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Barthélémy Boganda, 48, stoutish Premier of Ubangi-Shari in French Equatorial Africa, which now bears the ambitious name of the Central African Republic. It is a land of which it is said that the majority live in the Stone Age, and the advanced people live in the Middle Ages. The son of a witch doctor who claimed to have eaten human flesh, Boganda became a Roman Catholic priest, was unfrocked after he went to Paris as a Deputy and married his French secretary. A prosperous coffee planter and shrewd politician who likes to spout Latin phrases, he once gained enormous prestige by announcing just before an eclipse that he would perform the miracle of blotting out the sun. His dream is of a "United States of Latin Africa" embracing all of French Equatorial Africa, as well as parts of Portuguese Angola and the Belgian Congo. Of Africa's present boundaries, he says: "We are not responsible for the mistakes of the explorers."
Léopold-Sédar Senghor, 52, the grand old man of Senegalese politics, widely regarded as Africa's foremost intellectual. An opinionated and brilliant man, the son of wealthy Catholic parents, Senghor started his career as a teacher in the Parisian Lycée Louis-le-Grand, which traditionally gets the cream of Sorbonne graduates for its faculty. He fought with the French as an infantryman in World War II, joined the Resistance, became a literary lion in Paris after publication of his poems, Chantes d'Ombre. His second wife is a Frenchwoman. As one of the architects of the new Mali Federation which keeps its links to Paris, his hope for the future is for a commonwealth " à la française" in a time when Europe will once again be the world's "premier spiritual power."