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4 Sabar Dances and a Women’s Public Sphere Dance and Urban Networks “Dakar, Dakar, Dakaaaru! Yeggal, bu gaw [Get on, quickly]!” The apprenti— the boy who collects fares and taps on the roof of the van to signal the driver when to stop and when to move again—pushes me into the vehicle, helping the woman behind me load a bright blue bucket full of fresh fish. I squeeze into a seat,jostling for space between two passengers.The van races off at great speed,only to stop two hundred meters away to pick up more passengers.Taking advantage of the red light,two young taalibes1 approach the vehicle.Reciting a prayer in Arabic and leaning into the van,they thrust an empty tomatosauce can between the legs of passengers.The older boy chants in a loud voice, gasping for breath between long sentences, while the younger child barely moves his lips. The man seated next to me and two women on the opposite side bends over to drop some change into the can as the van spouts clouds of dark smoke and rumbles into motion at the green light.Her voice riding over the sound of the motor, a woman to my left starts yelling at the apprenti: “May ma suma weccit , yow! Soixante-quinze laay fay [You,give me my change! I paid seventy-five CFA Francs].” I have seen the apprenti argue with customers over the price of the fare and come to physical confrontations with a few of them, if they happened to be young males of his age. Yet this time, without a word, he hands the woman her twenty-five CFA Francs as she steps off the van. Twenty-five CFA Francs2 in an economy of scarcity are something to argue over and for. With a twenty-five coin one can buy a thin slice of cold water- melon; a tightly packed tiny plastic bag of bright iced juice (spicy ginger or sweet bisaap are the most common); two small bags of cold water; a fruit- flavored lollipop or two candies; a small kola nut; a handful of peanuts,cooked or raw, sweet or salty, peeled or with shells; one Marlboro or one Camel cigarette (for thirty CFA Francs one could buy two Excellences—the national brand); a dose of Nescafé wrapped in plastic; a small square of butter to spread on bread or a spoonful of chocolate (people with a taste for the savory can ask for homemade mayonnaise or tuna paste); a small dose of pepper,salt,curry, or cayenne; five sugar squares; or a handful of dried berries. The list could continue. A great number of products are sold in minuscule quantities by a great many people: women sitting quietly at the edges of the street, sometimes just outside their homes, displaying their meager products on cardboard boxes; young and not-so-young men in continuous motion, crowding busy bus stops and intersections to advertise in a loud voice the content of their boxes held above their heads; older men or women displaying a few kola nuts on round trays; men selling bread and mayonnaise in tiny kiosks dotting the corners of every neighborhood; or the more fortunate shopkeepers ,who sell from the well-stocked walls of their own shops and market stands. The thousands of women, men, and youth that engage in the informal economic sector crowd the streets of the city each day with their petty trading and services (pounding millet with mortars and pestles, drying fish and fruits, tanning leather and sewing gris-gris, shining shoes, or cutting hair). Street vendors and small-service providers are among the most vulnerable echelons of a wider informal economy.According to Meine Van Dijk (1986), more than half of the active population in Dakar works in the informal sector ,3 while unemployment reaches between 12 to 40 percent (Duruflé 1994; Bop 1995; Diop 1996).4 The informal sector, with its areas of commerce, production, and service, provides employment for those excluded from the formal labor market while attending to the needs of the majority of the population. Substantial earnings can be made within the informal sector,yet many within this sector earn less than the minimum legal wage and work under precarious conditions, lacking health insurance and retirement benefits (Van Djik 1986; Duruflé 1994). Thus, in the city of Dakar, the great majority of the population is excluded from access to social security5 and is left extremely vulnerable to...

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