Refoulement in the French Colonial Conception of the City

The two decades from 1914 to 1934 saw increasingly heightened concern in the colonial state's perception of Africans as the principal undesirable element of the capital of France's important West African colony. Administrators adhered to a race-driven concept of urban modernity, one that was threatened by Dakar's growth even as that growth brought the city to greater prominence. State vision was for a grand capital, major Atlantic port, and modern city. This was expressed throughout the years of high colonialism— key decades for the development of Dakar—but was also accompanied by a current of concern among officials that the capital's African setting and social makeup could compromise its potential. As the men who staffed the colonial state attempted to hone their professional approach to urban management, they brought into their work a rhetoric around Africans that was embedded in the language of modernity. Within it, the majority of Africans were cast as inappropriate to city dwelling, making the generation of strategies to discourage them from coming to or remaining in town a vital aspect of running the capital. Part of the project of making Dakar what they believed was modern was dealing not only in the technical details of urban planning but also in the social attributes of the city. Yet, these ideas did not correspond to realities on the ground. Ultimately, the energy and effort devoted to making Dakar a modern European city did little to wrest the day-to-day power to shape urban life from the hands of those who lived it. The way in which this was perhaps most obvious was in the simple fact of Dakar's growth from the 1910s through the 1930s to an African-majority city, a process that stood in deep contrast to the goals and visions of the state.

In France, a reconceptualization of urban space began in the 1850s with Haussmann's transformation of Paris, but it was in the early decades of the twentieth century that its relationship to urban life, human development, and modernity was more explicitly drawn out in circles of urban planners, architects, and sociologists. As colonial administration of FWA congealed, the concept of professionalized rule took shape in Dakar, informed not only by colonial imperatives but by global trends.

The Second World War as a Window

By the time of the Second World War, Dakar had become a city that coupled unique opportunities and specific barriers for those who lived there. Its fluidity, which frustrated officials, was an attribute that contributed not only to its diversity but also to the types of activities Dakarois pursued and the ways in which they did so. The war brought about two shifts in the dynamics of transactions in the colonial capital. War brought about shortages and rationing, which aggravated the “just enough” world in which Dakarois lived and catapulted the issue of daily needs to the forefront of city dwellers’ minds and actions. The terms of transactions and access to resources were central to urban everyday public discourse. The grievances of the urban population regarding their daily lives also moved into a new place of prominence in the state's spectrum of concerns. Wartime generated intensified surveillance, with greater attention to the happenings of daily life. The war thus serves as a window with a special view of the city; it permits an understanding of the depth and flexibility of the transactional culture. The state became more vigilant about tracking public sentiment and activity, raising their prominence in official documentation. Those sentiments and activities put even greater pressure on Dakarois in their transactional lives. As urgency set in, a growing range of unauthorized actions emerged in the city, and preexisting illicit practices became more prominent.

As the seat of the government of colonial French West Africa, Dakar took on particular roles during World War II. It served as a strategic base and, with the regime change in France, as a Vichy stronghold outside of France.1 Dakar became entrenched in the political and military struggles of the war, especially as it became a target of Allied and Free French efforts to erode Axis power in Africa.2 Amid a global war, France also relied on its African colonies to bolster its forces, bringing about new experiences for African servicemen and shifting dynamics between soldiers and the French colonial state.

Urban Spaces and Selves: The Cape Verdean Community of Dakar

Urban life in colonial Africa involved forging selves and opportunities. Carving out economic spaces in which to operate was critical to the task. In a colonial context that foregrounded questions of race and identity, deployment of those concepts was inherent to the process of creating and maintaining economic opportunities. The jobs people occupied were significant motors of urban growth, and the holders of a vast number of such jobs were not autochthonous Dakarois. In the capital of FWA, wage earners and merchants came not only from Senegal and the larger colony but from other colonies, particularly the nearby Portuguese holdings, and from other zones of French control, such as Syria and Lebanon. Whereas those from Senegal and its region often built Dakar into a wider network of geographies of work and residence, those from Portuguese colonies and the Levant were immigrants whose intent was to stay. In many ways, the creation of permanent immigrant communities in Dakar stood in contrast to the city's tendency toward transience while contributing to the expansion of the city through the arrivals of people from elsewhere.

The transactional culture of colonial Dakar relied on factors such as proximity, origin, trust, opportunity, movement, and flexibility, and communities coalesced around those. It also was shaped by the attitudes and actions of the colonial state. Cape Verdean success in Dakar has much to reveal about colonial urban niche economies and the dynamics of categorization that existed under colonialism. Most important is the simultaneous prominence and pliability of colonial exercises in identity definition. In his study of colonial Dar es Salaam, James Brennan has pointed to a “particular ambivalence at the heart of British interwar policy” as pertained to understanding what the colonial state perceived as native and nonnative identity categories. He argues that application of categories was neither consistent nor well defined and that “the process of identity formation had multiple if unequal participants” whose motivations varied in nature. The dynamic he describes was present across colonial contexts as the very act of seeking to know, define, and control identity was one that could only be fraught with assumptions and unintended consequences. Steven Fabian argues that the specificity of place is a significant factor to consider in any analysis of urban identity formation and self-perception.

Foreigners, Intermediaries, Dakarois

Dakar attracted many immigrants from origins beyond sub-Saharan Africa— notably, those from Europe, North Africa, and the Levant. During the inter-war period, the Lebanese became the most prominent—and most fiercely debated—immigrant, or “foreign,” community in Dakar, as they established themselves in various parts of West Africa.1 Over those decades, Lebanese Dakarois placed themselves in sectors that made them relevant to other city dwellers’ needs and integral to the fabric of the city's transactional culture. The more locally entrenched the Lebanese became, the sharper became the exter-nal focus on their status as foreigners. It was the very ability of the Lebanese to harness local economic opportunities by serving the African clientele that not only made them integral to the urban sectors of retail and credit but also singled them out to the French. Their direct commerce with African commu-nities generated hostility among French commercial stakeholders toward the Lebanese, especially during a time of global economic downturn.

French business interests pointed most directly and aggressively to the role of Lebanese traders in rural areas, where the peanut trade was of great interest and importance to colonial commerce. However, the role of Lebanese merchants in Dakar was not fully understood or interpreted as predatory in that way. The urban setting presented transactional options that were broad and often hidden. Like Cape Verdean Dakarois, Lebanese came to occupy a position in the colonial capital's transactional culture that was difficult for colonial administrators to classify. They operated in an economic space both French businessmen and administrators had neither truly grasped nor fully controlled, seen as neither European nor African. The state, but most frequently French commercial interests, turned to the notion of the intermediary to define the Lebanese. The concept of the intermediary as applied to the Lebanese in Senegal became infused with negative overtones for French stakeholders and, at times, the colonial state. The concept was a powerful one, as it appealed to the impulse to classify and know populations. In scholarship on the Lebanese in Senegal and other West African sites, the term intermediary has persisted as a descriptor of the community's role.

Residence and Transience

Despite colonial ambitions for a European city stabilized through segregation that privileged whites, the realities of Dakar included a flexible, fluid model of residence. Living in town was broadly conceived. City dwellers of diverse backgrounds adopted of a range of strategies—including varying degrees of mobility—in this regard. Transience became a mode of residence, and as Dakar evolved, transience became more expansively infused into various aspects of urban life. The nature of transience makes it inherently elusive, and locating it in various aspects of city life requires a close look into the spaces city dwellers occupied. In urban settings, the most prominent of those spaces were places of residence, which in the colonial capital also entailed places of work. City dwellers formulated creative residential strategies in which movement and transience were useful. Likewise, Dakar's diverse residential landscape developed many features that catered to mobility and its consequence, transience. The commonplace nature of transience in the city instilled a fragility into housing arrangements, including those that were at places of employment.

Dakar's main civil court cases provide a window into the sorts of considerations and dynamics that often were hidden from view yet integral to urban life in Dakar. As disputes arose, matters surfaced in the Tribunal that revealed how city dwellers formulated their approaches to residence and maintaining working situations. The records show a flexibility in the practices of Dakarois as they navigated their pragmatic arrangements. While the colonial administration attempted to draw clear lines between city dwellers and everyone who belonged in other areas of the territory, Africans in Dakar pursued their own strategies with little need to define urban residence in precise terms. Many considered themselves to be from elsewhere, but this had little bearing on the fact that they lived and worked in the capital as Dakarois.

The civil court cases that Dakarois lodged from the mid-1910s through the mid-1930s reveal a number of traits in the city's transactional culture around housing. First, the arrangements made between property owners and renters were devised as needed and with no parameters at an official level regarding renting. Second, the housing market consistently suffered from shortages.

Transactional Relationships and State Racism1

In colonial Dakar, the intersection of urban African networks and colonial policies concerning African fiscal lives produced a local transactional culture in which informality was central. These dynamics were very apparent in Dakarois’ everyday money management. Colonial administrations in Africa created a system in which most financial resources such as credit were available through official channels over which the state had control and were limited or inaccessible to colonized populations. In Dakar, part of the mechanism of ensuring the exclusivity of the formal economy and the exploitative economic basis of colonialism was an ideological framework that cast Africans as fiscally immature, severely restricting access to funds other than the most necessary. At the height of its colonial rule in West Africa, the French state pursued the rhetoric of African fiscal responsibility to a granular level in its wage policy, marrying a paternalism that proposed a need for tutelage to shape Africans into savvy economic actors with an overt urgency to produce more and more reliable labor.

Colonial policies were fraught with unintended consequences, and as state efforts to keep permanent African settlement in town at bay ultimately encouraged expanding informal settlement, the French administration's efforts to curb African accumulation merely encouraged creative fiscal practices to flourish in colonial Dakar. In the context of racist constraints, which limited formal fiscal management and a wage regime aimed at limiting any form of real earnings, Dakarois focused on quick, adaptable, and flexible strategies of resource access. Social networks were key to such a system. People in the colonial capital forged opportunities with one another, placed in a colonial schema meant to create perpetual need among African city dwellers and retain them in the low-paid labor force. The many transactional court cases individuals brought to the Tribunal reveal that the ability of Dakarois to turn toward other city dwellers as financial resources was a key necessity in the colonial city. Particularly within the context of concerted state efforts to entrench Africans in a form of poverty prior to the end of the Second World War, maximum flexibility among city dwellers in their monetary dealings was necessary and commonplace. The French colonial state, in fact—and contrary to its own goals—helped create a vibrant informal system.

In 1960, Dakar became the capital of Senegal. It became an African city in the fullest sense, realizing a political status that matched its composition and urban identity. This book has shown that identity to have been forged by city dwellers as they sought to mitigate the racism embedded in colonialism to make Dakar a resource and a livable space that suited their own needs. This historical foundation, paired with Dakar's role as an economic, social, and cultural mecca in its region, poised the city for rapid growth once the changes of the mid-1940s set in. The capital grew in population, and trans-formative change in the city's landscape followed in the 1950s as intensive development took place in the waning years of colonialism. By the time of independence in 1960, the greater agglomeration that constituted Dakar had a population of almost half a million people, a milestone it more than doubled only fifteen years later.

Part of Dakar's outward-facing identity was one of transience and impermanence. The capital's involvement in local, regional, and global networks— and the movement of people inherent to them—only deepened over time. In the absence of significant natural resources on which to build a national economy, Leopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal's first president, sought to maintain the country's international standing, with Dakar at its center as an incubator of heterogenous human resources. Senghor positioned Senegal to act as a global hub that was hospitable to people from all over the world. Journalists, diplomats, multinational corporation employees, researchers, nongovernmental organization workers, and others replaced French colonial administrators and their corollaries as Dakar's transient foreign community.

For many years, I was among them, inserting myself further and further over time into the transactional culture, which had become complex and expansive by Senegal's fiftieth anniversary of independence while maintain-ing many of the attributes established some eighty years prior. As a transient Dakarois, I found myself participating in the local transactional culture that wove throughout the court records I read through each day. The prominence of informality, which had originated in Dakar's early years of growth, was embedded in a world that paired scarcity with prosperity and remained central to its workings.

In 1922, the Tribunal de Première Instance, Dakar's principal civil court, received a complaint from Diame Diop. It alleged that Makha Diouf had borrowed a bracelet from the complainant with the purpose of temporarily pawning it to be able to purchase an animal for his butcher's shop. Once Diouf had sold the product at his butcher's shop he would be able to reclaim the bracelet and return it to its owner. Still awaiting the return of the bracelet, Diop sought its restitution and brought the matter to the court. This ordinary case was just one among thousands brought over the course of the first several decades of the twentieth century in Dakar, capital of former French West Africa (FWA) and today the capital of Senegal. People in colonial Dakar approached the court to broach the obstacles and stalemates they encountered as they managed their resources and the networks of transactions in which those resources were embedded. As they did so, they carried with them ideas and assumptions about what was acceptable and what was not in the expanding social and economic landscape of Dakar. In this way, a case such as Diop v. Diouf was about more than simple reclamation of property or breach of faith. It was also about needs, practices, and expectations in a French West African colonial urban setting.

This book is about those needs, practices, and expectations. The lens it adopts is one that focuses on Dakarois’ strategies for living in and negotiating the city with each other and within a world of racism espoused by a colonial state that was self-contradictory and unable to achieve the degree of control it sought. By peering into corners of life that ostensibly were mundane but in actuality were central to an urban existence while minding the overarching umbrella of state rhetoric and imperatives, this book explores the contours of life in Dakar over the formative period of its development as a major regional city. It is not a history of a city. New neighborhoods and lines drawn, streets named and spaces reshaped, political debates and mechanisms of rule installed, port and the military installments—these aspects of Dakar have been examined and explained elsewhere, providing an excellent sense of how Dakar featured in the stories of French colonialism in West Africa.

Rooting Transience through Residence without Settlerism

Dakar was not a deeply rooted Atlantic city born of the earlier commercial era but a new city erected during and following the moment of colonial conquest, representing the new relationship between France and West Africa. France did not consider its major cities in Africa to be sites of indirect rule or places in which native authority as conceived by the state would hold sway. Rather, they were sites of France's power, embodied in signs of French civilization and ideals, which were not masked but overtly conveyed. French administrators saw the presence of their own as a boon and marker of modern urban life in their cities in sub-Saharan Africa, which they understood to be inherently nonurban and unmodern.

This chapter explores the complex relationship with residence that existed at the level of the colonial state, pointing to the importance of its ideas regarding two populations—one that it termed European and another that it recognized as autochthonous—in helping it project attitudes toward everyone else. It reveals that white residence dictated French priorities in Dakar, even in the absence of a settler dynamic, while also showing that the existence of a community of autochthons provided a language of rightful urban belonging to only a limited group of Africans. Dakar was not built atop a tabula rasa. The society that inhabited the Cap-Vert peninsula shaped the evolution of urban forms and dynamics, as occurred throughout colonial Africa. John Parker's work on Accra showed that many of the important debates that emerged with urban growth occurred not only between the state and Africans but within African communities, especially autochthonous ones. Working in Yoruba towns, Margaret Peil proposed a model for the interactions between autochthons and newcomers, positing the ways in which each adapts to the other by way of turning to different livelihoods. These are important perspectives that intervene in the tendency to perceive dynamics involving autochthons as ethnically defined or principally tied to land ownership concerns. For Dakar, autochthony influenced both transactional culture and the model of transient residence as well as the racial contours of French assertions regarding city dwelling.