes are now heading to Senegal to the delight of literary scholars, historians and archivists.
Taken together, the collection tells the stories of the relationships Senghor fostered with other writers, intellectuals and politicians from around the world. It also provides a window into his contributions to the anticolonial Negritude movement, a literary flowering influenced by the Harlem Renaissance that brought together Black writers and scholars from French colonies in Africa and the Caribbean during the 1930s.
“Beyond the sentimental value, this collection constitutes an invaluable contribution to better understanding Senghor’s thought and the history of 20th-century ideas,” said Alioune Diaw, a researcher at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal.
The books are written by authors from Madagascar to the United States. Some are simply signed by Senghor. (One of his earliest annotations is scribbled on a book by the Jamaican American writer Claude McKay, a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance.) Others contain several passages he underlined with a pen and a ruler.
Anne Schneider, a researcher at the University of Caen in Normandy, France, viewed the book collection for the first time in April. Reading passages that Senghor had highlighted, she said, was a fascinating insight into what piqued his interest. “The archives remind us that he was someone with very current thinking on humanism, universalism and interculturality,” she said. “These are all extremely modern themes.”
Hundreds of titles include signatures from prominent people of his time, such as the French poet Louis Aragon, the former French president François Mitterrand and the American writer Richard Wright. In a copy of his 1938 collection of novellas, “Uncle Tom’s Children,” Wright wrote: “To Leopold Sedhar Senghor, my brother in the fight for freedom. Freedom belongs to the strong.” In another inscription, the Vietnamese writer Pham Duy Khiem even refers Senghor to pages in his novel “Nam et Sylvie” where a character is inspired by Senghor himself.
“These weren’t just conventional signatures, but very strong human relationships,” said Claire Riffard, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research.
The collection also reveals how close he was to many other influential writers of the Negritude movement. “To the old Leopold Sedar Senghor,” begins a humorous note scribbled by the Martinican poet and writer Aimé Césaire, in a copy of his “Discourse on Colonialism,” published in 1950. “I am sure that despite his political affiliations, he hates colonization, destructive of cultures and civilizations.”
Before he died in 2001, Senghor, who was the president of Senegal from 1960 to 1980, donated a majority of his manuscripts to the National Library of France in 1979. His remaining libraries were dispersed among his estates in Dakar, Paris and Normandy, where he spent the last two decades of his life with his wife, Colette Hubert. In that house, after the end of his presidency, Senghor spent long hours in his library studying and writing letters until his final days. Hubert donated the house, which is available for the public to visit, and its contents to the town of Verson when she died in 2019.
Last year, the Senegalese government bought some of Senghor’s other belongings, including jewelry, military decorations and diplomatic gifts. Those items are currently being stored at the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar.
Céline Labrune-Badiane, a historian, was among those who raised alarm about the necessity of keeping the collection together when the auction was first made public. “It was already dispersed,” she said. “It’s a good thing that some of them are now going to be reunited in Dakar.”
It is unclear where the books will be stored or if they will be available to scholars.
Still, Mouhamadou Moustapha Sow, a historian at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, said that the arrival of Senghor’s items was a welcome return.
“The first problem we face as African historians is access to postcolonial archives,” he said. “Bringing back the heritage of Senghor is a reconquest of our cultural sovereignty.”