Leopold Senghor
Without doubt, the most accomplished of African revolutionary was Leopold Senghor, the first independent leader of Senegal. Senghor never raised a fist in protest, and never fired a shot in battle, but he led a revolution that championed the autonomy of black culture while at the same time celebrating all that could be derived from France.
Senegal was the flagship territory of the French colonial empire in Africa, and as such, a great emphasis was placed on developing an assimilated society of elite blacks acculturated with French values. In 1914, for example, a Senegalese black man, Blaise Diagne, sat in the French Chamber of Deputies as a representative of the overseas commune of Dakar. Leopold Senghor also occupied that seat at a later date, one of a number of black territorial representatives present at the center of French parliamentary tradition.
Leopold Senghor was born in 1906 into a wealthy Senegalese trading family, beneficiaries of unusual liberalism displayed by the French towards their favorite colony of Senegal. He suffered none of the bitter experiences of racism so common in other colonies, French or British, and he began his education at an elite French Lycee in the capital city of Dakar. In 1928, at the age of 22, Leopold Senghor set sail for Paris.
This was the great Jazz Age, and the decades of Paris Noir. It coincided also with the Harlem Renaissance, a powerful, post-reconstruction cultural revival that Leopold Senghor immersed himself in, while studying in the great institutions of the Sorbonne and the University of Paris. There he developed his uniquely aggregated Franco-African identity, while at the same time stacking up academic achievements. He was designated professor of the universities of Tours and Paris, while studying linguistics at the École pratique des hautes études, a constituent college of the University of Paris.
Along with other black intellectuals and academics from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, Senghor began to develop the idea of Négritude. This, like the Harlem Renaissance, promoted and argued for black cultural autonomy in the face of European imperialism. This ought not to imply a rejection of French values, far from it in fact. Senghor valued more than anything his achievements within the French system and sought a symbiosis of the very best of both cultures.
Leopold Senghor saw service during WWII in the French army, although much of that time was spent as a German prisoner of war. In 1951, he was elected to represent Senegal in the French Chamber of Deputies, and in 1960, almost as a matter of protocol, he led Senegal to independence.
Senghor presided over no wars, shed no blood and suffered no military coups. He remained loyal to France, but a liberated African. In 1983 he was elected to the French Academy, and handed over power peacefully in 1980. In 2001 he died peacefully, and in many ways, that is the revolutionary concept he stood for.