Poet Turned President

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Leopold Sedar Senghor led Senegal to independence from France in 1960 and served as its first president until 1980, when he became one of relatively few African heads of state of his era to leave office voluntarily rather than through death, coup or defeat. He continued publishing poetry throughout his presidency, and in 1983 became the first Black member elected to the Academie francaise, the body that has overseen the French language since the seventeenth century, a recognition that treated his literary and his political careers as a single continuous achievement rather than two separate lives.