Senegal's first president, LΘopold Senghor, who died on December 20th aged 95, was the first of the independence generation of African leaders, many of whom ruled autocratically over one-party states, to resign of his own free will, relinquishing power at the age of 74, after 20 years in office. The move was entirely in keeping with his political principles as a democrat. Afterwards, again unusually, he scrupulously refrained from dabbling in politics, to the great relief of his successor, Abdou Diouf.
His place in history was much more than simply political. As an African intellectual in 1930s Paris, he was one of the founders of the negritude movement, which provided a vital cultural base for those seeking the emancipation of the black race.
His long life embraced many dichotomies - between Africa and Europe, black and white, colonialism and independence, elitism and populism, even culture and politics - all marked by a constant quest to reconcile opposites. Intellectually, he eventually found a kind of world synthesis in the universal civilisation ideas of the French Catholic sage, PΦre Teilhard du Chardin.
He was born in Joal, a small Senegalese coastal town. Of ethnically mixed parentage, he was brought up in the Serer culture of his father but, more significantly, as a Christian, then, as now, a small minority in Senegal. Education by Catholic missionaries brought a distinct advantage in a Muslim country, and for one as bright and dedicated as the young LΘopold, excelling became an obsession.
Frustrated in his early ambition to become a priest, he obtained a place - one of the few for Africans - at the lycΘe in Dakar, from where he won a scholarship to the LycΘe Louis-le-Grand in Paris, the first African to gain such an award. In three years at Louis-le-Grand, and guided by his classmate Georges Pompidou, he bathed in French culture, discovering literature and his favourite poets, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, as well as the Catholic, Claudel. He obtained his dipl⌠me d'Θtudes supΘrieures a year after moving to the Sorbonne in 1931, with a treatise on exoticism in Baudelaire.
He then targeted the difficult agrΘgation degree, which no African had ever obtained. To get it, he had to take French citizenship - an extra hurdle, since he was not a citoyen of Senegal's four communes - and undertake military service, but, in 1935, after the third shot, he won it. To be the first African agrΘgΘ, especially in grammar, was always a plus point with the Senegalese when he sought their political support.
The early 1930s was the period when he met the French Antilleans, Aime CΘsaire and Leon Damas, with whom, under the influence of transatlantic ideas of "the New Negro", he originated negritude. All three were poets, writing in French. LΘopold Senghor's verse (his first volume, Chants D'Ombre, was published in 1945) gives essential pointers to his inner conflicts.
It is not clear who coined the word negritude - LΘopold Senghor used it in a 1936 poem, but it resonated throughout the French-speaking world and beyond in the late 1940s and 1950s.
At the outbreak of the second World War, he rejoined the French army, and, with the fall of France in 1940, became a prisoner-of-war in camps within Vichy, where he wrote many of the poems of his second volume, Hosties Noires (Black Victims), again with radical implications, especially in his prayer for African soldiers who had sacrificed so much for Europe.
Released because of illness in 1942, he returned to teaching and research, completing his doctorat d'etat at the Sorbonne. These were years of ferment, especially after the liberation of Paris in 1944, and he was increasingly drawn into politics, especially after the Brazzaville conference of 1944, where it was decided that African territories would be represented in the French national assembly. He became a member of the constituent assemblies of 1945 and 1946, and helped draft the constitution of the fourth republic. From 1946-1958, he was one of the deputies representing Senegal.
Thus he was introduced to Senegalese electoral politics, a game he played with masterly cunning for more than 30 years.
Political success in Senegal reinforced his Paris powerbase, and though in 1948 he had split with the socialist bloc and joined an independent group, he was still one of the few Africans who made it to French ministerial rank, in the Edgar Faure government of 1955-'56.
By the later-1950s - with the Suez crisis and Ghanaian independence - changes loomed, and, in the face of decolonisation, he was one of those who tried to preserve the French West African Federation (AOF).
The transfer of power to the territorial assemblies in 1956 undercut the AOF seriously, but it was only the coming to power of General de Gaulle in 1958, and his backing of the territorialists under Felix Houphouet-Boigny (initially in the abortive French Community), that scuppered federalism. Its last surviving remnant - the Mali Federation of Senegal and French Soudan - lasted only three months, collapsing amid recrimination in September 1960. LΘopold Senghor, left as president of one country, gravely short of resources, and with a third of its people in a bloated ex-federal capital, embarked on the tightrope of independence politics.
He was pushed by Senegalese political volatility into a virtual, but never constitutional, single-party state. This came after his own prime minister, Mamadou Dia's abortive coup in 1962, when French troops, who, to this day, have not given up their base in the country, tilted to LΘopold Senghor's side.
In 1972, he encouraged the formation of an opposition party and, three years later, decreed that there should be two - one Marxist, one Liberal, as well as his own Socialist party. He also encouraged a limited growth in press freedom, and continued a commitment to cultural development, in spite of Senegal's limited resources.
The one sector he found difficult was the economy, and, in 1970, he appointed one of his brightest technocrats, Abdou Diouf, as prime minister, with a specific economic brief.
Yet Senegal's problems remained.
In retirement, he wrote more poetry and prose, and had the satisfaction of being elected a member of the Academie Franτaise in 1983.
LΘopold Sedar Senghor: born 1906; died, December 2001