African City Textualities

Ranka Primorac

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317990321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The stereotype of Africa as a predominantly 'natural' space ignores the existence of vibrant and cosmopolitan urban environments on the continent. Far from merely embodying backwardness and lack, African cities are sites of complex and diverse cultural productions which participate in modernity and its dynamics of global flows and exchanges. This volume merges the concerns of urban, literary and cultural studies by focusing on the flows and exchanges of texts and textual elements. By analysing how texts such as popular and canonical fiction, popular music, self-help pamphlets, graffiti, films, journalistic writing, rumours and urban legends engage with the problems of citizenship, self-organisation and survival, the collection shows that despite all the problems of Africa, its cities continue to engender forward-looking creativity and hope. The texts collected here belong to several different genres themselves, and they are authored by both distinguished and younger scholars, based in and outside of Africa. The volume explores the textualities emerging from the cities of Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Above all, it calls for an end to disabling hierarchical categorisations of both texts and cities.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

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

Donal Cruise O’Brien

Introduction: doing without a written text?

There are texts aplenty in Dakar: texts in French; texts in other international languages, notably in Arabic; texts available in government-sponsored documentation (always in French) or in libraries and bookshops (mostly in French) . Senegal is the birthplace of a major French-language poet, Leopold Sedar Senghor, co-founder with Aimé Césaire of the Negritude movement, member of the Académie Française and President of the Republic of Senegal from 1960 to 1980. Senghor’s political and cultural rival, Cheikh Anta Diop, historian, polemicist, defender of African culture and of the Wolof language, also produced his many volumes in French, and published them in Paris. These are only two internationally known Senegalese writers in French: there are many more, some very distinguished. But their very success draws attention to an important lack: that of written texts in the language that most of the people in the country speak, the urban dialect of the Wolof language centred on the city of Dakar.

Urban (or Dakar) Wolof builds on the language of the pre-colonial Wolof states which became the north-western part of the French colony of Senegal. Since the days of colonial rule (when colonial towns were established amid largely Wolof-speaking people) , and especially in postcolonial circumstances – that is, after 1960 – what was originally a language of ethnicity has become the dominant language of the country’s towns and cities. Urban Wolof borrows words and phrases from French, fitting them to African purposes. It is the language of the marketplace, advanced by the process of urbanization, by inter-ethnic marriages (again, principally in towns) and by its use on the radio, whether state or independent, which reaches an estimated nine-tenths of the population of Senegal. If you want your advertisement to get maximum audience reach, you want it to be in Urban Wolof.

And yet, for the great majority of townspeople, this urban idiom remains primarily spoken, and there is hardly any trace of it to be found in Senegalese published texts. The idea of Senegal as part of the “French-speaking” world (la francophonie) is misleading. Only a minority of people – approximately 10% of the country – speaks French with any fluency. French may not be widely spoken in Dakar, even less in the countryside around it, but in Senegal French is the language of written and of all state documentation. It is also the language of the elite (some of the time) . A more honest label for francophonie in Senegal or in Africa might be francotextualité, a substitution unlikely to have much appeal to the diplomats of the Quai d’Orsay. In postcolonial Senegal, as under colonial rule, the French language alone is the medium of official documentation and instruction.

Very important political issues are involved here, and remarkably little public debate. A cultural and linguistic movement of greatest importance for the country has gone almost unre-corded by the people responsible for the movement, people who are themselves often on the move. Not that the Wolof written text is entirely absent: there have been Wolof magazines put together by students at Dakar’s Université Cheikh Anta Diop, but these never succeeded in reaching out much beyond a university readership and had disappeared by the1980s. There has also been the work of the university philologists, which has resulted (among other things) in a Wolof dictionary, and some literary texts in Wolof. By and large, however, it remains the case that for the great majority of people, in Dakar or in Senegal, Wolof is the medium of speech. Senegal, it appears, can do without a Wolof written text.

And yet Wolof is much more widely spoken than any other language in Senegal, and it is beyond compare in its capacity to cross ethnic frontiers. City dwellers of different ethnic backgrounds can begin to imagine themselves as the collectivity of people who have chosen to spend most of their time speaking Dakar Wolof. Urban Wolof is the language of the schoolyard if not the school room, it is the language of government employees when they chat in the corridors of power, and it is very much the language of politicians’ speeches and radio broadcasts. Professional linguists have long urged the educational and administrative use of Wolof, and develop-mentalists have pointed to the many potential benefits of the government communicating with its citizens in a language most can understand (Cruise O’Brien, Symbolic Confrontations 120–40) . But the government hesitates.

One can well imagine that in the (perhaps not too distant) future, a Wolof literary culture is going to emerge: Wolof newspapers with widespread circulation, a Wolof mainstream literature, award-winning Wolof novels. Then there will likely be more demand for the state to turn away from the use of French, and towards an officialdom with state files in Wolof. But there is an unstated reason why the Senegalese state has been so very reluctant to envisage any serious development of textual material in Wolof, or any teaching in Wolof. As long as the use of Wolof remains a matter of individual choice – what one chooses to speak in the home or doing business in town – there has been no organized resistance to its use, not even in areas of the country with a secessionist movement, as in the (ethnically non-Wolof) Casamance region of the South. Speaking Wolof is understood to be your own private business. But all that might change if the state were to turn to the use of Wolof texts in government, teaching in Wolof in government schools and using textbooks in Wolof. It would be no use pointing out that Wolof is the only one of Senegal’s African languages with anything like the potential for nationwide use, that is to say, to the cost-effectiveness of Wolof in official use when compared with any other Senegalese language. If Wolof were to become a matter of state imposition rather than individual choice there would likely be reactions from the country’s other language communities. (Six of the other ethnic languages are “officially recognized” – the more completely to be officially ignored.) Status issues would be involved, as well as issues of political power, and people can kill for status as well as power.

Senegal’s language politics has remained peaceful up to now, and the spread of Wolof as an oral medium continues without let or hindrance, driven forward by urbanization and without any help from official promotion or standardization. Spoken Wolof is a matter of democratic choice, an aggregation of individual choices that amounts to the development of a national language culture not by state imposition but democratically, coming up from below, and in the face of official practices of containment. As the citizens open their mouths to speak, turn their ears to listen, a Senegalese national language comes into being. On the frontier between language and politics, this amounts to a major collective achievement, even if it is one that has been intended by nobody in particular. This is above all an urban achievement, the work of people of diverse ethnic origin who have chosen to live together in Senegal’s towns, above all in the largest city and the national capital, Dakar. Until now, this has been an achievement largely without a text, at least in the sense of text as a printed or written document. If, however, we were to stretch the definition of a text to include what has been painted on the city’s walls, designed for viewing, then we might want to include the wall paintings of Dakar’s clean-up movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the euphoria of Set Setal (clean, clean up) . A rich variety of imagery is present here, pictures of some heroes of anti-colonial resistance, of Sufi Muslim leaders, a number of 20th-century politicians, especially those important to Dakar like Blaise Diagne (the first black African to be elected to the French national assembly, in 1914, a man of Dakar) or Lamine Guèye (elected to the French national assembly in 1945, who also settled in Dakar after a long stay in France) , and no present-day politician except a small mural of Abdou Diouf, then the country’s president (somebody’s discreet loyalty) . But the walls were dominated not by politicians but by cartoons, portraits of Sufi Muslim leaders from the 19th century to the present, the Senegalese stars of World Music, football players and people of neighbourhood fame.

Here is a difficult text to read, but Set Setal has been understood by well-qualified Dakar observers (see, for example, Diouf) as a statement of protest on the part of the city’s youth – schoolchildren, students, the young unemployed – in the first place against the decline of the state or municipal services, the stink of the city. Young people who had been getting a reputation for street violence in the years immediately preceding Set Setal, and who had come to inspire fear in some of their elders with the burning of cars and the destruction of property after the controversial national election results of 1988, then with the killing of Moors in 1989 (of which more below) , wanted to make a positive statement, perhaps also an apology to their elders: we can clean up the city ourselves, if you (the city or state government) cannot or will not. There is also a local pride here, an urban pride. Youssou N’dour sings “Once I was a country boy, now I am a city man.” Some of the murals of the time can also be read as a statement of urban identity, including neighbourhood identity: we’ve come to the city to stay.

This productive quality of the city extends to a range of fields, starting with that of political economy. Dakar helps to keep Senegal viable. This case of urban productivity – cultural, linguistic, economic, social and political – is a possible correction to the academic focus on the African city as a source of problems, from crime and alienation to predation on the surrounding countryside (see, for example, Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou) . There have been some good reasons for a negative emphasis in writing about African cities. It is not too difficult to find lurid material, from drug traffic to prostitution, crime and delinquency, to point at the contrast between some people’s urban luxury and most people’s rural impoverishment. But one doesn’t need to see most of that as peculiarly African. There is then the question of government policy, the indictment of an urban bias in African governance, the short-sighted exploitation and over-taxation of rural producers. There is plenty of truth in this, in the Senegalese case as elsewhere in Africa. But while country people may not be in a position to riot, they should not be seen as inert victims. They have looked to possible escapes from government mismanagement and predation, above all by getting on the move and heading for the city. Urban bias isn’t just a matter of government policy, it’s a popular choice, and it isn’t leading the state to ruin: not so far, and not in this case.

Dakar in the African context

The problem of urban bias, of a disproportionate allocation of resources to towns and cities, in particular to capital cities, is a commonplace of development studies. International prestige is certainly a factor here, presidential vanities too: money is spent where its effects can most readily be seen. The flower beds near the official buildings are well watered, while the countryside is in drought – so goes the developmentalist caricature. But it’s not just a caricature: the state chooses to spend around the capital city more broadly, in food subsidies for urban consumers perhaps, with other political considerations in mind. This is the logic of rational choice in Africa, most tellingly set out by Robert H. Bates: if people in the capital city are aggrieved, they can take their discontents to the public stage, they can riot, they will get international attention, they might even have the short-term satisfaction of provoking a military coup.

The discontents of the countryside entail no such pressing dangers for state power. At least until the 1980s, the state could draw its resources from the agricultural sector through the establishment of marketing boards as obligatory purchasers of export produce, setting a standard price which left a comfortable margin for the board. If you lived in the countryside and wanted some cash in hand, there would be no option but to sell your goods to the state. Bates did warn that this was a short-term logic, which ran the risk of provoking the collapse of commercial agriculture, then the collapse of the state itself. But the logic of the short term has had its appeal to many politicians over the years, so there it is: the notion of the city (and the government) as a drain.

Dakar has looked like an extreme example of this type of situation, the overdeveloped town set against the impoverished countryside. One could start with the city’s location on the Cape Verde peninsula, the refreshing sea breezes in the peninsula’s microclimate a contrast to the often scorching heat of the mainland. As one approaches the city from the sea the beauty of Dakar stands out – although not so to every observer: I once heard the film director François Truffaut declaim on the Gorée ferry that we were looking at no more than multi-storey slums (des taudis à étages) .¹ So let’s keep the relative luxury of Dakar in perspective, even if we prefer also to keep our distance from the supercilious posture. The great majority of the city’s population lives a long way from luxury, far even from the modest skyscrapers of the city centre, out in the shantytowns of Dakar’s periphery, scraping a living as best they can in the informal economy, “getting by” (Ebin, “Getting By”) .

But there are advantages to life even in peripheral Dakar: subsidized staple food (imported rice) to start with. Even in times of famine you won’t die of hunger in Dakar. City dwellers, furthermore, have a sense of their relative advantages over country people, a sense of superiority that has its colonial history extending to the mid-19th century. In 1848, the year of revolution in France, the new government of the Second Republic extended rights of citizenship, including the right to vote, to France’s colonies (at that time no more than a scattering of commercial ports in Senegal as far as sub-Saharan Africa was concerned) . The rights were then withdrawn after 1851, under the second Empire of Napoleon III, but restored after the empire’s fall in 1870 and the advent of France’s Third Republic. From that time forth the citizens of the four coastal communes of Senegal, three of which are included within what is now greater Dakar, were to have rights which were denied to the rest of Senegal and French sub-Saharan Africa: the right to vote, by universal (i.e. adult male) suffrage, the right to justice by courts, the right to elected municipal government, even the right to elect a deputy to the Assemblée Nationale in Paris. Beyond the pale of the four coastal communes, the rest of Senegal lived under the more arbitrary colonial regime of the indigénat – native justice, colonial officer’s justice, good enough for the subjects but definitely not good enough for the citizens of the coastal communes (Johnson) .

Country people had time to build up their resentments at this kind of urban privilege in colonial Senegal, attitudes given an outlet after the Second World War when the right to vote was extended to the Senegalese hinterland. Leopold Senghor built his political career as spokesman for the newly enfranchised of the bush (la brousse) against the corruption and self-regard of urban politicians. As president of independent Senegal for its first 20 years, he retained the support of the countryside against some urban opposition, and could win national elections without the need for fraud. To rural voters Senghor was “our man” against town snobberies, even if he presided over a government apparatus which operated to the disadvantage of agricultural producers. The anomaly of this situation, with the people of the countryside as willing losers in the urban–rural imbalance, made its impression on me at the time of my first research in Senegal in 1966–67.

The research was on the political and economic organization of the Mouride brotherhood: a Muslim brotherhood of Dakar’s immediate interior, well organized around the memory of its saintly Sufi founder Amadou Bamba (1850/51–1927) and led by the genealogical and spiritual descendants of its founder. The logistics of that research were a regular reinforcement of the impression of urban bias as a central reality of Senegalese political life. With a base in Dakar (a small house in an inner-city estate built for lower-level civil servants) , and a working lodging with a pair of junior civil servants near Touba, the Mouride brotherhood’s centre,² I would commute on Monday morning up the escarpment and into the interior, a modest journey of a little over 100 miles. Not much in geographical distance, but this short drive took me into another world of religious imagination and another political economy. And then on Friday evening I would drive from Touba back down the road to Dakar: a strong memory remains of the moment when the road swings over the top of the escarpment and down towards the Cape Verde peninsula, the fall in temperature, the little breeze, even a whiff of sea air. For all my sympathy with the peanut producers of the Touba area and my involvement in their imagin...