A city that keeps a country going: In praise of Dakar

Abstract

In part an academic reminiscence looking back at a lifetime of research into Muslim communities in and around the city of Dakar, this article situates the city within the contexts of Senegal and Africa while focusing on a seldom‐mentioned paradox: that Senegal’s emergent sense of unified nationhood is to a large extent predicated on the near‐absence of written texts in the country’s most widely spoken language, urban or “Dakar” Wolof. I discuss some cultural and political implications of this absence and, in the face of discourses representing the city as a space that is either exceptional or problematic, praise the productivities and freedoms of Dakar as both integral and indispensable to the modern nation.

Keywords:

• Dakar
• francophonie
• Mouride Brotherhood
• Senegal
• text
• Wolof

Notes

1. The famous director was then (1975) making the film Adele H., and I just happened to be on the same ferry, within earshot.

2. In Touba I still owe a great deal to Thierno Sow, who in 1966–67 was my interpreter and guide. One evening in his compound, after a hard day’s driving along sandy tracks and talking with villagers far and wide, he asked me if he might make a personal remark, then with an apologetic smile said that I looked to him very like a monkey: a friend for life. There were also many good evening conversations, on Mouride and other subjects, with Saidou Ba and Alioune Kane at the governmental campement in Ndame, near to Touba.

3. The national population of Senegal is 10 million people, two million of them living in Dakar.