PARIS, Dec. 20 — Former Senegal President Leopold Sedar Senghor, one of
Africa's major statesmen and a poet of international repute, died on
Thursday in France aged 95, French authorities said.
French President Jacques Chirac said Senghor was ''one of the
greatest contemporary humanist figures.''
''Poetry has lost a master, Senegal a statesman, Africa a visionary
and France a friend,'' he said in a statement.
Senghor was Senegal's president for 20 years until 1980 but was
equally known for poetry and philosophical work which expounded the concept
of ''negritude,'' or ''black is beautiful.''
Senghor, who quit power 21 years ago, spent most of his retirement
in the northern village of Verson in Normandy with his French wife. Police
in the local Calvados department said he had died after taking ill in
recent days.
Short, stocky and soft-spoken, Senghor wrote several volumes of
poems and was twice strongly tipped for the Nobel prize for literature,
although he never actually won the award.
His philosophy was summed up when he said: ''I wear European
clothing and the Americans dance to jazz which derives from our African
rhythms -- civilisation in the 20th century is universal. No people can get
along without others.''
Senghor was born in Senegal on October 9, 1906, but educated in
France.
He read French at the Sorbonne between World War One and World War
Two, making friends with philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and author Albert
Camus.
Copyright 2001 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or
redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior
written consent of Reuters.
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