On the evening of 11 February 1927, on the second day of the inaugural meeting of the League Against Imperialism, the tall, gaunt, figure of Lamine Senghor strode to the podium to deliver the penultimate speech of the session. Senghor was a decorated veteran of the First World War who had risen to prominence in the mid-1920s as a leading figure in the emerging communist-inspired anticolonial movement in France. In his speech he denounced imperialism as a modern form of slavery and called on the workers of the world to unite and overthrow the entire capitalistimperialist system. By all accounts, his rousing speech was received rapturously by the delegates gathered at the Chateau d’Egmont, some of whom rushed to the podium to embrace the Senegalese militant who would continue to be feted over the remainder of the Congress. In many photographs from the event, Senghor is clearly the centre of attention: other delegates drape their arms around his shoulders, broad grins etched on their faces. It does not seem an exaggeration to claim that he was one of the stars of the show: a posed photograph of Senghor in profile, fist clenched standing at a lectern, was reproduced in the conference proceedings and was used to illustrate various articles about the Congress over the months to come. The novelty and the exoticism of his status as a black African, for a largely European audience, also surely played a part in this rapturous response.

Senghor had been invited to participate in the inaugural meeting of the League against Imperialism in his capacity as President of the Committee for the Defence of the Negro Race (Comite de Defense de la Race Negre, CDRN). The CDRN, launched by Senghor in March 1926, was a broad church in which he sought to bring together both moderate and radical members of the black community in France while also reaching out to subjects in the colonies, primarily through the circulation of the movement's newspaper (sent overseas in small packets with sympathetic sailors). The CDRN was working, like many of the other delegations in Brussels, within a “complex political landscape” that operated between the local (as expatriate communities in Europe), the national (representing their countries of origin), and the international (operating as representatives within a transnational political network, as Klaas Stutje demonstrates so clearly in his chapter on Mohammad Hatta and Indonesian nationalism).