Fodé Roland Diagne | Ferñent (Senegal)
Born on September 15, 1889 and died in France on November 25, 1927, Lamine Arfan Senghor was the first communist from the West African colonies of French imperialism.
Lamine Arfan Senghor was a “tirailleur” (Senegalese war veteran) born in Kaolack in 1889, who found himself demobilized with 100% disability in the aftermath of the First World War. He had already played a major role in the “tirailleurs sénégalais” mutiny in Fréjus, when they demanded better conditions.
He joined the Communist Party, which was on the way to becoming Bolshevized in the 1920s. An active member of the Union Inter-coloniale (created by the PCF at the request of the IC for work among the colonized), he worked to denounce and unmask MP Blaise Diagne, a collaborator of French imperialist colonialism. He wrote a book entitled “Violation d’un pays” in which he described the process of annexation of African countries and the collaboration of a certain African “elite” with colonization.
At the time, the Union Inter-coloniale, headed by Henri Barbusse, was conducting anti-colonialist, anti-militarist propaganda among veterans of the French colonies.
In 1926, Lamine Senghor created the Comité de Défense de la Race Noire (CDRN), which brought together all Blacks in France (West Indians and Africans).
Among the Blacks living in France at the time, misery and injustice were rife. For example, a “100% white war pensioner, father of one child, earned 15,390 francs a year, while his fellow Negro, 100% mutilated, father of one child, earned just 1,800 francs a year”.
The CDRN published a manifesto, an extract of which reads: “We want the Negro to be treated more humanely throughout the world! We no longer want our sisters and brothers to die ignored in European hospitals. We want them to be in solidarity with each other as they are in foreign countries. We no longer want the Negro people to be an object of exchange and traffic… We want… to have a newspaper in Paris to denounce before the world any injustice done to the Negro in any corner of the planet…”.
After acquiring a newspaper, “La Voix des Nègres”, the CDRN set about creating sections in the provinces. Lamine Arfan Senghor worked tirelessly, regardless of his state of health, to set up sections in Marseille, Bordeaux, Le Havre and Draguignan, amidst the worst difficulties and police harassment (some pro-French Negroes denounced his “Moscow activities”).
On November 30, 1926, L’Humanité published a telegram from the CDRN to the Enlarged Executive Committee of the Communist International (CI), in which the CDRN informed of Lenin’s election as its perpetual Honorary President. It should be noted that Lamine Arfan Senghor maintained a correspondence with Lenin before the latter’s death.
CDRN activities intensified, and a section was created in Senegal, where the newspaper “La Voix des Nègres” was distributed to railway workers and sailors, notably during the 1925 strikes in Dakar and Saint-Louis.
In February 1927, Lamine Senghor and Tiemoko Garang Kouyaté took part in the Brussels Anti-Imperialist Congress. Like Amilca Cabral at the Tricontinental in Cuba, he was one of the leading spokesmen for the anti-imperialist struggle against French colonialism in particular, declaring that “what you call capitalism is colonialism in Africa”. Lamine Arfan Senghor’s participation in this congress led to the withdrawal of his disability pension. But nothing could dent the determination of this tireless communist.
Following a disagreement with certain CDRN members, Lamine Arfan Senghor, together with Tiémokho Garang Kouyaté and their friends, created the Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre (LDRN), whose newspaper was “Race Nègre”. He resumed his propaganda activities, which had cost him two months in prison. His release had been secured thanks to a vigorous international campaign led by the League Against Imperialism and its friends. Throughout his short life, he was active in organizing around 5,000 African workers residing in the imperialist metropolis of France, and extended his organizational work by setting up militant cells and groups in Africa itself, a task continued by his Communist alter-ego Tiémokho Garang Kouyaté until his internment in the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was murdered in 1942. Exhausted by illness, Lamine Arfan Senghor died on November 25, 1927 in Fréjus.
Following in the footsteps of Lamine Arfan Senghor and Tiémokho Garang Kouyaté is a necessity for the current generation of pan-African anti-imperialist fighters in the second phase of national liberation underway in Africa, against the backdrop of the decline of Western imperialism and the ongoing advent of an anti-hegemonic multipolar world.