Dakar, Dec 18 (APS) – The current face of certain African cities reflects their colonial past, said Senegalese academic and thinker Felwine Sarr on Wednesday, referring in particular to cities built against its inhabitants and configured to the expectations of the colonial power.
“Colonial cities were built against their inhabitants and configured to meet the needs of resource extraction,” he noted, adding: “Much of the current face of African cities has been shaped by experience colonial”.
Felwine Sarr made this observation while delivering, Wednesday in Dakar, the inaugural conference of an international symposium on the theme “A sense of place” of which he is the director.
This meeting, which continues until Saturday at the Théodore Monod Museum of African Art at Cheikh Anta Diop University, brings together, among others, artists, researchers, architects, urban planners and geographers.
At the initiative of Raw Material Company, an art institution based in Dakar, this intellectual event offers a framework for reflecting on “the ecological question, endogenous knowledge, cosmological and mythological resources and hospitality”, indicates your.
The author of Afrotopia (2016) – an essay in which he invites Africa to no longer “run on the paths that are shown to it, but to walk nimbly on the path that it has chosen” – also focused on “the original mythical and symbolic matrices of African cities which predate colonial events”. In this regard, he cites the examples of Timbuktu and Gao, in Mali, as well as Benin City, in Nigeria.
“African cities existed long before colonization,” insisted Felwine Sarr, who joined Duke University in North Carolina (USA) in 2021, where his academic work focuses on the ecology of knowledge, contemporary philosophy African and diasporic. He taught development economics and the history of religious ideas at Gaston Berger University (UGB) in Saint-Louis for 13 years.
“It’s a reflection to take stock of the city’s crisis, also the ecological crisis and all the difficulties that individuals have in fully inhabiting the places that must nourish life,” he said. he hammered home, alluding in particular to the spatial, environmental, demographic and security challenges that challenge “African cities, current and future”.
He insisted on the need for “adequate urban planning”, in view of “the galloping statistics of African cities, which will concentrate more than half of the continent’s population by 2030”.
“In 2030, Lagos (Nigeria) will have 25 million inhabitants, Kinshasa 16 million (Congo), Cairo (Egypt) 14 million and Dakar (Senegal) 7 million,” he suggested.
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