Once again, the beautiful boulevards of Dakar have erupted in rapturous dancing and sonorous singing, the kind of enchanting soul-stirring music for which Senegalese musical prodigies are globally famous. There is cause and justification for the joyous din and national rapture. The people of Senegal have just elected their youngest president ever, a forty four year old former tax inspector who has been in the trenches against the increasingly authoritarian and power-besotted Macky Sall.
This kind of open conviviality and camaraderie on the streets irrespective of age, gender, class and ethnic affiliations speak to the nature of truly organic nations. It is a humbling and ennobling sight of a nation for itself in motion and sterling action as opposed to a nation in itself hobbled by deep and fundamental contradictions.
But it is necessary to sound a cautionary note of warning to starry-eyed idealists and our rudderless youths who believe in instant coffee revolutions and ersatz people’s power. The seeds of revolution do not grow on a barren landscape until the soil is fertilized accordingly. This is not the first time the people of Senegal have been involved in a battle of will and wits with recalcitrant rulers. They have been at it for quite some time. Each battle is memorialized in the national museum of remembering and form part of the nation’s heroic saga.
Let us not race ahead of the narrative. You can rate a purposeful and determined people by the way they treat the great intellectuals of the nation. It is not by accident or sheer coincidence that the grandest and best-appointed boulevard in Dakar is named after Cheikh Anta Diop, one of Africa’s greatest sons ever. So, is their most prestigious university.
In an epic doctoral dissertation submitted to his university in Paris the like of which has not been seen before or likely to be seen thereafter, Diop bravely and boldly advanced the postulation which was rare at that time that the fundament of western civilization and its scaffolding was none other than the Black civilization of Egypt.
In the hypocrisy-ridden world of western scholarship and its otiose inanities, this was a sharp suicide note to push at that point in time particularly when the decolonizing movement had not gathered its final momentum. Despite its copious citations and heavy duty cross-referencing, the thesis was resoundingly rejected for its contumely and intellectual temerity .All they ever asked of this self-esteeming fellow from Senegal was to become an evolue or a French black person and every other thing would fall in place.
In the event, excommunication, exclusion, alienation and stigmatization swiftly followed. But Cheikh Anta Diop was unfazed and undaunted, ready to defend and advance his postulations anywhere and at any time. It was perhaps as a result of the stress and great exertions that the great man succumbed to a massive heart attack at the age of sixty two in 1986.
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But the Senegalese people never forgot or abandoned their own, honoring him at every turn and lionizing him at every available opportunity. It will be recalled that Leopold Sedar Senghor, the first post-independence president of Senegal and the revered founding father, is also a great African intellectual and philosopher.
Despite being a minority Christian president in a predominantly Moslem country, Senghor is accorded the status of a secular divinity by his grateful compatriots for ruling them with much wisdom, humaneness and compassion. After leaving office, Senghor retired to a Paris suburb where he was often seen wheeling his own shopping cart with his wife. His successor, the tall, gangling Abdul Diouf, also retired to France after being electorally steamrolled in a popular revolt against the ruling oligarchy.
In sum, the last three presidents of Senegal have been driven from power by popular protests and people’s power. Macky Sall who was part of the movement to remove Abdoulaye Wade from power received his own comeuppance last Sunday. No other African country has achieved this feat of popular self-assertion. The heroes are the Senegalese people.
