A History of Urban Planning and Infectious Diseases: Colonial Senegal in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

This paper deals with the spatial implications of the French sanitary policies in early colonial urban Senegal. It focuses on the French politics of residential segregation following the outbreak of the bubonic plague in Dakar in 1914, and their precedents in Saint Louis. These policies can be conceived as most dramatic, resulting in a displacement of a considerable portion of the indigenous population, who did not want or could not afford to buildà l'européen, to the margins of the colonial city. Aspects of residential segregation are analysed here through the perspective of cultural history and history of colonial planning and architecture, in contrast to the existing literature on this topic. The latter dilates on the statutory policies of the colonial authorities facing the 1914 plague in Dakar, the plague's sociopolitical implications, and the colonial politics of public health there. In the light of relevant historiography, and a variety of secondary and primary sources, this paper exposes the contradictions that were inherent in the French colonial regime in West Africa. These contradictions were wisely used by the African agency, so that such a seemingly urgent segregationist project was actually never accomplished.

Reading the changing dynamic of urban social distances during the COVID-19 pandemic via Twitter

“…On the contrary, fear might reinforce the conception of the stranger as a 'symbol of otherness', as it becomes associated with the possibility of becoming infected. Bigon (2012) argues that the spread of infectious diseases in west Africa has caused segregation and despair. Hoffman (2016) has highlighted the spread of violence under such circumstances.…”

Archaeology of Two Pandemics and Teranga Aesthetic

“…A case in point is the bubonic plague that hit Dakar from April 1914 to January 1915, killing 3653 people out of a population of 26,000 inhabitants in less than a year. The French colonial government took a series of harsh decisions including the displacement and confinement of African populations in new neighborhoods, the imposition of new architectural standards with bricks and stones, the burning of huts and quarantine camps, issuance of movement passes for Africans, and the establishment of sanitary cordons, among many other measures (Bigon 2012 ). In reaction to these, many Africans moved to the outskirt of Dakar, where they were welcomed with open hands by other Africans in accordance with the principle of teranga .…”

Traditional medicines, law and the (dis)ordering of temporalities

“…If Europe is a useful terrain to observe power shifts around gender and class in medicine, the dangers of adequating biomedicine with a sense of linear modernity and its embracing by law, are most visible in the context of colonial expansion. European states actively and through both legal and practical interventions rewrote what they saw as 'forward-thinking' or 'modern' medicine (Ciekawy, 1998;Hess, 2003;Bigon, 2012). Indeed, biomedicine became one of the key tools used by colonisers to promote the narrative of modernisation that they relied upon in establishing their power over local populations in colonised territories (Vaughan, 2001;Echenberg, 2002;Langwick, 2011).…”