This volume, the last in the series Population Dynamics of Sub-Saharan Africa, examines key demographic changes in Senegal over the past several decades. It analyzes the changes in fertility and ...their causes, with comparisons to other sub-Saharan countries. It also analyzes the causes and patterns of declines in mortality, focusing particularly on rural and urban differences.
A series of transformations, reforms, and attempted abolitions of slavery form a core narrative of nineteenth-century coastal West Africa. As the region's role in Atlantic commercial networks ...underwent a gradual transition from principally that of slave exporter to producer of "legitimate goods" and dependent markets, institutions of slavery became battlegrounds in which European abolitionism, pragmatic colonialism, and indigenous agency clashed.InSlavery and Reform in West Africa, Trevor Getz demonstrates that it was largely on the anvil of this issue that French and British policy in West Africa was forged. With distant metropoles unable to intervene in daily affairs, local European administrators, striving to balance abolitionist pressures against the resistance of politically and economically powerful local slave owners, sought ways to satisfy the latter while placating or duping the former.The result was an alliance between colonial officials, company agents, and slave-owning elites that effectively slowed, sidetracked, or undermined serious attempts to reform slave holding. Although slavery was outlawed in both regions, in only a few isolated instances did large-scale emancipations occur. Under the surface, however, slaves used the threat of self-liberation to reach accommodations that transformed the master-slave relationship.By comparing the strategies of colonial administrators, slave-owners, and slaves across these two regions and throughout the nineteenth century,Slavery and Reform in West Africareveals not only the causes of the astounding success of slave owners, but also the factors that could, and in some cases did, lead to slave liberations. These findings have serious implications for the wider study of slavery and emancipation and for the history of Africa generally.
During the early 1990s, global health experts developed a new model of emergency obstetric care: post-abortion care or PAC. In developing countries with restrictive abortion laws and where NGOs ...relied on US family planning aid, PAC offered an apolitical approach to addressing the consequences of unsafe abortion. In Dying to Count , Siri Suh traces how national and global population politics collide in Senegal as health workers, health officials, and NGO workers strive to demonstrate PAC’s effectiveness in the absence of rigorous statistical evidence that the intervention reduces maternal mortality. Suh argues that pragmatically assembled PAC data convey commitments to maternal mortality reduction goals while obscuring the frequency of unsafe abortion and the inadequate care women with complications are likely to receive if they manage to reach a hospital. At a moment when African women face the highest risk worldwide of death from complications related to pregnancy, birth, or abortion, Suh’s ethnography of PAC in Senegal makes a critical contribution to studies of global health, population and development, African studies, and reproductive justice.
The once famous trading center of Gorée, Sénégal today lies in the busy harbor of the modern city of Dakar. From its beginnings as a modest outpost, Gorée became one of the intersections which linked ...African trading routes to the European Atlantic trade. Then, as now, people of all nationalities poured into the island; Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese came to trade with the Mande, Moor, Tukor, and Wolf tribes. Trading parties brought gold, horses, firewood, mirrors, books, and more. They built houses of various forms, using American lumber, French roof tiles, freshly‑cut straw, and pulverized seashells, and furnished them in as cosmopolitan a fashion as the city itself.
Mark Hinchman'sPortrait of an Island: The Architecture and Material Culture of Gorée, Sénégal, 1758‑1837considers the houses, portraits, and furnishings of the island's early modern inhabitants. Multiple features of eighteenth‑century Gorée‑‑its demographic diversity, the prominence of women leaders, the phenomenon of identities in flux, and the importance of commerce, fashion, and international trade‑‑argue for its place in the construction of an early global modernity. In an examination of the built and natural landscape,Portrait of an Islanddeciphers the material culture involved in the ever‑changing relationships amongst male, female, rich, poor, and slave.
This book describes how style of dress influences the body's demeanour and habit. In describing dress practices in three West African communities - Muslim, Animist and Christian - it considers the ...role played by dress in the enculturation of the body.
As part of our program to reconstruct the inter-dune depression's history in western Senegal and the diatom microflora inventory in Senegal, a 125 cm long core was taken from Mbao pond in the suburbs ...of Dakar.
Diatoms were present only in the upper half of the core but their abundance remained poor to medium. However, an inventory of a total of 92 species and varieties belonging to 39 genera was determined. The most represented genera were Eunotia and Nitzschia (13 species each), with Pinnularia (9 species). The microflora is characterized by a dominance of epipelic, epiphytic and aerophytic species. Specific diversity was low and unevenly distributed throughout the core.
Based on the diatom assemblages and lithological data, the following conclusions could be drawn:
The absence of diatoms at the base of the core (zone O) is due either by their mechanical destruction by an agitated depositing environment, or by dissolution after their deposit:
The base of the diatom section of the core or zone A is characterized by an association of very shallow freshwater aquatic environment with acidic pH; The upper part (zone B) is marked by the disappearance of acidophilic species and the development of mesosaprobic and meso-eutrophic alkaliphile species, linked to organic pollution caused by human influences, resulting in eutrophication of the waters of the pond. The dominant species have a great capacity of adaptation to the high concentrations of dissolved substances, following a strong evaporation as a result of a deficit of rainfall.
•Along the Mbao Pond core (Senegal), diatom flora is quite diversified.•The most represented genera are Eunotia and Nitzschia (13 species each).•The distribution of this microflora shows the change from acidic freshwater to eutrophic alkaline brackish water pond.•These variations are attributed to a rainfall deficit and increasing human influences.
Faith in Empire is an innovative exploration of French colonial rule in West Africa, conducted through the prism of religion and religious policy. Elizabeth Foster examines the relationships among ...French Catholic missionaries, colonial administrators, and Muslim, animist, and Christian Africans in colonial Senegal between 1880 and 1940. In doing so she illuminates the nature of the relationship between the French Third Republic and its colonies, reveals competing French visions of how to approach Africans, and demonstrates how disparate groups of French and African actors, many of whom were unconnected with the colonial state, shaped French colonial rule. Among other topics, the book provides historical perspective on current French controversies over the place of Islam in the Fifth Republic by exploring how Third Republic officials wrestled with whether to apply the legal separation of church and state to West African Muslims.
Over the last twenty-five years, garbage infrastructure in Dakar, Senegal, has taken center stage in struggles over government, the value of labor, and the dignity of the working poor. Through ...strikes and public dumping, Dakar's streets have been periodically inundated with household garbage as the city's trash collectors and ordinary residents protest urban austerity. Often drawing on discourses of Islamic piety, garbage activists have provided a powerful language to critique a neoliberal mode of governing-through-disposability and assert rights to fair labor. In Garbage Citizenship Rosalind Fredericks traces Dakar's volatile trash politics to recalibrate how we understand urban infrastructure by emphasizing its material, social, and affective elements. She shows how labor is a key component of infrastructural systems and how Dakar's residents use infrastructures as a vital tool for forging collective identities and mobilizing political action.
Weaving sound historical research with rich ethnographic insight,An Impossible Inheritancetells the story of the emergence, disavowal, and afterlife of a distinctive project in transcultural ...psychiatry initiated at the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar, Senegal during the 1960s and 1970s. Today's clinic remains haunted by its past and Katie Kilroy-Marac brilliantly examines the complex forms of memory work undertaken by its affiliates over a sixty year period. Through stories such as that of the the ghost said to roam the clinic's halls, the mysterious death of a young doctor sometimes attributed to witchcraft, and the spirit possession ceremonies that may have taken place in Fann's courtyard, Kilroy-Marac argues that memory work is always an act of the imagination and a moral practice with unexpected temporal, affective, and political dimensions. By exploring how accounts about the Fann Psychiatric Clinic and its past speak to larger narratives of postcolonial and neoliberal transformation,An Impossible Inheritanceexamines the complex relationship between memory, history, and power within the institution and beyond.
