The thousands of works that belonged to the former Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, composed of more than 300 lots, will be put up for sale on April 16 in Caen, France, for amounts ranging from 20 to 3,000 euros.
The International Research Group Léopold Sédar Senghor (a group of researchers and academics founded in 2022) is calling, in a letter addressed to the new authorities in Dakar, to buy back the lot of this literary and heritage treasure that risks being scattered.
The previous government had done so in 2023 during the sale of personal effects of the "poet president" who passed away on December 20, 2001, at 96, in his home in Verson (Normandy), where he had settled with his wife after voluntarily leaving power in 1980.
"We have, roughly, a thousand works from Senghor's personal library. There are all the works of Senghor's friends and of the Negritude movement, such as Aimé Césaire, who dedicates, for example, the Discourse on Colonialism to this old Léopold Sédar Senghor. There are also books by Aragon, the book by Jean Price-Mars, so the Haitian ethnologist, who was really very important in the construction of Senghor's thought, and many works by Senegalese authors, West African, which constitute an absolutely major heritage of Senegalese and West African literature, which have thus contributed to the Negritude movement," explains the academic Céline Labrune-Badiane, stating that the modalities of their repatriation to Senegal do not belong to them.
"Nevertheless, we would like to draw the attention of the new Senegalese authorities, the future Minister of Culture, on the need, precisely, to bring this heritage back to Senegal so that it can be accessible to the public. The State of Senegal can very well buy back at least part of these works," she estimated.
