Doing the Dirty Work: The Cultural Politics of Garbage Collection in Dakar, Senegal

by

Rosalind Cooke Fredericks

B.S. (Brown University) 2000 M.S. (London School of Economics and Political Science) 2003

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

Geography

in the

Graduate Division

of the

University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:

Professor Michel Watts, Chair Professor Gillian Hart

Associate Professor Ananya Roy Professor Mamadou Diouf

Fall 2009

UMI Number: 3410806

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Doing the Dirty Work: The Cultural Politics of Garbage Collection in Dakar, Senegal

©2009

by Rosalind Cooke Fredericks

Abstract

Doing the Dirty Work: The Cultural Politics of Garbage Collection in Dakar, Senegal

by

Rosalind Cooke Fredericks

Doctor of Philosophy in Geography

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Michael Watts, Chair

This dissertation examines the social history of garbage management in Dakar in

the wake of structural adjustment as a lens into the changing landscape of citizenship in

this important African democracy. Senegal's capital has been racked with a cycle of

garbage crises which periodically hold the city's residents captive to their own waste.

Through analyzing the specific conjuncture of circumstances which have produced the

trash crises in Dakar, I take them to be not chaotic periods of disintegration, but

productive moments where key political, economic, and social factors crystallize and new

configurations of social relations are negotiated. Through joining an inquiry into the

political economy of garbage management with an exploration of the cultural struggles

through which it gains meaning, I engage with debates on the political economy of

development, the African state, and the postcolonial urban condition.

Specifically, I examine the labor of garbage management (trashwork) in Dakar

beginning with the founding of today's collection system in the well known Set/Setal

youth movement. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I trace the social history of

trashwork from Set/Setal to the present day trashworkers' union movement to illuminate

1

how certain people get positioned, and position themselves, to do the dirty work, with

different rewards and dangers, across the uneven spaces of the city. I focus primarily on

the municipal trash collection force, but, in so doing, necessarily contend with the

osmosis between "formal" and "informal" trashwork and the key question of household

and community-based trash management. The politics of trash collection are shown to be

embedded within discourses surrounding state and personal responsibility, cleanliness,

and work which turn on key cultural reference points, including Islam, generation, and

gender as well as a spatial imaginary of belonging in Dakar. Fleshing these out, this

study illuminates how economic change works through and along lines of difference but

also how cultural identities may provide the organizing platforms through which to

understand and contest economic forces.

2

This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Stephanie Yeun Kim for her boundless encouragement and friendship. A brilliant scholar and tremendous

human being, Stephanie's spirit lives on in all of us.

1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: Introduction Trash in Place: The Dirt and Disorder of Development in Dakar 1

CHAPTER 2 Governing Garbage: A Re-Reading of Senegal's Neoliberal Transition through Trash...49

CHAPTER 3 Legacies of Set/Setal: Youth and the Labor Question in Dakar 110

CHAPTER 4 "We Are Not Garbage": The Priesthood of Trashworkers 153

CHAPTER 5 Wearing the Pants: The Gendered Politics of Sweeping the Boulevards 190

CHAPTER 6 Participatory City?: Community, Citizenship, and Revolt in the Alternoos Era 220

Conclusion The Hope of a Trash(y) Job 277

References 283

n

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

List of Figures

Figure 1.1. Remnants of the 2007 trash tevolts in HLM Fass 1 Figure 1.2. Youth activists from Set/Setal, painting a mural 2 Figure 1.3. Cities in Africa with more than one million inhabitants 25 Figure 1.4. Map of the Department of Dakar 29 Figure 1.5. Satellite image of Dakar and the Cape Verde Peninsula 46

Figure 3.1. "How we get diarrhea" mural from Set/Setal 134 Figure 3.2. "Emploi" (Work) mural from Set/Setal 136 Figure 4.1. An SNTN press conference 170

Figure 4.2. Two trashworkers in Niari Tali 174 Figure 5.1. A cartoon depicting the Set/Setal youth movement 196 Figure 5.2. A Set/Setal mural from the neighborhood HLM Fass 198 Figure 5.3. A young woman trashworker from Niari Tali 209 Figure 5.4. A group of female trashworkers of the Niari Tali neighborhood 211 Figure 5.5. Xadi Gning, Controller of the Grand Yoff Zone 216 Figure 6.1. Administrative Map of Greater Dakar 226 Figure 6. 1. The narrow pedestrian paths inside Yoff's traditional neighborhoods 228 Figure 6.3.The Seven Traditional Neighborhoods of Yoff 229 Figure 6.4. A view of one of the major dump spots on Tonghor's beach 231 Figure 6.5. A view toward the ocean from the Tonghor beach in 2007 231 Figure 6.6. The mural on the wall of the eco-sanitation station in Tonghor 234 Figure 6.7. The Original Plan for the HLM Fass neighborhood 238 Figure 6.8. Map of HLM Fass 239 Figure 6.9. One of the main high-rise buildings in HLM Fass 240 Figure 6.10. A recent Set/Setal event in HLM Fass 241 Figures 6.11 and 6.12. The remains of the trash revolt in HLM Fass 261

List of Tables

Table 1.1. Urban Population and Urbanization Rates, 1950-2050 24 Table 2.1. Recovery Rates for the Garbage Tax (TEOM) in Dakar 85 Table 2.2. Institutional History of Garbage Management in Dakar 109

in

LIST OF ACRONYMS

AGETIP Public Works and Employment Agency Agence d'Execution des Travaux d'Interet Public contre le Sous-emploi

AMA Municipal Environment Agency Azienda Municipalizzata per I 'Ambiente

AOF French West African Federation Afrique Occidentale Frangaise

APECSY Association for the Economic, Cultural, and Social Promotion of Yoff. Association pour la Promotion Economique, Culturelle, et Sociale de Yoff

APRODAK Agency for the Cleanliness of Dakar Agence pour la Proprete de Dakar

APROSEN Agency for the Cleanliness of Senegal Agence pour la Proprete du Senegal

ASC Sporting and Cultural Association Association Sportive et Culturelle

CADAK/CAR Community of Dakar Urban Areas/ Community of Rufisque Urban Areas Communaute d'Agglomeration de Dakar/ Communaute d'Agglomeration de Rufisque

CAMCUD Federation of the Associations and Movements of the Dakar Urban Community Coordination des Associations et Mouvements de la Communaute Urbaine de Dakar

CFA West African franc

CGT Tonghor Management Committee Comite de Gestion de Tonghor

CNTS National Federation of Senegalese Workers Confederation Nationale des Travailleurs du Senegal

CS A Federation of Independent Unions of Senegal Confederation des Syndicats Autonomes du Senegal

CSC Senegalese-Canadian Consortium Consortium Senegalo-Canadien

CUD Dakar Urban Community Communaute Urbaine de Dakar

ENDA Environment and Development Action in the Third World Environnement et Developpement du Tiers Monde

FAL The Front for Alternance

IV

Front pour VAlternance

GIE Economic Interest Group Groupement d'Interet Economique

GPF Women's Interest Group Groupement de Promotion Feminine

HAPD High Authority for Dakar's Cleanliness Haute Autorite pour la Proprete de Dakar

HLM Affordable Housing Habitations a Loyer Modere

IAGU Institut Africain de Gestion Urbaine

The African Institute for Urban Management

IMF International Monetary Fund

MIGA Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (World Bank)

MNC Multi-National Corporation

NGO Non-Government Organization

OHLM Office for Affordable Housing Office pour la Habitation a Loyer Modere

ONAS National Sanitation Agency of Senegal Office National de VAssainissement du Senegal

ONCAD National Agricultural Produce Marketing Board Office National de Cooperation et dAssistance pour le Developpement

PAML Program of Medium-term and Long-term Economic and Financial Adjustment Programme d'Ajustement a Moyen et Long Termes

PDS Senegalese Democratic Party Parti Democratique Senegalais

PREF Economic and Financial Recovery Plan Plan de Redressement Economique et Financier

PRODAK Cleanliness in Dakar Proprete de Dakar

PS Socialist Party Parti Socialiste

RUP Relay for Participatory Urban Development program (ENDA)

Relais pour le Developpement Urbain Participe

SAP Structural Adjustment Program

SIAS The Industrial Company for Senegal's Urban Development La Societe Industrielle d'Amenagement Urbain du Senegal

v

SICAP

SNTN

SOADIP

SYNAPRONE

SYNAPS

TEOM

The Cape Verde Real Estate Company Societe Immobiliere du Cap Vert

National Union of Cleaning Workers Syndicat National des Travailleurs du Nettoiement

The African Company of Diffusion and Promotion La Societe Africaine de Diffusion et de Promotion

The Union of Cleaning and Environment Professionals Syndicat Nationale des Professionels de Nettoiement et de I'Environnement

National Union of Senegalese Cleaning Agents Syndicat Nationale des Agents de la Proprete du Senegal

Household Garbage Tax Taxe d'Enlevement des Ordures Menageres

FREQUENTLY USED FRENCH AND WOLOF TERMS

Alternance animatrice bonne boubou buujumaan concessionaire gestion de proximite intersyndicales journees de proprete marabout originaire quartier sacerdoce sensibilization Set/Setal societe d'economie mixte sopi talibe

2000 presidential elections animator maid West African traditional dress garbage collector (derogatory) contractor localized management union federation days of cleanliness Sufi spiritual guide "original" inhabitant of Senegal's Four Communes neighborhood priesthood education Be clean/Make clean (youth movement) parastatal enterprise change disciple

VI

PREFACE

On an otherwise unremarkable April morning at the beginning of my fieldwork in

2007 in Dakar, I received a phone call from a friend who worked downtown. He said that

the main boulevard into the financial district had been blocked with garbage on his

morning commute and that, as a result, city traffic was a mess. Knowing garbage was my

thing, he thought I would be interested. "The trashworkers are striking and all hell's

breaking loose... People are dumping their trash in the streets!" he complained. By the

time I arrived on the scene on the back of another friend's motorcycle, the streets had

mainly been cleared. Flanking a few of the main arteries, however, huge garbage piles

evidenced the events that had just occurred. I took photos and spoke with a few local

residents. It wasn't until a meeting later that day with my advisor, Mamadou Diouf,

however, that I grasped the full import of what had occurred and how it would change the

course of my dissertation. In that meeting, as planned, I began presenting Mamadou with

my original research proposal to study the community-based trash management projects

that had sprouted up in Dakar's periphery during the early 2000s. Gently interrupting, he

suggested that I first explore the trash "crisis" that was transpiring all around me. I was

lucky, in a perverted sense, because I had descended on Dakar to study trash and trash

had exploded onto the public radar just in time for my fieldwork. The subject of garbage

had invaded the airwaves, streets, and minds of politicians and city residents alike.

Mamadou urged me to take a step back and see the larger questions raised by garbage

that were literally right under my nose.

As is the case with most large research projects, the questions posed by this work

have evolved over time. Stemming from my long interest and engagement with urban

vii

environmental management in Africa and other contexts, I began this project looking

specifically at NGO-initiated community-based waste management projects. My masters

research had looked at one such project in the Yoff commune and I had been drawn in

further by some broadly circulating "best practice"-style literature documenting the

"successes" of those projects (e.g. Gaye 1996; Gaye and Diallo 1997). Contrasting with

this optimistic literature, my preliminary research had revealed that all such projects were

no longer functioning and that they had been highly contested in some neighborhoods. I

intended to pose some questions about the "failure" of such NGO-inspired projects and,

more broadly, to interrogate the role of participation in urban waste management. The

2007 trash strikes and the public dumping which followed on their heels made it all too

apparent that my original inquiry was too narrow to capture the full significance of the

politics surrounding garbage in this city.

As it turned out, the community-based trash projects in the city's periphery were

just one sliver of an older and wider struggle surrounding the organization of garbage

labor in the home and city. They were also just the most recent iteration of a discourse of

participation in the sector that could be traced back to a legendary social movement that

had brought the city's youth into garbage collection as volunteers over fifteen years

earlier. As I sat down to chat with the city's garbage workers about their strikes, I found

that today's story was told through memories and references to that earlier moment.

Though the history of the youth movement had been thoughtfully considered by

Mamadou Diouf and other scholars, no one had explored its connection with today's

garbage predicament or what had become of those youth activists. Glimpsing just an

inkling of all that was behind the so-called garbage "crisis"—which I, like others, had

viii

previously glossed as simply the manifestation of a failed public service—I began to ask

some bigger questions of garbage in Dakar.

Just a couple of days after the dumping event I spoke of above, I was invited to

the trashworkers' union meeting where a second strike was called. In an electrifying

speech to a packed audience of workers who had not been paid for two months, the

union's charismatic leader incited his colleagues to resist the oppression of "the

politicians" who, he said, had used and abused them. Calling his union a Muslim

priesthood, he justified their actions against the state through reference to the spiritual

value of their work purifying the public space. The union leader's speech highlighted one

striking thread of the fabric of cultural politics encompassed in garbage and the work of

cleaning. As I would soon discover, caught up in garbage and its labor is a complex

landscape of identities and claims-making between different social actors in their

spatialized relations with each other and the state. Because it implicates changing social

relations at the heart of the family, neighborhood, city, and the state, garbage offers a

window into no less than the urban question in Dakar and the landscape of democracy

and citizenship in Senegal's neoliberal period.

The concerns posed by garbage raise a number of key questions animating

contemporary debates on the postcolonial African city in the neoliberal age. Mike Davis'

and AbdouMaliq Simone's work represent two influential approaches with very different

political implications. On the one hand, Dakar can easily be located on the map provided

in Mike Davis' Planet of Slums (2006), with garbage as the perhaps the quintessential

symbol of the public service casualties of structural adjustment. Davis' book has been

important in conveying the urgency of global inequality and the especially dire case of

ix

the African city in the contemporary era. Davis' version, however, is incomplete in that it

doesn't allow us to see the specific way that neoliberal reforms have worked in particular

contexts, the idioms through which they are understood, or how these processes are

contested and reconfigured in the process. In contrast with a view from the streets of

Dakar, the Planet of Slums obscures the claims staked in urban management debates

around, for instance, garbage, and tends to depict the urban African as a passive victim

who has no role or recourse in dynamics occurring on a planetary scale. On the other

hand, AbdouMaliq Simone's project aims to combat a long legacy of global map-induced

Afro-pessimism through looking at the dynamism of the local in African cities. He

emphasizes the openness of African urban spaces and the highly contingent processes

through which they are actively being remade in order to restore a sense of optimism and

possibility. The cocktail of contestations and negotiations that actually constitute the

functioning of the African city, are, Simone argues, the foundations For The City Yet to

Come (2004).

While I have learned a great deal from Simone's project and share with him the

need to work against Afro-pessimistic portrayals which reduce urban Africans to

impotent suffering masses, I am also wary of the risks of, on the other side, of a type of

Afro-optimism that is conveyed in an overemphasis on radical openness and contingency.

I hold Davis and Simone's perspectives in productive tension in order to consider Dakar

within the global economy without silencing the struggles of the Dakarois. As will

become clear in the following chapters, my goal in this dissertation is to find a middle

ground between a Planet of Slums reading of African cities and a Simone-ian sense of

possibility. Through rooting this analysis in a Gramscian investigation of the cultural

x

politics of garbage, I explore how neoliberal reforms are understood and reconfigured in

the process of their particular implementation in Senegal without minimizing the

devastation that has been wrought at their helm. Using a critical ethnographic approach—

where my primary research sites were both trashworkers' roadside hang-outs and the

kitchens of neighborhood women as well as the union headquarters and ministry offices

where the trash policies are nailed down—I aim to tell the garbage story beginning with

those doing the dirty work, but always in light of their relation to the state and the global

political economy.

The following chapters will illuminate the cultural reference points through which

claims are staked through garbage politics. As we shall see, this is an exploration of how

structural adjustment involves restructuring not only of the economy but also of "the time

and space of African lives" (Simone 2004: 8) and the contours of state power. As such,

my approach stands in direct contrast with the vast majority of research on contemporary

Senegal that tends to keep "culture" and "politics" separate. Through looking at the

politics of this everyday struggle—trash—which lies at the foundation of the health and

image of the city, I work with a notion of politics that is much larger, one that

encompasses all of the cultural resources marshaled in negotiations over the right to be,

work, and thrive in the city. Though by no means a full response to Mamadou's

contention that the whole history of Senegal can be told through garbage, this dissertation

is one small cut in that direction.

XI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation would not have been possible without the support, inspiration,

collaboration, and critique of many people. First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to

the people in Dakar who so graciously opened their homes and entrusted me with their

stories. I have learned an enormous amount as a scholar and a human being through this

project and am grateful for all that my respondents have taught me along the way.

I would particularly like to thank Madany Sy for welcoming me with open arms

into the affairs of the main trashworkers' union (SNTN) and for introducing me to many

of the union's leaders and delegates in their tireless efforts to improve the lot of the city's

trash collection force. In particular, Djibril Gueye, Abdoulaye Diop, and Xadi Gning

were incredibly obliging with their time. I am also grateful to the leaders of the other

trash unions in Dakar for their candid feedback, including: Cheikh Tidiane Yade and

Mbaye Sene of SYNAPS and Djaga Diawara of SYNAPRONE. I am beholden to all of

the trashworkers who generously shared their personal histories and opinions but,

especially, the to the sweepers and collectors of Niari Tali, Yoff, and Grand Yoff for

letting me invade their hang-out spots and lunch breaks. I will certainly never forget

those always illuminating, often funny, and sometimes sad hours spent "talking trash."

I am equally indebted to the residents of HLM Fass and Tonghor who invited me

into their homes and allowed me to look at their garbage. In HLM Fass, my work would

never have been possible without the time and energy of Said Gning and his family and

his friends. In Tonghor, Seynabou Ndir introduced me to the neighborhood and facilitated

the smooth running of my interviews. I thank all of the other residents who let me

xii

interrupt their busy days, offered me food and drink, and allowed me to pry into some

sticky and private matters.

In the various institutions and government agencies where I gathered important

data and documents, I would like to thank the following people: Mamadou Diouf, the ex-

director of the Collectivites Locales and Mouhamadou Tall, the archivist at the same

institution; Ibrahima Fall from the Dakar mayor's Office; Michel Seek from the Direction

de I'Environnement; Issa Barry and Oumar Cisse from the old Communaute Urbaine de

Dakar, Cheikh Mbaye from AMA; and former Mayors Adema Ba from Fass, Colobane,

Gueule Tapee and Issa Seydina Laye Ndiaye from Yoff. I am indebted to the current

mayor of Yoff and ex-mayor of Dakar, Mamadou Diop, for squeezing me into his busy

schedule and giving me access to his collection of unpublished memoirs. From ENDA, I

would like to thank Badara Dieng, Amadou Diallo, and Malick Gaye.

I am also deeply grateful for the years of support, guidance, and intellectual

inspiration I received from my academic advisors at Berkeley. My chair, Michael Watts,

has been a great mentor and intellectual guide who has taught me to talk fast and write

with a punch. His advice, moreover, to "Run with trash!" proved immensely helpful early

on and I could never have made it through without his encouragement and wisdom all

along the way. Our meetings in hipster coffee shops in San Francisco were certainly a

highlight of this journey. My intellectual debt to Gill Hart and her theory-method

approach shines through this work and I feel privileged to have had her in this project

from the beginning. Ananya Roy's classes and poignant comments were always most

useful and I am thankful to have received her insight and advice throughout this project. I

also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mamadou Diouf from Columbia University. If it had

xiii

not been for our serendipitous meeting in New York three days before my qualifying

exams, this project would have looked very different. His generous mentorship and

brilliant scholarship were of major consequence for this project and what lies beyond.

Finally, I am grateful to the support of Mariane Ferme in Anthropology and the

intellectual rigor she demanded in her class, my qualifying exams, and our wide-ranging

conversations on many subjects.

This research would also not have been possible without the assistance of

academics in Senegal who provided grounded feedback as well as practical guidance. I

would like to acknowledge Alfred Inis Ndiaye from the University of Saint Louis,

Gaston-Berger, as well as Babacar Fall, Amadou Camara, and Mame Demba Thiam from

Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. Some other Africanist scholars who have helped

me with contacts and in talking through my ideas at different stages of the project

include: AbdouMaliq Simone, Jesse Ribot, and Melanie Samson. In addition, this

fieldwork would have looked very different without the expert Wolof training from my

two very special jangkat: Pape Sow at Berkeley and Oumoul Sow at the Baobab Center

in Dakar. Both were dear friends who helped to translate much more than Wolof during

my experience in Senegal.

A huge debt is owed to my research assistants in this project. Ndeye Bineta Laye

Ndoye was more than just a partner in the day to day challenges of this research; she was

also a great teacher as well. Her poise, diplomacy, and mental acuity joined with her calm

and sense of humor to make her my savior on many a difficult day in Dakar. I cannot

overemphasize the great chance I had to share my fieldwork with this outstanding

geographer also preoccupied with garbage. I am indebted to her generosity as a colleague

xiv

and friend throughout this project. Ndeye Sophie Coly also aided me immensely with the

transcription of my interviews and I thank her on a million counts for her emotional

support and friendship during my time in Dakar. Finally, I am thankful to Fifi Sambou

and Adja Ndiaye for their transcription efforts.

My time in Dakar would not have been the same without the small universe of

scholars and friends who orbited my home, La Maison Rose. I thank the other graduate

students I was lucky enough to discover in Dakar, including: Cameron Gokee, David

Ansari, Sarah Zimmerman, Lindsey Simms, Erik and Karin Wimbley-Brodnax, Flynn

Coleman, Kelly Duke Bryant, Toby Warner, and Nicole List for their support,

encouragement, and company on many a balmy Dakar night in the courtyard. My

Senegalese friends and family made me feel that Dakar was my home and helped to

smooth over the stickier parts of moving, settling in, and everyday life while entrusting

me with deep friendships that I will never forget. I am particularly thankful to Ronald and

the whole Diop family of Yoff for holding me so close all of these years and teaching me

true generosity. Ousmane Fall helped me enormously with the logistics of my move to

Dakar and in finding the right dance spots. Boubacar Sow was a great intellectual

resource and friend. I am thankful to Iso and KoulGraoul for helping me to find a balance

of work and play in Dakar. Finally, Abdou Mbodj was and remains a steadfast ally and

tireless buttress through all of the challenges posed by these last years.

Back in Berkeley, my "rogue" writing group provided the feedback and support

without which the writing of this dissertation would never have been possible. I am

extraordinarily indebted to the deep reading and critique I received from this powerhouse

group: Sapana Doshi, Tracey Osborne, Mike Dwyer, Asher Ghertner, and Malini

xv

Ranganathan. I will certainly miss our intense theoretical discussions as well as our

rowdy outings.

I am thankful to the staff of the Geography department for their wise answers to.

my tireless inquiries: Nat Vonnegut, Delores Dillard, Carol Page, and Dan Plumlee.

My friends and family have also been a huge resource for me during this process.

I would never have survived the writing without the sustenance provided by my sister

Maddy's cooking and her husband Preston's dance parties. My mother's tireless

insistence that I not work too hard was certainly an important reminder to breathe and

take breaks. My friends Ian, Kate, Becca, and Michelle were a daily support that kept me

sane and grounded through this whole endeavor, in all of its trials and tribulations.

I gladly acknowledge the financial support I received for this research. I received

two academic year FLAS fellowships to study Wolof at Berkeley. Funding for two

preliminary summer research trips to Dakar was provided by the UC Berkeley Center for

African Studies and the Social Science Research Council. Finally, the fieldwork itself

was made possible with generous grants from the National Science Foundation and

Fulbright-Hays (US Department of Education).

Finally, I want to thank my father, the other Dr. Fredericks, for providing the

original inspiration for my obsession with garbage. Our adventures in dumpster diving

clearly made a lasting impression.

xvi

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

Trash in Place: The Dirt and Disorder of Development in Dakar

Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death.

—Mary Douglas (1966: 7)

1. Digging through the Trash

In 2007, seven years after winning a landmark election hailed as a crucial step toward the

deepening of democracy in Senegal and on the African continent, President Abdoulaye

Wade was elected to his second term with an overwhelming majority. Two months later,

the city was plunged into one of its greatest garbage crises yet, as its trashworkers went

on strike and the Dakarois, in solidarity, staged dramatic neighborhood-wide trash

"revolts" in which they externalized their household waste through public dumping.

m :••:•%$$ . • M^-f ...;,•

V ^r

Figure 1.1. Remnants of the trash revolts spearheaded by Dakar residents in May 2007. Note the campaign message for Abdoulaye Wade left over from the February 2007 presidential elections. (Source: author)

1

Mountains of trash, putrefying under the uncompromising West African summer sun,

literally choked the capital's grand boulevards and paralyzed many of the city's functions

(Figure 1.1).

These events contrast markedly with a different trash crisis that transpired in

Dakar almost twenty years prior. In 1989 the city's youth—who just a year earlier had

seriously threatened the peace in unprecedented acts of violence—ambushed the city's

trash-clogged public spaces with brooms and buckets. Cleaning the city in a frenzied

explosion of what came to be billed as "participatory citizenship," these young men and

women staged one of the country's most remarkable social movements ever seen. The

Set/Setal ("Be Clean/Make Clean" in Wolof) movement lives on in the memories of those

who lived it and in legend for those too young to remember (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2. Youth activists from the Set/Setal movement, painting neighborhood murals to clean and beautify the public space in 1989. (Reprinted, by permission, from ENDA (1991: 9)

2

Moreover, most of the workers who went on strike almost 20 years later, provoking the

trash revolts of 2007, were exactly the same individuals who spearheaded the legendary

. social movement. Juxtaposed, these two tales of dirt and disorder in Dakar are of

enormous significance. In a culture where cleanliness of body and soul is of deep

spiritual import, acts of dirtying or cleaning and ordering public space are profoundly

symbolic. What is to be made of this dramatic series of seemingly contradictory events in

Senegal's recent history?

This dissertation addresses these two moments and their interstices in a study of

garbage in Dakar during Senegal's neoliberal period. A subject that graces the public

media every week and frustrates many Dakarois in their everyday lives, the city's trash

challenge is almost always either rendered as a technical problem to be explained away

with reference to financial or material insufficiencies or as a product of corruption, plain

and simple. Dakar's trash problem is, in short, usually neatly packaged as an urban public

service casualty of structural adjustment induced "urbanization overspeed" (Ankerl 1986:

11) in Africa. As such, it becomes part of the depressingly familiar narrative of the

"failed" African metropolis, a symbol of "The Coming Anarchy" (Kaplan 1994) on a

continent ruled by chaos, decay, and, as Michael Watts sardonically critiques, "a civil

society gone awfully wrong" (1996: 253), quickly sliding farther and farther off the map

of "global interconnection."

I take a different approach from those chronicling the failed African city. This

dissertation explores the insights to be gleaned from the garbage crises over the last two

decades that can used in understanding the vast political, economic, and socio-cultural

changes under way during Senegal's neoliberal period. As the seat of state power and

3

politics in a country that has been upheld as one of Africa's few democratic "success

stories"—at the same time, the locus of enormous debate, tension, and mobilization

around garbage—Dakar's trash politics represent an important site through which to

explore larger questions of development and democracy. In fleshing out the very specific

conjuncture of circumstances that have produced the trash crises in Dakar, I take them to

be not chaotic periods of disintegration, but productive moments in which key political,

economic, and social factors crystallize and new configurations of social relations are

negotiated. I examine the labor of garbage management in Dakar—what I call here

trashwork—to illuminate how certain people get positioned, and position themselves, to

do the dirty work, with different rewards and dangers, across the uneven spaces of the

city. I focus primarily on the municipal trash collection force, but in so doing, I

necessarily contend with the osmosis between "formal" and "informal" trashwork and the

practices and discourses of household garbage management. The organization of

trashwork raises probing questions about the changing nature and expression of state

power and the implicated "citizen practices" of the Dakarois. I take on both questions

and their connection in an effort to complicate notions of African cities that imagine them

as decaying and unknowable.

This research is grounded in an assertion of the inseparability of method and

theory. I draw on Michael Burawoy's "global ethnography" (2000) and Gillian Hart's

"critical ethnography" (2004) as my principal methods of analysis in order to capture the

interconnections between the politics of place and broader configurations of neoliberal

political-economic trends. Importantly, I draw on Hart and concepts of spatiality to move

beyond Burawoy in exploring the production of globalization in lieu of simply studying

4

its "impacts" (Hart 2004). Excavating the garbage piles to uncover the hidden,

complicated mesh of meanings and practices surrounding garbage, I use trash as a lens

into the changing contours of citizenship in this African city.

The next sections explore the way in which I join together an understanding of the

particular material and symbolic relevance of trash as waste with the location of Dakar

within the larger frame of neoliberal debates. This foundation elucidates my framework

for exploring the greater import of the cultural politics of trash for understanding

Senegalese urban development. Thus, arguing precisely against the notion of African

political landscapes as different, this work instead urges for a refiguring of our

conceptions of what it means to be a citizen, the contours of how we describe

fundamental city-ness, and how we contemplate a range of alternative urban futures.

2. The Dirt and Disorder of Development1

In her seminal work on pollution and taboo, Mary Douglas (1966) illustrates how

symbolic associations around impurity maintain social structures. Dirt should be seen,

she argues, as simply "matter out of place" or "disorder"; there is a social function behind

rites and rituals defining what—and who, for that matter—is considered pure versus what

is labeled a contagion. In her words,

As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread of holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behaviour in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organise the environment. (1966: 2)

1 This title is drawn from the title of Jo Beall's article on waste management in Pakistan (2006). 5

Discourses around the danger of dirt and ritual pollution produce social borders and

thereby classify people into different social categories within a hierarchy of status.

Drawing from Douglas' formulation thus helps us to see how managing wastes is all tied

up with ordering and boundary making—two processes inextricably linked to the

exercise of power.

The management of waste has long been a subject of interest for scholars of

culture and the human condition. Much as the excavation of privies and ancient garbage

heaps give archeologists clues about the inner-workings of societies that have long

disappeared, scholars of the recent past and present dig through the detritus of systems—

material and symbolic—for a better understanding of a people, a historical moment.

Scholarship on disease control in the colonial era, for instance, reveals significant insight

into the colonial encounter, and, importantly, how the colonizer fashioned himself

through judging the practices of others.2 Space in the colonies was produced and

regulated along racialized lines, informed by ideas of dirt and disease. Disease outbreaks

were thus read through power relations and ideas of difference, and they often acted as

pivotal moments of socio-spatial reorganization.

Calling this phenomenon the "sanitation syndrome," Maynard Swanson, for

instance, revealed how colonial policy surrounding the bubonic plague intensified—

indeed acted as an instrument of—racial segregation in some South African cities (1977).

Some other notable examples of the interlocking politics of difference and sanitation in

the colonial era include Warwick Anderson's study of "excremental colonialism" in the

2 Waste management has also been deeply implicated in city planning policy and practice in the West. For example, discourses of cleanliness and indiscipline resonate with a number of other long-running debates including the historic question of pollution and class that can be seen in the progressive era in the U.S. (Riis 1890). For this project, however, I focus on those discourses deployed in a colonial/postcolonial context.

6

Philippines (1995), Sidney Chaloub's inquiry into yellow fever in Rio de Janeiro (1993),

Brenda Yeoh's research in Singapore (2003), Vijay Prashad's study of "native

dirt/imperial ordure" in India (1994) and, of particular relevance to my study setting,

Myron Echenberg's (2002) analysis of the bubonic plague in Senegal. Drawing from

these works and Dipesh Chakrabarty's insightful exposition on garbage in India

illuminates how ideas surrounding the control of wastes were deeply bound up with

notions of modernity (1991). Chakrabarty shows that the modernizing ideals of colonists

and nationalists alike were constantly contrasted with the "backwardness" of publicly

defecating and trash-throwing natives, with pervasive effects on urban planning practice.

The language of modernity and its orientalist deployment opposite the image of the "dirty

brown bodies of the colonized natives," for instance, often "justified a disregard for

providing sanitary amenities for the natives" (Prashad 1994: 243). It also elicited an

emphasis on hygiene and, with it, the key question—which preoccupied Gandhi, among

others—of the presence or "absence of a citizen-culture on the part of the people"

(Chakrabarty 1991: 18).

An obsession with ideas of cleanliness and the impetus to order the trashy—and,

by extension, dangerous—city remains a central component of contemporary

modernizing missions. In Jo Beall's words, the "great Victorian sanitation movement

lives on today in the discourse of development, particularly in relation to urban

infrastructure and services" (2006: 82). Useful here is Hart's distinction between "big D"

development and "little d" development, where the former is understood as a post-Second

World War project of intervention in the Third World and the latter is the uneven,

historical process of capitalist development (2001: 650). Beall draws on Douglas to

7

explore the "dirt and disorder of development"—read as big D—in Faisalabad, Pakistan

through the uneasy disjuncture between a messy social reality full of historically

contingent cultural systems surrounding waste management and "development as an

ordering and unidirectional process" (2006: 81). I join with this approach to problematize

those modernizing projects which—harkening back to the colonial era—take as their

starting place the disorderly nature of social systems surrounding waste and elide the

cultural meanings of trash and trashwork.

Arjun Appadurai's provocative article on toilet festivals in India takes a different

tack. He sees a local non-government organization (NGO) as turning on its head the

social-power hierarchy implied in the "politics of shit" (2002: 38). These public

celebrations of waste and toilets, Appadurai argues, are one way that the poor—through

transforming shitting into "exercises in technical initiative and self-dignification" are

actively transgressing dirty class associations and "finding ways to place some distance

between their waste and themselves" (2002: 39). While I agree that waste can be

deployed creatively to subvert ordering paradigms, I question Appadurai's conclusions

regarding the counter-hegemonic import of these festivals. I draw from these festivals—

in which World Bank officials were often a key audience—to reflect upon the hidden

postcolonial traces in the up-beat, populist discourse on urban services and waste that is

so central to the "revisionist" neoliberal paradigm governing (big D) development

(Mohan and Stokke 2000). Managing waste today, as in the colonial era, is deeply tied up

with controlling individual behavior and the socio-spatial organization of communities.

In the neoliberal era, furthermore, where self-management has become a central logic

8

governing the exercise of power, the question of people managing their own wastes has

come even more to the fore.

Garbage, one element of the larger discussions of sanitation, has been

increasingly recognized as a key development challenge—in many places, a failure—

throughout the global South. Though long neglected, the particular challenge of waste

management in urban Africa has recently gained some scholarly attention (e.g. Beall

1997; Fahmi 2005; Miraftab 2004b; Myers 2005; Onibokun 1999). However, apart from

the few studies that have begun to consider the garbage challenge in its full material and

symbolic complexity, most accounts of African trash today have more in common with

colonial era narratives of dirt and disorder. The garbage problem in African cities often

stands in as the quintessential symbol of "what's wrong" there: the visual expression of

the failures of development and the chaos taking over the African continent. The trash

crisis, in other words, acts as a potent metaphor for the African "crisis" writ large. The

journalist Robert Kaplan's depressing Malthusian account of his ride to the airport in

Conakry, is illustrative:

The forty-five-minute journey in heavy traffic was through one never-ending shantytown: a nightmarish Dickensian spectacle...The corrugated metal shacks and scabrous walls were coated with black slime. Stores were built out of rusted shipping containers, junked cars, and jumbles of wire mesh. The streets were one long puddle of floating garbage. Mosquitoes and flies were everywhere. Children, many of whom had protruding bellies, seemed as numerous as ants. (1994: 54, emphasis added)3

Accounts like Kaplan's are a dime a dozen in the popular press, alongside images

of war, disease, and the other unspeakable horrors overtaking the African continent. Even

Africanist scholars deploy garbage imagery to convey the severity of the African state of

3 Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy" article became one of the best-selling issues in The Atlantic Monthly's, history, was cited far and wide, and has inspired a number of apocalyptic websites and other media.

9

affairs. Though used to a very different end in their sophisticated representation of the

"crisis" as experienced in Yaounde, the following passage from Achille Mbembe and

Janet Roitman is just one example:

The landscape of decay is everywhere, unfolding and arranging itself like a fold in a fabric on the edge of the world; in the midst of an almost surreal decor, transformations are enveloped in quasi-magical effects. The city is laced with a string of litter and refuse that is rarely collected. Masses of rubbish have become the capital's landmarks, replacing street names and main crossroads. When they spill over in all directions and infest the atmosphere with their stench, the garbage is set on fire... It is testimony to this work of Sisyphus; this devouring and omnivorous force cannot be ensnared and becomes practically autonomous. (2002:106)

This sort of imagery dominates many portrayals of African cities today. Although there is

no doubting the devastation wrought from the garbage crisis and its inextricable

connection to the political-economic stagnation and deepening poverty that has gripped

the continent and its residents within its noxious fumes for decades, one must ask what is

obscured by such representations. Depictions of the garbage crisis in Dakar, for instance,

rarely mention the waste management workforce that is tied up in the saga nor,

furthermore, the cultural mores that are implicated (and transgressed) when a whole

neighborhood actually throws their garbage into the street in a self-described act of

"rebellion." I argue that trash out of place stems from—and symbolizes—political crisis.

However, common representations of trash crises often obscure the actions that provoke

the disorder and the possibility of that disorder being creative. As Douglas herself noted,

"We must [...] ask how dirt, which is normally destructive, sometimes becomes creative"

(1966: 196).

The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) defines crisis as: "A vitally important or

decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turning-point; also, a state of affairs in which

10

a decisive change for better or worse is imminent." This denotation resonates with an

understanding of crisis coming out of a long line of Marxian debate on the role of crises

in capitalism (See Harvey 1982). Keeping this formulation in mind, I develop here a view

of the trash crisis in Dakar that aims to tease out its creative productivity. I take the two

major trash crises of Senegal's neoliberal moment—those of 1988 and 2007—as key

points of rupture, when political-economic disorder became materially visible in the

public space and when, crucially, different actors negotiated a new configuration of social

relations upon historically sedimented layers of meaning. The trash crises are thus the

manifestation of the disorder of development, key moments of revelation and reflection

on larger political questions, as well as productive moments when old and new actors

renegotiate their roles in the urban labor question, or more broadly the orderly processes

of city-making. Deeply wrapped up with the question of trash and its management are

important questions about the state—its ability to delineate, delegate, and fulfill its duties,

and its image and legitimacy in the eyes of the nation's people and outside observers—

but also questions about the citizens: their relationships to the state, to the space of the

urban environment, and to each other.

In approaching these questions, it is necessary to first contextualize this inquiry

within the neoliberal moment. The following section situates the garbage crisis within the

general "African crisis" to ask key questions about the "slumming" of Africa and its

place—at least symbolically—as the world's dump.4

4 Although I do not explore this here, it is well known that many African countries—along with other, particularly Asian, countries in the Third World—actually receive a lot of the garbage, toxic and otherwise, produced in richer countries.

11

3. Neoliberalism, Hegemony, and the African State

Senegal's trash crises must be contextualized within the recent political-economic

moment—that is, Senegal's unique neoliberal experiment, and, more broadly, the global

neoliberal era and the dismal conditions that have befallen most African countries in its

grip. By now an all too familiar catch-all term, neoliberalism can be seen at its most basic

as "a theory of political-economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best

be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an

institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and

free trade" (Harvey 2005: 2). The practice and processes—or paths—of neoliberalization

in specific places and moments have, however, been immensely diverse, complex, and

unavoidably imbricated with the particular spaces, histories, and socio-cultural milieus in

which they are observed. The vast majority of sub-Saharan African countries were

directed down a neoliberal development path in the 1980s and 1990s via the extensive

programmatic roll-out of Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) on the continent

following the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s. In the first clear articulation of

neoliberal development theory in a policy document, economist Eliot Berg's (1981)

report for the World Bank—known as the Berg Report—blamed the African crisis on

African states' "bad policies" and posited the solution to the continent's woes as this now

familiar package of reforms aimed at deregulation, privatization, and rolling back the

state. Though "[developments in the 'periphery' may be as significant, if not more so, as

those in the 'core' in explaining the spread of neoliberalism" (Larner 2003: 210), much

less attention has been paid to the roll-out of structural adjustment in Africa than to the

rise of neoliberalism in the West.

12

While the impacts of SAPs on economic growth in Africa are still the subject of

great debate, it is generally well recognized that "the idea that deregulation and

privatization would prove a panacea for African economic stagnation was a dangerous

and destructive illusion" (Ferguson 2006: 11). In contrast with other parts of the world

that have shown some positive impacts of neoliberalization, "[i]n Africa it has done

nothing at all to generate positive changes" (Harvey 2005: 254). This period has seen the

lowest rates of economic growth ever recorded on the continent as well as sharply

increasing inequality, widespread social dislocation and conflict, and the emasculation, in

most contexts, of African states' ability to provide for the common good. Mike Davis

argues in "SAPing the Third World" from his volume Planet of Slums that SAPs acted as

"urban poverty's big bang" especially in Africa (2006: 152). In his apocalyptic rendering,

the African city—a filthy rotten mess that recalls Kaplan (above) and echoes the

dependency debates of the 1960s—has become, at its essence, a disease-ridden holding

pen for the continent's burgeoning populations, continually squeezed, or "SAPped," in

successive cycles of primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession, to use

Harvey's phrase (2005).

Narratives of the African "exception" and stories of gloom and doom that paint a

picture of African countries as "degrading," "unfinished," "unworkable," and "failed" are

not new or imaginative. They are, in fact, consistent with a long legacy of discourse,

deeply tied up with other rounds of globalization, which places Africa as the primordial

other, a perverted and incomplete version of the Western whole (Mudimbe 1994). An

attention to the continent's connection to the rest of the world helps in working against

the naturalizing and disabling effect of depictions that simply recite a "series of lacks and

13

absences, failings and problems, plagues and catastrophes" (Ferguson 2006: 2). To this

end, I find quite useful James Ferguson's novel deployment of the shadow metaphor

often used to describe Africa's place in the world—an otherwise hackneyed expression

conjuring notions of the "dark" continent—and, in particular, his emphasis on Africa's

relationship to the West. In his words, "A shadow, in this sense, is not simply a negative

space, a space of absence; it is a likeness, an inseparable other-who-is-also-oneself to

whom one is bound" (2006: 17). In this light, and recognizing that "Africa" is in many

ways a mythical entity—fabricated as a coherent geographic entity despite great internal

diversity (Mudimbe 1994)—we are forced to consider not the fact of Africa's

interconnection with other parts of the world, but, rather, the way the continent has been

injected into the "neoliberal world order" (Ferguson 2006). As a result, analyses of Africa

can be asked to speak "of the world" (See Simone 2001) and some questions can be

asked about the material and symbolic "rubbishing" (See Chakrabarty 1991) of the

continent.

Keeping in mind an awareness of the violence and tragedy that has been reaped

on the African continent as a whole with structural adjustment, and the importance of

contextualizing this recent history within an understanding of how the African continent

has been integrated into the successive waves of globalization, I am also interested in

working against a tendency to universalize the "African" experience. My aim here is to

look at the specific and unique experiences of neoliberal reform in Senegal over the last

decades and their concrete expressions. I draw from scholarship that endeavors to work

against "overgeneralized accounts of a monolithic and omnipresent neoliberalism" (Peck

and Tickell 2002: 381) to instead explore how a certain set of ideas around, most

14

basically, the primacy of the market have come to be adopted, implemented, and

contested in very specific and different ways in individual contexts. I draw here from

scholarship emphasizing the "different variants of neoliberalism, the hybrid nature of

contemporary policies and programmes," as well as "the multiple and contradictory

aspects of neoliberal spaces, techniques, and subjects" (Larner 2003: 509).5 This

approach thus contrasts with most characterizations of neoliberalism "which tend to

generalize about its negative or positive effects" (Postero 2007: 17) by being more

"sensitive to local variability" and neoliberalism's "complex internal constitution" (Peck

and Tickell 2002: 382). I thus view the "roll-out" of neoliberal reform as a messy

process, carried out through local political contexts, and reject a teleological "impact

model" of globalization as a global bulldozer wreaking havoc on a passive local victim

(Hart 2001).

This dissertation seeks to rework understandings of neoliberalism in light of these

understandings by exploring one part of the Senegalese experience. Senegal's neoliberal

path, we shall see, has in certain ways been textbook: the country was the first on the

continent to undergo structural adjustment starting in 1979, and it has taken a number of

serious measures towards liberalizing the economic and political playing fields. However,

though the prescriptions may have arrived in Senegal as a one-size-fits-all formula, their

conception, implementation, and effects have been deeply specific to this place. My

analysis draws on Hart's development of the notion of trajectories of socio-spatial

change, which is grounded in a view of specific places as "nodal points of connection in

socially produced space" (Hart 2002: 34-36, quoting Massey (1994)). I draw from her

emphasis, following Stuart Hall (Hall 1980, 1985), on attending to the specificity of a

5 See also, Larner (2000).

15

historical conjuncture while being attentive to wider connections to explore how forces

(power relations, political economy, and historical sedimentations) come together in

different ways to shape the political landscape. My approach is premised on a recognition

that "economic practices and struggles over material resources and labor are always and

inseparably bound up with culturally constructed meanings, definitions, and identities"

(Hart 2002: 27). To this end, Senegal's neoliberal trajectory can only be unearthed with

an analysis of the specific inter-relationship of economic processes and political

imperatives with historically contingent and contested cultural forms and meanings.

These interconnections underlie the driving questions behind this research.

One of the key concerns raised in the scholarly work on neoliberalism is its

impact on the state and the changing contours of state-society relations. Though

neoliberal discourse is deeply bound up with ideas surrounding the "withdrawal of the

state" and the ascendance of a smaller, non-interventionist state in exchange for a freer

market, it is well understood that the "free," "self-regulating" market involves a

remarkable amount of planning and production on the part of the state (Polanyi

2001 [1944]). States have far from disappeared in the neoliberal age: they have, in fact,

been of central importance in ensuring the spread of neoliberal ideologies and facilitating

and defending the implementation of neoliberal policies (Harvey 2005). Scholars

examine, instead, the reconfiguration of the state's formula of authority—and the "space"

of the state (Brenner 2004; See Brenner et al. 2003)—under these new political-economic

arrangements and the myriad expressions of governmental power.

Governmentality theorists have focused on thinking beyond the traditional nation-

state apparatus. Following Foucault's influential statement, governmentality expands the

16

purview of the "art of government" to include not only those traditional forms of

authority we associate with governing (i.e. laws) but all of the multiform tactics,

techniques, and strategies through which government pursues "the perfection and

intensification of the process it directs" (Foucault 2003 [1978]: 237). This interpretation

is useful in helping us to think through how the subjects of government come to take part

in their own self-management and, especially, to understand how governing works

through the entrepreneurial subject produced in neoliberal discourse and practice.

However, the way that Anglophone governmentality scholars have often deployed the

analytic has been less useful for considerations of the actually existing state and what

Tania Li calls "the practice of politics" (2007). In Li's estimation, the key limit to

governmentality's explanatory power—as it has been developed in the literature—lies in

its over-attention to programs and policies and under-attention to the "witches' brew of

processes, practices, and struggles that exceed their scope"—or "what happens when

those interventions become entangled with the processes they would regulate and

improve" (2007: 27-28). Africanist scholars, moreover, point to the limitations of much

governmentality-based analysis for understanding African development and the

production of what may be called "ungovernable" spaces therewith (Watts 2003: 26). In

light of these critiques and because I am centrally concerned with the messy process

flagged by Li and its implication for the Senegalese state, I draw from a Gramscian

theorization of hegemony in this analysis.

Writing his Prison Notebooks (2000) while imprisoned by Mussolini's fascist

regime in the 1930s, Antonio Gramsci was considering a very different historical

conjuncture than neoliberalism. His theoretical intervention is, nonetheless, deeply

17

applicable to an analysis of the neoliberal era. As a way for Gramsci to explain the source

of the extraordinary resilience displayed by capitalism in the West and the lack of a

revolutionary working class there as well as the implications of fascism, his development

of the idea of hegemony was centered on placing culture and ideology at the heart of

political-economic analysis. Hegemony for Gramsci is the process by which dominant

groups in society, including fundamentally but not exclusively the ruling class, maintain

their dominance by securing the consent of subordinate groups, including the working

class, through the negotiated construction of a political and ideological consensus. As

such, Gramsci's approach represents a sort of "Marxism without guarantees" (Hall 1986),

in which ideology cannot be simply read off economy, but where, instead, the two are

deeply intertwined and dialectically co-productive. While ideology does have a specific

function in securing the conditions for the expanded reproduction of capital, this is not its

only function, and there is no perfect symmetry between ideology and class (Hall 1988:

41). Importantly, hegemony acts as an "unstable equilibrium" (Hall 1980: 52), a complex

articulation of correspondences that exist in a historical moment and are neither

permanent nor guaranteed. It must be continuously achieved through a "war of position,"

between different ideologies and practices that critically require consent located within

civil society. A major aspect of the workings of hegemony is the ability of the dominant

class to project its own way of seeing the world as universal so that those who are

subordinated by it accept it as "common sense" and "natural" through key institutions

including education, the law, and mass culture (Gramsci 2000). Ideology for Gramsci

thus represents a dynamic conception seen as a historical connection between forms of

consciousness (ideas) and forms of concrete (material) struggle.

18

Key to Gramsci's comparative political analysis is his particular conception of

civil society. For him, civil society is not conceived as having "an integrity and coherence

of its own" (Burawoy 2003: 198) but is instead a specific historical product and is

interwoven with the state. In fact, institutions of civil society formed the outer

"earthworks" of the state, through which the ruling classes maintained their hegemony

(Ibid: 229). For Gramsci, it was necessary to transform civil society, indeed to create an

alternative hegemony of the subordinate classes, before it would be possible to challenge

state power. Hall employs and extends a Gramscian framework to consider the historical

work that specific ideologies do in different settings (Hall 1980; 1988). Like Gramsci,

Hall thus emphasizes the process of construction of hegemony and thus its inherent

instabilities. Important in this analysis of ideology is discourse, but a discourse which is

never separated from material practice and the institutional forms it takes. For Hall (and

Gramsci), the state is seen as one of the most crucial sites for modern capitalist social

formation, as the site where political practices are condensed (Grossberg and Slack

1985).

In considering the African continent in the neoliberal era, it is generally

recognized that structural adjustment has dramatically reshaped the form and power of

African states, particularly considering SAPs' explicitly anti-state prerogatives. Indeed,

most if not all Africanist analysts would agree that the recent period in African

development has seen a crisis of the state accompanied by a serious erosion of its

administrative and institutional capacity. The idea of state "weakness" demands further

attention, however. Some scholars argue against the weak state thesis by demonstrating

the perverted "strength" of African states as, for instance, a vehicle for organized

19

criminal activity (Bayart et al. 1999). Jean-Francois Bayart et al. argue that this

phenomenon more accurately represents a "maturation of social capital" within the state

apparatus, which allows it to proceed with few checks on its authority (Ibid.). Similarly,

Roitman's research exposes how so-called "informal" smuggling economies are deeply

interconnected with and enabled through "formal" regulatory sources of power (2005).

For his part, Mbembe articulates the crisis of the modern African state as not a simple

regression to statelessness but a restructuring of the state's formula of authority to a form

of "private indirect government" (2001). He and others emphasize the role of NGOs as

key players in the new configurations of power and their often deep complicity with state

projects despite the rhetoric, so prevalent in the development discourse, of their being an

"independent" third sector.

Keeping these perspectives in mind, my aim is to probe further into questions of

state legitimacy and citizenship in Africa's neoliberal era. African states have generally

not enjoyed uncontested legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens given their fraught origins

(See Mamdani 1996), yet, for many, their legitimacy has been profoundly called into

question during the neoliberal period. In Mbembe's words, "Having no more rights to

give out or to honor, and little left to distribute, the state no longer has credit with the

public. All it has left is control of the forces of coercion" (2001: 76). As lines of

accountability are blurred and those who impose government policies become invisible,

he argues, the reciprocity implied in citizenship has, in turn, been sharply eroded (Ibid.).

However, though it is widely recognized that the state's "defection from responsibility"

(Mbembe and Roitman 2002: 118) in the neoliberal era has deep consequences for its

authority, public welfare, and questions of citizenship, little scholarship has concretely

20

examined the changing relationship between the African state and its citizens in the wake

of structural adjustment.

The challenges of neoliberalism for the African state do not imply a descent into

disorder and anarchy. Mbembe, himself, reminds us that,

such phenomena are not automatically indicators of chaos. It is important to see in them, also, struggles aimed at establishing new forms of legitimate domination and gradually restructuring formulas of authority built on other foundations. (2001:76)

It is important, furthermore to study those states that have coped with the strains of

structural adjustment through democratic systems and not just authoritarian ones, though

they should not be romanticized. Some states have endeavored through new means to

retain or build popular legitimacy despite hostile political-economic conditions. In this

light, it is important to characterize those reconfigurations of power and democratic

processes that have occurred in places like Senegal. As one of Africa's most stable

democracies—a reputation solidified when Abdoulaye Wade's opposition party came to

power in the famous political turn-over AIternance of 2000—Senegal has long been a

sort of darling of the international community. And yet, as in other African contexts,

faced with economic liberalization, shrinking state coffers, and an inability to administer

the public good, the Senegalese state has had to scramble to find new formulas through

which to retain its power and legitimacy. A significant body of scholarship has

endeavored to flesh out those reformulations over the last two decades.6 Building on that

literature, this research offers a new view of Senegal's unique path, seen through Dakar's

garbage. A key public service and a significant labor force (averaging 1500 jobs) in a

time of increasingly scarce formal employment and the state's diminishing ability to

6 For a few of the key texts, see Cruise O'Brien et al.(2002), Diop (1993b), and Diop and Diouf (1990). 21

control it, the trash sector, we will see, came to represent an important battleground of

state power and democratic politics.

Drawing from a Gramscian understanding of hegemony, I read the social and

institutional history of municipal trash management in Dakar to flesh out what I see as

two different phases in the construction of state hegemony in the last twenty years in

Senegal. With respect to the first, from 1989 to 1999—following and deeply intertwined

with the legendary Set/Setal movement mentioned above—I argue that the shift to a more

flexible, participatory trash system peopled by youth and women workers represented

part of a new hegemonic formula that was secured on a moral-ideological level through

the idea of participatory citizenship. With respect to the second period, from 2000 to

2008, after the election of Abdoulaye Wade, I argue that we see a turn back to a more

coercive formula of rule as the new state struggles with its particular challenges to

legitimacy. This period, is in turn, met with a rising tide of discontent amongst the

Dakarois, as manifested in the trash revolts. This complicated story, I will show, is

deeply specific to the historic trajectory of state-society relations in Senegal and the

simultaneous liberalization of the economic, political, and religious realms that happened

during the neoliberal era there. I foreground the role of citizen practices—social

movements around trash, in this case—in triggering, shaping, and contesting those

renegotiations to show how coercion and consent are never fully distinct in this setting,

but operate in dynamic tension throughout consecutive conjunctural moments. This

project has thus been aimed at illuminating the process of neoliberalization in one

African context, to see how, in Wendy Larner's words, "neoliberalism articulates with

other political projects, takes multiple material forms, and can give rise to unexpected

22

outcomes" (2003: 511). To emphasize this messy process and its unexpected outcomes, I

explore the cultural politics surrounding these changes in the space of this particular city.

I introduce that discussion by way of a consideration of the city, below.

4. African Cities and Neoliberalism: The Trashy Edge of the Map

This analysis is also concerned with thinking about the spaces of neoliberalism,

and, in particular, the space of the African city and its citizens in these transformations. It

is now well recognized that "cities have become strategically crucial geographical arenas

in which a variety of neoliberal initiatives—along with closely intertwined strategies of

crisis displacement and crisis management—have been articulated" (Brenner and

Theodore 2002: 4). The reconfiguration of power at the national scale has thus been

accompanied by the intensification of neoliberal political-economic transformations at

the urban scale over the last decades. Cities and city-regions represent essential arenas of

state restructuring; inter-urban competition has been an outcome of the regulation of the

economy at the national scale (Brenner 2004). The creative destruction implied with

gentrification and "redevelopment" in cities of the global North and South alike are

dramatic testament to this phenomenon (See Smith 2002).

Saskia Sassen (1991) and other scholars argue that a handful of cities, including

New York, London, and Tokyo, have become the privileged loci for the concentration of

power in neoliberal globalization through their operations as centers of command and

control of finance capital. Similarly, in Manuel Castells' focus on the geography of

informational flows and technology in constituting networks of power in contemporary

capitalist development, many parts of the Third World, particularly Africa, represent

23

what he calls "black holes" of information—part of a Fourth World that is "structurally

irrelevant" to informational capitalism and thus marginalized from capital accumulation

(1998). Such debates return us to ideas of Africa's lack of connection to the globalizing

rest of the world. Cities in Africa are, for that matter, often omitted in representations of

the continent, which presume the continued domination of the rural sphere, despite the

fact that we observe in Africa fantastic rates of urban growth (Table 1.1) and the

explosion of some of the world's megacities and mega-urban corridors (Davis 2006; UN-

HABITAT 2008). Existing representations of African cities are, as we've discussed,

usually replete with chaos and decay.

Urban Population (Millions) Average Growth Rate (%)

Africa

Asia

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

Northern America

Oceania

1950

33

237

281

69

110

8

1975

107

574

444

198

180

15

2007

373

1645

528

448

275

24

2025

658

2440

545

575

337

30

2050

1234

3486

557

683

401

37

1950-1975

4.76

3.54

1.84

4.21

1.98

2.60

1975-2007

3.90

3.29

.54

2.55

1.33

1.44

2007-2025

3.15

2.19

.18

1.38

1.11

1.17

2025-2050

2.52

1.43

.08

.69

.70

.89

Table 1.1. Urban Population and Urbanization Rates, 1950-2050. (Adapted from: UN Urbanization Prospects 2007 Revision (UN 2007).) Note Africa's current urbanization rates (bold).

According to the UN HABITAT'S 2008 State of African Cities report, in 2007 the

total urban population of Africa was estimated to be 39 percent (373 million people) with

an average annual urbanization rate of 3.3 percent—the highest in the world (2008: 4).

Forty-three percent of these urban populations live below the poverty line. By 2050 there

24

will be more people living in African cities than the combined urban and rural

populations of the Western hemisphere (Ibid.)- Africa is rapidly becoming urban, as is

clearly illustrated in Figure 1.3, which depicts those African cities with more than one

million inhabitants. This urban growth rate raises serious concerns about representations

that leave a dark spot on this part of the globe.

i,s*£S\$£>«*/ , M p s l i 88°3M>

Dakar / cw yi ', (2.5 million) »"~"'r

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Figure 1.3. Cities in Africa with more than one million inhabitants. (Source: (UN-HABITAT 2008: x))

While "global city" perspectives are important in revealing the remarkable

concentration of wealth and power in specific geographic locations and the strategic role

of cities in flows of information, people, and finance capital, they do not go far enough

toward examining the spatial production of global power, the terms of global integration,

and the presumptions underpinning the constructions of "city-ness" they are built upon.

25

Jennifer Robinson and others draw attention to the geography of urban theory represented

by those globalization theorists who position Third World cities as "off the map" of

global power (2002). She forces us to consider how theories of "global cities" and the

like reify their own categories and hierarchies and are, in fact, part of the production and

regulation of those cities' power through an othering of "ordinary cities." Relational

understandings of Africa elucidate how profoundly this perspective "perpetually

underplays the embeddedness in multiple elsewheres of which the continent actually

speaks" (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004: 348), and, crucially, African cities' key strategic role

in empire, past and present. Part of a community of scholars urging for a more

cosmopolitan urban theory that illuminates flows of people, ideas, cultures, and

imaginaries in addition to flows of capital, AbdouMaliq Simone speaks of a "worlding

from below," through the explosion of an outward-looking imaginary through, for

example, identification with a global black youth culture and membership in regional and

international Islamic brotherhoods (2001). A map of global Islamic networks and

imaginaries would, indeed, paint a very different image of global integration than the

global city map (Robinson 2002). A critical understanding, then, of the production of

space in representations of neoliberal globalization helps us to explore how different

places are produced in relation to each other (See Hart 2002). Understanding ordinary

African urban economies and imaginaries is thus not simply critical in helping us to

understand how Africans are remaking themselves in the face of extreme constraint but

may also mean "understanding the world itself (Berner and Trulsson 2000: 26). This

work offers a cut in that direction through a study of the mundane and everyday in the

"ordinary" city of Dakar.

26

As privileged loci of globalization, cities—including African cities—are also host

to the messy processes and consequences surrounding the implementation of neoliberal

policies and programs. In Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell's formulation,

As key sites of economic contradiction, governance failure, and social fall-out, cities find themselves in the front line of both hypertrophied after-welfarist statecraft and organized resistance to neoliberalization. Regressive welfare reforms and labor-market polarization, for example, are leading to the (re)urbanization of (working and non working) poverty, positioning cities at the bleeding edge of processes of punitive-institution building, social surveillance, and authoritarian governance. (2002: 395)

The extraordinary wave of popular protest—the so-called "IMF Riots," the neoliberal

era's version of the "bread riots" in eighteenth-century Europe—that swept across the

Third World and the countries of the former socialist bloc during the 1980s and 1990s in

response to the mounting debt crisis and austerity measures were powerful testimony to

this reasoning (Stiglitz 2002; Walton and Seddon 1994). Their African incarnations were

especially dramatic and even contributed to shaking loose some governments' hold on

power (for instance Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia) (Bond 2008; Wiseman 1986).

Furthermore, in the re-spatialization of state power, local governments (and, by

extension, urban public services), can be seen as particularly important sites for the

crystallization of contradictions surrounding neoliberal restructuring (See Hart 2002).

In Senegal, we will see how Dakar (see Figure 1.4) has played a major role in the

implementation and negotiation of structural adjustment. As increasingly the center of

economic control and opportunity in the country, it has acted as the major receiving

basket for the rural exodus over the last twenty years. Exhibiting one of the continent's

fastest urban growth rates, Senegal's urban population grew from 34 percent in 1975 to

49 percent in 2002 (UNDP 2003). Dakar's urban growth rate was estimated at 2.9 percent

27

from 1988 to 2005. At 2.5 million inhabitants in 2005, it comprised 23 percent of the

total Senegalese population, or around half of the country's urban population (Senegal et

al. 2007; UN-HABITAT 2007). Yet, as in other African contexts, the simultaneous

erosion of the state's role in employment and public services has meant that urbanization

rates have far outstripped that of economic opportunities in the city, contributing to the

dramatic growth of urban poverty. The city's sprawling impoverished suburb-slum of

Pikine, which is now home to almost half of the city's 2.5 million inhabitants, is a clear

manifestation of this phenomenon7 (See Figure 6.1).

The neoliberal period in Dakar has borne witness to a drastic reduction in public

services as well as what had been the government's role as the "employer state" offering

jobs to many in the urban area. As a public service and one of the last bastions of state

employment, the city's garbage sector was inevitably caught up in those developments.

Senegal's version of the IMF riots—those in the 1980s and more recent demonstrations

in the 2000s—have often directly confronted the urban garbage management system in

Dakar and, more generally, the filth of the city. Building on an understanding that urban

services are a key area of struggle in neoliberalizing contexts around the world (e.g. Hart

2008), this study telescopes in on those moments, always foregrounding the key symbolic

resonance of trash. In so doing, it responds to the severe dearth of research (with,

perhaps, the exception of that focusing on South Africa), particularly by political

ecologists, looking at the negotiation of neoliberal reform in African cities.

7 Davis estimated that Pikine—what he called one of the world's largest "megaslums"—was home to 1.2 million inhabitants (2006: 28). The population of Dakar was 2 million in 2000 and projected to be 2.9 million by 2010 (UN-HABITAT 2008: 175). 8 In his work on garbage in African cities, Garth Myers points out that most political ecology research is still quite focused on rural Africa (2005).

28

Figure 1.4. Map of the Department of Dakar, divided into its 19 Communes D'Arrondissements. (Source: wikicommons)

The Urban Setting: Dakar (1800-2008)

A brief history of Dakar is useful here to introduce the city's long history of

political and economic importance as well as its unique democratic legacy. In 2007,

Dakar celebrated its 150th year and a long history of what can be seen as intimate

connection with global economies and imaginaries. The Cape Verde peninsula was

originally settled by Lebou—one of Senegal's nine ethnic groups—fisherman no later

than the fifteenth century (Sylla 1992). Meanwhile, the Portuguese first landed on the

island of Goree (a small island off the peninsula) in 1444, where they founded a

settlement that was to become part of the slave trade network. The island, just off the

mainland, changed hands between the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French many

times before the French finally took control of it nearing the end of the seventeenth

century. First settling the African coast in Saint Louis in 1659, the French took definitive

29

control of the colony of Senegal in 1817 after losing it to English occupation during the

French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. The towns of Saint Louis and Goree formed as

commercial outposts during the height of the mercantile era and the Atlantic slave trade

and came to be known as the "old colony" of Senegal (Gellar 1976). In 1857, the French

founded a military base at the Lebou village of Ndakarou, which they called Dakar.

Dakar and Rufisque, farther East along the Cape Verde peninsula, grew to prominence in

the late nineteenth century. These four coastal settlements (Saint-Louis, Goree, Rufisque,

and Dakar) were organized into communes, the smallest administrative unit in the French

system, in the nineteenth century and came to be known as the Quatre Communes (Four

Communes) of Senegal. The Four Communes represented France's oldest colonial

holdings in tropical Africa as well as the clearest expression of France's direct rule

policy.

The Third Republic ushered in the modern political era in the Four Communes

and gave communal governments legal recognition and a uniform plan for administrative

organization. The three primary institutions of local government were set up at this time:

the Deputyship to Chamber of Deputies in Paris—considered the most important elected

representative, and conferring "honor" and "prestige" to the colony—municipal councils

and mayors, and the General Council (conseil general) or the representative assembly for

all of the Communes (Idowu 1968: 272). Between 1854, with the expansionist

governorship of Louis Faidherbe, and 1904, when the centralizing process of the

Federation of French West Africa was completed, the modern boundaries of Senegal

were established. In contrast with the legal framework of the Four Communes, the rest of

the colony—known as the Protectorate—fell under the direct authority of the colonial

30

administration. Fully empowered municipal institutions (communes de plein exercise)

were officially organized according to French metropolitan law in 1872 for Saint-Louis

and Goree, then 1880 for Rufisque, and 1887 for Dakar.

The originaires—or the original inhabitants of the Four Communes—are widely

recognized to have enjoyed the most political expression of French colonies in tropical

Africa during the colonial period. The originaires had special rights under French

colonial code—termed "citizenship"—which amounted to special legal status and

participation in local as well as French elections (Diouf 1998). In contrast, the inhabitants

of the Protectorate were known as subjects (sujets) and were subject to the Native Code

(indigenat). Because of their claim to land on the peninsula, the Lebou constituted a large

percentage of the originaires and have dominated Dakar politics since colonial times.

Dakar became the capital of the French West African federation (AOF) in 1902

and has grown in importance, size, and reputation since that time. Colonial authorities

spearheaded major infrastructure projects—including the port facilities as well as the

Dakar-Saint Louis and Dakar-Niger railway—which consolidated Dakar's role as a major

West African port and administrative center. The city was host to major French trading

firms and a major military base. The legacy of black politics in Dakar during colonialism,

as detailed in G. Wesley Johnson's important book (1971), laid the groundwork for

municipal politics in Senegal as well as the city's role as the political center of the

country. The turn of the century marked a pivotal moment in urban politics when black

Africans began to dominate all three municipal bodies. Three vacant seats on the Dakar

municipal council were filled by Africans in the 1898 election, independent candidate

Galandou Diouf was elected in 1909 to the General Council, and then Blaise Diagne was

31

famously elected to be the Senegalese Deputy to Paris in 1914 (Johnson 1971). From

then on, the originaires began to dominate local politics in Dakar. Thirty-two years later,

a man named Leopold Senghor would serve as one. of the last Deputies to France's

National Assembly before he would become the first President of independent Senegal.

Much as the city was the seat of the French colonial administration in West

Africa, today it operates as an influential center of the development apparatus, in one of

the most highly favored countries for development aid in Africa. The city has, as Bayart

would call it, a long "history of extraversion" (1999)—as well as a long history of being

the locus of debate and contest around citizenship. Though the basis of the economy has

shifted—along with the successive "globalization projects" —from the export of slaves

(Barry 1998), to peanuts to tourism today,10 the city has dominated politics and power in

the region for some time. In many respects, Dakar can be seen to stand in for the

nation—some would say to the detriment of the rest of the country. As a result, the

garbage crises in Dakar take on larger than life significance in this small country: the

trashing of Dakar symbolizes the trashing of the nation. The dirty city, moreover, stands

in the way of the image the state would like to project of a space of leisure for sun-

craving would-be tourists.

Depictions of chaos and decay surrounding the garbage "crises" in Dakar sit in

tension with a rhetoric of Senegalese "exceptionalism" that has long placed the country

and its capital a bit apart from other African settings. In a way, the trash crises and riots

Mamadou Diouf describes the citizenship of the urban residents in Senegal (including Dakar) during colonialism as "a nineteenth century globalization project" (1998). 10 Tourism is an increasingly dominant contributor to national GDP (Senegal et al. 2007). '' Dakar is a major financial center, home to a dozen national and regional banks (including the BCEAO which manages the unified West African CFA currency), and to numerous international organizations, NGOs, and international research centers.

32

stand in contrast with the city's—and country's—special reputation past and present as a

beacon of hope within a struggling continent. French tourists, arriving in droves in Dakar

for beach vacations, are consistently shocked by the capital's garbage problem. The fact

that there have been cholera outbreaks over the last few years due to poor sanitation is

just one more seemingly anachronistic piece of evidence of the city's troubles. A quote

from a traveler's blog on a visit to Dakar is illustrative: "The air of animals, cars, and

garbage made me feel ill during the trip. The culture of littering was strange to me."

This traveler tried, as do most tourists to Dakar, to get away from Dakar as quickly as he

could. Many tour companies actually ferry their clients away from the city directly upon

arrival in the city's airport, skirting the garbage filled streets and slums in search of

cleaner air on the beaches far from the city. How would these tourists—and Kaplan, for

that matter—read the trash revolts of 2007? Perhaps as the writing on the wall for the

impending anarchist gloom and doom taking over even this imlikeliest of suspects?

5. Doing the Dirty Work: The Cultural Politics of Trash

Drawing from the discussions above, it becomes apparent that the neoliberal era

in African cities has been one of dramatic socio-spatial reorganization and dislocation. In

particular, these profound transformations have been lived, fueled, and contested through

intense "battles over cultural identities—and the power to shape, determine, and literally

emplace those identities" (Mitchell qtd. in Myers 2005: 12). I take on these battles by

considering the shifting geography of responsibility and reward for trashwork in Dakar.

12 Given Dakar's role as a key port and heart of "civilization" in colonial times, together with the first president, Senghor's, deep ties to France and role in founding the negritude movement, the city occupies a special place in the European imagination of Africa. 13 http://boggblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/part-ii-dakar-senegal.html

33

The reconfigurations of labor arrangements around trash in Dakar, I will show, cannot be

understood outside of their cultural politics, owing to the deep symbolic significance of

trash as waste and the importance of identity in organizing trashlabor and its meaning.

My aim is to reveal the importance of these embodied struggles around trash for ideas of

self and one's relationship to urban space, the state, and the "community." As such, this

investigation makes these cultural politics speak to the larger questions of cities and

development in the neoliberal period. In so doing, it demonstrates that apocalyptic

narratives of chaos and decay have little to say about the actual, lived reality of

neoliberalism and the innovative practices and imaginaries that are building the city.

The Cultural Politics of African Cities

To understand the symbolic and material import of the trashlabor battles, it is

helpful to first review some of the recent literature on the cultural politics of African

cities. In addition to emphasizing the "worlding of African cities" (Simone 2001), as

mentioned above, scholars of African urbanism have documented how the neoliberal

period in Africa has been accompanied by an unprecedented resurgence of "local"

identities—based on family, clan, birthplace, religion, gender, and the revival of the

ethnic imagination—which simultaneously provide crucial networks of support and

platforms for exclusionary practices based on "internal borders" (See Mbembe 2001).

Attention to cultural identities emphasizes that economic change works through and

along lines of difference but also that identities are, in fact, produced through political

and social struggle and may provide the organizing platforms through which to

understand and contest economic forces. Among those identities religion, gender,

34

generation, and autochthony were found to play a crucial role in shaping the cultural

politics of trash in Dakar. These will be briefly considered below.

The persistent import of religion in anchoring disaffected, marginalized

postcolonial African populations cannot be underestimated. Research on the Islamic

brotherhoods and Pentecostal networks, for instance, highlights the continued—indeed

increasing, in many settings—role played by religion in African urban economies and

imaginaries. The resurgence, moreover, in many settings, of witchcraft beliefs as an

idiom through which to negotiate insecurities associated with the neoliberal era in the

spiritual realm has been well documented (Ashforth 2005; Bornstein 2003; Geschiere

1997). In Senegal—where the population is 94 percent Muslim and the vast majority of

Muslims identify with Sufi orders (CIA 2009)—the role of Islam is fundamental in

helping residents cope with and make sense of economic change and social dislocation.

Here, like in many African countries, "Muslim modernity" (Kane 2003) and, specifically,

the Islamic brotherhoods, provide key material, social, and moral resources for urban

residents facing the "crisis" and the absence of state public welfare services (Lubeck and

Britts 2002; Simone 1994; Watts 1996). My research echoes these findings in showing

how Islamic beliefs played a crucial role in not only informing Dakarois' views and

practices of cleanliness but also the social organization of trashwork and trashworkers'

experiences of and mobilizations around their work.

Place-based loyalties have been shown to be of particular relevance for

contemporary African politics. Diouf's work on the Senegalese Mouride trade diaspora,

for instance, highlights how a deep sense of belonging in reference to the home city

Touba was precisely what enabled traders' highly dynamic international network to

35

thrive (2000). Autochthony—or claims of belonging or indigeneity associated with a

particular place or "roots in the soil" (Leonhardt 2006)—while by no means a

phenomenon limited to Africa, has nonetheless been the focus of a significant amount of

attention in recent Africanist scholarship (e.g. Geschiere and Jackson 2006). Autochthony

claims are associated with processes of intensifying globalization as people attempt to

stake claims against "strangers" or those who came later (allogenes). In his study of

Cameroon, Socpa details, for instance, how the democratization process and multiparty

politics reinforced local identities and gave rise to an emotionally laden opposition

between autochthons and allogenes (2006). The autochthony debates are particularly

relevant for Dakar because of the significant role of the "original" inhabitants of the Cape

Verde peninsula—the Lebous—in urban politics there. As we shall see later, place-based

and autochthonous claims intersected with claims to labor as well as practices and

perceptions of cleanliness among city residents to form an important feature of trash

politics in Dakar.

The neoliberal era in urban Africa is also well recognized to have precipitated

massive changes in the politics of gender and generation. Because structural adjustment

has worked through local systems of power, those who had less cultural and social capital

before reforms often were further disenfranchised through them. As two marginalized

groups in African society, African youth and women have been particularly hard hit by

neoliberal reforms. The endless pursuit of the cheaper and more "docile" labor to

commodify has radically transformed the positionality of women and other societal

groups (Standing 1999). The imperative to flexibilize labor in neoliberalism has thus

worked through the figure of the "disposable worker" (Bales 2000; Wright 2006), who is

36

often female and often young. In certain African contexts, women have been shown to be

doubly burdened by structural adjustment due to the erosion of what traditional networks

of power they might have had before these commodification processes (Elson 1989). The

targeting of women in the interest of flexible, low-paid, or even "participatory" labor is

just one way that accumulation by dispossession has worked through reconfiguring

women's social reproductive labors. Yet, in all of these transformations there have been

fractures, unexpected outcomes, and strategic openings. As we shall see later, the

feminization of the trash sector has brought with it some important opportunities as well

as challenges for women in Dakar.

Owing to gerontocratic traditions on the continent, African youth have also been

especially troubled—and troublesome, for that matter—in the neoliberal globalization

game. As I discuss below, youth erupted across the continent onto the political radar

during this period through a variety of outlets, including war and democracy. An

examination of Dakar's trash sector shows that youth politics have formed the central

organizing feature of the social history of trash management during this time, and their

activities in this sector open a window into the growing importance of youth for

Senegal's democratic landscape.

While many analyses point to the way that neoliberal reforms have often worked

through lines of difference with dire outcomes for the continent's most marginalized, I

am interested in working against the silencing of urban Africans in these processes. These

erosions are met with a whole range of alternative "institutional forms through which to

construct social solidarities and express a collective will" (Harvey 2005: 171). Research

on urban associations (Tostensten et al. 2001) and urban informal economies (MacGaffey

37

1991; Simone 2004a), for instance, has demonstrated the extraordinary resilience and

even dynamism of urban networks that are rooted in social identities in responding to

new challenges. In an important political project fighting the Afro-pessimism that has

long dominated perspectives on Africa, Simone emphasizes that the African city is

particularly open to spaces and practices of re-inscription through which entrenched

forms of customary authority can be remade (2003; 2004a; 2004b). My research draws

from these perspectives and their call for an attention to the micropolitics of "alignment,

interdependency, and exuberance" (Simone 2003) that can be found within the cultural

politics surrounding neoliberalism in Dakar.

Understanding Identity and Articulation

The above discussion shows why identity is of central importance in the urban

politics of neoliberal Africa. However, a few words on how I view the cultural politics of

identity are needed here. In particular, this analysis is rooted in an understanding of

identity as "constructed through social struggle, positioning subjects within multiple

matrices of power" (Moore et al. 2003). In this sense, we can understand cultural

identities as always actively constructed, and, crucially, that racial, ethnic, gendered,

generational, and other "forms of difference are always produced in relation to one

another and to class processes" (Hart 2002: 37). Differences can thus be seen to assume

diverse forms in distinct contexts (Scott 1988). This attention to identity formation as a

process helps us to move away from notions of identity as a bounded, stable property of

individuals. Cultural identities are not essential and eternal entities; rather, they are

38

constructions "subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture, and power" (Hall 1990:

225-226, qtd. in Li 2000: 152).

Stuart Hall's development of the concept of articulation is useful here in

explaining how different identities, histories, and political-economic configurations link

up or articulate. Hall draws attention to both meanings of the term articulation: the

joining together of particular assemblages of constitutive elements and the "process of

rendering a collective identity, position, or set of interests explicit" (Li 2000: 152). He

thus draws from Gramsci to emphasize the historical contingency of the "terrain of the

conjunctural" (Gramsci 2000)—on which different forces and identities can become

articulated. In Moore et al.'s words, in this formulation a "critical question becomes how

contingent constellations come together in particular historical contexts... and how those

linkages inform political subjectivities and cultural identities" (2003: 3-4). What this

helps to emphasize is the key "work" that positionalities—articulated, enunciated

identities— do within different articulations, or how they become historically active to

different ends within an analysis of the relations of force (Hall 1980). Li explored how

indigenous identity, in particular, was produced in Indonesia during a conjunctural

moment "at which global and local agendas have been conjoined in a common purpose,

and presented within a common discursive frame" (2000: 170). Identification as

indigenous— occupying the "tribal slot"—thus represented an active positioning within a

political project. I join with Li and others drawing from Hall's concept of articulation to

emphasize the constitutive and contingent role of identity.

Use of Hall's insights on articulation necessarily pushes us to think about

grounded practices in particular historic moments and places. It also helps to connect the

39

process of identity formation and positioning to the question of hegemony, and in

particular, the role of the state. I draw from this perspective to think about the process by

which state hegemony works through and is contested along the lines of cultural

politics—understanding that subject positionings draw from and may reconfigure

historically sedimented constellations of meaning or bonds of identity. This emphasis

can, in turn, reveal those spaces through which hegemony is consolidated or avenues for

an alternative politics centered on ways unities can be "disarticulated" to enable

"alternative dispositions of power and resistance to emerge and be empowered"

(Grossberg and Slack 1985: 90). I use articulation as formulated by Hall to always keep

the political-economic moment and the forces of structural inequality in tension with the

power of ideology and identity to explore how economic change happens in and through

specific local histories and cultural imaginaries. This is not intended to confirm

Senegalese exceptionalism but, rather, to emphasize the messy process of the

implementation of neoliberal reform and the unexpected outcomes, forged in the

"crucible of cultural politics" (Moore 2000), to these new arrangements.

I draw from critical spatial theory, furthermore, to consider how those social

relations and their cultural politics are produced and contested in space. Drawing from

Henri Lefebvre, space can be viewed as constituted through active social practice (1991

[1974]). This helps to reveal how urban spaces are linked to "specific identities,

functions, lifestyles, and properties" and yet exist within a "multiplicity of connotations"

that makes it "always possible to do something different in and with the city than is

specified by these domains of power" (Simone 2004b: 409). Space is, thus, imbued with

power relations and the possibility of their being consolidated or challenged. If, drawing

40

on Doreen Massey (1994), we see that identity is produced through spatial practice, we

can ask how ideas of difference are reworked through the renegotiation of spatial

boundaries. This perspective is particularly useful in thinking about how the different

identities implicated in trashwork in Dakar have been repositioned through changes in the

social history of trashlabor. Gender and generational identities, in particular, are

profoundly implicated in the production of space (Massey 1994, 1998). I will thus

explore the openings and possible disruptions to hegemonic relations that may occur

through the spatial practices of youth and women in the shifting landscape of trashwork.

This exploration is informed by Simone's contention that hierarchies of power in space

are particularly contested and "open-ended" in African cities because they are

"incomplete" and thus "elaborated through flexibly configured landscapes" (2004b: 409)

yet rejects the notion of their infinite openness. Drawing on Gramsci and Lefebvre, I aim

to situate spatialized practices of city-making always within an analysis of the relations of

force and the complex conditions of possibility—and challenge—they may provide for

the Dakarois.

Trashwork and the Problem of the "Outside"

The case of trash is a particularly useful lens through which to explore the cultural

politics of identity in the neoliberal era precisely because it is such a loaded subject.

Cultural associations surrounding trash and trashwork were deeply implicated in the

restructuring of the trash sector in the neoliberal period. A closer look at case of trash

thus provides a magnifying glass into the role of cultural politics in constituting and

contesting political-economic change, and the way, moreover, that cultural meanings and

41

understandings get reworked, transformed, and layered over in that process. It is this

reconfiguration of meanings through which openings, possibilities, and unexpected

outcomes were to be found in the story of trash reform.

I return to Douglas and her reminder, in Chakrabarty's formulation, "that the

problem of 'dirt' poses in turn the problem of the 'outside'" (Chakrabarty 1991: 19-20).

Rubbish, or "[t]he dirt that goes out of the house marks a boundary between the inside

and the outside" (Ibid.) The "inside" is thus constructed as protected and safe whereas the

"outside"—which can be "rubbished"—is figured as potentially malevolent, disorderly,

and dangerous. The question of the "outside" raised by dirt and waste is thus deeply

spatial. The dichotomy that works to code certain spaces with specific meanings also

applies to people—both those associated with the labor of waste management and those

simply associated with rubbished spaces. Labeling people as dirty/clean is thus all bound

up with the socio-spatial ordering of society. In Douglas' words,

Ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating, and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created. (Douglas 1966: 5)

In India, dirty associations can most explicitly be seen along caste lines. "The lowest

castes are the most impure, and it is they whose humble services enable the higher castes

to be free of bodily impurities" (Douglas 1966: 152-153).14 As not only the most impure

in society but also the bridge connecting the outside, which can be "rubbished," to the

clean inside, Chakrabarty described sweepers as, therefore, possibly dangerous (1991).

Their labor is, in any case, extremely charged.

141 realize that Douglas' formulation is a dated analysis of caste. I am most interested in her point that the wasteworkers provide the service of enabling others to be free of bodily impurities.

42

Municipal trash collectors in Dakar, like those elsewhere in the world, face all of

the potent associations of working with waste. Though the work is not traditionally

associated with caste, as it is in India, it is certainly degraded work that has important

class, gender, and religious associations. The particular importance ascribed to

cleanliness in Islam—and, particularly, the connection made between physical

cleanliness and spiritual purity—certainly plays into negative associations connected to

those working with waste. Before the neoliberal transformations that I document, the

trash collection force in Dakar was mainly peopled by men who were not from Dakar and

who were seen as low-class outsiders. Through the dramatic story that I chronicle, the

municipality of Dakar orchestrated the almost complete switch-out of that labor force in

the early 1990s for the youth agitators (men and women) of the Set/Setal social

movement that had taken over the streets of Dakar in 1989. The following chapters

explore the cultural politics of that transition and the key ways that the meaning of

trash work has been perceived and contested through the emergent identities of Dakar's

trashworkers. I then follow the construction of trashwork in the home and in the

voluntary community-based trash initiatives that have come to the fore in further pursuit

of flexibilized trashwork.

In this analysis, I draw from Mary Searle-Chatterjee (1979) to explore the "power

of the polluted" or the power exerted through the construction of the "outside" in waste

and wastework. She shows how the sweepers of Benares, India actually took advantage

of their contaminated status through their actions with individual people and through the

threat of the withdrawal of their labor. In her work, she finds that "one can say that power

and prosperity, relative though they may be in this case, actually rest on degradation"

43

(Searle-Chatterjee 1979: 282, emphasis added). Similarly, my work looks at the way that

new configurations of social power hierarchies were to be negotiated for youth and

women within the space of trashwork. This investigation was also centrally concerned

with looking at those moments when, echoing Douglas from the beginning of this

chapter, trash becomes creative. Public strikes by the trash workers and public dumping

by residents of Dakar invert the power of dirt and use it to critique the state and the very

boundaries it is intended to uphold. In an Islamic context, the act of dirtying the public

space in this way sends a powerful message to the authorities—through literally blocking

the movement of their SUVs with trash—that enough is enough. Through exploring the

roots of today's formal trash labor force in Set/Setal youth, who intended to clean as

critique of the government, I show how the associations surrounding trashwork have been

reconfigured, challenged, and deployed in the larger political battles implicated in trash.

Intersecting positionalities drawing from gender, religious, generational, and

autochthonous identities were of central importance to these battles. Where trash

becomes creative, identity associations are potentially disrupted, and fissures are formed

in the larger hegemonic processes of controlling populations.

The fact that the African city is "rubbished" contributes to its status as being

located on the "outside." In probing the meaning, origin, and political consequence of

that rubbish, I want to use the trash story in Dakar to disrupt the spatial relegation of the

African city as "off the map." While this project is in no way intended to undermine an

outrage at Africa's place in the uneven geography of development—indeed it will

illuminate some of the nefarious consequences of neoliberalism in Dakar—it strives to

work against a naturalization of that placement while shedding light on the important

44

processes of contestation through which urban Africans cope with and reconfigure global

forces.

Methods and Outline of the Dissertation

As mentioned above, this dissertation is rooted in an understanding of the

inseparability of method and theory. The previous discussion roots my theoretical-

methodological claims in my critical ethnographic approach. The research is based on

over eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Dakar between 2005 and

2008. The fieldwork involved extensive participant observation in neighborhoods and on

trash collection routes, individual and group interviews with residents, trashworkers,

government officials, and company managers, review of the secondary literature, analysis

of government documents and policies, and conversations with scholars and other

"experts" on trash and politics in Senegal. The ethnographic research was centered in the

Department of Dakar although research into the institutional history of the sector covered

the Greater Dakar Region (see Figure 6.1). Trashworkers at multiple sites across Dakar

were interviewed (Figure 1.5), mainly on their collection routes or, most commonly, at

the workers' "hang-out" spots where they took their breaks. The neighborhood

ethnographies were conducted in two neighborhoods: HLM Fass in the Fass, Colobane,

Gueule Tapee Commune d'Arrondissement (borough) and Tonghor in the Yoff Commune

d'Arrondissement, (see Figure 6.1). These interviews were conducted in fifty households

in each neighborhood, with a mixture of household members. The large majority took

place within respondents' homes.

45

Figure 1.5. Satellite image of Dakar and the Cape Verde Peninsula, with interview sites marked. (Source: satellite photo (2005) courtesy Direction du CADASTRE, Republique du Senegal)

During this time, I carried out more than 250 interviews in Wolof and/or French,

most of which were digitally recorded. My Senegalese field assistant, Ndeye Bineta Laye

Ndoye (with a masters in geography studying trash), accompanied me on most of the

interviews conducted in Wolof. For the first half of the fieldwork, she helped

significantly with translation during these interviews; as my Wolof improved, her

assistance tapered off. She and two other assistants transcribed the interviews into

French. All translations from these interviews and from the primary and secondary

literature in French into English, unless otherwise noted, are my own. For those

interviews not recorded, I relied on my carefully assembled fieldnotes (Sanjek 1990).

With the exception of government officials or those who explicitly asked that I use their

real names, I have hidden the names of my respondents for their protection.

46

Following this introduction, Chapter 2 traces the political economy of Senegal

over the last two decades through the institutional reorganizations of garbage

management. After a brief introduction of Senegal's pre-neoliberal political-economic

history, I divide the neoliberal period into two major moments: the last decade of

Socialist Party rule (the 1990s) and the reign of Wade with Alternance, 2000-2008.

Beginning with one trash crisis and ending with another, this chapter examines Senegal's

unique neoliberal transition and its implications for state hegemony. As such, it speaks to

a set of debates considering the political economy of Senegal, the legacy of development

and democratic politics in Dakar, and state-society relations in neoliberal urban Africa.

Chapter 3 builds on the overview of Senegal's political-economic history to

explore more deeply the crisis of 1988, Set/Setal, and the reconfiguration of the social-

power relations that was to follow on its heels, as viewed through reorganizations of

Dakar's trash labor force. It reveals the dovetailing of the urban labor question with the

youth question to help explain the concrete ways that neoliberal reforms were battled out

through cultural politics in the specific historic conjuncture of the late 1980s/early

1990s—or the end of the Socialist Party era. This chapter offers a fresh perspective on

Set/Setal, which has never before been considered in light of the neoliberal moment and,

drawing from this, contributes to timely scholarly debates on youth politics animating the

Africanist literature.

Chapter 4 follows the trashworkers to a more recent moment (2007-2008) as they

battle to improve their lot as a union. Through examining the recent trash battles, I thus

reflect on the Alternance period and the different ways that the Dakarois—in this case,

the city's workers—cope with and contest their difficult predicaments in precarious labor

47

arrangements. This chapter offers a novel perspective on youth politics by following

those youth, as a political force, into their adult lives and the landscape of unionized

labor. Key to this analysis is an emphasis on the role of religion in urban politics and

imaginaries and, specifically, as a platform for contesting the flexibilization of labor in

the neoliberal period.

Chapter 5 revisits the question of formal trash labor by narrowing in on the role

that gender has played in the neoliberal social history of trash. This discussion illuminates

how urban restructuring and participatory development play on and reconstitute gendered

spaces and divisions of labor and connects the feminization of trashlabor to the urban

labor question and youth politics. In fleshing out the radicalizing experiences of women

in Set/Setal and as trashworkers, it illuminates the strategic openings and opportunities

provided by trashwork and its gendered associations.

Chapter 6 broadens the scope of trashwork to examine the household and

neighborhood geographies of garbage with the advent of participatory trash management.

It explores two Dakar neighborhoods—one of which was involved in community-based

management strategies and the other that spearheaded the trash revolts of 2007—to reveal

the political imagination of the Dakarois faced with the garbage crisis. Contributing to

debates on understandings of community, participation, and the household, I conclude by

reflecting on Alternance and future prospects for democratic politics in Senegal.

A brief conclusion draws on trash politics to return to some of the debates raised

in the preface and this introduction to reflect on the "rubbishing" of the African city,

cultural politics, and our understandings of the urban condition.

48

CHAPTER TWO

Governing Garbage: A Re-Reading of Senegal's Neoliberal Transition through Trash

1. Introduction

The stench from rotting piles of trash permeating the far reaches of Dakar in 1988

signaled that all was not right in the capital city. As the manifestation of an underlying

political-economic crisis, the garbage crisis of the late 1980s was to serve as an alarm bell

as well as one of the key grounds on which a new political compromise was to be forged.

Similarly, in 2007, the dirty capital was the symbol of larger discontent and disorder—

but one which was met with a very different set of state and community reactions. 1988

spawned a massive youth social movement aimed at cleaning the city; whereas, in 2007,

the workers and residents alike in Dakar staged protests through externalizing their

garbage into the public space—thereby dirtying it. Using trash politics in Dakar as the

barometer of political-economic crisis in Senegal, this chapter explores the period

spanning these two crises—seen as the heart of the country's neoliberal era.

As one of Africa's most long-running and stable democracies, Senegal is often

placed as something of a success story of African development and democracy. This

reading of Senegalese exceptionalism reached new heights when the opposition party

candidate, Abdoulaye Wade, was elected to power in 2000 (Alternance) after forty years

of Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste) (PS) rule. A smooth, peaceful, and generally

uncontested turnover, Alternance cemented Senegal's democratic reputation at a time

when many other African countries were becoming increasingly mired in

authoritarianism and civil strife. And yet, the last eight years have proven disappointing

49

for most observers—with the state exhibiting some worrying autocratic tendencies and

critiques of the Wade regime reaching unprecedented proportions. Reflecting back over

the country's half-century history, we can see that Senegal's democratic path has been far

from trouble-free and the unique conjuncture of factors that have contributed to the

country's formula for stability—and its weaknesses. A closer look illuminates the

problematic nature of the construction of state hegemony and the deep challenges to state

legitimacy, particularly in the context of structural adjustment. The cycle of garbage

crises which have paralyzed the capital city every few years since independence are the

visual, visceral expression of the inability for the Senegalese state to resolve its

development challenges—especially over the last 20 years.

Because of its important legacy for democracy on the continent and its

construction as a success story, the impact of neoliberal policy in Senegal is of particular

import. Senegal was the first country to undertake structural adjustment in Africa and

thus has a long and deep legacy with regard to neoliberal political-economic policies. A

key public service, trash management has undergone immense institutional and labor

force transitions over the last twenty years which reveal the specific contested

negotiations around—and concrete effects of—neoliberal reform in this context. I will

show how the trash sector—and, more broadly, the environmental management of the

capital—acted as a key political battleground in the state's quest for power in both two

neoliberal moments, but how this played out in different ways in these two conjunctures.

Through connecting the three key threads of a complex fabric—the evolving role of

religion, the political economy of structural adjustment, and the construction of the state

and party politics—I explain the peculiar evolution of the trash sector over this period,

50

which has run the gamut from a public to private to community-based system. This

demonstration will reveal how these reorganizations were centrally aimed at controlling

labor and public unrest, gaining electoral support, and exerting control over scarce state

resources.

This chapter begins with an exploration of the construction of the Senegalese state

in colonialism and the first decades of independence (sections 2 and 3)—and its

"exceptional" recipe for stability—to examine the effects of the simultaneous

liberalization of the economic, political, and religious playing fields during the neoliberal

period (beginning with section 4). This analysis is then divided into two moments: a)

1988-2000: the lead-up to Alternance (section 5) and b) 2000-present: the Wade era

(section 6). After giving a background in each of the previous sections of the history of

trash management, this is where I read the political economy of Senegal through trash. In

the first, through tracing the key pivotal political-economic moment of the 1988 crisis

through the 1990s, I examine the final years of Socialist Party rule and show how the

reorganization of the trash sector was part of the PS party-state's strategy to cope with

challenges to its authority and calm the rising public discontentment with its development

failures. I will argue, in short, that the turn to a participatory trash sector was part of an

extension of the passive revolution which allowed the PS party-state to retain power

through the 1990s. Then in the second moment, I explore—through the new

administration's garbage politics—what I call the post-Alternance "age of

disappointment"—as the state turns back towards coercion and the Dakarois turn away

from party politics. Drawing from an understanding of how Dakar politics stand in for

national politics, this analysis will explore the insight that struggles around governing

51

Dakar's garbage provides into the changing nature of state-society relations and the

shifting space of politics in the wake of structural adjustment.

2. Colonial Legacies: The Sufi Social Contract and the Age of the Peanut

The birth of the modern state of Senegal within colonialism has deep

consequences for the contours of contemporary Senegalese development. Senegalese

exceptionalism has often been explained through the country's unique formula for

governing its plural societies that dates back to its colonial experience (Bayart 1986;

Fatton 1999). Perhaps the most important colonial legacy for the Senegalese state is the

role played by religion in the foundations of state-society relations.

In Citizen and Subject, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the colonial policy of

indirect rule, through which the colonial powers instrumentalized ethnic and religious

leaders to bridge the rural and urban divide, institutionalized a form of "decentralized

despotism" of customary authority over rural populations (1996: 308). Thus colonial

states sought to achieve what Sara Berry describes as "hegemony on a shoestring"

through tapping cultural authoritarian possibilities in order to maintain social stability,

specific forms of economic production, and administrative control with limited resources

and from a distance15 (Berry 1992). In Senegal, the rule of custom in colonialism meant

the rule of Islam. Leonardo Villalon has described religion as "one of the most

important—arguably as the most important—element influencing the 'shape' of

Senegalese society and hence the exercise of state power" (Villalon 1994b: 416). The

extensively-studied (See Behrman 1970; Copans 1980; Coulon 1980; Cruise O'Brien

15 Though Mamadani and Berry were considering some of the same questions about colonial rule through customary authority, their specific analyses do diverge on some significant points that I do not consider here.

52

1975) historic social contract between the leaders of the Sufi brotherhoods in Senegal and

the colonial state can be seen as a prime example of Mamdani's decentralized despotism,

where the Sufi leaders acted as supreme clients to the state. In many respects, this

arrangement achieved for the state a highly productive relationship to the Senegalese

peasantry, contributing to stability, a lack of resistance to colonial domination, and the

long-lasting hegemony of the France-sympathetic Socialist Party.

Senegalese Islam is overwhelmingly Sufi, with two major Sufi orders, or

brotherhoods (tariqd), dominating the country's Islamic tradition since its origin and

consolidation in the colonial period: the Tijaniyya (Tijani) and Muridiyya (Mouride)

orders. In Senegalese Sufi tradition, the orders are centered around spiritual guides or

leaders, also known as marabouts. Amadou Bamba, a Wolof Sufi marabout originally

belonging to the Qadiriyya brotherhood (today the third largest), founded the Mouride

brotherhood in 1886 in Western Senegal, the heartland of Senegal's dominant ethnic

group, the Wolof (Creevey 1979). Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the new

maraboutic order was Bamba's insistence on the importance of work and, particularly,

the emphasis he placed on his talibes (disciples) performing manual labor, especially in

agriculture, for their marabouts. The Mouride brotherhood "offered a rallying point for

the displaced in rural Wolof society and for those who resented the French and sought to

protect the Islamic way of life" (Clark 1999: 156). Stemming from his early reputation as

fiercely anti-imperialist and anti-French, Bamba was exiled from Senegal for a number of

years. However, in the context of a changing French administrative policy and a growing

recognition of practical benefits to collaboration, Bamba soon changed his tune towards

53

the French and the two powers were able to forge what David Robinson has termed

"paths of accommodation" in the early twentieth century (2000).

The administration of the French West African federation (Afrique Occidentale

Frangaise, AOF)16 had initially officially concentrated on a policy of direct rule

{assimilation in French) centered on the Four Communes (four original coastal cities) of

Senegal—widely regarded to have been the most intense implementation of assimilation

policy in tropical Africa. In G. Wesley Johnson's words, "Colonial theory was especially

important in Senegal because it was France's oldest African possession and in a very real

sense a 'pilot' colony... for testing the theories evolved in Paris" (1971: 75). However,

drawing from evidence that assimilation in the urban areas of the Four Communes had

"led to a resurgence rather than to an effective subordination of native political

demands," experiences in Indochina and Algeria, as well as in reaction to peasant

resistance led by the Mourides and other Islamic marabouts in rural Senegal, the French

changed their colonial policy to native cultural policy after World War I (Mamdani 1996:

83).17 Association policy thus saw "premature" demands for freedom as the greatest

impediment to "civilization" and sought to better control and regulate colonial subjects

through existing traditional institutions.

16 The AOF was a federation of eight French colonial territories in West Africa, including: Mauritania, Senegambia and Niger, French Sudan (now Mali), French Guinea (now Guinea), Cote d'lvoire, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and Dahomey (now Benin). Until independence, the administration of Senegal was essentially that of the AOF. 17 The change from a focus on assimilation to association (the expressions of which were in no place or time completely distinct) also reflected changes in French colonial ideology emerging from the internal contradictions of a mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) that was, at once, premised on racism and republicanism. Assimilation policy is rooted in the Revolutionary doctrine of equality of man and the mission civilisatrice that made it the Republic's right and duty to uplift primitive colonial subjects to the ideals of French civilization. The change to association came with a recognition that natives were not necessarily capable of being uplifted, inspired by racist doctrine emphasizing their inferior constitution (See Conklin 1997).

54

The French administrator-scholar, Paul Marty, studied the Sufi brotherhoods

closely and recognized what he saw as the more peaceful characteristics of "Islam noir"

in comparison with Islam in the Arab world, and, in particular, the Mourides' central

contributions to the Senegalese economy, especially through the peanut export trade

(1917). He led the charge for a shift in colonial policy away from fear and repression of

the Sufi brotherhoods to one of collaboration through association as the most efficient

system of mediation between the colonizers and subjects. Marty's belief that it was in the

French interest to foster the internal unity of each brotherhood rather than instigate

factional rivalries within them would guide government Islamic policy for some time to

come (Cruise O'Brien 1971; Harrison 1988; Klein 1968).

In 1910, Amadou Bamba issued afetwa justifying obedience to the French and

then, in 1926, was given permission to build a large mosque in Touba (the holy city of

the Mourides), which is the largest mosque in Senegal today. In return, Bamba gave a

large sum of cash to the colonial government, a donation intended to help stabilize the

French franc (Clark 1999). This exchange cemented mutually beneficial relations

between the state and the brotherhood, and after Bamba's death in 1927, the Mourides

and the French authorities cooperated even more closely. This tacit social contract

between the brotherhoods (particularly the Mourides) and the French colonial regime

allowed the colonial state to achieve cooperation from the Islamic brotherhoods in

achieving hegemony over its rural subjects. Given the French state's lack of legitimacy,

staff, and money, Donal Cruise O'Brien has called this bundle of relationships "a quite

remarkable success story" for its role in facilitating economic growth and stability (1978:

187). He draws from David Laitin (1990) to argue that the French state received a "free

55

ride" with regard to legitimacy, in drawing from the powerful relationship of trust and

commitment between the Sufi disciple and his spiritual guide (2003: 194).

The Muslim leaders maintained order and collaboration of their rural

constituencies in state projects, most notably the peanut export trade, and, in exchange,

they received special treatment from the state in the form of land, infrastructure,

agricultural investments, as well as a hefty financial cut of the peanut industry.

Administratively appointed chiefs and Muslim saints were enabled to found huge

agricultural estates under the financial and technical assistance of so-called "providence

societies" set up by the colonial state, which remained the dominant institution of

agricultural administration throughout the colonial period. This bolstered the political

power of chiefs and saints acting as intermediaries and contributed to reinforcing existing

social inequalities (Cruise O'Brien 1975). The social contract rested on France's

neutrality towards brotherhood expansionism in exchange for the widespread

mobilization of peasant labor in export production (Robinson 1988). It cemented the

importance of the peanut export economy for some time to come. In comparison with

other French colonies—most notably Algeria—this arrangement worked remarkably well

for the French regime and would have profound consequences for the political economy

of independent Senegal. Importantly, the application of association never completely

replaced assimilation in the Four Communes, but merely, issued forth the rise of two elite

groups: those French educated urban elite who had benefited from the citizenship

privileges of the Four Communes and the religious elite from the hinterland. The two

"systems" were, in fact, intricately interlinked and mutually reinforcing, as would be

more clearly seen in Senegalese politics.

56

There was a distinct break in colonial policy towards the African colonies—

including Senegal—in the late 1930s and 1940s which was to lay the groundwork for the

end of the colonial era. In an attempt to prevent or minimize the general unrest and

"disturbances" that were being felt in certain other parts of its empire, the French

switched to a strategy of governing West Africa in which discourses of development took

center stage (Cooper 2001). This new strategy aimed to reinvigorate the colonial project

and quell social dissent (especially labor) through infrastructure improvements and

programs that would simultaneously make colonies more productive and more

ideologically stable in the tumult of the postwar years. The Vichy regime resorted to

forced labor in an attempt to modernize its West African colonies and then the Free

French followed suit in certain ways, forwarding a development plan that was targeted at

enhancing African welfare as well as the imperial economy. Ironically, this development

discourse would be turned on its head as an argument for the end of colonialism (Cooper

2001). By the late 1940s and into the 1950s, massive labor strikes in Senegal forced

colonial officials to reckon with social questions that could not be solved within the

development framework.

3. Senghor's Senegal: Independence, Early "Success," and the Onset of the Crisis (1960 -1980)

The Failure ofDia and the Courting of the Marabouts

A deputy in the French National Assembly,18 Leopold Sedar Senghor19 founded

the Senegalese Democratic Block Party {Bloc Democratique Senegalais) in 1948 and

18 The first black African to sit on the French National Assembly was Blaise Diagne, (born in Goree) who was first elected in 1914. Originally limited to residents of the Four Communes (the originaires), universal suffrage was granted in 1957, ratcheting up the importance of electoral politics. 19 See Senghor's biography (Vaillant 1990).

57

dominated pre-Independence Senegalese politics in the 1950s. Senghor and his right hand

man, Mamadou Dia, capitalized on the expansion of universal suffrage in the 1950s to

harness the support of the marabouts, whose interests the urban elite had neglected, while

also courting urban labor.20 In late 1958, after Charles de Gaulle had come to power in

France, Senegal became an autonomous republic within the French Community (a sort of

Commonwealth). In January 1959, Senegal then joined with the Sudanese Republic (the

former French Sudan, now Mali) to form the Mali Federation, which became independent

in June, 1960. On Aug. 20, 1960, Senegal withdrew from the Federation, becoming an

independent state within the French Community. A new republican constitution was

adopted and, on September 5, 1960, Senghor was elected to be the first president.

Senghor, who ruled from 1960-1980, set out with a firm fist and strongly directive role in

the economy on what he saw as a totalizing enterprise to mobilize the masses. Senghor,

and the elite educated "barons" of what was to become the Socialist Party,21 led a project

of nation-building and state-led development that aimed to modernize Senegalese

economy and society and to usher in African socialism. Senegalese nationalists

saw their mission on the eve of independence as a great beginning. To recommence history, definitively seal off the colonial sequence, erase the memory that it engendered in the community, its space, and its political and economic logics, these were the calls to order of the bearers of Senegalese modernity. (Diouf 1997:296)

Mamadou Diouf argues that, despite being thrown out of power by Senghor in just 1962,

Council President then Prime Minister and, generally, Senghor's right-hand man from

1957 to 1962, Mamadou Dia, played a key role in charting the direction and discourse of

20 Senghor had gained popular support over his political rival, Deputy Lamine Gueye, when he sided for the workers in the legendary Dakar rail strike. 21 Originally named the Union Progressiste Senegalaise (UPS), the party officially became the Socialist Party (PS) in 1976.

58

the new country's development trajectory (1997). Dia and his supporters sought to build

an "integral" state—one that could reach and mobilize the masses, without the necessity

of intermediaries. The development project was to be led by political and social elites

"who attributed to themselves a pedagogic and messianic role" (Ibid: 298). They aimed to

control the country's economic and financial activity through public and parastatal

enterprises, exclusive agricultural cooperatives that would bring the agricultural crop

under government auspices, and the use of membership in the Socialist Party as a

qualification for a role in the state apparatus (Ibid: 305). The highly centralized state

worked to control the peanut economy that remained of key importance as well as to

stimulate and protect nascent industrialization. Aiming to rely less on France and take

away control from the rural religious elite, however, Dia came to embody a radical

reform movement. Though the exact series of events are still contested, in the political

crisis of 1962, Dia was accused of attempting a coup d'etat and thrown into jail—

thereby stymieing what may have been the development alternative he represented.

Senghor's first decade was, in fact, marked by continuity with past colonial

economic policies. Although Dia had aimed to move away from the use of marabouts as

intermediaries, in practice, the domination and mobilization of the masses went hand in

hand with the political entrepreneurship of the marabouts, who were, in Diouf s words,

"able to successfully resist the Diaist enterprise. The marabouts developed a certain

capacity to turn the new structures to their advantage, they gained a direct foothold, for

the first time, in the modern sectors" (Ibid: 305). In fact, many scholars have illuminated

how Senghor ended up building the political basis of his regime on the same ties that had

existed in the colonial period, actively seeking and obtaining the cooperation and support

59

of the powerful Mouride leadership and its disciples (Cruise O'Brien 1975). Despite

promoting a discourse of industrialization as the foundation of development, the

industrial sector remained firmly under the control of French capital and agriculture

became the main sector for state intervention. Stemming from his inability to be a secular

messiah and need for the grassroots connection the marabouts provided in what was still

an overwhelmingly rural nation, Senghor's regime was obsessed with peasants and the

rural sphere. In the 1960s, the agricultural cooperatives which came to replace the

"providence societies" went even further to draw off the economic surplus of peasant

production, enabling "the national bureaucratic and party leaders to consolidate an

alliance with rural notables" who had already gained under colonial rule (Cruise O'Brien

1975: 141). In the name of African socialism, Senghor centralized bureaucratic oversight

of the rural cooperatives via the National Agricultural Produce Marketing Board

(ONCAD), which was created in 1966. ONCAD was to become a massive organ of

resource extraction and, by all accounts, a bureaucratic nightmare. It played an important

political role by consolidating the rural power of the marabouts, who "were granted

special privileges and rights that contributed to their material, as well as spiritual control

over their peasant disciples" (Fatton 1987: 57).

State concessions to the religious authorities were reciprocated with political

support. Through the use of formal ndigals, or religious injunctions, religious leaders

mobilized their disciples to vote for the Socialist Party in the elections throughout this

period. Senghor (a Catholic) declared Touba an independent religious center (deemed an

"Islamic republic") in 1962 beyond government control and continued to court the

brotherhoods, especially the Mourides, in the consolidation of his power and navigation

60

of party politics. This tight interrelationship between the state and the Muslim

brotherhoods was a key source of stability in the country in the face of a challenging

economic environment and political instability in neighboring regions (Creevey 1985;

Cruise O'Brien and Coulon 1988; Diop and Diouf 1990; Fatton 1987). In Villalon's

words, the social contract provided "a mode of organization and vehicles for transmitting

popular sentiment that allowed for a more productive engagement with the state than was

possible in much of Africa" (Villalon 2004: 64 (quoting Villalon 1995)). From 1960 to

1968, Senegal was characterized by relative stability and growth.

1968 and the Onset of the Organic Crisis

1968 marked a definitive year that was to foreshadow troubles to come. Massive

demonstrations in the cities revealed early disappointments in the nationalist project and,

in the country, the peanut crop was beginning to go downhill due to drought and poor

prices for peanuts on international markets (Diop 2006: 105). The indicators of Senegal's

first organic crisis—emerging from the structural contradictions in the economic

foundations of the country and the crisis of authority they generated (Gramsci 2000)—

were bubbling up to the surface (Fatton 1987). Senghor initially reacted to the events of

1968 through repressing the unions and cementing an autocratic, one-party state that

would last until 1974.

As 1970s progressed—and with them, economic stagnation—Senghor was to

launch a new political strategy aimed at loosening state centralization and fostering

democracy. The declining agricultural crop was contributing to a general malaise paysan

22 He then developed an integrated unionism premised on "responsible participation" in the government (see Chapter 3).

61

(peasant discontent) at the end of the 1960s and beginnings of the 1970s, which revealed,

in Christian Coulon and Donal Cruise O'Brien's view, the limits of clientelism (1990:

152). Although there was a lull in the economic deterioration between 1974 and 1979,

political opposition and union movements gained traction from the rural exodus to the

cities and diminished buying power. Senghor began to initiate political reforms. In 1970,

he created the post of Prime Minister in an effort to "deconcentrate" power, and in 1974,

he authorized the creation of the opposition party, the Senegalese Democratic Party

{Parti Democratique Senegalais) (PDS) (also known as the liberal party), as a way to

"better slow and control political agitation" (Diop 2006: 105). Each of these moves

constituted the first elements of what Robert Fatton has called a passive revolution that

would be consolidated under Diouf in the early 1980s (1987).

By the time Senghor stepped down from power in 1980, the domination of the

ruling class and the power of the original social contract with the religious authorities had

come under serious strain again—contributing to the organic crisis of the 1980s that

would be the source of major political-economic restructuring (Fatton 1987). ONCAD

was finally abolished in 1980 as the government acknowledgement that its agricultural

policies had failed. In contrast with the totalizing ambitions of the PS barons, during this

time there was a proliferation in community-based and informal economic activities,

coupled with a "resurgence of networks of kinship, age classes, youth groups, women

from the same neighborhood, reinventing economic, social, and cultural structures to

contain the totalizing thrust of political and administrative power" (Diouf 1997: 308). In

Section 4,1 will explore more fully the PS-state's strategy to cope with the organic crisis,

but first will provide an overview of Dakar's garbage system under Senghor.

62

A Brief History of Garbage Management under Senghor

During the first two decades after Independence, the trash system in Dakar

followed an institutional path that at first glance may seem counter-intuitive but which, in

fact, signals some of the larger trends at play in the country's political economy—most

notably, the increasing stakes of urban development and the challenge of keeping the

urban peace. See Table 2.2 for a chart detailing the institutional history of garbage in

Dakar from Independence.

1960-1971 : Municipal Services (La Regie Communale)

From 1960 to 1971, the management of household waste in the old Commune

(municipality) of Dakar - called la Grande Commune de Dakar - was a small-scale affair

directly ensured by the municipal services (La Regie Communale). Senegal's Hygiene

Code (Code de VHygiene) charges local governments with the collection and disposal of

solid wastes. These responsibilities and the means to exercise them are laid out in the

Municipal Administration Code (Code de VAdministration Communale). Using horse-

drawn carts and other small equipment, the municipal services transported the garbage to

a dump located in an old quarry in Hann, close to the Medina, not far from downtown

Dakar. A composting factory was constructed in 1967 in Mbao by the Senegalese state,

but ceased to operate in the early 1970s due to lack of profitability (BCEOM 1986). The

dry lake bed, Mbeubeuss (40 km from Dakar), was transformed into a new dump, to be

used along with the composting factory in the 1960s.

This municipal service ran relatively smoothly until its first crisis in 1968—not

coincidentally paralleling that of the country as a whole—which extended until 1971

23 Law 66-64 of June 30, 1966 modified in 1969, 1970, and 1972.

63

(Benrabia 2002: 261). Problems cited in a World Bank report were: insufficient or

inappropriate material; poor management of personnel and equipment, and insufficient

financing due to poor recovery rates on the Household Garbage Tax (la Taxe

d'Enlevement des Ordures Menageres) (TEOM)24 (BCEOM 1986). By the end of the

1960s, the city had become filthy and garbage a point of political contention, so the

authorities decided to privatize the waste management system (Diop n.d.: 93). Thus

began a saga of institutional struggle—and punctuated crises—in the trash system that

would oscillate between different institutional forms for the decades to come.

1971-1984: Private monopoly (SOADIP)

In 1971, the Commune of Dakar signed a five year contract with the private local

company SOADIP (la Societe Africaine de Diffusion et de Promotion) for Dakar's trash

management. SOADIP was responsible for sweeping and maintaining public roads and

the collection and disposal of garbage from Dakar, Pikine and Rufisque. The company

built two transfer stations (in Bel Air and at the entrance to Pikine) and introduced a fleet

of modern collection vehicles. Pushed by the state to hire workers from the previous

municipal system, SOADIP employed more than 1100 people, including 600 for

cleaning, 350 for collection and disposal, and 60 in the technical service workshops

The financing of household waste management is covered by the TEOM, which dates back to the Law of August 13, 1926, stipulating that the municipal councils could institute a TEOM. The base decree (I'arrete de base) number 822 (February 3, 1958) then required that all properties would be subjected to the TEOM, calculated based on the built property values. Municipal decisions regarding the TEOM would require approval by the Minister of the Interior. The minimum revenue of the tax was fixed at 5 percent of the net revenue of built properties. Then, Law 72-52 (June 12, 1972) fixed the tax at a maximum of 6 percent in the Commune of Dakar and 5 percent in the other communes. It is collected by the Treasury Service of the Ministry of Finances. The recovery rates are infamously low and inadequate for covering service costs. The TEOM is currently collected via the electricity bill. See Table 2.1 with recovery rates from the 1990s. 25 Three areas which did not fall under SOADIP's jurisdiction were two planned housing areas managed by the OHLM {Office pour la Habitation a Loyer Modere) and SICAP {Societe Immobiliere du Cap Vert), as well as the Port of Dakar (Port Autonome). Each of these areas had their own autonomous management system already in place (BCEOM 1986: B19).

64

(BCEOM 1986: B20). SOADIP assured the fairly regular management of garbage until

the early 1980s. Faced with defaults in payments from the municipality,27 the company

was unable to maintain its equipment and service. With only a fraction of its trucks

functioning and unable to pay its employees, SOADIP ceased all activities in March,

1984 (BCEOM 1986: B.21).

Early Participatory Experiences

The trash crises that began under Senghor were the physical manifestation of the

larger economic crisis in the everyday lives of the Dakarois. These early crises, and the

reaction of the state and the urban populations to them, were to foreshadow the later ways

that trash was to figure quite centrally in political-economic crisis in the neoliberal

period. The public was actively mobilized by the state to clean up Dakar first by

Mamadou Dia, who enlisted Socialist Party youth in cleaning the city and getting rid of

those undesirable elements encumbering the public space (including prostitutes and

vagabonds). This precedent was to lead to other initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s,

including the Operation Augias, through which the state tried to tap local energies in the

city's management (ENDA 1991: 7-8). Diouf describes the Operation Augias as "the

occasion, for the ruling class, to affirm its munificence, its incontestable power and

authority over populations locked into the grid of political containment" (2002: 268). It

was, in his view, a way for the ruling party-state to assert its nationalist project. Not

26 The proportion of city workers who joined SOADIP is unknown. The exact origin of the workers is also impossible to qualify, but many workers are known to have come from areas outside of Dakar, as it was considered undesirable work for the Dakarois. 27 A report on the disputes between SOADIP and the Commune of Dakar concludes that, in total, the CUD (that was to take over the responsibilities of the Commune) owed SOADIP 1.45 billion CFA in back payments (Diouf n.d.).

65

surprisingly, as that nationalist project began to splinter in the 1970s, these events were

characterized by profound disillusionment and even violent reactions (Ibid). They stand

in contrast with the grassroots initiative (Set/Setal) that was to develop at the end of the

1980s to clean Dakar but prefigure the state's interest in controlling such a movement, as

we will see in the following sections.

4. DiouPs Early Years: Passive Revolution and Structural Adjustment (1980-1988)

In this section I examine how the changing economic basis of the economy,

urbanization, and the shifting role of religion in politics joined with social agitation and

mobilization to precipitate deep shifts in the state's formula of power in the 1980s. This

forms the backdrop to the crisis of 1988 and the twenty years to follow it, which will be

read through the trash sector in the next section.

Economic Crisis and the Dawn of Structural Adjustment

By the end of the 1970s, it was clear that the Senegalese economy was entering

into a serious economic crisis. Rural exodus and a stagnant industrial sector were

hastening rapid urbanization and the explosion of the informal economy. The

"providential" state—which had become the country's main employer—was deeply

indebted and inefficient.28 Having borrowed significantly from private banks in the

It is not denied that the Senegalese state had its troubles during this time. In Diouf s words, the protection of the economy by the state had contributed to the "development of an attitude of total irresponsibility on the parts of those associated with power. In fact, political protection that guaranteed impunity generalized bad management, clientelism, corruption, and the total absence of sanctions, positive or negative" (Diouf 1997: 308).

66

1970s, Senega] received its first structural adjustment (SA) loan from the Word Bank in

1979. As such, it became the first African country to undertake adjustment policies and

pioneered a massive wave of adjustment programs across the continent. Structural

Adjustment Programs (SAPs) in Africa were the Bretton Woods institutions' solution to a

reading of the African economic crisis as epitomized by Berg Report (1981). This hugely

influential paper—and the SAPs that were built around its prescriptions—offered a

highly "internalist" reading of African economic woes. The Senegalese state and its

"political management of the economy" (Diouf 1997: 311) was seen as the supreme

culprit behind the country's woes, demanding intervention and assistance from

international institutions. A long-time favorite of the international community, Senegal, it

was hoped, would become a model of economic liberalization through adjustment. As is

now well understood, the neoliberal reforms promoted through SA rendered development

technical and apolitical and chased out the "nationalist dream of economic development

and social equality... in the name of economic efficiency" (Ibid.: 314).

The new president of Senegal, Abdou Diouf—Senghor's hand-picked

successor—was to lead the charge for structural adjustment. With his arrival onto the

political stage in 1981 came a "transformation in the modalities of management of the

Senegalese economy and the arrival of a new social category at the inner sanctum of

power" (Diouf 1997: 309). Diouf s presidency ushered in the period of "technocracy,"

where the old barons of the Socialist Party were replaced with younger "technocrats."

Fashioned as more managers than politicians, the technocrats favored administrative

"expertise" over the mass movement politics so associated with the nationalist

29 Between 1974 and 1979, 40 percent of Senegal's borrowing came from private banks, flushed with the petrodollars circulating internationally during this time (Somerville 1991, quoting Partie Socialiste du Senegal 1985:26).

67

movement. After the elections of 1983 confirmed Diouf as head of state, he orchestrated

a massive "politico-administrative shake-up" that involved abolishing the post of Prime

Minister. Jean Collin—Minister and Diouf s right-hand man — emerged as the key

player in the new regime for its first decade (Diop and Diouf 1990). Diouf and the

technocrats embraced structural adjustment as a strategy to defuse the economic crisis

and reestablish financial equilibrium. In 1979, the government had signed a multi-year

economic and financial recovery plan (PREF) loan with the International Monetary Fund

(IMF) and then, in 1984, launched a program of medium-term and long-term economic

and financial adjustment (Programme d'ajustement a moyen et long termes) (PAML) for

the period between 1985-1992.

In the 1980s, Senegal received a total of fifteen different stabilization and

adjustment loans from the World Bank and IMF, some of which were actually cancelled

for non-compliance (Van de Walle 2001: 2). It is generally recognized that reforms were

only partially implemented in the 1980s, as was documented by Berg himself in his

report entitled Adjustment Postponed: Economic Policy Reform in Senegal in the 1980s

(1990). Using "make-up" and various strategies to conceal certain economic indicators,

the state was able to avoid full compliance (Diop 2004: 13). During this period, the

•2 1

country fell deeper into economic crisis. Worsening economic conditions combined

with the rollback of state services to unleash calamitous social consequences, including a

dramatic backtracking on progress made in health and education in the 1960s and 1970s.

30 A white Frenchman who had previously been a colonial administrator, Collin opted for Senegalese nationality at Independence and served for decades with the Socialist Party. Collin was Minister of Finances from 1964 to 1971. He was then twice Minister of the Interior and Chief of Staff to President Diouf before he retired from government in 1990. 31 Whether continued economic decline in Africa was the result of the poor implementation of reforms or the reforms themselves is an extremely complicated question that has been the subject of vast debate over the last few decades (See Mkandawire and Soludo 1999).

68

Rates of urbanization took off as the agricultural sector continued to decline and urban

informal economies mushroomed. The political difficulties faced by the government were

exacerbated by the negative consequences of structural adjustment, causing people to lose

faith in "the capacity of the ruling party to reform the Senegalese economy and society"

(Diaw and Diouf 1998: 131).

Political Liberalization and the Passive Revolution

The Senegalese state thus found itself in the early 1980s faced with a profound economic,

political, and social crisis—an organic crisis in the Gramscian sense—or a moment in

history where "incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves," inspiring

political forces to "make every effort cure them" (Gramsci 2000: 201). A "general decay

in the existing order" (Fatton 1987: 55), this represents a '"crisis of authority': this is

precisely the crisis of hegemony or the state as a whole" (Gramsci 2000: 218). For

Fatton, this crisis stemmed from the material weakness of the ruling class, particularly the

bureaucratic bourgeoisie (Diouf and his technocrats) who controlled political power. The

Dioufian state faced pressure from the international community to solve the crisis via

reform centered on reducing state power and moving away from the logic of totalization

that had been so associated with the first twenty years of the country's independence.

Fatton argues that the ruling class was able to weather the organic crisis and

effectuate the restructuration of the economy as prescribed by structural adjustment and

necessitated by the weakening social contract with the brotherhoods through liberalizing

the political playing field (1986; 1987). In his words:

The inherent weakness of the ruling class as a whole, and of the bourgeoisie in particular, created the terrain in which grew the organic crisis. Despite such

69

significant weakness, the ruling class demonstrated an exceptional amount of statecraft in preserving its domination. It effected a passive revolution which went beyond the promotion of its narrow and immediate corporate interest. Authoritarianism was displaced by the politics of hegemony, yet the structures of power remained fundamentally unchanged. This is precisely why the democratization of Senegal should be viewed as a successful passive revolution. (1986: 730)

For Fatton, Diouf consolidated the passive revolution that was begun in 1976 when

Senghor had adopted a new constitution that transformed the one-party state into a

tripartite political system through further political reforms which turned Senegal into a

"full-fledged" liberal democracy (1987: 1). Thus, through deftly "ushering in unlimited

pluralism," Diouf was able to neutralize a threat from the left and undertake a

restructuring of the state and its ideological apparatus, without transforming underlying

power structures (Fatton 1986: 744). The passive revolution quieted public resistance—

stemming from the malaise paysan as well as the frustrations of the intellectuals,

students, and repressed working class who were all profoundly dissatisfied with the first

decades of independence (Fatton 1987: 57)—to the restructuration of the economy and,

in particular, the austerity measures he was leading in the public sector. The process of

democratization provided the "means of transforming a governing elite into a true ruling

class" (Ibid.: 69). This effort required shifting,

from a situation where the Murid brotherhood serves as an ideological apparatus of the state, although it does not convey nor practice the ideology of the state and the groups staffing it, to a situation where the state must become the emanation of its own ideological apparatuses. The state does not seek to eliminate or really to further control the brotherhood; it seeks to develop its own instruments of domination. (Copans 1980: 249, qtd. in Fatton 1987: 88)

Although some scholars were quick to point out that the democratic gains during this

time still only made Senegal a "quasi-democracy" (Vengroff and Creevey 1997) that was

70

really more about political consensus, real gains were made in opening up the political

playing field. The PS party-state and its new ideology of a sursaut national (national

regeneration) via a technocratic approach to economic reform, moreover, gained

immense popular support in the early 1980s. The elections of 1983 were a huge triumph

for Diouf, who won more than 80 percent of the vote (Cruise O'Brien 1983).

This popularity was, however, to be short-lived. Political liberalization may have

been part of a passive revolution in Diouf's early years, but the challenges to state

legitimacy would continue to plague the PS in the devastating wake of structural

adjustment. The cracks in the hegemonic projects of the ruling class were soon visible

again with the further adoption of free market ideologies. The character of the Senegalese

economy was to impose "obdurate limitations on the impressive travail of the organic

intellectuals and the passive revolution itself within a few short years (Fatton 1986:

749). Stemming from Diouf s technocrats' positions as elites who were short on ties with

the grassroots, the new state still lacked "the social basis and the local entrenchment of

the patrimonial and clientelist state, which ha[d] assured the stability of the country"

(Coulon and Cruise O'Brien 1990: 154). The Socialists were fractured amongst

themselves, moreover, as Diouf never fully gained control over his own party.

The growing informalization of the Senegalese economy, furthermore, worked

against the coherence of the ruling regime, with broad impacts for state power, the

contours of patronage resources, and the composition of the ruling class. Far from the

intended goal of reforms—namely to foster the growth of a dynamic, efficient and

productive independent bourgeoisie—Ibrahima Thioub et al. argue that a merchant

capital logic in fact continued to dominate (1998). What changed was the state's ability to

71

capitalize, structure, and regulate it. In their words, this did not "signal the emergence of

a Senegalese capitalist class that can act as a unified, organized force pushing economic

liberalization or more efficient and productive forms of developmentalism" (Ibid.: 83).

Instead, these developments can be seen to have eroded the capacity of the state to sustain

patterns of economic activity established under colonial rule (See Boone 1990) and to

have changed the expression of patronage away from a system that assured stability

(Coulon and Cruise O'Brien 1990: 154). As the 1980s progressed, with the diminished

capacity of the state came increasing pressure to control shrinking state coffers and, thus,

heightened competition between political rivals and different levels of government.

While the Senghorian/Dioufian passive revolution ensured the persistence of the PS-state

into the late 1980s, this fix was to prove temporary in the face of the diminishing capacity

of the state to shape and benefit from the economy. The eroding religio-politico-

economic social contract with the marabouts, moreover, was to further challenge the

state's hold on power and legitimacy during this time.

The Shifting Role of Religion in the Economy and Politics

Diouf continued the policy of pragmatic collaboration with the maraboutic

leadership fostered during Senghor's era. As a member of the Tijaniyya order, Senegal's

largest brotherhood in terms of total membership, he favored both the Tijani and Mouride

brotherhoods, but his government remained officially strictly secular in the Senghorian

tradition. The effective linkage provided by the marabouts, however, came under

increasing strain in the 1980s and 1990s. Whereas Diouf had been voted in with a large

majority in 1980 after the brotherhood leadership, or Khalifa-generals, pronounced their

72

customary ndigal to their disciples to vote for him, from 1988-on, the religious leaders'

influence in the electoral scene appeared to be weakening.

Overall, the 1980s saw key shifts in the politics of religion, involving essential

reorganizations in the fundamental relationship between the brotherhoods and the state

and between the marabouts and their disciples. With the precipitous decline of peanuts

and the rural economy and the concomitant rural exodus, profound changes continued at

the political-economic heart of the different brotherhoods. The Tijaniyya brotherhood

already had a "faithful clientele amongst the elites and merchants" and worked to solidify

its foothold in the urban space and economy (Coulon and Cruise O'Brien 1990: 161). The

Mourides, on the other hand—the key players in the rural peanut economy and the social

contract with the PS party-state—had to reorganize according to the new conditions even

more dramatically. As is described by Cruise O'Brien in his essay "Charisma Comes to

Town," the Mourides adapted to the new circumstances through furthering their

migration to the cities (especially Touba and Dakar) and transforming the basis of their

livelihoods to urban commerce and globalized informal trading networks (1988). The

rapid growth of Touba, the holy city in the Mouride heartland, which is now Senegal's

second largest city, is an illustration of this trend. Through urban da'iras, or religious

self-help associations, the Mouride brotherhood offered a training and solidarity system

that was incredibly "well-adapted to situations of change and crisis" (Coulon and Cruise

O'Brien 1990: 161).32 The appearance of the now iconic images of the Mouride founder,

Amadou Bamba, in murals all over Dakar symbolized the migration of the Mourides and

reorganization of their spatial geography from the rural to the urban (See Roberts et al.

2003). These changes restructured the brotherhoods' relationship to the PS party-state,

32 For more on these institutions, see Diop (1981) and Gueye (2001) for a more recent study of Touba.

73

pushing Coulon and Cruise O'Brien to observe in the late 1980s that the state was in

serious disarray, far from the "remarkable success story" it had once been (1990: 164).

During Diouf s early years, the relationship between the marabout and his

disciple that formed the bedrock of the religious basis of citizenship was, moreover,

being re-written. A number of factors were joining during this period to "liberalize" the

religious playing field, including the general liberalization of the economy and politics,

the diversification and informalization of the economy, and the education, urbanization,

and thus autonomization of the individual, as well as a weakening of the hierarchical

authority of the brotherhoods (See Cruise O'Brien 2003). While not necessarily

secularizing Senegalese society—in fact, the converse has been postulated—these

developments were, nonetheless, contributing to a kind of "democratization" of religion.

Thus we can see that what Cruise O'Brien insists are the intrinsically democratic

elements of Sufi Islam contributed to the deepening of political democracy during this

period. He argues that the conditionality of authority in Sufi Islam operates as "close to a

Sufi social contract," or the reciprocal exchange derived from the brotherhoods leaders'

reliance on the charismatic devotion of the population which is relatively democratically

determined through people's free choice to follow different marabouts (1986: 74). For

this reason, he argues, Sufis have actually taken very well in certain places (like Senegal)

to modern electoral politics (Ibid.: 76). With urbanization and the changing basis of the

economy, the Mouride talibe became less reliant upon his marabout for access to land

and agricultural resources, underscoring this democratic tendency.

Perhaps the greatest illustration of this democratization was with the crumbling of

the original formula whereby the marabouts delivered the votes of their disciples to the

33 With generational differences and competition between marabouts within the same brotherhood.

74

PS regime in the elections. Ironically, the evidence that this compulsion was fading first

showed up in the 1983 even though the PS fared quite well. In those Presidential

elections, despite the Mouride Khalifa-General Abdou Lahatte Mbacke's pre-election

ndigal to vote for the PS, a significant number of Mouride voters appear to have defied

these instructions and voted for the opposition party (PDS), even in the Mouride

heartland (Cruise O'Brien 2003: 202). In Cruise O'Brien's words:

A loyal disciple should have known what to do. Yet the nationally declared results seemed to show a new defiance from below, in part a generational revolt, a shift of opinion led by the urbanized and commercially active. (2003: 202-203)

The shifting basis of the state-brotherhood and the talibe-marabout relationship was

perhaps most dramatically expressed in the controversial 1988 elections. Despite a blunt

ndigal to vote for Diouf from the Khalifa-General—"any Mouride who does not vote for

Abdou Diouf will be betraying Serigne Touba"34 (qtd. in Cruise O'Brien 2003: 203)—the

opposition received almost 30 percent of the vote. Even more dramatically, an

anonymous revolt was mounted against the ndigal in Touba: the morning after the

election, the walls of the most holy mosque were plastered with notes protesting the

ndigal in electoral matters (Beck 2001; Cruise O'Brien 2003; Villalon 1999). Not since

1988 has a Khalifa-General of the brotherhoods pronounced a political ndigal in favor of

a presidential candidate, indicating the deep "cracks in the edifice" of the mutualism

provided by the original social contract between the marabouts and the ruling party

(Villalon 1999, 2004).

The Mouride founder Amadou Bamba is also known as Serigne Touba. 75

Garbage Management in Diouf's Early Years: SIAS (1985-1995)

Before I go on to read the next phase of Senegal's political-economic history

through trash, I will first summarize here what was occurring with trash management in

the period just described. With the bankruptcy of the private company (SOADEP) charged

with the city's trash collection, in 1984 the city became clogged again with its own waste.

Private truck and horse-drawn cart operators profited from the crisis through offering

their services for those clients who could pay and generally exacerbated the crisis through

evacuating household garbage into the public space. Faced with the trash crisis and the

fleeting popularity the Socialist Party after 1983, the government convened an inter-

ministerial working group to study the situation and propose solutions. In the meantime,

the new mayor of Dakar, Mamadou Diop, took charge of garbage management,

employing his own Technical Services division to conduct periodic waste management

activities with the assistance of the Army Corps of Engineers (Genie Militaire). Despite

these efforts, the immense piles of garbage that had built up in Dakar could not be fully

tackled. A special event, Set Wecc ("very clean" in Wolof), was organized in February of

1985 by the Army with the help of the local populations, enabling the evacuation of

160,000 tons of garbage to the dump at Mbeubeuss. Finally, based on the working

group's suggestions, the Director of Local Governments (Directeur des Collectivites

Locales) decided to create a parastatal enterprise or "mixed economy" company (societe

d'economie mixte) through which, it was hoped, the state could exercise more control

over the system than it had with the private company (BCEOM 1986: B22). As such, in

the middle of the 1980s, the trash system went in the opposite direction than was

35 The city used what remained of the SOADIP materials, complemented with municipal equipment and rented materials.

76

advocated by structural adjustment. The move represented a step towards state

centralization and can be seen as a last-ditch example of foot-dragging in public sector

reform.

The new garbage company La Societe Industrielle d'Amenagement Urbain du

Senegal (SIAS), was created on April 15, 1985 with the state as majority shareholder.36

The new governing body managing the greater region of Dakar, the Urban Community of

Dakar (Communaute Urbaine de Dakar) (CUD), signed a five year renewable contract

with SIAS on October 11, 1985. SIAS was given the exclusive management of the

territory of the CUD and charged with cleaning and sweeping of roads and public spaces

and the collection and disposal of garbage38 (BCEOM 1986: B24). Although the CUD

was responsible for financing the company, the Ministry of the Interior was given legal

jurisdiction over it, much to the dismay of the CUD president, Mayor Diop. "Out of this

situation was born a sharp discontent on the part of the President of the CUD, who was

responsible for a service that he financed but over which he exercised no authority"

(Benrabia 2002: 269).

Much of SIAS's equipment was that which the company inherited from SOADIP

with new material coming from a French partner, SITA.39 Like with SOADIP, SIAS was

advised to hire workers from the company that it replaced, however the total number of

The other shareholders included: the Societe des HLM, SICAP, LONASE, and la Caisse de Securite Sociale as well as the French garbage company SITA (BCEOM 1986). 37 The CUD was created in 1983 as a governing structure over the greater region of Dakar (joining the five Communes of Dakar, Rufisque, Bargny, Guediawaye and Pikine). As stipulated in Decree 83-1131 (October 1983), the CUD was responsible for household waste management in the Region of Dakar. In 1985, the CUD counted 1.4 million habitants. 38 SIAS effectuated two types of collection: door-to-door in the most accessible neighborhoods and stationary containers placed by markets and in the peripheral and irregular neighborhoods. 39 The total cost of material investments was 2 billion CFA which was covered by a supplier credit granted by the French bank, Credit du Nord (BCEOM 1986). Contributions to the equipment investments were later to be made by the governments of Japan and Saudi Arabia (Benrabia 2002: 264).

77

employees who had worked for SOADIP is unknown and the Director General of SIAS is

known to have recruited widely amongst his own ethnic group. The company had 1355

employees in 1986, with personnel salaries and benefits accounting for over half of the

operation's costs (including overtime, bonuses, compensation, paid leave, and other

benefits) (BCEOM 1986: B26-31).40

SIAS satisfied its responsibilities adequately for only a short time. By 1988, its

deficiencies were glaring and the capital's garbage problem had become a key point of

political and social tension. Some of the reasons cited for the system's inadequacies by a

UN Habitat report included: a "plethora" of personnel, bad technical choice of material,

lack of maintenance, the CUD's incapacity to oblige fulfillment of responsibilities, the

insufficiency of funds (due to poor rate of return on the TEOM (see Table 2.1)), and the

private use of SIAS equipment41 (Cisse 2007; IAGU/CNUEH 1998). Despite these

problems, the contract was renewed in 1991. The garbage crisis of the late 1980s,

however, was to usher in a new era in garbage collection, as discussed in the next section.

5. Neoliberal Times: Set/Setal, the end of the Socialist Era, and Participatory Garbage (1988-2000)

The crisis of 1988

In 1988—as, I will show, it was again in 2007—Dakar was drowning in its own

garbage. The public filth manifested, again, a larger crisis at the heart of the Socialist

Party-state and its political-economic and religio-cultural foundations. During this time,

widespread social unrest and mobilization by a discontented populous in Dakar—

40 The World Bank report on SIAS emphasized that efforts to reduce the system costs should be concentrated on the exorbitant costs of the personnel (BCEOM 1986: B26). 41 It was widely rumored that the SIAS trucks and equipment were periodically used outside of Dakar for religious events.

78

particularly by the city's youth—met with the state's scramble to retain its legitimacy,

hold onto power, and control the social peace. As the dire social consequences of

structural adjustment and overall economic crisis deepened and unemployment

skyrocketed, these young Dakarois took to the streets in record numbers, protesting the

failures of the educational system in 1987-1988, and relatedly, in rallying their support

for opposition candidate Abdoulaye Wade's electoral campaign—best known as sopi or

"change"—leading up to the elections of 1988.42 These mobilizations then turned violent

with the highly contested election results, which placed incumbent Abdou Diouf as the

winner, and youth rioted in Dakar. The government responded to the riots by declaring a

state of emergency, imposing a curfew, and by arresting and convicting the opposition

leaders for their role in inciting the violence (Young and Kante 1992). The city's streets

then turned violent again in the spring of 1989 with a spate of ethnically motivated

murders in broad daylight during the country's diplomatic crisis with Mauritania.43

Though the PS had retained power, state hegemony and the integrity of the party-state—

Fatton's passive revolution—appeared threatened, as acutely symbolized in the sinister

vision of the youthful urban rioters. In 1994, Villalon was to characterize the end of the

1980s as the most severe political crisis in Senegal since 1962 (with the alleged coup

attempt by Mamadou Dia) (1994a: 164). New constituencies were raising their heads,

new formulas of power were emerging, and garbage was taking center stage as both a

symbol of state crisis as well as an important terrain on which to organize.

For a nice overview of the 1988 elections, see Young and Kante (1992). 43 Diplomatic ties between the neighboring countries were severed and several hundred people (estimates vary between 100 and 1,000) were killed in April and May 1989 in a spate of looting, rioting and reprisals in both Dakar and the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, as well as in other towns on both sides of the border. The ethnic violence was allegedly sparked by a dispute over grazing rights along the Senegal River (Parker 1991).

79

In the wake of the 1988/1989 violence followed a different sort of social

movement in Dakar that signaled what Mamadou Diouf has argued to be the youth's

rejection of the traditional political sphere and resort to new forms of citizenship: the

Set/Setal movement (1992; 1996). Considered in more detail in Chapter 3, Set/Setal

involved the localized activities of Dakar youth to personally improve their own

neighborhoods, in reaction to the increasing filth of the city and the widespread

disappointment with its policy-makers. Through painting elaborate murals, organizing

local events, and cleaning-up their neighborhoods, the youth aimed to cleanse the city—

physically and morally. As such, Set/Setal represented both an indictment of the state's

failings and a call for the citizens of Dakar to take local development into their own

hands in the wake of the disappointing 1988 elections. These Set/Setal youth's labors

were to become the target of the PS-state's political-economic ambitions in the early

1990s through their incorporation into a completely new trash system to replace that of

SIAS. This radical institutional shift was a direct response to the confluence of changes at

the nexus of state-economy-religion relations in the late 1980s and offers a revealing look

into Socialist Party's attempt to retain power during this period. The following sections

will explore the final years of PS era in Senegal through the lens of this trash transition.

The Battle for Trash and the Long Neoliberal Passive Revolution

The failures of SIAS had become an enormous social and political problem for

the CUD by the late 1980s that gained the extensive attention of the press, the political

parties, the NGOs, and the Dakar population at large (Benrabia 2002: 265). The SIAS

workers, cognizant of their precarious positions and suffering from the occasional delays

80

in salary payments, had begun organizing and critiquing the failings of the company

during this time, and even held a "strike" where they dumped trash at the foot of the

presidential palace in the late 1980s. By 1990, the youth of Set/Setal's cleaning activities

had become indispensible in filling the gaps left by the flailing trash collection company

and Dakar's mayor and president of the CUD, Mamadou Diop, masterminded their

incorporation into a city-wide participatory trash system which was to replace SIAS and

last until Alternance. At first simply rallying support around periodic clean-up events,

Diop began to formalize and coordinate these events in the early 1990s. As the youths'

efforts became more and more significant, the mayor began contracting with private local

companies (other than SIAS) to rent trash trucks and paying participating youth a small

"reward" for their efforts. Organized around the so-called "Days of Cleanliness"

(Journees de Proprete), youth efforts were thus institutionalized as a parallel,

participatory system of trash collection and street sweeping to that of SIAS, which was

not officially dissolved until 1995.44

During this period (1990-1995), the youth efforts became progressively more

formalized, and participants were required to be organized into registered community

associations (GIEs45). In 1992, a tripartite body was set up between SIAS, the CUD, and

a commission charged with reforming the public sector to chart an "emergency plan" to

solve the crisis (Benrabia 2002: 266). A new arm of the CUD, CAMCUD (Coordination

des Associations et Mouvements de la Communaute Urbaine de Dakar), was created to

federate the youth associations and, finally, in March of 1994, an inter-ministerial council

pronounced the end of SIAS. On Sept. 27, 1995, SIAS was finally dissolved and in

44 While it was out of the scope of this study to examine the origin of SIAS's failings, chronic mismanagement and payment irregularities were cited as key problems. 45 Groupement d'lnteret Economique (Economic Interest Group).

81

October the "New Cleaning System" (Nouveau Systeme de Nettoiement) (NSN) was

codified under the exclusive control of the mayor, who took on full organizational and

financial responsibility.46 In the second half of the 1990s, the system was managed

through a newly created public works agency and the payments were regularized. A

private Senegalese-Canadian Consortium {Consortium Senegalo-Canadien (CSC))47 was

charged with technical support and system coordination. The 109 GEEs (and their 1542

members (Doucoure 2002)) were made officially responsible for: street sweeping,

garbage collection, and the education (sensibilization) of the communities they served

with regard to household garbage management. Receiving only three-month temporary

contracts, these youth had no benefits or job security and were paid at minimal, day labor

rates.48

As detailed in Chapter 3,1 argue that this transition to youth in the trash sector

can be seen as part of a reformulation of hegemonic relations at a critical political-

economic conjuncture. Cracks in PS-state hegemony were embodied in the youth riots,

decline of SIAS, and then the repudiation of the state in Set/Setal. The reformulation of

the relationship between religion and politics and the liberalization of the political

playing field had politicians courting voters like never before. The reconfiguration of the

state's role in the economy and the decline of formal labor had broad impacts for state

power, the contours of patronage resources, and the urban labor question. The impacts of

45 The principle objectives of the new system were stated as follows: "1) the rationalization of the collection and transport system for solid municipal wastes; 2) the involvement of the population in the improvement and management of their quality of life; 3) the mastery of the collection and evacuation systems; 4) the reduction of the costs of collection and disposal" (Senegal 1998: 27). 47 The CSC was composed of a Senegalese company, Kheur Khadim, and a Canadian company Chagnon, and was mainly charged with the optimization of the collection system, vehicle acquisition and maintenance, managing the dump, and general system coordination (Benrabia 2002: 252). 48 Note, the amount paid to the GIEs accounted for only 19 percent of the new system (Diop n.d.: 99). See the sub-contracting agreement for more details on the specific duties of the GIEs (Senegal n.d.)

82

structural adjustment, moreover, made large-scale public institutions (even parastatal

ones) less and less politically and financially tenable and the control of budgets in the

remaining sectors even more desirable. A new approach to neoliberal reform was needed

that took the edge off of the social consequences that were proving difficult to manage in

the cities. The competition between the local and national state in the era of

decentralization, finally, placed the control of the trash sector at the center of a rivalry

between the City of Dakar and the national government. From a heterogeneous state's

point of view, channeling Set/Setal activists into the trash system—and thereby changing

the institutional form of the sector as well as the composition of its labor force—offered

not only a solution to a budgetary crisis and failing, inflexible, trash system which was

threatening a labor revolt, but a calculated political maneuver to simultaneously shore up

electoral support for the local PS apparatus and quiet the foreboding youth agitations that

had taken the city hostage in the late 1980s. To the resistance of the Ministry of the

Interior, the mayor was able to recapture control of an important sector that represented

the paramount challenge he faced in managing the capital city. The youth—men and

women—of Dakar had become the focus of a party battle, a power play between the local

and national state, as well as the base of one politician's (Mayor Diop) ambitions to

conquer the democratic landscape.49

Building on Fatton's argument that political liberalization in the early 1980s acted

as a successful passive revolution whereby the PS-state apparatus replaced the

authoritarianism of Senghor's administration with liberal democracy and thus defused an

organic crisis and threat from the left (1986: 729), I argue that the transition of Set/Setal

into the trash sector can be seen as one manifestation of the extension and reconfiguration

49 Diop was, during this time, preparing for his own bid for the presidency.

83

of this passive revolution into the 1990s. The passive revolution needed to be

continuously secured in the new context of electoral competition and the crumbling of the

original relgio-political foundations of the state. The PS-state attempted to manage the

continuation of organic crisis under the conditions of a further liberalizing economy

through flexibilizing the workforce, promoting a community ethic for public service,

further democratizing the electoral process, and shoring up support with new urban

voters. A number of reforms were initiated in the electoral code as well as revisions in

the legal and constitutional systems, including the re-establishment of the post of Prime

Minister (Villalon 1994a). Offering the trash sector jobs to the Set/Setal activists

represented one of the state's key strategies to deal with its shrinking capacity and

legitimacy and to quiet social mobilizations through a more inclusive patronage system

that included youth and women.51 The World Bank, furthermore, offered an incentive to

target youth through its funding of a public works agency that became deeply involved in

the trash sector. Part of a global paradigm shift to a kinder, gentler "revisionist"

neoliberalism in the face of widespread social dislocation (Mohan and Stokke 2000), the

agency's projects were aimed at improving living conditions in poor urban

neighborhoods in order to satisfy certain basic needs that had been eroded with

adjustment policies and, in so doing, keep the social peace (WorldBank 1992, 1997). In

its first year (1996), the World Bank financed half of the trash system's budget indirectly

through this agency (Benrabia 2002: 282). Given the perpetually poor rates of return on

In 1991, the government undertook electoral reform through elaborating a new and consensual electoral code - the first since the mid-1970s—in the most recent attempt to "democratize a democracy." Reforms included changing the voting age from 21 to 18, requiring obligatory secret ballot, and revision of the party electoral lists (Villalon 1994a). 51 See Chapters 3 and 5.

84

the Garbage Tax (TEOM), as shown in Table 2.1, this was an attraction for the cash-

strapped city.

Year

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996-2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Estimated

1,076 1,272 1,345 1,692 1,480 1,300 no data 1,000 1,000 1,500 1,500 1,500 2,189

Collected

771 757 699 847 469 600 no data 731 986 944 773 1,041 1,174

% Collected

72 60 52 50 32 46

73 99 63 52 69 54

Trash Budget

2185

3356

5040 5520

5520-7000

% of Total Trash Budget Covered

35

18

15 18

21-17

Table 2.1. Recovery Rates for the Garbage Tax (TEOM) in Dakar in million CFA. (Data sources: (Chagnon 1996: 109); Direction des Collectivites Locales (personal communication, 2007))

Another function of the new youth-based trash system was its utility for recruiting

"militants" and voters for the Socialist Party. As we will see in Chapter 3, the clean-up

events were used as direct political rallies and those most active in the party were the

most rewarded in the system. Young men and women (who made up 30 percent of the

new trashworkers) were emerging as key political constituencies to court in the 1990s—

as well as potential critics to appease. Thus through a language of participatory

citizenship, grassroots development, and environmental stewardship, Mamadou Diop was

able to steer youth energies towards "productive" ends in the interest of city management

and, in so doing, court their political support. The changing out the trash sector for the

21,000,000 CFA = $2070 (2009). 85

young activists of Set/Setal stemmed directly out of a political crisis in which the

government was forced to reckon with youth as a force of change.

The presidential elections of 1993 would prove that the PS strategy had worked

again to at least postpone, for one last time, the tide of change at the polls glimpsed in

1988 and allow the passive revolution to continue. Echoing Fatton's analysis of the 1983

elections, the further opening of the democratic playing field for the 1993 elections—the

first election that "all political parties had insisted was as perfectly democratic as

possible" (Villalon 1994a: 185)—can be seen to have lent legitimacy to the PS and

divided the opposition. The PS-state's efforts to gain the support of the urban youth,

moreover, through such initiatives as the youth-based trash sector, operated as direct

political rallies to foster support for the party. However, it's also important to note that

these PS efforts had worked on a different level. A closer look at the election results

showed that Diouf's victory was actually attributable to a remarkable silence on the part

of the youth:

Urban youth, despite their high level of politicization, seem in particular to have failed to vote... Voting, it seems, did not appeal to many young Senegalese as an effective way of expressing political preferences. (Villalon 1994a: 185)

Although Diouf won in 1993 with an overwhelming victory, this was largely attributed to

the successful mobilization of rural voters in contrast with an incredibly high abstention

vote, particularly among young urban voters (Ibid).

This silence of the youth—in votes and in violence—can be read as another,

perhaps more important, element of the extension and reconfiguration of the neoliberal

passive revolution: the securing of hegemonic relations in the cultural realm that was

accomplished, at least in part, through the fostering of an ethic of community

86

development that is so acutely symbolized in the Set/Setal based trash system. I recall

Gramsci's "ethico-political" dimensions of consent (2000: 194-195) to depart here from

Fatton's (1987) emphasis on "big P" political parties to instead attend to the role of the

cultural sphere in mobilizing consent and forwarding a neoliberal agenda. In this way, I

am reading Gramsci very differently from Fatton, who doesn't go far enough in

considering the foundations of consent in civil society. The tapping of Set/Setal

functioned to quash what could have been the revolutionary potential of the youth

activists and instead channel those youth away from insurgent projects towards the

material act of cleaning the city. This acted to patch the cracks in the state's hegemonic

project that were apparent in the physical manifestation of disorder. In the spirit of what

Dia had hoped to accomplish with the Operation Augias many years earlier, Mayor Diop

and the Socialist Party aimed to root the state in the grassroots via Set/Setal. Though

youth may not have overwhelming voted for Diouf in 1993, their simple abstention, in

contrast with the violence with which they had resisted the PS-state in 1988 testifies to

the efficacy of this project.

If trash is the cultural expression of the fissures in the state's hegemonic project,

then the new trash system captured youth efforts in "ordering" with brooms and buckets

through a production of proper urban citizenship. As we shall see in Chapter 3, the "Days

of Cleanliness" through which Mayor Diop channeled these youth energies, were steeped

in discourses forwarding the neoliberal tenets of decentralization, good governance, and

community participation. In the face of the crumbling of the ndigal (no major ndigals

were pronounced in the 1993 elections), the social upheaval caused by SAPs, and the

withdrawal of the state in the provision of its traditional welfare duties, the formalization

87

of Set/Setal thus worked to stem the tide of opposition and relocate the political

imaginary of the Dakarois back to the neighborhood and, in this case, the problem of

trash. This new emphasis on youth, the moral-ethical project of cleaning the city, and

keeping the urban order through "participation" allowed the ruling party to continue the

long neoliberal passive revolution into the 1990s.

The Late 1990s: Accelerated Adjustment and Diouf's Tenuous Hold on Power

Structural adjustment moved full speed ahead and the state withdrew from the

public sector in the 1990s with much more expedition than the previous decade. In 1994,

under pressure from the international community, Senegal devalued its currency,

precipitating a short-term economic crisis and multiplying the difficulties of the national

treasury. With the devaluation of the CFA (West African franc), a new package of

reforms was launched that would signal a more neoliberal turn and an era of even more

marked state disengagement. Whereas deregulation had occurred on a limited, sectoral

basis in the 1980s, massive swaths of the public sector were privatized in the 1990s,

including the electricity, telecommunications, and water sectors. Reform of the civil

service was centered on several major strategies aimed at controlling recruitment

practices and minimizing new hires. In the 1990s, the public and parastatal sectors shrunk

decidedly and only employed 7.5 percent of the working population in 2002 (Senegal et

al. 2004: 3). As a last remaining slice of those jobs, the trash sector represented an

important pot to control.

Urban water reform was initiated in 1995; the telecommunications' sector was privatized in 1997; and electricity sector reform was begun (and cancelled, as will be discussed later) in 1999.

88

The progressing decade was to again prove to be a tenuous state of affairs for the

PS-state. Whereas, early in the decade, the state had undertaken significant political

reforms which had the notables of the PS sharing more power and sitting with members

of the opposition (Diop et al. 2000: 163), subsequent years saw a striking pull back of the

political reforms achieved in early 1990s. This included a lifting of the two term limit for

the president, which contributed to widespread disillusionment and anti-PS sentiment

(Villalon 1999: 132). The municipal elections of 1996 were wrought with controversy

and alleged irregularities, which cemented the discontent of the youth. At the end of the

decade, despite some economic improvements at a macro scale, Senegal found itself in a

situation characterized by deepening inequality, the degradation of sanitary and other

infrastructures, the decline of the educational system, and the rising cost of living. The

development goals of the country and its leaders had been put on the back burner,

exchanged instead for the short-term goals of international lenders. In Momar-Coumba

Diop's analysis, the SAPs had put into place a supreme system of patron-client relations

between the international lenders and technocrats who escaped all political mandate and

democratic control (2004: 14). SAPs reinforced, moreover, a tendency to concentrate

power in the hands of the president. Instead of navigating the country's development,

managing the social peace was made the top priority in order to ensure the proper

implementation of SA and the neutralization of social resistance. By the end of the 1990s,

the legitimacy of the PS-state was under enormous strain again—only this time the

outcome would be quite different.

89

6. Alternance, "Alternoos," and the Difficult Construction of Wade's Hegemony (2000-2008)

Alternance and the Evolving Fabric of Religion and Politics

On March 19th, 2000, Abdoulaye Wade of the PDS was elected to power with 58

percent54 of the popular vote (Diop and Diouf 2002: 137). Monitored extensively by the

Senegalese media as well as foreign observers, the Alternance (meaning "turnover,"

"alternation") elections were widely considered to be the most free and fair elections to

date in Senegal. After hearing of his defeat, Abdou Diouf graciously stepped down in a

smooth and peaceful turnover that surprised the international community and stood in

stark contrast to recent events on the continent—notably the coup d'etat in Cote d'lvoire.

Despite the Socialist Party's pre-election efforts to quell social unrest and exercise its

remaining patronage capacities to retain the support of the growing urban electorate—as

we saw in the trash case—desperation on the part of a population unable to envision its

future, let alone its daily survival, found voice in Wade's call for sopi. The development

promises of the PS appeared bankrupt—especially to the exploding youth population

born after independence, for whom the nationalist project held little or no meaning.

Deftly targeting those disenfranchised and frustrated urban dwellers through dramatic

theatrics of public support (epitomized in the so-called marches bleus, "blue marches"

(Foucher 2007)), Wade—who had been a stalwart character on the Senegalese political

scene since Senghor-—finally convinced the Senegalese that he would represent a new

direction in Senegalese politics and right the wrongs of the last difficult decades. Thus,

out of the context of the dislocation and impoverishment of the Senegalese population at

54 In the second round of the Presidential elections, backed by a coalition of political parties organized into the Front pour VAlternance (FAL), which was composed of the Coalition pour I'Alternance 2000 and the Coalition de I 'Espoir 2000.

90

the hands of Diouf s technocrats, emerged a historic changing of the political guard.

Ironically, it was in voting for one of the last great Independence-era politicians—and a

liberal, at that—that the youth defied their "elders" (religious and otherwise) to seek

change.

Alternance indicated to many the advent of true, substantive multi-party

democracy in Senegal. In many ways, the transition "reinvigorated an idealistic and linear

reading" of Senegal's political trajectory and re-inspired the oft-formulated ideas of

Senegalese exceptionalism that had begun with analysis of Senghor's successes but had

floundered through the Diouf years (Dahou and Foucher 2004: 6). The last eight years of

Wade's presidency, however, have proven immensely disappointing to most observers.

The further intensification of liberal economic policies, widespread transhumance

("grazing") whereby the new PDS party-state has integrated PS leaders into the new

government, and generally more-of-the-same policies have led some scholars to ask

whether Alternance hasn't, in fact, represented the solidification of the ruling class'

hegemonic project (now dressed in a new party's robes) through neutralizing the left

(Diop and Diouf 2002). Other scholars argue that what these last years demonstrate

perhaps more clearly is the "impossible construction of the hegemonic block" (Dahou

and Foucher 2004), which has, instead, led Wade towards more authoritarian tendencies

in his frustrated quest for legitimacy. Before I get to my examination of this trend, as seen

through the garbage sector, it is first necessary to consider the meaning of Alternance as

the marker of the politico-religio-economic reconfiguration of Senegalese society.

91

In 2000, Diop et al. called the reconstruction that came with the "uprooting of the

Baobab" a moral reconstruction that worked to:

disconnect public space from the space of belief, in the elaboration of a radical distinction between the public and the private, the individual and the collective, the domestic and the official, the masculine and the feminine, the young and old. (2000:177)

At the heart of these distinctions was a key debate spawned by the elections with regard

to the evolving relationship between religion and politics in Senegal. Leading up to the

elections, religious discourse had asserted itself in an unprecedented manner. On the one

hand, some young, "modern" or "society" marabouts (marabouts mondains) challenged

the Senghorian tradition of secular government though attempting to form political

parties—aiming for a new type of power, not just as intermediaries but as politico-

religious leaders (Samson 2000: 7). Ousseynou Fall and Cheikh Abdoulaye Dieye were

two such candidates, running under "divine appointment" in the 2000 elections (Villalon

2004). Paradoxically, the voters expressed a remarkable distinction between religion and

politics at the poles. Although the Khalifa General did not pronounce a formal electoral

ndigal to vote for the incumbent party, there was widespread rejection of the lower-

ranking marabouts'1 ndigals. The proclamations of this new generation of marabouts to

their disciples to support Diouf were met, in some cases, with a surprising level of

resistance, which scholars have termed, variously: the "defeat", "aborting", "crumbling,"

and "scattering" of the ndigal (Audrain 2004; Samson 2000). Xavier Audrain, for

example, explores the dramatic public rejection of the ndigal proclaimed by the Mouride

marabout Cheikh Modou Kara Mbacke, which was met with hisses and boos by his

youth following (2004: 100). The electoral victory of Wade in the different fiefs of the

55 The famous Senegalese tree, the Baobab, was the symbol of the Socialist Party.

92

grand marabouts reveals the substantive depths of the defeat of the ndigals overall in

2000. The poor showing of the marabout-politicians in the elections, moreover, indicates

that voters were not terribly interested in the religious leaders' foray into politics, leading

some intellectuals to applaud the elections as a "victory of citizenship" (Mbow qtd. in

Villalon 2004: 66).

The defeat of the ndigal and the election of Abdoulaye Wade do raise a number of

provocative questions for an understanding of the changing relationship between religion

and citizenship in contemporary Senegal. While some observers concluded that a certain

secularization had finally taken root for urban citizens, other scholars argue that

Alternance indicated less a secularization of the population, but, rather, a more active

expression of citizenship than was evident in the earlier decades of the historic social

contract between the marabouts and the state (Diop et al. 2000: 170). Audrain contends

that, in fact, religion and politics are becoming increasingly entangled, as youth reject

politicians as corrupt—in this case, Abdou Diouf and his collaborators—and increasingly

identify with their marabouts (2004: 102). Nonetheless, the youth appear to be

differentiating between spiritual and political matters in a new way and—recalling Cruise

O'Brien (1986)—exercising their democratic choice in both spheres. This resonates with

Linda Beck's analysis of a more democratic demand for accountability from both the

marabouts and the state by merchants in Touba in the late 1990s (2001). The protest

staged by merchants in Touba56 in 1997 against taxes imposed by the local councilor and

accompanied with an ndigal by the Mouride Khalifa-General, for instance, illuminated a

56 In Touba (the holy city of the Mourides), local government and religious authority are intimately interconnected. Put simply, after years of poor infrastructure development in Touba, the merchants wanted to see proof that their tax money would be put to good use. This was a somewhat revolutionary development, according to Beck, in light of traditional talibe-marabout relations (2001).

93

fundamental shift in political authority which indicates "the growing autonomy of

disciples vis-a-vis their marabouts and the state" or what she calls "reining in the

marabouts" by their disciples (2001: 603). Thus, in the face of the pluralization of

competitive religious and state authority, coupled with the multiplying expressions of the

autonomous political power of the urban youth, the marabouts and the state alike have

been forced to reckon with demands for a more accountable and democratic patronage

system.

The implications of Alternance for the relationship between religion and politics

also pose key questions for the old social contract between the state and brotherhoods. In

certain respects, the demise of the Socialist Party seemed to signal the end of the original

social contract between the Sufi brotherhoods and the party-state. Again, the debate has

been lively. In Cruise O'Brien's view, while the relationship has taken different form, the

brotherhoods continue to buttress the state. In his words, the contract has broadened; it is

now more clearly between the brotherhoods and the state (not the party): "any state

authority will have to do political business with the brotherhoods, and the brotherhoods

know they need the state" (2003: 212). He goes on to conclude, optimistically (in 2003),

that this represents a more inclusive, more flexible contract, one that is probably more

important than ever in sustaining the state of Senegal.

A closer look shows how, continuing the process which started in the 1980s, the

brotherhoods have adapted to recompositions in the country's political-economic

foundations. With the demise of peanuts and massive migration to the cities and abroad,

they have shown remarkable skill in reshaping their economic networks along migratory

routes centered on commerce and in reinforcing their power with international Islamic

94

clientelism (Cruise O'Brien 2003: 206). Rooted in an insular system of solidarity—of an

intense group identification that turns on a spatial imaginary always connecting them to

Touba—the Mourides, for instance, have been able to transform diasporic social

networks into a powerful and profitable international trade network (Copans 2000; Diouf

2000). Thus, through forging dynamic new economic niches—centered on the migratory

rents which are now at the center of the country's economy57—the Mourides remain a

formidable economic force. The promise of paradise remains strong, but what becomes

important is the identity of the talibe as belonging to a collective whole amidst the plural

environs of the city (Cruise O'Brien 2003: 206).

Nonetheless, while the brotherhoods' role in the Senegalese economy remains

important and the persistence of their connections with the state is undeniable, insights

from the last few years show that the challenges to state legitimacy provided by the

dismantling of the original social contract between the state and the brotherhoods that

began with Diouf have continued with Wade. The 2000 elections, as presented above,

and the intense de-legitimization of Wade's state over the last few years (below),

highlight the very difficult construction of state hegemony in the wake of the

liberalization of the religious, economic, and political playing fields.

Alternoos, Garbage, and the Age of Disappointment

C O

Despite having been, in many ways, the Socialist Party Mayor's fief, many of

the trashworkers of Dakar shared in the hopes of their fellow Dakarois with Alternance.

57 The growth of the Senegalese economy from 1995 to 2001 (5 percent) is attributed to the growth of three sectors: fishing, tourism, and migratory rent (remittances) from Senegalese abroad—with the latter as the most significant development (Dahou and Foucher 2004: 8). 58 This was a word commonly used by the trashworkers themselves.

95

Although they were, officially, clients of the Socialist Party and many of the leaders were

very politically active PS "militants," many of the sector's employees had began secretly

supporting Wade in the late 1990s. Resentful of their precarious positions as "exploited"

laborers and political puppets, they began organizing for better labor conditions and, in

some cases, whispering their support of Wade. The rewards of their patrons appeared

minuscule and they were ready to demand a better lot. The arrival of Alternance for these

workers, like for the rest of the city and country, brought with it hope for an end to the

long reign of stagnation and, in their particular cases, insecure work. The trashworkers

formed a politically "independent"59 union, the National Union of Cleaning Workers

(Syndicat National des Travailleurs du Nettoiement (SNTN)) on December 15, 2000, just

a few months after Wade took office. This was to help them to better defend their jobs

and advocate for improved conditions in the turbulent restructuring that was to come.

With Wade came a more forceful move towards privatization, public sector reform, and,

in particular, the dismantling of the socialist party apparatus and its institutions. The

participatory trash sector was an obvious target for "reform."

Just two months after the elections, a new government agency was created that

was to take over the management of the trash sector when the CUD was finally dissolved

a few months later. The Agency for the Cleanliness of Dakar (Agence pour la Proprete

de Dakar (APRODAK))60 was placed under the direct oversight of the Prime Minister's

office. The CUD was dissolved on July 21, 2000 (and with it, CAMCUD) in what is

widely seen as a political strategy to eviscerate Mayor Diop's power base and recuperate

59 See Chapter 3 for a discussion of their choice of union federation. 60 The agency was first named the High Authority for the Cleanliness of Dakar (Haute Autorite pour la Proprete de Dakar (HAPD)), then shortly after, PRODAK (Proprete de Dakar), before it became APRODAK in 2001. A few years later, when it was no longer implicated in Dakar's garbage, it was changed to APROSEN (Agence pour la Proprete du Senegal).

96

the trash sector. After serving 18 years as Mayor, Mamadou Diop eventually lost in the

local elections on May 12, 2002 to liberal candidate Pape Diop, a close ally of Abdoulaye

Wade. Mamadou Diop soon became mayor of the Yoff district, as one of the only

remaining socialist mayors in power. With the dissolving of the CUD, the trash system

underwent a major reorganization. Initially hiring multiple local contractors

(concessionaires) for the cleaning and collection services, a call for bids was put out in

2000 for a major waste management company on the international market. The Swiss

company Alcyon was selected for the exclusive market of Dakar's garbage collection and

a contract was signed in January of 2001 between Alcyon and the Minister of the

Environment under the approval of the Prime Minister.61 The 25-year contract was

eventually ceded on November 11, 2003 to Alcyon's main sub-contractor AMA-Senegal,

a private subsidiary of an Italian waste management company (AMA-Rome).62 AMA's

investments were covered by the World Bank via the MIGA (Multilateral Investment

Guarantee Agency).63

Soon after AMA was officially awarded the contract, the Dakar trashworkers

(who had entered the system with Set/Setal) were officially hired by AMA with formal

contracts and given regular benefits, including health coverage. This temporarily closed

out the insecure and informal institutional arrangements under which the trashworkers

had labored for more than 10 years as a non-contract, low-paid labor force. The period is

61 Alcyon S.A., which was actually a research office (bureau d'etudes), had three sub-contractors who operated as technical partners: a) AMA (Rome, Italy) (Azienda Municipalizzata per 1'Ambiente); b) ERECO SA (Dakar, Senegal); c) SOFRESID SA (Groupe Bouygues, France) (Senegal 24-04-2002 ). 62 An advisor to the central administration of AMA-Senegal holds that AMA-Rome, which is Rome's municipal waste management company, submitted its bid because of the Mayor of Rome's (Walter Veltroni) personal desire to become involved with African development concerns (Personal interview, October 24, 2007). 63 The MIGA (Project no. 5498) issued four guarantees totaling $15.7 million. The MIGA website claims: "With MIGA's support, AMAS has generated 1,700 jobs under this project and has thus become the largest private sector employer in the country" (MIGA).

97

reflected upon by workers today as the "golden age," as it was indeed the first time that

the youth had official contracts and regular salaries for their work (the rate was set at

65,000 CFA for the majority of collectors and sweepers). The main union (SNTN) was

formally integrated into the company's operations during this period.

The golden age, however, was short-lived, and AMA's deficiencies were apparent

by 2004. After some severe scandals—in which AMA was accused of shipping used

trucks from Italy in place of new ones, amongst other issues—by 2005, the system

appeared in crisis again. Garbage was building up across the city and outraged residents

began vociferously critiquing the system's deficiencies. The Minister of the Local

Governments and Decentralization (which had inherited the oversight of APRODAK)

broke the contract with AMA on October 5, 2005, citing widespread corruption,

mismanagement, and devastating public health consequences. The first cases of cholera

in many years had been registered in Dakar during the rainy season of 2005.64 A call by

Fadel Gaye, the mayor of the Dakar-Plateau downtown Commune d'Arrondissement,

however, to return the "normal" management of garbage back to the local governments—

fell on deaf ears (Gueye 2005). Under pressure from the World Bank (stemming from its

insurance of AMA's investments), the national state quickly reinstated its contract with

AMA, building in some new checks and balances. The contract was definitively

cancelled directly by the President Wade on July 23r 2006. During this time, a new inter-

municipal organization (the entente CADAK/CAR65) was created to federate the Dakar

64 See the newspaper coverage (Diouf April 5, 2005 ; Harris September 1, 2005). 65 CADAK/CAR stands for the "Community of Dakar Cities/Community of Rufisque Cities" (Communaute d'Agglomeration de Dakar/Communaute d'Agglomerations de Rufisque).

98

municipalities and charged with managing the garbage sector. Though seemingly

patterned after the CUD—while aimed at being "less political" and more

"technocratic"67—the CADAK/CAR is generally viewed as an impotent shell of a

municipal organization.68

With the end of AMA's contract, Dakar was plunged into its next garbage

"crisis," characterized by nebulous institutional arrangements, poor working conditions,

and garbage build-up in the public space that lasts until today. Since 2006, the sector has

been managed by a power-sharing agreement between the CADAK/CAR and the

Ministry of the Environment and contract with local private operators who supply the

collection trucks and help manage the dump. The exception is Dakar's downtown area

and financial district (Plateau and Medina as well as some other smaller, privileged

zones), where the state has contracted with the French company Veolia Proprete (a

subsidiary of Vivendi), to coordinate all aspects of the collection on a "test"69 period

basis. The workers for Veolia are recruited through a temping agency and, thus, lack

formal contracts and protections, as are the rest of the workers, who are technically on the

payroll of the Ministry of the Environment. This period has been punctuated by massive

labor disputes and demonstrations (see Chapter 4) and has been the source of widespread

press coverage as well as public criticism and mobilization (see Chapter 6).

APRODAK had become APROSEN, and was removed from direct implication in the garbage management of the capital city. Though APROSEN remains involved in education and other outreach initiatives in Dakar, it is mainly charged with work outside of the capital. 67 The Director of the CADAK/CAR used these terms in explaining why the CUD had been replaced by the CADAK/CAR. He was very quick to call himself a "technocrat" and describe his origins in the private sector (Personal interview, May 30, 2007). 68 The President of the CADAK/CAR is the Mayor of Dakar. Its official mission revolves around the management of: 1) Ordures Menageres (household garbage); 2) La Voirie (the roadway network); and 3) I'Eclairage Publique (public street lighting). 69 Originally contracted with for a three month "test", Veolia's has been given a number of extensions and new short-term contracts, but 3 years later, lacks a long-term contract.

99

A closer look at the institutional contours of the garbage saga since Alternance

reveals a number of important trends which resonate with many of the critiques of

Wade's presidency that have emerged in the last few years. To begin with, the changes in

the trash sector are consistent with the way that Wade has been seen to forward neoliberal

reforms begun under Diouf—arbitrarily and unpredictably. Though privatization of the

public sector has been key on his agenda, he has privatized in fits and starts. This is most

clearly illustrated by his reversal of the attempts at privatization of the electricity sector

upon coming to power in 2000 followed by his move towards privatizing it in the last

couple of years. Similarly, Wade privatized what was a more community-based local

government trash system through contracting with AMA, but, then, moved back to a

system that lies somewhere between private and public when he severed the contract and

instituted today's unusual "transitional phase."

In certain respects, Wade can also be seen to have brought the state's long history

of extraversion to new heights through courting of international development aid,

ramping up Senegal's role in international affairs, and encouraging private investment

(Dahou and Foucher 2004). His favoring of international companies has been severely

criticized because of direct personal links discovered with the President or his family.

The choice of AMA is a case in point: the company has no experience in the developing

world (it is, in fact, Rome's municipal garbage agency) and is alleged to have been

selected based purely on personal connections. Similarly, the choice of Veolia for

70

downtown Dakar has come under intense fire from public observers and trashworkers

alike because of exorbitant service costs and supposed connections between the company

See, for example, articles in the local press (LeQuotidien April 19, 2007; Nettali April 30, 2007). 100

and the President's son and chosen successor, Karim Wade. Veolia currently receives

almost half of the total garbage budget (460 million CFA/year) (see Table 2.2) and serves

only a fraction of the city's burgeoning population (two of the forty-four7 Communes

d'Arrondissements that make up the Region of Dakar).

The case of Veolia represents, furthermore, the increasing disparity between the

rich and the poor that we see at the hand of Wade's policies. The continued dismantling

of what little remained of Senegal's welfare state and the concentration of services in the

central part of the city has dramatized the geography of that disparity, contributing to a

stark segregation between the better off, inner-city districts and Dakar's exploding

periphery (banlieue). As we will see in Chapter 6, the poorer and peripheral

neighborhoods have generally suffered disproportionately from the most recent garbage

crisis, with vast swaths of the city becoming putrid when the rains flood the garbage-

filled streets and clogged sanitation infrastructure.

The trash sector exemplifies many of the allegations that have run rampant over

Wade's tenure regarding the mismanagement of public funds and political

manipulation—and multiplication—of government agencies. From the dissolution of the

CUD, through the implication of HAPD, PRODAK, APRODAK, APROSEN,

CADAK/CAR, and multiple ministries, solid waste management in Dakar has known

"unprecedented instability in the choice of the public institution charged with project

management" (Cisse 2007: 41). Government ministries and other bodies have been

shown to mutate according to the state's will as it periodically reorganizes the form and

71 Karim Wade, formerly a banking executive in Europe, was appointed by this father to be the organizer of the Islamic Summit held in Dakar in March 2008. It is generally believed he is being groomed to be President Wade's successor. Although the rumor of Karim's connections to Veolia are difficult to prove, they are widespread. 72 Veolia services Plateau and Medina in downtown Dakar (see Figure 1.4).

101

function of its patronage systems (Dahou and Foucher 2004). Since Alternance, multiple

agencies and ministries have been created, with the responsibilities of each shifting

behind closed doors with the whim and favor of the president in his political calculus

(See Samb 2004). Along with the multiplication of the administrative bodies, moreover,

has been a selective increase in the privileges of the ministers and other advisors (Dahou

and Foucher 2004: 114). The mismanagement of government resources was perhaps most

devastatingly illustrated in the tragic sinking of the government-owned ferry, the Joola,

in September of 2002 due to high-level official negligence.73 The nebulous institutional

arrangements surrounding garbage since the severing of AMA's contract in 2006 are a

much less tragic but, nonetheless, unfortunate example of the disasterous consequences

of the management of the public sector under Wade's thumb. As unprotected laborers in

a risky sector, the trashworkers have been relegated back to the extremely precarious

conditions they knew with the CUD. Only this time, they labor under even more

confusing institutional arrangements in which they "don't know who they work for or

where they're going," according to their union leader.74

The filthy state of affairs provides visceral testimony to the widely-held feeling

that Alternance has turned into "Alternoos"—a play of words commonly used to critique

the Alternance government's tendency to party (noos in Wolof, which has the

connotation of "eating one's money") instead of working. Accusations of corruption in

the management of public resources under Wade have reached "a magnitude without

precedent" (Diop 2006: 117). The increasingly obscure and enigmatic organization of the

sector—and with it notions of who controls what and who works for whom—contributes

73 Over 1800 people were killed in the tragedy, making it one of the worst maritime disasters in recorded history. 74 Madany Sy (Personal interview, July 10, 2008).

102

to a widespread obfuscation of the causes and consequences of the trash crisis and a

muddling of possible routes for efficacious action.75 The trashworkers now find

themselves laboring in unprotected conditions much like they did under Mayor Diop, but

the lines of authority structuring their predicaments have become dramatically more hazy

under Wade. The trashworkers union's strategy during this time as well as the Dakarois'

reactions through revolt raise some key concerns for an understanding of citizenship

negotiations in the Wade era that will be taken up later chapters.

One key element of AlternancelAlternoos observable in the instability and

proliferation of government bodies responsible for waste management is an overall trend

towards state centralization that runs counter to the discourse of decentralization the

government presents to the international community. Though there has been a

proliferation of administrative entities, in general, Alternance has meant: "draining

institutions of their substance and stripping the other branches of government of their

powers in order to subordinate them to the executive and render them impotent" (Mbow

2008: 158). The "de-responsibilization of municipal agencies and their side-lining in the

decision-making process on garbage matters" is an apt example of this trend (Cisse 2007:

41). Thus, the dissolution of the CUD as one of Wade's first actions as president

represented not only a strategy to eviscerate the fief of one of his main rivals from the

Socialist Party, but also a strategy to re-centralize political power. The CUD, although

facing its own financial difficulties, was, nonetheless, a significant local government

body which had, under Mayor Diop, become quite powerful. In dissolving the CUD and

creating a national managing agency, APRODAK, that sat within the Prime Minister's

75 This resonates with Mbembe and Roitman's analysis of the "figures of the subject in times of crisis" (2002).

103

Office, Wade aimed to grab that power back for himself. His founding, later on, of the

CADAK/CAR, which technically took on the shape of the CUD but is in practice just a

skeleton of the former's power, is widely recognized to have been a thinly veiled attempt

to mask his centralization efforts within a facade of decentralization. The value of

controlling the budget and jobs represented by the trash sector joins with the importance

of controlling Dakar's development—as the economic, political, and symbolic heart of

the country—made this move a priority in Wade's early years. This is consistent with

wider trends that show substantive decentralization efforts in Senegal to be blocked.76

Part and parcel of this centralization of government power has also been an

ominous tendency towards authoritarianism centered on the monarchism of Wade—what

Mbow calls "reigning, not governing" (2008). With the revision of the constitution by

referendum in January of 2001 and various measures taken since, Wade has managed to

concentrate his executive powers and render impotent even those at the heart of his own

party.77 This has been met with a "veritable tempest of criticisms, interpretations, and

virulent polemics" against Wade's autocratic and patrimonial tendencies (Dahou and

Foucher 2004: 6)—exemplified in the well-known scathing critique by renown

Senegalese journalist Abdou Latif Coulibaly sub-titled "Alternance booby-trapped?"

(2003). Similarly, Jean-Francois Havard, in his article entitled, "From the victory of sopi

[change] to the temptation to nopi [silence]?", argues that the numerous violations of the

freedom of expression that have occurred since Alternance have precipitated a crisis of

legitimacy for Wade's regime (2004). The media has been repressed during Wade's

tenure with a severity not seen since the 1980s (Diop 2006: 115). Relatedly—and we can

76 See Ribot et al. for an exploration of decentralization in the forestry sector (2006). 77 The drama surrounding Wade's relationship to his former right-hand man, Idrissa Seek, whom he threw in jail for alleged mismanagement of public funds, is the best known illustration of this trend.

104

see this in the trash sector, as explored in Chapter 4—Wade has attempted to control

labor unions, even at the cost of destabilizing them (Mbow 2008: 159).

Though some of the macro-economic indicators have improved since Alternance,

the cost of living has shot up during this time, contributing to heightened violence and

•jo

public discontent at what is turning out to be perhaps the greatest period of

disappointment yet in Senegal. The number of demonstrations and expressions of

violence in Dakar are intensifying, as people react to the rising cost of living, exploding

unemployment, and vanishing means to make ends meet. More and more Senegalese

youth look to international migration as the way to activate their futures. Faced with the

withdrawal of the state's public welfare functions, like elsewhere in Africa, Dakar has

seen an explosion of self-help organization, either of religious orientation or of the

community and NGO variety. The trash sector is a good example: there has been an

explosion of Set/Setal inspired community-based trash projects in the late 1990s and early

2000s that aim to replace the public service, particularly in the peripheral and irregular

communities. These initiatives are part of a wider trend towards "self-sufficiency" in the

most poor areas, as the state makes its priorities known and NGOs swoop in to alleviate

the most dire circumstances. Ideas of participation—in all of its gendered and classed

glory—has been a key development within the trash sector and wider approaches to

public service provision in the Wade era, which I will explore more fully in Chapter 6.

7. Conclusions

In Diop's analysis, Alternance has not effectuated the moral reconstruction of

society that was so awaited. Instead, he states:

78 In 2007, 2008, and 2009 there were riots in Dakar.

105

The multiplication of accusations of corruption and of poor management has deteriorated the image of the ruling class. The promises of the expansion of liberties and the promotion of a different political ethic have not been realized. The ruling class did not know how to muster the courage required to treat the structural causes of the situation in which Senegal found itself at the end of the 1990s ... In their banter, the politicians don't talk about the social questions, despite the deteriorating conditions of life. For the youth, they think of 'la debrouille' or 'partir'... the indication of the moral bankruptcy of their elders and their version of 'development.' (Diop 2006: 125-126)

Wade's government—though it seemed for a brief moment around the elections of 2000

to be able to carry the hopes of the Senegalese—it is now greeted widespread disfavor

that it fights through autocratic and personal rule. What we see in his turn to coercion is

the weakened nature of state legitimacy in the post-Alternance period. Wade's win again

in the elections of 2007, was received in Dakar with generalized feelings of impotence,

disappointment, and even disgust—as evidenced in the widespread public dumping that

occurred just after the elections in 2007. In the Secretary General of Senegal's Labor

Party79 Abdoulaye Bathily's words: "After years of sunshine, we have so many clouds

gathering over us in Senegal... We are lost, adrift. And if we can't make it, what country

can?" (Polgreen 2008). Many youth, who mobilized so fiercely for Wade through the

years, especially in 2000, proclaim now—following the documentary Democracy in

Dakar (2007)—to have given up on party politics. "We've been waiting 40 years for real

change in this country... But we are still waiting" said Didier Awadi, a rapper who

helped steer youth towards voting for Wade in 2000 (Polgreen 2008).

Perhaps what can best be gleaned from a look at the institutional reorganizations

of the trash sector over the last few years and their contextualization within the analyses

and critiques of Wade's years in office is a better understanding of the difficult

Bathily's Movement for Labor Party was one of those parties that joined with Abdoulaye Wade's coalition in 2000 but have since broken with him.

106

construction of hegemony that faces the Senegalese state in the neoliberal period. The

sentiment voiced above is only the latest chapter in a long saga of changing state-society

relations in this challenging period. The sector's nebulous organization and, relatedly, the

trash crisis that still holds the Dakarois (trashworkers and residents) in heated conflict

with the state, symbolize the country's difficult political-economic predicament. Looking

back over the long neoliberal period through garbage, we can see a number of important

trends in those transitions and negotiations. Perhaps the most fundamental are the state

power scrambles in the face of the fragility of its hegemony under conditions of structural

adjustment and economic stagnation. With the fizzling of the original social contract that

held the state and its citizens in predictable relations, we have seen the deepening of

democratic practices but also, more recently, the state's reversal of democratic gains via

Wade's clamping down on civil liberties and democratic expression. Without recourse to

the passive revolution of the 1980s and 1990s, Wade has coped with challenges to his

legitimacy through brandishing a stronger fist. This has, in turn, been met with the

protestations of the Dakarois—as we shall see in the trashworkers union and residents'

revolts in later chapters.

What we can see in these developments is an essential reconfiguration of the

space of politics. On the one hand, we see a move away from the importance of political

parties—seen as the domain of the nooskats (corrupt partiers) that has shown for little

over the last couple of decades. However, on the other hand, we see the Dakarois rising

up to make claims directly on the state, still drawing on their religious convictions, but

independently of their religious advisors. As such, a key thread of this respatialization is

the changing space of religion. The original social contract between the state and

107

religious authorities which "captured" the Senegalese in its "successful" formula of

stability is officially defunct, signaling a deepening of democracy as well as new

challenges to and formulas for state power. As will be discussed more in Chapter 4, the

relevance of religion has most certainly not dwindled in everyday practices and even

political imaginaries, but the space of religion has been dramatically reconfigured and the

means of accessing religious meaning and devotion more privatized, and thus, less

operationalized by the state. Overall, as I have endeavored to show, this liberalization of

the economic, political, and religious realms has had profound consequences for the

Dakarois, the Senegalese state, and the particular bundle of relationships and citizenship

practices that have made Senegal the privileged target of analysis for so many years. The

particular implications of the political-economic transitions overviewed here for the

trashworkers and citizens caught up in the garbage crises will be considered in the

following chapters.

108

Table 2.2. Institutional History of Garbage Management in Dakar (with budgets). (Data Sources: (ADEME 1998; BCEOM 1986; Benrabia 2002, 2003 ; Chagnon 1996; Cisse 2007; Diop n.d.; Doucoure 2002; Ly 1997; Senegal 1998, n.d.)

Dates

1960-1971

1971-1984

1984-1985

1986-1995

1996-2000

2000-2001

2001

2002/2003 -2006

2006-present

Type of Institution

Public (local)

Private (monopoly)

Army

• Parastatal enterprise (societe d'economie mixte)

• Parallel community-based system (1990s)

Community-based system (with World Bank-funded employment agency)

National agency (using local private contractors)

Private (monopoly)

Private (monopoly)

National ministry and multiple private contractors

Actors

Municipal Services (Regie Communale)

• SOADIP • Autonomous areas

managed by OHLM, SICAP, and the Port of Dakar

Army Corps of Engineers (Genie Militaire)

• SIAS • Other Senegalese

contractors • AGETIP (beginning

early 1990s) • Consortium

Senegalo-Canadien • Set/Setal (beginning

1989) then in the formofCAMCUD

• CAMCUD • Consortium

Senegalo-Canadien • AGETIP • GIEs • Transport contractors • NGO projects

(ENDA)

• APRODAK • Local transport

contractors (12) • NGO projects

• Alcyon (MNC) • NGO projects

• AMA (MNC) • NGO projects

• Veolia Proprete (MNC)

• Local contractors

Managing Body

Municipal government (Commune de Dakar)

• Municipal government

• Ministry of the Interior

CUD

• CUD • Ministry of the

Interior

CUD

HAPD, PRODAK, APRODAK (under the tutelage of the Primature)

Minister of Local Governments and Decentralization

• CADAK-CAR • Ministry of the

Environment

• CADAK-CAR • Ministry of the

Environment

Budget (million CFA/year)80

1971-1978: 650 1977: 997 1980s: 1,462

1986: 1991: 1995:

1996: 1998:

2000:

2001 :

2004:

Total:

(Veolia:

2,127 2,185 3,356

3,600 4,140

4,616

5,040

5,520

5,520-7,000 2,520-4,800)

1$ = 525 CFA (2009). Costs are calculated based on the tonnage actually delivered to the dump. 109

CHAPTER THREE

Legacies of Set/Setal: Youth and the Labor Question in Dakar

Cleanliness in your spirit Cleanliness in your acts

I thus encourage you Cleanliness, oh cleanliness Cleanliness in your soul...

—Youssou Ndour (1990)81

1. Introduction

This chapter builds on the overview of Senegal's political-economic history

presented in the preceding chapter to explore more deeply the crisis of 1988 and the

reconfiguration of the social power relations that was to follow on its heels, as viewed

through the trash sector. It will hone in on the impact of neoliberal restructuring in the

1980s on urban labor to show how Dakar became a strategic site in the reformulation of

state hegemony at the end of that decade. It will show, moreover, how youth came to be

key players in both economic restructuring and maintaining social peace. This

examination thus reveals the dovetailing of the urban labor question with the youth

question to help explain the concrete ways that neoliberal reforms were battled out in the

specific historic conjuncture of the end of the Socialist Party era. Of key importance here

is the argument that the implementation of neoliberal reforms and their management

worked precisely through the production of difference, where young men and women

came to occupy privileged positions in the reconfiguration of state power and patronage.

81 Ndour is the father of the popular music mbalax and a national hero of Senegal. These lyrics are taken from the song "Set" (cleanliness), which is generally seen as the themesong of the Set/Setal movement.

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The analysis thus reveals how the reformulation of hegemonic relations worked on a

cultural level: youth trash collectors were to take on a key symbolic role as the face of the

nation and its orderly development. The transformation of the Set/Setal youth movement

into the trash sector thereby acted as a sort of redefinition of citizenship in and through

the intimate spaces of the city.

This moment must be located within the specific trajectory of the liberalization of

the political, economic, and religious realms over the preceding decades in Senegal that

was presented in Chapter 2. To summarize, in the 1980s, Senegal launched upon its long

neoliberal moment through the implementation of structural adjustment programs aimed

at relieving the country of its debt and stimulating the economy. The demise of the peanut

crop, patterns of urbanization, and the explosion of the urban informal economy were

shifting the economic geography of the country and building on the capital's colonial

legacy to place Dakar as the key locus of political, economic, and increasingly, religious

power. At the same time, rising unemployment, declining purchasing power, and the

withdrawal of state employment and welfare services were precipitating dramatic social

dislocation and unrest. These tumultuous patterns affected different members of

Senegalese society—in demographic and geographic terms—unequally, conditioning

their access to employment and other resources in significantly different ways.

This chapter aims to map the Set/Setal-trash transition onto the trajectory of the

urban labor question as it stretches back to the period before Independence—a question

that has been crucial to the stability and orientation of power relations in Senegal.

Examining the social history of labor in the capital's trash sector—a bastion of formal

labor in an age of informality—illuminates how different people get taken up to do the

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work of trash with shifting rewards and responsibilities over time and space. This chapter

goes beyond approaches that focus on simple understandings of patronage politics,

however, to illustrate how the turn to youth was not simply about their economic or

political utility but also about the moral and ideological foundations of the state in civil

society (Gramsci 2000). As such, this work challenges simplistic notions of patronage as

a unified phenomenon so prevalent in the "neopatrimonialism" literature on the African

state (See Bratton and Van de Walle 1994) to illuminate the contingent contours of

reformulations of state hegemony in the neoliberal era; furthermore, it investigates that

hegemony's constitution and contest in the urban social movements and changing social

power relations of the Dakarois. Through joining an understanding of youth politics and

identity with the urban labor question in neoliberal restructuring, we see the very specific

role that the Set/Setal-trash transition was to play in consolidating Socialist Party (PS)-

state hegemony.

At its core, this analysis shows how the structural changes in the political-

economic constitution of the country are contested and how different social actors strive

to inscribe their legacy, through their sweat, in the space of the capital city. A

consideration of the youth question—and the reorganization of labor around the

production of a young, participatory nation—thus reveals how the trash labor transition

was constituted in spatial practices and imaginaries. Youth identity and politics are

deeply bound up with order, boundary, and transgression, and we thus see how securing

youth's place in the public space involved a reordering of social hierarchies—as well as

the possibilities for their transgression. As such, this study shows that the transformations

involved in neoliberal restructuring are rooted in and contingent upon often competing

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local and national politics through a spatialized negotiation between different social

actors and the state.

A decisive element of the trash transition, I will show, was the inauguration of a

fluidity between formal and informal trash labors that was to carry forward in important

ways. The Set/Setal-based trash system—as the original participatory moment in trash

labor—ushered in the age of participation in the trash sector and a rhetoric of community

responsibility which has since been deployed in a host of community-based strategies

around waste (see Chapter 6). Following Set/Setal, and the way it was taken up by the

authorities, the neighborhood became a space of responsibility for the city's cleanliness; a

good community, moreover, became a clean one. Underpinned by the imperatives of

neoliberal reform and the discourse of participatory development, we can see the distinct

departure from the idea of trash management as public service to be fully managed by the

state. Interesting was not just the budget-relieving function of participation as the state

reacted to shrinking coffers and pressures to downsize, but also its political function in

ordering certain bodies in the interest of the state. Formal and participatory trash

strategies operate together in a complex exchange that situates different people and

places—with different rewards—in the service of trash management. Deeply embedded

in the landscape of paid and unpaid trash labor are discourses of responsibility for trash

and cleaning up the city—connected to gender, age, Islamic notions of purity, and

"belonging" that are deployed differently in specific conjunctures. These draw on local

idioms and meanings to gain traction, but also provide, as we will see in Chapter 4, the

fodder for alternative constructions that have been used to make claims on the state itself.

82 Formal trash labor is used to denote "official," paid, state-sanctioned waste management activities, and informal trash labor means those activities not sanctioned nor funded by the state. The analysis will show precisely how the line between the two becomes blurred with Set/Setal.

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The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the history of the labor question

leading up to the neoliberal period and then exposes the particular dynamics introduced

with the onset of neoliberal reform in the 1980s. It then explores the youth.question, first

in theorizing youth in Africa and then in examining the arrival of youth onto the political

scene in Senegal. After describing the Set/Setal movement, I bring the urban labor

question and youth questions together to explain the Set/Setal-trash sector transition and

its import for understanding state hegemony and neoliberalism in Senegal. One vital

outcome of this study is that in showing the moral-ethical work necessary to engage

youth in the participatory work of trash, I also show how reforms are contradictory

processes that invite contestation. This narrative provides the backdrop to Chapter 4,

which explores the instability and impermanence of this project and the origins of the

modern day trash labor battle in the Set/Setal transition.

2. A Brief History of the Labor Question in Dakar: Keeping the Peace

To contextualize the social history of trash labor in the neoliberal period within

the historic labor question in Dakar, this section will briefly discuss the legacy of Dakar

labor in the colonial period. A deeper discussion of the postcolonial period, paying

particular attention to the advent of structural adjustment, follows.

Urban Labor in the Colonial Era

Owing to Senegal's long urban history, salaried labor developed early in towns

such as Saint Louis, Rufisque, Thies, and Dakar. Dakar had been a particularly important

urban labor center and pole of attraction to rural migrants for a long time, and it had a

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legacy as one of the Four Communes and the capital of the French West African empire

(AOF). Despite this rich urban history, the colonial state neither fully reckoned with the

issue of forced labor nor fully posed the urban labor question until forced to do so by

labor mobilizations in the colonies, particularly in dominant trading cities like Dakar. The

question of labor in the colonial era in West Africa from the point of view of colonial

governments early on was, essentially, limited to the number of workers and how to force

them to work. As a result, various strategies for coercive labor control dominated the

organization of labor in the AOF for the first half of the twentieth century.

Although wage earners of the Four Communes had begun forming labor groups as

early as 1919 and trade unions established a firm foothold in Senegal even before World

War II (Martens 1982), Frederick Cooper argues in his authoritative monograph

Decolonization and African Society that the question of urban labor did not become a

major preoccupation of the colonial government until "increasingly forceful collective

action" took place in the colony from the mid 1930s onward (1996a: 1). Protest

movements during the Vichy regime and into the Free French period after the war—

including important ones in Dakar—would finally bring the forced labor issue to the table

(Ibid.: 166). Following on the heels of the legalization of unionism with the decrees of

1937 and 1944, an extended strike movement in 1946 uniting urban laborers from diverse

Babacar Fall argues that, faced with the challenge of engaging African labor power for the profit of the colony in the transition after abolition, the colonial administration used three direct derivatives of slavery as forms of forced labor (Fall 1993, 2002). These were then transformed into five distinct strategies (requisition, prestation, "deuxieme portion du contingent militaire, " mandatory penal work, and compulsory cultivation) for engaging Africans to labor for the colony in a mixed regime of forced and free labor in the first half of the twentieth century, peaking from 1920 to 1936 (Fall 2002: 8). In 1930, though, in the wake of the Geneva Convention, France passed a bill to regulate its coercive labor policies, the first real reforms did not commence until 1936; they then gained force after World War II and provided the opportunity for a re-articulation of colonial policy (by the Free French) as well as indigenous nationalism (Fall 2002: 12-14). Forced labor in French West Africa was officially abolished by the French National Assembly with a bill presented by African parliamentarians on April 1,1946, but certain specific forms of forced labor persisted until 1956 (even after the Code du Travail was passed to regulate labor in 1952).

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occupations in Senegalese cities effectively shut down the empire's major port (Dakar),

and forced French officials "not just to make concessions but to think" about the idea of

an African working class (Cooper 1990: 192). Influenced by these and other

mobilizations, in a little over a decade the conception of the African urban worker held

by the colonial authorities had shifted from that of temporary wage earner to that of an

industrial man in the likeness of a European urban industrial worker. The French West

African Railway strikes from October 1947 to March 1948 involving nearly 20,000

workers and lasting for five and a half months, made famous in the novel God's Bits of

Wood by Ousmane Sembene (1962), then cemented the labor question for colonial

authorities. While Cooper disagrees with Sembene on the wider implication of the strike

for the Independence movement, it is clear that this epic and unprecedented mobilization,

rooted in the demand for equal pay with white workers, forced the French to reckon with

the very real possibility of labor unrest (Cooper 1996b).

These shifts in colonial thinking on labor policy were one element in the overall

sea change in approach (termed "stabilization") towards governing and profiting from the

colonies taken by France in the postwar years. A central element of this approach—the

"development concept"—was adopted with the aim of reinvigorating a waning

colonialism and quelling the threat of a labor crisis becoming unbound (Cooper 2001). In

this light, the French government sought to shape and define the urban labor question

through the metropolitan-based Code du Travail (Labor Code). Paradoxically, the

modernizing ideal it embodied would eventually be central to France's loss of the

colonies, as African labor unions turned officials' arguments into their own as the basis

for claiming equal pay and entitlements (Cooper 1996a: 19). The labor question was, of

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course, deeply interlinked with the political one, and officials began to fundamentally

question their ability to control African populations.

In brief, the labor mobilizations of the late colonial period not only obligated the

colonial government to move away from forced or exploitative labor, but provoked great

fear in the administration and foreshadowed the end of colonialism. While the specific

implications of the early labor movement for the Independence movement and

construction of the nation are complex, it is safe to say that the urban labor question in

Senegal has always had significant political import for governing the territory and that

the country's union legacy is a rich and important one. The following section will look

briefly at the labor question and unionism in the postcolonial period.

Urban Labor in the Postcolonial Period

As in most African countries, labor relations in Senegal—particularly Dakar—

have undergone considerable change since Independence. These transformations of labor

relations are briefly explored here before I look more closely at the neoliberal period and

the question of trash labor.

In the late colonial period in Senegal, the federation's economic policy had

stimulated a considerable industrial economy, making the private sector the main

employer: in 1957, of the 94,272 salaried workers in Senegal, 73,535 or 78 percent were

employed in the private sector (Fall 2002: 49). With the breakup of the federation and

with it the loss of a consumer market for manufactured products, post-Independence

Senegal experienced a sharp decline in private sector employment. This instability in the

industrial sector would continue through Senegal's contemporary history, and industry

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would cease to be one of the main employers of Senegalese wage earners in 1964 (Ibid.:

48). The public sector began to expand after 1962 and began to dominate the economy

after 1965. The period from 1962 to 1979 has been termed the "20 glorious years of

employment" and represented the period in which the government acted as the main

employer (Ibid.: 50). By 1979 the government employed 54,151 people or one-half of all

wage earners (Ibid.: 49). Urban students were particularly well situated during this time;

the vast majority of the country's graduates were rewarded with employment (Foucher

2002 qtd. in Zeilig and Ansell 2008: 40).

The public sector in independent Senegal drew its designs from the public sector

in the colonial model except that it was intended to serve the ideological purpose of

demonstrating state legitimacy and asserting a socialist legacy (especially in the rural

sector with ONCAD (see Chapter 2)). After considerable growth in the 1960s, the public

sector exploded in the 1970s, with 33 new public enterprises and state-owned enterprises

created from 1973 to 1975 (Bellitto 2001: 79). The water sector was nationalized in 1971

followed by electricity two years later (Ibid.: 94). The trash sector did not follow until

1985 with the creation of the parastatal corporation, SIAS. By the 1980s the government

was the sole or majority entity of 86 public and parastatal companies, representing 20

percent of GDP and employing 35,000 workers (Somerville 1991: 153). Public sector

workers, in fact, earned more than private sector workers during this time, rates that were

incommensurate with revenues—all part of the state's attempt to create a middle class

and keep the social peace (Bellitto 2001: 139). The minimum salaries of urban workers

were kept relatively high and the cost of basic necessities was subsidized to keep the

urban peace. The importance of the public sector in the politics of social control and in

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the trajectory of the country's political economy during this period thus cannot be

overestimated.

The vast proportion of financing for the public sector came from outside of the

country and thus contributed to an enormous foreign debt and onerous payback

responsibilities. External factors including fluctuating export prices and the oil price

hikes of the 1970s magnified the problems and exaggerated the debt. As described in

Chapter 2, with the arrival of Senghor's successor Abdou Diouf in 1981 came the reign

of the "technocrats," a new generation of bureaucrats with economic reform in mind. The

state embarked on a series of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and it remains

along this path. After a brief description of organized labor in early Senegalese history,

the following section highlights the implications of structural adjustment for the urban

labor question in the 1980s.

Unionism in the Early Postcolonial Period

Although the exact role of unions in the nationalist movement remains the subject

of debate, it is clear that Senegal has a long and rich union history that played a key role

in the late-colonial history of the AOF and Senegal's move toward Independence. The

post-Independence period, while a complicated web of union activity, can be roughly

broken down into two major periods: the era of "responsible participation" —or of

complicity between the state and the unions—and the move toward autonomy from the

state. Both eras are deeply enmeshed in the overall trends in employment in the country

and the party politics of the last five decades (See Diallo 2002; Diop 1993a; Fall 2006).

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The period immediately after Independence saw an effort by President Senghor to

channel what had been a significant autonomous labor movement into "something that

coqld be managed by political parties and in their language of nationalism and

solidarity"(Cooper 1996a: 20). Thus the 1960s were framed by the party-state's attempt

to consolidate its own power, enhance its ties with the national union, and resist union

pluralism. These goals eventually culminated in the implementation of the philosophy of

"responsible participation" in 1969 as a direct reaction to the crisis and union activity of

1968. During the responsible participation period, the union was literally integrated into

the ruling party-state apparatus and relegated to the role of essentially keeping the social

peace in exchange for formal participation in some of the nation's development

decisions.

The renaissance of an independent worker's movement was born of reaction to

the limitations of responsible participation (Ndiaye 2008: 5). Following on the heels of

increased protest movements starting in 1973, in the second half of the 1970s, opposition

political parties gained increasing recognition and trade unions rallied in their support. It

is in the context of the democratic opening and in the onset of severe economic crisis—

and the concomitant adoption of structural adjustment programs—that responsible

participation began to disintegrate and the autonomous unions began to gain ground.

Structural Adjustment and the Labor Question

The era of structural adjustment in Senegal has brought the years of state

employment to an end, deeply restructured the urban workforce, and unleashed major

84 Senghor reportedly set the tone for policies towards the unions in 1960 when he said, "your role is to support us, us the government" (Dakar Matin, April 5, 1960, qtd. in Diallo 2002: 445).

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changes in organized labor in Dakar. As a bedrock element of structural adjustment, a

central aim of reform packages in Senegal was the shrinking of the public sector toward

the gradual withdrawal of the state from employment and the flexibilization of the labor

force in order to cut the public wage bill. At the onset of structural adjustment, the wage

bill had reached 60 percent of government spending (Fall 2002: 52). The reform of the

public sector was, however, slow and sectorial at first, and some public (and parastatal or

"mixed economy") companies continued to be created (including SIAS) up until 1988.

Reform of the civil service was centered on several major strategies aimed at controlling

recruitment practices and minimizing new hires (Fall 2002). This policy worked only

modestly until 1988, when the government started encouraging voluntary early retirement

for civil service workers. Efforts to reduce the wage bill and shrink the size of

government were frustrated and difficult, particularly amongst the higher echelons of the

administration (Toure 2004), but the civil service growth rate did slow (from 6 percent

between 1975 and 1982 to 2.5 percent in 1983-1984) (Somerville 1991: 157).

Importantly, the formal jobs that did remain became more flexible with the passage of

more liberal labor regulations and policies that made it easier for employers to fire

workers and use contract labor (Somerville 1991).

Privatization and the withdrawal of the state from public employment joined with

the decline of private Senegalese industry85 to precipitate the collapse of formal

employment in the 1980s and 1990s. The impacts of this collapse and the economic crisis

in general on the urban labor question are far-reaching. Rapid rates of urban migration

flooded the cities with job seekers, particularly the country's sprawling macrocephalic

85 It is beyond the scope of this analysis to explore in detail the origins of the industrial crisis in Senegal. For one particularly illuminating case, see Catherine Boone's thorough and persuasive examination of the rise and fall of the Dakar textile industry (Boone 1992).

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capital Dakar, which acts as the greatest receiving basket of the whole country, even as

the formal jobs there became increasingly rare. The job crisis created massive

unemployment, which, although difficult to measure, increased dramatically in the

1980s and 1990s. The decline of formal labor was met with the explosion of the informal

sector, which became the most dynamic sector, dominating the formal sector in the late

1980s and early 1990s; informal workers registered as 60 percent of the active workforce

in 1986-1991 (Niang 1997a: 39).

Unemployment was experienced most dramatically by the city's young people,

who were becoming an increasingly large segment of the population owing to

demographic trends. From 1976 to 1988, people younger than 18 years of age accounted

for the majority of the population (57.7 percent), with those school aged (6 to 15)

growing at a rate of 4 percent per year (Cruise O'Brien 1996: 58). Stemming from their

marginality in social networks and the declining efficacy of educational degrees in

securing employment, young people flooded the informal markets and became a central

element of the masses of out-of-work people and those occupying the public space.

Young women had even less access to the formal sector during this time, with

unemployment reaching a peak of 44.3 percent for women aged 20 to 24 in 1991 (Fall

2002: 58). Donal Cruise O'Brien reported that in the late 1980s, roughly 40,000 young

people each year aged to working age in the cities in Senegal and only perhaps 5 percent

could find jobs in the formal sector (1996: 59). During this time, the job crisis seriously

diminished the purchasing power of the Dakarois just as food prices skyrocketed. These

86 Unemployment rate estimates often given are notoriously wide-ranging. Fall estimates that rates of unemployment rose from 11.2 percent to 14.9 percent between 1970 and 1976 (Fall 2002: 55). A government report, which is generally assumed to be on the low end of estimates, estimated that the unemployment rate was 18.9 percent in 2002 in Dakar (Senegal et al. 2004: 13).

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factors and reforms aimed at scaling back the health care, education, and other social

service sectors all contributed to the general impoverishment of the Dakarois and their

widespread dissatisfaction with the government (Somerville 1991).

As mentioned in Chapter 2, despite its popularity in the early 1980s, by the mid

1980s the cracks in the Socialist Party's passive revolution were already apparent, and

expressions of discontent began to gain visibility in Dakar. There were student strikes in

1985 and 1987—the latter of which actually ended in the "white year" (annee blanche)

(1987-1988), when the educational system was paralyzed and students' work was

annulled (Diouf 1996). There was a police revolt in 1987 as well and widespread union

protests starting in 1984. Though workers had more grievances arising from widespread

layoffs and attempts to flexibilize the workforce, structural adjustment provided a

difficult environment for labor organizing. In the 1980s the union movement saw

decomposition and reorganization around two tendencies: the fragmenting of the two

major unions and the growth of autonomous unions as the labor movement tried to face

the environment of economic reform. Overall, the SAPs brought the state and the workers

into more direct conflict as work became more precarious, unemployment increased

dramatically, and a weakened state had to try to neutralize opposition to its

implementation of very unpopular policies. The trash company SIAS' workers joined in

the conflictual spirit of labor organizing during this period. Three unions eventually

formed to unite the SIAS workers, each union affiliated with a different political party:

the Socialist Party and two opposition parties. In the late 1980s, faced with delays in

payments and other irregularities, they began to strike, using their power over Dakar's

cleanliness and order to demand better working conditions.

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Taken together, the trends described above reveal the tense conditions in place at

the end of the 1980s, particularly in Dakar. Urbanization, the decline of the traditional

social contract with the religious leaders, and the imperatives of neoliberal reform and

their nefarious consequences were congealing in a geographical reorientation of power

relations which placed the urban labor question in Dakar at the center of the crisis in the

state's foundations in the late 1980s. Youth, furthermore, were coming out as the losers

in structural adjustment, and as a result became the greatest potential threat to the urban

peace. The following sections explore how youth became strategic in the state's battle to

retain power and legitimacy in the late 1980s as young people raised their heads in

ambiguous expressions of their potential power and mobilization as a group. Next, I flesh

out the argument introduced in Chapter 2 that the incorporation of the Set/Setal youth

movement into the trash sector arose from the confluence of the explosion of youth onto

the political scene and the economic and political imperatives of the neoliberal moment

as a key state strategy in the reformulation of hegemony and the restructuration of urban

labor relations. But first, I explore the important debates through which to frame an

understanding of youth in Africa to help us better understand this important moment.

3. African Youth and the Political Sphere

Theorizing Youth

Before we consider the context wherein youth came to occupy such an explosive

place in the political imagination, it is useful to first consider approaches to

understanding youth in Africa—a subject of recent preoccupation for Africanist scholars.

Though generation has long been recognized to have particular import in African

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societies—as can be seen, for instance, in the extensive tradition of anthropological

studies on age transitions as key rites of passage (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1940)— youth in

Africa came into the spotlight as a key political force and important subject of social

inquiry only over the last couple of decades. This turning point stems from a

widespread recognition that as a social category, youth have been sharply impacted by

the contradictory forces facing African societies and especially mobilized during this

time.

Drawing from Deborah Durham (2000) and others, "youth" in Africa is best

conceived as a relational, historically constructed social category that is context

specific.88 This understanding emphasizes that youth, as a category of persons, is deeply

tied up with power, knowledge, rights, and notions of agency and personhood (Durham

2000: 117). As such, the vast transformations taking place on the African continent over

the last few decades can be seen to have key implications for the category of youth and

the experience of people defined as youths in their society. Scholars caution against,

however, a tendency to politicize African youth a priori. Alcinda Honwana and Filip de

Boeck argue that youth rebellion in the African setting was until recently embedded in

social dynamics that did not threaten fundamental power structures (2005: 6). In the

immediate postcolonial period, young African nations made youth the symbol of their

See, for instance the early works of Jean-Francois Bayart et a/.(1992) and Achille Mbembe (1985), followed by Mamadou Diouf (1996) for the Senegalese context. The last 10 years has seen a proliferation of studies on youth in Africa, as seen in the Politique Africaine issue dedicated to the theme of "Children, Youth, and Politics" (2000) and the book that followed it in English, Makers and Breakers (Honwana and De Boeck 2005). 88 See Durham (2000) for a concise introduction to the Anthropological Quarterly issue on youth. She emphasizes that anthropological scholarship shows that the category of youth is not necessarily connected to biosocial stages. People may, in some cases, permanently remain in the category of youth into their 30s or 40s, not traversing the line into adulthood for various reasons.

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hope and future and attempted to channel and direct their involvement in building the

nation. In Mamadou Diouf s words,

In its cultural and political versions, the nationalist project sought to do two things: to maintain the frontier between elders and juniors that characterized traditional African values, and to put young people at the center of its plans for economic development and national liberation. (2003: 3-4)

Authority figures were thus preoccupied with preserving social power hierarchies that

held youth in marginalized positions. Using various strategies including encadrement

(supervision) and repression, postcolonial African states tried to integrate youth into the

social hierarchy by institutional means, and thereby thwart the dangerous challenge they

represented to existing power structures.

Diouf (2003) and others argue that the emergence of youth as rebellious "makers

and breakers" (Honwana and De Boeck 2005) in Africa is, in fact, a fairly new

phenomenon as vast and growing numbers of youth face particular exclusions in the

wake of the failure of the nationalist project and the rise of the neoliberal era. Associated

variously with deepening democracy (See Bond 2005), a "crisis of youth" (See Richards

1995), "generation trouble" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005), and a "lost generation"

(Cruise O'Brien 1996; 2003), these youth movements mark the political emergence of

youth as a social category. John and Jean Comaroff argue that in the late twentieth

century, youth have gained unprecedented autonomy, but neoliberal globalization has led

to their dramatic marginalization (2005). They observe that young people's simultaneous

visibility and marginality creates an intrinsic bipolarity wherein they represent both the

greatest source of creativity—as expressed in the recent rise of assertive, global youth

cultures and all manner of entrepreneurialism, including advanced forms of transnational

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banditry (See Roitman 2005)—as well as the embodiment of the threat of civil disorder

and violence. Youth violence, furthermore, is not necessarily revolutionary, and may

indeed be harnessed as the "infantry of adult statecraft" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005:

24) as can be seen in the preponderance of child soldiers in recent conflicts on the

continent. Thus, while the Comaroffs argue that youth "embody the sharpening

contradictions of the contemporary world in especially acute form," they also argue

against a notion of the "youth crisis" that ignores this ambiguous threat and promise

(2005: 21).

Excluded from education, healthcare, salaried jobs, even access to adult status,

these marginalized youths found themselves literally out of place: permanently straddling

social categories, unable to found homes of their own, and existing in a time when

"becoming somebody can no longer be taken for granted" (Cruise O'Brien 1996: 58). In a

politics "from below" or of "the powerless," these "social juniors" {cadets sociaux)

emerged on the political scene in the 1980s and 1990s (Bayart et al. 1992)—often as a

source of fear and needing to be controlled. The expression of their political emergence

involved new forms of sociability and often the creation and habitation of new spaces in

the public sphere. Understanding, following Doreen Massey, that "the control of

spatiality is part of the process of defining the social category of 'youth' itself," (1998:

127) we can see how through irrupting into the public space in new—often violent—

ways, youth thus endeavored to confront, resist, or renegotiate spatial boundaries and the

control those boundaries implied. Forging spaces that "escape the logics of public and

administrative control, communitarian prescriptions, and state surveillance" youth

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expressed "within the public sphere, in a violent, artistic, or spiritual way, a desire for

recognition and a presence" (Diouf 2003: 5).

Although the emergence of youth in Africa as a political force is unquestionable,

the implications of youth mobilizations demand closer attention in their specific contexts.

In many respects, as particularly burdened losers in the economic crisis due to their

marginal status in gerontocratic power structures, while representing, simultaneously, the

easiest targets of millennial capitalism's material fantasies (Comaroff and Comaroff

2005), youth appeared as a "natural opposition with little to lose" (Bayart et al. 1992: 94).

Yet, Bayart et al. conclude that youth's potential as an organized counter-hegemonic

force remains unlikely, because they are also perhaps the most subject to manipulation

and a lack of unity of action with other marginalized societal groups (1992). This chapter

takes on one manifestation of state-youth dynamics represented by the channeling of the

Set/Setal movement into the trash sector to reflect on that contention.

The Political Emergence of Youth in Senegal

The youth mobilizations leading up to and following the elections of 1988

catapulted the youth issue in Senegal onto the political radar. Although they had been a

visible force in the independence struggle and then in the crisis of 1968 (Zeilig and

Ansell 2008), Senegalese youth had not previously been seen as such a force for

opposition politics as they became in 1988. After participating massively in Abdoulaye

Wade's electoral campaign, they came out to vote for his opposition party and, in so

doing, defied their religious elders to an unprecedented degree by rejecting and protesting

the ndigal to vote for the Socialist Party.

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The so-called casseurs ("breakers")—Senegal's version of the "lost boys"—who

rioted after the elections of 1988 inspired great fear amongst the Dakarois (Cruise

O'Brien 1996). Overall, these events and then the violence surrounding the Mauritanian

crisis in 1989 served as potent testimony to the sinister possibilities of youth agitation and

contributed to the overall political crisis that closed out the difficult decade. The old

social contract between the state, religious authorities, and Senegalese citizens was

floundering and the problem of youth was front and center. Like elsewhere in Africa,

economic crisis and its disproportionate impact on youth combined with the impasse in

the education system to give the young Dakarois a sense of hopelessness and

abandonment by the state. In addition to uneducated youth in Dakar, students—who had

formerly been special beneficiaries of the employer state—began to "face an

astonishingly bleak set of circumstances linked to the collapse of jobs traditionally

regarded as 'graduate work'" (Zeilig 2007: 2). In the wake of 1988, youth from many

walks of life united in the Set/Setal movement.

4. Set/Setal and the New Trash System: Youth, Labor, and the Ordering of Dakar

The previous sections have attempted to historicize the politics of labor and the

politics of youth in Dakar, paying particular attention to the specific trends and tensions

that came to bear in the late 1980s with the deepening of neoliberal reform. This section

brings the two analyses together in thinking through the Set/Setal social movement and

its transition into Dakar's trash labor force. It will show how, as youth emerged as some

of the most vocal critics of reforms and their dire social consequences, they were to

forcefully insert the youth question onto the political calculus of the ruling party as a key

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challenge of the urban labor question in the new flexibilized economy. The youth and

urban labor questions had become powerfully joined, in other words, and the state would

attempt to resolve them both through a new patronage formula which included young

men and women. One key element of this new strategy was the tapping of Set/Setal and

the face lift it gave the state through the image of the young trashworkers ordering Dakar.

This new system, moreover, allowed the state to avoid the labor problem it faced with the

unionized SIAS trashworkers and to advance its public sector reform via the

flexibilization and informalization of public services.

Set/Setal

As discussed in Chapter 2, the Set/Setal movement provided a sharp contrast to

the violent events of 1988-1989. Building on the experience of the navetanes (cultural

and sporting activities organized during the summer vacation months) and incubated

within the formal youth groups (ASCs, GIEs, and GPFs89) that were beginning to expand

beyond their original focus on sports, the movement involved an unprecedented level of

popular mobilization throughout the city. Diouf described it as follows:

Since July 1990, the juvenile violence has transitioned into to a kind of intense madness that remains an enigma. Under the dumbfounded gaze of the adults, these former hunters of Mauritanians, groups of young people put into action their new creed: order and cleanliness. (1992: 42)

Through painting elaborate murals, organizing local events, and cleaning up their

neighborhoods, the youth aimed to cleanse the city in a literal sense—in terms of

sanitation and hygiene—but also morally in a fight against corruption, prostitution, and

89 Associations Sportives et Culturelles (Sporting and Cultural Associations), Groupements d'lnteret Economique (Economic Interest Groups), and Groupements Promotion Feminine (Women's Interest Groups).

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genera] delinquency. They drew from both meanings of the expression: set, which means

clean; the state of being clean and setal, which is the act of rendering something clean.

Stemming from its roots in the neighborhood youth group, Set/Setal brought together a

cosmopolitan community of youngsters who were more or less representative of their

own community demographics. Because youth generally participate in neighborhood

associations regardless of their educational status, ethnic group, religion, class, or gender,

the key feature of the movement was belonging to a neighborhood, regardless of other

societal divisions.90 Students were key activists behind the movement and young women

were eager participants as well.

Set/Setal involved youths' irruption into the public space in new and important

ways. Reacting to the dearth of safe, unsullied, or uncorrupted public space, the youth

insisted on their right to the city (Mitchell 2003) by claiming and rehabilitating the

public space. As an article in Dakar's Sud Hebdo newspaper put it,

Set/Setal is an original movement that differentiates itself from those that have preceded it, such as the operation Set wecc and other Operation Augias. In contrast with these, which were ordered by the local government services, in contrast to those actions that [political] parties organized . . . we observe a movement where the youth occupy the space completely. (Diop et al. 1990, qtd. inENDA1991:7)

Youth occupied space, not just with their presence and visibility, but with their labor.

Rejecting the laziness and boredom they saw as epidemic, these youth reordered space

with the sweat of their brow. They cleared out spaces of leisure like soccer fields and

This phenomenon varied, of course, by neighborhood and by flavor of the association. In more affluent neighborhoods, the youth tended to be more educated, for example, but because of the level of unemployment, often even these educated youth were very active in their youth group. The implications of this phenomenon—and the strong presence of young intellectuals in Set/Setal—for the trash union battle are considered in Chapter 4. In terms of ethnicity and other divisions, certainly in some neighborhoods specific ethnic groups dominate (eg. the Lebou in Yoff), but overall, youth associations are quite representative of the local demographics.

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playgrounds, built monuments, and planted gardens—emphasizing not only their right to

occupy the city but also their ability to personally mold it to their own desires.

The elaborate Set/Setal murals painted all over Dakar—the remnants of some of

which can still be seen today (See Roberts et al. 2003)—tell of a youth imaginary that

strove to deconstruct the nationalist memory that had dominated since Independence

(Diouf 1992: 46). Carefully documented in the book Set/Setal published by the NGO

ENDA91 (1991) and explored in probing detail by Diouf (1992; 1996; 2003), the murals

and other efforts of the movement's youth drew from continuously reformulated ethnic,

religious, regional, and national identities. Celebrating such diverse political and cultural

icons as Bob Marley, Nelson Mandela, Amadou Bamba, and Martin Luther King, Jr.92—

sometimes all on the same wall—the murals signified a departure from Afro-pessimism

and a movement toward hopeful aspirations for unity, peace, and a reorientation of values

perceived as having gone astray.

Importantly, these references often drew on the religious virtues of faith and piety.

In a chart displaying the themes of Set/Setal murals and the frequency of their

appearance, religious themes appeared twelve percent of the time, alongside other

popular themes including "cleanliness/health," "heroes/history," and "traditional life"

(ENDA 1991: 27). Thus through literally inscribing the space of the city—coloring it

with faces, messages, and symbols and even renaming city streets and neighborhoods—

the youth tried to take possession of the city, to re-order it with their own references and

values. In Set/Setal the "neighborhood is substituted for national territory as the canvas

91 ENDA stands for Environnement et Developpement du Tiers Monde, (Environment and Development Action in the Third World). Based in Dakar and intervening mainly in concerns related to urban livelihoods across the global South, ENDA is one of the best-known NGOs in West Africa. 92 See the murals depicted on pages 52-65 (ENDA 1991).

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for elaborating the symbolic and imaginary," and Dakar youth oppose the state by

possessing their natal urban spaces (Diouf 1996: 248). Most political messages conveyed

in the early Set/Setal movement were distinctly not oriented toward the contemporary

political context; they aimed to rise above candidates and parties and unite the Dakarois

through other commonalities—a different idea of politics than that of the 1988

mobilizations.

The Set/Setal imaginaries were also underpinned by a critique of a sort of social

and moral degradation that was perceived to be gripping Dakarois society. To attack

these head-on, the youth organized efforts intended to purify what they saw as a "sick"

society, invaded by tobacco, alcohol, prostitution, and violence (ENDA 1991: 45). While

they painted explicit messages aimed at improving community behavior, the youth also

organized myriad activities through their ASCs such as school programs, vocational

training, and sporting events. They even set up "vigilance" committees—like the so

called "Mafia Boys" of Niari Tali neighborhood. The Mafia Boys and the like were

groups of young locals whose job was to not only help clean up the neighborhood, but

also provide a sort of neighborhood security force to counteract the societal disintegration

and violence that was increasingly perceived as a threat to urban livelihoods (Diouf 2003:

8).

The idea of set (cleanliness, the condition of being clean), as sung in Youssou

Ndour's famous themesong of this era, highlighted the connection to ideas of purity,

which implicitly and sometimes explicitly were connected to Islamic traditions. ENDA

argued in its documentation of the movement that the theme of cleanliness was

inseparable from the theme of purity; the group also point out that most Dakarois have an

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obsessive fear around eliminating dirt. Drawing from the deep connections seen between

physical cleanliness and purity in the soul, these youth were working to redefine

themselves in contrast to their delinquent, debauched, and even drugged-out reputation

(ENDA 1991: 57-58).

A central element of Set/Setal's ordering efforts was aimed explicitly at cleaning

up the local environment, through education campaigns as well as clean-up operations

aimed at trash and sanitation. Their education campaigns were manifest in a

preponderance of murals dedicated to exposing populations to the dangers of pollution

and the origins of diseases like malaria and diarrhea (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1. A Set/Setal mural aiming to educate about poor hygiene and disease, with the caption that reads "How we get diarrhea." (Reprinted, by permission, from ENDA (1991: 52))

Intertwined with the political and economic crisis of the period was a general

degradation in the physical environment of the city and a paralysis in garbage

management precipitated by the insufficiencies of SIAS and strikes by its disenchanted

workers. In this context, youth efforts progressively constituted an essential element of

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local environmental management, especially in the poorer and more inaccessible areas—

like the traditional Lebou neighborhoods93—least served by SIAS. Dirt and trash

provided a metaphor for the general dirt and degradation the movement saw in the city

and a practical way to combat those forces with clear results. Many of these activities

were explicitly framed through the rhetoric of a new environmental consciousness that

was taking root, particularly in the youth groups that were leading the charge with

Set/Setal. Some of these groups were patterned after the model of the ASCs but with

explicit environmental missions, like that of the "Youth-Environment" association of

Reubeuss (ENDA 1991: 6-7). Many of the images harkened back to rural life with urgent

messages like "don't cut the trees" and images of plants and livestock (Ibid. : 76). Of

course, this was the age of the ascension of environmental consciousness internationally,

and the youth of Dakar were not immune to these messages. For them, the degradation of

the environment was most obvious in the urban spaces in which they lived their lives.

Their labors in cleaning the local environment through Set/Setal represented a

repudiation of their impotence, a rejection of their superfluity in the urban labor force.

These youth had found themselves in a world described as follows: "Diplomas that lead

to nothing, and little or no work: this is the haunting, throbbing reality, for large numbers

of young Dakarois" (ENDA 1991: 51). In endeavoring to make themselves useful

despite their position at the bottom of the social hierarchy, they expressed a departure

from the gerontocratic traditions they were supposed to have inherited from times past.

Set/Setal marked their taking ownership of their neighborhoods ("Our neighborhood is

ours" stated many murals (Ibid. : 80)), their city. Carving and inhabiting new spaces and

93 There are a number of Lebou neighborhoods in the periphery of Dakar which represent "original" settlements of Lebou fisherman dating back over 500 years. These neighborhoods are self-consciously called the "traditional" neighborhoods, which will be discussed in Chapter 6.

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reordering the urban environment, youth reacted against an omnipresent feeling of

insecurity with expressions of efficacious agency that confirmed their power, creativity,

and undeniable role in the future well-being of the country. The following quote from a

former Set/Setalien and present day trashworker in Niari Tali is illustrative:

We woke up, and we wanted to change our lives. We were tired of just sitting around, drinking tea, and waiting for things to happen. Who were we waiting for? Set/Setal was a revolution—it was the youth growing up and deciding to clean up their lives. It changed us, Dakar, and this country forever. (Personal interview, June 14, 2007)

Central to this message was an insistence in the value of work (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2. Set/Setal mural depicting work, as the heading ("Emploi") implies. (Reprinted, by permission, from ENDA (1991: 82))

Part of a wave of grassroots movements across the continent aimed at taming and

managing the urban decay from structural adjustment and its uneven impacts (See Bond

2005), Set/Setal earned youth in Dakar a prominent place in studies of African social

movements and democratic change (See Mamdani and Wamba-dia-Wamba 1995).

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However, though the movement retains a special, almost fetishized, place in the

memories of the Dakarois —"rather in the way that Parisians remember May 1968"

(Cruise O'Brien 1996: 62)—its legacy requires further attention. Cruise O'Brien briefly

offered that "organization soon got the better of spontaneity in this instance, as NGOs

and the state captured Set/Setal" (1996: 62), yet the transition of the movement into the

trash sector and the implications of that transition have never before been considered. The

following section considers this important development while reflecting back on the

movement's legacy for the urban labor question and the relevance it held for the

reconstitution of citizenship and state power in Senegal.

Formalizing Set/Setal: The New Face of Trash in Dakar

As I introduced in Chapter 2, the Set/Setal youth movement represented a unique

opportunity in the political calculus of the Senegalese state after the trying decade of the

1980s. I argue that youth were incorporated into the formal trash system not only because

their efforts had become indispensable to trash management activities but because this

offered part of a solution to the urban labor dilemmas facing the authorities. These urban

youth's good deeds in their communities needed to be fostered and regulated, and thus

their energies needed to be channeled toward less revolutionary ends in the interest of the

state. As described in the previous chapter, Mayor Diop organized the formalization of

Set/Setal into the city's trash collection system in the early 1990s, and the program

continued through 2001.

One way that the new system aided the state in dealing with the urban labor

question at the end of the 1980s was the escape hatch it provided to the labor uprising

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emerging with the SIAS workers. With their strikes, the workers were beginning to put

serious pressure on the local and national state. It was well known that many of the

workers were not affiliated with the Socialist Party. The head of one of the three SIAS

unions, the Democratic Cleaning Union (Syndicat Democratique du Nettoiement)

(SDTN), who claims to have personally organized the dumping of garbage in front of the

presidential palace in SIAS' final years, has also claimed that Mayor Diop was deeply

threatened by the workers.94 Dissolving SIAS and replacing the workers with youth

allowed him to implement a cheaper system but also one in which the workers were seen

as much less risky because they lacked formal contracts, rights, and all of the protections

of the previous system. The dissolution was also intended to undermine the opposition's

organizing that was suspected to lie at the heart of the trash workforce. Although Mayor

Diop offered to integrate former SIAS workers into the new trash system provided they

organized themselves into community organizations (GIEs), in practice only a small

minority made the transition (less than 200). Most preferred to leave the sector all

together given the pay cut and lack of benefits, or because they did not want to work with

the youth.95 Others chose to leave or were impeded from joining because they were

considered rabble-rousers or were not members of the Socialist Party. In the words of the

same SIAS syndicalist above,

Mamadou Diop had said that if you want to enter into the system, you have to form a GIE. Some were for it, others like me and my group, we did not agree. Personally, I knew that [he] wanted to erase us! (Personal interview, June 12, 2007)

Personal interview (June 12, 2007). 95 The integration of the SIAS workers into the new system was not an easy one and those involved remember deep disagreement at the time between the older "professionals" from SIAS and the Set/Setal youth. These issues can still be felt on some level today in the rivalry between trash unions.

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When he eventually tried to form a GIE, it was not accepted by the CUD because, in his

opinion, it was known that he was not a member of the Socialist Party.

Diop wanted to use. the system not only as a forum for mobilizing support for his

party, but also as a reward for his political clients. As mayor of Dakar, Diop was keenly

interested in shifting the rewards provided through the trash system jobs to the Dakarois.

Although most of the SIAS workers probably spend much of their lives in Dakar, many

came from non-Dakarois families or had moved to the capital for the trash jobs. The

SIAS director, moreover, had shown a preference for hiring from his family, his region

outside of Dakar (Saint Louis), and his own ethnic group (Toukouleur). The switch to

hiring youth was a way of reversing this pattern in the interest of Diop's urban

constituents.

The decision to hire youth was explicitly targeted, moreover, at this newly visible

constituency of Dakar youth. The following quotes are illustrative:

Yes, there were political motivations because this was the beginning of the revolt of the youth. Because the youth wanted change. The authorities felt that these youth wanted change . . . and they really wanted to convince the youth that the system was still good.96

In 1988, there were all those troubles . . . and Mamadou Diop, when he saw all those youth, he said to them: don't throw those stones. He judged well to jump [at the opportunity]. It was he who said that if you don't occupy yourselves with the youth, they will occupy themselves with you. He was right.97

Thus, urban youth had come to represent a threat that needed to be contained and brought

into the state's hegemonic fold. In the context of a growing awareness of the undue

burden they bore and proof of their volatility in the face of structural adjustment,

Personal interview with ex-SIAS worker (June 12, 2007). Personal interview with ex-President of CAMCUD and current Department Chief (June 29, 2007).

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Set/Setal offered the state the opportunity to channel—and thus pacify—the youth

mobilization that had been its greatest nightmare just a few years earlier.

The mechanism with which the state would try to at least temporarily solve the

youth and urban labor questions would be a new initiative aimed at employing urban

youth. In fact, the state's interest in the youth dovetailed with that of a powerful

international actor—the World Bank. Besieged by criticism of the dire social

consequences of structural adjustment conditionalities, the World Bank was beginning to

consider policies that complemented reform with more attention to social safety nets. The

Dakar riots of 1988-89—a shocking event in a place considered a model of peace and

development—had received the Bank's attention leading to this policy shift. In

collaboration with the Senegalese state, the World Bank offered a means of targeting the

youth through its partial funding of a public works agency modeled after Bolivia's

no

Emergency Social Fund (Graham 1994), centered in Dakar. The Public Works and

Employment Agency, or AGETIP (Agence d'Execution des Travaux d'Interet Public

contre le Sous-emploi), was formed in 1989 and rolled out in the 1990s in two phases,

with the goal of generating a significant number of (mainly manual and temporary) jobs

for unemployed youth." The context and motivation behind the AGETIP projects are laid

out clearly in the following excerpt from World Bank's Project Appraisal Report:

This project was actually the second of two major attempts in Senegal at quelling the social discontent unleashed by structural adjustment in the late 1980s. The first, DIRE (Delegation a ['Insertion a la Reinsertion et a I'Emploi), though established in 1987, received more attention after the events of 1988. Funded by the state and international donors, DIRE was aimed at the people most unhappy with the economic reforms: parastatal workers who were laid off, civil servants who voluntarily retired, and university graduates. Designed primarily as an expensive "sweetener" for buying off these groups, DIRE was, for a variety of reasons, considered a failure (Graham 1994). 99 For the first phase of the Public Works and Employment project (1989-1992), the World Bank dispersed a $20 million loan, and there was additional co-financing from the African Development Bank, other funders, and the government of Senegal and the municipalities. In the second phase (1993-1997), the World Bank distributed $38 billion, and there was additional co-funding from other sources (WorldBank 1997).

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In 1988, Senegal faced serious economic and political problems. Despite a decade of structural adjustment, economic growth had remained weak throughout the 1980s (2.1 percent per year), and unemployment had increased (official unemployment rates rose from 16 percent in 1976 to 30 percent in 1989). Unemployment was most severe in urban areas, especially among the young (two-thirds of the officially unemployed were 25 or younger). The public blamed the structural adjustment program imposed by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and France for the situation, and Senegal's political parties exploited public sentiment in order to build voter support. Then, in February 1988, the young urban unemployed took to the streets in violent riots and protest. . . . It soon became clear that existing government agencies and public enterprises would not be able to deliver such programs speedily and efficiently. Another type of agency was needed, as well as simplified procedures that would allow small and medium-sized enterprises to provide the bulk of the construction work. The World Bank and the government of Senegal worked closely together to find the solution that ultimately became AGETIP's trademark: delegated contract management. (WorldBank 1997: 7)

The first in a wave of similar projects in Africa funded by the World Bank,

AGETIP became a key partner in the youth-based trash sector in the early 1990s. A

formal convention was signed between AGETIP and the CUD in October 1995, ushering

in the trash system that would replace that of SIAS (Chagnon 1996). AGETIP—which

has since become a permanent, fee-based institution—was hailed as a success by the

World Bank for being "lean and efficient." By February 1996, AGETIP had executed

more than 1,250 subprojects and created more than 19,000 person-years of employment

(WorldBank 1997: 14-15).100 These estimates included the 1500 trash jobs "created" by

the new system. Being able to minimize state expenditure, tap youth labor, and manage

these funds at the local level was part of the attraction of the system for Mayor Diop, as

explained by a trash unionist:

So the politicians not only managed an imminent political problem—that of unemployment since it enabled them to take the youth, sponsor them, and put them into the [trash] circuit—but it also enabled them to directly manage the

AGETIP expects to have created a total of about 35,000 person years of employment if all subprojects are completed.

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[trash sector] funds which were of significant importance. (Personal interview, June 28, 2007)

As I argued in Chapter 2, the trash sector came to represent the turf on which Mayor Diop

was to fight to enhance his power vis-a-vis the national state. Given the financial

weakness of the local state in Senegal, the inflow of World Bank money made the new

system even more attractive to Diop.

As highlighted in the statement above, stemming from the aim to move away

from the politicization that had taken root in government jobs, AGETIP was intended to

avoid politicization through its official NGO-like organization. Ironically, in contrast

with the World Bank's appraisal, the doling out of the new jobs was ironically based

around an explicit political calculus. Beyond the strategy to diffuse the increasingly

mobilized youth and engage them as a low-cost, flexible labor force, formalizing

Set/Setal provided a direct forum for the mayor to rally political support. Participants

remember the "Days of Cleanliness" as explicit Socialist Party political rallies through

which "the workers also understood that the politicians were recruiting people [voters]

directly for their political electorate."1 One Zone Controller from Niari Tali

remembered the period as follows:

You had to do politics by force. I remember it very well, there were celebrities, I think it was a French senator, and we were required to go to the welcome event. If not, you'd be fired that day. Because the system had become purely political. ..It was politically motivated because if you wanted to be a part of the system, you had to be a Socialist f i rs t . . . They gave us Socialist Party T-shirts, or else you wouldn't be paid at the end of the month . . . So even if you were affiliated with another party, you had to follow this rule to stay in the system. (Personal interview, July 2, 2007)

Personal interview with collector from Niari Tali (June 27, 2007). 142

Workers had their identification cards collected by their immediate bosses, who had to

show them to the politicians to prove that they were filling recruitment quotas for the

Socialist Party. The formalization of Set/Setal thus functioned directly to reward and

recruit new Socialist Party members from the ranks of the youth.

As the previous quote suggests, however, this political calculus was not just about

votes; it was also about Mayor Diop's philosophy and image, both at home and abroad.

Diop was a celebrity politician who as mayor was very active in international

development dialogues and networks. He employed the Set/Setal-based trash system as

an important symbol of his commitment to youth and to an ideal of participatory

citizenship—two issues that were taking center stage in debates about African

development and democracy. In an interview on the movement, Diop in fact repudiated

the idea that the movement was at all a grassroots, spontaneous movement and claimed to

have invented Set/Setal himself:

No, it wasn't spontaneous; it was generated, part of our reflection. I was elected mayor and there was garbage everywhere in Dakar and we didn't have the financial means. After some reflection, I said to myself, why not engage the population [of Dakar]? We went down to the neighborhoods and discussed it with the youth. They each started to clean their own neighborhood. It's like that that it began. It was deliberate. (Personal interview, July 17, 2007)

He went on to hail the participatory system as the ideal system through which to clean the

city and engage its residents. He critiqued the formalized system that followed on the

Set/Setal system's heels:

[Today's workers are] simple employees! Whereas, the idea behind Set/Setal was voluntary participation. It was the populations that came to participate. The new system makes it so that the workers are paid by the month and that's the spirit now. You no longer feel the engagement of the populations, but before, in the neighborhoods, the people got together on Saturday and Sunday to clean. The

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youth who were in the system with CAMCUD now are paid . . . formalized . . . it's not good. (Personal interview, July 17, 2007)

Mayor Diop did, in fact, win some acclaim in international development circles

through the new trash system. In a "best practice" case study for the international NGO

ICLEI, the system was credited with "beginning to restore healthy and sanitary

conditions in the five municipalities that make up the [CUD] . . . increased garbage

collection coverage by 15 percent, created approximately fifteen hundred jobs, and

proven to be more efficient than systems in the past" (1997). It also celebrates the new

system for its remedy of a "major weakness" of the previous system: the lack of

engagement by local populations. The system even gained Diop and some of his most

active youth notoriety in various international conferences and other venues. One

trashworker from Medina remembers as follows:

[The system] even won us medals at the national and international levels! We were knighted with the National Merit Badge. Me, I remember, I did England— Manchester—with the Global Forum . . . just to talk about the [youth-based trash] system. (Personal interview, May 22, 2007)

Set/Setal youth did, indeed, appear as a delegation at the Global Forum held in

Manchester June 1994 on the theme of "Cities and Sustainable Development.102 In his

memoire written about his experience as mayor, Diop places the Set/Setal trash system

front and center as one of the "exceptional and exemplary" accomplishments of the City

of Dakar under his leadership (n.d.: 70). He describes it as a key strategy toward "The

Construction of a Democratic Urbanism," rooted in principles of decentralization, good

governance, and community participation, as the following excerpt shows:

For a general document on the Forum, see Whittaker (1995). 144

The application of the principles of good governance allowed the City not only to make visible its actions and to increase its means of intervention in the various fields of urban development, but also to carry out the mobilization of previously unknown urban development actors. The institution of the partnership with CAMCUD, the various ministries intervening in the City, military engineers, the sports and cultural associations (ASC), the inhabitants of the districts, associations of women, public and private sector companies was thus at the base of the significant results obtained in the fight against insalubrity and the valorization of the financial resources of the City. (Diop n.d.: 70)

In my interviews with Diop, he spoke of the trash system as his greatest pride, saying that

the issue of youth and environment were—and remain—concerns close to his heart. In

reflecting back on the system, he emphasized the value of the participatory trash system

over today's system for its efficacy in terms of budgets and in fostering a civic

consciousness:

Well, now they [the Wade government] pay a lot [to clean the city]. For me, with 200 million per month I managed to clean the city and the region [of Dakar]. And now they are almost to a billion and it is not clean. Thus beyond even the system of management, there is the participation of the population and their cleanliness— cleaning [the city] starts there. People . . . have to do their share of cleaning, to be engaged in maintaining the communal areas. You clean your house but you throw your refuse in the street—that isn't good! It should be understood that one must be clean but also that one must also take part in management of the street. It is a whole new behavior—the education of the citizen. It is important because here it is said that the municipality has to deal with i t . . . That's not the case. (Personal interview, July 17, 2007)

As can be seen in the above quotes, transitioning Set/Setal into the trash system

was thus about much more than simply renting some trucks and providing some buckets.

It involved fostering a whole ethic of participation—one that resonated with the spirit of

Set/Setal and thus had the buy-in of the youth, but also one that served the mayor's

interests and was sellable to a watchful international community. The former of these

elements—youth buy-in—would pose the key challenge at the beginning of the transition

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into the system. As mentioned above, the Set/Setal activists had turned away from

violence and begun to mobilize their communities in an explicit rebuke of the state. Fed

up with what they saw as the neglect by politicians of the real needs of their communities

and disappointed in the failure of the opposition party in the elections of 1988, these

youth had rallied communal support in an exercise in self-management and autonomy

from the state. Transitioning from cleaning up their neighborhood trash voluntarily as

part of an exciting youth-driven movement to being paid low wages as the city's trash

collectors was therefore not automatic. The mayor's initial assistance to the Set/Setal

movement was well received, but the formalization of the whole system into a parallel

trash collection system was seen as a mixed blessing. Although the youth were the first to

demand remuneration for their cleaning activities and although most were relieved to

have access to employment, even at day-labor rates, it took significant effort for them to

reconcile the identity shift from activist to trash worker. For some of these youth,

moreover, many of whom were students and were from relatively affluent families,

trashwork was far from the job of their dreams.

As I discuss in the Introduction, trashwork, precisely because it deals with waste,

is a subject loaded with cultural associations that set it apart from other sectors. Waste

discourses work to associate certain people with the task of cleaning, along lines of

societal difference (Douglas 1966), as seen in the famous association between sanitary

labor and caste in South Asia.103 The trashworkers in Dakar were not immune to the

potent associations that accompany working with waste. The trashworkers before them

In the context of traditional Hindu society, the Dalit caste (also called the Untouchables) have been historically associated with occupations regarded as ritually impure, such as the stigmatized task of sanitary and trash work. See Prashad (2000) also Beall (2006).

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had not been considered true Dakarois, and were seen as radical outsiders. In the words

of the Adjunct Secretary General of today's trash union (SNTN),

Before us this work was often done by people who were not Senegalese. In the beginning it was the Bambaras who came from Mali. Then the Toucouleurs came from Fouta because the first technical director of SIAS was from there and he brought in his parents [relatives]. In the beginning, no one [in Dakar] wanted to do it because it was seen as unclean and unhealthy to work with trash. (Personal interview, December 4, 2007)

As evidenced by his statement, the SIAS workers were not even considered Senegalese

citizens. The first major challenge of the new system was getting the Dakar youth—from

average, even upstanding families—to accept the class stigma: in all of the

neighborhoods I surveyed, men recalled being embarrassed at first about working with

trash. Worried that they would be identified by community members, they covered their

faces to avoid being recognized; some refused to work in their own neighborhoods. These

were notable differences from the time of Set/Setal when, in a spirit of patriotic civic

duty, anyone and everyone contributed to cleaning their own neighborhoods. Getting paid

to be a trashworker was altogether different, however, as recalled by one trashworker in

Medina:

It was not at all certain that the youth of Dakar would accept working in household garbage. That was the first challenge. When we signed the first contract, they asked everyone there to come work in the trash sector. Well, there were some who accepted and others who refused. Among those who accepted, there were those who hid their face in order to be able to do trashwork. Because this was not a job for a youth! At that time, for youth, this was really not an acceptable job. They had girlfriends, neighbors, and everyone . . . it was out of the question to collect trash where you lived. If you lived in the Medina, you would prefer to collect trash in Grand Dakar. If you lived in Grand Dakar, you went to Pikine. This was to protect these guys. But after some time, the youth saw that this was a job like any other job and there was nothing to hide. So, there was a revolution. At a certain point, all of the youth wanted to work in garbage. (Personal interview, May 22, 2007)

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As I discuss in Chapter 5, this stigma intersected in significant ways with gender,

due to cultural associations of domestic cleaning duties as women's work. Because of

these associations, women who joined the sector (about 30 percent of the youth) felt less

stigmatized, and their participation actually encouraged the men and enhanced

community acceptance. As much as the youth were at first suspicious of the state's

involvement, that involvement lent legitimacy to the trashwork from the perspective of

community members, and the youth were proud of being key players in the big

production of the Days of Cleanliness. At these events, the mayor himself made frequent

personal visits, and he sometimes provided the youth with snacks, popular music, and t-

shirts, in addition to brooms and wheelbarrows. The "official-ness" of the events thus

encouraged youth to want to be a part of the system. In the end, furthermore, the sheer

pressure the youth felt to exploit the opportunity for work to support their families amidst

conditions of economic crisis outweighed the work's stigma. The negative associations

eventually faded as communities became accustomed to seeing their young people

collecting trash and as the trash union labored for respect (Chapter 4).

5. Conclusion

By joining the analytics of the youth and urban questions, this chapter has

endeavored to flesh out the negotiations involved in the extension of the Socialist Party-

state's passive revolution into the 1990s. An attention to youth in the management of

urban populations helps to illuminate how neoliberal restructuring and the reorganization

of urban labor relations that they elicit works through the production of identity. We see

104 In certain neighborhoods women were the first to climb onto the trash trucks to do the collection circuit; they claim to have never cared about hiding their identities. Their enthusiasm helped to encourage men to participate and residents to respect the new trashworkers (see Chapter 5).

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how the social history of trash labor has engaged different bodies, playing off power

relations and their implied borders but also, in the process, reconstituting them. In his

study of the history of Zanzibar, Burgess decries the dearth of scholarly interest in

"examining how generation endures as an identity in urban environments or in the

postcolonial era" (1999: 31). Although there have been many studies since he made this

statement, some gaps remain. I argue that contemporary studies of youth movements in

Africa are too often disassociated from their political-economic contexts and not enough

have examined concretely how youth have been incorporated into neoliberal reform. This

chapter has attempted to move in that direction by examining how youth activists from a

radical social movement in Dakar became the city's trashworkers. It has also emphasized

that the category of youth must be disaggregated to look at the intersections of different

identities, including gender, which will be explored further in Chapter 5.

This examination shows that the Set/Setal transition acted not only to engage

youth in the state's cleaning endeavors but also to change the image of the state in its

moment of crisis. The highly visible system rejuvenated—in each neighborhood of the

capital—an illegitimate state by making these youth the public expression of state power.

As Mayor Diop's fief, the new trash system, along with the other AGETIP projects, thus

helped to temporarily resolve the urban labor question through a production of

participatory citizenship symbolized in the youths' orderly cleaning activities. In contrast

to the violent riots in 1988-1989, which had demonstrated their ability to subvert

authority, with Set/Setal youth had established their right to be in the public space in a

new way. Mayor Diop tapped this dynamic—and even claimed it as his own—through

his new trash system, in which youth would appear as a new, non-threatening expression

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of the state. This gestion de proximite (localized management) placed young people as

their own community's trash collectors—delimiting, in effect, a more decentralized, less

visible state that penetrated neighborhood communities more intimately.

As this chapter makes clear, the trash labor transformation following Set/Setal,

though hailed for "creating" new jobs (ICLEI 1997; WorldBank 1997), was really about

shifting who got those jobs and with what political utility. In a way, the shift represented

a claim by young Dakarois (both men and women) to be taken into account and was a

move by their mayor toward a more autochthonous trash labor system. This geographic

and demographic switch in the trash labor force also acted as a strategy to flexibilize the

trash jobs and undercut the labor organizing of the previous system. The SIAS workers,

whether they lost their jobs or were integrated into the new system, reflect on the

transition almost uniformly with dismay and disappointment. Similarly, the activists-

turned-trashworkers today look back at the 1990s as an exploitative period in which they

suffered a great deal. However grateful they may be to have gained access to

employment, under the Set/Setal trash system, they worked for low wages under difficult

conditions with no protections and minimal equipment.

The switch to a participatory trash system would also succeed in blurring the lines

between official and unofficial trashwork and in forwarding the notion of individual and

neighborhood responsibility for trash management, as clearly articulated in Mayor Diop's

statements. This was just one example of a wave of revisionist neoliberal programs based

on utilitarian ideas of civil society that responded to the riots that erupted out of the social

dislocation and economic crisis of the 1980s in Senegal and other parts of Africa. Central

to these new approaches were the increasingly key partnerships of NGOs. ENDA, the

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NGO that published a book on Set/Setal, made a film on one of the main organizers and

muralists, Joe Ouakam, and became an official partner in the new trash system in parts of

the city soon thereafter.105 In the course of the next decade, furthermore, ENDA was to

spearhead a number of voluntary community-based projects in Dakar's periphery.

It is important also to consider the spatial imaginary of the transition. A central

element of the incorporation of the Set/Setal youth into the trash sector was their claims

to those entitlements as Dakarois. The mobilization of urban residents in the late 1980s

and the increasing importance of the city as the basis of electoral politics had made the

urban youth a preoccupation of the country, and even international observers. Youths'

demands for work and for the ear of the government were rooted in an assertion of their

role as the real citizens of the city, those we were best equipped and deserving to work in

it. This autochthonous imaginary of belonging as a precondition for laboring in the city

was not only particularly urban—and drawing from cosmopolitan references—but was

also centered on an explicit rooting in the space of the neighborhood. Set/Setal set out to

overwrite an imaginary of the nation with one centered on the quartier, wherein one's

simple belonging to a neighborhood came with entitlements and obligations to serve

one's community. Due to its roots in Set/Setal, the trash labor force is overwhelmingly

local, with people still, as of this writing, serving their own neighborhoods and families.

Thus through a language of participatory citizenship, the local citizen was made

responsible for his or her own environment and community, and the neighborhood was

placed as the locus of the political imaginary. The political implications of the youth

versus state discourse of participation, were, however, originally quite different, as

Set/Setal strove to critique of the government's inadequacies, whereas the state deployed

105 Interview with Amadou Diallo (ENDA), November 15, 2007.

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these discourses in the period that followed as a justification for low-paying work and,

ironically, as a forum for party politics. As elaborated in the next chapter, this re-locating

of citizenship back to the local eventually played out in salient and complex ways for the

union battles and political imaginary of the trash workers today.

To conclude, the legacy of Set/Setal in the trash sector does echo Bayart et a/.'s

warning that despite the fact that they represent a natural opposition, youth movements

are vulnerable to manipulation (1992). That legacy illuminates the specific way that this

radical youth movement was subsumed into the ruling party's political-economic

imperatives and ethical regime via a discourse of participation. The channeling of

Set/Setal into the trash sector can be seen as a domestication of the youth activists'

revolutionary ideals, a humbling of their previous ambitions through their relocation as

low-paid garbage collectors. However, the turn to youth in the social history of official

trash labor and its accompaniment by discourses of responsibility and blame is not a

simple case of the cooptation or exploitation of a social movement, but rather a

demonstration of the messy process of the construction of hegemony—involving a

negotiation between different social actors in their conversations with each other and the

state—and, thus, its inherent instabilities. The trashworkers' battle since 2006 for rights,

fair pay, and safe working conditions tempers Bayart's conclusion by showing how youth

politics have redefined the democratic landscape in some key ways, state intervention

notwithstanding. Today's union battle represents a different conjuncture, with its own

challenges and possibilities. The next chapter explores the creative strategies for

maneuver that the youth have used more recently to struggle against the continuation of

the long neoliberal era in Dakar.

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CHAPTER FOUR

"We Are Not Garbage":

The Priesthood of Trashworkers

At 11 a.m. on April 27, 2007, in the largest meeting room of their union

federation headquarters, an anxious crowd of trashworkers waited for their union's

General Assembly meeting to begin on "Senegalese time." Having arrived when the

meeting was officially convened at 10 a.m., I sat in the corner of the room with my

research assistant, excited and nervous to have been invited to the union's meeting. I had

only recently made phone contact with the union's leader, Madany Sy, and he had

immediately invited me to the meeting. This was just the beginning of my being brought

into the fold of the union's inner workings, and I was awed by the energy in the room.

Some of the workers had come straight from work and still wore their work clothes:

tattered remains of old AMA106 uniforms and faded baseball caps. The workers' shoes

were the worse for wear: many wore torn "jelly" sandals that could provide only minimal

protection, and others wore slightly better sneakers. Other people came in their regular

street clothes, but all of those were basic and understated: the women wore worn and

faded boubous107 and the men wore t-shirts and jeans. The union's executive committee

sat at one end of the room's huge table—most of them were more formally dressed in

fancier boubous or button-up shirts. The energy was palpable and the temperature in the

poorly ventilated room continued to rise. As the morning wore on, more and more

The waste management company for whom they had worked from 2001 to 2006. A traditional West African sleeved robe.

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workers filled the room until there were no more seats and people had to stand. My rough

guess puts the attendance at more than two hundred workers.

The crowd hushed as Sy entered the room. He headed straight to the head of the

table, armed with a commanding presence. An attractive man in his early 40s, he was

dressed in a nice but not outlandish boubou and wore modern, intellectual-looking

glasses. Sy's demeanor demanded respect, yet he appeared humble and approachable. A

gifted public speaker, he spoke to a rapt audience that occasionally erupted into applause.

The following excerpt from his speech (translated from the Wolof) provides a clear

indication of his message and sense of authority:

All of you are incited to march on May 1st because this is the day for workers. Even if [the event] is a celebration, it's a celebration without joy. It's a chance for us to show our discontent and our disagreement.. . . Despite the fact of our great difficulties, we are muted, we work in the shadows. . . . Comrades: the authorities of this country do not respect the cleaning workers. They do not take us into account. We have really been deceived... . We are the left out, the forgotten of the Republic. They treat us like garbage. This must stop today! We must take responsibility for ourselves. . . . The most important thing, is that we go together to the end. That we are united.. . . God envisioned by his will that we would be hired by that intermediary [AMA]. We have worked in this sector for years without being hired on. Because it was a passage we were obliged to make. This is why, I tell you, we keep working. Each one of us does his job. This is all we've got, and it's a way of living our religion. But if our work is oppressing us, of course we have the right to rise up within the rules of the game. We have addressed ourselves to everyone, and none of them have met with us. We thank the religious leaders because they pray for u s . . . . The problem we have is with the politicians. A politician never says where he is going . . . . They have been fooling us for years. That should push each and every one of us to take up our responsibilities.. . .

If they arrest me during the week, I call for you to keep fighting! [The crowd erupts into murmurs and noise, then applause]. My father used to say: "When I am in front, follow me, when I move back, kill me, when I die, avenge me." [Rowdy applause] I want that to be our slogan because we are doing the most dangerous work that there is. [Someone interjects: "we are all dead."] We are no longer living. We are stressed. Before you receive your salary, you have to fight for it. This needs to stop. Now, we have taken all the other paths we could, without a response. The mayor of Dakar asked me to warn him before I spoke on

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the radio. He didn't want to hear his name, so I accepted. I waited a year, then, I called him. He ignored me. I write to him, without response. He says bad things about me... I don't have much, but I have my dignity. He has more money than me but he is not more dignified. We all have the same dignity, my friends. We are the same as the mayor. We are all human beings. A man has the right to rise up when he feels oppressed by another man. We have the right to speak the truth. If people are afraid to tell the truth to his face, we will do it. . . .

In view of this critical situation, today we launch the second plan of action. We have decided to radicalize the movement from Dakar to Yene [the farthest reach of the Dakar region]. [Applause] Comrades, please understand that when I speak of radicalization, that does not mean acts of vandalism, destruction, or fights. Don't forget that we are Republicans. . . . The population will support us. . . . The state needs to fulfill its responsibilities and solve the problem of the cleaning sector. We, my friends, are strong, thanks to God. We believe in our profession. It's a passion. We are dignified. We have been sacrificing for this work for 15 years. . . . God willing, we will be victorious in the end.

After a few other short speeches from other leaders and responses from the crowd,

the meeting was adjourned with a short blessing by a religious leader. The workers

gradually filed out. The crowd was riled up, but serious. They knew what they had to do

and were ready. After the May 1 march, which had a massive turnout, Sy called for a

second, major strike after the first one that the union had held in April.108 Most of

Dakar's 1800 trashworkers did not collect the city's trash for over a week. Trash piled up

in public squares and by the side of the road and the city became choked with its own

refuse. Finally, the union was given its first meeting with Dakar's mayor, Pape Diop.

Within a short while, the union had received two months of back pay and a number of

other smaller, but significant, concessions.

1. Introduction

As we saw in the previous chapter, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the youth

activists of Set/Setal became the new trashworkers of Dakar. This chapter follows those

The April strikes were the ones that brought on the neighborhood trash revolts considered in Chapter 6. 155

same workers to a more recent moment (2007-2008) as they battle to improve their lot as

a union. In contrast with the many analyses of youth movements that consider only one

moment of mobilization, this analysis considers what became of youth activists—as

individuals and as a political force. Ironically, the state's attempt to diffuse a labor crisis

in the trash sector during Set/Setal, through trading out the labor force for unemployed

youth, was to sow the seeds for a more powerful, cosmopolitan, and locally-rooted union

that draws from the citizen duties conjured in Set/Setal to demand respect for their labor

and make claims on the state. This story resonates with Fred Cooper's observation on a

much larger scale of the way the introduction of the idea of "development" by the

colonial governments as a way to "reinvigorate colonialism" actually "turned out to be a

central to the process by which the colonial elites convinced themselves they could give

up colonies" (2001: 64). Similarly, the promotion of the idea of participatory citizenship

by the Senegalese state to justify a cheaper and easier way to manipulate the trash system

actually has allowed the trashworkers to "bite back" at the state in the form of one of the

most visible and dynamic unions active in contemporary Senegal.

The union represents a potent symbol of the continued relevance of the urban

question in Dakar, as well as its articulation with the youth question. Led by the

charismatic Madany Sy, the union has burrowed itself into the minds and hearts of the

Dakarois and has gained the attention of the local and national state over the last couple

of years. Beyond their visibility and some concessions gained in their battle for safe

working conditions, the trashworkers' union has redefined the profession in some key

ways and is at the forefront of forging a new independent unionism in Senegal. The

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trashworkers are, moreover, an active force behind a renegotiation of notions of

citizenship and the space of politics in Dakar today.

Though they are now adults, it is precisely the bonds from Set/Setal that inform

the trashworkers' political identities and union battle. Building on their experiences as

youth activists and their shared histories over the last two decades, the trashworkers have

deftly transformed their plight and packaged their demands into a savvy political

platform. As the following analysis shows, under the leadership of Madany Sy, the

trashworkers' political imaginary roots their demands in commonly held and indisputable

Senegalese values. This makes their claims concrete and draws on the moral compass of

the populations they serve to overcome the stigma of the profession and their dangerous

situations as unprotected temporary-contract employees. As such, we can see that the

trashworkers have launched their battle from the same terrain on which they were first

brought into the formal trash sector—the moral-ethical obligation and responsibility for

cleaning the city. Though they center their claims in some of the same discourses that

were used to bring them into near voluntary labor in the 1990s, they transform these

duties into grounds on which to defend their rights and demand the reciprocal obligations

of the government for whom they work.

Antonio Gramsci believed that "common sense" ideologies—or those

"conceptions of the world" or ways of knowing oneself and one's culture—were crucial

to the effectiveness of any political project (2000). Elements of popular common sense

contribute, in his view, to the functioning of the dominant hegemony and people's

subordination by making their situations seem natural and unchangeable. New political

projects thus required common sense elements, if transformed, to be successful. In this

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light, Stuart Hall has argued that the ascension of Thatcherism in England—and with it

the hegemony of neoliberal economic policies—was constructed through a novel

combination of new free market doctrines with old Toryian values (1988). As such, a new

ideology became popular—gained the consent of the masses—because of its rooting in

old "common sense" values. Similarly, the ideology of participatory citizenship that the

state grasped and advanced to the ends of flexibilizing the urban workforce in the 1990s

in Dakar, as exemplified in the participatory trash system, was grounded in a moral-

ethical plane that situated people with responsibility for cleaning their neighborhoods.

This ideology of participatory citizenship launched with Set/Setal and transformed in the

new trash system thus formed a key element of what Gramsci referred to as the "terrain

of the conjunctural." In his view, it was precisely "upon this terrain that the forces of

opposition organize" (2000: 201). Just as hegemony worked through common sense, for

Gramsci opposition movements would have to contend with those naturalized ideas as

well. The ideological struggle involved in political movements would thus be based itself

initially on common sense ideas in order to critique them and move towards new

ideologies. Religion, in Gramsci's view, has often been part of ethico-political ideology

and is thus a key element of what constitutes common sense (2000: 206).

Gramsci's insights are useful in considering how the trashworkers' union grounds

its ideologies within common sense ideas—drawing from the ideas put forth with the

participatory trash system and common Senegalese values—but then transforms them in

the interest of their union battle and changing state-labor relations. The trashworkers'

political imaginary is centered on a discourse tying ideas of local, autochthonous

citizenship to devout Muslim service. As such, it draws on values of Islamic piety and

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community participation to argue for workers' rights to better working conditions. In so

doing, the value of their work becomes indisputable, their claims difficult to oppose. In

other words, the trashworkers are able to root their grievances in common.sense values

that resonate for the populations they serve and the politicians they encounter. As I will

explore more in Chapter 6, residents across Dakar are not only aware of the union's battle

but generally in agreement with their platform of demands. In fact, those community

members interviewed who had been involved in the neighborhood-wide trash dumping

"revolts" in 2007 were adamant that their actions had been in solidarity with the workers,

and against the state. The state has been less easily won over, but as I will show, the

union has nonetheless made some key concessions that would have been impossible

without the irrefutable legitimacy carried by their grievances on a moral and ideological

level. This chapter thus builds on the previous one to show how hegemony acts as an

impermanent and "unstable equilibrium" (Hall 1980).

This chapter draws from interviews to explore the political imaginary of the

trashworkers and their union, SNTN, The National Cleaning Workers Union. The post-

Alternance period—or Alternoos, as many would call it—has been a time of intense

disappointment for the youth of Dakar. For the city's trashworkers, it is a period in which

they straddle the line between adult and youth. They are technically "grown up" and

many are married and have kids, but many others have been unable to establish their own

homes or start families due to the precariousness of their jobs. In Senegalese definitions

of adult status, which imply having a family and being able to adequately support it,

many trashworkers have not yet "arrived" into adulthood, even though they may be well

into their thirties and forties. The early Alternance period was one in which they knew the

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greatest level of security (AMA), but only for a few short years. Since 2006 the sweet

taste of a normal, formal protected employment has turned bitter. Now, more than ever,

they know about what they should be entitled to and the farce that "participatory

citizenship" really is when it means you fulfill your duties but the state does not.

As a cosmopolitan labor force—owing to Set/SetaVs democratic beginnings—the

movement is strengthened by its diversity. Its leaders, all of whom came from the ranks

of Set/Setal''s leadership, are a dynamic and confident bunch with deep ties to their own

communities. The union's autochthonous history and place-based loyalties in the

community buttress its community support, though not without complication. Fashioning

themselves as an Islamic environmental movement, moreover, the union fuses Islamic

values with international discourses surrounding environmental protection and human

rights. This amalgam allows them to pay homage to the historic sedimentations of

meaning and action around the trash sector while tapping the legitimacy of the space of

religion. Finally, like trash unions before them, the union today uses the power of waste

in the public space as a tool to put pressure on the state. Meanwhile, they deploy the

gestion de proximite to communicate with and enlist their own neighborhoods in the daily

practices of their profession and to battle for legitimacy and fair treatment.

2. The Trash Union's Historic Trajectory

The precariousness of their positions in the 1990s as unprotected, low-paid, day-

laborers did not elude the youthful trashworkers. Though their conditions had improved

with the arrival of AGETIP (under which certain areas actually had improved salaries of

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up to 47,500 CFA per month109), many of these dynamic community leaders were

conscious of the inadequacy of the compensation for the labor they performed and the

risks they undertook as the city's cleaners. Looking back, many characterized the 1990s

as a period of suffering and even exploitation. One trashworker from Niari Tali explains,

"It was easy to exploit us because we weren't located in any register or department. We

weren't considered workers, just volunteers."110 One man particularly outraged at the

scandalous nature of a trash system based on near voluntary labor was the man who was

to was to found the trashworkers union—Madany Sy. The Secretary General of his local

youth group (Sicap Liberte 4), Sy had been deeply involved in the Set/Setal movement

and then, in turn, the transition to official trash collection. An outspoken advocate for

workers' rights, he began to be seen and heard as a leader in the ranks of young

trashworkers by the middle of the 1990s.

Workers' mobilizations in the 1990s also tracked their political independence

from the Socialist Party (PS). Looking back, workers tell of dissent in the ranks of

workers as the decade progressed and their situations had not improved. They began to

disagree with Mayor Mamadou Diop and the Socialist Party publicly—either by

indicating their support of Wade or lobbying for better conditions and pay. As one

worker from Grand Yoff noted, the mayor was afraid of losing the youth vote—"but lose

it he did." In the end, according to him, when Wade was elected in 2000, it was clear that

Diop had lost his following.111 After the dissolution of his power base (the CUD) from

2000-2001, Mamadou Diop lost in the municipal elections of 2002 to Pape Diop, a

Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS) leader and Wade's right-hand man. The case of the

109 About $90 per month at today's currency exchange rate. 110 Personal interview (July 3, 2007). 111 Personal interview (July 7, 2008).

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Set/Setal trash sector transition thus raises key questions for an understanding of the

functioning of the patronage system and the relationship between youth and their

"elders." Even within what was seen as Diop's fief (CAMCUD and the youth of this

system), there was intense dissention. Sy himself is a self-described socialist but he

admits that he became disenchanted with politics during this period. Having previously

been a militant of the PS for years, he was to "retire" from politics with Alternance.

Among the ranks of the sector as a whole, it is clear that the workers were not immune to

the general fervor behind the PDS in Dakar. While it is difficult to know how many of the

trashworkers voted for the PDS in the elections, my interviews suggest that a fair number

probably joined their youthful compatriots in voting for Alternance despite the pressure

to do otherwise and the clear connection between their jobs and the PS. After the

elections, they were, of course, free to publicly cross over to the PDS. As Sy explained,

Yes, the major the part [of workers had been Socialist Party activists] but on the other hand, I know that it is said that the men leave but the institutions remain. Now they are the liberals, everyone became a liberal! (Personal interview, July 10,2008)

Thus, a certain kind of independence clearly had settled in among these urban

voters—as it had in the larger population—which is important for an understanding of the

workers' political imaginaries but also of the wider landscape of Senegalese democratic

politics. The channeling of Set/Setal into the trash sector can be seen as a last resort to

combat the inevitable for the PS. Unfortunately, the change that was sought in the

opposition liberal party (PDS) was to prove perhaps an even greater disappointment.

Having begun mobilizing workers since 1995—and even losing his job as a

trashworker for two years in the late 1990s for organizing a strike protesting their lack of

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medical coverage—Madany Sy joined some other colleagues at the end of the decade to

begin forming the trashworkers union. In the words of his long-time comrade and co-

founder of the union: "Our work was very difficult and we didn't even have medical care.

The workers were treated more or less like slaves! It was necessary to fight to eradicate

all of that!"112 Their union, SNTN, was finally formed in 2000, just a few months after

Alternance. In the institutional reorganizations that were to follow, Sy's union was

uniquely situated to be incorporated into the new trash system. Although two smaller

unions did form over the next few years, my research has focused on SNTN, as it

represents the majority of workers (around 1300 in 2008) and was to lead the other

unions in a number of mobilizations.

As was mentioned in Chapter 2, the arrival of the PDS to power came with a more

forceful move towards privatization, state centralization, and the dismantling of the

socialist party apparatus and its institutions. The CUD was dissolved in 2000 and the

sector was re-centralized then privatized with the AMA contract. During the workers'

"golden age" from 2003 to 2006, the SNTN was formally integrated into the company's

operations, with an office at the company's headquarters and deep links to the company's

administration. Each worker had 500 CFA deducted from his or her monthly paycheck as

a membership fee for the union. During this time, the union was particularly privileged—

a fact later decried by the workers; each of its leaders, including Madany Sy, held a well-

paid administrative post within the company. The regular trashworkers' salary rose to

62,000 CFA per month (~$120) and the trashworkers were given medical and vacation

benefits.

112 Personal Interview with Noumou Ndiaye, the current Treasurer of SNTN (June 4, 2007). 163

Only when the state broke its contract with AMA—initially in 2005 and

definitively in 2006—did the union really begin to work in earnest defending the interests

of its workers. During the first break, the union actually sided with the company against

the state's prerogatives and continued to lobby for AMA to stay on. By the second break,

however—which was a hasty move made directly by President Wade with no warning

given to the union—the writing was on the wall. The chaos and reorganization that

accompanied the final rupture of the contract precipitated an immense mobilization on

the part of the union activists, as they scrambled to protect their jobs and forge a new

relationship with the state. The period since July 2006 has seen the trashworkers wage

one of the most dynamic union battles in Senegal's recent history. This ongoing trash

"crisis"—characterized by nebulous institutional organizations, massive strikes by the

trashworkers, and neighborhood-based revolts involving the wide-scale dumping of

household wastes by neighborhood residents—has propelled the question of trashlabor

onto the radar of the Dakarois and the state alike. It is also a period during which all of

the privileges gained during AMA's short tenure—including medical care, normal

equipment allowances, and formal contracts—have been erased. Under the current

unusual power-sharing agreement between the national and local states, workers struggle

to know to whom they should even voice their grievances.

The major challenge facing the trashworkers immediately after the state finally

terminated its relationship with AMA was whether the 1800 trashworkers who had

worked for AMA (most of whom started in Set/Setal) would remain the city's

trashworkers. For the 320 higher-level workers, including the executives, those working

in the garage, and the health services, this was not the case; they were neither

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incorporated into the interim system set up to manage the city's trash nor formally laid

off or indemnified, until much later (Sarr May 9, 2007). The vast majority of these

workers organized themselves into a second, smaller, trashworkers' union, SYNAPS.113

SYNAPS was actually founded by an ex-SIAS worker (Cheikh Yade) who had been

involved in union activity for one of the SIAS unions. As a result, many of the workers

affiliated with SYNAPS—most of whom were drivers—had entered the trash sector with

SIAS. This is just one indicator of the longevity of the differences and tensions between

the youth who entered with Set/Setal and the ex-SIAS workers as there was, indeed, some

rivalry between the two unions in the 2000s. The old SIAS workers' union activities in

the new system also testify to the fact that although Mamadou Diop had managed to quiet

the SIAS workers in the early 1990s, they had not yet had their last word. SNTN and

SYNAPS put aside their differences and joined with a recently founded third, smaller

trash union, SYNAPRONE114 to form the United Front {Front Unitaire) of trashworkers

in 2007 to better fight for all workers' common rights. Madany Sy was made the Front's

leader.

Most of the rest of the trashworkers—the collectors and sweepers at the center of

this study—were re-hired in 2006 as temporary workers through the temporary work

agency Ultime. In Veolia's two districts, the union (SNTN) claims that, despite promises

by the state that ex-AMA workers would be given priority in hiring,115 a minority portion

113 The Syndicat Nationale des Agents de la Proprete du Senegal (National Union of Senegalese Cleaning Agents) was, at first, a rival union consisting mainly of ex-SIAS workers who remained in the system. Because most of them lost their jobs in 2006, these workers had a different agenda from SNTN and were not a central part of this study. 114 Syndicat Nationale des Professionels de Nettoiement et de I'Environnement (The Union of Cleaning and Environment Professionals). 115 The director of CADAK/CAR confirmed that these promises had been made by the Mayor of Dakar but then added that he did not believe CADAK/CAR nor any other government agency should have the right to tell a private company who to hire (Personal interview, May 30, 2007).

165

of workers have been hired back and, of those re-hired, a high number have already been

fired.116 Veolia's presence in Dakar in general has been at the center of a number of

intense disputes between the state and the union in the last couple of years. The

employment of the Veolia workers and the rest of the workers in Dakar is characterized

by a lack of a formal work contract, delays in payment—sometimes of even months long,

lack of equipment, and no medical coverage. These workers, have, furthermore, yet to

receive any formal lay-off letters or indemnities for benefits they lost with AMA.

In certain respects, though their expectations have changed, the situation of the

trashworkers can be seen as having regressed back to where it began in the 1990s. In

spite of promises made by the state, the workers continue to labor under extremely risky

conditions and many now shoulder heavier familial burdens. The difficulties they have

faced since 2006 should not be underestimated: many have fallen ill during this period or

have lost their homes due to their loss of a job or payment irregularities, and many spoke

of strain and dislocation in their family lives due to the stresses on the job. Adding this to

the onerous physical demands of the work and related health problems (including injury,

1 17

heat exhaustion, and illness from exposure to microbes ), and their positions can be

characterized as quite perilous. On the other hand, the achievements of the union cannot

be ignored and, though they are still mired in convoluted institutional arrangements and

difficult working conditions, the trashworkers have gained the attention of the state and

have won some small, but promising, concessions. Since summer 2007, they have been

116 Over 50 employees were reported to have been fired within the first year of Veolia's tenure in Dakar. This statistic and rumors of abusive and exploitative management styles are cited by members of SNTN to critique the company. 117 Due to notoriously dirty working conditions, the trashworkers suffer disproportionate burdens of disease. An outbreak of Tuberculosis in 2007 was but one dramatic expression of this phenomenon (Nettali 2007).

166

received numerous times by the mayor of Dakar, the Minister of the Environment, and

finally, the director of Veolia—all of whom had previously refused to see them. These

negotiations have accelerated the liquidation process of AMA, regularized the workers'

payment schedule, and challenged some of Veolia's practices in the downtown districts.

One of the greatest achievements for the trashworkers came in 2007 for the fired

workers of SYNAPS. After a hunger strike staged by SYNAPS (SudQuotidien February

23, 2007; WalFadjri January 9, 2007 ) and a number of larger city-wide strikes in which

the unions banned together, these 320 garage and administrative workers were finally

formally laid-off and paid off (a total in 712 million CFA) in the summer of 2007 after

more than 11 months without work or indemnities (SudQuotidien October 4, 2007).

Despite this concession, the future for the majority of trashworkers and the organization

of labor in the sector in general remains an open question, and the workers continue to

fight to improve their lot.

Another small triumph came in September 2008. After two years of criticism of

Veolia and its hiring and firing practices in the Medina and Plateau, the SNTN finally

won a battle widely covered by the press in Dakar over the right for workers in Veolia's

zones to be affiliated with the union (Nettali September 22, 2008 ; SudQuotidien

September 22, 2008). Accused of firing over 100 workers for their affiliation to SNTN,

Veolia was required by the state to re-hire them in a major coup to the union. These gains

demonstrate that the workers cannot completely be left out of the equation, that the jury is

still out on the future of trashwork, and that the resonances of youth activism have yet to

run their course.

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3. Independent Unionism and Trash's Organic Intellectual

The trashworkers' union has faced an unstable atmosphere for union organizing

over the past few years. In what now seems to have been a lucky aberration, the trash

union enjoyed the greatest benefits in its first few years during the AMA period and is

only now facing the conditions that have befallen many other sectors with Alternance.

Since 2006 trashworkers have been relegated to the temporary, contract labor that has

become the norm for recruitment in the Wade administration (Ndiaye 2008). There

remains significant doubt whether today's "transitional period" is really short-term and

whether the present government intends to formally hire the workers—or contract with a

company that will—ever again. In fact, the self-described "technocrat" director of

CADAK/CAR (Mamadou Lakhassane Cisse), who is involved in managing the workers

on an institutional level, told me that he felt that keeping a flexible workforce was a

company's right and that the government should not intervene to impose hiring or

contract requirements on a trash company. This would be, in his words, unnecessarily

I I S

meddling in "business decisions" when "what matters is results." A Veolia manager,

moreover, told me that he did not believe his company was interested in ever hiring the

workers as employees and did not think that the government would have a say in the

matter.119 Under the leadership of Madany Sy, the trashworkers have, nonetheless, made

progress toward challenging these inhospitable conditions and are, in the process, helping

to redefine labor relations in Dakar. The union's recipe for success demands closer

attention.

118 Personal interview (May 30, 2007). 119 Personal interview (May 15, 2007).

168

The union's leader, Madany Sy has certainly been one of the key actors in the

trash union's unique trajectory. As originally head of his community youth group, Sy's

leadership in the trash sector owes to his leadership in Set/Setal. In many ways, he can be

seen as the organic intellectual (Gramsci 2000) of the trash movement. During Set/Setal,

Sy was one of the more radical participants: his colleagues reflect back on his early

willingness to do the work that others sneered at and the passion with which he mobilized

the youth. The time Sy put into the "trenches" of dirty work as a trash collector is a major

element of his popularity. In one worker's words, "He was a collector like us, so he

knows pertinently the problems with which we are confronted." Though he was

amongst the more educated participants in Set/Setal, Sy is seen to be just like everyone

else—and certainly plays up this element of his personal history. The fact that the union

unites both educated and uneducated workers can certainly be seen, moreover, as one of

its unique strengths.

For Gramsci, organic intellectuals hailing from the ranks of the working class are

important to the ability of the working class to challenge the existing order.121 He saw

these intellectuals as helping to articulate, through a language of culture, the feelings and

experiences of the masses and, thereby, provide ideological leadership. In many ways, Sy

does just that, and with a leadership style that makes him immensely accessible and

"down to Earth"—in a society in which leaders are often seen as looking down from atop

a rigid hierarchy. The following quote, taken from Sy's speech at the April 2007 meeting,

illustrates his leadership philosophy:

If today I've been given the reins, that makes for a huge burden. And I'm even the youngest. It is up to the Good Lord to choose a guide, a leader. That's not to say

120 Personal interview (June 27, 2007). 121 See "Intellectuals and Education" (2000).

169

that you are better than the others, far from it. (SNTN General Assembly (April 27, 2007)

Sy goes to great lengths to make himself personally available to union members—

all of whom have his cell phone number and are invited to call him directly. In the very

beginning of my research, I actually first "found" Sy when asking the trash collectors in

my neighborhood if they knew of him. "He's our leader!" they shouted from the back of

the trash truck as it zoomed away. "Call him! He's always available!" they said as they

quickly recited his cell phone number from memory. Through his tireless radio shows,

press conferences, and newspaper interviews, Sy's name has become a household term as

he conveys his workers' plight to the Dakarois and earns their support (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1. An SNTN press conference in March 2008. Madany Sy (middle) is shown here reciting the union's grievances and threatening a general strike. (Source: author)

Sy has also gained the personal respect of certain government officials, who have been

quite surprised to find such a dynamic leader rise from the ranks of the trashworkers. Sy

170

himself told me the story of when he first met the Minister of the Budget. As Sy began to

give his speech, with his usual charisma, the Minister apparently "got goosebumps" and

asked him, out of surprise, "but why are you working in garbage?"122

Under Sy's leadership—and that of his dynamic executive board peopled by other

leaders from Set/Setal—the SNTN has been part of an important move toward autonomy

within the Senegalese labor movement. Though many of its founders (including Sy) and

members were originally active in the Socialist Party during the 1990s, in forming the

union in 2000 after Alternance, the choice of which union federation to affiliate with was

an important decision. A brief overview of the union landscape is needed here to clarify

that choice. Two major trends were underway in the 1990s within the Senegalese labor

movement: 1) the formation of union federations (intersyndicales) or umbrella

organizations grouping together existing unions and 2) the growing number and power of

independent or "autonomous" unions (syndicats autonom.es) as the Senghorian tradition

of state-affiliated unions disintegrated. The Socialist Party-state had long tried to reign in

organized labor through its doctrine of "responsible participation," but as this lost steam,

two major poles of autonomous unions emerged in 1989.

In the 1990s, as the decline of public service jobs took full effect, the unions were

faced with new challenges in a labor context increasingly dominated by voluntary, day-

labor, or short-term contractual work.12 Informalization was thus a major factor blocking

unionism, despite the effort made by unions to organize workers in the informal sector. In

the face of de-unionization and the weakening of unions due to their internal

122 Personal interview (July 10, 2008). 123 For instance, the rate of unionization for workers with formal contracts (of determined length (duree determinee) or salaried {duree indeterminee)) was 50.8 percent compared with 19.5 percent for day-laborers (Diallo 2002: 459).

171

fragmentation or politicization, the unions attempted to regroup as a survival strategy into

federations after 1990. During the 1990s, although a certain level of unity and

compromise was reached between the unions through federations as they rallied against

the common cause of structural adjustment and its devastating impacts, labor was

weakened by the state's attempt to infiltrate autonomous unions (Ndiaye 2002: 407). This

period did, however, bring for more unified contestatory mobilization: two general strikes

were held in the 1990s (1993 and 1999), whereas there had not been any in the 1970s or

1980s.

With the election of opposition candidate Abdoulaye Wade in 2000, "responsible

participation" was officially rendered meaningless, and the CNTS (main union) finally

officially disaffiliated itself from the Socialist Party. Although political tendencies and

party connections still exist within the major union federations (including the officially

"independent" unions), the move towards independence has signaled a new period in

Senegal's labor history. The SNTN leaders' sour experience with the "politicization" of

Set/Setal and the trash sector—and the climate of Alternance—made them particularly

concerned with choosing an independent federation. Their choice of the CSA (the

Federation of Independent Unions of Senegal {Confederation des Syndicats Autonomes

du Senegal) was a decision taken explicitly to avoid the influence of political parties.

Affiliation with the CSA has not immunized the SNTN against government nor

party intervention aimed at the unions, which has continued in different form under

Wade. In 2007, for instance, Wade attempted to organize the elections of the union

federations and doled out "free money" to the union federations on May 2, 2007 after

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asking for a day of "no disturbances" on May 1, 2007 (International Workers Day).124

Though the trashworkers' union marched peacefully on May 1, it went on strike soon

after. In fact, the trashworkers' union is just one player behind a wave of protests and

mobilizations that have taken place since Alternance to attempt to resist the infiltration of

the government in the liberal era. Protests (including labor) in general have actually

increased since 2000 in Senegal.125 The 2006-2008 period has been punctuated by some

particularly dramatic events, including the frequent trash strikes. Perhaps what these

illustrate best is Alfred Ndiaye's observation that new labor relations are being forged—

with difficulty (2008). The trash sector supports what he argues is as a blocked

negotiation process between labor and the state—in which political parties still try to

meddle in unionized labor and unions have no recourse but to "hot" strategies—strikes—

to resist these and make their voice heard. Symbolizing the current dire situation, the

trash strikes are a dangerous business with nasty impacts on the trashworkers and

Dakarois alike.127

4. The Political Imagination of the Buujumaanxl%

Despite the lamentable circumstances under which they currently labor—essentially

completely unprotected within a hazardous profession—the trashworkers of Dakar

124 See Nettali articles (May 1, 2007; May 2, 2007) and Ndiaye (2008). 125 Personal communication with Alfred Inis Ndiaye (July 2008). 126 Leading up to the Organization of the Islamic conference (OIC) in spring of 2008, there were a number of riots and protests as the Wade government tried to remove human "encumberments" (including street vendors) in the supposed interest of cleaning the capital for the event. 127 The trash crisis has widespread human and environmental health impacts in Dakar. For instance, garbage is widely recognized to have been one of the factors behind the resurgence of cholera in Senegal over the last few years (Diouf April 5, 2005 ; Harris September 1, 2005). 128 The term was originally used to describe the young oyster collectors of Mbour (buuj means oyster in Wolof) (Diop and Faye 2002: 698) but in present day parlance is used to derogatorily describe informal recyclers and trash pickers and, at times, formal trash workers.

173

maintain an intense unity and camaraderie (see Figure 4.2).129 I argue that it is precisely

the shared history and bonds from Set/Setal that inform trashworkers' identities and the

contours of their union battle.

^ * .: | j | \ 'lip

*' °*willllllf • ^w w"%

k\» » *?«» A y' -'fo

%f/# •, M

' -• >\*. • . * T E

Figure 4.2. Two trashworkers in Niari Tali, taking a break from collection on a hot day in July, 2007. (Source: author)

This section examines the major elements of trashworkers' political identities and

platforms, through which they derive value and meaning in their work and make claims

on the state. In many ways signifying a new era of politics in Dakar ushered in with

Set/Setal, this new imaginary is centered on a place-based idea of participatory

citizenship and a deep spiritual conviction of religious service through cleaning. My

exploration draws on an understanding, following Tania Li, that a group's self-

identification,

129 Many of the trashworkers have, for instance, pooled resources to aid their fellow comrades in need, through paying hospital bills and offering a place to sleep for those who have lost their homes.

174

¥T$

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is not natural or inevitable, but neither is it simply invented, adopted, or imposed. It is, rather, a positioning which draws upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes, and repertoires of meaning, and emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle. (2000:151)

Li's analysis of cultural identities thus draws from Hall's interest in how cultural

identities "come from somewhere, have histories. But far from being eternally fixed in

some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture, and

power" (Hall 1990: 225). Although Li was referring above to a specific self-identification

as tribal or indigenous, this is a useful conception of identity that helps to illuminate the

work that the trashworkers' positioning does to give their labor value and legitimacy

through connecting with common sense, locally-rooted values. Like Li's, my analysis is

also attentive to how identity is produced through the spatial practices that constitute

political struggle.

Local Participatory Citizenship

As described in Chapter 3, because of the negative associations of the profession,

it took work for the youth of Set/Setal to transform the idea of trashwork in their own

minds—and in the views of their communities—into a job deserving respect. That battle

has yet to be won: every day, the trashworkers of Dakar face not only the hazards of their

working conditions, but also the disrespect of some members of the populations they

serve. While much improved from the Set/Setal days when neighborhoods and families

were purportedly shocked and disgusted by Dakarois in the profession, and aggression

towards workers was elevated, many still feel frustrated at the lack of respect accorded by

the population, as can be seen in this quote from a trash collector in Niari Tali who has

worked for almost 20 years in the sector:

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The people need to know that just because we work with trash doesn't mean they need to think of us as garbage cans! We are not garbage! We are just the same as all the men and women of this country! (Personal interview. July 4, 2007)

In an effort to valorize the profession, the union has launched a campaign over the

last couple of years to promote a new language within the sector, insisting that the regular

collectors and sweepers who make up the bulk of the sector's works be called "surface

technicians" (techniciens de surface) in lieu of the negatively associated terms eboueur

and balayeur for street sweepers and even the extremely derogatory term buujumaan.

The demand to have a title unmarred by the negative associations of the job goes hand in

hand with the union's demands for treatment of trashworkers as "full human beings" with

all the "normal" rights due to citizens and workers of the country.

One key discourse through which they assert the value of their work is thus their

role as active local citizens and environmental stewards. An important original

motivation behind Set/Setal had been the idea of youths taking local development and

environmental management into their own hands, in the context of what they saw as the

state's defection from duty (Diouf 1996). This idea has carried through as the

trashworkers make claims on the greater value of their work as an indispensible service to

their country and city—one that they do with passion and dignity, as seen in the quote

below from a trashworker in Gueule Tapee:

This profession has become a virus for us. I often say that if this country is going to develop, it will be thanks to us, its sons, and not thanks to foreigners. I have this conviction, this faith. Also, this work is very noble. Just as the military work to safeguard and protect the homeland, we are there to protect the population. (Personal interview, May 22, 2007)

176

Many, in fact, insist that they remain in the sector not for the pay—if it had been

for that they would have left it long ago—but out of a commitment to their communities

and their country. This argument forms the bedrock of today's union strategy as well. In

his communications to the members of his union and in his statements to the government

as well, Madany Sy repeatedly emphasizes his workers' commitment to Senegal and their

fundamental role in ensuring the wellbeing of the capital's citizens. For instance, in the

general assembly speech quoted at the beginning, he said this to the workers:

It's thanks to you all that Dakar is a nice city to visit, that the people don't fall ill. Do you know this? Do you know that thanks to you development is possible in this country? You play a major role in the [protection of the] environment. It is thus unacceptable that we are not taken into account. (SNTN General Assembly, April 27, 2007)

In cultivating an image of the trashworkers of Dakar as long-term providers—

even martyrs—for this respectable cause, Sy presents his union as modern and

progressive. Deploying a language of environmental protection, furthermore, allows him

to connect his movement to the larger legitimacy carried by such discourses. Set/Setal

was, in fact, considered by many participants and observers to be an "environmental"

movement—the founding moment of the city's environmental consciousness. Individual

workers and the union alike draw from their experience in Set/Setal and the

environmental services they provide the Dakar community today to legitimize the

profession and their labor demands. To this end, Sy and his union colleagues have also

been adroit at connecting with international labor movements and a narrative of workers

rights. Their relationship with labor activists in Italy, for instance, led to widespread

Italian press coverage in 2007 and even protests in Rome—the home base of the

company AMA, which had left Dakar trashworkers in such limbo when it lost its contract

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with the state of Senegal in 2006. These connections eventually led to a diplomatic

mission of the trashworkers' union to Rome in the summer of 2007, where they were

warmly received by Italian unionists and government officials. Although these

connections have fizzled a bit and the workers are still in legal limbo with AMA, these

connections no doubt helped the union frame its battle in legal terms, bolstered their

conviction of the immoral nature of their saga, informed the liquidation process with

AMA, and positioned the union as a formidable force to be taken seriously by the state.

Trashworkers' defense of their roles as active citizens and environmental stewards

is also deeply tied up with localized, place-based, and autochthonous identities that reach

back to Set/Setal. As mentioned earlier, the rooting of activists-then-trashworkers' labors

in their own, often tight-knit, neighborhoods had a powerful impact on both their

individual experiences of trashwork and of community reaction. Localized citizenship

claims are often deeply embedded in autochthonous claims of belonging that shape both

workers' identities and their mobilizations. This claim is consistent with recent

scholarship that points to the continued strength or resurgence of autochthonous claims of

belonging and resistance to "new-comers" {allogenes) in both rural and urban Africa

(Geschiere and Jackson 2006; Leonhardt 2006).130

In the transition from Set/Setal to the trash sector, the most important criterion

employed was the idea of being a true Dakarois—born and raised—in relation to those

recent migrants from the hinterland who were seen to be flooding the city and taking

increasingly elusive jobs. What is interesting here is the sudden claim on these trash jobs,

which had otherwise been happily left to the allogenes by the Dakarois. One of the key

results of this place-based, urban-as-autochthonous takeover of trash was the replacement

130 See the special issue on "Autochthony and Crisis of Citizenship" of the African Studies Review (2006).

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of what had been an ethnically homogenous labor force with a remarkably cosmopolitan

one, owing to Set/SetaVs roots in the local youth groups, which often united groups

across lines of social division. This feature allowed for the entrance of women for the

first time (as discussed in the next chapter) as well as a representative mix of youngsters

in terms of class, education, ethnicity, religion (including Sufi brotherhood), and

caste —demographics that hold today in the sector. It placed the majority of

trashworkers as their own neighborhood service providers, which has most certainly

helped to gain neighborhood support for the workers in their fight with the state. In two

neighborhoods where I interviewed households (HLM Fass and Yoff), many people knew

a trashworker (or were related to one) from whom they were informed about the current

scenario. This was particularly true in Yoff, which had its own special challenges and

dynamics, as described below.

While the Set/Setal criteria of being "of the neighborhood" brought together, in

most areas, a diverse group of youngsters, in Dakar's "traditional" neighborhoods, being

a local or an autochthon is defined ethnically. Drawing from the city's history—settled by

Lebou fisherman and progressively inundated by other ethnic groups from other areas of

the country—the so-called "traditional" villages, now neighborhoods, of Dakar are

defined as Lebou. These extremely tight-knit communities, which to this day retain an

extremely powerful local traditional governance system, have an intense associative

tradition.132 For this reason, they are often at the forefront of initiatives that involve

131 Although caste has been connected with wastework elsewhere, it was not found to be an issue in the Dakar trash sector. See Diouf (1981) for a discussion of caste in Wolof (Senegal's dominant ethnic group) society. 132 This idea of community solidarity in the Lebou neighborhoods is actively produced by the Lebou and others alike. As Chapter 6 describes, the idea was marshaled to justify choosing the Lebou districts for ENDA's pilot projects.

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community mobilization. During Set/Setal the Lebou neighborhoods were some of the

movement's forerunners, and youth from these neighborhoods were among its key

leaders. In the words of the trash unionist who manages the Lebou districts of Dakar in

explaining why Set/Setal took root so strongly in Yoff (a Lebou neighborhood):

You see with the Lebous, it's solidarity. It's an ethnic thing. The Lebous, the Sereers, the Diolas—these are the ethnic groups that love solidarity. So, you see, I came here saying I have a little project. How are we going to make it happen in the village? I went to speak with the elders. I presented them the problem and they said, that's interesting, take the youth and direct them.(Personal interview, May 12,2007)

When the city signed a contract with AGETIP to upgrade the Set/Setal activities

formally into the new trash system of Dakar, the Lebou commune of Yoff (not

accidentally the home of Mayor Diop) was chosen as the pilot test zone.134 According to

Issa Ndoye, the local coordinator of trash collection in Yoff who worked with Diop to

roll out the project, "Because they wanted to implicate the youth, it was necessary to

experiment the system with the Lebous. If it worked with them, everyone would do it!"135

On the other hand, it can be surmised that Yoff provided a convenient starting place for

Diop's efforts to reward those youth supporting him and his party, given his personal

connections there. The Set/Setal trash system was coordinated by the powerful

community association APECSY136 with great "success" that was then replicated in other

areas.

The implications of the particular dynamics in place in the Lebou communities for

the trashworkers' movement today are far-reaching. Like in other parts of the city, the

My master's thesis looked at community mobilization around ecological sanitation initiatives in the Lebou district of Yoff (Fredericks 2003). 134 Mamadou Diop is a Lebou and is now the mayor of Yoff. 135 Personal interview (November 16, 2007). 136 The Association for the Economic, Cultural, and Social Promotion of Yoff.

180

fact that these workers serve their own communities often contributes to the enhanced

cooperation of the populations in garbage collection. The gestion de proximite creates a

sort of intimacy and dialogue between the trashworkers and the populations they serve, a

dialogue that had never before existed and is even more pronounced in the extremely

tight-knit Lebou communities. The Yoff trashworkers interviewed felt that the fact that

they served their own small communities—though difficult at first—helps them to gain

the respect of the population and also inspires them to work harder in cleaning up their

own neighborhoods. When asked if his workers were respected, the Yoff manager stated,

But of course! Because these are their sons, their brothers, their husbands . . . because my personnel are all married and live here . . . and could one day in the future become the djaraf [Lebou traditional leader] or the mayor! (Personal interview, November 16, 2007)

Individual behavior is intensely circumscribed the Lebou neighborhoods, incentivizing

good behavior with regard to trash and trashworkers (see Chapter 6). Given that these

areas are often the most difficult to keep clean due to the lack of paved roads and

inaccessibility to vehicles (including trash trucks), this respect and compliance is no

doubt critically useful for the trashworkers. On the other hand, intense solidarity within

the communities served does complicate worker mobilizations, most notably in providing

a disincentive to strike. As a result, although most trashworkers are members of the

union, they were found to cut short their strikes in their own neighborhoods compared

with those neighborhoods where the workers have fewer connections with whom they

serve. A trashworker in Yoff provides an example:

It's very difficult [to strike in your own neighborhood] because when I strike and I pass by the market, I see the piles of garbage, and really that makes me feel bad!... Here we live like a family. If you go on strike, the people are going to challenge you. (Personal interview, November 27, 2007)

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These dynamics reveal the importance of the sedimented histories and social

relations that exist in specific places—individual neighborhoods in this case—in shaping

political identities. Participation in Yoff—from Set/Setal to the new trash system—gained

traction from the particular relevance of community management and autochthonous

claims for the Lebou. However, community solidarity was so strong there that it actually

deterred workers from striking. In other areas, the solidarity factor was less salient, and

greater challenges had to do with finding common understandings among diverse urban

communities. Regardless, these observations further corroborate Diouf's (1996)

contention that Set/Setal marked a break with a nationalist imaginary and ushered in the

space of the neighborhood as a key realm of identification and contestation, and that this

disjuncture has carried through in important ways to today. The Set/Setal-based trash

system is one example of how people in Dakar are more involved, in many respects, with

their neighborhood than they are with their nation.

The Priesthood of Trashworkers

Beyond their shared history, plight, and sense of belonging, the trashworkers of

Dakar are united by another bond: their common faith and conviction that the labor of

cleaning the city is a divine act. One of the most unanticipated but key themes that arose

in my discussions with trashworkers was idea of trashwork as God's work. Madany Sy,

the union leader, cemented the idea when he explained that they were like a "priesthood"

(sacerdoce) who were gaining credit in the eyes of God for the otherwise unrewarded

sweat they poured into this work. Although not the only religion emphasizing the

importance of cleanliness in pursuing the divine path, Islam is known for the particular

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importance given to cleanliness in body and spirit. The ablutions performed before

praying, including the washing of one's face, hands, and feet, are just one element of the

ways that cleanliness is fundamental to Islamic faith and practice. The emphasis on

physical cleanliness as signifier of spiritual cleanliness, moreover, does not stop at the

body but is also implicated in the domestic and public space. One's home should be kept

clean as a symbol of one's purity.

The meaning given to impurity and the act of cleaning in Islamic societies can be

seen to have multiple and complex implications. The cleaning of holy Muslim sites

(including mosques), for instance, is understood as an act of deep worship, as

demonstrated in the biannual ritual washing ceremony of the Kaaba (inner navel) of the

Grand Mosque in Mecca, by Saudi dignitaries. Yet, the act of purging everyday public

spaces of their dirt and garbage is one that comes with all of the usual negative

associations. Because wasteworkers may be associated with impurity in certain Muslim

settings, their work holds the potential to be stigmatized. Jo Beall's work in Pakistan, for

instance, shows how minority Christians retain a monopoly over street sweeping and

sanitation work because the career is considered so undesirable by Muslims (2006). Thus,

despite the fact that unemployment has forced some Muslims into the profession, overall,

Christians are able to use what is considered by others as their ritual pollution to gain an

economic advantage in the sector.

In Senegal, where the vast majority of workers, mirroring the Senegalese

population, are Muslim, many of the trashworkers describe their job today in terms of its

value as religious service. Looking back, this was an element of the motivations behind

137 See, for instance, the newspaper article discussing the cleaning of the Kabba on August 1, 2008 (Abu-nasr 2008).

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the Set/Setal movement itself—an element that has not been fully considered in the

literature. Although not an explicitly religious movement, connections between Set/Setal

and Islamic conceptions of purity are not hard to find, as discussed in Chapter 3.138 One

of the transformations implied by Set/Setal was an extension of the space of the spiritual

realm of influence beyond the body and the household. Even more explicitly, the

trashworkers union that grew from it emphasizes—through both a language of

environmental and religious responsibility—the cleanliness of not just the home, but also

of the street, the neighborhood, and the city. As such, they can be seen to be advancing a

sort of Islamic environmental ethic that makes their work gain stature and respectability.

Some of the trashworkers cite the importance of cleanliness in Islam as a key

personal reason that they originally became involved in Set/Setal and then the trash

sector. Today, however, as they face an uphill battle with the state, they emphasize their

religious service through trashwork as a key part of their identity as workers and a

platform for improved conditions. One trashworker from Medina proudly explained that

he had actually stopped wearing protective gris-gris139 in 1993 when he started in the

profession because he knew that he was already blessed by God for his work. His words

sum up what many of the trashworkers expressed as one of their central motivations:

I'm not the only one to think that this is a manner of practicing his religion. In the same way that people pray, we are also endeavoring along the Islamic pathway that preaches cleanliness, one of the precepts of the Islamic religion. Places of worship are ubiquitous in the street, so cleaning the street is a way of reinforcing one's faith. And even if we miss some prayers, we know that God blesses us for the work that we're doing because nothing is more noble and commendable than to clean. (Personal interview, May 22, 2007)

The urban da'iras—Mouride self-help and educational associations—have been known to have been involved in cleaning activities, among other forms of urban management. 139 Gris-gris are talismans often worn on the body to ward off evil spirits and bring good luck. Although originally derived from African religious practice, gris-gris are commonly used by Senegalese Muslims who incorporate them into their spiritual practice as Muslims.

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The notion that the work is noble and brings them closer to God was a common

response among trashworkers interviewed. In many ways, this worked to portray the

workers as martyrs, who suffer for the good of their community as devout Muslims,

despite poor conditions and treatment. This perspective is held, furthermore, by many of

the populations they serve—some of whom even commend the workers for their labors

and pray for them. Often the idea of destiny plays into these convictions, with

trashworkers explaining that they accept work in garbage because it is their destiny as

chosen by God. The head of the union, Madany Sy, was extremely forthright in his

conviction that the trashworkers are doing the work of God and that his mission, as their

leader, is a divine one. He states,

If I'm here [in the trash sector] to this day, it's because of my beliefs. Because they say that to be a true believer, a true Muslim, one must be clean. One must not be sullied; cleanliness is essential. Thus those who collect trash, those who collect the trash of the markets, hospitals, the households, they have a surplus with regard to God. They [trashworkers] are like a priesthood. It's like a divine mission that they are doing here . . . They say, "I do it for God,"—that's powerful! Even if the authorities don't pay us, God will help us, will pay u s . . . . When I tell some people that I work in trash, they say to me, that's not true. Today, everything that I have, I got it through trash. It's my bread and butter. I got married thanks to trash. I am well-known thanks to trash. I am respected thanks to trash. I have made a colossal contribution, thanks to trash. I have been a humanitarian because of trash. I sacrifice myself today so that people don't have to be contaminated by illnesses... . So, it's a very strong gauge of beliefs. If it weren't for the faith, if it weren't this religion, well, we would have quit long ago. But they say that sooner or later, God will pay us for our efforts because no effort is los t . . . . So, it's God that wanted this. We say that no one can escape his destiny. God allowed us today to do this job well because it's a priesthood. (Personal interview, July 10, 2008)

Sy's statement sums up and transforms with drama and flair the feeling of

bonding and sacrifice that unites the trashworkers and underlies their claims with the

government and the populations they serve. As a priesthood, their labor becomes a

calling: worth sticking with but also repudiating all negative associations and demanding

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the respect that would be accorded those working for a higher mission. This sentiment is

reminiscent of Gandhi's treatment of the Dalit caste in traditional Hindu society, which

has historically been associated with sanitary work. In 1930 Gandhi began to refer to the

Dalits as Harijans or "children of God" in a campaign to improve their status through

recognizing their common humanity under God (Prashad 2000). Similarly, instead of

attempting to remove the workers from the profession, he attempted to counteract its

negative associations by saying that instead of the lowest occupation, sanitary work was

"in fact the highest inasmuch as it protected health."140

As I elaborate in the next chapter, gender features deeply in the societal divisions

that structure the social history of trashlabor—and this can be seen to link up in important

ways with religion. In the course of my interviews, only male workers articulated their

work in religious terms—a fact that raises an interesting point about the gendered space

of religion and expressions of faith, as well as the gendering of stigma associated with the

profession.

5. Conclusions

This chapter has told the story of how a priesthood of garbageworkers was born

out of the ashes of a youth movement that aimed to purge Dakar of its literal and moral

filth. Rife with mixed blessings, this story lends insight into the legacy of youth politics

and the way that labor and activism gain meaning through specific, articulated,

positionings that build on local histories.

In response to Bayart's contention (1992) that youth were an unlikely

oppositional force (see Chapter 3), Donal Cruise O'Brien posed the youth question more

140 Harijan, 12 May 1946 (quoted in Prashad 2000: 112).

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recently and offered that "something of a counter-hegemony has materialized over the

1990s in the form of multi-party politics, the electoral displacement of incumbent

regimes in Senegal (2000/1) and Ghana (2001)" (2003). Youth—particularly urban

youth—were the key drivers behind the historic change of the political guard with

Alternance in Senegal, lending credence to this contention. However, while the role of

youth in Alternance is incontrovertible, and while the election of an opposition candidate

was a significant event, the view from a few years down the road shows Alternance to

have been much less revolutionary than was presumed. What we see in today's post-

Alternance period is, instead, widespread disillusionment with a long neoliberal age that

has become perhaps even less manageable under President Wade.

Paralleling the disillusionment experienced by students in the movement with

Alternance (Zeilig and Ansell 2008), a view from the trash sector reveals a profound

disappointment with the way the sector has been used politically and, consequently, a

turn away from big "P" (party) politics that secured trash jobs for those youth in the first

place. Having lived through Mayor Diop's antics and now suffering through Wade's

maneuverings—and in the process making absolutely no advances in job security—these

Dakarois are fed up with "politics." Most of my respondents, when asked what is wrong

with the sector, replied bluntly with some version of "II y a trop de politique dedans

[There is too much politics in it]."

This is not to say that the trashworkers are not challenging the rules of the game

or engaging with the state and political battles. They are, instead, steering clear of parties

and remain distrustful of politicians. To recall the Sy quote from the beginning of this

chapter, "The problem we have is with the politicians. A politician never says where he is

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going . . . They have been fooling us for years." Even in the course of the last three years

since it was thrown out in the cold with the rupture of AMA's contract, the union can be

seen to trust the government less and be increasingly ready to use its one key leverage

point—the general trash strike—with impunity. Since 2006, the trashworkers have

resorted to the strike more than in any other period in Senegalese national history. This

trend, which parallels the advancing rate and extent of mobilizations in other sectors,

raises some key questions for Senegalese citizenship in the wake of structural adjustment.

Mamadou Diop himself observed,

Before, they demonstrated, but not in a systematic way. Now, we have the impression that the people are liberated. With the Alternance regime, each time they are unhappy, they react and descend into the streets. They throw garbage, they block the roads! (Personal interview, July 17, 2007)

The "revolts" of the Dakarois will be taken up in Chapter 6, but I use this quotation to

emphasize that a certain independence—and impudence—has settled in, of late, the likes

of which have not been since the events leading up to Set/Setal.

This impudence and boldness does not come without an explicit goal. The trash

workers, as we have seen, are quite organized and have clear grievances. Their battle,

though, is explicitly situated outside the realm of party politics and grounded on another

plane: the moral and ethical foundations of Senegalese society. Precisely through

conjuring the memories, relationships, and historically sedimented meanings and values

that bind their communities together, the trashworkers have organized through religious

discourse and localized understandings of citizenship to validate their profession and

stake political claims. Turning around the very discourses through which they were

initially formalized into the service of trash collection and joining them with an Islamic

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environmental ethic, they offer a scathing critique of the state's delinquency in holding

up its side of the bargain implied in citizenship.

This research thus builds on a large body of scholarship showing how religious

identity has gained force with the failures of secular development and nationalism-

failures that reinforce to the continuing role of religion in anchoring disaffected,

marginalized postcolonial African populations. However, it should not be read as

indicating a reversal in the secularization of politics we have witnessed over the last

decades in Senegal (see Chapter 2). In fact, as I have described them, expressions of

religiosity in the trash sector are quite compatible with Xavier Audrain's observations of

the Dakarois' growing independence from religious advisors in the political sphere in

Senegal (2004). While Islam does inform trashworkers' politics, it is far from in the

conventional sense of instruction or obligation to support political parties. Trashworkers'

religiosity instead bolsters Michael Watts' observation, drawing from Gramsci, of some

of the "critical understandings" central to an oppositional culture that could emerge from

"Islamic modernities" to challenge dominant hegemonies (1996: 285). In contrast with

Mike Davis's (2006) portrayal of religion as a sort of opiate of the masses facing

structural adjustment and state withdrawal, Islam, in this instance, is precisely the

mechanism through which this savvy union movement is making direct claims on the

state. Whether this represents a sort of religious earthworks (See Gramsci 2000) in

opposition to party politics in Senegal is as yet unclear, but as a trend contesting Wade's

fragile hegemony, it is certainly significant.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Wearing the Pants: The Gendered Politics of Sweeping the Boulevards

1. Introduction

That day was one of my first days on the job. The mayor had brought in some trucks and we were doing the collection. I wore pants that day, so I could climb onto the truck. My family saw me leave the house and said, 'What...?' But I just left. That day I rode on the top of that truck all the way to Mbeubeuss. Was I scared? Yes, but I was also proud. (Personal interview, July 8, 2008)

This quote is from a female trashworker in Parcelles Assainies, recalling her

experience with the Set/Setal-based trash system. This woman was just one of hundreds

who, in the early 1990s, donned trousers and baseball caps and, in plain view of their

shocked families and friends, climbed onto garbage trucks in order to collect their

neighborhood trash. An integral element of Set/Setal, these women were transformed

alongside young male activists from voluntary neighborhood do-gooders into the city's

low-paid trash collection force. Fifteen years later, they represent some of the more

outspoken members of the trashworkers union. This chapter revisits the social history of

trashlabor over the neoliberal period through concentrating explicitly on the workings of

gender in that transition. Beginning with Set/Setal and tracing developments up to today's

union battle, it illuminates the contradictory openings provided by the mobilization and

reconfiguration of women's "traditional" roles and labors. Thus, through understanding

the way that the transformations in the social practice of waste management worked

through gendered bodies and imaginaries, this chapter lends insight into the gendered

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politics of labor in contemporary African development and the changing democratic

landscape of this African city.

The transition of women from a youth movement into Dakar's trash sector

appears to represent a paradoxical moment: it signaled their political emergence and

entrance into new spaces and roles, while, at the same time, further entrenching them into

dirty forms of labor built upon a naturalized connection to waste and impurity. As such, it

is a rich case through which to explore how gender articulates with political-economic

imperatives in the neoliberal transition. In particular, this paper will show how changes in

the character of urban labor following structural adjustment—most notably: flexibility,

the increased osmosis between the formal and informal, and the reign of an ethos of self-

help—work in and through gendered spaces and divisions of labor. It will reveal how

gendered discourses of waste—especially the view that waste is women's work—get

taken up to differentially burden (and reward) women and men with trashlabor over time.

Though this analysis documents an overall pattern of feminization in the sector—women

went from comprising zero to 30 percent of the sector's 1800 jobs141—it also shows how

this pattern was far from a linear, uncontested progression and the different meanings that

gender took in specific contexts. This discussion will illuminate how ideas of

participatory development play on and reconstituted gender inequalities and will connect

the feminization of trashlabor to the urban labor question and youth politics. Through

bringing the household and political economy into conversation, it thus shows how

gender has been a key axis of difference at play in the cultural politics of garbage and

141 Although the exact number is unavailable, according to the trashworkers' union, the total number of women in the trash sector just after Set/Setal was probably around 30%. Now, it is between 20-30% and rising, as explained later. The total number of trashworkers (sweepers and collectors) has ranged between 1200 to 1800 during this time.

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highlights the ambiguous openings provided by the neoliberal era and the deepening of

democracy that has accompanied it in Senegal.

2. Urban Restructuring and the Feminization of Trashlabor

The entrance of women into the official trash labor force must be contextualized

within the intense political and economic upheaval that was taking place in Senegal in the

late 1980s/early 1990s and its socio-political implications for women in Dakar. Through

reconstituting inequalities between men and women, structural adjustment is generally

recognized to have had particularly deleterious effects on women, especially in Africa

(Elson 1989, 1991). Faced with widespread male unemployment, diminished household

buying power, and the rising cost of living, women in Dakar felt increasing pressure to

look for income outside of the home. Due to the collapse of formal employment

combined with their inability to access most patronage resources and low levels of

education, as well as a general resistance amongst employers to hiring women, their

efforts were overwhelmingly concentrated in the informal economy. Where women were

able to break into shrinking formal job markets, it was often in the least desirable sectors

with extremely precarious labor conditions. The flexibility afforded by the informal

sector offered women the opportunity to supplement their household income while

continuing to perform their reproductive labors at home, thereby doubling, in many cases,

their labor burden (Callaway and Creevey 1994; Ndiaye 2008). In those few formal

sectors where women dominated the formal labor force—for example, the fish product

industry—women have been hit particularly hard by structural adjustment, both owing to

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those industries' particular sensitivity to liberalization and the inferior status of women's

labor (Niang 1997b: 227).

In many respects, urban restructuring in Senegal reflects global trends in the

feminization of labor: women entering the workforce en masse, but overwhelmingly

occupying the most precarious and exploitative labor positions and, thereby, acting as a

type of "subsidy" to production in neoliberal capitalism (e.g. Nagar et al. 2002; Roy

2003; Wright 2006). Gender is a key organizing principle of globalization and

development: over the last twenty years, we have seen both a rise in female labor force

participation as well as the proliferation of (feminized) low-end, contractual, exploitative

jobs filled by men and women (Standing 1999). Some scholars even argue that SAPs

worked precisely through exploiting what is seen as the elasticity of women's labor

power (Moser and Peake 1996). Extensive research illuminates, moreover, how such

processes of feminization have often been facilitated through gender stereotypes which

designate certain labors as "women's work."142 Feminist scholars draw our attention to

the household as the crucible of conflict and negotiation around the gendered division of

labor and its dialectical connection to larger political-economic configurations (Berry

1993; Carney and Watts 1990; Guyer 1981; Hart 1992; Moore 1992). In the African

context, gender and household-level social relations play especially key roles in

organizing access to and control over productive resources as well as divisions of labor

(Berry 1989). A key element of neoliberal globalization has been the harnessing of

women's unpaid labors at little or no compensation through a language of community

' The "nimble fingers" argument is perhaps the most well-known example of a biological argument for women and child labor in certain industries. See Leslie Salzinger for a provocative exploration of the construction of gender in the workplace in Mexico's global factories (2003); also Aihwa Ong (1987).

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responsibility and participation premised on constructions of women's traditional roles

and spheres.

In the case of waste management, research in diverse settings reveals that gender

stereotypes connecting women not only to nature but to dirt, disorder, and household

wastes, end up reserving the dirtiest tasks in the household—and the city—for women

(Ali 1998; Beall 1997, 2006; Miraftab 2004a, b; Samson 2003, 2007). Faranak Miraftab

(2004a; 2004b), for instance, argues that under the auspices of a neoliberal rhetoric of

"voluntarism" and "skill acquisition," women were mobilized in Cape Town as voluntary

"municipal housekeepers" in the poorest black townships. Similarly, Melanie Samson's

work in Johannesburg has shown how, through "exploiting African women's more

vulnerable position in the labour market," trends in waste management have reinscribed

apartheid era racial inequalities and disproportionately burdened women with trashlabor

(2007: 21). This literature raises serious concerns about the mobilization of gendered

waste discourses and the feminization of official and informal trashlabor under neoliberal

policies. Recalling Mary Douglas (1966) and the associations between waste and status,

in considering the feminization of trashwork, we must, thus, take into account the stigma

that is attached to those who work with waste—along multiple, articulated, axes of

difference144—and the very real possibility that the feminization of wastework may

enhance women's marginalization on a number of counts.

At the same time, in her exploration of the "power of the polluted," Mary Searle-

Chatterjee argues that for the sweepers of Benares, India, their "very lowness... gives

143 Vandana Shiva has long argued women's inherent connection to nature and their role as nature's custodians (1989). 144 As we saw in the last chapter, research in other areas has shown wastework to be importantly associated with religion and caste: street sweepers in Faisalabad, Pakistan, for instance, have traditionally been Christians and in India, waste-work has long been associated with caste (See Beall 1997; Prashad 2000).

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them a certain amount of power" (1979: 280). Telling a story of women sweepers

physically mauling taxi drivers that had offended them, she argues that precisely because

these women are unfettered by purity and status, they "have a strength which no other

category of women has" (1979: 282). These polluted women found ways of taking

advantage of high caste fears of contamination while at the same time taking immense

pride in their work—insisting on their toughness and honor. While these observations are

in no way meant to minimize the difficulties that might be faced by trashworkers, I draw

from this the key point of the potentially paradoxical implications of stigma and the need

to examine the workings of gender in specific historical conjunctures.

The analysis below will show that women's entrance into Dakar's trash sector

was indeed premised on their "traditional" connection to domestic trash management in

Senegal and brought about through—initially—a language of participatory citizenship

that accompanied neoliberal restructuring. As such, it raises a number of the concerns

flagged in the literature on the feminization of labor in the neoliberal period. However,

the route to feminization in the trash sector has been unstable and highly politicized, and

the case makes clear that the implications for workers are context-specific and more

complex that would be assumed. To flesh out these tensions, I will explore here the

articulations of political economy, gendered power relations and political identities in

specific moments in the social history of trashwork in Dakar that have framed divisions

of labor and their meaning for workers and their communities. This will illuminate the

particular political circumstances through which the feminization of trashlabor in Dakar

came about and was negotiated, the very different work that gender stereotypes

effectuated in different periods and their instability, and the ambiguous opening it

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provided for women to enter new—even radical—spaces and roles. The discussion will

explore, furthermore, how the gendered struggles over trashwork are produced and gain

meaning through spatial practice.

3. Women in Set/Setal and Dakar's New Trash System

Figure 5. 1. A cartoon depicting the Set/Setal youth movement. Note the participating woman, to the far left. The bubble reads: "It's the 'Set Setal' of Bad Memories!" (Reprinted, by permission, from ENDA (1991:56))

Stemming from its roots in neighborhood associations, Set/Setal brought together

a decentralized, cosmopolitan, and more or less demographically representative

community of youngsters. Though little recognized in the literature, young women were

active participants in the Set/Setal movement (see Figure 5.1). A neighborhood

phenomenon, young women left their houses on the days scheduled for clean-up events—

just like their brothers—and went to work improving the city. While not the majority in

leading Set/Setal, women were, nonetheless, amongst its leaders and organizers. Their

participation stemmed from two major factors: 1) women's increasing involvement in

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neighborhood management, whether through "female" sections of youth groups or

through their own associations (GIEs or GPFs ) and 2) their connection to the work of

cleaning in the home.

Sweeping, cleaning, and dealing with household wastes are key elements of

women's duties as managers of the domestic space in Senegal. Wastework in the home is,

thus, naturalized as intrinsically women's work. Within the sphere of household

wastes, furthermore, there exists a hierarchy of feminization, or a value-laden spectrum

of duties, some of which are associated with women more than others. Thus, each item in

the catalog of substances to be disposed of—from malodorous fish carcasses to human

excrement—has its own symbolic realm of meaning as well as its material challenges,

which combine in the social organization of waste work. Sanitation-related activities

(toilets and plumbing) are generally seen as less feminized while trash sorting and

disposal is the most feminized of waste work. Cutting across the gendered division of

waste labor in the home are differentiation according to marital status,148 age, and

ethnicity, with younger wives and girls generally responsible for transporting solid wastes

outside the home, and household maids or bonnes usually reserved the dirtiest and most

onerous waste duties. Waste management responsibilities and priorities are thus different

for each household member.149

For instance, the now "President of the Women" in the trashworkers union had been vice-president of the women's section of her neighborhood youth group, ASC Niari Tali. 146 Economic Interest Groups (GIEs) and Women's Interest Groups (GPFs). 147 Women's connection to ritual impurity through Islamic custom may reinforce their association with the cleaning duties, but this connection was not directly explored in this research. For a discussion of the South Asian context, see Jo Beall (1997). 148 Single women are of lower status than married women and older wives are considered higher in social rank than younger wives. 149 Chapter 6 will show how this impacted the community-based trash projects through shaping household members' willingness to pay the user fees.

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The task of household trash management in Dakar is a complicated challenge.

The hot weather, high percentage of organic matter (including fish and animal guts), and

lack of adequate storage facilities150 and space in most Dakar homes make keeping trash

from getting stinky and dangerous a tall order. The exacerbation of this challenge in the

face of the withdrawal of funding for public services with structural adjustment and the

failure of urban management systems to keep up with urbanization rates has certainly

been most heavily borne by women in Dakar households. For this reason, it is easy see

how young women were not only well-equipped to help with the cleaning of the

neighborhood but also that they were keenly motivated to be part of the solution to the

garbage crisis which precipitated Set/Setal (see Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2. A Set/Setal mural from the neighborhood HLM 4. Note the woman in the image, wearing pants and armed with a broom. (Reprinted, by permission, from ENDA (1991: 10))

Given the movement's emphasis on cleaning, moreover, many of the outreach and

education activities were aimed at women and improving household management

150 Most homes do not have trashcans because they are considered too expensive and it is assumed that they will inevitably be stolen.

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activities. The fact that young women participants were seen as the "cleaners" in their

households legitimized their place out and about cleaning with their male compatriots. As

Set/Setal began to be formalized, women were thus well situated to become integrated

into the trash system that was to be founded on the labors of the Set/Setal youth. The full

implications of that integration, however, require deeper analysis.

As we saw in the last chapter, the trashlabor switchout occurred precisely at the

political-economic conjuncture of Senegal's neoliberal transition, the rise of Set/Setal,

and the intense political competition of the 1990s. Urban youth had emerged in the late

1980s as a particularly powerful force to be reckoned with on the political stage and

women were emerging as a key constituency as well. Though there remained significant

barriers to women's participation and power in the political process, they had made

important headway in gaining visibility and representation by the early 1990s. Women

represented over 25 percent of national candidates for most political parties, and the

number of women elected to political office had increased at all levels of government

(Beck 2003: 153). Having been active in mobilizing political support since before

colonialism, in the context of increased electoral competition in the 1990s, women were

taking on more and more importance as voters and political activists rallying support

around male and female candidates (Beck 2003; Callaway and Creevey 1994; Creevey

1996). In addition to providing a forum for their entrepreneurial activities (Sarr 1998),

women's neighborhood associations—among the most "dynamic grassroots associations

that have emerged in Dakar" (Gellar 2005: 105)—had become, and remain—a

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particularly important forum for mobilizing voters and placing specific interests on the

political agenda.151

I argue that through funneling the early trash collection activities into political

rallies centered around neighborhood associations and by offering the trash jobs as a form

of political patronage, the Socialist Party aimed to transform women activists into

political clients. In the tense political climate of the time, tapping Set/Setal was a strategy

by Mayor Diop to empower the local state and foster support for his party—and gaining

support among women voters was part and parcel of this plan. Placing young women

alongside young men as the face of this public service conveyed a message of modernity

and opportunity to the urban residents and worked to rejuvenate the state's image in the

eyes of the Dakarois. Women, for their part, used the occasion to both seize onto rare

formal jobs as well as expand their sphere of political influence. Though some describe

the recruitment of women—and women's organizations—at these rallies as more for their

"applause"—and votes—than their leadership, in other areas, they were key leaders. In

certain neighborhoods, women's associations were the central body around which the

trash collecting activities were managed and their leaders the new sector's on-the-ground

coordinators. The Set/Setal based trash system thus enhanced women's visibility and

provided them with a direct entree to politics. In exchange for their participation in these

political rallies and in rallying voters for the Socialist Party, women received jobs in the

new trash system, a public forum for their activities, and access to the mayor's office

through CAMCUD. As part of the trash sector, women continued to be targeted for

specific—often seen as political—roles in the sector, as discussed below.

151 See also Amy Patterson (2002). Her work, however, demonstrates that despite the growing mobilization of women and some of the possibilities opened up by decentralization reforms, there are many blockages to women being equal participants in the political system in Senegal.

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4. Wearing the Pants: Gender and Trashwork in Dakar

The 1990s

Through the mayor's political strategy to enhance his power and image through

the trash sector, young women gained a foothold in a formal labor sector and began

occupying spaces and roles that were, in many ways, quite new. These new roles,

however, took work to come about, be legitimate, and were to change the sector and the

lives of workers forever. This section explores the specific experiences of men and

women in the first period of the new trash system and the gendered idioms through which

the new labor arrangements gained meaning.

In most zones, early on, women trashworkers did exactly the same tasks as the

men, including climbing, riding, and filling the trash trucks. One woman, Xadi Gning,

who has been active in the movement since the beginning and who is now one of the few

female Controllers in the sector (pictured in Figure 5.5), recounts how the system began

in her natal neighborhood in downtown Dakar:

I was young, but I had some kids behind me in the neighborhood. I noticed youth in other neighborhoods like Grand Yoff, Pikine doing Set/Setal so I took the initiative. I said to myself: now why can't we, the real 'city' dwellers do this too? I saw the 'daddy's girls' and 'daddy's boys' just sitting around at home and I said, no, I'm going to go door to door and ask these youth to come out. And so, we would spend the whole weekend doing the tour of the neighborhood. We mobilized 1000 or 1500 youth! We got together t-shirts, brooms, buckets, and eventually we got Mayor Mamadou Diop's attention and support. Why? Because as mayor, he was very happy. He had never seen this before in downtown Dakar. Eventually, I supervised a group of 10 women volunteers. Each time that piles of trash had built up or whenever there was a collection [event], they would show up... You could just see their love [for this work]. They wanted to be seen, that image of women on the trucks.. .they loved that image of themselves!... It was from this that [my colleague] volunteered to take these 10 women and do the collection of the Gueule Tapee [neighborhood]. That was in 1995, 1996, 1997, and women were the only ones doing the collection. They were so brave. The whole country came out to film them, to watch their reaction, but they were so calm. They were without concern... and afterwards, others came from other

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neighborhoods and said, 'Why can't we do that?' (Personal interview, December 5, 2007)

These particular women from Gueule Tapee, who were nicknamed by their colleagues

Les Amazones (the Amazons), were some of the pioneers of the Set/Setal movement and

its transition into organized trash collection. Their early work—and their nicknames—are

an important indicator of the unconventional gender roles implied by Set/Setal and the

new trash system.

The professionalization of the movement—and of women's labors—into a paid

activity was not a development that went unnoticed. As Oumar Cisse, the ex-head of the

Environment Commission of CAMCUD put it, getting involved in Set/Setal voluntarily

for women wasn't a problem: "But to work in trash, in the professional sense of the term,

that was more than radical! It was extraordinary to see women on the trash trucks and all

that!"152 This raises an important point: women's wearing the pants in the literal sense of

the word was not nearly so radical an activity as "wearing the pants" symbolically,

through getting paid (however little) by the state for those labors. Many women were

wearing trousers for the first time in public, a non-traditional style of female dress. This

enabled them to more easily conduct the work (especially mounting the trucks) but

could have been seen as unconventional at the time. The act of becoming a young

breadwinner with a formal job—often replacing that role for unemployed men in their

households—was, however, even more significant.

The women involved were fully cognizant of the radical nature of their new roles

and recall the experience with intense pride. Contrasting trashlabor with another form of

152 Personal interview (March 11, 2008). 153 At the beginning, the trucks were open top, not the rear-opening conventional trucks we associate with the job today. Women found that in order to climb and ride on these trucks, as well as do the sweeping, pants were often required.

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women's labor outside of the home—prostitution—they emphasized on countless

occasions the upstanding moral qualities of "earning their bread with the sweat of their

brow"154 and how much it meant to them to be able to work to support their families.

Wearing pants, baseball caps, and gloves, armed with shovels, rakes, whistles, and

whatever other scant materials could scrounge up, these women were, according to my

respondents, quite a sight to see out in the public space. The following account from a

trashworker in Parcelles Assainies, who was very involved in Set/Setal and eventually

became a manager in the trash sector, is illustrative:

At the beginning, people watched us and were surprised to see us working in the sector as women and exclaimed: "That one's a woman!" It's only because of my earrings that they recognized me because I would wear sunglasses, and a head wrap, then on top of it a baseball cap and all of that with the goal of protecting myself from the dust. With this outfit, it was difficult for people to distinguish the sex of the worker. Before, the men had a complex and were bothered about working in trash, but with the integration of women, that disappeared. Eventually, I felt proud when I climbed onto the trash collecting truck with my work clothes on. Even more than all of that, there was a sort of unity and complicity between us, the workers of Parcelles Assainies. We didn't have a complex about the work—that really was more of a problem for the men because they would avoid passing by places where they were known. (Personal interview, December 6, 2007)

What's interesting in this and other similar accounts is the fact that, in the beginning,

women were much less ashamed of working in trash publicly than men. As we saw in the

last chapter, a major feature of the new system was that most people worked in their own

neighborhoods, serving their own communities, which initially posed problems for the

male workers. Women, on the other hand, had no qualms—they were often the first to

climb onto the trucks and refused to hide their identities. Their participation, alongside

men, in the formalized trash system actually encouraged the men, through dampening

Female trashworker in Grand Yoff, personal interview (July 8, 2008). 203

their embarrassment and enhancing community acceptance, as can be seen in the

following trashworker's account (also from Parcelles Assainies):

At the beginning, we [women] were separated and placed as surveyors [on the ground]...Then after a while, we noticed that the people acted differently towards women and men [collectors]. We decided that it was necessary to put a woman in each truck as a security guard to do the collection with the men...Because if a woman who came to dump her garbage saw another woman in the truck, she would re-examine her behavior compared to how she would have acted with men. By this time male collectors were abused, tired. It was seen that integrating the women in the trucks was going to facilitate the work of the men. Thus we became security guards and went with the trucks to Mbeubeuss [dump]. (Personal interview, July 10, 2008)

Gendered subjectivities thus deeply shaped both trashworkers' experience of and their

communities' reactions to these new roles and spaces. This quote highlights how, in

particular, the gender of the collector could dramatically impact the behavior of her

fellow community members. Gendered relations scripted behavior at the important

interface between the private (domestic) waste management system and the public

(street) collection system. In terms of the gendered subjectivities of the collectors,

moreover, the unconcern on the part of women workers despite the radical aspects of

their doing this work and the differentiated respect accorded to workers by the citizens

they served, has to do with the gendered culture of trashwork and its status implications.

As mentioned earlier, household waste management is seen as women's work

and, thus, all of the associated stigma for dealing with this form of "dirt and disorder" or

"matter out of place" (Douglas 1966) is already attached to them. In contrast to these

urban young men, who had not previously borne the brunt of association with waste, for

women, the job was not a new or mysterious one. They dealt with household garbage

everyday, which immunized them from many of the stigma concerns of the work. In the

words of a male trash unionist in Niari Tali: 204

The people closest to this problem are women. These are the same women who sweep at home so they don't have any complexes about trash. A man who sweeps, well, that's rare. In general, it's women. It was difficult [to get the men to work] but we succeeded all the same in getting rid of their complexes to have them work in the system. Now each day there are people [including men] who come to see if they can work in the trash sector. (Personal interview, June 29, 2007)

This quote illustrates the complex articulations of status, class, and gender that lend

meaning to trashwork. For men, although their participation in the cleaning activities of

Set/Setal was legitimized because it was seen as an altruistic deed for their communities,

the implications of the work changed with its professionalization. Once they were paid,

they faced the stigma attached to being a trashworker—in all of its feminine and class

connotations. Despite the fact that they were often holding their first formal jobs and felt

pressure to contribute to the family income as well, young men often faced more of an

"identity crisis" in the early stages of their trashwork. For women, conversely, the

professionalization of Set/Setal actually enhanced their standing because of its lack of

gender differentiation—they did all of the same tasks as men did and got paid for them.

In this respect, their occupation of the same roles as men—and the relatively equal

consideration of their labor in relation to men's—can be seen to have masculinized

women's cleaning labor in the period following Set/Setal. The system acted as a platform

for women to occupy new roles as financial breadwinners—often for the first time—and

to extend their domain of influence into the public sphere.

As we saw in Chapter 4, one way that men have demanded respect for their

trashlabors has been their insistence on its spiritual value as a holy service of purifying

the city. In distinct contrast with women—who never explicitly made the connection

155 Sweeping {belayer in French and Wolof) is a term used in Senegal to describe general cleaning activities.

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between trashwork and Islamic service in my interviews—a large number of men overtly

defended the work's value on religious terms. I do not wish to presume that men valued

the spiritual import of the work more than women, but, rather, to explore the work that

this positionality—the value of publicly articulating the idea of trashwork as spiritual

service—did for one group over the other. As professional trash workers, these young

men's labor was feminized, whereas for women it increased in value. Changes to the

urban political economy, therefore, can be seen as challenging and renegotiating ideas of

both femininity and masculinity—as men were forced to reckon with their inability, in

many cases, to properly care for their families and had to deign to do work "beneath"

them, and women began to look outside the home to properly care for their families. This

helps to illuminate that gender identities always work in articulation with other identities

in shaping subjective experiences of (trash)work. When asked about their motivations for

joining the sector, while some women speak to this day of their "love" for the work and

desire to keep their communities clean—they are more often than not brutally candid

about the fact that they are in it for the money and other opportunities. For the vast

majority of these women, this was their very first opportunity to work outside the home,

and they deeply valued the possibility of contributing financially to household expenses.

Recent Developments: 2000-2008

Through the strange twist of fate which turned a social movement into an underpaid,

community-managed trash sector, women became key members of the trash sector in

Dakar in the early 1990s. Legitimated through their role as the managers of trash in the

home, they cracked what had been an all male sector and began to clean Dakar's

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boulevards. While many of these same women remain in the sector today, their place,

role, and rewards in the sector, have been far from static. An analysis of the last 15 years

shows that gendered discourses have in fact been some of the key lines around which

changes in the social history of trashlabor have turned—and in often surprising and non­

linear directions. Overall, a contradictory trend emerges: whereas the early Set/Setal-

based system actually played down gender differences—men and women (especially the

masculinized Amazones) did the same work156—women's positions in the waste sector

have more recently been targeted for differential treatment. This trend can be observed

with two developments: 1) as the official sector became more formalized and the jobs

more sought after; and 2) as voluntary, non-government organization (NGO)-initiated

community-based projects exploded on the scene at the end of the 1990s. Within the

former (official sector), the emphasis on gender difference has justified both the firing

and hiring of women at different times and places, and within the latter (NGO projects),

solely women have been solicited for voluntary neighborhood trash management. Both

will be briefly considered below.

The privatization of the sector when the state signed the twenty-five year contract

with AMA in 2001 made women's occupation of what were suddenly becoming more

sought-after and lucrative jobs a point of contention. With the arrival of AMA, the

trashlabor force was downsized and, though it is impossible to know exactly how many

might have been laid off, it is clear that, in certain instances, this prompted the firing of

women workers.157 In Yoff, for instance—where the labor force required by the new

company was half the previous staff (from around 60 to 30 employees)—the result was

156 With different implications for the men and women involved. 157 Some women also left voluntarily when they got married or had children.

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the complete lay off of all women workers (as well as some men). Curiously, the two

implicated (male) managers present quite different justifications for laying off women

workers. The zone manager explained that the women had been let go in the downsizing

because they were not main breadwinners, and, thus, that they had less rights to the jobs

than their male counterparts. The sector boss, on the other hand, had a very different

explanation as expressed in the following quote:

Before, there were a lot more of us. There were women. There were lots of women, even. Then, at a certain moment, they said they needed those on the trucks, the collectors, more than the sweepers. And the women were sweepers. We got rid of all the women because they weren't part of the collection crew. What's more, there were some women who were older... they were with the politicians. In general, it was they [the politicians] that sent them and all they could do was to sweep. At the moment when we had to get onto the trucks, we needed to shrink our numbers ...In this case, we needed to remove those that couldn't mount the trucks. Because at that time we were working with open-top trucks and women couldn't climb onto them. So, it was necessary to keep the youth. (Personal interview, November 23, 2007)

Thus we see three different justifications given for removing the women: that they

needed the jobs less than their male counterparts, that they had inferior physical abilities,

and that they were too "political." In an added twist, the sector boss mentioned that he'd

had to fire his own wife, admitting that she had been quite angry in reaction. Overall,

those women who lost their jobs still resent the fact that they were seen as a disposable

workforce, defending their hard work and length of commitment in the sector. Ironically,

it was the same women who had been the pioneer collectors in certain neighborhoods

who were later fired because they were seen as inappropriate for the job. Their firing

demonstrates the tensions faced as women's roles in the household and urban economy

were shifting in a society where men were traditionally seen as the heads of households

Personal interview (November 16, 2007). 208

and main breadwinners. What's more, a couple of the same women who were fired in

Yoff were then selected to be the voluntary waste managers in the NGO community-

based project that was launched a couple of months later in the same neighborhood.

Though I will discuss this more later and in the next chapter, this highlights the tensions

at stake here in the gendered valuation of labor. The final sentence of his statement,

furthermore, echoes an interesting theme prevalent in the literature on African youth

which came up often in this research: the definition of youth as male. As mentioned

earlier, depictions of the Set/Setal social movement almost always obscured women's key

roles in the movement. Similarly, here, the sharp delineation of youth as categorically

distinct from young women, raises a number of concerns for how we understand the

social categories of youth and gender—and their intersection. One must ask what is lost

in this categorization in considering the woman pictured below, who entered the trash

sector at age 17, when she took over the position of a deceased aunt in 2001.

Figure 5.3. A young woman trashworker from Niari Tali. (Source: author)

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In our interview, she at once insisted on just being just "one of the gang" with her male

colleagues while, at the same time, lamenting the fact that women were considered less

able-bodied than men and that her supervisors treated her differently as a woman.159

Women's role in the trash sector clearly represents an evolving debate which

raises a number of concerns about women's labor, domestic duties, and ideas of physical

difference. This underlines the important dialectical connection between household labor

and the political economy of work in Dakar. Even the trash union's Secretary General,

who is seen as a friend to women in many respects, while he praised his women workers

for the great work they do, is also quick to highlight that many women are not cut out for

the work:

.. .you know, this work is not really adapted to certain women. There are women, for instance, you see their physique, the pagne,160 who, well, can't do certain tasks. What's more, it's a dangerous job that demands lots of physical energy. It's true that we try to do everything so that at least these women don't get injured but... to tell the truth... this job is not suited for those women. Often, with the volume of work that they have it is difficult. How can you, for example, nurse your child if you're working? It is you who must cook at home. You go to the job in between but you don't even manage to do your job correctly. You have to take care of your husband, your children. You must take care of the needs of your family and at the same time as you still find volumes of work waiting for you. Thus, there's a problem...On the other hand, there are some women who really do not have anything to envy of the men. There are women who are really brave, resourceful, and who do extraordinary work. Because in their time, there were women who rode on the trucks.. .These were Les Amazones of the Gueule Tapee. (Personal interview, July 10, 2008)

What this insightful statement highlights is one of the key problems intrinsic to the

feminization of labor: that often women entering the formal labor market end up doubly

burdened as they continue to be responsible for all of the social reproductive activities at

home. Some women workers have no other option than to bring their babies with them to

Personal interview (June 15, 2007). The wrap-around skirt that is customary for Senegalese women to wear.

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the job—as many of the women who have remained in the system are now both the

primary breadwinners and still responsible for childcare, cooking, and cleaning duties.

The photo (Figure 5.4) below of a group of trashworkers on their break in Niari Tali is far

from unusual. Often, these women took turns watching the children while the other

women worked. Judged by their male peers for not performing the same quality work,

this has the potential to become a point of contention at the workplace.

Figure 5.4. Some of the trashworkers of the Niari Tali neighborhood, on their "lunch" break. Often these women had no money with which to buy food while they were on the job. Note the two children with them. (Source: author)

Although these women may be occupying the same position as men, the authority

relationships between men and women in the household are, moreover, most certainly

implicated at work. In addition to reports of a certain resentment directed towards them

for work allegedly done less well, women also have reported gendered discrimination for

minor infractions, promotions, and the like. What's interesting is the contrast between

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this insistence on gender difference today and the premise of gender equity seen in the

Set/Setal days. Gender became more of an issue, in other words, as the jobs became more

desirable. Not surprisingly, some of the most dramatic problems have come about for the

handful of women who are in actual positions of leadership, managing teams with men

and women. One sector manager I spoke with, who had been deeply implicated since the

beginning and widely praised by many for her commitment to the sector and its workers,

was fired in 2007 for speaking back to her male boss. Devastated by the loss and

struggling to support her family, she was still lobbying the union to help her try to get her

job back over a year later. Her story demonstrates women's difficult position as workers

and leaders occupying increasingly sought after jobs.

The privatization of trashwork after AIternance with AMA was, overall, a mixed

blessing for women. In some cases, being female worked in their favor and sometimes to

their disadvantage—illustrating the complexity of the workings of gender in this case.

During the AMA period (2002-2006), women seem to have fared quite well. Although

still a minority, more women achieved leadership positions and, in certain

neighborhoods, a cushy new post called Ambassadrice was created, for which women

were hired to "educate" communities about improved neighborhood management. Many

male trashworkers looked back at these well-paid positions with resentment—referring to

the women as Diriankes (a Wolof word emphasizing the women's large size) and

accusing them of just being useless, politicized posts. The favors women received during

this period stand in contrast with the starkly negative impacts of the privatization of trash

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management on women in other places and highlight the importance of the specific

political-historical context.161

The period since 2006 has posed new challenges. In addition to criticism that has

been leveled against Veolia's contract that I highlighted in Chapter 2, the company has

also come under criticism for its hiring practices. In addition to using a temp agency, and,

allegedly overworking its laborers, Veolia also now appears to be actively recruiting

young women in their districts—justified, in the opinions of some, because they are seen

as better workers and less likely to rock the boat. At the same time, much to the

consternation of the union, the company has also been firing workers—including

women—with abandon, and has put into place labor conditions that the union calls

exploitative and dangerous. The company's practice of night shifts for sweepers

(including women) came under so much fire from the union and other observers that in

some areas women have been taken off these shifts or the shifts have been changed

altogether.164 The pattern with Veolia appears to follow much more closely trends in the

feminization of labor elsewhere: the company is at least attempting to use gender in its

pursuit of more flexible, less accountable, and cheaper labor. As unprotected workers in

one of the city's most dangerous and risky sectors, all trashworkers suffer from today's

dire conditions, but the situation is perhaps most perilous for women, given the double

shift they work at home and in the street. They are also most certainly at a disadvantage

161 See the research on South Africa (Miraftab 2004b; Samson 2007). Samson's research in Johannesburg, for instance, showed that privatization of waste management has disproportionately burdened women wasteworkers through employing them as a voluntary or near voluntary labor force in poor areas. 162 Drawn from personal interviews from trashworkers and one of Veolia's collection managers. 163 The union alleges (and this is backed up by some interviews with Veolia workers) that workers are being made to work illegally long hours, are kept from taking breaks, and have been fired for such simple things as drinking water at work. 164 The union won its battle quite recently with the company in September of 2008 when it called a general strike across Dakar to protest the firing of workers for their participation in the union. The state intervened and the workers were hired back on (Nettali September 22, 2008 ).

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with regards to personal security concerns and problems connected to their inability to

access proper toilet facilities during the workday.165 While Veolia was not a central

object of this study, suffice it to say that the current moment of crisis and institutional

rearrangement in the trash sector is just the most recent chapter in the dynamic story of

gender and trashwork in Dakar.

Set/Setal introduced the fuzzy line between paid and voluntary trashlabors, but it

has continued in the years since. In the late 1990s, a number of Set/Setal inspired

community-based trash projects were initiated by an NGO in peripheral, difficult to

service, Dakar neighborhoods. Rooted in ideas of women's connection to trashlabor,

entrepreneurial spirit, and perceived skills as community managers, these projects were

centered on women's voluntary labor through a language of participatory citizenship. In

Yoff, as I mentioned above, where the project was intended to relieve the state's

collection responsibilities in notoriously inaccessible and dirty areas, two targeted

volunteers were ex-trashworkers (women) who were laid off when the zone was

downsized. Conveniently, it was when these women's entrepreneurial potential was no

longer desirable in the paid sector that it was touted in the voluntary sector. While I

discuss this project more fully in Chapter 6,1 highlight it now to show how gender

continues to be a key feature of negotiations around the social division of trashlabor, the

precedent set by Set/Setal for participatory trash management, and the very real

possibility for gender to be instrumentalized in exploitative labor arrangements. .

Many of my female respondents cited the lack of bathroom facilities during work as one of their greatest challenges.

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5. Gender and the Union

Most of the women surveyed in this research considered themselves members of

the main trashworkers' union, SNTN, and women generally had a strong presence in

union meetings. However, while the union has certainly made strides in women's

representation and participation, it is safe to say that it still reflects many of the

patriarchal values that exist in Senegalese society. Though there is a "Women's

President" on the executive board, who is in charge of "women's issues" and responsible

to women workers, and though, as seen in the quote by the General Secretary Madany Sy

above, there is a certain level of recognition of women's specific burdens, women's

contributions are not as welcome as men's in meetings, they are not amongst the key

decision makers, and women are not seen as worthy of men to hold these jobs. In two of

the General Assembly meetings I attended, women's attempts at taking the floor

precipitated heated exchanges in which they were told to sit and wait their turn. When

asked about the "Women's President," a female sector manager described her as someone

who used to be their outspoken advocate but who "stopped talking" once she was placed

in this post.16 When they did express themselves in union meetings, however, women

made some of the most powerful interventions and often called for more radical actions

to be taken by the union in negotiating with the state. Though an exact count of the

number of union representatives who are women was not available, over 25% of those

present at a union delegate meeting in 2007 were women.

Most women workers, however, did state that they considered the union to "not

have any problems" with regard to women.

166 Personal interview (December 6, 2007). 167 Personal survey of the SNTN representative meeting (November 24, 2007).

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Figure 5.5. Xadi Gning, Controller of the Grand Yoff Zone. Xadi was one of the founders of Set/Setal in downtown Dakar and is now an active delegate of the union.

Xadi Gning (quoted earlier, pictured in Figure 5.5), a Controller in the Grand Yoff Zone,

who is a union delegate, for instance, although she admitted that sometimes her co­

workers had been threatened by her in a leadership position, was extremely positive about

the union and insistent that it defended "everyone's" interest. When I asked her about

"women's interests," she went on:

No, there aren't any different interests. Maybe they say that the weak sex is the woman, but there really is no difference! Everyone has their own problems. If the union can solve a problem, it will solve it! But I see that most of the time, it's the men who have problems. Sincerely, if you did a survey of the union, you'll find that very few women have problems. (Personal interview, December 5, 2007)

As can be seen in this quote, it is important not to assume that women trashworkers in

Dakar primarily identify as women or that they wage politics on a gender platform. A

strong number of them, like Xadi, refused to admit that there were even "women's

issues" at stake. This may be a problem of definition, a weakness of the interview

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process, or may just represent the fact that these women don't frame their labor battle in

those terms. In fact, when asked if they felt they faced disproportionate strain as women

or if these jobs were particularly difficult for them, a majority of women responded that

no, in fact, the male collectors had it worse, since women were only sweepers now and

collecting (working on the truck) is seen as a harder and riskier job. Though this may

represent their rejection of any admission of their fragility or inferiority in order to guard

their right to be trashworkers, it may also simply indicate that they identify first as

workers, in unity with their colleagues, before they do as women. This resonates with

Maxine Molyneux's account of the subordination of women's interests for the common

cause in the context of the Nicaraguan Revolution (1985). It also echoes postcolonial

feminists' warning against a West-centric feminist reading which places "third world

women" disembodied from their cultural contexts and limited to their gender identity

(Mahmood 2005; Mohanty 1991; Spivak 1988). Rather than presuming the form and

direction of women's interests and agency, this study has been more concerned with

exploring how their gender identities may articulate with other identities to shape

political platforms.

Overall, the trashworkers' union is probably more conscious of women's issues

and accepting of women's leadership than many institutions in Senegal, simply deriving

from the fact that it is a young organization in which young men battled, from the

beginning, alongside their sisters, for respect and fair compensation. The difficulties

faced between men and women on the job and in the union emerge mainly when issues of

authority and preferences for hiring/firing become an issue, but amongst the ranks of

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uniformly paid sweepers and collectors, one can see a deep level of comradeship and

unity in the face of difficult conditions shared by all.

6. Conclusions

The last twenty years in Dakar have seen tremendous political-economic changes

and with them deep shifts in men's and women's roles in the family, the economy, and

politics. This chapter shows how the politics of garbage are constituted in and through

those dynamic gendered spaces and divisions of labor. As not only a fundamental public

service but a bastion of formal labor in an era of informality and a symbol of the

country's development, the social history of the trash sector thus helps to illuminate how

the neoliberal political-economic transition in Senegal gets battled out along gender lines.

Through examining gender roles within the household and their implication in

negotiations around the urban labor question in the wake of structural adjustment, we can

see that women's "traditional" connection to trashlabor provided cultural legitimacy to,

first, the participation of women in a youth movement oriented towards cleaning up the

city, then, their jobs as a key slice of the city's paid trashworkers, and finally, as the

central targets in voluntary community-based projects in certain neighborhoods. Some of

these trends—particularly the most recent developments—confirm the possibility that

discourses naturalizing gendered responsibility for dirty work can be deployed to further

entrench women into exploitative labor positions.

At the same time, this analysis also shows that the workings of gender in

development must be analyzed within specific historical contexts, and are unstable and

often full of contradiction. In certain respects, the story of gender and trash in Dakar

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challenges a narrative of the feminization of labor which paints it as an inevitable, uni­

directional process. The feminization of Dakar's trash sector came about through a very

specific set of circumstances—and their different meanings for different players—which

were immensely political. This history shows how women's connection to trash is

reconstituted in different settings and that, in fact, they may gain some political voice

within this strategic essentialism. This paper has aimed to tease out those tensions and

fractures—manifested in the spatial practices of trousered women climbing onto trash

trucks—through which embedded power structures have been destabilized and gendered

understandings reworked. As AbdouMaliq Simone has pointed out with regard to the

community-based trash project in Pikine district of Dakar, it was precisely because

women's involvement in garbage management went below the radar because trash is

women's work, that they were able to use these projects as "platforms for reaching the

larger world" and channel them to their economic advantage (2003). Similarly, women's

connection to trashlabor in the home allowed them to be key participants in a fairly

gender-radical movement (Set/Setal) through which they became active political subjects.

The trash case thus illustrates the complex implications of the deepening of democracy in

Senegal during this time, and women's rising importance as a political constituency.

Though their emergence as political clients isn't synonymous with the acquisition of

political power—in local, nor trash union politics—this is a significant development,

nonetheless, that needs to be located within the landscape of democratic politics in

Senegal. Women's involvement in Set/Setal, moreover, challenges the historic legacy of

Set/Setal as a male youth movement and raises some key questions for the where young

women fit into understandings of youth politics in Senegal and beyond.

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CHAPTER SIX

Participatory City?: Community, Citizenship, and Revolt in the Alternoos Era

The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, and their task of removing the residue of yesterday's existence is... like a ritual that inspires devotion, perhaps only because once things have been cast off nobody wants to have to think about them further.

—ItaloCalvino(1974: 114)

1. Introduction

On the morning of April 24, 2007, the central Dakar neighborhood of HLM Fass

was far too quiet. As household women went about their usual morning cleaning

activities, they were all too aware of the eerie absence of a sound that usually hastened

them along: the incessant honking of their neighborhood trash truck as it did the rounds,

emptying this dense neighborhood of its most dangerous product. It was day thirteen of

the trashworkers' strike, and while most of the Fassois were vaguely aware of the

conflict between the union and government from the frequent radio coverage of the

drama, this was no consolation for them as they tried to keep their homes clean and their

children safe. The smelly remains of the week—including fish guts and goat entrails,

plastic bags, and vegetable matter—were building up and overflowing in the piles, rice

sacs, and buckets used for trashcans in the otherwise run-down Dakar neighborhood. The

garbage cluttered courtyards, balconies, ditches, "gardens," and makeshift soccer fields—

stinking up homes and encumbering public meeting areas.

As introduced in Chapter 2, Alternoos is a play of words commonly used to critique the Alternance government's tendency to party (noos in Wolof, which has the connotation of "eating one's money") instead of working.

220

By sundown, a couple of neighborhood leaders were inspired to tell the

government that the problem had continued long enough. As midnight approached, the

idea spread like wildfire. Mothers, daughters, sons, and fathers alike left their homes that

balmy night and went about their tasks quickly and quietly, piling their refuse high in the

middle of the Dial Diop Boulevard they knew the politicians would be traveling the next

morning on their way downtown. As a targeted message to the local, communal mayor,

they also sculpted a special edifice of detritus directly in front of his dilapidated office in

the heart of HLM Fass. Just a few meters away from the capital's Independence obelisk

(see Figure 6.8), these garbage piles formed a different kind of monument—one that

commemorated what these residents saw as the government's neglect and even

repugnance at the well-being of its citizens.

Across the city, other neighborhoods did the same, ridding their homes of this dirt

and decay and depositing it anywhere they could in the public space. In Tonghor, where a

pilot participatory garbage collection project had long since disappeared, women and

girls' only recourse was to defy a community ordinance and dump their garbage on the

beach, where it would inevitably wash into the ocean and tangle their fishermen's nets.

Five years earlier, six neighborhood women had tirelessly collected their neighbors' trash

for next to no compensation as part of what was hailed as a cutting edge community-

based garbage collection system initiated by one of Senegal's most prestigious NGOs,

ENDA (Environmental Development Action in the Third World).169 Lasting less than a

year, the project had ended with a dramatic standoff between the community association

and the local commune that was eventually settled by the national government. The

169 The organization's name in French is: Environnement et Developpement du Tiers Monde. ENDA is an international non-profit organization founded in 1972 and based in Dakar.

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trajectory of that project was to foreshadow the demise of a wave of similar projects

initiated by ENDA in peripheral Dakar neighborhoods. Inspired by Set/Setal—which

ENDA had become keenly involved in scaling up in the early 1990s—these projects

represented the next chapter of participation in urban public services in Dakar.

Joining these two stories together—the trash revolts in a central Dakar

neighborhood (HLM Fass) and the participatory trash project in a peripheral, traditional

one (Tonghor)—this chapter delves into the community politics of garbage in Dakar's

recent history. It complements my examination of the political economy of trash in

Senegal and the battles surrounding official trash labor to explore the political

imagination of the Dakarois faced with the garbage crisis and their implication in

managing trash in the home and the space of the neighborhood. Building on the

contention from previous chapters that the space of the neighborhood has become an

increasingly privileged locus in the pursuit of cleanliness, I examine the implications of

the "community-based management of order and disorder" (Diouf 1997) and the

provocations of the Dakarois' citizen-like (or un-citizen-like) practices surrounding

garbage management.

Juxtaposing ethnographic evidence from both neighborhoods, I unearth the fabric

of claims revealed through discourses surrounding community trashwork. This analysis

reveals how images of community (Li 1996) are produced and activated through

interactions around garbage and how these turn on specific articulations of identity in

different contexts. Importantly, in the space of claims around trashwork, we see how

ideas of community interface with notions of authority and, thus, the key relations

between state and community implicated by participation. This knowledge deepens our

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endeavor to read the meaning behind the city's clean and dirty spaces, enabling us to

reflect on some larger questions about development and citizenship in this dirty moment

in Dakar.

A central element of this investigation is a reflection on what I have called the

osmosis between "informal" and "formal" trashwork ushered in with the neoliberal era in

Dakar.170 As in other locations, ideas of "participatory citizenship" have taken root since

the early 1990s in Dakar with a slew of CBO and NGO-based projects aimed at filling the

"gaps" left by the state with structural adjustment and, in the process, "empowering"

"entrepreneurial" citizens (See Gaye 1996). The management of garbage has been no

exception, and communities have organized themselves around and been organized into

differing strategies to cope with the garbage challenge. The two major NGOs that

intervene in urban environmental management in Dakar—ENDA and IAGU (The

African Institute for Urban Management^71—have both been involved in recruiting

community members into the management of their own waste.

Often reminiscent of the modernizing colonial era narratives referred to in

Chapter 1—while at the same time, drawing inspiration from Set/Setal—these initiatives

are centered on individual behavior modification and community mobilization. I look at

one example of ENDA's community-based trash management projects in Tonghor to

illuminate the project's conception, trajectory, and unique injection into larger

community dynamics with the goal of reflecting on debates over participation in

170 It was beyond the scope of this project to examine the multitude of other "informal" trash management activities that happens at the dump and in the city's impressive recycling network. 171 The organization's name in French is the lnstitut Africain de Gestion Urbaine. IAGU has intervened mainly on questions of medical waste and the city's dump, Mbeubeuss, and so was not considered in this study. It is useful to note, however, in considering the legacy of Set/Setal, that the Executive Secretary of IAGU (Oumar Cisse) was a key player in Set/Setal and then worked directly with the youth-based trash system as the head of the Environment Commission for the CUD.

223

community based development. This investigation involves a consideration of the links

between formal and informal trashlabor and deepens the understanding of the shifting

geography of responsibility and reward for these labors that has formed in the post-

Set/Setal neoliberal era. Central to this analysis is an inquiry into discourses and power

dynamics at play in the household and community and how these intersect with ideas of

cleanliness through associations made between different groups of people and waste. This

study reveals that a politics of difference has been central to the organization of

wastework in the home and neighborhood—in this case along gender, age, and

autochthonous lines of imagining community roles and responsibilities. I also show,

however, how participation has worked to position people differently in specific

neighborhoods and, importantly, in relation to the official trash sector.

After an exploration of the landscape of community and household politics

surrounding garbage in Tonghor, I examine in more detail the notion of the trash revolt

by exploring this phenomenon as it occurred in 2007 in HLM Fass. I seek to probe how

the act of intentionally creating disorder through the dumping of garbage in the public

space can be understood in relation to Set/Setal and later community-based trash projects'

attempts at ordering. Building on Mary Douglas' (1966) insistence (discussed in Chapter

1) on the creative possibilities contained in dirt out of place, this section explores the

productive moment of the trash revolt through an investigation of concerted dumping in

HLM Fass and the larger landscape of trash management in that neighborhood. These

intentional acts of disorder and disobedience are then discussed alongside the focus on

ideas of individual "behavior" {comportement) and responsibility that have come to the

fore during the trash crisis. In probing the symbolic import of these acts—as well as

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participating citizens' purported goals—I develop the notion of "rubbishing" as citizen

practice. These notions allow me to ask some larger questions of Alternoos and state

legitimacy and, more broadly, to return to my inquiry on neoliberal development in this

African city.

While I do draw from the experiences of two Dakar neighborhoods, the

comparison offered here is not intended to be conventional per se; rather, it is a

juxtaposition of two moments in Dakar's recent history: community-based garbage

management (Tonghor, 2002) and the trash revolts- (HLM Fass, 2007). These two

neighborhoods represent places where the community politics of garbage have been

particularly visible and in many cases volatile, and thus, provide relevant fodder for this

inquiry into today's trash crisis. Both have faced immense garbage challenges of late but

exhibit different responses and idioms through which these challenges are understood.

The two sites are otherwise not exceptional in the larger urban landscape. As one planned

and one traditional Lebou neighborhood, they represent two different types of

settlement—with the full richness of their garbage challenges—that together characterize

much of Dakar. Both are modest lower- to middle-class neighborhoods where many

families struggle to make ends meet, but they are by no means the poorest of the poor of

Dakar. The ways that these sites are different, moreover, provide further provocation for

my discussion of community as seen through garbage politics.

2. Two (Trashy) Dakar Neighborhoods

This section briefly introduces the two neighborhoods in which I explored the

household and neighborhood politics of trash. In the following section, I draw from the

225

experiences of both in discussing the politics of community and revolt in Dakar's current

garbage crisis.

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Tonghor, Yoff

Tonghor is a Lebou neighborhood in Dakar's Yoff Commune d'Arrondissement.

As mentioned earlier, the Lebou neighborhoods of Dakar represent some of the self-

proclaimed "traditional" Lebou fishing villages that have occupied the Cape Verde

peninsula for over 500 years but which are now absorbed into the rapidly growing capital

city (Sylla 1992; UNESCO 2000). I chose Tonghor because it is one of the Dakar

neighborhoods considered to have the most pressing garbage problems and was one of

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the neighborhoods chosen for ENDA's community-based waste management projects.

Tonghor is one of the original—and oldest—of Yoff's seven traditional neighborhoods.

As such, Tonghor experiences many of the classic issues faced by those neighborhoods in

the contemporary era of urban management. Tonghor's population was estimated at

6,891 of Yoff's 53,200 habitants in 2002 (Ndoye 2005: 36).172

Uniquely situated as the "original"173 inhabitants of the area, the Cape Verde

Lebou have a long tradition of both incorporation into municipal politics in Senegal as

well as autonomy and self-determination in the face of urban development.174 Proclaimed

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by themselves and others as a proud and traditional people, the Lebou in these

neighborhoods have retained an extremely insular, powerful, and complex customary

authority base. This traditional176 political organization—as well as a deep rooted

associational legacy—overlaps with the neighborhood Islamic leadership177 and

municipal authority with important effects.

Despite being officially incorporated into the Greater Dakar Municipality, the

Lebou neighborhoods are doubly disadvantaged in receiving Dakar-based public services

due to their location on the periphery of the city and their traditional village plan. Built

around the family concession and spatially limited in their expansion, these 172 In 2005 Yoff s population was estimated to be 57,000 inhabitants (Senegal et al. 2007: 163). 173 Because of their claim to land on the peninsula, the Lebou constituted a large percentage of the originaires of the first four urban areas of Senegal, the Quatres Communes (Diouf 1998). See Chapter 2 for more on the history of Dakar. 174 The Lebou actually declared their Republic, independent of French authority, in 1790. The Lebou Republic lasted until 1857, when the Cape Verde peninsula was annexed into the French colony (Sylla 1992). 175 The billboard on the highway announcing that you have entered Yoff describes it as a "traditional village." 1761 use "tradition" not to denote its static, unchanging nature—as it is clear that customary authority in Dakar has undergone distinct transformations in colonial and post-colonial period—but, rather, to engage the discourse of tradition employed by the Lebou and the historical roots of their contemporary neighborhood governance structures. 177 Many of the Lebou identify with the Layenne brotherhood, the smallest of the Sufi brotherhoods in Senegal, founded by Libasse Thiaw at the mosque in Yoff (now named after him) (Mbacke 2005).

227

neighborhoods are extremely dense and irregular, and most areas have only narrow,

sandy pedestrian paths (Figure 6.2).

Figure 6. 2. The narrow pedestrian paths inside Yoffs traditional neighborhoods. (Source: author)

Combined with a fierce politics of land and resistance to change by the local

customary authorities, these features pose a number of challenges to infrastructural

upgrading and waste management. Most areas within the traditional Lebou

neighborhoods are inaccessible to the municipal garbage collection services, and they are

among the least developed in terms of liquid sanitation infrastructure (Gaye 1996).

Whereas wastes previously were disposed of in "the bush" surrounding the villages, these

neighborhoods are now plagued with problems related to poor sanitation. The vast

majority of residents use individual sanitation systems, collecting solid and liquid wastes

and disposing them into the street, open drains, or the beach. Piles of trash build up in

these areas, and inadequate sanitation systems overflow when it rains, endangering

human and environmental health (Abdoul 2002; Gaye and Diallo 1997). Declining fish

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stocks—attributed by many to pollution from the beaches and overfishing by commercial

trawlers—contributes to insecurity in what is a progressively less viable economic base.

Tonghor was founded in .1613 by a Lebou named Gaal Diagne (SIP). As Figure

6.3 shows, it is a highly constrained neighborhood, bordered on two sides by other

neighborhoods, by the highway to the south, and by the ocean to the north.

Figure 6.3.The Seven Traditional Neighborhoods of Yoff. (Author's map, with satellite photo (2005) courtesy Direction du CADASTRE, Republique du Senegal). Note the airport runway (bottom left).

Due to the large family size and the age of the settlement, family concessions are densely

populated—with upwards of 30 to 40 relatives living in one family structure of multiple

buildings generally arranged around a common courtyard. Most of the residents of

Tonghor are Lebou, though newcomers (allogenes) are moving into the area, as they are

in all of the Lebou neighborhoods. A long-term population of waa Geej Ndar,° who are

fisherman of the Sereer ethnicity, have relocated to Yoff from Saint Louis for the fishing

industry. Unlike most Lebou, who own their own property, most of the waa Geej Ndar do

H8 «^yaa Qeej Ndar" translates directly from the Wolof as "people from the Saint Louis sea." 229

not own land, and they often live in even more cramped, irregular habitations near the

water. The waa Geej Ndar are generally understood to be the poorest, least educated

members of the population and, as I discuss below, they are still often seen as outsiders,

despite being in Yoff for generations in many cases.179

Lebou neighborhoods have been the main sites of a wave of participatory waste

management projects spearheaded by ENDA in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In

addition to Tonghor, the other sites were Thiaroye-sur-Mer in Pikine and two projects in

Rufisque, much farther out in the periphery of the city. The attention to waste

management in these projects was premised on an understanding of the nefarious impacts

on human health of poor sanitation. Gaye and Diallo reported that, before the project in

Rufisque began (which was aimed at liquid and solid sanitation), 75 percent of patients

treated at a local dispensary suffered from diarrhea, dysentery, or skin diseases—illnesses

directly attributed to inadequate sanitation and hygiene (1997: 13). ENDA's community-

based sanitation projects have been a central thrust of the organization's activities to

improve Dakar's urban environment and have earned them some notoriety in

international development circles.

Tonghor, in particular, has long had one of the worst garbage problems in Yoff

(Ndoye 2005). A study conducted in 1997 as a baseline for the community-based trash

project estimated that 60 percent of Tonghor households disposed of their garbage on the

Very little is written about the waa Geej Ndar, and it is not known how many currently live in Yoff. This is further complicated by their intermarriage with the Lebou. In any case, the waa Geej Ndar are the largest ethnic minority in Tonghor, and a very rough estimate would put them at least 10 percent of the population. 180 ENDA's community-based sanitation projects have been celebrated in UNESCO's Best Practices for Human Settlements, as a case study for the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex, and in the widely-circulating article by Gaye and Diallo (1997), among other international fora.

230

ground or by burying it; over half of these discarded their garbage on the beach or in the

ocean (Zeitlin and Diouf 1998: 4). The following photos are from the beach in Tonghor.

Figure 6.4. A view of one of the major dump spots on Tonghor's beach, with my back to the ocean. On this day in 2005, the youth were holding a mini clean-up event to remove some of the trash. (Source: author)

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Figure 6.5. A view toward the ocean from the Tonghor beach in 2007. Note the young woman on the left who has most likely come to dump whatever waste or waste water was in her bucket. (Source: author)

231

In the same survey, the vast majority of garbage disposal outside of the home was

conducted by young women (76%), older women (9%), household maids (18%), and

boys (2%). A major challenge to the neighborhood is the distance from most households

to the paved road where the city's trash truck passes to collect garbage. The sandy roads

in the interior are often impassable for these vehicles, so most households have to walk

some distance to the road when they hear the honking of the trash truck.

In response to the neighborhood's particular sanitation challenges, ENDA

launched a community-based trash and liquid sanitation project in Tonghor in 2001 in

collaboration with the neighborhood's main CBO, the Tonghor Management Committee

(CGT).181 Seed funding would come from French and Canadian development funds, and

the project was to be maintained through a revolving savings fund based on household

contributions (a user fee). Senegal's national Sanitation Agency (ONAS), the local

government (Commune d'Arrondissement de Yoff), and Yoff's main community

association (APECSY182) were official (non-contributing) partners in the project. The

liquid component of the pilot project involved the implementation of small-scale (off-

grid) sanitation stations for individual households and an experimental multi-family eco-

sanitation station. The solid waste component of the project targeted all Tonghor

households183 (ENDA 1999) and involved a door-to-door horse-drawn cart "pre-

collection" system that would (in principle) connect with the city's trash system. The

The committee was formalized in the 1990s but is considered to have existed for a long time before that. 182 Association pour la Promotion Social, Economique et Culturelle de yojff (Association for the Social, Economic, and Cultural Promotion of Yoff). 183 For a target population of more than 6000 residents.

232

goals of the horse-cart system were to reduce dumping in public areas and to relieve the

burden on neighborhood women in their struggle to manage garbage.

The project feasibility study performed by APECSY for ENDA emphasized that

the participation of the local population was key to the project's philosophy and

execution (ENDA 1999). The CGT was the main player at the neighborhood level. A

pilot committee was created within the CGT to work exclusively on the project, and a

young male (mid-thirties) member of the CGT was made its volunteer coordinator. The

most important community participation was the six women chosen as "animators"

(animatrices) of the project. In particular, these women were chosen as the liaison

between the households and the three (male) horse-cart drivers, who were hired on at

30,000 CFA/month (~$60) for their labors.185 Originally completely volunteer, and then

receiving a small "token"186 of 15,000 CFA for their efforts, two animatrices

accompanied a horse-cart driver each morning on the collection rounds. Signaling to the

households that the cart had arrived, the women then solicited each household's financial

contribution (1000 CFA/month) and loaded the garbage onto the cart. They also were part

of community outreach, in which the CGT tried to educate (sensibilizer) neighborhood

women on how to properly store and separate garbage, as well as how to interface with

the collection. See Figure 6.6, below.

Drawn from the feasibility study (ENDA 1999; Zeitlin and Diouf 1998) and interviews with project managers. 185 Though not originally from Yoff (and not Lebou), the horse-cart operators were locally based men who owned their own horse carts. Because of historical associations between the Sereer and draught animals, the vast majority of horse-cart operators in Senegal are Sereer. 186 This is the language used by the project coordinators.

233

Figure 6.6. The mural on the wall of the eco-sanitation station in Tonghor. These were intended to educate neighborhood women on proper waste management behavior as part of the ENDA project. (Source: author)

The animatrices were all Lebou residents from Tonghor chosen because they were seen

to be motivated, well-respected, "needy," and intimate with many of the people they were

serving.187 The difficulty of the task meant that these women and the horse-cart drivers

often ended up spending more than half of each day doing the collection (8 a.m. to 2

p.m.). In the beginning, they did the rounds every day, but they eventually reduced their

labors to four days per week to lessen the burden. The collected trash was separated by

community members who were paid a small fee and sent on to a composting station

(organics) or a "transfer station" (non-organics) before the latter was, theoretically, to be

delivered to the dump by AMA trucks.

Both the liquid and solid aspects of the Tonghor project were short-lived.

Although my research was focused on the solid waste part of the project, it is important

187 Personal interview with CGT coordinator (November 8, 2007). 234

to note that the liquid sanitation side also did not go as planned. The eco-sanitation

station was built (see Figure 6.6), but only a small proportion of households were

connected to it. Running for at most 12 months, the door-to-door trash collection project

had ceased to function by 2003. A number of problems were cited: the households'

refusal to pay the small fee demanded,188 the overexploitation of the horses (whom the

cart operators used for other tasks after their trash duties were over), and a major problem

regarding the transfer station. In short, the composting station never worked as planned

and organic and non-organic garbage was dumped on the edge of Yoff, near Dakar's

airport (see Figure 6.3). The birds that were attracted to the rotting garbage pile began to

pose a hazard to the airplanes and an order by the Aviation Administration (ASECNA)

delivered the project's final blow.

Since the ENDA project ended, Tonghor communities have struggled to manage

their garbage. The official trash management system —which, as we will see, was

sidelined during this project—has attempted to improve its routes to better penetrate the

inaccessible neighborhoods. Through various one-off events, the neighborhood youth and

women periodically clean the trash-clogged beaches (see Figure 6.4).

HLM Fass

The neighborhood of HLM Fass in the Fass, Colobane, Gueule Tapee Commune

d'Arrondissement of represents a contrasting type of settlement in Dakar, with a very

different history from that of Yoff. A planned neighborhood in central Dakar, HLM Fass

188 Interestingly enough, in the feasibility study conducted by ENDA, while 93 percent of Tonghor respondents were interested in participating in the project, only 43 percent said that they would be willing to contribute financially to the project (ENDA 1999). 189 Since AMA's departure in 2006, trash management in Yoff is now run by the sub-contractor Deco Art Proprete (DAP).

235

was constructed in 1968 as part of an urban upgrading scheme intended to create

affordable housing for Dakar functionaries. Fass,190 the larger area in which it is located,

had been irregularly settled for some time. Unlike the neighboring Gueule Tapee

neighborhood, which originally consisted of Lebou fishing villages, Fass was described

in Assane Seck's tome on Dakar in the 1960s as "a veritable squatter neighborhood,

without roads and without lighting" that was full of migrants from the hinterlands as well

as people overflowing from the Medina (1970: 165).

As Seek was writing his important work on Dakar, plans for Fass and for the

greater Grand Medina zone of which it was a part were well underway. The Affordable

Housing {Habitations a Loyer Modere) (HLM) component of Fass was constructed in

1968 as just one wave of evictions and slum upgrade schemes marking the twentieth

century in Dakar. As Fatou Sow mentions, "The whole history of Dakar's growth is

intermingled with that of the successive episodes of pushing back and evicting people

that left a mark on it" (Sow 1983: 47, quoting Sow (1980)). First, the "indigenous"

populations had been kicked out of downtown Dakar (Plateau) with the creation of the

Medina in 1915, under the pretext of the bubonic plague epidemic that hit Dakar

(Echenberg 2002). The first master plan for city of Dakar in 1946 then provided the

impetus to continue the evacuations and "upgrades" towards zones of extension reaching

farther and farther out of the Cape Verde peninsula.

It is generally accepted that Fass was named after Fez, Morocco by Tijani inhabitants. Today, there are seven neighborhoods in Fass: Fass Casiers, Fass Delorme, Fass Paillote, Fass Batiment, HLM Fass, Fass Louveau, and Fass Marigot.

236

HLM Fass was just one of the affordable housing neighborhoods constructed in

the 1960s by Senegal's Office for Affordable Housing (OHLM).191 Patterned after the

French public housing agency of the same name and aimed at accommodating rapid

population growth in the major cities, the OHLM, created in 1959, was meant to house

"Senegalese workers with modest incomes" (Diop 1983: 131). It followed on the model

of the SICAP (the Real Estate Company of Cape Verde (Societe Immobiliere du Cap-

Vert)), which was founded in 1951 by the French. Whereas the SICAP had built only

small, low density villas in Grand Dakar, the OHLM aimed to provide different types of

housing that were more accessible to a wider range of Dakar workers. The OHLM

functioned as a public agency until 1987, when it became the National Affordable

Housing Corporation (la Societe Nationale des Habitations a Loyer Modere)

(SNHLM).192 The vast majority of its construction projects have been located in Dakar.

As part of the "Renovation of the Medina" or "Operation Medina," some of the

burgeoning populations of the Medina and the Gueule Tapee were relocated into HLM

Fass in an effort to move them out into a more intensively planned periphery.

191 Ordinance 59-026 on March 18, 1959 created a Commissariat for Urbanism and Habitat {Commissariat a I'Urbanisme et a I'Habitat) of which the OHLM was a part. 192 By law 87-046 on December 28, 1987.

237

Figure 6.7. The Original Plan for the HLM Fass neighborhood. (Courtesy SNHLM)

Although the HLMs were at first out of reach for most people except the petty

bourgeoisie, in the 1970s the projects were made more accessible to a larger population

of Dakarois—including HLM Fass. After the upgrading of the Grand Medina and Grand

Dakar came the Parcelles Assainies (Improved Parcels of Land) projects, which were

aimed at those Dakar workers without access to the HLM and SICAP housing. In

contemporary Dakar, HLM Fass appears central, and the city's periphery lies in Pikine,

Guediawaye, and Rufisque.

The land for HLM Fass was officially bought by the OHLM on July 21, 1964

from the French governor Jean Lureau.193 Construction began in the late 1960s and was

finished in the 1970s. Around 350 habitations were constructed of mixed housing (see

Figure 6.7), including some apartments in multi-unit high-rise buildings (see Figure 6.9)

and some smaller buildings and one-level homes. HLM Fass began as an extremely

diverse neighborhood demographically and has continued along that route to today: it is

193 OHLM property title dated July 21, 1964. 238

home to Christians and Muslims as well as an impressive mix of most of Senegal's ethnic

groups. Like in many of the planned neighborhoods of Dakar, the eventual uses of the

neighborhood have confounded original plans and expectations.

Figure 6.8. Map of HLM Fass (outlined in black). (Author's map, with satellite photo (2005) courtesy Direction du CADASTRE, Republique du Senegal)

Although HLM Fass was originally planned to house functionaries in Dakar, with the

collapse of state employment in the 1970s and 1980s, the vast majority of HLM Fassois

were not salaried workers. HLM Fass is today seen as a bit of a run-down neighborhood,

full of dilapidated buildings and struggling families. Many residents are renters, and the

mainly three room apartments (salon, two bedrooms, kitchen) are now home to extended

families who cope in extremely cramped quarters. Although the neighborhood is centrally

located in Dakar, residents find a way to raise livestock in public spaces and even on

239

balconies (see Figure 6.9). An estimated 4000 people lived in HLM Fass, out of the

58,810 residents estimated to live in the Fass, Colobane, Gueule Tapee Commune

d'Arrondissement in 2005 (Senegal et al. 2007).

Figure 6.9. One of the main high-rise buildings in HLM Fass, photographed in 2007. Note the livestock. (Source: author).

There is a strong camaraderie among many of the residents of HLM Fass despite

their diverse backgrounds. Though there are many new residents who rent apartments,

many of the people who moved there initially remain, and many members of the younger

generations were born there. Although less organized than Tonghor, HLM Fass is host to

a number of community associations that attempt to intervene in neighborhood affairs

and improve the well-being of the Fassois. Although the neighborhood is attached to the

city's sewer system, sanitation still poses enormous problems, many of which are central

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features of community organizing. Fass' main community-based association, the

Association for the Well-Being of the Fass Populations (Association pour le Bien Etre

des populations de Fass), was founded in 1999 by local residents concerned about the

local sewer canal, Canal IV, that forms the northern border of the neighborhood.194 One

of the city's major open sewer canals and renowned for its odor and unsightliness, Canal

IV was clogged with garbage and a breeding ground for mosquitoes by the end of the

1990s. Around 2000, the association's efforts to improve it through petitioning the

government succeeded. After a visit from Mayor Mamadou Diop, the canal was paved

and unclogged, temporarily relieving the situation dramatically. The Fass CBO continues

to work on concerns related to sanitation, in addition to education, computer literacy, and

other community-building endeavors. It also partners periodically with the youth

association, ASC Fass, to conduct clean-up events patterned after Set/Setal (Figure 6.10).

Figure 6.10. A "Set/Setal" event put on by the main CBO and ASC in HLM Fass, June 2007. Note the strong participation of young women. (Source: author)

Personal interview with the General Secretary, Ibrahima Senghor (August 28, 2007). 241

In 2007 two HLM Fass CBOs were chosen to be the lead players in the rollout of

a pilot "Eco-quartier" (Eco-neighborhood) initiative that was intended to engage the

populations of Fass in improving the local environment, especially household garbage

management. Although the neighborhood is much more easily accessed by the trash

trucks than Tonghor because of HLM Fass' grid layout and paved roads, it is not without

garbage challenges. An extremely dense neighborhood with relatively little public space,

HLM Fass confronts all of the conditions faced by most Dakar neighborhoods when the

trash system becomes paralyzed, with little recourse. As the initiators of the trash revolts

in 2007, HLM Fass residents have been among the most visible in reacting to those

conditions.

3. Producing Participation in the Space of Trash

In this section, I draw from observations in Tonghor to consider the participatory

aspect of waste management. To accomplish that, the fluidity between labors officially

deemed formal waste management and those community-based initiatives that have

flourished since Set/Setal must be contextualized within the constellation of ideas

surrounding community-based development and participation that have come to the fore

with the rise of neoliberalism as a development paradigm. Community-based waste

management projects fit squarely within the "revisionist" neoliberal discourse (Mohan

and Stokke 2000) governing contemporary development policy in Africa and claiming to

enhance service delivery and local democracy by empowering the most marginalized,

especially women (WorldBank 1989). Urban community groups are often hailed as the

solution to urban problems for their potential to enhance operational performance and as

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a democratizing force challenging authoritarianism and stimulating new forms of

inclusive citizenship (Tostensten et al. 2001; UNCHS 1996). This discourse of

participation, however, has been met with a strong scholarly critique that raises key

questions about the impacts and implications of community-based development as

potentially "the new tyranny" of market-based strategies aimed at rolling back the state

and exploiting the poor (Cooke and Kothari 2001; Hickey and Mohan 2004). Scholars

have exploded the idea of NGOs as an independent "third sector" operating outside of the

state and raise serious questions about their accountability, sustainability, and apolitical

status, and about their implication in advancing neoliberal capitalism (Harriss 2001;

Rakodi 2002; Uphoff 1996).

The idea of participatory or community-based development, moreover, raises a

number of questions about how ideas of community are constructed and, in particular, the

ideas surrounding "culture" they are premised upon. Watts reminds us that the "meteoric

rise" of social capital theory in the mold of Robert Putnam (1993), which has acted as

neoliberal development's "big bang" (Watts 2006: 35, quoting Harriss 2002: 75), has

represented a sort of cultural revolution in development discourse and practice (Watts

2006: 35-39). This cultural revolution and its obsession with community have closely

accompanied a reformulation and re-spatialization of the state. "It is through the political

objectification and instrumentalization of this community and its 'culture' that

government is to be re-invented" (Rose 1999: 172-173). In this paradigm, norms, values,

and associations are constructed as the property of communities and, in turn, as central

and desirable features in the interest of a development project beyond the state. More

specifically, we see that,

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Pre-existing communities must be enabled and enhanced in their institutional capacities in order that they can assume responsibility for their own self-improvement by tapping market power, conducting themselves in a competitive arena, and acting in a calculated manner. (Watts 2006: 44)

Critical scholarship on participation reveals how the identification of such pre-existing

communities often naturalizes their boundaries and obscures their internal power

relations. Conceptualizations of communities as undifferentiated "sites of consensus and

sustainability" (Li 1996) can, instead, hide social divisions that structure different

community members' relationships to the economy and ignore interactions among

communities (See also Cleaver 1999). Furthermore, as we saw in the last chapter, notions

of empowerment connected to community development are often revealed to be quite

slippery—conflating the fact of participation with empowerment, without considering the

specific cultural context (Mohan and Stokke 2000).

The ascendance of community in urban management also raises a number of

questions about how we understand labor and its differential rewards. Looking at the way

"formal" and "community-based" trash management are, in fact, co-constituted, we can

see how community-based development is premised on tapping and reconfiguring

relations of social reproduction. As we saw in the last chapter, discourses around waste

are explicitly gendered in Senegal, which has deeply informed the social history of

formal or "official" trash labor. Similarly—and interconnected with those

developments—community-based trash management has been bound up with gendered

social relations and the organization of household labor. Community-based trash projects

in Dakar have explicitly deployed gendered discourses that construct trashwork as

women's work in targeting women as key project "participants." I am here interested in

widening the purview of what is considered trashlabor to uncover all of the labor that

244

goes into managing garbage in the home as part of the processes of social reproduction.

This helps to illuminate the interconnection between household and neighborhood-based

community trash management.

It is widely understood that the categorical distinction between the realms of

production and reproduction determine the nature and value of work and are premised on

the construction of labor taking place in the home (in reproducing and maintaining

laboring bodies) as "nonwork" or work with no value (Mitchell et al. 2004). An attention

to the inseparability of the realms of production and reproduction helps to illuminate the

nature and value ascribed to different kinds of work, including that involved in

maintaining households or, in the words of Katharyne Mitchell et al., "life's work." They

explain,

Theories of social reproduction attend to not only how subjects are hailed in multiple ways through the institutions of society—institutions structured and maintained within relations of dominance that simultaneously contain their own internal logics and trajectories—but also how these institutions and the social relations that uphold them are the sedimented outcome of material social practice. Their very basis and continued existence are secured—or not—in the dialectics of production and reproduction, in large measure through the compass of social practices of social relations that we are calling here "life's work." (Mitchell et al. 2004: 10)

Drawing on this understanding, we see how social hierarchies are (re)produced in

distinguishing which kind of trashwork is worthy of reward. The reward for trashwork is,

in turn, imbricated with and inseparable from the social space in which it is associated. In

this light, community-based trash management thus represents a deployment of not only

women's cultural responsibility for trash but, in effect, an extension of their social

reproductive roles in the community. Dipesh Chakrabarty notes how the management of

245

household trash is about marking a boundary between the inside and outside of the house,

but,

Housekeeping is also meant to express the auspicious qualities of the mistress of the household. . . . Auspicious acts protect the habitat, the inside, from undue exposure to the malevolence of the outside. They are the cultural performance through which everyday "inside" is both produced and enclosed. The household rubbish marks the boundary of this enclosure. (1991: 20)

In this sense, participatory trash projects secure the cleanliness of the

neighborhood as the responsibility of its female residents—as a reflection of their

"auspicious qualities." Although Set/Setal originally broadened the scope of that

responsibility to the larger community, in the ENDA projects the responsibility for

neighborhood trash was re-rooted in the household and ascribed more exclusively to

women. Without rejecting the idea of participation—which owes its roots to radical

campaigns for more deliberative democracy—I explore below how the targets of

participation have been constructed in community waste management in Dakar in light of

these critiques. I seek to understand, furthermore, how the space of community is

imagined through the claims staked in these projects.

Participation and Labor Value in Community-Based Trash Management

The ENDA community-based trash collection project was originally conceived by

APECSY who looked to ENDA as the implementing agency when it received the

funding. It comes as no surprise that APECSY was involved, given their special

involvement in Yoff s Set/Setal movement and then youth-based trash sector in the

1990s. However, the ENDA project differed from Set/Setal in one key respect: the

explicit turn from youth to women. The feasibility study conducted by APECSY

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emphasized the important role played by women in managing household garbage in Yoff,

and this role dovetailed well with ENDA's objectives at that point in time. ENDA and its

CBO partners (APECSY and the CGT) designed the project so that women would be its

key participants. The choice of women as the animatrices was, for project coordinators,

described as an obvious one, given that they saw trash as a women's affair in Senegal. In

the words of Malick Gaye1 5 from ENDA, "as it's women who do the separation at the

source, that's what motivated us to place women as key links in the chain" of the

project.196

The six women chosen, for their part, seem to have been taken a bit by surprise.

One of the animatrices, whom I shall here call Aissatou, described their selection as

follows: "One day, I received a piece of paper saying there was a meeting. I went down

[to the community meeting] and they explained that ENDA had chosen us to work with

the horse-carts to collect the neighborhood trash."1 7 When she and the other women

asked why they were chosen, they were greeted with a question, "Do you want to do your

part to support your neighborhood, your country?" All six of them responded with a yes.

The two women (Aissatou and Bineta) who had been trash collectors with CAMCUD but

were fired with the arrival of AMA knew why they, in particular, were chosen. Aissatou

explained, "They had already seen us doing this work with Set/Setal and on the [city's]

trash trucks. I was one of the most well known because I had played a key role in the

[trash] movement. Whenever there was something in the neighborhood to do with trash, I

Malick Gaye is the head of ENDA's Relay for Participatory Urban Development program (Relais pour le developpement urbain participe) (RUP). Most of the community-based sanitation projects (including Tonghor) were coordinated by RUP. 196 Personal interview (November 14, 2007). 197 Personal interview (November 19, 2007).

247

was involved."198 The village elders centrally implicated in the project through the CGT

emphasized that the "neediness" of the women was also taken into account in choosing

these participants. They stated that they had purposefully chosen women who were not

well off and, thus, who could make use of such an "opportunity." Three of the women

were divorced or widowed heads of household, and three were over 50 years of age.

From a practical standpoint, the involvement of women was seen as a way to best

interface with household garbage managers to ensure the project's successful

implementation. Mayor Issa Ndiaye, who was involved in rolling out the project in his

dual role as mayor of Yoff (from 1996-2002) and member of APECSY's executive

board, explained as follows:

[The participation of women] was good because women can speak to other women . . . because the Tonghor neighborhood has a specific mentality, a specific sociology. So, it was important to have women who could speak to other women so that the routes were respected . . . so that each woman knew which route she was part of, what trash she needed to bring out, at what time, e t c . . . . It was a question of organization, and the women allowed for everyone to be properly coordinated into this organization. And so, the women, while the others went to the beach for money-making activities, they were taking care of the common interest! . . . The women were well chosen because it's the women who had the capacity to withstand this work. Even if people spoke badly to them, they took it in stride! They didn't create any problems. What interested them was the cleanliness of the neighborhood . . . that the instruction and decisions taken by the Tonghor Management Committee [CGT] were applied.. . . So, whatever [community] reaction they received, they were incredibly diplomatic! Truly, they withstood lots of grief. (Personal interview, November 25, 2007)

The mayor's insightful statement raises a number of concerns that were firmly echoed, in

justifying women's roles, in many of my interviews with those coordinating the project.

Because household trash management is considered women's work, then coordinating the

door-to-door system was seen as best achieved by female participants who could more

Personal interview (November 19, 2007). 248

easily influence the behaviors of the women in the homes they were serving. Women's

"natural" attributes, including diplomacy, non-confrontational style, and their "intimacy"

with the communities, were constructed as key skills as animatrices. These stereotypes

are interesting to compare with those mobilized to justify or delegitimize women's

occupation of formal trash jobs, explored in Chapter 5. The mayor's insistence,

furthermore, that the women were altruistically working in the "common interest" for

their neighborhoods supports my contention that these projects were aimed at extending

women's domestic cleaning duties beyond the household. Given no choice but to

participate in the project to "support their neighborhood" these women's "auspicious

qualities" (Chakrabarty 1991) came to be judged through the lens of their cleaning efforts

in the public space.

For their part, the animatrices agreed to participate out of a sense of obligation to

their communities, as enforced by community leaders. As mentioned in Chapter 4,

behavior is tightly conscripted in Yoff, and the intimacy of community gives the

impression of neighborly surveillance at all times.199 The power and authority of

community elders—especially over these poorer women—furthermore, cannot be

underestimated. These women also participated, however, hoping that the work might

translate into more lucrative opportunities. In my interviews with all six participants, it

was clear that their participation in the project had been quite onerous and that they were,

in the end, deeply (but secretly) disappointed with the lack of compensation or other

opportunities gained. At the very beginning, they were unpaid; for a few months they

received 15,000 CFA per month, less than half of what the horse-cart driver received,

199 It is a common adage that there is "no crime" in Yoff because someone is always watching. What problems do arise, moreover, are generally handled "from within"—meaning by village authorities.

249

until community contributions waned and they received next to nothing. What's more,

the community members they served believed they were better paid. Aissatou described

her experience as follows:

I'd wake up early to do my duties around the house then go meet the horse cart operator to do our circuit with the other animatrice. We left our kids, left our work at the house, to go rid people's homes of garbage. I would follow behind the cart, whistling and letting everyone know we were coming so they would bring out their garbage. . . . The work was really hard. . . . You'd see someone bringing out a huge tub full of garbage and you'd say to her: "come help me lift this onto the cart." She would respond, "I won't because you're the one who's paid to do it!" But, in reality, the pay that we were supposed to receive, no one paid it to us! We continued on because we wanted to work . . . we kept working. Then, you find that even before the end of the month, you'd have a sore chest and then, finally, that what you're supposed to receive, that no one gives it to you. What we wanted was to work and that's the chance that God gave us, so we said we would grab that chance. We grabbed it because it's better than nothing but it didn't help to fulfill any of our needs. You could work all day until 2 p.m., go home, wash, do the washing, do our work, then the next day get back up to do it again. (Personal interview, November 19, 2007)

The animatrices' responsibility for collecting the household financial

contributions became the source of many of the difficulties that they faced and the origin

of the confusion among community members regarding the value of their work. Given

the controversial nature of these fees and their widespread rejection by community

members (see below), animatrices' role in their solicitation was a sticking point to put it

mildly. All six animatrices stated that this had been the hardest part of their job. For

Aissatou and Bineta, the fact that they had been fired because they were not seen as the

main breadwinners and then enlisted into these near-volunteer positions was especially

problematic. Though she never complained about having been selected, Aissatou was

highly critical of the way that she and the other animatrices were taken advantage of

through these projects. When the ENDA managers look back on the project, however,

they hail the participation of women as having been its most successful element. In

250

ENDA's promotional materials on similar projects in other areas, the participation of

women was used as a key metric of project success. In an Environment and Urbanization

article about a similar sanitation project in Rufisque,200 Gaye and Diallo highlight that not

only were most of the scheme's active participants women, but that "women are more

involved in decision-making than men" (1997: 20). The only weakness of the Tonghor

project—and the explanation for its failure—mentioned by the ENDA managers was the

"technical problem" of the transfer station's proximity to the airport.

As the history of the Tonghor trash project shows, the construction of

participation—who participates, how, and with what rewards—is bound up with the

production and definition of community. In describing the Rufisque project, Gaye and

Diallo emphasize,

This new approach . . . stresses that local problems can be solved by local communities, by all groups in the community, including women and young people, working and taking decisions together. (1997: 9)

The deployment of gender in these projects was part of a reconfiguration of social

relations at the neighborhood level through a reorganization of labor and its value.

Central to the targeting of women in these projects was a repudiation of the labors they

already perform—i.e. all of the "life's work" (Mitchell et al. 2004) duties that the

animatrices left behind as they went about their neighborhood trash job—in the home, as

well an extension of those unpaid activities into the neighborhood. In this sense, we can

see how the jobs ended up doubling their unpaid activities by extending the realm of

social reproduction into the public sphere. This extension also came as a fundamental

rejection of the value of women's labor in the official trash sector. Fired from municipal

200 The PADE project in Rufisque was a precursor to the Tonghor project and was the inspiration behind the project design.

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trash collection because they were not deemed worthy of those jobs, these women were

then installed into the community-based project as idealized volunteers, called upon to do

the work out of responsibility to their communities. Although they worked day in and day

out with the horse-cart drivers, the payment of these men was never in question. The

drivers were clearly seen as workers, whereas the women were seen as participants. As

workers, the men's labor was deemed valuable—and worthy of reward—whereas

women's neighborhood trash management labor was rendered an intrinsic duty

undeserving of compensation.

Quite in contrast with the early experience of women trashworkers (see Chapter

5), whose labors were masculinized when they entered the public space to collect

garbage, the labors of women in the community-based system were devalued. Especially

for the two former trashworkers, the ENDA projects in effect de-categorized them as

workers and positioned them instead as active citizens and community members.

Whereas the official trashworkers (even in the Set/Setal era) felt that they had gained

some political voice in entering the public space as trashworkers, the Tonghor

animatrices felt no such thing; instead, they experienced immense disappointment with

the devaluation of their labor. This outcome resonates with much of the critical literature

on community-based trash management elsewhere and feminists' observations that it

often entails an instrumentalization of gender in the service of exploitative labor (e.g.

Miraftab 2004a; Samson 2007). It also stands in direct contrast with AbdouMaliq

Simone's observations of the ENDA project in Pikine, which he contends offered

neighborhood women a "platform for reaching the larger world" (2003).

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Community-Designed and Community-Funded Development

Despite a prevalent rhetoric in ENDA's promotional materials on its community-

based sanitation projects that they were community-designed and driven, as we saw in the

animatrices' recollection of their initiation into the project, neighborhood residents,

including animatrices, were in practice completely excluded from project design. Beyond

a survey administered for the feasibility study, which did explore community members'

views on cleanliness and household garbage management practices, women's feedback

was not solicited in the design of the project. The animatrices were selected, given little

choice whether to accept their new roles, and simply instructed on what to do. When I

asked them if they had played a role in shaping the design of the project and the methods

of reaching the community, they were all emphatic that no, they had not been consulted

prior to the project's roll-out, and that, indeed, they would have designed it quite

differently. The role of the community in designing the project was exclusively

channeled through the two implicated CBOs, CGT and APECSY, in their

communications with ENDA early on. Within these institutions, exchanges regarding

project design took place only between the head of the CBOs, (older male village elders

and community leaders), and ENDA's project managers. Given that these two CBOs

represent the associational powers that be, the project can be seen to have directly

interfaced with and reinforced existing community power dynamics. In light of the

contention that waste is women's work, the complete elision of feedback from women in

the project sheds light on whose prerogatives stand in for the voice of the community in

this instance. The supposition that extending women's duties into the public sphere

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represents an automatically empowering means to engage them in community-driven

development is a deeply flawed logic indeed.

Beyond the gendered nature of community feedback on the project design, a

closer look illuminates another element of the definition of community activated by the

project: its ethnic definition. Community-based organizations in Yoff almost always have

an ethnic element to them that is rooted in the intent to preserve the Lebou's traditional

way of life (and hold on land)201 in the face of modernization and immigration. Although

they do not explicitly exclude non-Lebou, both APECSY and CGT are understood to be

run and populated by Lebou. As a result, in practice the waa Geej Ndar residents are

often sidelined from community decision making processes. Because autochthony in

Yoff is defined by ethnicity (Lebou are the original inhabitants and thus belong), claims

909

to manage Yoff "traditionally" yoke ethnicity with tradition.

The garbage project was no exception, even given the fact that the waa Geej Ndar

areas of Tonghor are considered the dirtiest and most garbage-challenged areas. The waa

Geej Ndar were not consulted regarding the project, nor were they implicated in the

project design: no waa Geej Ndar are in leadership (or even visible membership)

positions in the organizations. All of the animatrices, furthermore, were Lebou. This

ethnicization of the project can be partially explained by the strong role of ENDA in its

conception. Promotional literature on the ENDA projects often highlighted the historic

and ethnic legacy of Dakar's traditional neighborhoods as, by definition, Lebou

neighborhoods. Given the charismatic appeal of this conceptualization for funders of

201 As the original inhabitants of the Cape Verde peninsula, the Lebou have long been embroiled in Dakar land disputes. In Lebou neighborhoods, in particular, it is infamously difficult for outsiders to acquire land. 202 As discussed briefly in Chapter 4, this is consistent with observations in other African cities revealing that autochthony claims (often connected to ethnicity) often become more intense with urbanization in the neoliberal period. See Geschiere (2006).

254

these traditional villages and the powerlessness of the waa Geej Ndar in local politics,

this focus comes as no surprise. It does, however, stand in direct contrast to the inclusive

rhetoric, of ENDA's literature regarding its community-based projects and their supposed

attention to the most marginalized members of society. As the poorest—and

predominantly property-less—members of Tonghor society, the exclusion of the waa

Geej Ndar can be seen to be rooted in the intersection of class and ethnic divisions.

Importantly, these dynamics were to play an important part in frustrating one key element

of the project's design: the collection of the user fee.

One of the key concerns that scholars critical of community-based development

schemes have raised is based on the notion of the user fee, or the devolution of the costs

of basic services to the community. Consistent with trends towards user fees in urban

public services that can be seen throughout the developing world in the neoliberal era, the

Tonghor community-based trash project was rooted in the principle of the poor paying

(more) for development. The project's feasibility study emphasized that the user fee for

the door-to-door trash collection was as an important part of involving participants in a

sustainable community-driven model of public service. The payment scheme was laid out

in an appendix section entitled, "When the poor finance development" (Quand les

pauvres financent le developpement) (ENDA 1999: 136). Each household was asked to

pay 1000 CFA/month (~$2), to be collected at the end of the month by the animatrices. A

flat rate calculated per household, this fee was separate from the Garbage Tax (TEOM),

which is collected on the electricity bill based on property values.

The user fee ended up being an enormous problem, and the animatrices faced

intense resistance to its collection. This impinged on their small salaries and those of the

255

horse-cart drivers, and ushered in the final demise of the project. Although the vast

majority of my respondents claimed to have regularly paid the fee, the animatrices

indicated that in practice many people struggled to pay or refused to pay. In the former

Yoff mayor's words, "Prices are soaring! With the money they have, they can no longer

buy what they used to buy and then, if you ask them to contribute user fees, they want to

contribute, but they don't have the means!"203 The rising cost of garbage collection thus

came in the face of the rising cost of living and residents' decreased spending power. Just

before the project was launched these residents had received their trash collection by the

municipal service for "free" (though the service was irregular). Given that the vast

majority of the residents either did not pay the Garbage Tax (see Figure 2.1) or were

unaware that they paid it, the sudden addition of the collection fee was not a welcome

development. For those who actually do pay the tax, the new fee represented a doubling

of their payment for garbage services.

Beyond their ability to pay, furthermore, was a resistance to paying out of

principle. Many emphasized that they believed it was the government's responsibility to

provide the service to the public without user fees. The following statement sums up

many residents' perspective on the trash project and the user fee:

It's good and it's not good! Because we're citizens, the state is supposed to help us . . . the government should be able to pay this money! [The project is] a good thing because we get rid of our garbage, but it's not good because it lessens our [buying] power . . . If you put your trash on the cart, you are going to pay! It's good because it cleans our neighborhood but bad because it hurts us! (Personal interview, November 26, 2007)

Personal interview. (November 25, 2007). 204 This question begs the larger question of the distribution of the tax burden and its connection to public services. A user fee that is directed at disadvantaged neighborhoods and that does not replace the garbage tax but adds to it clearly burdens those communities disproportionately.

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The institution of the user fee was thus taken as just one more symbol of the state's

negligence. This sentiment, furthermore, was particularly exaggerated among the waa

Geej Ndar, who exhibited the least willingness to pay. As the poorest residents, they had

less ability to pay, but they also distrusted local authorities and associations. They saw

the project as just one more scheme by the Lebou establishment, which they felt did not

represent them. These residents exhibited the least buy-in of the Tonghor neighborhoods,

and their refusals to pay constituted a key reason that the project floundered. This

outcome highlights that the ethnic definition of community deployed in these projects in

the end worked against its eventual success.

The gendered landscape of household waste management and its connection to

household bargaining power was also an important factor in the difficulties surrounding

the user fee. My research revealed that the gendered nature of domestic trash

management informed household members' priorities regarding household expenditures.

Because they are in charge of managing and disposing of household garbage, women

were more willing to pay for the door to door service as it alleviated their trash burden.

However, because few women in Tonghor are financially independent, they often found

it difficult to make this contribution themselves. Given the small amount of money they

did control, paying the fee themselves could be a significant burden. On the other hand,

asking husbands to pay for the service was not always successful; they did not prioritize

the service. The assumption of uniform value for the service within the household was

clearly a major oversight of the project. The disproportionate burden of the user fee on

household women further calls into question the project's supposed concern for the poor

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and marginalized. The "poor pay for development" principle could perhaps be best

described as "the poorest pay more for development."

A Flurry of Wings and the Return of the Trash Truck

After less than a year of operation, the Tonghor community-based trash collection

project was in shambles: many if not most residents refused to pay the user fee, the

overworked animatrices were exhausted from their labor (which at that point was no

longer paid), and even the horse-cart drivers were fed up as the project was having more

and more difficulty paying their meager salaries. On top of these problems, the lack of

coordination between the community-based project and the municipal trash collection

force—which was, in theory, supposed to enable the transfer of trash from Yoff to the

dump—ended up in complete disaster. The transfer station had long ceased to operate as

such and was instead a towering mountain of garbage just off the highway in the flight

path of the city's airport. The garbage pile was an eyesore to people traveling to and from

the airport, and worse, birds feeding off the garbage pile were a danger to aircraft. When

the national aviation administration weighed in, the project was definitively cancelled.

In contrast to being labeled merely a "technical problem" by END A, the transfer

station disaster signifies much more with regard to the relationship between the state and

the community implicated in the Tonghor trash project. From the very beginning, there

was tension between the municipal authorities, who were involved in managing the

official trash collection system,2 5 and the NGO-community based project. Although the

Yoff Commune d'Arrondissement was officially a partner in the project, it claims to have

205 After the Yoff Commune d'Arrondisement was created in 1996 with the decentralization laws, the commune was implicated (more than other areas) in garbage collection. Before and after AMA's arrival, the commune acted as the interface with the CUD and then with private contractors.

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been excluded from decisions regarding the ENDA project from the start. For their part,

both ENDA and the community associations maintain that the state did not comply with

its responsibilities in the bargain. A critical point in these conflicting claims is the tension

between the traditional neighborhood leadership (as represented by the local associations

APECSY and CGT) in partnership with the NGO and the state's authority. The stalemate

between the two authority structures, as manifested in the huge garbage pile by the

airport, was just one expression of a larger tension that often exists in Yoff that arises

from its long tradition of self-governance and parallel systems of authority. The

involvement of the national aviation agency was an intervention from higher echelons of

state authority over the conflict, in the interest of preserving the clean image of the city

and nation, given the importance of the airport road in the national imaginary. The utter

lack of coordination between the official trash system and the community-based one

resonates with a familiar critique of participatory projects for their lack of synergy with

more long-term government endeavors.

The Tonghor trash project clearly raises a host of questions about the definition of

community employed and reinforced in the projects as well as the complex relationships

they engender among different authority bodies, including the state. We have seen how

this project was built on a definition of participation and community that was deeply

gendered and ethnicized and which in many ways reinforced neighborhood cleavages and

power dynamics. Looking to fulfill its mandate to appeal to the gender and ethnic

sensibilities of its funders, the NGO sought to support a project that was "women-

centered" in a "traditional" Lebou neighborhood. The community space imagined by the

NGO project was, thus, part of a reconfiguration of community and household labor

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along gender and ethnic lines in the historical context of local power dynamics. A certain

kind of community was thus produced through the project—one that was far from natural

and apolitical. Significantly, it was precisely along gender and ethnic lines that the

project was to exhibit its weak points; its lack of coordination with the state then

delivered the project its final blow.

Soon after the project disappeared, the municipal trash trucks began collecting

along their usual circuit in Tonghor; residents currently make do with this service. During

trash crises, like that of 2007 to the present, the residents of Tonghor deploy creative

strategies to manage their garbage just as Dakarois across the city do. Although Tonghor

residents apparently did not participate in the trash revolts considered in the next section,

it is unclear whether their non-participation was a result of differing political platforms or

simply that they could resort to dumping on the beach. Although a ban by the CGT is still

in effect, prohibiting dumping on the Tonghor beach, young women periodically defy the

ban and use the beach during these crises and at night. Besides periodic efforts by the

neighborhood's youth and women to clean specific areas when they become clogged with

refuse, no comprehensive community-based project has been attempted since 2003.

4. "We Can't Eat Overpasses": Trash Revolt, Alternoos, and the Politics of Blame for the Dirty City

Five years after the demise of the Tonghor project and across town closer to the city

center, local residents were engaging with their garbage in a different sort of

neighborhood action: the trash revolt. This section foregrounds the 2007 trash revolts in

HLM Fass (Figures 6.11 and 6.12) in a discussion of the politics of blame for the trash

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crisis, and, more generally Alternoos, as a metaphor of disappointment in the Alternance

period.

Figures 6.11 and 6.12. The remains of the trash revolt in HLM Fass and surrounding areas a few hours after the mayor sent in a special collection force to remove the garbage that was directly blocking the roads. (Source: author)

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Building on the previous section exploring the projects that brought community

members into the management of their trash, I explore here the acts of public dumping

through which Dakar residents have engaged with the management of their waste through

intentionally dirtying the public space. Although neither the first nor the last time that the

Dakarois have thrown their garbage into the public space in a defiant political act, the

trash revolts of late April 2007 were a particularly dramatic instance of concerted

neighborhood dumping. I draw from interviews with participants and leaders of the

revolts in inquiring into residents' intentional rubbishing practices. Mindful of Simone's

statement that development is about "capturing residents to a life aesthetic defined by the

state so they can be citizens" (2004a: 7), I explore the notion of citizenship implied by

these acts, which demand reciprocity from the state for citizens' and workers' trashlabors

alike.

As introduced at the beginning of this chapter, the April trash revolts took place

during one of the trashworkers union's longest strikes, after the elections of 2007. As the

trash accumulated in their homes, women across Dakar were forced to find ways to cope

with the putrid refuse in an effort to protect their families. In HLM Fass, residents used

various creative strategies, including adding ash to the garbage to remove the stench,

tying up the garbage in multiple plastic grocery bags, and even trying to bury their trash.

The mounting garbage was far from easy to manage in this dense neighborhood. In the

words of a female resident of HLM Fass who was an active participant in the revolts,

We realized that the trash trucks hadn't come for two weeks. Fass is not very spacious; there was a nauseating smell throughout the neighborhood. People couldn't even breathe normally. What's more, there were children who were playing next to the trash where worms were starting to come out of the ground. They could have gone back home to eat without washing their hands. . . . There

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was a risk of disease! It [dumping] was the only solution that we had since the mayor refused to resolve the problem. It was our way of letting him know that we were not happy with the situation, forcing him to react. (Personal interview, May 23, 2007)

After the evening prayer on April 24, 2007, a few of the residents discussed the idea of a

revolt and decided to dump the garbage that night at midnight on the main boulevard and

in front of the mayor's office. One of the key organizers, a young law student born and

raised in HLM Fass, whom I here call Abdou, described his experience as follows:

One day my older sister said "Don't you smell that odor?" I decided to do something about it.. . . Around 11 p.m., I couldn't wait any longer . . . I grabbed brooms and sacs [of garbage]. At the beginning, we were two or three people, but when the people passed and saw me, they said "Oh, Abdou, it's you who's doing that? Well, I'm coming because you are really cool so I'm going to support you." And then, all of a sudden, everyone came out. We did it right here [by the mayor's office] and there was also an enormous pile there on the road. It [the dumping] was hard work and we finished at the earliest around 3 a.m. . . . But, it worked! By early morning, Pape Diop [the mayor of Dakar] had sent in some guys to clean it all up and it was mostly gone by noon. (Personal interview, May 23, 2007)

As Abdou notes, the trash revolts that day did work: the mayor of Dakar

intervened to clean up the mess. Only after the trashworkers continued their strike with a

second plan of action, however, did the mayor finally meet with the trashworkers' union

to resolve the dispute. A few days later, the workers were finally paid and went directly

back to work until the next series of strikes that they held a couple of months later for

other grievances. The media coverage of the neighborhood revolts was extensive,

dramatically pronouncing that the Dakarois had had enough of government inaction on

the trashworkers' strike (e.g. Fall May 3, 2007; Nettali April 25, 2007; SudQuotidien

April 25, 2007). The following passage from an article entitled "Insalubrity: Dakar

(re)invaded!" characterizes much of the reporting:

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Insalubrity has again taken over the neighborhoods. The Senegalese capital is invaded by heaps of rubbish dumped by angry populations. . . . Colobane, Fass, Gueule Tapee, Medina, Him Fass are under the yoke of the garbage. Ulcerated by the inaction of the authorities, the residents have reacted. The week-long strike [of the AMA workers], who claim two months of back pay for a total of 24 million, seems to be at the source of this situation. . . . We are attacked by the nauseating odors of Dirtiness, queen of the capital. The residents, discontented to see the waste continue to pile up in front of their homes, before our eyes, dump their trash onto the road. (SudQuotidien April 25, 2007)

My interviews with residents of HLM Fass revealed that participating residents

and organizers of the revolts were quite proud of what they had orchestrated and,

furthermore, that they had widespread support among their neighbors. The organizers and

participants were also very clear about the message they had intended to send. In aiming

their action precisely at "the politicians" (both the local communal mayor and the other

political figures who drive along the Dial Diop Boulevard to get to their offices

downtown), their goals were twofold: to tell the officials to resolve the problem with the

garbage workers and to convey their larger discontent with being neglected. These two

goals deserve deeper consideration. In considering the first (solidarity with the workers),

one trashworker's perspective on the revolts, copied here, echoes many of his colleagues'

views towards the neighborhood action:

The people were with us. God made it so that we live in the same zones as we work. They knew us; they were our neighbors. They asked us why the truck no longer came to do the collection. We informed them that we had gone two months without being paid. They felt that wasn't just and that if it had been them, they also wouldn't have accepted it. They pay their garbage tax and are not going to accept to live with garbage in their homes. So, they threw it all in the main arteries where the authorities drive. Therefore, we can say that the people supported us 100 percent. They did that out of their own initiative. (Personal interview, May 21, 2007)

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A large proportion of the residents of HLM Fass whom I interviewed did indeed

indicate a measure of solidarity with the workers. At a minimum, they believed the

workers had the right to strike, given their grievances, and at best, they had joined in the

workers' fight through the trash revolt. The following statement by the two main trash

revolt organizers, Babacar and Ibrahima, is illustrative:

What we did was a total revolt. Because we are revolted by the attitude of the state! It's the state that should fix this problem. We noticed that this was a recurring problem that had returned again. These workers are not well paid. They are the heads of households who live a pitiable existence facing three months without pay. We think that is terrible.. . . It's revolting. Revolting. Revolting. This is as fundamental public service. . . . It's the state's responsibility. It's the state that pays the workers, who pushed them to go on strike. Here in Africa, a father can't go three months without receiving his salary. It's totally impossible! We think that the state is responsible. When we did the "dumping" of the trash on the main road, we knew that was exactly where the authorities passed. The next morning, they went and got people to collect that trash. That goes to show that the only language those people [politicians] understand is, in the end, violence. When the people don't revolt, they [the politicians] don't even think about the people. But when we did that, they came to us saying "You shouldn't have done that. The cars pass here, etc." Before we dumped the garbage on those roads, they had stayed more than two weeks without doing anything. . . . We are not savages, we are citizens. We are educated. (Personal interview, May 16, 2007)

This statement illuminates how much the trashworkers' public education campaign had

worked: the residents they served were aware of their predicament and were behind the

workers in their dispute with the government. As I argued in Chapter 4, this is no small

feat, given the negative associations of the profession.

Beyond simply supporting the trashworkers, however, the statement above also

highlights the second goal of the revolts: a broader demand for services and

accountability from the Senegalese state. Those participating in the revolt saw the lack of

adequate trash collection as symbol of their overall disadvantage in the scheme of urban

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governance and as a symbol of the state's abandonment of its citizens. Ibrahima

continues,

Just over there, the communes are clean. That's to say Veolia, the new trash collection company, only cleans two communes, including Plateau, where you find the institutions and the Palace. The president of the Republic is there and he wants to show the foreigners that Dakar is beautiful, is clean. But next to that, in the peripheral areas where we're considered second class citizens, they don't clean. They come once a week. Over there they clean every day. So, we were forced to mount a rebellion against the state . . . a sort of civil disobedience saying that we are not second class citizens . . . and that worked. They came to clean up the trash. C'est la vie. (Personal interview, May 16, 2007)

This resident, who has also published on politics in the Dakar newspapers, was not alone

in expressing the feeling that Fass is part of Dakar's periphery. This is a surprising

perspective in light of the fact that Fass is situated so close to Dakar's geographical and

power center, particularly in relation to Lebou neighborhoods like Yoff and the massive

growing slum (Pikine) on the outskirts of the city. The comment reveals these citizens'

feelings of neglect in comparison to the well-off downtown areas. Many of the residents

of HLM Fass voiced concerns about the segregation of the city, where garbage

collection—or the spatial geography of cleanliness—was a metaphor for the city's class

divisions.

The trash revolts and the HLM Fassois' views on the garbage crisis are

particularly revealing for the state of politics at this particular moment in Dakar. April

2007 was just one month after the presidential elections of 2007, in which Wade won

with an overwhelming majority to little jubilation from the Dakarois. It was generally

accepted that these elections signaled not a vote of confidence for Wade, but rather a vote

of no confidence in his rivals and a consequence of having many candidates in the final

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rounds. At this time, support for Wade was dwindling, as Alternance had brought little

opportunity to most Dakarois and as the cost of living skyrocketed. The only signs that

Wade was "working" were the massive infrastructure projects that had turned the capital

into a messy construction site. The extensive road network construction project in the

capital was a central part of Wade's preparations for the 11' session of the Organization

of the Islamic Conference summit (OIC) to be held in Dakar in spring 2008.

Viewing Alternance through the lens of garbage after the elections of 2007, most

Fassois were disenchanted with the state of affairs. "We cannot eat overpasses!"

exclaimed many residents when asked to comment on Wade and his government's track

record. Most people instead offered up a litany of critiques of Alternance, suggesting

instead that it be called Alternoos, in reference to the party in power's tendency to party

(noos) instead of work. Two of the organizers of the trash revolts quoted above, Babacar

and Ibrahima, made very clear their disillusionment with Alternance. Both had been

active organizers for Wade's party in 2000, but they admitted that the last seven years

had been overwhelmingly disappointing. They argued that the trash crisis was an

example of "bad governance" on the part of Wade but that this negligence was like

playing with fire. The fact that even "pacifist mothers" would dump their garbage in the

street, they said, was a symbol of how dire and risky the situation had become. Their

explanation continues,

It's the lack of a political will to solve this problem. During this time, they are in the middle of bypassing the media, buying the presidential airplane, placing government officials in the most optimal working conditions. Really, those people are Europeans over there, in an under-developed country! Sixty ministers with SUVs—a car that consumes so much fuel. They all have chauffeurs, domestic servants. (Personal interview, May 16, 2007)

206 There were thirteen candidates for president in the final round, which greatly diminished any chance for the opposition to get enough support to rival Wade.

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Similarly, the head of the HLM Fass neighborhood association described Alternance in these terms:

What is going on? While their [the politicians] lifestyles improve, the people are dying of hunger! We are talking about [people making] billions! We had never heard of that before—you heard of a billionaire once a year, now you hear it every day! . . . The Senegalese people are still hungry! (Personal interview, August 28, 2007)

A common response to the feeling of Alternoos is a widespread frustration with

politics in general. The participants in the trash revolts emphatically insisted that this had

not been a politically minded act. Many people insisted that, in fact, they were so fed up

with party politics that they were completely apolitical now. They emphasized that all

they sought was some action and accountability on the part of their leaders, no matter

which party. One resident who said that he had voted for Alternance and now suffers

from Alternoos summed up his perspective in this short sentence: "La politique est

poubelle [Politics are trash]."207 Abdou, the young law student, said he would never get

involved in politics. "All I do in this neighborhood is for God. It's to have grace, never

profit." 08 This is a revealing statement that resonates with the discussion in previous

chapters of the role of religion and politics in Dakar today. It also highlights what I have

flagged as a move away from "big P" (party) politics in the late Alternance period.

Although my analysis considers the trash revolts to be profoundly political acts, it is

important to note this shift from party politics and the bad word represented by the phrase

"la politique" today.

Even though the Fassois blamed Wade and, more generally, Alternance for the

trash crisis, much of the negative sentiment voiced by the revolt participants was also

207 Personal interview (September 13, 2007). 208 Personal interview (August 27, 2007).

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aimed at the local mayor of the Fass, Colobane, Gueule Tapee Commune

d'Arrondissement, Adema Ba. Mayor Ba, who came to power in 2002 after being

engaged in Wade's PDS party since 1974, was uniformly disliked by my respondents in

HLM Fass. One woman who participated in the revolts described him as follows: "We

don't know him at all. Me, I don't know if he is black or red. I have never seen him. I

know him by name but I can't tell you what size he is."209 Most people in Fass shared the

view that the mayor was a stranger to his own commune and that he did nothing for his

constituents. Many knew that he was not ultimately responsible for garbage collection in

the commune, but they blamed Ba for not intervening during the trash strike to at least

help the Fassois cope with the crisis. Abdou took Mayor Ba's inaction as an indicator of

his contempt for the people of his commune. In a candid interview, Mayor Ba lent some

insight into his position. As it turned out, he did resent his post and thus perhaps his

constituents:

I helped [Wade] to become President and what did he do for me? He betrayed me. The President betrayed me! I joined the PDS when it was only 1 month and 18 days old and remain in it to the present day and what has he done for me? Today what I am is a poor mayor! A mayor in a neighborhood where the people don't even know their head from their ass. And I think I deserve more than that! I think I have enough courage and brass to manage more than that! (Personal interview, September 21,2007)

The mayor's statement sums up in remarkably blunt and unapologetic terms the

political nature of the post of the communal mayor as well as how little power they are

seen to have in today's political landscape. In a still incredibly centralized state system

(despite decentralization reforms), the communal mayors command extremely few

financial resources and are, in fact, charged with few responsibilities. Although the

garbage sector became a bit more decentralized under Dakar Mayor Diop, as I argue in

209 Personal interview (May 23, 2007).

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Chapter 2, Wade has, in effect, recentralized the sector by placing it under joint

management by the mayor of Dakar and the Minister of the Environment. The communal

mayors have very little involvement in the sector at this point. Mayor Ba said about his

exclusion from garbage management,

You'll see that the people here will tell you that the mayor hasn't done his job and the neighborhood is dirty, but they don't know that it's not even my job! . . . I'd like to be in charge of it! I am a civilized man; I have the brains but I don't have the means! . . . The state has done nothing for that! The state, who has responsibility for this [garbage collection], has done nothing! (Personal interview, September 21, 2007)

Mayor Ba's frustration at being blamed for something over which he had little

responsibility joined with his overall disappointment at what he felt was his lackluster

reward for service to his party to make him clearly contemptuous of both his own

government and his constituents. His scathing words exemplify the absolute disconnect

between Alternance politics—and in this case, the management of the trash sector—with

the citizen practices of the Dakarois. With no indication of who is actually responsible

for the paralyzed public service holding them captive to their own waste, the default

person to blame was the communal mayor, whose office sat smack in the middle of their

neighborhood.

5. Conclusion: On Discipline, Comportement, and the Participatory City

This chapter has endeavored to flesh out how the garbage crisis is experienced at

the neighborhood level by examining two places in the Dakar urban landscape. Exploring

the different histories and challenges of garbage management in Tonghor and HLM Fass,

we can see how struggles around trash offer a language through which to view

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community dynamics and their relationship to the state. I consider a further example of

participation below, in an effort to tie these two moments together.

Just a few weeks after the trash revolts of HLM Fass, the neighborhood was

chosen as one of two Dakar neighborhoods to host a pilot participatory trash project

called Eco-quartier. An initiative of APROSEN, the project was intended to engage

local residents in the smooth running of garbage management at the neighborhood level,

as a complement to municipal garbage collection. Although the project had not yet been

concretized, the proposal was eerily reminiscent of Tonghor: it would involve volunteer

community participants who would spearhead educational campaigns and a user-fee-

based "pre-collection" scheme. The reasons officially cited in choosing HLM Fass were

its "well-developed associations" and the fact that it is a disfavored neighborhood with

"cleanliness problems."211 A more probable motivation behind the choice was Mayor

Ba's position on the advisory board of APROSEN and his (and others') disquiet at the

rubbishing events that had brought the neighborhood into the news the previous April.

While the project was only in the planning phases at the time of this research, I use it here

to connect questions of participation and revolt in trash management. Two issues that are

important for our discussion stand out.

The first issue concerns the politics surrounding participation and the construction

of community entailed in community-based projects. Two CBOs were chosen to lead the

community element of the Eco-quartier project: one women's association and one youth

association. When asked why these specific groups were targeted, the managers at

210 APROSEN is the national agency created by President Wade that is charged with cleanliness-related concerns mainly outside of Dakar. The Ministry of Hygiene is also implicated in the Eco-quartier project. 21' Interview with APROSEN Director of Programs and Evaluation, Madame Assane Gueye Cisse (March 12,2008).

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APROSEN stated that these were the two most "dynamic" elements of the community

and that these groups needed to centrally involved in such a project because they are

marginalized groups. The choice of the women's organization was specifically justified

through the familiar ideas of women's responsibility for waste and their strength as

community mobilizers.

The youth organization was justified on different terms, however. Harkening back

to the Set/Setal days, youth were explicitly targeted both because they were seen as

keenly interested in community management and because they were seen as "idle" and in

need of distraction from tendencies toward delinquent activities. In my conversation with

Mayor Ba, it became clear that the youth were chosen to be the key players in this project

in direct response to their actions in the trash revolt. These dangerously idle young men,

in particular, had shown their colors in the trash revolt and needed to be managed.

Reminiscent of the role Mayor Diop's trash system was to play in his efforts to quiet the

youth, we can see how bringing people into the management of their own waste again

serves a larger political purpose.

Comparing the Eco-quartier and Tonghor projects reveals some very similar

elements. Consistent with trends that we saw in the official trash sector, the elements of

community identified as participants in community-based waste projects shift and change

over time according to various calculi on a number of political registers. The changing

landscape of participation in community-based waste projects illustrates how the choice

of the ideal participant is premised on an understanding of different groups' labor value

as well as a host of presuppositions about their roles as representatives of the

"community." My examination of the Tonghor community-based trash project showed

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how notions of community were enacted through an ethnic and gendered imaginary.

Although the new project is just in its infancy, we can see how those lines of imagining

community and (re)structuring neighborhood garbage labor differed in the Eco-quartier

project. In that project, young men were seen as the central labor force to be captured in

the project, and a sprinkling of women was added for good measure. Given the timing of

the selection of the youth CBO (just after the April trash revolts), it is unsurprising that

these young rabble-rousers were targeted (much like their Set/Setal predecessors) for

institutionalization within the new state initiative. The targets of participation,

therefore—and their ability to represent community—unfold differently over time and

space as do the rewards and responsibilities for this dirty labor.

Taking the longer view in considering the new Eco-quartier project next to the

older ENDA ones, we can see the downside of the proliferation of pilot projects

associated with NGO community-based projects in the neoliberal period. The Eco-

quartier initiative seems to be going down the same road as the ENDA projects and, as

such, seems bound to repeat some of the same mistakes. The Eco-quartier initiative has

shown no evidence of having better plans than ENDA to coordinate with the municipal

waste efforts, take in community feedback in its design, or work against the exploitation

of marginalized community members. Many of those involved in the Eco-quartier project

were not even aware of the history of ENDA projects.

As we know from critiques of participatory projects around the world, this lack of

sustainability and knowledge-sharing down the road is perhaps the rule rather than the

exception. Both projects studied here call seriously into question the optimistic images of

the participatory community—or city, for that matter—conjured through community-

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based waste management. They instead complement much of the critical literature on

participation to expose it as neither good for the most marginalized nor terribly effective

in providing public service. Although Simone's work (2003) on the ENDA sanitation

project in Pikine had a hopeful message—since in that project, he observed women and

youth banding together to find or create new economic and political opportunities—the

eventual demise of that project after Simone's article went to press provides further

testament to the temporary nature of the gains envisioned with these projects. 12

A second observation of the Eco-quartier project in HLM Fass is particularly

pertinent to our discussion of participatory citizenship. In both this project and the

Tonghor projects we see an interesting development: the rejection of the notion of self-

management. In contrast with the history of Set/Setal and the incorporation of youth into

neighborhood waste management almost two decades earlier, I found a distinct

skepticism and reaction against these projects among community members. Despite the

rhetoric of duty to one's neighborhood and country through participation, the participants

in both projects (actual in Tonghor, prospective in HLM Fass) and the neighbors they

served felt that workers should be compensated for their labors and that the state should

be involved. Residents and a community leader in HLM Fass actually went so far as to

say that their community would refuse to participate in the Eco-quartier if it seemed that

the project was "exploiting neighborhood youth." If Tonghor is an indicator, the eventual

failure of all of ENDA's community-based trash projects in Dakar, moreover, can be

taken as a sign that communities are rejecting the volunteer participant model in one way

or another. These failures and rejections, and people's "undisciplined" behaviors of

2121 found out that the project was no longer functioning when I visited Pikine during preliminary research in 2006.

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intentional rubbishing, can be distinguished from the Set/Setal model described in

Chapter 3 and my argument there that the PS party-state was able to win people over to

its own prerogatives through a sort of disciplining of the community through cleaning.

Instead, these failures perhaps testify to the fact that the Dakarois have learned from

Set/Setal and other "participatory" experiences and are skeptical of taking up the state's

slack through volunteer initiatives. In light of this "participation fatigue" and the general

dismay at Alternance, ideas of the participatory city conjured in Malick Gaye's work on

Entrepreneurial Cities (1996) appear to have lost their luster.

For their part, however, the authorities involved in garbage management and

those technically not (including Mayor Ba) continue to place the blame for the garbage

crisis on the behavior (comportement) of the Dakarois. I quote Mayor Ba again from the

same interview:

The people here have a certain behavior. Pass by in front of the homes and you'll see all sorts of stuff being built, broken, dumped there. . . . There is a characteristic indiscipline that is fostered by the government's weakness and lack of effective management... . These are the dirty neighborhoods. There's a lack of civic behavior; the people do what they want. It's disorderly... . Everyone cleans at home but dumps in the road! (Personal interview, September 21, 2007)

Ba's statement resonates with a common theme raised in my interviews with people

responsible for governing the garbage system: the allocation of blame for the root cause

of the trash crisis on the "undisciplined" comportement of the Dakarois. Although his

language is perhaps more contemptuous, Mayor Ba's statement echoes a general view put

forth by politicians that the dirty areas in Dakar are those which house dirty people.

While there may be room for improvement in the Dakarois' trash sorting and littering

practices, it is clear that the sector's weaknesses are systemic and that citizens' practices

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are usually quite well adapted to the service they are accustomed to receiving. A

particularly salient aspect of the trash revolts is the direct inversion of blame represented

by public dumping. Abdou put it this way: "They think we're dirty because we live here.

But, we are not dirty! This is the mayor's trash, so we gave it back to him."213 The act of

externalizing the garbage that they had been striving so hard to manage in the home was a

refusal to be sullied by what they knew was the state's negligence.

The Yoffois and Fassois' very forthright demands for garbage services from the

state (local or national) constitute a demand for accountability from their elected

representatives. The case of HLM Fass was particularly explicit. In blocking the way of

the politicians with their garbage, the Fassois refused to be neglected and actively

contested their peripheral status with regard to public services. Enacting their demands

for reciprocity with the state, these residents felt they were fulfilling their citizen duties

through public dumping. Rubbishing, in this sense, was transformed into a civic act: it

was a creative action in the mold of Douglas' notion (1966) of trash out of place in the

interest of making claims on the state. Of particular interest is the move, in both places,

away from recourse to the party political machine, toward a sort of blanket rejection of

politics, writ large. This is consistent with my findings among official trashworkers, as

discussed in Chapter 4. In the revolt organizer Ibrahima's words describing HLM Fass

after the trash revolts: "People are awake now. The divisions in the neighborhood are

melting away."214 Solidarity around the trash problem has proven a unifier of extremely

diverse neighborhood residents, from all walks of life. The implications of this unity will

be discussed in the conclusion.

213 Personal interview (August 27, 2007). 2,4 Personal interview (May 16, 2007).

276

CONCLUSION

The Hope of a Trash(y) Job

The previous chapters have told the social history of trashwork in Dakar over

Senegal's neoliberal period. They have revealed how the management of the garbage

sector and the organization of its labor represent much more than the history of a failing

public service or the expression of a withdrawing African state. Instead, the history of

Dakar's trash during this period is the story of the reorganization of the state under new

political-economic conditions and of its new relations with and between its citizens. In

this light, we have glimpsed how structural adjustment has been negotiated in and

through Dakar's special history and cultural context. In particular, I have exposed the

process of claims-making between the Dakarois—young, old, male, female, Muslim, and

autochthon—in asserting their right to the city and its services, a political voice, and a

job.

In so doing, I have aimed to paint a different picture from that of global maps to

instead provide a geography of the everyday. Speaking from garbage has meant speaking

of the mundane everyday processes of household and neighborhood ordering that provide

the fundamental basis of health and livability in this and all cities. Through ethnography,

I have endeavored to illuminate the stories and voices of those caught up in city-making

in Dakar. In certain instances, this has provided a hopeful perspective which works

against notions of the failed African metropolis rotting under its own detritus through

showing the order and intention behind Dakar's garbage predicament. It has revealed the

vast political-economic reorganizations, labor disputes, and the demands of fed-up

Dakarois for a better city that lie beneath the trash crises. These observations resonate

277

with AbdouMaliq Simone's (2004a) emphasis on the contestations through which

African cities are being remade; on the possibilities and openness contained within this

urban landscape.

This is not Kaplan's anarchy (1994) or, for that matter, Davis's (2006) hellish

vision of the African city as warehouse for the urban proletariat. We have seen in the

garbage story how urban residents are reconfiguring neoliberal processes and local and

national politics. Far from an object that was "plopped down" from on high in singular

form, neoliberal reform has worked precisely through the social power relations of the

Dakarois and changing state-society relations. Through the trash union, the neighborhood

garbage revolts, and resistance to user fee community projects, the Dakarois have not sat

idly by. Rather, they have informed, contested, and reconfigured these processes all along

the way. Islam represents, in this story, moreover, a far cry from Davis' notion of religion

as a sort of song of the dispossessed or "the reenchantment of a catastrophic modernity"

for survival in the absence of the state (2006: 195). Religious conviction, we have seen in

the trashworkers union, has been a platform for making claims on the state. Trash as

God's work is deployed to justify the trashworkers' plight and struggle in the spiritual

realm for very concrete benefits in the here and now of urban politics.

We can see, furthermore, that the way that structural adjustment has worked

through the production of difference on Dakar's laboring bodies has had some unintended

consequences and strategic openings. Though youth and women were brought into the

work of trash because of their location on the low rungs of the social hierarchy, for some

this meant new and important opportunities. While we saw in the community-based trash

example from Tonghor that strategic essentialism—in this case along gender lines—can

278

be used in the interest of exploitative labor arrangements, the history of women in the

official trash sector tells a different story. Again facilitated by their naturalized

connection to waste, women gained important leadership opportunities and access to new

political spheres through their entrance into the garbage sector. This highlights the

instability of gendered difference and how it becomes activated in specific circumstances,

but always in articulation with other identities.

The youth story, moreover, contained in the Set/Setal -trash transition is one in

which a plan to quiet youth in the long run stoked the fire of their discontent with the

political system and contributed to their savvy as a vociferous union working against a

liberal tide. This research joins with literature emphasizing the important emerging role

of youth in urban politics in Africa, and yet, offers some new insights into the political

resonances of youth activism in organized urban labor. It also demands a reconsideration

of how we understand the gender of youth. I have explored the articulations of generation

and gender in specific settings to consider their very different import for subjectivities

and positionalities contained in struggles over garbage labor. This analysis highlights the

instabilities of hegemonic systems and the potential for negotiation contained within

moments of crisis.

Yet, we know from Lefebvre (1991 [1974]) that urban space is not infinitely

open. The story of the spatial practices of trash has not been one of endless possibilities

for transgression or subversion. Drawing from my engagement with Lefebvre, Hall, and

Gramsci on hegemony, I have aimed to always contextualize these cultural politics—and

the different positionalities of engaged groups—within relations of force. I have drawn

extensively on the rich foundation of literature on Senegalese political economy to

279

always connect the household and neighborhood politics of garbage to the shifting

landscape of state power and party politics. We have seen, in particular, the very concrete

impacts of structural adjustment in this sector, and the scramble for power between

parties and different levels of government that it has precipitated. Through reconfiguring

the patronage capacities of the state—as just one thread in a fabric of transformations

occurring in the religious, social, and economic basis of society—we have seen how

economic reform in this era has necessitated the consolidation of consent in new

directions. In particular, I argue that we have witnessed two very different moments of

hegemony during this time. At the end of the Socialist Party era, the recruitment of

consent worked on a moral-ideological plane through a production of participatory

citizenship via the incorporation of young men and women into the new trash system.

Then, in the late Wade era (Alternoos), we saw a turn to coercion through outright

autocratic strategies to quell the rising dissent of the Dakarois and, in turn, their response

in the strikes and trash revolts which have recently paralyzed the city. Participation in

waste management has resurfaced centrally, though in different guises, throughout this

story.

Importantly, in the most recent trash politics we have seen the fractures behind

Alternoos and the inability of the new state, despite these coercive tendencies, to stem the

tide of opposition. I have argued that the Dakarois have distanced themselves from the

traditional spheres of party politics during this time, while still directing their actions at

the state. Upon writing this conclusion, however, it is clear that this has not meant that

they have turned their backs on political expression through the ballot box. The

displeasure of the Dakarois with the Wade government and the current state of affairs

280

found voice in the local elections during April 2009. In these elections, Wade's PDS

party fared extremely poorly with a number of key PDS figures losing to candidates from

the new opposition coalition (of which the Socialist Party is a member), including the

Mayor of Dakar and Wade's right-hand man, Pape Diop. With an unexpectedly high

voter turnout, those elections seem to signal that a new political chapter, the post-

Alternoos period, may be on the horizon. Overall, we have seen in the last twenty years

massive changes in Dakar's political landscape. And while Wade's era has been one of

deep disappointment and the forwarding of neoliberal policies, these recent events and

the general independence at the polls expressed by the Dakarois can only be taken as an

indicator of the health of Senegalese democracy. Whether the recent rejection of the

neoliberal state will provide the space for the emergence of an alternative, more

legitimate state, remains the key question.

Through considering a wider purview of politics in Dakar through the struggles

surrounding garbage at home and in the street, I have offered a different perspective to

that of the political science-dominated literature on the African state and political

economy. A view towards cultural politics, rooted in grounded ethnography, has been my

effort to bridge the Afro-pessimism/Afro-optimism divide at play in scholarship on

African cities. An effort to flesh out the cultural meanings through which people

articulate and effectuate both their city survival strategies and their claims as citizens has

been one aimed at connecting the "big P" politics of the state and the economy of

neoliberalism with the everyday of the household and its labors. It is this everyday that is

the foundation of the state. Through considering all of the contests of citizenship wrapped

281

up doing the dirty work, I have offered a window into what it means to be a citizen and

what goes into city-making in this African city.

And yet, precisely through speaking of the everyday in an ordinary city (See

Robinson 2006), I have also told a profoundly global story. The story of garbage in Dakar

is the story of World Bank and IMF structural adjustment policies, of international

companies, and of the hopeful imaginaries and aspirations of those striving to assert their

right to more than just the dregs of the global economy. Following James Ferguson

(2006), it also raises key questions for how we understand citizenship in today's

globalized world. Drawing from a conception of Africa as global shadow, where shadow

conjures not an absence, but a kind of relative, he writes:

To take seriously African experiences of the global... [demands] a discussion of social relations of membership responsibility, and inequality on a truly planetary scale. (Ferguson 2006: 23)

If we see Africa as a notion through which the world is structured, what can we say about

a global community in which urban Africans can, at best, only hope for a trashy job?

282

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