French colonial Dakar: The morphogenesis of an African regional capital

By Liora Bigon and Xavier Ricou

Chronicles the design of Dakar as a regional capital, and suggests a connection between the French colonial doctrines of assimilation and association and French colonial planning and architectural policies in sub-Saharan Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784997861

Liora Bigon

Liora Bigon is a Research Fellow in European Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Book preview

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General editor: Andrew S. Thompson

Founding editor: John M. MacKenzie

When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

French colonial Dakar

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SELECTED TITLES AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES

WRITING IMPERIAL HISTORIES

ed. Andrew S. Thompson

MUSEUMS AND EMPIRE

Natural history, human cultures and colonial identities

John M. MacKenzie

MISSIONARY FAMILIES

Race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier

Emily J. Manktelow

THE COLONISATION OF TIME

Ritual, routine and resistance in the British Empire

Giordano Nanni

BRITISH CULTURE AND THE END OF EMPIRE

ed. Stuart Ward

SCIENCE, RACE RELATIONS AND RESISTANCE

Britain, 1870–1914

Douglas A. Lorimer

GENTEEL WOMEN

Empire and domestic material culture, 1840−1910

Dianne Lawrence

EUROPEAN EMPIRES AND THE PEOPLE

Popular responses to imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy

ed. John M. MacKenzie

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

ed. Saul Dubow

French colonial Dakar

The morphogenesis of an African regional capital

Liora Bigon

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Liora Bigon 2016

The right of Liora Bigon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 978 0 7190 9935 9 hardback

First published 2016

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

Contents

List of figures

Foreword by Xavier Ricou

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

1 Introduction: French colonial Dakar: the morphogenesis of an African regional capital

2 Planting the flag and military planning in imperial Dakar: asymmetries, uncertainties, illusions

3 Street naming, infectious diseases and planning in early colonial Dakar: segregationist insights

4 The quest for architectural style for French West Africa: invented traditions and ideologies in colonial Dakar

5 Afterword: Dakar’s ‘old city’ and beyond

Appendix. Key events in colonial Dakar, 1850s–1930s

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1.1 Colonial West Africa (map drawn by the author).

1.2 Senegal, including the former Four Communes (map drawn by the author).

1.3 An old renovated façade of an eighteenth-century house of a European merchant/métis in Saint-Louis, Senegal (author’s photo).

2.1 Pre-colonial Senegal and the Wolof empire (map drawn by the author).

2.2 Pre-colonial Ndakaru, map drawn by Faidherbe in 1853 and titled ‘The village of Dakar’ (courtesy of the Archives Nationales du Sénégal).

2.3 Drawing made by a French visitor to Ndakaru in 1839, entitled ‘Hut of the village chief in Dakar’ (redrawn by the author according to the original held at the Archives Nationales du Sénégal).

2.4 Engraving made by a French visitor to Dakar in 1862, entitled ‘View of the Mission of Dakar’ (private collection).

2.5 Dakar in 1876 showing the town’s demarcated empty lots (redrawn by the author according to the original at Cambridge University Library, Map Collection, Maps 723.01.3481).

2.6 Typical French fortresses in Senegal and French Sudan (Mali), the 1850s (composed by the author).

2.7 Residential house in Djenné, the 1960s, exemplifying the ‘Sudanese’ architectural style (courtesy of Marli Shamir).

2.8 Tata in Tiong (drawn by the author according to an engraving from the late nineteenth century, contained in Thierno Mouctar Ba, Architecture militaire traditionnelle et poliorcétique dans le Soudan occidental du XVIIe à la fin du XIXe siècle (Yaoundé: Editions Clé, 1985), p. 163).

2.9 Plan of Hann’s agronomic station, established in January 1870 by the French Corps of Engineers (courtesy of the Archives Nationales du Sénégal).

2.10 The historical promenades in Gorée (baobab trees) and Saint-Louis (coconut trees) (photos by the author).

2.11 Street scene on Dakar’s Plateau: historical postcard (private collection) and a recent photo (by the author).

2.12 Médine, showing the French fortress to the right of the indigenous settlement on the bank of the Upper Senegal River, 1864 (courtesy of the Archives Nationales du Sénégal).

2.13 Late-nineteenth-century casern located in Dakar’s city centre (photo by the author).

2.14 Part of a plan showing the floors of the casern illustrated in Figure 2.13, drawn in 1901 (courtesy of the Archives Nationales du Sénégal).

2.15 Drawing of the façade of one of the straw barracks erected in the military camp of N’dar Tout, Saint-Louis (courtesy of the Archives Nationales du Sénégal).

2.16 Pinet-Laprade’s master plan for Dakar, 1862 (private collection).

2.17 Dakar’s major public works projects of the 1890s, centred on the waterworks, the railroad, and the military and commercial ports (private collection).

3.1 The three main quarters and street names in early colonial Dakar, in the 1910s (by the author).

3.2 Recent photo of rue du Docteur Roux, Dakar. Most of the colonial street names in the city centre were preserved following independence (photo by the author).

3.3 Plan of Dakar in 1915, lacking the newly established Médina quarter of 1914 (courtesy of the Archives Nationales du Sénégal).

3.4 Lebu huts in Dakar in the 1910s. Fortier’s postcard (private collection).

3.5 House in Dakar’s Médina on the crossroads of streets 5 and 8. The address is handwritten on the wall by the occupant to promote his business (photo by the author).

3.6 Extracts based on Plan of Saint-Louis, 1884, showing the separation in the status of the built areas for the purpose of taxation and expropriation (map redrawn by the author according to the original at The National Archives, Kew, CO 700/West Africa 24).

3.7 The displacement of the Lebu quarters from Dakar’s city centre by the early twentieth century (map drawn by the author based on Assane Seck, Dakar: Métropole ouest-africaine (Dakar: IFAN, 1970), p. 129).

3.8 The inauguration of the wide, tree-lined avenue Gambetta in Dakar, 1912, as part of the assainissement projects (courtesy of the Archives Nationales du Sénégal).

3.9 One of the first residences of the newly established Médina, 1915. Notice the opening words of the Quranic sura al-Fatihah on the Gable (courtesy of the Archives Nationales du Sénégal).

3.10 Part of a map showing the Médina’s orthogonal plan, 1916 (courtesy of the Archives Nationales du Sénégal).

3.11 Intersection of streets in the Médina (photo by the author).

3.12 One of Lebu’s original households, still existing today, on Dakar’s Plateau (photo by the author).

3.13 The 1937 art deco monumental façade of Institut Pasteur, Dakar (photo by the author).

4.1 Plan of Kermel’s original structure, 1865 (courtesy of the Archives Nationales du Sénégal).

4.2 French postcard from the 1930s showing the neo-classical Municipal Theatre in Algiers, built for the French expatriates in 1853 on place de la République (author’s collection).

4.3 French postcard from 1928 showing Dakar’s Palais du Gouverneur Général, 1908 (author’s collection).

4.4 Senegal’s Presidential Palace in Dakar, today (photo by the author).

4.5 Dakar’s Chamber of Commerce (bulit 1910), today (photo by the author).

4.6 A present-day photo of Dakar’s Court of Justice in the 1910s, now Senegal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (photo by the author).

4.7 Dakar’s town hall (built 1914), today (photo by the author).

4.8 Monument Thérèse Nars on Dakar’s Plateau, today (photo by the author).

4.9 Monument to Van Vollenhoven in Dakar (erected 1921), today (photo by the author).

4.10 French postcard from the 1940s showing neo-Moorish colonial architecture in Algiers: the main post office, 1910 (author’s collection).

4.11 Postcard showing marché Kermel in Dakar in the 1910s (author’s collection).

4.12 Marché Kermel today, with one of its three entrance portals (photo by the author).

4.13 Kermel’s ruins following the 1993 fire, Le Franc, 1994 (courtesy of California Newsreel, all rights reserved).

4.14 A 1930s postcard of marché Sandaga in Dakar (author’s collection).

4.15 Architectural detail of Bamako’s main market, built in the neo-Sudanese style, the 1920s (private collection).

4.16 Section of Gidan Makama Museum in Kano, Nigeria, today (photo by the author).

4.17 The façade of the Polyclinique of the Médina, Dakar (built 1932), today (photo by the author).

4.18 The old neo-Sudanese building of Dakar’s Maternité, Dantec Hospital in the 1930s (photo by the author).

4.19 Section of Malik Sy School, Dakar in the 1930s (photo by the author).

4.20 Dakar Cathedral (designed 1913, built 1936), today (photo by the author).

4.21 IFAN Museum, Dakar (built 1938), today (photo by the author).

4.22 Marché Sandaga (built 1934), today (photo by the author).

5.1 The present administrative division of Dakar Region (map drawn by the author).

5.2 Building made of temporary materials on the outskirts of Pikine (photo by the author).

5.3 Modernist architecture in Dakar, 1930s–1950s: the old international-style post office, Hotel La Croix du Sud, and Building Administratif of the Senegalese Government (photos by the author).

5.4 The cityscape of Dakar, as seen from the city centre inland. Notice the Great Mosque (1963) at the centre, and BCEAO to the right (photo by the author).

5.5 The ‘Third Millennium Gate’, Dakar, Corniche Ouest, 2000. Designed by Senegalese architect Pierre Goudiaby Atepa (photo by the author).

Foreword

At the western edge of the world

‘My dear Diniz, I suggest we should call this new region Cap Manuel, in homage to our King.’

‘But have you noticed how green this place is after the desert we have just passed? Let’s rather baptise it Cap Vert and let’s get onto the ground to raise a padrão and say a prayer.’

Was it because they discovered the peninsula of Cap Vert during the rainy season of 1444 that the first Portuguese navigators called it that, or was the vegetation entirely absorbed by the town that was built there? Almost certainly a bit of each, but today a great deal of imagination is required to think of all that green.

It was my turn to discover it when I set eyes on the town in the 1960s, just after the country had achieved independence. Dakar was white and smelt of groundnuts. It was still provincial but had proud ambitions to become the economic capital of West Africa, a status that it had pinched a bit earlier from the old town of Saint-Louis, which was moping in the north of the country. On the sea, brushed by the trade winds, it had large, untouched open spaces that gave it some breathing space; the planners planned, applying rules of hygiene and segregation, sometimes laying out districts too clearly; the architects needed to invent a new African style and designed audacious, avant-garde buildings that took the climate into account; the streets were regularly cleaned by the Sanitation Department using a seawater pump; traffic flowed, and street vendors had not yet invaded the public spaces. You will understand that this description compares rather positively with the Dakar of today.

Of course, this development is quite normal for any older town that is gradually becoming more modern, though in truth, the metamorphosis of Dakar started much earlier. When it was founded by colonists in 1857, there already existed several Lebu fishing villages on the peninsula: Ndakaru, Ben (Mbegne), Hann, Yoff, Ngor etc. The villages were connected by paths and were protected by mud walls dating back to the period when the young Lebu ‘republic’ was resisting the invader from Cayor. The colonial town was established on this matrix, around the port that was its main engine of growth. Gradually the paths became roads and the villages grew, and ended up forming a single conurbation.

Designed in the colonial period for several tens of thousands of inhabitants at the most, the town today is home to almost three million. It is now uncontrollable, and has been handed over to the speculators; it has completely slipped out of the grasp of the planners, architects, local government, fiscal networks, and even its inhabitants. The rural exodus that took place in the 1970s following the major droughts in the Sahel created a large-scale influx of new, poverty-stricken populations. These had little experience of urban living, understood poorly its codes, were unaware of its history or heritage, and occupied every small free space, including those where construction was not permitted; this created challenging problems of energy, drinking water and sanitation, creating mountains of waste and irretrievably polluting the water table and the adjacent sea. They gradually built a new town without points of reference, constructing on an impoverished urban framework poor-quality individual houses. In the older, wealthier centre, all the older colonial buildings are living on borrowed time. Around the marché Kermel, the emblematic monument of the old centre, identically rebuilt in 1993 following a fire, the old businesses that had created the town’s prosperity have been demolished to make way for modern, impersonal high-rise buildings.

Such is the fascinating history of the metamorphosis of Dakar that Liora describes in this book, in an extremely precise and well-documented manner. I have no doubt that it will become a reference work for those who think about and plan the city, who will learn from their predecessors to understand better the present and prepare for the future, and will perhaps try to give it back some of the green of the western edge of the world.

Xavier Ricou

Architect

Gorée, Senegal

Acknowledgements

During the many years of conceptualising and carrying out this project, I have benefited from a network of institutions, forums, colleagues and others who provided me with intellectual and economic support, hospitality and friendly help.

I would like to thank the Hebrew University for its support on several occasions during my ongoing research, in the form of two post-doctoral and other grants and fellowships. These contributed towards, inter alia, my several visits to Senegal and France, attendance at conferences and book purchases. Several intellectual training sessions were particularly inspiring, especially those of the European Forum, with its inherent openness to non-European cultures, and of the Truman Institute’s round table, a rich source for fertile communications. I also enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, the cross-departmental inspiration of both staff and students at the Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design and the Holon Institute of Technology – these continue to reshape my thoughts over the years, aside from the institutional support given for my attendance at several international conferences in Prague (EAUH) and Lisbon (EAUH, IPHS). Some pan-European meetings that were enabled through my membership of the EU-COST Action, ‘European Architecture beyond Europe’, chaired by Mercedes Volait, were inspiring as well. A book research scholarship from the Israeli Science Foundation was also helpful in publishing parts of this book in Hebrew in 2014 with Bar-Ilan University Press; and I gratefully acknowledge the permission of the respective publishers of Planning Perspectives, Urban Studies Research and Urban History – where segments from articles of mine have appeared and are paraphrased here.

I am indebted to the critical comments made by the peer-reviewers of Manchester University Press, and I was also lucky to benefit from the professional work and team effort of the staff there. In addition, I am grateful to the numerous people who were involved with the many different stages and aspects of this study: especially to Victor Azarya, Fatoumata Cisse Diarra, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Mark Crinson, Louis Dioh, Papa Momar Diop, Mamadou Diouf, Felix Driver, Myron Echenberg, Ruth Fine, Odile Goerg, Joanna Grabski, Bashir Hakim, Robert Home, Yossi Katz, Anthony King, Saliou Mbaye, Edina Meyer, Carl Nightingale, Ambe Njoh, Deborah Pellow, Labelle Prussin, Garth Myers, Francine Robinson, Eric Ross, Awa Seck, the late Marli and Meir Shamir, Noam Shoval, Alain Sinou, Allasane Thiam and Oren Yiftachel.

Abbreviations

chapter one

Introduction: French colonial Dakar: the morphogenesis of an African regional capital

This book deals with the planning culture and architectural endeavours that shaped the model space of French colonial Dakar, a prominent city in West Africa. With a focus on the period from the establishment of the city in the mid-nineteenth century until the interwar years, our involvement with the design of Dakar as a regional capital reveals a multiplicity of ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ forces. These include a variety of urban politics, policies, practices and agencies, and complex negotiations on both the physical and conceptual levels. The study of the extra-European planning history of Europe has been a burgeoning field in scholarly literature, especially in the last few decades. There is a clear tendency within this literature, however, to focus on the more privileged colonies in the contemporary colonial order of preference, such as British India and the French colonies in North Africa. Colonial urban space in sub-Saharan Africa has thus been left relatively untreated. With a rich variety of historical material and visual evidence, the book incorporates both primary and secondary sources, collected from multilateral channels in Europe and Senegal. It includes an analysis of a variety of planning and architectural models, metropolitan-cum-indigenous. It is also one of the pioneers in attesting the connection between the French colonial doctrines of assimilation and association, and French colonial planning and architectural policies in sub-Saharan Africa.

Borrowed from the life sciences, the term ‘morphogenesis’ in the title of the book is derived from the Greek morphê, shape, and genesis, creation, and usually means the generation of form in the context of developmental biology.¹ This term is useful for the understanding of the rationale behind the organisation of this book and its perspective. First, it involves, in our colonial urban context, the tracing of the history of Dakar from its embryonic creation as a French city (and even much earlier), throughout its development in terms of spatial configuration and built form, until the interwar period. However, a monograph arranged in chronological sequence does not lead us to a linear or parochial analysis: a salient leitmotif in this work, for instance, is the issue of transnationality, which takes us from the site-relatedness of Dakar towards conceptual mobility, fluidity and heterogeneity. This approach addresses some imbalance indicated by recent critical scholarship in geography that ‘more analysis is needed on how – through what practices, where, when, and by whom – urban policies are produced in the global-relational context, are transferred and reproduced from place to place, and are negotiated politically in various locations.’² In addition, our focus on contemporary Dakar does not come at the expense of other comparative work on colonial urban space in sub-Saharan Africa (and beyond), carried out so far by the author or by other scholars³ – rather it is inspired by and converses with it.

Second, the term ‘morphogenesis’ is useful in our context as it also implies an understanding of Dakar’s urban forms as a process. The physical form, similarly to biological morphogens, is constantly generative, being dynamically constructed, reconstructed, deconstructed, activated, deactivated and negotiated upon amongst the various inter- and intra-players, be they autochthonous, expatriates or other mediating agencies. This relational process occurs in spite of the power imbalance that is inherent in the colonial situation, because, as this book clearly shows, Dakar was far from being ‘unambiguously expressive’ in terms of ‘a system of disciplinary power’, as Lyautey’s Rabat was, according to Timothy Mitchell.⁴ In sub-Saharan Africa (and beyond), European ‘colonialisms’ were mainly introduced by a series of hegemonic projects. But the transformative process of these projects ‘was necessarily incomplete, for it needed to preserve social and cultural differences to constitute and justify external rule, and it therefore left a realm of subaltern autonomy’.⁵ A ‘perfect system of control’, as shown by Jennifer Robinson, was not achieved even through the planning practices in South Africa, an extreme case of colonialism.⁶ And, as Garth Myers suggests, European modes of planning in eastern and southern Africa were often ‘undone by internal contradictions and by circumventions of the urban majority’.⁷

What this means, as the title of this work indicates, is that colonial Dakar, through its morphogenetic process, was both an African and a European city, indigenous and French imperial, ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ – including in-between variations and nuances. Our reflections are therefore engaged with two levels of geographies, including the interplay between them: the colonial ‘top-down’ spatial politics and their opposed yet complementary autochthonous ‘bottom-up’ counterparts. The dialectical process of spatial design and conceptualisation thus engendered is also morphogenetic because of the multitude of fronts that were involved, networks and connections.⁸ This also means, in the words of the urbanist Bish Sanyal, taken from his edited collection entitled Comparative Planning Cultures, that ‘I am intuitively aware that culture matters’.⁹ Therefore by embracing the term ‘morphogenesis’ in the context of urban planning and architecture, and by adapting a historical approach, the role of cultural processes in shaping the urban form are highlighted. This transforms the discussion of planning and architectural expressions in colonial Dakar into an almost ethnographic exercise.

A note on historiography

The study of French colonial Dakar by combining area studies with planning and architectural history studies leads towards a more nuanced understanding of the European city beyond Europe. This understanding is important against the background of the state of research on and the historiography of the colonial city. Until not long ago, urban historians studied the colonial terrain as a passive receptor of exported ideas, flowing in a virtually unidirectional way from the global ‘centre’ of the North-West to the south-eastern ‘periphery’. As noted by several scholars, only recently, more than a generation after the decolonisation era, we have started to bind the (visual) histories of the former métropoles with those of their empires.¹⁰

This geo-cultural understanding is not sufficiently reflected in recent textbooks concerning urban planning in general. The prominent planning historian Kenneth Kolson, for example, confines his narratives of modern urban design exclusively to Western Europe and North America. Consequently, his only reference to colonial planning relates to the frontier plantations of the ‘New World.’¹¹ Similarly, Peter Hall opens his book on the ‘intellectual history of urban planning’ by admitting this conceptual and geographical problem. That is, the supposed global history is actually ‘glaringly Anglo-Americocentric’.¹² While in another comprehensive work on the history of urban Europe, edited by Jean-Louis Pinol, a comparative part is included concerning overseas developments – any conversation between indigenous urban traditions and their European counterparts is reduced to a minimum or nothing.¹³ Most astonishingly, in a Century Paper on the ‘new’ planning history published in 2011, only three bibliographical items – out of 356 items in total! – dealt with sub-Saharan Africa.¹⁴ Two of the three items referred to South Africa, and all three are concerned with the British colonial heritage, reflecting the ‘anglophone’ viewpoint of the three authors of the Century Paper.¹⁵ A similar picture regarding the dominance of the North-West in the production of planning knowledge appears from Oren Yiftachel’s mapping of the ‘gatekeepers’ of theoretical knowledge. ‘Still’, he indicates, ‘it is conspicuous that in the first eight issues of the new Planning Theory journal (2002–04), only three of 47 articles were devoted to issues emerging from the South-East, while 40 articles dealt with various aspects of decision-making and communicative processes’.¹⁶

While there is an understanding that relatively little attention has been given to the history of European planning practices in the overseas, colonial territories, it is especially true regarding the African continent and sub-Saharan Africa in particular.¹⁷ In addition, within the literature on (post-) colonial urban spaces of sub-Saharan Africa, it can be argued that until recently, the anglophone research tradition has typically dealt with ‘history-in-the-city’ – that is, the history of social movements and popular struggles around community issues. A prominent tendency of its French counterpart, on the contrary, has typically been to deal with the ‘history-of-the-city’ itself.¹⁸ Exceptions to these general research trends do of course exist; yet projects like Africa’s Urban Past (2000), based on a London conference that was conducted by David Anderson and Richard Rathbone, are rather surprising.¹⁹ The latter project is broad and provides an overview of current research in political, economic and cultural urban history, but, as remarked by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘the authors overlook French-language publications despite the fact that this is one of the areas where French-speaking historians have done the most work’.²⁰

However,