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1UM0U SY The African Place, Dakar, Senegal Hudita Nura Mustafa Design by O u m o u Sy, 1998. Alate modern space of saturation by connections and strategies , Dakar is perhaps too many places to too many people, heavily weighted with images, hopes and opportunities not easily available in Africa. Deteriorating buildings, crowded streets and sandy alleys amidst urban grids concretize the collision of French and (neo) colonial modernity with an African vernacular modernity of very different socio-spatial projects. Africans have always made places for themselves in the heart of this colonial territory and in fact made the world look to Dakar's popular and artistic culture. Less concrete but maybe more pervasive are African struggles to make place in a more immaterial sense. To consider late modern space from an African perspective is to consider some of the deepest disappointments of post-independence - glaring inequalities, violence, breakdown of values of reciprocity, spaces of indifference, aspects once unthinkable in Africa. City life is the site of 'promiscuity', an unhealthy forced density of social interaction with ambiguous meanings . Yet, African urban communities generate not only culture and art of universal appeal but regenerate values and strategies that survive , if not resist, the onslaught of deepening global inequality and uncertainty. Ritual events double as savings meetings, cloth doubles as money, courtyards double as workshops. What might the internet with its unprecedented speed and information have to do with such a local and mundane reality of survival? When Oumou Sy shows up in her colonial officers' helmet and says that she has come to colonize, she means it. Oumou Sy, one of Africa and Senegal's pre-eminent fashion and costume designers, works at the intersection of art, spectacle and social space. She takes all venues as potential sites for her costumes and fashions which are rooted in African aesthetics and traditions - film, opera, fashion catwalks, popular parades in Dakar. As the digital divide threatens to once again intensify Africa's marginalization in the global economy, new initiatives such as Oumou Sy's Metissacana cybercafe , the first internet cafe in West Africa, claim an African place in virtual space. Metissacana's bridge into virtual space enables clients to access the enormous resources of the worldwide web in a space that is social, comfortable and affordable for a range of clients. This enables Dakar residents to access the web's unprecedented speed and density of communication, information retrieval and commerce at 1200 cfa an hour, or a fraction thereof, with instructors on hand. For Dakar's huge community of international (European, American and African) bureaucrats, researchers, students and visitors, this assures important contacts. As African universities and infrastructures break down under financial and political pressure, the internet may actually serve the reinvention of practices of learning and communication. 4 4 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art Carnaval, in the tradition of the St. Louis Fanal, is a procession of costumed characters through Medina streets which brings Sy's designs, made for film and haute couture, to a popular audience. Since 1997, the annual fashion show brings together designers from across Africa for a week of display and networking (without competitions). New African immigrant communities animate and reanimate battles for Dakar's cityscape. Lebanese and French, still in many ways the neocolonial rulers of Senegal, joined by a small elite, have long claimed Plateau as their commercial and residential home and remain comfortably ensconced there. But immigrants from Futa Toro, Guinee, Benin, Togo, Mauritania and Morocco occupy the markets and surrounding streets alike. They sell cloth, fruit, gold, make garments and pirate music videos. VCRs from New York, cloth from Hong Kong and cosmetics from Nigeria make Sandaga market a West African centre of global culture. Through commerce and popular cultural production , Senegalese have made the colonial capital their own. The Dirriankhes, the Grandes Dames of commerce, inhabit the city with their wealth and elegance of Mercedes Benz, gorgeous sartorial display , elaborate ceremonies. Icons of the Mouride and Tijiane Islamic brotherhoods - photographs, calendars, amulets - cover the urban interiors, reminding us that all roads lead out to holy sites beyond the mundanity of daily life. Visual and performative culture is grounded in Senegalese life and...

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