Word: senghor
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...government paid the bulk of the $500,000 bill for the gathering and provided most of the economists for the discussions. Some of the chiefs of state flew in aboard Caravelle or Mystere jets. Everyone spoke French at the meetings. In one of the most important speeches, President Leopold Senghor of Senegal, the unofficial poet laureate of black Africa, made an extraordinary statement for an area that has gloried in shucking off colonial rule. Said Senghor: "We desire to keep and use fruitfully the positive aspects of Francophone colonialism...
...taught the Africans that loss of French culture could only bring a reversion to barbarism in their countries. Also, the French government gave African politicians a voice in the affairs of both France and the empire. Though no Africans ever sat in the British House of Commons, men like Senghor were Deputies in the French National Assembly long before their countries became independent...
Such men look to France as their second country. These days, Senghor lives abroad several months of the year on the farm in Normandy where his French wife was born. President Hamani Diori of Niger takes an annual trip to France for a "cure" in the baths at Vichy. When the son of the President of the Ivory Coast married the niece of the President of Togo, all the chiefs of the French-speaking African states got airline tickets with their invitations. The wedding was, of course, in Paris...
...spare Tshombe's life, not only for humanitarian reasons but for fear that his execution might spark resentment, and perhaps even a new Congo revolt that could undermine Mobutu's regime. Such enlightened African leaders as the Ivory Coast's Felix Houphouet-Boigny and Leopold Senghor of Senegal are known to oppose any execution as crude blood revenge. And the spectacle of Tshombe's wife, Ruth, and one of her sons, Jean, 23, vainly pleading with the United Nations for a "world habeas cor pus" to save her husband did arouse a measure of international sympathy...
...budding governments have composed their own. Senegal's anthem ("The red Lion has roared/The Tamer of the Bush has jumped forward") was written by Poet-President Leopold Senghor, Jamaica's by the Minister of Industry, the Ivory Coast's by its Information Minister. Malaysia expropriated an Indonesian love song called Moonlight, changed the words, then banned the original version. Kenya's solution was to graft the hymnlike words of one proposed anthem ("O God of all creation/Bless this our land and nation") onto the music of a Pokomo tribal lullaby...