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CHAPTER 1
Making Mobility Matter
Just as Dakar's infrastructural projects were beginning to roar to life in early 2006, a series of street-based protests further strained traffic circulation in the city. Students at UCAD had launched a series of demonstrations and sit-ins aimed at drawing attention to the deteriorating learning and living conditions at the overcrowded university. Public protests of this sort are nothing unusual in postcolonial cities like Dakar, where strikes frequently disrupt the school year and students often struggle to complete their studies in a reasonable amount of time due to années blanches, entire academic years "lost" to strike. Indeed, this public protest reflected a long legacy of UCAD students demanding accountability, dialogue, and political change in Senegal. This particular demonstration, national newspapers claimed, had been sparked by the discovery of expired meat lingering in a dining hall refrigerator and by the government's failure to disburse scholarly stipends as scheduled. Outraged students accused the government of neglecting its obligations to the nation's youth and took to the street in angry protest.
I found myself unexpectedly caught up in this commotion one February afternoon as I traveled via cab from my downtown office to an important interview in the city's Liberté section. After cursing the university students for their laziness and the state for its failure to provide, the cab driver reached into the backseat, opened my door, and announced with an air of bitter resignation that I'd have better luck heading to my destination on foot. Unsure of what to do next, I followed a small crowd of other urban residents past long lines of stalled vehicles toward the university — only to find the campus tightly patrolled and restricted by the Senegalese gendarmerie. A more complete picture of the day's events emerged that evening, when television news programs aired images of students, the vast majority of whom were men in their late teens and early twenties, clashing with military police officers who had been called in to quell the uprisings. This unexpectedly violent demonstration, the news anchors explained, had prompted the city to barricade roads and limit movement around the campus. In the days and weeks that followed this highly publicized conflict, urban residents struggled to make sense of this violent skirmish in a city known for its relative peacefulness. Rumors soon circulated that tensions had escalated when students of the prestigious university confronted the officers, demanding that the police treat them with respect. After all, they shouted, they were the country's future leaders. Police officers scoffed in reply, according to the rumors, insisting instead that UCAD students were only second tier: after all, everyone knew that Senegal's future leaders were all educated abroad.
At first glance, this scuffle between military police and university students might appear to be a straightforward symptom of globalization and its malcontents, a relatively recent effect of neoliberal ideologies and practices that emphasize the redistribution of labor, the restructuring of African economies, and globalized modes of consumption. But a closer look at the historical linkages between transnational migration, authority, and belonging in Dakar quickly suggests otherwise. "Senegalese have always been migrants," was the constant refrain I heard during my research. "It's who we are as a people." Indeed, since at least the colonial era, global mobility has been a mark of belonging, success, and authority in Dakar. All four of Senegal's presidents studied at some point in France, for instance, and top positions in government and the private sector have long been awarded to candidates who were educated abroad. In a country with few profitable natural resources — fishing and peanut cultivation have been Senegal's economic mainstays for more than a century — transnational labor migration has brought relative stability to household budgets and has enabled productive investments and exchanges that would otherwise not have been possible. Even the city itself is narrated as a centuries-old, strategically positioned crossroads shaped by regional and global movements of slaves, goods, currencies, and beliefs. Seen from this perspective, the officers' alleged rebuke of the UCAD protestors is not entirely "new" but is instead a reflection of "trajectories of extraversion" (trajectories d'extraversion) that have linked Africa with the West for centuries (Fouquet 2007, expanding on Bayart 2000).
Though concerns about transnational migration and meaningful urban participation are at the heart of this encounter, there is also more to the story. I have carefully framed this confrontation between state emissaries and university students as part of a much more complex urban landscape, one marked by growing concerns about urban mobility, ostentatious construction projects, government accountability, and substantive presence in Dakar. As students and officers wrestled with questions about leadership and migration, residents elsewhere struggled to navigate a city in constant flux, eke out a living, and make sense of an increasingly hostile political and economic landscape. This widened ethnographic lens brings into view the dense entanglements between differently positioned urban residents as well as different kinds and scales of mobility. I argue that students' anxieties about their place in the city are inextricable from state efforts to assert presence through large-scale construction projects, from rumors of government corruption and mismanagement of resources, and from public apprehension about detours, bottlenecks, and rising prices.
This chapter has two primary aims. First, I put contemporary Senegalese preoccupations with global mobility into historical context. To do so, I offer a brief overview of Dakar's colonial, postcolonial, and structural adjustment years. Touching down at key moments in the city's history, I pay close attention to how migration was historically articulated with practices and ideologies of secular governance, gendered citizenship, and urban development. I also attend to the ways that urban construction projects have been used at different points in time to make mobility "matter." The remainder of the chapter identifies a new moment in Dakar's contemporary history, one that is characterized by a steadfast commitment to "mobility" despite — and at times because of — its elusiveness as a goal and strategy. As grand mobility-focused projects and expectations clash with the grim realities of the urban present, there emerge new debates about what it means to live in, belong to, and govern the city.
The Colonial Era: The Originaire and the Mark of Mobility
Situated at the westernmost point of the African continent, Dakar has long been narrated as a cosmopolitan crossroads and as a city in perpetual motion. Long before the arrival of European settlers, vast trade networks that spanned the Sahara regularly stopped along the peninsula, bringing currencies, goods, and Islam from North Africa and beyond into the region. Cap-Vert was later incorporated into transatlantic slave trade circuits and then into the French colonial empire. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, Dakar had emerged as one of four key urban centers, called Quatres Communes (Four Communes), in French West Africa. Within the Four Communes, colonial officials built and extended rail and port systems, military installations, and migratory and commercial networks. They also experimented with "assimilationist" modes of citizenship and governance born of French revolutionary thought. By the 1860s, French colonial policies had produced two classes of state subjects in the Senegambia region: a cohort of African elite urban men, called originaires, who claimed special privileges and were accorded a status that approximated French citizenship in exchange for their "assimilation" to French cultural norms; and an unassimilated majority "African" population that was confined to peripheral areas and provided labor, paid taxes, and required permission to travel between the urban center and its peripheries. Unequal access to forms of mobility, codified in law, was at the very heart of the distinction between originaires and other African subjects. In addition to their ability to move freely within the commune, originaires were granted access to the metropole itself, in particular to pursue educational opportunities that would help them cultivate identities as évolué (evolved) French citizens. At least as early as the colonial period, then, urban and global mobility emerged as the visible mark and privilege of an elite, male citizen-subject.
Spatial divisions and urban constructions helped to concretize the distinctions between colonial subjects. While intensive French investment in infrastructural development was, in many ways, a practical necessity aimed at better accessing, exploiting, and funneling raw materials to the colonial metropole (Cooper 1996; see also Gellar 1976), Dakar's broad boulevards and paved roads also provided expatriates and originaires with modern, orderly spaces for consumption and leisure that resembled the boulevards of Paris and that clearly demarcated European quarters of the city from so-called African settlements (see Whittlesey 1948). These two spheres were further distinguished through housing construction practices; while European-style concrete structures characterized "Dakar" proper, Africans lived precariously on the city's margins in impermanent structures without running water or other modern amenities. In this way, urban construction and development practices helped to give weight to the French Empire's assimilationist goals and to make visible and tangible colonial visions of society and governance (see Ralph 2005). What emerges from this quick sketch of assimilationist policies and colonial urban landscapes is a sense that mobility, construction, and urban presence and governance have been tethered together in some way since at least the colonial era. Moreover, it was through the construction and regulation of infrastructures, both global and local, that abstract colonial categories and visions were made tangible and visible to ordinary urban dwellers.
The originaire/ African distinction was not as fixed as these spatial divisions might suggest, however. In reality, the category of originaire was an impossibly narrow one, and it only became more exclusive and elusive with time (Gellar 1976; Coquery-Vidrovitch 2001). Even those who claimed originaire status did not necessarily identify with French cultural values, particularly those concerning monogamous marriage and religion, and their claims were thus frequently dismissed by the French metropole (Lambert 1993). Nonetheless, originaires themselves were keenly aware of the potency of this political category (243) and actively policed its limits, dismissing newcomers to the city as outsiders whose rights and claims to urban presence they found dubious (Johnson 1971; Gellar 1976). The deeply contested category of originaire was thus shaped as much by the colonial government as it was by unequal relations among colonial subjects themselves. It was as much a vague assertion of global identity as it was a very grounded claim to the city itself.
Moreover, the originaire/ African distinction was not the only one of social or political import in colonial Dakar; instead, it was one of many ways to configure success and social status. For instance, occupation-based class hierarchies in colonial Senegal valued work within bureaucratic and administrative offices over work in other sectors (Gellar, Charlick, and Jones 1980, 14). These colonial-inspired conceptions of status and social participation also existed in productive tension with indigenous configurations of authority and presence rooted in Islamic piety and practice and in precolonial modes of governance and social organization. Throughout the colonial era, there was a remarkable resistance among rural-based members of the Murid Sufi order to French models and values — a resistance that would, with time, shape and infuse modes of urban and transnational belonging and social status (Diouf 2000). Emphasizing the spiritual value of hard work, Muridism catalyzed alternative conceptions of belonging that gravitated around agricultural labor, centralized the relationship between religious teachers (called marabouts) and adherents, and extended membership opportunities to the masses.
My point is not that contemporary ideas and debates about mobility, construction, and identity map neatly onto colonial policies of assimilation. Nor do I want to suggest that these were the only formulations legible or available to those who lived in colonial Dakar and its periphery. Colonial categories and values were vigorously and relentlessly replaced, debated, reinterpreted, and rejected, undermining the power of the colonial state to authoritatively define and shape African identities and itineraries. What I am suggesting instead is that the contemporary link between mobility and urban presence that appears, at first, so new has instead a longer and more complex history. Indeed, as early as the mid- to late nineteenth century, both urban and global mobility were seen as a means of achieving masculine presence and as a public confirmation of these claims to the city and to citizenship. Within this context, private dwellings and public infrastructures emerged as powerful signs of belonging and exclusion and as technologies for sorting, restraining, excluding, connecting, and abandoning differently positioned bodies. In turn, these assimilationist landscapes further distinguished urban centers like Dakar from the rural hinterlands — a distinction that persists in contemporary Senegal despite the constant traffic that continues to link rural and urban regions.
The Early Independence Era: The Salaried Man and the Construction of the New African Nation
In his report on the 1966 UNESCO-supported First World Festival of Negro Arts, John Povey (1966) writes of the spectacular infrastructural and architectural improvements made by the host city of Dakar in anticipation of this international gathering of artists, intellectuals, and tourists. Describing his arrival by plane in the "fresh, attractive, sophisticated city" (4), the author appears as dazzled by the modern, urban landscape as he is by the artistic presentations and productions that were the intended focus of the festival. Povey marvels at the "handsome if flamboyant" new immigration office at the airport, at the legion of comfortable taxis that await disembarking passengers, at the city's fresh white cement and stunning new N'gor Hotel, and at the spectacular views afforded by the Route de la Corniche as one heads into the heart of the city. He recalls strolling past fountains and orderly squares in the city's center, through new downtown museums, theaters, and government buildings. These grand structures and spaces were built to preserve Senegal's cultural heritage and to promote a fantastic vision of the future inspired by the dominant ideologies of négritude, a truly global movement that valorized the proud aesthetic and intellectual traditions of Africans living on the continent and throughout the diaspora. Meanwhile, Povey briefly notes, the nagging poverty and inequality that characterized this former colonial capital was carefully contained, deliberately and "neatly shrouded from visitors' view by stretches of rush matting or corrugated iron" (4).
What Povey encountered was a postcolonial capital city in remarkable flux. Between 1946 and his arrival in 1966, Dakar's population had swelled from 190,000 to 480,000 (Lambert 2002, 104), and an increasing number of migrant workers had arrived, seeking seasonal opportunities or permanent residence. These newcomers typically joined other disenfranchised urbanites living in informal settlements on the city's margins, much like they would have during colonialism. These precarious spaces contrasted sharply with Dakar's revitalized urban center, called Plateau, where new museums, galleries, public squares, and bureaucratic complexes hosted a global elite. Just a short drive north of Plateau, the UCAD (then the Université de Dakar, still affiliated with the University of Paris and the University of Bordeaux at that time) was quickly emerging as the city's intellectual heart and one of the most prestigious centers for higher education in West Africa. Through the pouring of concrete and the christening of new institutions, President Léopold Sédar Senghor and his allies worked to establish Dakar as a critical hub of the global négritude movement, one that was dedicated to nurturing and displaying Africa's thriving intellectual and artistic spirit. These new structures also housed a highly centralized postcolonial state responsible for distributing resources, overseeing economic and urban development schemes, and defining national priorities and belonging (Diouf 1998). What emerged in the early independence era, then, was a capital city whose character was defined in direct opposition to colonial privileges and practices even as it was built on and often indistinguishable from them. It was a city animated as much by modern conventions of governing and building as it was by claims to a distinctly African intellectual and aesthetic legacy.
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Excerpted from "Bottleneck"
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