Only One Hat

Three months ago, in a bitter end to a beautiful friendship, Poet-President Leopold Senghor of peanut-growing Senegal, on the West African coast, booted out of office his old friend, Premier Mamadou Dia, after Dia had turned on Senghor in an attempted coup. Last week, in a referendum run off while Dia languished behind the barbed wire of a military camp outside Dakar awaiting trial for treason, the 56-year-old Senghor legalized his position as Senegal's strongman.

While pro-Senghor demonstrators chanted, "A single hat on a single head," more than 1,000,000 Senegalese shuffled to the polls and handed Senghor a 99.5% oui on a new Senghor-tailored constitution. True to the slogan, the new charter scraps Senegal's two-man, President-Premier system in favor of a single, strong presidency for Senghor.

The victory was resounding proof of Senghor's support among Senegal's masses, and it is made all the more impressive by the fact that he is a Roman Catholic in a 70% Moslem land. But the outcome was also, in a sense, a painful defeat for Black Africa's most distinguished intellectual. For it had been the bespectacled Senghor who originally installed Senegal's two-headed system of divided powers after leading the country into independence 2 1/2 years ago. Until he and Dia fell out, French-oriented Senghor* loftily ridiculed other French African nations that had chosen one-man rule. Now, whatever his continuing popularity at home, Senghor has probably lost some of his effectiveness as the leading spokesman for political liberalism in former French Africa.

The brilliant Senghor's intellectual credentials are impressive indeed. His much-discussed poetic works include Chants d'Ombre, Ethiopiques and Nocturnes. With Martinique's Poet Aime Cesaire, Senghor founded the mystic philosophy of "Negritude." Senghor was the first African ever to win France's coveted agregation de grammaire academic degree, and he served with distinction as a territorial member of the postwar French National Assembly. By all accounts, he has been brooding over the political circumstances which forced him to end his 17-year friendship with Dia and take over as strongman. But Senghor was not likely to let his sense of guilt get him down. He is, after all, a strong admirer of Charles de Gaulle, and modeled his new constitution partly on De Gaulle's design for the Fifth Republic in Paris. Perhaps with his mentor in mind, Senghor conceded in one of his poems that "absolute power requires the blood of the most dear being." In any case, by week's end he had grandly christened Senegal's new regime, "La Deuxieme Republique."

* His wife Colette, an attractive woman in her 30s, is from Normandy.

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