Hannah Dee on a Cosmopolitan Hub in the Midst of Striking Poverty: The Many Paradoxes of Dakar

By: Hannah Dee

October 13, 2010

Each city has its paradoxes. InWashington, DC, there are homeless people huddled on the same streets that are lined with the multimillion dollar homes of the country's elite, and the harsh contrast between rich and poor is an inescapable feature of the nation's capital. In Dakar, those contrasts are even more glaring. Perhaps it is because I am a visitor, and we view other societies through a sharper lens than we view our own, but Senegal's paradoxes have come to define my perception of this colorful, bustling, contradictory country.

Horse-drawn carts fight for the same road space as gleaming Mercedes, and the same women who dress in immaculately tailored, vivid dresses may have nothing to feed their children. In my neighborhood, young boys, some no older than six, approach us on the streets with nothing but tin cans and pleading eyes. Their clothes are often dirty, their faces streaked with dirt. Beggars, some with their legs atrophied and useless from polio, often sit alongside the route to our school.

Meanwhile, many of the houses in the neighborhood are beautifully constructed three-story homes with mango trees in the garden or vine-covered balconies overlooking the dusty roads. Most families employ at least one full-time maid, and security guards are scattered throughout the community. In my neighborhood, and the other neighborhoods like it, people have jobs ranging from doctors to store owners to the universally ambiguous bureaucrats.

As American university students, however, we are living in a bubble of prosperity in a country where the unemployment rate hovers around 50 percent. Despite the marbled mansions along the coast and the comfort of our neighborhoods, the fact remains that, for the most part, the economic system is fundamentally broken. A trip to a market here is like a chaotic trip to the past, a past, that is, with abundant "Made in China" labels and honking taxis. Marché Sandaga, the largest downtown market, consists of streets crammed with vendors selling every good imaginable: peanuts, statues, jewelry, fruit, shoes, even underwear.

A single street may have five rows of battered wooden stalls. As obvious foreigners, it is impossible to walk anywhere without groups of young men accosting us and steering us toward their shops, while people shout at us in Wolof and French: "You are my first client!" or "I will give you a good price, a very good price!" There are so many vendors, many of them selling the exact same goods, that it is impossible to understand how anyone makes any money. Indeed, it would seem that for many vendors, working at a market is not so much a steady job as an attempt to do something, anything, in a country where jobs are so hard to find.

Senegal's economic situation is intimately related to its education system, and this, too, faces immense obstacles. A major university of Dakar, Université Cheikh Anta Diop, has a capacity of about 15,000 students. Sixty thousand students are currently enrolled. There is no shortage of hardworking youth, but the educational system is often strikingly ineffective at capturing that potential. Some policies that appear, on the surface, to support the country's education and future development goals may actually impede Senegal's future growth.

The government, for instance, offers scholarships that allow its most promising youth to attend university in France. In theory, these students will then return to Senegal to work for the government for 10 years. In actuality, there is no way to enforce this contract and no guarantee of a government job. The end result is that the state essentially sponsors its brightest youth to permanently leave the country.

I have seven host siblings, and all of them had the opportunity to receive advanced degrees in Europe in fields ranging from engineering to law; only two returned to Senegal. Salaries here are notably lower than in Europe and the United States, and the result is a perpetual brain drain. Until relatively recently, doctors in Senegal received only a couple of hundred dollars per month, and when we visited a public clinic in Dakar the doctor spoke wearily of his many colleagues who left chasing wealthier lifestyles in Europe and North America.

Perhaps nothing embodies the contradictions of Senegal more than the recently erected African Renaissance Monument, which was unveiled this year to symbolize the cultural and economic emergence of Africa. The controversial 27 million dollar statue stands gleaming on one of highest points of the city, overlooking the ocean. This monument, meant to represent Africa's strength, was built in North Korea. And from the top of the statue, visitors have a prime view of Dakar's five-star hotels, and its slums.

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