Where did Léopold Sédar Senghor grow up and live?

📍Joal-Fadiouth, Fatick, Senegal

1906 – 2001

“I was born Léopold Sédar Senghor on the 9th of October 1906 in Joal-Fadiouth, a fishing village on the Petite Côte of Senegal, the son of a Serer Catholic merchant. Joal-Fadiouth — the village of shells, where the island cemetery is made of cockle shells — gave me the Serer world that I carried into French poetry and politics. I went to France, became the first African to achieve the agrégation in grammar, befriended Aimé Césaire, and developed the concept of Négritude — the affirmation of African cultural values against the assimilation that French colonialism demanded. I was Senegal's first President from 1960 to 1980, when I became the first African leader to voluntarily transfer power to a successor. I was elected to the Académie française in 1983. The poet-president.”

👍 LovedJoal-Fadiouth and the Serer world of my childhood. The Négritude movement and the affirmation of African cultural dignity. The voluntary transfer of power that modelled democratic succession.

👎 DislikedThe tension between the French intellectual formation and the African political responsibility. The one-party tendencies of the early presidency. The distance between the poetic vision and the political reality.

Map showing where Léopold Sédar Senghor lived — Joal-Fadiouth, Fatick, Senegal

🗺️ Approximate location today

📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons

Sources: Vaillant, J. Black, French, and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor (1990), Harvard University Press; Senghor, L. Selected Poems (1964, translated John Reed and Clive Wake)