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.
135
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.
138
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).
139
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).
140
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
172
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$
ik
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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:
175
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
177
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.
179
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.
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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).
194
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.
205
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.
221
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
224
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
226
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
228
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
240
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
242
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
246
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.
251
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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