Progressive Geographies

Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) is known as a poet, one of theoreticians of négritude and the first President of Senegal. Senghor’s 1948 edited collection Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et Malgache de langue française[Anthology of new black and Malagasy poetry in French] had a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, which was reprinted in Situations III and has been translated at least three times as “Black Orpheus”. In English, that text is probably better known than the collection it introduced. Much of Senghor’s own poetry is available in English. Recently, two collections of essays have recently been published by Duke University Press – Writings on Politics and The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics.

Before becoming Senegalese president, Senghor taught linguistics and African literature. He served in the French army in World War II, part of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais riflemen unit recruited from French West Africa. This time in his life is of course discussed in biographies, and there is also a discussion of Senghor’s experience in Clarence Lusane’s book Hitler’s Black Victims:

On 20 June 1940, Senghor was taken prisoner while defending the bridge at La Charité-sur-Loire. He would eventually spend time in seven different camps including Poiters at Frontstalag 230, Charité-sur-Loire, Romilly-sur-Seine, Troyes, and Amiens, among others. In many instances, the camps that held the African POWs were more like labor camps with prisoners tasked to a wide range of duties. Some African prisoners found themselves working on farms as hired prison labor, while others were domestic and personal servants for German officers (Hitler’s Black Victims, p. 159; see Spleth, Léopold Sédar Senghor, p. 11-12).

There are reports that the Germans originally planned to execute Senghor and his fellow captives, but that they were persuaded by a French officer this would be dishonourable (Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor, p. 109). Apparently, Senghor and the others called out “Vive la France! Vive l’Afrique noire!” (Senghor, La poésie de l’action, p. 83). He was thereby identifying the twin affiliations of metropolitan and colonial homelands (Vaillant, Black, French, and African, pp. 166-67). Many colonial soldiers were executed, a story which is told in detail in Raffael Scheck, Hitler’s African Victims. Some however were captured, and many of these prisoners were put to work. As well as Scheck’s work, Armelle Mabon, Prisonniers de guerre «indigènes» and Sarah Ann Frank, Hostages of Empire: Colonial Prisoners of War in Vichy France are good on this, a theme which is somewhat neglected in the literature on POWs more generally. The Frontstalags were generally reserved for colonial prisoners, though some metropolitan French soldiers were held in them too – including Émile Benveniste, who later escaped and went into exile in Switzerland, a story I tell in detail elsewhere. Although some were originally in camps in Germany, the colonial prisoners were later transferred to camps back in France.

(The terminology of ‘colonial’ was not necessarily used at the time, since France did not consider its North African territories as colonies, but as part of France. ‘Indigenous’ was sometimes used, or ‘North African and colonial’.)

Lusane indicates that the period in the camp was “a crucial transitional period… a cultural reawakening” for Senghor, incarcerated together with other Africans. Despite his academic training in France, and pre-war position as a lycée teacher, he was a second-class private, like Benveniste, and was therefore held alongside recruits straight from France’s colonies. He gained a new understanding which came through both in his own poetry, and in his understanding of négritude (Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims, pp. 159-60). The second part of Senghor’s 1948 collection Hosties Noires is entitled “Camp 1940”, including poems he wrote in the camps. One poem is dated to “Camp d’Amiens, Septembre 1940”, four others to Front-Stalag 230, others to Paris after his return. The first part of Hosties Noires, “Ethiopie”, includes two poems to the Tirailleurs Sénégalais.

Senghor learned German in the camp, which allowed him to read philosophy and literature, including Goethe, in the original. His attitude to France’s neighbour, sometime enemy, and its intellectual life is described in detail in János Riesz and Aija Bjornson, “Senghor and the Germans”. He was seen by the camp commandant reading Plato in Greek, which helped to get him allocated to administrative work (Senghor, La poésie de l’action, p. 84). While in the camp he was diagnosed with “some unknown ‘colonial disease’”, probably spuriously as a meaning of deceiving the Germans, and released in February 1942 (Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims, p. 161; see Spleth, Léopold Sédar Senghor, p. 12; Vaillant, Black, French, and African, p. 177). He went back to teaching, and after the liberation held a chair at the École Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer [National School of Overseas France].

Hosties Noires is an ambiguous title, the first word meaning hosts or victims, coming from the Latin hostia and closest in sense to the sacrificial host in religion (see Vaillant, Black, French, and African, pp. 171-72). The poems of this collection are all included in his Œuvre poétique, and translated by Melvin Dixon in the bilingual The Collected Poetry.(The Collected Poetry also includes the French texts, a reprint of Œuvre poétique, but unhelpfully as an appendix, rather than on facing pages to the translations.) Dixon translates this collection as “Black Hosts”. A few of Senghor’s poems from this time are in French and English translation here. Senghor says that there no word of hatred towards the Germans in these poems – he always made a distinction between Nazis and the German people (La poésie de l’action, pp. 84-85).

The biographies of Senghor naturally discuss these periods of his life, and I wasn’t sure there was much new to discover. But then I found that Raffael Scheck has written about Senghor’s time in the camp. I mention his book on Hitler’s African Victims above, but he is also the author of French Colonial Soldiers in German Captivity during World War II, and some related chapters summarising the account, including “French African Soldiers in German POW Camps, 1940–1945”.

Scheck is particularly important because he identified Senghor as the author of an anonymous report about the experience of captivity. The report is in the Archives nationales and is entitled “Compte-rendu de captivité établi par un prisonnier indigène récemment libéré [Captivity report written by a recently released prisoner]”, dated to 7 July 1942. The author was a released prisoner from Senegal who was a “professeur agrégé dans un lycée de Paris”. Senghor was the only person at the time who was all those things (see Benoït Hopquin’s report in Le Monde).

Scheck published the report in Jeune Afrique in 2011. He wrote about what it means for our understanding of Senghor in French Colonial Soldiers in German Captivity and particularly in his article “Léopold Sédar Senghor prisonnier de guerre allemand: Une nouvelle approche fondée sur un texte inédit” in 2014.

There is much less literature on the Frontstalags than other prisoner of war camps, in part because many of those incarcerated did not record their experiences, either because they were not literate in European languages, because they were labouring and had less time in the camps to keep diaries or write letters, or because records were not kept. The report is therefore not just significant because it is by Senghor, but also as a key source for what is known of the Frontstalag in which he was imprisoned (see Scheck, “Frontstammlager (Frontstalag) 230”). In Hostages of Empire, Sarah Ann Frank, has also made use of Senghor’s work on this camp (i.e. pp. 14, 82-83), noting that she had found this anonymous report early in her research but until Scheck’s identification had not realised its author or rarity (p. 273 n. 19).

Senghor therefore might feature in my own future research, which plans to explore the story of French academics who were POWs. I’ve written a bit more about that planned project here, and about two other people I expect to discuss, Étienne Wolff and Fernand Braudel in other posts in this series.

References

Xavier Courouble, “A Concealed Reality: Léopold Sédar Senghor’s years in captivity”, Unbound: Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, 24 February 2017.

Sarah Ann Frank, Hostages of Empire: Colonial Prisoners of War in Vichy France, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021.

Benoït Hopquin, “Un document inédit de Léopold Sédar Senghor”, Le Monde, 16 June 2011.

Jacques L. Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor: An Intellectual Biography, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971.

Clarence Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era, New York: Routledge, 2003.

Armelle Mabon, Prisonniers de guerre «indigènes»: Visages oubliés de la France occupée, Paris: La Découverte, 2010.

Hannah McCann, “Still Unheard? The Voices of African POWs Imprisoned in Wartime France”, Historians for History, 7 March 2023.

János Riesz and Aija Bjornson, “Senghor and the Germans”, Research in African Literatures 33 (4), 2002, 25-37.

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée Noir”, Situations III, Paris: Gallimard, 1949, 229-86.

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus”, trans. S.W. Allen, Présence Africaine 10/11, 1951, 219-47.

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus”, trans. John MacCombie, The Massachusetts Review, 6 (1), 1964-65, 13-52; reprinted in “What is Literature?” and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, 289-330.

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus”, trans. Chris Turner, The Aftermath of War, Seagull, 2008, 259-329.

Raffael Scheck, Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Raffael Scheck, French Colonial Soldiers in German Captivity during World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Raffael Scheck, “Léopold Sédar Senghor prisonnier de guerre allemand: Une nouvelle approche fondée sur un texte inédit”, French Politics, Culture & Society 32 (2), 2014, 76-98.

Raffael Scheck, “French African Soldiers in German POW Camps, 1940–1945”, in Judith A. Byfield, Carolyn A. Brown, Timothy Parsons and Ahmad Alawad Sikainga eds. African and World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 420-38.

Raffael Scheck, “Frontstammlager (Frontstalag) 230” in Geoffrey P. Megargee, Rüdiger Overmans and Wolgang Vogt eds. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Volume IV: Camps and Other Detention Facilities under the German Armed Forces, Bloomington: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Indiana University Press, 2022, 198-201.

Léopold Sédar Senghor ed. Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et Malgache de langue française, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2^nd edition, 1969 [1948].

Léopold Sédar Senghor, Hosties noires, Paris: Seuil, 1948.

Léopold Sédar Senghor, La poésie de l’action: Conversations avec Mohamed Aziza, Paris: Stock, 1980.

Léopold Sédar Senghor, Œuvre poétique, Paris: Seuil, 1990.

Léopold Sédar Senghor, The Collected Poetry, trans. Melvin Dixon, Charlottesville: CARAF/University Press of Virginia, 1991.

Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Senghor: Le manuscrit inconnu”, Jeune Afrique, 24 July 2011, 22-31.

Léopold Sédar Senghor, Writings on Politics, ed. Yohann C. Ripert, Duke University Press, 2025.

Léopold Sédar Senghor, The Essential Senghor: African Philosophy and Black Aesthetics – eds. Doyle C. Calhoun, Alioune B. Fall and Sheikh Thiam, Duke University Press, 2026.

Janice Spleth, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Boston: Twayne, 1985.

Janet G. Vaillant, Black, French, and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

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This is the 95th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and so far through 2026. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. The pieces are not as formal and developed as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week.

I discuss what I am doing in this series in “Writing the ‘Sunday histories’ – an experiment in sharing short pieces on a blog”, my contribution to the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly “Reflections on Writing” Series – all pieces are open access.

The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.

Alejandra Mancilla, From Sovereignty to Guardianship: Governing Antarctica, Governing the World – Oxford University Press, June 2026 (print and open access)

ABC News discussion with David Rutledge

Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, driest, and highest continent in the world, so it is no wonder that it has been painted as exceptional in geographic and climatic terms. But not only that: Antarctica is also seen as exceptional politically. Since the Antarctic Treaty came into force in 1961, it has been under the Joint Guardianship of a group of states that have kept peace and privileged science as the main activity on the continent, with a focus on the protection rather than the exploitation of nature.

For natural scientists, Antarctica is seen as the largest open-air laboratory in the world. In From Sovereignty to Guardianship, Alejandra Mancilla proposes that Antarctica should also be seen as a laboratory for territorial governance, providing inspiration in places where both the regime of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources of individual states and the international regime of Common Heritage of Mankind have proven insufficient and inadequate. At the same time, she shows that Antarctic governance has important limits that can be surmounted to be made less state-centric and less anthropocentric, embracing the fact that protecting Antarctica requires acting beyond Antarctica, and vice versa. Given the global environmental challenges that we face, and the growing challenges to international law and cooperation, this book argues that environmental governance around the world can—and should—benefit from the creative and often unexpectedly fruitful political imagination of Antarctica.

Mélanie Lamotte, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire – Harvard University Press, January 2026

New Books discussion with Edward Blum

From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India.

The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways.

Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building.

Leonhard Emmerling, The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullius – trans. Parnal Chirmuley, Seagull, 2026

New Books discussion with Morteza Hajizadeh – thanks to dmf for the link

In a world obsessed with expertise and control, the figure of the idiot illuminates deeper truths about society.

Dostoevsky and Nietzsche wrote about him; Dadaists and punks idolized him; artists like Warhol and Beuys made him their icon. From holy fool to punk rebel, the idiot—a figure that traces its roots back to the Greek idiotes, a person who was alienated from public life—has always challenged society’s norms from the margins. Far from a simple madman, the idiot is a powerful subversive, a person who disregards norms and finds profound insight in a state of unmediated inspiration. Using a cross-disciplinary approach bridging literature, religion, art, and philosophy, this volume traces a rich journey up to the present, where the idiot reemerges in a dramatic twist: a public figure who inverts social norms, confounds the boundary between private and public, and declares a new, paradoxical view of the world.

Mark Carrigan, The AI Crisis in Higher Education: A Strategic Proposal – University of Manchester, September 2026 (open access)

Language models have become ubiquitous in universities without being normalised. Mark Carrigan argues this has produced a multidimensional crisis of trust, and a dilemma in which adapting to AI and integrating AI undercut each other. He proposes strategic under-integration: building the relational capacity universities need to cope with ongoing change.