Presenters
Abstract
What do outdated horse-carts; latest BMW’s; sheep grazing by the road; Samsung buildings, sellers of peanuts, clothes, pillows, phone-charges, plates; car rapide buses; motor bikers with no helmets; and drumming parties all have in common? They occupy, persistently and seemingly without any conflict, the sand-covered streets of Dakar—Senegal’s capital and largest city. Here I offer impressions of the contradictory and surprising ways in which Dakar functions as a cosmopolitan city despite the many “country” elements one finds there. I attempt to capture the essence of the city, as a stranger walking and driving through its streets, in the hope of figuring out how fluidity and stasis, innovation and history, progress and delay exist side by side.