Figure 1 is a photograph of the newly elected executive committee of the League Against Imperialism (LAI) during the First International Congress against Colonialism and Imperialism, held in Brussels in Egmont Palace in February 1927.Footnote 2 Of the twenty-four people in the photograph, Senegalese anti-imperialist leader Lamine Arfang Senghor is the only one holding the hands of the people sitting beside him. The German feminist and activist Dr. Helene Stöcker, standing behind him, has her right hand on his shoulder. He is held on his right by Dutch trade unionist Edo Fimmen and on his left by Chinese general Lu Zhonglin, who is sitting next to the future first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. While we may not be privy to the reasons why these three members of the committee chose to make physical contact with Senghor in the group photograph, one might speculate that it is because, as David Murphy (Reference Murphy, Louro and Stolte2020, 211) writes, “he was one of the stars of the show,” given “the novelty and the exoticism of his status as a black African, for a largely European audience.” Or perhaps it was due to his deteriorating health: in November of the same year, Senghor died of tuberculosis. The members of the executive committee—likely meeting Senghor for the first time at the conference—might be trying to convey a form of sympathy or support, possibly because of their admiration for the president of the Committee for the Defense of the Negro Race (Comité de défense de la race nègre, CDRN) and his staunch commitment to anti-imperialism. The unusual posture could be a physical manifestation of interpersonal connection and affective support, grounded in the members’ anti-imperialist solidarity with Senghor.
Executive Committee of the League Against Imperialism, Brussels Conference, 1927.Footnote 1
Understood in these terms, the photograph serves as both an affective and a material trace of interwar anti-imperialist solidarity. But is the pose in fact a demonstration of affection, solicitude, and support, or is it a manifestation of interwar negrophilia-inflected exoticization? The time elapsed since this photograph was taken makes it impossible to gather testimonies from attendees of the event to learn what might have led to such a pose. The motivations are likely unrecoverable, but this fact has productively prompted my own engagement with more recent and still-recoverable affective and material traces of anti-imperial solidarity with Senghor’s work and militantism. In this article, I interrogate forms of recoverability, of hidden, or fleeting stories, texts, and images of anti-imperialism, through the work of Senghor.
In Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (Reference Miller1998), Christopher Miller highlights the political divergence between Lamine Senghor and Léopold Sédar Senghor, his distant cousin. According to Miller, the shifts from Lamine Senghor’s “radicalism” to the “accommodationism” of Léopold Senghor’s writings in the 1930s “testify to a demise of radicalism” (1998, 40). However, when situated in the longue durée of anti-colonial activism in France and Senegal, this demise is not definite. It becomes merely temporary: as this essay contends, the kind of radicalism that Lamine Senghor’s militancy inspired was repurposed in the 1970s by members of the radical Left in Senegal and by African students in France. The historical reconstruction of Senghor’s life, as will be discussed below, involves contending with transtemporal attempts to piece together hard-to-access and partial information that is scattered across locations and decades, often with the goal of conveying the staunch radical ethos of Lamine Senghor’s writing.
The underground lives of texts
In 1979, a Maoist-inspired Senegalese cultural movement called Le Front Culturel Sénégalais (FCS) republished Lamine Senghor’s pioneering work La Violation d’un pays (Reference Diop1927). First published in France during the interwar period, this work (hereafter referred to as Violation) was deemed clandestine by the authorities in the colonies that constituted the federation of French West Africa.Footnote 3 The FCS’s underground republishing and semi-clandestine methods used to circulate Senghor’s Violation in the second half of the twentieth century bestowed a renewed significance on this influential figure of interwar anti-imperialism and Black internationalism. The movement breathed new life into his work while creating new anti-imperial connections, particularly during the long 1960s, which in Senegal began in the early 1950s and lasted more than two decades.
Senghor’s work and life story were mobilized as “usable past” (Ranger Reference Ranger and Fyfe1976), mainly by the Senegalese New Left from which the FCS emerged, as a corrective to the national history concurrently being crafted by President Léopold Sédar Senghor. Young anti-imperial activists (students, left-wing intelligentsia, writers, artists, and disaffected youth) opposed Léopold Sédar Senghor’s regime, his use of Negritude as a cultural policy, and his theory of African socialism. They viewed his regime as neocolonial and sought to usher in a cultural revolution. Part of their cultural movement consisted in rehabilitating unsung anti-colonial heroes. They thus linked their anti-imperialism in the 1970s to Lamine Senghor’s interwar anti-imperialism and declared themselves “heirs” of the latter (Wane Reference Wane, Bianchini, Sylla and Zeilig2023, 31). As a result, Lamine Senghor’s legacy was reactivated, and it sedimented in poems, articles, brochures, iconography, and so on—bits of which are still accessible today.
The underground republication of Lamine Senghor’s work by the FCS is also a story about the material history of underground texts. Writing about material objects in The Social Life of Things (Reference Appadurai1988, 5), Arjun Appadurai points out that “even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context” (emphasis in the original). Indeed, the fact that part of the “social life” of Violation unfolded underground illuminates several matters, from surveillance in interwar French West Africa to radical leftist movements under Léopold Sédar Senghor’s regime. This essay seeks to reconstruct this little-known underground life as a way to elucidate transtemporal forms of anti-imperial solidarity and the role of literary texts in such a configuration. As Michael Lucey (Reference Lucey, Behdad and Thomas2011, 127) suggests about “the contextual life” of literary texts, “written texts draw, of course, on their context of initial occurrence or inscription as they are written, but any subsequent act of reading, retransmitting, or reentextualizing them is self-evidently a new act of contextualization.” Given the secrecy and unofficial methods surrounding the production and circulation of texts such as Violation, a focus on the material history of its republication offers fruitful avenues for exploring the context in which it emerged. Such a process prompts a retracing of underground networks and their methods of circulation and dissemination of ideas, texts, and sensibilities during the period of African decolonization and anti-imperial movements in the postindependence period.
I understand such a process, building on Edward Said (Reference Said1984), as an act of affiliative reconstruction (see also Thieme Reference Thieme2002, 14). Affiliative reconstruction goes beyond attention to intertextuality; it is predicated on reconstructing the connections between texts that are lost, unknown, or understudied as a result of their underground publishing and circulation and/or their clandestine status at a given historical period. Said (Reference Said1984, 20) defines a “filial relationship” as one that signifies lineage and thus represents a natural connection between texts within the same literary tradition, generation, country, and so on. He describes “affiliation,” however, as that which “transforms these bonds into what appear to be transpersonal forms,” leading him to associate filiation with “the realms of nature and of ‘life,’ and affiliation [with] ‘culture and society.’” Said’s words here pertain not only to reader reception but also to the social and cultural lives of texts. He observes, “To recreate the affiliative network is therefore to make visible, to restore materiality to the strands connecting the text to society, author, and culture” (175). Although Said’s intention was to decolonize literary criticism by emancipating it from European canonical literary traditions as the sole lens for textual interpretation, his approach can be extended to noncanonical and underground texts. The FCS’s attempts to restore what they saw as a “natural” filiation with Lamine Senghor is what prompts my affiliative reconstruction of the underground life of Violation. Indeed, the FCS’s anti-imperial cultural work, made possible by underground networks and methods, interrogates the very intersection of decolonization and the underground. It enables us to trace and historicize forms of anti-imperial writing, as well as elucidate how the underground shapes the political work of culture.
The words underground and clandestine are often used interchangeably because they refer to secrecy and sometimes to illegality. However, the term underground carries different meanings across disciplines and across historical and cultural contexts. In literary studies, for instance, while secrecy and illegality can be defining aspects (Darnton Reference Darnton1982), the word underground can be used to refer to self-published and/or anti-hegemonic texts and not necessarily to anything secretive or illegal (Mortenson Reference Mortenson2013; Clements Reference Clements2017). Clandestine, by contrast, always connotes secrecy, and in the worst case, it implies illegality. In specific contexts, underground literature functions as a mode of literary creation, production, dissemination, and interpretation. Ann Komaromi (Reference Komaromi2012, 72) describes one of the most popular forms of underground literature, Soviet samizdat, as a “specific textual culture.” While the distinction between underground and clandestine may not be necessarily for all disciplines, it is important in literary studies and for my argument here: it helps us to account for the different statuses of Senghor’s Violation over the course of its material life. For instance, Violation was considered contraband by authorities in the colonies during the interwar period, which makes its smuggling into French West Africa clandestine. However, when republished independently by the FCS in 1979, it was neither banned by the authorities nor illegal to circulate, which makes the republication underground but not clandestine.
The 1979 republication of Violation qualifies as underground because it is marked by two distinct forms of underground production: a text that is produced in relative secrecy and is self-published. Senghor’s work appeared as part of a broader brochure on the activist that was self-published by young leftist militants in Dakar and Paris. FCS member Mansour Kébé retrieved a version of Violation at the national archives in Dakar in the 1970s and negotiated access to the document. Although he did not have the right to make a copy of the entire text, he did so anyway. He then sent it to fellow militants in France, who supplemented his findings with other documents from Senghor’s historical record and published the 1979 brochure, which they distributed to sympathizers. The brochure Lamine Senghor vie et oeuvre therefore included not only his fictional story Violation but also articles published by Senghor and information about his life and militant activities during the interwar period until his death in 1927. In this way, the FCS’s brochure can be considered a self-published work that was produced and disseminated via semi-secretive, though not illegal, methods. The names of the editors never appear on the publication; such anonymity adds another layer of secrecy. Produced outside of formal publishing channels, it circulated through informal underground networks, which limited its reach and accessibility. This dual aspect of underground circulation—secrecy and self-publication—contributed to the text’s marginalization, despite its significance to the history of anti-imperial thought.
What can the clandestine circulation of Violation in 1927 in the colonies and its underground republication in 1979 tell us about the links between interwar anti-imperialism and the protracted period of decolonization and postcolonial anti-imperial movements? What kind of work did literary texts do for anti-imperial militants in postcolonial Senegal, and how did their reproduction in the underground enable or preclude their dissemination, popularization, and critical reception?
Lamine Senghor and La Violation d’un pays
On July 26, 1927, as the steamer Nil lay at anchor in the bustling port of Dakar, its maître d’hôtel, Baba Sarr, met with Ibrahima Diack, a foreman at the Dakar branch of the Bordeaux trading house, Maison Maurel et Prom. Sarr handed Diack an inconspicuous brochure, accompanied by a photograph that Diack had asked to be enlarged. He told Diack, “Here, take this book. It doesn’t interest me. I heard that it was written by a Black man” (see Senghor Reference Senghor2012, 107–108). He continued, “you will read it and will have it read,” echoing a sentence by French communist writer Paul Vaillant Couturier in the preface to the slim book in question. The document Sarr handed over was none other than Lamine Senghor’s La Violation d’un pays. It did not come alone. Still aboard the Nil, among its cargo, were three bundles of La Race Nègre, the periodical of the League for the Defense of the Negro Race (Ligue de défense de la race nègre, LDRN), an interwar communist organization dedicated to the empowerment and liberation of black people, cofounded by Lamine Senghor (see Senghor Reference Senghor2012, 107–108). Although Senghor was under surveillance, both La Race Nègre and Violation had been published and circulated in France. In contrast, Robert Young notes that while “radical Paris-based newspapers and magazine … circulated freely if illicitly” in the colonies, Violation itself reached Senegal in only limited numbers (Young Reference Young2016, 262). To the colonial authorities in the metropole and in the colonies, these works signaled that Lamine Senghor and his cofounder of the LDRN, Tiemoko Garang Kouyate, who was from the French Sudan (now Mali), were “subversive” colonials (Keller Reference Keller2018, 34). Although copies of the periodical were swiftly seized by customs officers upon their arrival in Dakar, Violation appears to have evaded their scrutiny, since it was directly handed to Diack by Sarr. The text then “circulated clandestinely” within French West Africa (Murphy Reference Murphy and Murphy2012, lii). It would later have a new life—this time an underground life—when it was republished and circulated half a century later by the FCS in postindependence Senegal.
The FCS’s republication of Violation in 1979 rescued the work from relative obscurity, while the movement’s accompanying brochure about Senghor sparked renewed interest in the legacy of his militant life. Nevertheless, recurring themes in the scholarship about Senghor include the scarcity of information about him, the understudied nature of his remarkable deeds, and the difficulty of finding his only fictional text, Violation. Scholars have written about the multiple ways in which Violation unsettles established genealogies in African literature written in French, how it challenges historical narratives about the rise of nationalism in Africa, how it contributes to scholarship about Africans in Europe, interwar French communism, and Black internationalism (Murphy Reference Murphy and Murphy2012, lxi). The ephemeral nature of Senghor’s writings, primarily published in short-lived periodicals and mainly forbidden in the colonies during the interwar period, partly explains the difficulties of conducting research on Senghor and of accessing his work. Furthermore, according to the FCS, efforts to suppress his message during the nationalist period, for fear of a resurgence of a “communist threat” under the Senghorian regime, contributed to such silences and absences in the historical record. To remedy this situation, students in France and members of the FCS, in the 1970s, attempted to revive Senghor’s legacy and recover his writings. Guy Midiohouan (Reference Midiohouan2013, 140) aptly names his documenting of such attempts a “chronicle of a resurrection.” And yet, despite efforts to enact a resurrection of Senghor’s deeds and works, particularly by the FCS, the clandestine and underground nature of texts like Violation contributed to the limited remembrance of his legacy.
The basic contours of Lamine Senghor’s life are known. According to Olivier Sagna, who authored a thesis about Senghor in 1986 following his reading of the FCS’s 1979 brochure, Senghor was born on September 15, 1889, in Joal, Senegal, in the region of Sine. He was born to a peasant family of modest origins; he arrived in Dakar in 1912, worked as a houseboy, and then went on to work at the Bordeaux trading house, Maison Maurel et Prom. During this time, he experienced discrimination as a colonial subject, planting the seeds for his later anti-colonial activities (Sagna Reference Sagna1987, 307). He then fought during World War I as part of the 68th Battalion of Senegalese tirailleurs. He was gassed at the Battle of Verdun in 1917 and suffered from tuberculosis as a result of the damage to his lungs. While in convalescence in Frejus, Senghor likely met his future wife, Eugénie Comont (Murphy Reference Murphy and Murphy2012, xx, xxi). He returned to Senegal in 1919 as a decorated sergeant and wounded veteran (Sagna Reference Sagna1987, 308) and became a French citizen in 1920, after which he obtained a 30 percent disability pension for his war wounds, which would later rise to 100 percent as his health worsened (Murphy Reference Murphy and Murphy2012, vii). In 1923, he married Comont and became a mailman in Paris.
While in France, Senghor made plans to return to Senegal with his wife and children (his son, Diène, and his daughter, Marianne). Scholars surmise that while he was looking for funds to repatriate his family, he caught the attention of the Service de Contrôle et d’Assistance aux Indigènes (CAI), the ministry of colonies’ service of control and assistance to colonized subjects. The CAI then asked Senghor to join the Intercolonial Union (l’Union Intercoloniale, UIC) as an undercover informant (Sagna Reference Sagna1987, 309; Murphy Reference Murphy and Murphy2012, xxii), which he did. Created by the French Communist Party (le Parti Communiste Français, PCF), the UIC served as an organization to regroup colonial subjects of the French Empire who lived in France. It promoted anti-colonialism and was concerned with working-class issues of colonial subjects. While at UIC, Senghor turned into a staunch anti-colonial activist and contributed to the organization’s mouthpiece, Le Paria, where we find his anti-colonial writings (Murphy Reference Murphy and Murphy2012, xxii), many of which resonate with the fictional story he tells in Violation.
Disappointed by the PCF’s instrumentalization of colonials and by its failure to truly support their cause through the UIC, Senghor left the PCF to found his own organization in 1926, the Committee for the Defense of the Negro Race (Comité de défense de la race nègre, CDRN), with the Guadeloupean Max Bloncourt and the Haitian Camille Saint-Jacques, or: both of whom he met at the UIC (Murphy Reference Murphy and Murphy2012, xxiii; Sagna Reference Sagna1987, 386). In the pages of the CDRN’s journal, La Voix des Nègres, Senghor denounced colonial oppression, forced labor, and the inequality of the tirailleur’s pensions compared to those of French soldiers. However, in 1927, a split between members of his organization led to the creation of the aforementioned LDRN (Murphy Reference Murphy and Murphy2012, xlviii). In February 1927, Senghor attended the constitutive conference of the League Against Imperialism in Brussels, where he gave a famously fiery speech (see Murphy Reference Murphy and Murphy2012, xlii–xlix). Both La Race Nègre and Violation were published in France in 1927, the same year in which Senghor died at the age of thirty-eight.
Forms of anti-imperial writing
Often referred to interchangeably as a brochure or pamphlet, Senghor’s Violation is a thirty-one-page fictional story with illustrations. It is an allegory of imperialism told through an encounter between protagonist Degou Diagne, his community, and a character named the “pale man.” Degou and his people enjoy a serene and harmonious existence in M’Bine Diam (which translates to “the house of peace” in Serer), but that tranquility is disrupted by the arrival of the pale man, called “Sieur Bourgeois” (Sir Bourgeois), in the country. This newcomer amasses items of value while offering trivial goods in exchange, which the narrator describes as “very beautiful trifles” lacking in “humanity” (Senghor Reference Senghor2012, 8). He then proposes a harrowing transaction to Degou: for Degou to sell his own brother in return for a rifle, which the narrator describes as a “fetish” that would make Degou more powerful than everyone else. Degou—whose first name is a wordplay on the French word dégoût, (disgust) and whose last name, Diagne, is a thinly veiled reference to Blaise Diagne, who helped recruit African soldiers to fight for France in World War I—presents two brothers for the pale man’s selection. One of the brothers is shot by Degou as he tries to flee, while the other is taken away by the pale man. The exchange of a brother for a rifle, in addition to being an allegory for the slave trade and, to a certain extent, for Diagne’s contribution to the recruitment of African soldiers, symbolizes the original sin that triggers a series of tragic events within the narrative.
Following the fratricide, the plot progresses into a phase of conquest and domination orchestrated by “Le Roi Colonialisme” (King Colonialism), in which Degou assumes a crucial intermediary role. Here, the allegory of exploitation and oppression by the pale man of the people of M’Bine Diam transitions from slavery to colonialism. The reader is introduced to “La Reine République” (Queen Republic), who governs her own subjects, while King Colonialism rules over his colonial subjects. These allegorical figures, symbolizing the enslaver, the French Republic, and the colonial administration, are distinguished by the masculinization of colonialism and the feminization of the republic, and they signal distinct forms of oppression that the narrator expands on later in the narrative.
While Senghor advocated for solidarity between the European working class and colonized subjects, he identified nuances and disparities in the levels of oppression they experienced, as can be seen in Violation. When Queen Republic is attacked by her brother Germain Bourgeois, a war begins, and the subjects (the colonized) of King Colonialism are called upon to fight the queen’s war against her brother. The colonized are also compelled to pay taxes and are subjected to forced labor to support the queen’s subjects and her war efforts, a situation the narrator equates to slavery. After the war, the oppressed rise in revolt, incensed that they were not only asked for their lives but also burdened with increased taxes and a greater demand for their resources.
The narrative culminates in a joint revolution born from the combined grievances of the queen’s impoverished citizens, living in abject misery and precarity, and those of colonized peoples around the globe. The narrator suggests that the pale citizens, realizing the urgent need for solidarity, must unite with the colonized before the queen manipulates the colonized to suppress the rebellion among her own subjects. They strategically raise awareness among the colonized masses, highlighting the stark inequality between colonized and noncolonized soldiers, not merely out of altruism but as a pragmatic and self-serving strategy. Revolution spreads simultaneously among diverse groups, which the narrator describes using color terminology—“the yellow,” “the tanned,” “the less pale,” and “the pale citizens.” Colonialism meets its demise, giving birth to a fraternal alliance of liberated nations. This transformation replaces the broken brotherhood that opened the story’s tragedies with a new kind of brotherhood, one uniting the free people of the world.
Literary scholar Papa Samba Diop has called Violation “the first work of fiction from Francophone Africa to have put colonialism on trial, as well as the church, the administrative, and political powers combined” (Diop Reference Diop1984, 126). Particularly after its republication by the FCS, the work was touted for its important place in African literary historiography, in the history of interwar communism and anti-imperialism in France and West Africa, and in the history of African resistance against imperialism more broadly. Senghor’s Violation and his journalistic writings challenge claims that the first African demands for independence occurred only after World War II (Midiohouan Reference Midiohouan2013). Midiohouan’s insightful study reflects on the role of Violation in unsettling established histories of African literature written in French by contrasting it with Bakary Diallo’s Force bonté and Ahmadou Mapaté Diagne’s Les Trois volontés de Malic, largely seen as pro-colonial early works of fiction written by Africans in French: “[Violation] constitutes the first text where, through the themes addressed as well as through the effort of literalization, a Francophone African writer seeks to affirm the right of a Black person to difference and respect of other people” (Midiohouan Reference Midiohouan2013, 169).Footnote 4
In addition to its communist and anti-colonial nationalism, Violation pointed to ideas that would later resonate with the cultural struggle during the decolonization and nation-building periods. The FCS’s 1979 brochure, in which Violation was republished, suggests as much, arguing that Senghor foresaw the need to promote African languages: “As we can see, Lamine … also understood the primordial importance of national languages, already in 1927!” (Front Culturel Sénégalais, 1979, 15). Midiohouan argues that “he is the first African writer of French expression to raise the issue of the acculturation of the colonized by the school system and the compulsory use of the language of the white master” (Reference Midiohouan2013, 168). Decades after Senghor’s death, his ideas were recognized, reactivated, and or: recirculated during the decolonization period. The FCS sought to rehabilitate figures like Senghor to suggest historical continuity and ideological affiliation with their own, but they also did so to help chart a different national genealogy, one that was distinct from that of President Léopold Senghor.
In addition to alluding to language and acculturation, Senghor’s Violation, through its generic instability, offers avenues for analyzing the forms of anti-imperial literature. Some critics, including the text’s original preface writer Paul Vaillant Couturier, have noted that it begins like a folktale, while others have observed that it “ends like a political discourse” (Midiohouan Reference Midiohouan2013, 160). Couturier describes Violation as “a wonderful legend” and as “cruel” as “children’s tales that form the basis of the folklore of all peoples,” telling “the entire history of colonialism,” which contains “subtle doctrinal qualities” (Senghor Reference Senghor2012, 3). Along with being unable to categorize it, Couturier points to the story’s simplicity and attributes to it little aesthetic value, describing it as “a simple narrative” “in an unkempt form” (Senghor Reference Senghor2012, 3).
In his autobiography, Long Way from Home (Reference McKay1937), the Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay recounts how Senghor gave him a copy of Violation. Like Couturier, he remarks on the unsophisticated style and content of the story: “He gave me a little pamphlet he had written about the European conquest of Africa. The sentiment was quaint and naive, like the human figures stamped on old-fashioned plates” (McKay Reference McKay1970, 214). Christopher Miller (Reference Miller1998, 27) sees the story as devoid of “subtlety or finesse” and as characterized by or: an “artlessness.” Brent Edwards (Reference Edwards2003, 233), meanwhile, cautions that Violation’s shortcomings and “experimental” form “should not be dismissed too quickly.” For Edwards, the book’s generic instability and simple form call attention to “the formal parameters of radical writing in the interwar period” (233). Comparing Violation to other texts of the time, such as McKay’s Banjo and W.E.B Dubois’s Dark Princess, he rightly argues that the form and genre of the text “would appear to evidence an imperative based on the conviction that writing a fiction … does a kind of work that labor organizing and more straightforward history are unable to do” (233).
Edwards’s view of Violation seems to echo what the leftist youth of the FCS saw as valuable in Senghor’s story: its communicability, its simplicity, but also its overtly expressive features, such as the unambiguous metaphors and allegorical figures. Short and unsubtly illustrative, Violation narrativizes oppression in a way that is meant to be unequivocal and accessible, despite its Marxist jargon. Papa Samba Diop likens its generic form to the Wolof genre of the léeb: a parable or folktale made to be told in public and discussed, since such texts serve a didactic purpose. Similarly, Couturier, in the preface to Violation, calls for the written text to be disseminated orally (see preface to Senghor Reference Senghor2012, 3). Yet the story also has a visual element that aids comprehension: it is illustrated with drawings that resemble the cartoons of the periodical of the French section of the LAI, the Journal des peuples opprimés; they are also reminiscent of the illustrations in Mapaté Diagne’s Trois volontés de Malic (Midiohouan Reference Midiohouan2013, 168). Violation’s unusual form is one that Senghor, and others after him, have sought to experiment with in order to develop an unequivocal visual and written language. The FCS seemed to emulate the formal attributes of anti-imperial texts like Senghor’s in their own publications. David Murphy (Reference Murphy and Murphy2012, li), expanding on Edwards’s argument, points to Senghor’s “search for a language and a form that would allow the critique of colonialism and also a recognition … that the anti-imperialist struggle must also position itself on the cultural front.” Indeed, communicability and lack of ambiguity drove Senghor’s—and his imitators’—choice of form.
Violation’s form of storytelling involves allegories, a folktale-like structure, moralistic and didactic elements, and caricatural drawings. All these elements denote an urgent need and concern for legibility and, to a certain extent, a visceral reception. In this sense, the form of Violation reminds one of a key feature of revolutionary writing as later defined by Frantz Fanon (Reference Fanon and Philcox1963, 167) in his reading of Fodéba Keïta’s “African Dawn”:
Here things are clear. It is a meticulous account that develops progressively. Understanding the poem is not only an intellectual act, but also a political one. To understand this poem is to understand the role we have to play, to identify our approach and prepare to fight. There is not one colonized subject who will not understand the message in this poem.
Expanding Fanon’s focus on the mix of the didactic and the visceral, which is intended to galvanize the colonized into combat, I see Violation as premised on harnessing storytelling and literature more broadly as another language for anti-imperialism. The text is both a literary translation of Senghor’s political struggle into a digestible story and a work of imagination with a utopian dimension. Violation is not, however, a sophisticated work of literature that attempts to impress the reader with its aesthetic features; it is devoid of nuanced and deep representations of characters, for instance. Nor is it a realist text premised on historical accuracy, given Senghor’s idyllic depiction of precolonial Africa as a harmonious and peaceful world, metaphorized in village houses that symbolize harmony and fraternity. Violation is first and foremost a parable about anti-imperial struggle, one that is uncompromising in its utopian nature and didactic aims, as well as unapologetic in its commitment to the political work of storytelling.
Although its plot may seem straightforward, Violation’s focus on raising awareness underscores that Senghor’s text is anything but naive in its intent. Thus, rather than assessing the aesthetic value of the text, I suggest we shift our attention to what the form of this work—authored by a self-taught war veteran who became an anti-colonial and communist activist—tells us about the work of literature in anti-imperialist struggles. In the absence of political and legal rights, the ability of writers to shift demands for autonomy and equality onto the cultural sphere helped gradually transform mentalities by contributing to the cultivation of what Raymond Williams terms an “emergent consciousness” (Reference Williams1977, 123). This was a consciousness that paved the way for such demands to be articulated in political and legal platforms. Indeed, literature, among other cultural forms, has often functioned as an important site for negotiating autonomy, political rights, and imagined futures while fostering national consciousness and anti-imperial “trans-affective solidarities” (Mahler Reference Mahler2018, 10). Joseph Slaughter (Reference Slaughter2018, 214) observes that “for Fanon, national consciousness was the cultural route to political internationalism.” Similarly, for many writers and thinkers, including Senghor, anti-imperial literature was not only a creative act of resistance but also a means to reflect on and rally people around political demands and thus to map out a “cultural route” to decolonized political futures.
Single-party rule and clandestine politics in Léopold Sédar Senghor’s era
Before continuing to explore the material history of Violation, particularly does this work better: its underground status following its republication, it is essential to revisit President Léopold Sédar Senghor’s rule and the political and cultural movements that sought to challenge him. The FCS was born in the context of clandestine politics that emerged during President Senghor’s single-party rule, which he called a “unified” party system. It began in 1966 and continued until 1974, when multipartyism began to be permitted in limited scope with the creation of the Parti Démocratique Sénégalais (PDS) by Abdoulaye Wade. A system of limited multipartyism went on to be codified in 1976, allowing three political currents to be represented until unrestricted multipartyism was introduced in 1981 under Senegal’s second president Abdou Diouf.
Throughout Senghor’s tenure as president (1960–80), numerous events played a role in his gradual consolidation of power. Notable among these were the dissolution of the short-lived Mali Federation in 1960 and the end of the bicephalous leadership of Léopold Sédar Senghor with his prime minister, Mamadou Dia, in 1962. Dia was arrested on a presumed attempted coup, and Senghor subsequently centered power on the executive rather than the parliamentary governance system that initially existed. Other critical events include the dissolution of the main opposition party, the Marxist-Leninist African Independence Party (PAI), and the cooptation and banning of Léopold Senghor’s famous rival, the polymath Cheikh Anta Diop and his political parties. The Bloc of the Senegalese Masses was co-opted in 1963, while the National Senegalese Front, was banned in 1964. (Hesseling Reference Hesseling1985; Rassemblement national deḿocratique 1999).Footnote 5 Leading members of other opposing parties, such as those of the Parti du Regroupement Africain (African Regroupment Party, PRA), were also co-opted and their political parties absorbed by Senghor’s party, thereby effectively transforming the president’s Union Progressiste Sénégalaise (Senegalese Progressive Union, UPS) into the country’s sole legal party and marking the beginning of single-party rule. Meanwhile, banned political parties such as the PAI had gone underground since the early 1960s; they continued their political activities from abroad and through the student movement. The university campus, an intense site of political struggle, was divided among different factions of Marxists, Maoists, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists, Hoxhaists, and others (Bianchini Reference Bianchini2019). In the 1960s, the University of Dakar was a regional institution with students from the former colonial territories of French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, and metropolitan France, many of whom were involved in political activities. The international student movement was in full swing by 1968, and with the dissolution of several parties, the university became a proxy for those who opposed Léopold Senghor to continue disseminating their ideas, visions, journals, and pamphlets. Many adopted the style and rhetoric of global 1960s protest and were attuned to ongoing struggles for liberation. They found inspiration in such figures as Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, and Mao Zedong and their calls for revolution, and students took part in various global protests and demonstrations.
In 1967, President Senghor survived an assassination attempt, and the subsequent year saw the unprecedented events of May ’68, with a general strike spearheaded by students from the University of Dakar and union leaders (Bathily Reference Bathily1992; Blum Reference Blum2012; Gueye Reference Gueye2017). The May ’68 events posed a substantial threat to Senghor’s regime but did not succeed in overthrowing it. They nevertheless showed the fermentation of ideas and revolutionary desires of the Senegalese intelligentsia and, more broadly, of those disillusioned with Senghor’s regime. More importantly, the years after May ’68 marked the birth of the Senegalese New Left. The most prominent political party of the New Left was the Maoist-oriented clandestine organization known as And-Jëf/Xarebi, Mouvement Révolutionnaire pour la Nouvelle Démocratie (Revolutionary Movement for New Democracy, MRND), created by Landing Savané. And-Jëf was the offspring of another clandestine organization called Réenu Réewmi (which translates to “the roots of the nation”).
The 1974 and 1975 crackdown on the leadership of And-Jëf led to the arrest and torture of militants and to the seizing of their clandestine journal, Xarebi (the struggle) (Bianchini Reference Bianchini2019; Diop and Diouf Reference Diop and Diouf1990). The FCS, which included many members of And-Jëf, emerged in 1976, in large part as a response to the silencing of opponents in the political realm. In this context, as one former member of And-Jëf explained in an interview, “Culture became a conduit for keeping the movement alive in conditions of clandestinity” (Interview with Pape Touty Sow, April 6, 2023). Unlike President Senghor’s political opponents, dissenting writers in Senegal were not jailed for their work. In the Cold War context, where artists and writers faced imprisonment in many countries for speaking up against oppression or for being suspected of having communist ties, it is noteworthy that the Senghorian regime allowed cultural work as a site where political dissent could still be expressed. As a result, cultural works, events, and movements became a prime arena for expressing dissent in Senegal.
Underground texts, such as Lamine Senghor’s Violation, belong to the cultural dimension of what was termed “the patriotic movement”: a grassroots leftwing initiative that rose to prominence in the postindependence period but began in the postwar and anti-colonial periods.Footnote 6 The cultural patriotic movement was restructured in the 1970s by the New Left, which was influenced by Mao’s cultural revolution (Wane Reference Wane, Bianchini, Sylla and Zeilig2023). This moment of cultural effervescence had features of the long 1960s’ counterculture mixed with its own set of concerns emerging from the decolonization and postcolonial anti-imperial context, such as shaping national culture, promoting national languages, and fashioning a Senegalese New Man. The cultural patriotic movement was premised on cultural nationalism and revolutionary decolonization, and it was rooted in communist internationalism and Third-Worldism of the post-Bandung era. Using the languages, styles, codes, ideas, and values of diverse movements and ideologies, the cultural patriotic movement was an astute combination of underground and official activities, which took inspiration from Pan-Africanism and the Black Panther Movement, as well as Maoism, Trotskyism, Situationism, and Guevarism, among others.
The movement gave rise to an unprecedented period in which youth cultural clubs as well as sports and culture organizations (Association Sportive et Culturelle, ASC) became, as Mamadou Diouf (Reference Diouf, Prakash and Kruse2008, 356) has noted, “sites of refuge for political dissidence.” Clandestine and alternative presses emerged, challenging the dominant party’s media hegemony. Scholars, writers, and artists promoted the use of African languages in education and in literature, and members of the movement led literacy campaigns, published, translated, and smuggled texts deemed seditious into the country, and distributed them through underground methods.
The FCS was a “historical culmination” (Wane Reference Wane, Bianchini, Sylla and Zeilig2023) of this larger cultural patriotic movement. Between 1976 and 1984, it imposed itself as a movement and a trend, commonly known as Caada-gi. According to a former member of And-Jëf, the regime could not curtail the cultural movement precisely because it was so diffuse. Cultural work became a form of underground resistance contributing to broader global decolonization efforts. Political acts that could not be carried out openly—those that would have been met with repression, resistance, or censorship—were instead displaced onto the cultural realm, which was harder to curtail. Cultural expression was thus used as a conduit for political action.
The FCS’s decision to republish Lamine Senghor’s Violation in 1979 arose from this context of interconnected political, social, and cultural activity, which shaped and was shaped by nation-building efforts that occurred in the midst of the decolonization movement and anti-imperialist struggle against regimes deemed neocolonial. Lamine Senghor’s text, which was written before the decolonization movement, was redeployed by FCS members to oppose President Léopold Senghor’s nation-building project. By tracing the material life of the text to the work of the FCS and the Senegalese New Left, we can identify Violation as a cultural work that became a site for underground political action.
The FCS used music, poetry, and other forms of expression to convey their ideas. They published three poetry anthologies, one in Wolof and two in French: Téérebtànnu Taalifu xare Senegaal (May 1977); Anthologie de la poésie sénégalaise de combat (July 1978); and Les Braises rouges qui chantent anthologie de poèmes révolutionnaires (August 1980). The poems were signed with pseudonyms. The movement’s manifesto, Manifeste du front culturel sénégalais, was published in November 1977; authored collectively and distributed underground. In addition to the brochure about Lamine Senghor (July 1979), the FCS also published a brochure about Aline Sitoe Diatta (September 1980).
In contrast to the public events organized by the FCS, the texts it produced were printed using underground methods and circulated through clandestine networks to avoid authorities uncovering their origin and the funds used to create these documents, as well as FCS members’ connections to other clandestine organizations. To avoid exposing their clandestine networks, members of the FCS dropped off copies of their texts at night in front of the homes of sympathizers and gave them to students who could bring them to Europe to be distributed in leftist bookstores (Interview with El Hadj Momar Samb, August 23, 2022). French officials (who ironically worked in Senegal under France’s neocolonial cooperation agreements but were sympathetic to the anti-imperial struggle) also smuggled underground materials and texts that had been banned by the authorities (Interview with Oumar Cherif Diop, March 14, 2023).
Violation’s clandestine circulation in French West Africa in 1927 and its first republication by the FCS in Senegal in 1979, using underground publishing methods and semi-clandestine networks, shed significant light on the broader history of Senegal’s anti-imperialism. In their goal to advance their national democratic movement through a cultural revolution, the FCS bestowed a “retrospective significance” (Trouillot Reference Trouillot1995, 26) on Senghor’s work and connected it to their own movement. They argued that there was a long-running conspiracy to silence Senghor, stretching from the interwar period to their own era, in the 1970s:
One understands why the reactionary classes in power since the colonial period maintain a conspiracy of silence around Lamine Senghor after [they] practically assassinated him in 1927. The revisionists of the French Communist Party (PCF) make common cause with them! Is it surprising? Today, the Senegalese National Democratic Movement shatters this wall of silence into a thousand pieces. It brings to the largest popular masses the work of this worthy representative of the people. (Front Culturel Sénégalais 1979, 6)
The FCS’s impassioned statement and their 1979 republication of Senghor’s Violation generated a narrative about the underground life of this text and the broader suppression of its author’s legacy. The organization hoped to unsilence the past, but, ironically, it could only do so by producing the text underground, thus making the originally clandestine brochure from the colonial period an underground text in the postcolonial context. This “double silencing” through secretive publication and circulation methods arguably hindered the FCS’s goal of popularizing Senghor and claiming his rightful place as a national hero.
The underground lives of La Violation d’un pays
The FCS’s efforts to resurrect Senghor from the silenced past through their republication of La Violation d’un pays is a story written into the material history of the text itself. However, my own “chronicle of a resurrection,” like Midiohouan’s, is sure to be somewhat incomplete. That is because underground texts and the processes that led to their production are rarely fully recoverable given that secrecy is encoded in their very making. Greg Childs (Reference Childs2015, 38), who explores the limits of archival retrieval by emphasizing the production of secrecy as distinct from that of silences, calls for analytical nuance between the two. He maintains that silences can be omissions, whereas secrets are intentional. While what has been “silenced can be uncovered,” secrets “are perhaps better understood as attempts to keep certain facts and events from ever being registered, written, or knowable” (Childs Reference Childs2015, 38). Rather than treating secrets as something to be uncovered, Childs suggests approaching secrecy as an integral part of the context under study. The underground republication of Senghor’s Violation, for instance, involved secrecy, including the anonymity of the editors and the conditions of the text’s retrieval and reproduction. My affiliative reconstruction of the work is therefore bound to be a tale of the role of secrecy and of underground methods in anti-imperial cultural and political movements. Tracing the many lives of Violation therefore illuminates the labor and the limits of producing knowledge from the underground.
The FCS’s 1979 underground brochure on Lamine Senghor did, however, lead to new scholarship on the writer and activist, even if he remained relatively unknown outside of certain circles. Midiohouan (Reference Midiohouan2013, 142) argues that Senghor’s Violation is “probably the first document revealing that the activist had tried his hand at literature.” In his seminal 1984 article, “Un texte sénégalais inconnu: La Violation d’un pays de Lamine Senghor,” for example, Papa Samba Diop describes the FCS’s brochure laconically as a “document available at the Research and Documentation Center of Senegal in Saint-Louis” (124). Diop, who presents Violation as “a recent discovery,” does not provide information about the origins of the FCS’s brochure or its authors, likely because the brochure’s paratext is intentionally mysterious (see Figure 2); meanwhile, Midiohouan points to the document’s “very limited distribution” (Reference Goldblatt2019, 142). As the reception of this text indicates, the FCS’s brochure largely succeeded in obscuring its origins.
Cover of the Front Culturel Sénégalais’s 1979 brochure about Lamine Senghor. Courtesy of Ibrahima Wane.
My own excavation of the underground life of Violation helps make visible its origins in the cultural work of the FCS and how the text was disseminated outside of Senegal via underground networks. The story of Violation’s republication and distribution begins with Mansour Kébé, one of the founding members of the FCS. Kébé set out in the late 1970s to research the little-known WWI veteran turned mailman who had called for an anti-colonial revolution in the 1920s. “The cultural movement needed local heroes who met the criteria of staunch struggle against anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism,” Kébé told me (correspondence with Mansour Kébé on September 7, 2023). He first heard about Lamine Senghor through “political literature and some Marxist-oriented professors, such as Iba Der Thiam, who taught about the actions of Lamine Senghor, Garang Kouyate, Keïta Fodeba, Aline Sitoye, et cetera.” He went on to explain, “As I was interested in historical research, I ventured into this field without basic training or a budget” (correspondence with Mansour Kébé on September 7, 2023). Kébé conducted research at the National Archives, the university library, and the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) archives in Dakar. When he found a copy of Violation at the National Archives, he made a copy and sent it to the FCS’s external branch in France. “I had negotiated to access this document,” he said. “I managed to make copies … When we sent the documents to France, fellow students continued the research. Hamidou Dia, who has since passed away, revised the text. The first copy even had my own handwriting on it” (correspondence with Mansour Kébé on September 7, 2023). Kébé’s research spawned the FCS’s collective publication Lamine Senghor vie et oeuvre (Reference Diagne1979), which enabled a broader, if still underground, dissemination of Violation. Madieye Mbodj, who was also part of the FCS, recalls having to “write down by hand the entire copy of La Violation” so it could be reproduced (Samb Reference Samb2016). It remains unclear from which copy he worked and where his own handwritten copy landed. The multiple and differing recollections and versions of the text’s republication are part and parcel of affiliative reconstruction.Footnote 7
The afterlife of the 1979 brochure began in the African student movement in France, where future historian Olivier Sagna, who authored an early thesis on Lamine Senghor, learned about him:
I used to frequent the Présence africaine bookstore … where one could find, among other things, newspapers from the Senegalese opposition … and publications from Sankoré editions, created by Pathé Diagne. There was also the Maspero bookstore, which housed the essential literature produced by Marxist intellectuals from around the world, and the Norman Béthune bookstore, where one could find Marxist-Leninist (Maoist) literature. During this period, I met and associated with students who were members of the Association of Senegalese Students in France (AESF), which was under the control of And Jëf MRDN members. … It was within this movement that I discovered the brochure from the Senegalese Cultural Front (FCS) on Lamine Senghor. As I was getting my master’s in 1980–1981, I decided to dedicate my thesis to him in order to deepen and give a scientific character to the work initiated by FCS activists. (Interview with Olivier Sagna, on November 10, 2023)
What Sagna meant by “give a scientific character” was that the FCS’s 1979 brochure, despite being based on archival work, was a tool of propaganda whose aim was to turn Lamine Senghor into a national hero. The brochure is replete with hyperbolic remarks and presents an unusual mix of scientific research and epic-like narrative tropes in their uncritical glorification of his deeds. This might have inspired scholars such as Sagna to produce more scientific work about Senghor. The affiliative reconstruction of underground texts is important precisely because these documents—despite their unusual form and often propagandistic content—are the ones upon which more widely recognized works are built. Retrieving their traces, therefore, restores lost filiations while accounting for their networks of circulation and for the precarious conditions in which they were produced.
The material life of Violation in the second half of the twentieth century tells the story of a restored filiation between a Senegalese anti-colonial communist activist of the interwar period and the Senegalese cultural patriotic movement of the long 1960s. Such restoration matters because it challenges the dominant narratives that literatures of the colonial period written by African colonial subjects in French celebrated the colonial enterprise, and because it traces a continuity between anti-imperial texts written before and after World War II. The FCS’s endeavor, although important, was not as broadly successful as they had hoped. Its desire to popularize the legacy of Senghor seems to have garnered more attention in academia than in the popular realm. Even in 2021, Senghor was still described as being in need of rehabilitation (see Figure 3). This makes one seriously consider how the underground life of Violation might have condemned the book to an eternal process of attempted resurrection from a silenced past.
A July 2021 issue of the newspaper Le Soleil featuring Senghor, with an article by Sagna titled “Lamine Senghor, History’s Forgotten One.” The article advocates for the teaching of his legacy in “school textbooks” and his inclusion in “the pantheon of heroes.”
Following the republication of Violation, the life of the text took on new forms and became associated with not-so-underground activities. Its ideas were reframed and given new significance for the youth in Senegal and the diaspora in the long 1960s. Indeed, the FCS enacted the preface’s injunction not only “to read and have it read” but also to sing it and recite it, in part by infiltrating other organizations and their publication channels. For instance, the September 1979 issue of Baatu Penc mi (The voice of the public square), the journal of the Youth and Sport Organization (Association Sportive et Culturelle, ASC) of the Dakar neighborhood of Médina called Pencum Tilléen (Tilléen’s public square), was devoted to Senghor, celebrating what would have been his ninetieth birthday. The ASC Pencum Tilléen, and other ASCs throughout the country, were important for the FCS because the former provided sites where the cultural movement could expand its activities and circulate its ideas and underground texts among urban youth across the country. Through its covert activities, the FCS devised plans to infiltrate youth organizations in order to steer their cultural initiatives toward activities centering anti-imperialism and the creation of a decolonized national culture. Members of the FCS ultimately used the seemingly benign ASC, a youth neighborhood organization, as a cover and a channel to disseminate their ideas without raising suspicion. The ASC was thus a key node within the Senegalese underground network. Unbeknownst to many of its members, the ASC served as a channel to popularize the Pan-African, anti-imperial, and Maoist-inflected ideas of the FCS, as can be seen in the special issue on Senghor. Dedicated to Senghor, the September issue of Baatu penc mi endeavored to keep the militant alive in the minds of its readers (Figure 4). The journal includes biographical details that were not part of the 1979 FCS brochure, such as the death of Senghor’s son, Diène, or where Senghor lived when he moved to Dakar. This suggests that beyond the 1979 brochure, historical findings and writings about Senghor are scattered in different forms, spaces, and media that have yet to be fully retrieved.
Front cover of a special issue of Baatu penc mi, the journal of the ASC Pencum Tilléen, for the ninetieth birth anniversary of Lamine Senghor, with a reproduction of the portrait taken at the conference of the League Against Imperialism in 1927. Courtesy of Ousmane Faty Ndongo.
In the journal of the ASC, the rubric “lu pour vous” (read for you), authored by Vieux Diagne, summarizes Senghor’s Violation and notes its republication: “Today, this book … has returned to the homeland of the one who wrote it. Like a plant intoxicated with sun and life, it will grow on our soil fertilized by the blood of millions of martyrs” (Diagne Reference Diagne1979, 6). The last section of the issue is titled “poèmes dédiés à Lamine Senghor” (poems dedicated to Lamine Senghor). It contains three poems in Wolof and one in French that sing the praises of Senghor. One of the poems also appeared nearly a year later (in August 1980) in the FCS’s poetry anthology, in the last section entitled “Chants pour Lamine et Garang” (songs for Lamine and Garang), dedicated to Lamine Senghor and Tiémoko Garang Kouyaté. Praise songs that highlight Senghor’s deeds and discuss his legacy, these poems seek to paint him as a national hero whose legacy the FCS upholds and whose values activists should emulate.
The poems, which belong to the Wolof genre of kañ (praise poetry), offer a glimpse of how the anonymous Senegalese youth who authored them understood the life and work of Senghor in the late 1970s. They do not just record the heroic deeds of a given figure; they also seek to actively construct such a figure as a model. The poem “Kile moodi Jambaar Lamin Sen̈oor” (What a warrior, Lamine Senghor) seeks to achieve this dual function of offering praise and inspiring emulation, evoked through the verse “Say sët ñing lay woy te di la roy” (your grandchildren/heirs are singing your praises and emulating you). The assonance between the verbs “sing” (woy) and “emulate” (roy) emphasizes the author’s desire to establish filiation between Senghor and the postcolonial Senegalese youth and to claim for him a rightful place among national heroes. The poem paints Senghor as a hero, through the Wolof figure of the Jambaar (the valiant, the brave, or the warrior), who sacrificed himself for the oppressed. It narrates his journey of awakening through his experience as a tirailleur and then as a militant, naming specific places as milestones along this path, such as the Congress of the LAI in Brussels and the Draguignan prison, where he was incarcerated in 1927 following a disagreement with a police officer. The poem praises his behavior in the face of adversity, celebrates his determination, and notes the silencing of his legacy. It also serves, along with the special issue of Baatu penc mi more broadly, as a key historical artifact in my affiliative reconstruction of Senghor’s work. It shows that since the late 1970s, Senghor has been seen as a precursor and a pioneer in need of full rehabilitation by the Senegalese youth, who were in search of heroic figures and usable pasts for their nationalist history from below.
The editorial note to the special issue of Baatu penc mi demonstrates this. It likens Senghor to other historical figures such as Lat Dior and Aline Sitoe Diatta and uses language that resembles that of the FCS brochure:
The youth of today, bearers of the future, have the duty to rummage through every nook and cranny of our historical heritage and internalize the righteous virtues of exemplary men and women to fully assume their role. In this month of September, the youth of our country celebrates the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of an authentic son of the people: Lamine Senghor. (Baatu penc mi 1979, 1)
The accolades bestowed upon Senghor in this journal and the summary of Violation therein are an integral part of the underground life of this text: the special issue of Baatu penc mi shows how Senghor’s ideas and work were further disseminated, extending the reach of his anti-imperialism. Breaking down the underground text into digestible pieces, the editors’ summary of Violation furthered Senghor’s presumed attempt to make the story accessible and easy to process, which the original text achieves through simple prose and evocative imagery.
As I argued at the beginning of this essay, the photograph of Lamine Senghor and his fellow members of the executive committee of the LAI tell us something about the archive’s ability to gesture toward unrecoverable meanings and moments of history. In the fragmented and partially lost archive of the ASC Pencum Tilléen, another photograph from around 1979, which includes the image of Lamine Senghor, raises similar questions. A copy of his famous portrait taken at the LAI (Figure 5) is plastered on the wall of a courtyard in the neighborhood of Medina in Dakar, alongside anti-colonial iconography and other historical figures that were meant to spark emulation. Young people sit in what resembles a gathering of the ASC Pencum Tilléen, holding their meeting in a yard with a portrait of their anti-imperialist hero. This creates another form of solidarity, one beyond physical touch. The photograph is the expression of a transtemporal anti-imperialism that was central to the Senegalese youth’s desired cultural revolution.
Undated photograph of a get-together of members of ASC Pencum Tilléen, with Lamine Senghor’s iconic photograph in the background. Circa 1979. Courtesy of Ousmane Faty Ndongo and Raw Material Company.
While the clandestine circulation of Senghor’s Violation during the interwar period in the colonies may have furthered anti-imperial propaganda, it also showed the constraints on building anti-colonial solidarity. By restoring their filiation with Senghor, the Senegalese youth of the long 1960s expanded the activist’s reach via their underground networks, which left traces that have enabled my own affiliative reconstruction of the material history of Violation. This essay has argued for the importance of attuning to the underground as an analytic framework and a metaphoric space. In the case of Senghor, such work can help us better understand the uses and limits of secrecy, underground activity, networks, and methods during decolonization and the role of cultural production in political struggle.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ousmane Faty Ndongo, Mansour Kébé, Olivier Sagna, Ibrahima Wane, as well as Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy and Delphine Buysse, for generously sharing images and documents that made this research possible. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions, and to Erin Pettigrew and Mark Drury for their thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
