Roots in Reverse. Richard M. Shain

in a free African polity, organized around republican principles. However, in order for these changes to occur, Dakar in the 1940s and 1950s had to develop the physical, economic, and social infrastructures that could sustain cultural enterprises like the record clubs.

       URBAN GROWTH AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN POSTWAR DAKAR, 1940S–1960S

      Dakar, like many other urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa, experienced rapid growth from the 1940s to the 1960s. According to some estimates, between 1945 and 1960 the city doubled its population. Already by 1950, approximately one out of every ten Senegalese lived in Dakar.¹⁴ Such growth led to improvements in the city’s infrastructure and altered its urban identity. Dakar developed into one of the major cities south of the Sahara and the de facto cultural capital of Francophone Africa. The city became one of the major transportation centers of Africa in the 1950s, the focal point of far-flung sea, rail, and air networks. Although other African metropolises like Lagos and Kinshasa surpassed it as a business and industrial hub, Dakar’s markets and shops were filled with consumer goods of all types, sold at a price an increasing number of African customers could afford. It was indisputably the educational capital of Francophone Africa. Its population was sophisticated and multiethnic. In 1945, 43 percent of the city’s African population was Wolof; 13 percent was Tukolor; and the remaining 44 percent consisted of sizable communities of Pulaar, Serer, Cabo Verdeans, Hassaniya-speakers, and Bamana. It is likely that the city’s ethnic composition preserved this diversity ten years later.¹⁵ In addition, there were thirty-eight thousand French residents and a large concentration of Lebanese and Syrians. With its large expatriate population and its sizable communities of migrants from many parts of West Africa, Dakar had become one of the continent’s most cosmopolitan and culturally complex cities.

      From the time the Free French under Charles de Gaulle wrested control of Dakar from the Vichy regime in 1943, Dakar’s economy began to revive from the doldrums of the Depression and the early years of World War II. The Free French, knowing that the city had one of the best natural harbors in Africa, undertook improvements of the port’s infrastructure. Simultaneously the Dakar airport, established in 1937, became a major refueling stop for air traffic to Africa and the Allies stationed large numbers of French and US troops in the city. The soldiers freely spent money, stimulating local commerce; but even more important, the colonial authorities strengthened the manufacturing capacity of Dakar by creating import-substitute industries.¹⁶ By 1945 Dakar had become “a naval and air base of global importance”¹⁷ and a crucial center of trade and manufacturing.

      After the war Dakar developed even more rapidly. Always wary of the British, de Gaulle became concerned in 1945 that the British-controlled city of Accra in the then Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana) was overshadowing Dakar as the leading port in West Africa. To counteract this perceived threat, the French leader resolved to make the city into an imperial showcase through enlightened urban planning and an extensive public works program. De Gaulle’s plans entailed dividing Dakar into spatially distinct zones with areas reserved for administration, industry, commerce, and residential housing. His planners envisioned six residential sectors, accommodating various populations including a growing African presence. As is often the case with urban master plans, this ambitious undertaking never received a big enough budget to realize all its objectives. However, the French did spend enough money to make the port one of the leading cities in Africa, and the spatial model they imposed still shapes contemporary Dakar.

      Other changes in French colonial policy promoted Dakar’s growth as well. In 1946 France established FIDES (Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Économique et Social), supposedly to develop their African colonies rather than exploit them.¹⁸ Between 1946 and 1956, 64 percent of FIDES’ budget went to infrastructural improvements in France’s African colonies, especially transportation.¹⁹ These improvements made the movement of goods to and from Africa more efficient, reducing costs and encouraging investment. The French also worked to improve urban housing for Africans, although their efforts fell far short of meeting local demand. At the end of World War II they founded SICAP (Société Immobilière du Cap Vert) to provide housing for both Dakar’s growing middle class and its large working-class population. In its first year of operation, it built 150 houses and 4 cités ouvrières.²⁰

      During this same postwar period, French business interests found Dakar and Senegal increasingly attractive areas for investment. French capital came in two waves. Between 1946 and 1949 francs flowed into Dakar from France because investors in the metropole feared a communist takeover of the French government. Two years later, in 1951, as the French commercially disengaged themselves from Indochina, there was another significant flow of capital into Senegal, which the French business class regarded as more politically stable. Initially, French investment in Dakar provided funds for the enlargement of already existing manufacturing concerns and the establishment of new ones, a change in strategy from the 1930s, when the French had been more likely to invest in trade in agricultural commodities. By the mid-1950s French merchants and bankers were especially drawn to projects that made more consumer goods like radios, phonographs, textiles, and soft drinks available to Africans at lower prices. While Dakar never became an industrial powerhouse like Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, its industrial zones in the late colonial period were bustling with a number of beverage and textile concerns.²¹ It is not clear how many new wage jobs were added in the immediate postwar period, but given that gainful employment has always been scarce in Senegambia, the creation of these manufacturing jobs had a marked impact on Dakar’s hinterland and beyond. Hopeful job seekers from all regions of Senegal flocked to the city in search of work in the 1940s, forming a multiethnic labor force.²² The fact that most of these migrants were disappointed did not reverse the flow. Even if they were frustrated in their search for work, the migrants felt that ultimately there were more opportunities for them in Dakar than elsewhere in Senegal.