Senghor’s Grammatology: The Political Imaginaries of Writing African Languages

Abstract

In the 1950s, linguistic research became privileged terrain for articulating political and aesthetic visions in soon-to-be independent Senegal. The poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s eventual first president, made the study of African languages into a source of political and artistic legitimation even as he consecrated French as the language of culture. This chapter traces Senghor’s research on African languages and explores his intellectual rivalry with Cheikh Anta Diop, the progenitor of modern Wolof writing. After independence, polemics over how to write Wolof culminated in the censorship of Ousmane Sembène’s film Ceddo, which was banned for its use of a double letter “d” in its title (a spelling convention that Senghor had made illegal). This chapter explores how debates over writing systems came to figure the stakes of decolonization—who was authorized to speak for the past and who would shape the terms in which the future would be imagined.