Ousmane Sembène: The Making of a Militant Artist

7 The Experience of Racism

49 Spatial organization has always been the most telltale feature of colonial racism. But if Santhiaba, the “native” district in Ziguinchor, was something like an outgrowth, a collateral effect of the European settlement , things were altogether different in the Plateau of Dakar. It is perhaps worthwhile to say a few words about the history of the current Senegalese capital, to put things in perspective. The debate on the etymology of Dakar is still raging. The autochthons still call it ndakaaru. Historian Assane Sylla, drawing on the findings of linguists specializing in Dravidian languages, argues that the word derives from the Tamil nakarou, meaning “town” or “city.”1 The Bengali origin of the family name Mbengue, a typical Lebu patronym , is often brought up in support of this argument. Others claim that ndakaaru may have originated from a nasalized pronunciation of dëkk raw (house of peace, safe haven). It is also worth noting that according to various scholars, including Cheikh Anta Diop, the Lebus are said to be the de7 The Experience of Racism 50 dakar scendants of a Nile Valley ethnic group that ancient Egyptians called “The Peoples of the Sea.” After crossing the Senegal river in the course of successive migratory waves, they stayed for a while in Walo and Djolof,2 before settling for good on the Cape Verde peninsula around the middle of the sixteenth century. A Moor scribe named the place Dar-el-Salem (House of peace), which the Lebus translated as dëkk raw, and which would eventually evolve into Ndakaaru and Dakar. However, according to Boubacar Boris Diop, there are two other versions. The first is that Dakar comes from daxaar (tamarind tree), owing to a legendary confusion: a European asked the inhabitants about the city’s name and the latter replied by telling him the name of the tree they were sitting under. This is why, argues Diop, in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Les gardiens du temple, Dakar was fictionalized as Tamarine .3 According to proponents of the second version, one Daccar, a French military officer, gave the city his name. Each of these different accounts has its supporters, but they all corroborate the fact that the Lebu settlements of Mboth and Thiédem predate the arrival of Europeans in the Cape Verde region . True, the latter already knew their way around the coasts, with Gorée as a landmark. The Dutch transformed the island’s Lebu name, Béer, into Goode Rade (Good harbor), which eventually gave Gorée. Gorée was a hotly contested strategic site coveted by all the European colonial powers, on account of its location two miles off the mainland. After successively falling into the hands of the Dutch, the English, and the French, the island was “definitively” recognized as a French possession through a treaty signed on May 30, 1814, in Paris. From now on, the Lebus would feel a new threat hanging over their frail Republic, founded in 1790 after centuries of struggle against Kayor. The Lebu community was born out of a relentless quest for freedom, as is shown in Abdoulaye Sadji’s small collection of sea stories and legends, Tounka;4 and as the prospect of another foreign domination was looming large on the horizon, they prepared to face these new invaders—come from afar this time.5 As for the French, they were emboldened by their total control of Gorée and Saint-Louis and felt that the time was ripe to take over the Cape Verde peninsula, an area far larger than Gorée, and use it as their entry point into the interior. For the Lebus this was the beginning of the end, an “ominous dawn” that Cheikh Hamidou Kane vividly captured in L’aventure ambiguë. However, the complete annexation of Dakar and the ensuing loss of the Republic’s independence on May 25, 1857, did not involve any “blood and tears” tragedy. Negotiations were held that led to the signing of treaties, but that did not make any difference, as the experience of racism 51 Kane put it in his novel: “The result was everywhere the same: those who fought and those who surrendered, those who compromised and those who doggedly stood their ground, they all found themselves, at the end of the day, numbered, scattered, classified, labeled, drafted, administered.”6 After the 1857 treaty, it was only a matter of time before the Lebus would be...