Background
Assane was born on February 1, 1919, at Inor in Scdhiou Department, Casamance.
Assane was born on February 1, 1919, at Inor in Scdhiou Department, Casamance.
A graduate of the William Ponty Ecole Normale (teachers’ training), where he was first in his year, he went on to study in Paris getting degrees in modern letters and geography, and going on to obtain a higher qualification in geography.
He returned to Senegal in 1952 to teach geography at William Ponty School and later to teach at the Lycee Delafosse in Dakar, while studying for a doctorate. He went on to teach at the university, one of the first Senegalese to do so.
He stood in the 1956 elections on the platform of a Casamance separatist party, but by 1958 he had joined the Parti de Regroupment Africain, and stayed with those who wished Senegal to vote “No” in de Gaulle’s referendum.
There followed eight years of increasingly frustrating and difficult opposition. The PRA was crippled at the time of the 1963 elections and its leader, Abdoulaye Ly, gaoled.
In July 1966 a merger of the PRA with the UPS was announced, and three of its leaders, Ly, Seek and Mahtar Mbow, were given ministries. Seek was for two years Minister of Culture, and in June 1968, after the troubles at Dakar University, he was placed in the front line as Minister of Education. This was a typical Senghorean move as it gave the students someone they had supported as their minister, at the same time as putting him in a position where it would be easy to lose that support. It is to Seek’s credit that he stayed nearly five years in the post, in spite of a series of crises at the university, and the reward from Senghor was the Foreign Ministry.