On the evening of 11 February 1927, the tall, gaunt figure of Lamine Senghor strode to the podium at the inaugural meeting of the League against Imperialism (LAI). The LAI was one of the interwar communist movement’s most significant attempts to forge an anti-colonial front of nationalists, communists and socialists, uniting white Europeans and colonial subjects from around the globe. Yet, like other such initiatives, it proved short-lived. In his rousing speech at the LAI meeting in Brussels, Senghor denounced imperialism as a modern form of slavery and called on the workers of the world to unite and overthrow the entire capitalist-imperialist system. His call for a world of “no more slaves” applied equally to the exploited of the colonies and the working class of the industrial nations.
Lamine Senghor was a decorated Senegalese veteran of the First World War, a loyal servant of France who enlisted voluntarily in late 1915 but who later rose to prominence in the mid-1920s as a leading figure in the emerging communist-inspired anti-colonial movement in France. Throughout his brief career as a militant, he reserved particular scorn for France’s treatment of its colonial soldiers during and after the war, which was a central factor in his own radicalization. His views on the suffering endured by colonial soldiers was given greater authority by his own status as a “war invalid”, the self-description he typically used on the official public documents produced by the movements to which he belonged. In September 1917, his battalion of the tirailleurs sénégalais (West African infantrymen) had been gassed near Verdun, and Senghor had lost one of his lungs — an injury from which he never fully recovered.
Lamine Senghor at the 1927 Congress against Colonialism and Imperialism in Brussels, Wikicommons.
By all accounts, the Brussels speech was received rapturously by the delegates gathered at the Château d’Egmont. In many photographs from the Congress, Senghor is clearly the centre of attention: other delegates drape their arms around his shoulders, broad grins etched on their faces. He was quite clearly one of the stars of the show and seemed poised to become a leading figure of the nascent anti-colonial movement. But before 1927 was over, his health failed, as the dreadful injuries he had suffered during the war finally caught up with him and he died that November. Yet his political activity over the final three years of his life remains full of lessons. His brief career as a militant from 1924-27 illustrates the complex ways in which issues of race, class and anti-colonialism were intertwined in this era, and displays the radical purposes to which the identity of colonial veteran could be put to work.
Les Continents, n° 1, 15/05/1924, appeared in Laure Demougin, “René Maran essayiste : une légitimité par le journal”, Archipélies [Online], 14 | 2022.
The First World War on Trial
Senghor first came to public attention when he appeared as a witness for the defence in a libel trial that centred on the contribution of France’s African troops to the war effort. In October 1924, a Paris-based black newspaper, Les Continents, had published an article in which Blaise Diagne, parliamentary deputy for the four communes of the French colony of Senegal, was accused of having received “a certain commission for each soldier recruited” to take part in the war. In early 1918, Diagne had been sent to West Africa by prime minister Georges Clemenceau to recruit more African troops: the thinly veiled aim of his mission was to try and finally bring the war to an end while limiting the further loss of white French soldiers. Diagne’s success in recruiting 80,000 troops made him a hero both in France and in its African colonies, where locals could hardly believe their eyes that a black African was being greeted with the pomp and ceremony usually reserved for white dignitaries. But by the time of the libel trial, a growing number of voices on the Left and in the black community were beginning to question what they perceived as Diagne’s close relationship with the colonial establishment and the failure to deliver on the promises made to France’s colonial soldiers.
Lamine Senghor’s testimony presented the African colonial infantryman, the tirailleur sénégalais, as a man radicalized by his experiences who would now devote himself to denouncing colonial injustice. Shortly after the trial, Senghor wrote that: “Instead of attempting to prove precisely how much the great slave trader [Diagne] received for each Senegalese he recruited, they should have brought before him a whole procession of those blinded and mutilated in the war. […] All of these victims would have spat in his face the infamy of the mission that he had undertaken.”
A constant refrain in Senghor’s speeches and writings was the iniquity and double standards involved in the treatment of colonial veterans, and, in particular, their military pensions, which fell far short of the sums paid to French soldiers. Senghor’s position as a “war invalid” opened up a space within 1920s France in which radical ideas could be given a hearing. Could a man who had loyally served France, sacrificing his health, be so readily dismissed as an enemy of the state?
Cartoon from Le Paria, journal of the Intercolonial Union, 01/05/1922, Gallica.
Communist Anti-Colonialism
Senghor had been pressed to appear as a witness in the trial by the committee of the Intercolonial Union (UIC), a group that he had only recently joined. The colonial archives reveal, with no little irony, that he had initially been pushed to register as a member of the UIC by the secret police of the Ministry for the Colonies (the infamous CAI). It appears that the CAI recruited him as an informer in mid-1924, after his white French wife wrote in search of financial aid amidst as Senghor’s health deteriorated. Yet, within months, this gambit had backfired spectacularly, as the events surrounding the trial precipitated a genuine radicalization of his political beliefs.
The UIC was ostensibly an independent group run by and for representatives of the colonized peoples. In reality, it was controlled by the Colonial Studies Committee of the French Communist Party (PCF), and was launched within months of the historic split between Socialists and Communists at the Tours Congress in late 1920. Nguyen ai Quoc, the future Ho Chi Minh, was the sole colonized voice heard in the debates in Tours, and he would become one of the UIC’s most active members in its early stages. Yet, while the UIC was designed to demonstrate PCF commitment to the Communist International’s anti-colonial agenda, PCF support for the UIC and the anti-colonial cause was inconsistent, to say the least. By the end of 1923, a frustrated Nguyen ai Quoc had departed for Moscow, and, from the mid-to-late 1920s, the UIC began to split into separate national, regional and ethnic movements for independence that often sought to keep the PCF at arm’s length. Nonetheless, in late 1924, the UIC was still attempting to widen its appeal to more colonized groups in France, and Lamine Senghor’s rise to prominence provided an opportunity to reach out to the growing sub-Saharan African community, in particular to veterans of the war.
The 1924-25 campaign against France’s colonial war in the Rif mountains of Morocco was the arena in which Senghor would hone his famed skills as an orator. The campaign against the war — in which UIC members played a central role — saw French Communism finally attempt to prove its internationalist, anti-colonial credentials to an increasingly impatient Comintern, which regularly berated the PCF for failing to tackle French imperialism. Scholars have justifiably argued that the PCF hierarchy was not fully committed to the Rif campaign, which it largely perceived as a form of gesture politics that might appease the Comintern. There were, however, important individuals within the campaign — not least Jacques Doriot, head of the PCF’s Colonial Commission — who appeared fully committed to the anti-colonial cause. Amongst the other PCF figures who appeared most committed to the Rif campaign, we should take particular note of the contribution of Paul Vaillant-Couturier and the novelist, Henri Barbusse, author of Le Feu (1916), a prize-winning novel about the experiences of ordinary soldiers on the front lines, which was hugely popular with French veterans. Both men had fought in the war and had gravitated towards Communism via the Association Républicaine des Anciens Combattants (ARAC), a virulently anti-war veterans’ organization. Their shared experience as veterans created a fragile space in which a shared political agenda could be developed.
After loyally serving the PCF and the UIC throughout the Rif campaign, Senghor gradually came to resent the limited space the Communist movement devoted to black questions in general as well as to his own marginalized status. There were only so many times he could accept the non-speaking role or being asked to deliver the “fraternal salute” of his black brothers to PCF gatherings. Senghor decided that in order to promote the interests of black people, it was necessary to create independent black organizations, and in early 1926 with the creation of the Committee for the Defence of the Negro Race (CDRN), that is just what he did.
La Voix des Nègres, March 1927, Portail Mondial des Revues, https://sismo.inha.fr/s/fr/journal/253799
Black Independence?
After the CDRN’s creation in early 1926, Senghor crisscrossed France in a successful recruitment drive seeking to draw members of emerging black collectives, often constructed on an ethnic or regional basis, into a single black movement. Visiting the port towns of Marseille, Bordeaux, Le Havre and the major colonial military base at Fréjus (where trainee African officers were a primary target of his propaganda), he had, by late 1926, recruited — the CAI estimated — close to 1,000 members, from among a black population estimated to number less than 20,000.
The CDRN was a broad church in which Senghor sought to bring together both politically moderate and more radical members of the black community in France while also reaching out to subjects in the colonies, primarily through the circulation of the movement’s newspaper (typically sent overseas in small packets with sympathetic sailors). It utilized the language of France’s humanitarian, abolitionist tradition, mixed with the language of black pride that had been made popular by Marcus Garvey.
By early 1927, however, the broad coalition that had come together within the CDRN was already beginning to fragment. The first issue of its newspaper, La Voix des Nègres [The Voice of the Negroes] proudly and insistently proclaimed unity. But the CDRN was in fact in the middle of a long and protracted schism that would a few months later lead to its break-up, with Senghor and his fellow radicals deserting en masse to create the League for the Defence of the Negro Race (LDRN). The split in the organization was the result of complex personal, political and cultural issues but appears primarily to have divided the CDRN on ideological lines with the more assimilationist members remaining within a rump CDRN and the more radical, Communist-leaning members departing for the LDRN (this appears in part to have been a result of PCF maneuvering to drive a wedge between these camps).
The invitation for Lamine Senghor to speak at the Brussels Congress of the LAI arrived just as the CDRN imploded. In that speech, he would deliver his most impassioned critique of France’s treatment of its colonial veterans: “You have all seen that, during the war, as many Negroes as possible were recruited and led off to be slaughtered. […] The Negro youth are now more clear-sighted. We know and are deeply aware that, when we are needed, to lay down our lives or to do hard labour, then we are French; but when it’s a question of giving us rights, we are no longer French, we are Negroes.” Senghor died, however, before the year was out and it would take another world war for such a radical message to bear political fruit.
Image of a Secondary School in Senghor’s hometown of Joal, Exclusif.net, 02/11/2021.
Remembering Senghor
How, then, should we remember Lamine Senghor? He was a brilliant communicator of ideas, driven by moral outrage at the injustices of capitalist imperialism. In political terms, he spent the period between 1924-27 exploring different potential ways of rallying various forces against empire, while recognizing the specificity of the racial oppression suffered by black people. And central to his radicalism was his identity as a colonial veteran.
Biography
David Murphy is Professor of French at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He has published widely on French colonialism, its impact on Francophone cultures in West Africa, and the forms of political and cultural resistance that challenged it. He is currently finishing a biography of Lamine Senghor.
Bibliography
Michael Goebel, Anti-colonial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: CUP, 2015)
David Murphy, ‘“Defending the Negro Race”: Lamine Senghor and Black Internationalism in Interwar France’, French Cultural Studies, 24.2 (May 2013): 61-73. Special issue: ‘Racial Advocacy in France’, ed. by Dominic Thomas.
David Murphy, ‘No More Slaves! Lamine Senghor, Black Internationalism and the League against Imperialism’, in The League against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives, ed. by Michele Louro et al. (Leiden: Leiden UP, 2020), pp.211-35.
Lamine Senghor, La Violation d’un pays et autres écrits anticolonialistes (Paris: L’Harmattan, ‘Autrement Mêmes’, vol. 83, 2012).