A poet passes: Leopold Sedar Senghor remembered.

• Author: Abdallah, Ahmedou Ould
• Position: Obituary

IN 1961, less than twelve months after the independence of both Mauritania and Senegal, I was in my last year of high school at Van Vollenhoven, the prestigious French lycee in Dakar, Senegal. I still remember the beautiful green, white and beige cranes parading in the park of the presidential palace, the residence of former governors of French West Africa. I remember, too, going with a friend to visit my own President, Moktar Ould Daddah, then the guest of his Senegalese colleague Leopold Sedar Senghor.

To my surprise, President Senghor sat and spoke with us, giving a dissertation on lions ("quiet but respected kings of the bush") and explaining why Senegal's most important national award, "the Order of the Lion", is named after them. Senghor also spoke, beautifully and emotionally, of the baobab tree as a symbol of endurance, resilience, strength, but at the same time fragility; he was, of course, speaking in metaphor about humanity. Africans, he suggested, should be like the baobab: resilient but emotionally open. On leaving the palace for my boarding school, I was bewildered: There were almost no lions in Senegal except for one or two in the zoo. So why so much about lions, and why the baobabs even if there were plenty of them?

By 1972, I had become a member of my country's cabinet and went to Dakar in a presidential delegation visiting Senegal. As Senghor awarded me the Order of the Lion, his earlier comments on lions came to my mind. At a small dinner I followed his comments about universal civilization but also about cultural differences and manners among nations, and his jokes to illustrate his points. That same year I was lucky to travel with him from Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, to Dakar in his private plane. It was a delight. There were only five of us on board and he was in an excellent mood, talking to us after a difficult negotiation on the future of Air Afrique (still being debated!). He spoke of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, the late President Sekou Toure of Guinea, a political enemy, and of military juntas. Zaire, he said, is prone to conflicts because Mobutu -- then his politically--has a good heart but a rather slow brain mechanism, making him easily forget commitments and, worse, his own past mistakes. Pres ident Senghor complained of Sekou Toure, the boisterous leader of a "revolutionary" party, but said that he should be forgiven his foibles as his brain had been permanently damaged by syphilis. He noted that...