And-Jëf / PADS (Parti Africain pour la D émocratie et le Socialisme - African
Party for Democracy and Socialism) was founded on 14 December 1991 as the
merger of four leftist organizations:
And-Jëf / MRDN (Mouvement
Révolutionnaire pour la Démocratie Nouvelle - Revolutionary Movement for New
Democracy), a Maoist movement founded on 28 December 1974 by Landing Savané
during the clandestine congress of the forbidden organization Reenu-Rew (in
Wolof, The Roots of the Nation), eventually legalized in July 1981
UDP
(Union pour la Démocratie Populaire - Union for People's Democracy), a party
founded in 1981 by Hamedine Racine Guissé, sometimes considered as pro-Albanian
OST (Organisation Socialiste des Travailleurs - Workers'
Socialist Organization), a Trotskyst movement founded in 1973 in France by
Ndongo and Babacar Doudou, as GOR (Groupement des Ouvriers Révolutionnaires -
Revolutionary Workers' Group), eventually legalized in 1982
Cercle des
Lecteurs de Suxxuba (Suxxuba Readers' Circle), a pan-African movement
founded by Malick Ndiaye.
"And jëf" means "Act Together" in Wolof. Based at Dakar and chaired by Landing Savané, the party won four seats in the
National Assembly in 1998 but could keep only two seats in 2001. Savané
competed in the presidential election in 1988 (0.25% of the votes), 1993
(2.9%) and 2007 (supported by a leftist coalition, 2.1%). Vice- president of
the National Assembly from July 1998 to March 2000, Savané was appointed
Minister of Mines, Crafts and Industry in April 2000, and, subsequently,
Minister of State under the President (May 2005-February 2007, March 2008-May
2009).
The flag of And-Jëf / PADS is described in the
party's statutes, adopted in Dakar on 15 February 1998 during the second
congress of the party, as follows:
"Article 4. The emblem of And-Jëf /
PADS is made as follows: "A golden flag charged with a black circle
inscribing the map of Africa on a red background in its lower half a black
star symbolizing Senegal." [...]"
The
description of the emblem is quite ambiguous. The website of the party shows
the emblem as a disk outlined in black, divided red-yellow by the descending
diagonal, with a map of Africa counter-coloured and the black star on the
diagonal. http://apdasn.com/ajpads Ivan Sache, 17 January 2010