The collection also reveals how close he was to many other influential writers of the Negritude movement. “To the old Leopold Sedar Senghor,” begins a humorous note scribbled by the Martinican poet and writer Aimé Césaire, in a copy of his “Discourse on Colonialism,” published in 1950. “I am sure that despite his political affiliations, he hates colonization, destructive of cultures and civilizations.”
Before he died in 2001, Senghor, who was the president of Senegal from 1960 to 1980, donated a majority of his manuscripts to the National Library of France in 1979. His remaining libraries were dispersed among his estates in Dakar, Paris and Normandy, where he spent the last two decades of his life with his wife, Colette Hubert. In that house, after the end of his presidency, Senghor spent long hours in his library studying and writing letters until his final days. Hubert donated the house, which is available for the public to visit, and its contents to the town of Verson when she died in 2019.
Last year, the Senegalese government bought some of Senghor’s other belongings, including jewelry, military decorations and diplomatic gifts. Those items are currently being stored at the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar.
Céline Labrune-Badiane, a historian, was among those who raised alarm about the necessity of keeping the collection together when the auction was first made public. “It was already dispersed,” she said. “It’s a good thing that some of them are now going to be reunited in Dakar.”
It is unclear where the books will be stored or if they will be available to scholars.
Still, Mouhamadou Moustapha Sow, a historian at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, said that the arrival of Senghor’s items was a welcome return.
“The first problem we face as African historians is access to postcolonial archives,” he said. “Bringing back the heritage of Senghor is a reconquest of our cultural sovereignty.”
