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Astou Coly examines the police brutality against Boubacar Dramé, exposing the illusion that assimilation ensures safety. She explores survival's aftermath for the diaspora—the enduring trauma and fractured identity. The article frames cultural heritage as vital armor for navigating this persistent struggle.

When Boubacar Dramé, a community mediator, was brutalized by French police in 2019, more than a body was wounded. An entire illusion cracked. Astou Coly, our Strange Foreigner columnist, a PhD candidate in sociolinguistics and collaborator at the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, seizes this rupture to speak about those who survive. About those who, after the ordeal, must relearn how to breathe.

The illusion, precisely. The belief that by doing everything right — by being integrated, polite, useful — one escapes the reductive gaze. Boubacar Dramé believed it. Many of us, whether you're in Paris, Montreal, or New York, have believed it too. We tell ourselves that with time, with degrees, with good work, prejudices fade. Then one day, an incident, a violence, a look reminds you of your foreignness. Not the one you carry, but the one assigned to you.

Astou Coly doesn't just recount this violence. She explores its aftermath. What becomes of those who survive. Because survival is not healing. It's carrying within oneself the memory of the shock, the crack in trust, the doubt about one's own place. It's learning to navigate a world that has shown you its hardest face, while having to continue living, working, existing within it.

For the diaspora, this chronicle strikes a deep chord. It speaks to that double consciousness, that permanent gap between who we are and how we're perceived. It questions the price of survival. Must we rebuild on the ruins of silence? Or should we, instead, transform the wound into speech, into testimony, into struggle?

Astou Coly, with the precision of a sociolinguist and the sensitivity of one who observes from the Museum of Black Civilizations, offers us more than an article here. A key to understanding these lives suspended between two shores. Those of Boubacar Dramé, sometimes our own. She reminds us that our history, our culture, are not relics. They are armor, languages, compasses for those who survive — and who, despite everything, choose to keep living.

Chronicles of a Strange Foreigner: Survival Is Not Living

Conservation efforts in West Africa, like expanding Sapo National Park, often displace local communities and restrict their livelihoods. This exclusion occurs alongside mining expansion, creating a cycle of land dispossession and environmental degradation. The global push to protect land must shift from exclusion to including the ancestral knowledge of local populations.

Whether you're in Paris, Montreal, or New York, this story touches the core of our African heritage. In Senegal and Liberia, a troubling paradox emerges: conservation efforts threaten the very ecology they claim to save. Behind the noble commitments of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework – protecting 30% of land by 2030 – lies a darker reality. The expansion of protected areas often becomes an instrument of exclusion, pushing our rural communities off their ancestral lands while extractive industries advance under the guise of green development.

Consider Sapo National Park in Liberia, that jewel of West Africa's forests. Created in 1983 on the colonial model of 'fortress conservation,' it prohibited access to local populations while promising economic benefits that never materialized. The civil war drove people to seek refuge in the park, reviving old farms and practicing subsistence hunting. Then, in 2003, the state expanded Sapo's boundaries, citing ecological integrity concerns. For bordering communities, this was betrayal: their livelihoods restricted, their expectations dashed.

Today, Sapo spans 1804 km², dotted with artisanal mining camps. As a young miner says, 'The benefits we get from mining are here in our hands, but we keep waiting for these tourists who never come.' Boundary expansion and the growth of artisanal mining are inextricably linked – one fueling the other in a cycle of mistrust and degradation. Proposals to militarize the park to restrict human mobility ignore the social and economic relationships woven around these activities.

This dynamic isn't isolated. In Senegal too, we observe rural communities transgressing historic national park boundaries, driven by the expansion of protected borders and the encroachment of mining industries. Two global trends converge in West Africa: soaring demand for gold, bauxite, and iron ore, and the rapid expansion of protected areas. Together, they create overlapping resource frontiers where extraction and conservation align ideologically in a neoliberal vision treating nature as commodity.

Mining companies have become key funders of conservation, supporting parks, offset markets, and environmental programs – thus greening their operations in shareholders' eyes. But the heaviest price falls on our local communities. They bear the burden of land dispossession, restricted resource access, and mining degradation. They are the ones who will remain, sustaining these landscapes long after this wave of capital abandons the scene.

The global biodiversity alliance pushes for the 30×30 goal, noble in the face of failed global climate efforts. Yet in Africa, where per capita protected land often exceeds that in developed economies, this expansion has a dark underbelly. Our national conservation histories shape local engagement, and parallel processes in countries with radically divergent postcolonial histories offer a cautionary tale. It's time to rethink conservation's future – not as exclusion, but as inclusion of those who've known and cherished the land since time immemorial.

Conservation's Shadow: When Protecting Land Threatens Our Communities

Seven years after his sword's return, the manuscripts of El Hadj Oumar Tall remain in French archives. This withheld intellectual heritage represents an exiled memory and an incomplete historical justice for Senegal and its diaspora, who continue advocating for their rightful restitution.

Seven years ago, a powerful symbol finally returned to the land that bore it: the sword of El Hadj Oumar Tall was handed back to his descendants. Yet, this gesture, however symbolic, did not close the chapter. For behind the weapon lie the words – the precious manuscripts of the Toucouleur Empire's founder, still held in France. This unfinished restitution is not merely about objects; it is a battle for memory, a reclaiming of our own narrative.

For the descendants of El Hadj Oumar Tall, the struggle is both political and deeply memorial. They are not claiming mere parchments, but the keys to understanding an era, the written thought of a spiritual and military leader who shaped West African history. These documents are silent witnesses to resistance, faith, and governance. To keep them away from Senegal is to hold a part of our historical consciousness in exile.

Whether you're in Paris, Montreal, or New York, this story speaks to you directly. It reminds us that our heritage is sometimes scattered, that the traces of our great figures can be held far from their lands. The diaspora, in its unique position, understands this tension between here and elsewhere, between preserved memory and restored memory. Every withheld manuscript is a missing page in the collective book we strive to preserve and pass on.

Today, the question persists: when will these writings return to Senegalese soil? The restitution of the sword showed that the path was possible, but it remains incomplete. As long as the manuscripts remain in France, the dialogue between the two countries will stay suspended on this crucial point. This is a matter of historical justice, but also of respect – the respect owed to a people and their intellectual heritage.

We are following this case with particular attention, because it embodies a broader struggle: that of reclaiming our narratives by ourselves. El Hadj Oumar Tall does not belong to foreign archives; he belongs to Senegalese history, to African history. And as long as his words have not rejoined his land, our duty to remember will remain unfinished. The fight continues, carried by the determination of his descendants and by the acute awareness that, without our archives, we risk losing a part of ourselves.