SENGHOR, GLOBALISM AND AFRICANITY

A reflection on the challenges of African identity within the context of the persistence of European Modernity as the ideal of globalisation, offers an opportunity for a fresh perspective on the life and work of Léopold Sédar Senghor. We subject Senghor’s life and intellectual output to a critical triangular prism of: (1) Paul James’s critique of globalism as an ideology of globalisation; (2) Walter Mignolo’s enunciation of the epistemico-cultural implications of Western-led globalisation on the postcolony; and (3) Paulin Houtondji’s Afrocentric critical literary theory. The result is a claim we make that in the devotion of his literary talent and intellectual prowess to the nurturing of the ‘French way’, Senghor not only nurtured an imperialistic French globalism, but betrayed an opportunity to assert a political space for an enduring decolonial African epistemology during a critical period in the history of Africa’s relationship with Europe. Senghor’s life praxis is in this way presented as a typology of the psychopolitical pitfalls facing African thought leaders in their postcolonial engagement with Western modernity.