Figure 1: The old terminus building in Dakar, known simply as "La Gare"
During my early days of fieldwork in the old city centre of Dakar, Senegal, I was sitting with the trader Fatim in her tiny market stall under a tattered, weather-worn parasol. Fatim watched over her goods that were balanced on top of some old, repurposed metal drums. The rusty tracks of the former Dakar-Niger railway line stretched out on the ground behind us, forming the backdrop to this small outdoor market. A few dozen other rickety stalls were lined up along the old platform that led to the abandoned terminus building known simply as "La Gare" (Figure 1). Fatim thrust her arm out to indicate the space around her and exclaimed, 'Often, when people come here, they look around and say, "There is nothing here! ...Some people think the market at the Terminus (Marché de la Gare) doesn't exist anymore, so they don't come'.
The Terminus (La Gare) was the last station at the end of the Dakar-Niger railway line. The line had formerly connected the landlocked Malian capital, Bamako, to the Senegalese capital on the Atlantic coast. During the first decade of decolonisation a thriving Malian wholesale and retail market - le March̩ de la Gare Рhad emerged at the Dakar Terminus. When I arrived in Dakar in 2013 to conduct fieldwork, however, the passenger train, on which the Malian shuttle traders supplying the market had travelled, was no longer running; and the flourishing Malian market at the Terminus no longer existed. In 2003, under pressure from the World Bank, the Malian and Senegalese governments had privatized the formerly State-owned rail network. In 2009, the Senegalese passenger train running between the Malian border and Dakar was discontinued. In the same year, the Malian market at the Dakar terminus was bulldozed by Senegalese authorities, supposedly to make way for "The Seven Wonders of Dakar" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1O1wNsfmaM, accessed 7th of June 2023) - a prestigious, but as yet unfinished, construction project.
In this blog post I explore how the traders evicted from the Terminus had responded to persistent uncertainty and economic pressure following the demolition of their market. Rapid and unequal urban developments are occurring across the world, and particularly in the fast-growing cities of Africa. Such developments lead to disruption, uprooting and disorientation, creating immense economic and psychological pressures on urban traders whose livelihoods depend on working in a specific location in the city and accessing certain infrastructures and networks in that space, to connect with suppliers, customers, and middlemen. The following analysis explores what is produced by these pressures – not in a naively optimistic sense of "good things emerging" from pressure, but in a temporal sense of understanding the long-term outcomes produced by pressure. Specifically, I argue that the economic uncertainty and sense of disorientation and uprootedness associated with eviction from the Dakar Terminus had led to a kind of urban diasporic formation among the displaced traders. The analysis thus contributes a temporal perspective on pressure, showing what urban dwellers' responses to pressure may generate in the longer term.
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