Figure 1: The old terminus building in Dakar, known simply as 鈥淟a Gare鈥�
During my early days of fieldwork in the old city centre of Dakar, Senegal, I was sitting with the trader Fatim in her tiny market stall under a tattered, weather-worn parasol. Fatim watched over her goods that were balanced on top of some old, repurposed metal drums. The rusty tracks of the former Dakar-Niger railway line stretched out on the ground behind us, forming the backdrop to this small outdoor market. A few dozen other rickety stalls were lined up along the old platform that led to the abandoned terminus building known simply as 鈥�La Gare鈥� (Figure 1). Fatim thrust her arm out to indicate the space around her and exclaimed, 鈥極ften, when people come here, they look around and say, 鈥淭here is nothing here! …Some people think the market at the Terminus (March茅 de la Gare) doesn’t exist anymore, so they don’t come鈥�.
The Terminus (La Gare) was the last station at the end of the Dakar-Niger railway line. The line had formerly connected the landlocked Malian capital, Bamako, to the Senegalese capital on the Atlantic coast. During the first decade of decolonisation a thriving Malian wholesale and retail market – le March茅 de la Gare 鈥� had emerged at the Dakar Terminus. When I arrived in Dakar in 2013 to conduct fieldwork, however, the passenger train, on which the Malian shuttle traders supplying the market had travelled, was no longer running; and the flourishing Malian market at the Terminus no longer existed. In 2003, under pressure from the World Bank, the Malian and Senegalese governments had privatized the formerly State-owned rail network. In 2009, the Senegalese passenger train running between the Malian border and Dakar was discontinued. In the same year, the Malian market at the Dakar terminus was bulldozed by Senegalese authorities, supposedly to make way for 鈥淭he Seven Wonders of Dakar鈥� (, accessed 7th of June 2023) – a prestigious, but as yet unfinished, construction project.
In this blog post I explore how the traders evicted from the Terminus had responded to persistent uncertainty and economic pressure following the demolition of their market. Rapid and unequal urban developments are occurring across the world, and particularly in the fast-growing cities of Africa. Such developments lead to disruption, uprooting and disorientation, creating immense economic and psychological pressures on urban traders whose livelihoods depend on working in a specific location in the city and accessing certain infrastructures and networks in that space, to connect with suppliers, customers, and middlemen. The following analysis explores what is produced by these pressures 鈥� not in a naively optimistic sense of 鈥済ood things emerging鈥� from pressure, but in a temporal sense of understanding the long-term outcomes produced by pressure. Specifically, I argue that the economic uncertainty and sense of disorientation and uprootedness associated with eviction from the Dakar Terminus had led to a kind of urban diasporic formation among the displaced traders. The analysis thus contributes a temporal perspective on pressure, showing what urban dwellers鈥� responses to pressure may generate in the longer term.
The evicted traders were facing multiple pressures due to the destruction of networks and infrastructures that had underpinned their trade. Pressures included a decline in demand, problems with supply, and a continued risk of eviction, as well as a lack of trust at the new markets due to the interruption and dislocation generated by eviction. These pressures were exacerbated by ongoing economic crises in Mali and Senegal. 鈥淧ressure鈥� in this blog post is thus understood not merely as a momentary event or as one specific driver, but as multi-layered and ongoing (see Wiegratz et all 2020). My focus is specifically on pressures experienced by so-called informal traders and the urban displaced in West Africa, but my arguments regarding the formation of an 鈥渦rban diaspora鈥� (here in the aftermath of a major eviction) in the face of pressure in the city may be more widely applicable.
Traders facing multiple pressures
In the wake of the bulldozing of their market, the traders from the Dakar Terminus had experienced a double displacement: they had been evicted from their familiar marketplace and were at the same time witnessing a radical transformation of the spaces and infrastructures of the city that they had relied upon, rendering the old city centre of Dakar largely unviable as a trade and transport hub. After the passenger train from Mali was replaced with transport by road, the Malian shuttle traders bringing goods to Dakar were no longer propelled into the same social and commercial space as the market traders at the old Terminus. Shuttle traders (Figure 2) now arrived on busses in the sprawling northern suburbs of Dakar and truck drivers carrying their goods were reluctant to continue all the way into the congested old city centre (J贸nsson 2019).
Figure 2: Bus departing from suburb of Dakar, bringing traders and their goods back to Mali
And yet, the market traders evicted from the Terminus had largely remained working in the old city centre. Here they had set up a constellation of smaller Malian markets in the close vicinity of the old Terminus. Most of these traders were working under precarious conditions and at continued risk of eviction. Few people outside the Malian trading networks knew about these scattered new markets and the displaced traders had lost many customers after their eviction from the Terminus. Safi, who worked at a new cloth bazaar (Fig. 3) next to the old Terminus building, explained:
Many people thought we left after the market at the Terminus was closed. They just heard they were going to close the Malian market, so they’re not aware that we’re here. That includes even our old customers, who don’t come here. And the new people don’t know we are here, so they go to HLM [suburban cloth market] instead鈥�.
Figure 3: Entrance to the new cloth bazaar next to the old railway terminus.
Meanwhile, the decline of the displaced traders鈥� businesses was not only due to the relative invisibility and inaccessibility of the new markets, but also reflected the general worsening of the macro-economic environment. At the time of my fieldwork, financial crisis was deepening both in Senegal and in Mali. The neoliberal agenda of former president Abdoullaye Wade, who was voted out of office in 2012, had failed to result in economic advancement for most of Senegal鈥檚 population and his cleptocratic reign had left the national economy in shambles. In Mali, a military coup in March 2012 and the state of war declared in January 2013 had depressed the economy there.
These multiple economic pressures that traders faced – constituted by a decline in demand, problems with supply, and the ongoing risk of eviction at the new Malian markets in Dakar, in a wider context of economic crises in both Mali and Senegal – beg the question: why did the traders from the Terminus not simply dismantle their market network and begin new ventures elsewhere? And following from that: What kinds of pursuits were they engaged in at these markets, if not the singular pursuit of an income?
A diaspora formed by the pressures of urban displacement
The newly established marketplaces in downtown Dakar, together with a new terminus station for Malian freight trains, constituted scattered fragments of the dismantled former marketplace at the Terminus. The people working in these dispersed locations all referred to themselves as 鈥渢he people of the Terminus鈥�. The scattered new marketplaces comprising the evicted traders were collectively referred to as 鈥渢he Terminus鈥�. The networks and commercial activities associated with the Terminus were thus far more expansive than what met the eye at the empty, old terminus building where Fatim 鈥� mentioned in the opening vignette – was working. Beyond the few traders sitting outdoors by the old station there was a much bigger, partly invisible, network of evicted and scattered traders in Dakar, who continued to consider themselves part of the Terminus. As the Malian manager of the new terminus for Malian freight trains stated, 鈥楬ere and the market at the Terminus is the same thing. We are in continuity with the market over there鈥�.
Through various forms of collaboration, credit relations, and informal regulations of behaviour at the new markets the traders produced symbolic boundaries that demarcated who could be considered part of 鈥渢he people of the Terminus鈥�. This enabled the market traders to restore the interpersonal bases of trust, which was vital in the context of interruption and dislocation around the Terminus. Beyond the pursuit of profit and advancement of their businesses, traders also derived non-commercial benefits from inclusion in these markets. As a result of these boundary-making practices, and by literally referring to themselves as 鈥渢he people of the Terminus鈥�, the scattered and displaced traders reproduced a form of group consciousness amongst themselves and a continued mental orientation towards the Terminus.
A sort of diasporic consciousness was thus emerging in the aftermath of displacement from the Terminus. The traders were bound together by the shared myths, identities, memories and histories that were associated with the place from where they had originally dispersed: the Terminus. This is comparable to the kinds of identity formation that develops at other (larger) scales of displacement (Hage 2021) and 鈥渢he people of the Terminus鈥� thus in many ways resembled a diasporic network. My usage of the term 鈥渄iaspora鈥� here is mainly heuristic, pointing to a new way of understanding and analysing the impacts of urban displacement on close-knit networks, like the people of the Terminus.
It is impossible to deduce which of the multiple pressures faced by the evicted traders resulted in this diasporic formation and consciousness; but it was clear that this 鈥渄iaspora鈥� of displaced traders was a kind of coping mechanism in the face of multiple pressures. Exploring the long term aftermath of eviction and displacement in cities, in contexts of wider ongoing pressures of making a living and getting by, provides a new perspective on the city. It lluminates how and why the city is being configured in certain new ways by urban dwellers themselves, in response to the various pressures they face. Prevailing analyses that focus only on the immediate consequences of eviction cannot grasp how the ensuing displacement reconfigures interpersonal relations, identities, networks, livelihoods, urban economies, and even cities themselves, in the longer term. Given how ubiquitous urban displacement is in our current era of neoliberal gentrification (Freeman 2020) one can only imagine how many scattered networks and possibly even 鈥渄iasporas鈥� of evicted residents and dispersed traders, just like the people from the Terminus, exist in cities all over the world.
What pressure produces
At the face of it there was 鈥榥othing鈥� left at the Terminus after the traders had been evicted. The appearance of empty space, of cleared land, an unoccupied terra nullius at the old Terminus where 鈥淪even Wonders鈥� would emerge from the ground to renew the city 鈥� was, however, deceptive. The Terminus was still associated with Malian trade and the traders were still around. Their networks, their scattered new markets, and the imaginaries and history they associated with the Terminus were just not visible to the random passers-by turning up at the abandoned old station.
While very little scholarship has considered the aftermath of urban displacement, my ethnography highlights that traders and their markets do not simply vanish into thin air when eviction and demolition happen. Destruction and ensuing displacement does not produce a 鈥�tabula rasa鈥�, a clean slate where identities, networks and histories must be produced from scratch. Recent scholarship on the aftermath of destruction and displacement emphasizes the productive and generative aspects of such ruptures. Amanda Hammar, for example, argues that it is necessary to focus, 鈥榥ot only on what and who generates displacement and why but on what displacement itself produces鈥� (Hammar 2020: 70). In a similar way, the ethnography of the Terminus might encourage urban scholars and Africanists to consider the more generative aspects of 鈥減ressure鈥� in the city, understanding how it reconfigures urban spaces, economies, networks and imaginaries over the longer term.
What the story of the Terminus highlights is that urban displacement and pressure in the city does not merely lead to the scattering of people, fragmentation of networks, uprootedness from place, and loss of assets and income. New things emerge from the dust, and the old is not erased but is drawn upon to recreate meaning and purpose and to rebuild livelihoods. These observations are not naively hopeful tales intended to mitigate the painful process of urban displacement and its concomitant socio-economic pressures. Rather, my point is to highlight that things do happen in the aftermath of the kinds of urban renewal processes that involve clearances and displacement. Displaced people鈥檚 networks, memories and place attachments forged in certain parts of the city do not simply vanish with eviction.
References
Freeman, J. (2020). 鈥淥lympic Favela Evictions in Rio de Janeiro: The Consolidation of a Neoliberal Displacement Regime鈥�. The Handbook of Displacement. P. Adey, J. C. Bowstead, K. Brickell et al.: 271-286.
Hage, G. (2021). The Diasporic Condition. Ethnographic Explorations Of The Lebanese In The World. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.
Hammar, A. (2020). Displacement Economies: A Relational Approach to Displacement. The Handbook of Displacement. P. Adey, J. C. Bowstead, K. Brickell et al. Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan and Springer Nature: 67-77.
J贸nsson, G. 2019. 鈥淭he Need to Travel: Malian Women Shuttle Traders, Autonomy and (Mis)Trust in Neoliberal Dakar鈥� Africa, 89(4).
Wiegratz, J枚rg, Catherine Dolan, Wangui Kimari and Mario Schmidt. 2020. 鈥淯rban Africa under Stress: Rethinking Economic Pressure in Cities鈥�. Pressure in the City blog: /2020/08/17/urban-africa-under-stress-rethinking-economic-pressure-in-cities/
Dr. Gunvor J贸nsson is a trained anthropologist and an Honorary Research Associate in Sociology at the Open University. The insights presented in this blog are part of a broader ethnography featured in her forthcoming monograph, Urban Displacement and Trade in a Senegalese Market: an anthropology of endings. The book will be the first title in a new series, 鈥淯rban Africa鈥�, published by UCL Press & the International Africa Institute. Gunvor has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Senegal, Mali, South Africa and the UK. She has taught at SOAS and the University of Oxford, and has authored several articles and book chapters as well as an edited book and a special journal issue.
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