In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

77 C H A P T E R T H R E E The Biosocial Politics of Plants and People The Dakar neighborhood of Fas, named after Fez in Morocco, is just minutes from the city center where wide avenues and multistory buildings dominate. Arriving in Fas, however, is a quick reminder of how Dakar’s city planning, initially organized for the French colonial administration, peters out when one leaves the urban center and the adjoining area of le plateau. The plateau was the central hub of French West Africa’s colonial and economic administration , and has since retained government buildings, as well as banks, international hotels, and major hospitals. Ville, as locals call it, still stands in stark contrast to many parts of working-class neighborhoods (quartiers populaires ), like Fas, as well as those surrounding it, Fann-Hock, Gueule Tapée and the Medina, where the immediate terrain resembles more rural parts of the country. In these dispersing sectors of Dakar, sand paths serve as both street and sidewalk. They are flanked with cinderblock structures that seemed to appear overnight, suddenly filling voids in the landscape. Thrusts of busyness often animate open storefronts whose densely packed insides seem to uphold their makeshift supports. Throughout these neighborhoods, canteens and commerce stands offer foodstuffs, beauty products, electronics, and fabrics from locales as far away as Cincinnati and Dubai. In Fann-Hock, amid a row of houses with only the bottom halves painted, an indiscrete “clinic” is marked by a sprawl of bundled botanicals left to dry in the heat. The healer inside welcomes patients one by one as they queue up in his doorway. His sons and nephews who staff the clinic are dressed in what were once white lab coats. A few of the men hunch over to tend to the medicinal plants strewn out over the sidewalk. Dakar’s jumble of vital expansion and dense accessibility still validates French ethnologist Georges Balandier’s observation, more than fifty years prior, that “In its physical aspect as in its human aspect, the city is seeking its form in confusion” (1966, 176). This mix of form, colonial legacy, urbanism, therapeutic botanicals, and constant shuffle of old and new is “confusion” in its literal sense, an intimate intermingling in which the distinction of elements is lost by fusion. In this configuration we see a slightly varied continuation on the theme developed in the previous chapter: across the physical Chapter Three 78 landscape, people enact therapeutic networks that are sustained through their desires for economic and biological normalcy and stability. In this chapter I present an additional element of the therapeutic economies that people forge, namely a specific aspect of Senegal’s pharmacopoeia used to treat sickle cell, the medicinal plant Fagara xanthoxyloïdes. In many instances people with sickle cell understand this plant to be a specific , localized medicinal form of life as well as an economic good. Whether they are patients, healers, or doctors, people often solidify the therapeutic powers of fagara through human relations of care, which they frequently described and enacted through linkages of kin. Their intersubjective supports are key to the functioning of the informal economy that allows fagara to circulate and bolster sickle cell health. Rooted in direct interpersonal relations, people’s propensity to take fagara also extends beyond themselves. This botanical is local, but it does not stay put. Its back and forth across lines denominated as “traditional” and “modern,” its sale, its gifting, its promise in the global South as a therapy to space sickle cell crises, and (later) in France as a powerful alkaloid with wider potential, allow it to override boundaries that demarcate domains that may be seen as conceptually separate, such as a genetics lab and a traditional healing clinic. Fagara is not, however, a widely welcomed, uncontested object in all settings , at all times, as we will see in the later part of this chapter. In both its contestation and its circulation, it is a relational node in a health market that opens onto larger societal trends of healing, scientific authority, and global standing. It bears stating that the terrain of Dakar itself, its “elements,” both human and physical, undermines any attempt to cast the city as a traditional outpost of Africa that is now simply checked with aspects of modernity. Dakar—the place and the people—repeatedly “dazzled” Balandier in its refusal of nostalgia , so much so that he had to remind himself that “there is no point indulging in regrets...

Share