Twenty years ago, disappeared Léopold Sédar Senghor, an intellectual at the antipodes of "cancel culture"

On Thursday, December 20, 2001, at the beginning of the afternoon, a great African died in his house in Verson, in Normandy.

Léopold Sédar Senghor, aged 95, had been first in everything.

First African to obtain the aggregation of French grammar, first president of independent Senegal, first head of state to leave power on his own, in 1980, on a continent full of autocrats, first black to enter the Academy French… The first too, with his Martinican friend Aimé Césaire, to talk about “negritude”.

A man of immense prestige, of encyclopedic culture, of innate elegance has just left and France, the country he has served and cherished, is silent.

At his funeral in Dakar, where fifteen days of national mourning were decreed, neither the President of the Republic nor the Prime Minister were present.

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Jacques Chirac, once very close to Georges Pompidou, Senghor's khâgne friend, remained in Paris.

Just like Lionel Jospin, traveling companion of the deceased within the International

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