Leopold Sedar Senghor Quotes on Politics

Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Liberty I: Negritude and Humanism (Liberté I, 1964) and the long sequence of cultural-philosophical essays through Liberté V (1993) gave twentieth-century African political philosophy one of its most influential statements of the Negritude movement Senghor co-founded with Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas in 1930s Paris. The central project, integrated with Senghor’s parallel political work as the founding president of independent Senegal, is the philosophical articulation of an African civilization whose distinctive contributions — the rhythmic-emotional-participatory mode of being-in-the-world Senghor controversially distinguished from the Cartesian-analytic mode of European modernity — supply the irreducible African voice in the universal civilization of the future. The framework, drawing on Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, and the broader Catholic-humanist intellectual tradition, shaped the post-independence Francophone African intellectual tradition and remains a principal twentieth-century statement of the philosophical foundations of pan-African cultural identity.