Paris - Senegal's former president, Mr Leopold Sedar Senghor, one of Africa's major statesmen and a poet of international repute, died yesterday in France aged 95.
President Jacques Chirac of France said Mr Senghor was "one of the greatest contemporary humanist figures".
"Poetry has lost a master, Senegal a statesman, Africa a visionary and France a friend," he said in a statement.
Mr Senghor was Senegal's president for 20 years until 1980, but was equally known for poetry and philosophical work which expounded the concept of "negritude", or "black is beautiful".
Mr Senghor, who resigned as president 21 years ago, spent most of his retirement in the northern village of Verson in Normandy with his French wife. Police in the local Calvados department said he had died after taking ill in recent days.