Léopold Sédar Senghor

Senghor became a major cultural theorist of Négritude and argued that French Africans should hold full civil rights within a federal French structure rather than break away as independent states. When Senegal gained independence in 1960, he became its first president. Two years later he arrested his prime minister Mamadou Dia on suspicion of plotting a coup and imprisoned him for twelve years. Senghor then established an authoritarian one-party state, suppressing rivals until 1976 when he allowed opposition parties under conditions that favored his own. In 1980 he retired and handed power to Abdou Diouf. He later became the first African elected to the Académie française and won the 1985 International Nonino Prize.