Leopold Senghor: the strength of contradictions. (first word).

Leopold Sedar Senghor lived a remarkable life that spanned nearly the entire twentieth century and embodied many of its contradictions. Combining memories of his childhood in coastal Senegal, where he was born in 1906, with the discipline of his classical French education, a passion for African proverbs and rhythms, and a fascination for the writings of Saint-John Perse, Senghor made unique literary and philosophical contributions to the world of art. When he and Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, and a coterie of young colleagues discovered the ethnological writings of Leo Frobenius in the Paris of the 1930s, new life was breathed into the concept of "civilization," so central to the French cultural legacy. Their visions of Negritude became not only the foundation of an African cultural philosophy and aesthetics but also a pathway to the redefinition of the universal in its valorization of African identity through the canons of the West. In his poetry and copious critical writings, Senghor demonstrated and transcended the resonances of Negritude with an ideal of the harmony of what V. Y. Mudimbe, in The Invention of Africa, called a "unitary universe."

From his pivotal organizational role in the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris to his personal triumph in sponsoring the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts in Senegal, Senghor put his aesthetic and cultural principles into practice as a way of developing and showcasing the arts and literature of Africa and the African diaspora. During the early years of his presidency in Senegal, he devoted over a third of his nation's budget to promoting the arts. Underlying this commitment was the firm belief that the dignity of a nation and its people depended on a contribution to universal civilization through the arts.

Senghor's powerful poem about African leadership, "Le Kaya-Magan," originally published in Ethiopiques in 1956, foreshadowed some of the political struggles he eventually faced. Some critics have commented on the apparent contradictions between his African socialism, with its egalitarian schemes of economic relief, and the philosophy of Negritude, with its lofty ideals of cultural uplift. Senghor, however, saw his political practices and cultural philosophy as complementary poles of the dialectic of history and he was unwavering in his commitment to them. Yet he was also a man of great complexity, whose cultural and political pronouncements carried with them the deep, multiple meanings of a poetic phrase, a man who in 1969 was inducted into the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences as a foreign nominee and yet was more French than many of its members.

Art criticism, for Senghor, was based on "idea-sentiments," combining the intellectual and the emotional, the paradigms of Cartesian reason with the rhythms of an idyllic Africa. In a "discours" in Le Critique africain et son peuple comme producteur de civilisation (1977), he asserted that "... every true work of art, whether it is a novel, a riddle, or a caricature, is always a rhythmic image.... A work of art--poem or story, painting or sculpture, music or dance-these are not ideas but works of beauty. The role of criticism is not to say what it means but why and in what way it is beautiful." Senghor's approach occupies a special place in the contested canons of African art history, and the full impact of his theory of aesthetics is yet to be explored by a new generation of scholars and critics.

The contributions to African art and culture made by Leopold Sedar Senghor, who died last December 20, are celebrated here by Bennetta Jules-Rosette and Edris Makward.

BENNETTA JULES-ROSETTE is a professor of sociology and director of the African and African American Studies Research Program at the University of California at San Diego. Her publications include Black Paris (World Press, 1998), and she is currently working on a book about the life and work of Josephine Baker. She is also a consulting member of African Arts.