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.

The Manuscripts of El Hadj Oumar Tall: A Memory in Exile Awaiting Return

For several months now, Senegal has been navigating an economic period that tests the very foundations of our society. Persistent inflation, declining purchasing power, and an unfavorable international context are creating an increasingly difficult daily reality for millions of Senegalese. During his recent speech in Mbour, the Prime Minister acknowledged the severity of the situation, but his announcements of drastic restrictions raised more questions than answers. A fundamental question emerges: where is the genuine capacity for action in this multidimensional crisis?

Yet beyond official declarations and economic indicators, another reality is being written in the streets of Dakar, in the markets of Thiès, in the villages of Sine-Saloum. This is the story of citizen resilience drawing from our deepest traditions. Savings circles are being reinvented, community mutual aid systems are strengthening, and Senegalese ingenuity finds new expressions to confront adversity. This ability to create collective solutions, whether you're in Paris, Montreal, or New York, you'll recognize it immediately – it's that same energy that animates our communities across the world.

This resilience isn't merely a reaction to crisis, but the expression of a cultural identity that has always known how to transform challenges into opportunities. Our grandparents taught us that 'teranga' isn't just hospitality toward strangers, but first and foremost solidarity among ourselves. Today, this fundamental value manifests in concrete initiatives: collective kitchens that reduce food costs, informal microcredit systems that sustain local economic activity, skill-sharing that creates new forms of employment.

Confronted with political impotence that seems to paralyze institutions, it is therefore the Senegalese people who are currently writing the most significant pages of this difficult period. This crisis reveals not only the weaknesses of our system but also the extraordinary strength of our social fabric. While decision-makers search for solutions in economic textbooks, Senegalese people are inventing responses in the reality of their daily lives, proving once again that our greatest wealth lies in our ability to unite in the face of adversity.

Senegalese Resilience: When the People Write Their Own Destiny Amid Crisis

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

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

On March 11, 2026, Senegal's National Assembly voted to increase prison sentences for same-sex relations and criminalize any "promotion" of homosexuality. You've heard about religion, culture, African values. These explanations are not only insufficient, they divert attention. For this law did not spring from a sudden moral fervor. It is the calculated product of a bankrupt state, unable to protect its students or keep its promises, falling back on the oldest postcolonial reflex: governing the bodies of the most vulnerable when you can govern nothing else.

Look at the numbers, they don't lie. The same month the state paid $471 million to its creditors to avoid default, it passed this law. Public debt, falsified under Macky Sall, now hovers around 132% of GDP. External debt payments consume over half of state revenue. Thirteen billion dollars concealed. The IMF froze its credit lines. Student scholarships go unpaid. When a state can no longer deliver materially, when promises of transformation are suffocated by austerity, it delivers morally. Moral legislation costs nothing. It mobilizes religious authority, nationalist sentiment, and cultural anxieties, all at zero fiscal cost.

But this crisis does not create moral governance from nothing. It exploits a preexisting patriarchal architecture. Queer people do not suddenly become objects of discipline because the economy stumbles. They already were, constructed as such by patriarchy, independent of any economic cycle. The debt crisis does not invent this logic, it intensifies it. Take the death of Abdoulaye Ba, a medical student at Cheikh Anta Diop University, on February 9, 2026, during a police intervention. The university teachers' union, SAES, spoke of police brutality, pointing to structural roots: chronic deficits, understaffing, infrastructure backlogs produced by this same debt arithmetic. The same day as this death, military police arrested 12 men for "acts against nature." The bodies being punished are not the problem. They are the cover story for the problem.

And meanwhile, whether you're in Paris, Montreal, or New York, know that external influences are also at play. The network And Samm Jikko Yi, behind the law, reached out to MassResistance, a Christian-nationalist organization from Massachusetts that calls homosexuality a public health threat. The day after the law passed, Senegal signed a $90.4 million health memorandum with Trump's United States. The deal funds HIV and malaria fight, but deliberately excludes the gender-transformative programming essential for key populations. HIV prevalence among men who have sex with men reaches 49% in parts of Dakar, against a national rate of 0.3%. Entire communities are in hiding or exile. The theater of morality needs an audience looking the wrong way. This government is making sure they do.

The Theater of Morality: When Senegal's Government Rules Bodies to Mask Its Failures

Whether you're in Paris, Montreal, or New York, this reality concerns you: in West Africa, the alliance between mining extraction and biodiversity conservation isn't a break from the past, but the continuation of a reinvented colonial pattern. Take Simandou in Guinea: this iron ore deposit, Africa's largest, is presented as the cornerstone of a "green steel revolution". Backed by Rio Tinto and Chinese investors, this $24 billion project promises to reduce carbon emissions. But look closer: this "greenness" spreads across mountainous forests of exceptional ecological richness, where large-scale extraction threatens endemic species and ancestral communities.

150 kilometers south, the Mount Nimba range, a natural jewel and UNESCO World Heritage site, is also coveted. A simple white rope separates the strict nature reserve, sanctuary to Western chimpanzees and unique toads, from the Ivanhoe Atlantic mining concession. Here, the World Bank bets on "forest-smart" mining practices, a model claiming to reconcile technological innovation with environmental responsibility. But behind this discourse lies a darker reality: the state often facilitates the expropriation of agricultural and indigenous lands, reclassified as mining concessions or forest reserves.

This convergence is no accident. Since the International Council on Mining and Metals was created in 2001, the industry has adopted a language of sustainable development. As Rio Tinto's David Richards states, mining can be "part of the solution to biodiversity conservation". In exchange for legitimacy, companies fund ecological offset programs, like ArcelorMittal's in Liberia, implemented with Conservation International. These biodiversity offsets, promoted by the International Finance Corporation, allow extraction to continue while meeting environmental standards.

But this alliance rests on a deeper logic: capitalism reinvents nature as capital, generating new accumulation opportunities. Environmental historian Archana Prasad emphasizes this: this dynamic relies on expropriation, restructuring relations between the Global North and South. African states often act in concert with transnational capital, aligning national development goals with the interests of their own bourgeoisie and the global economic elite.

The result? A neoliberal conservation that, under the guise of sustainability, reserves more African land and biodiversity for external forces. World Heritage sites, recognized for their "outstanding universal value", are increasingly under pressure from extractive industries. Far from being contradictory, destructive extraction and the formal setting aside of land now operate hand in hand, enabling accumulation through dispossession and privatization.

Thus, whether speaking of Simandou or Mount Nimba, the pattern is identical: "green" becomes an alibi for a new form of colonialism, where protecting nature serves to justify its exploitation. Our ecological and cultural heritage is thus transformed into a commodity, in a cycle perpetuating historical imbalances. The real question isn't whether extraction can be green, but for whom and at what price this greenness is negotiated.

Conservation and Extraction: The New Face of Green Colonialism in West Africa

Two years ago, a promise resonated through the Senegalese political heart with the force of an ancestral oath. Ousmane Sonko, then an opposition figure, swore to restore the sacred independence of the judiciary – that backbone of any democracy worthy of our Wolof heritage of teranga and palaver. His words carried the hope of a refounding, a return to the principles that made our pre-colonial kingdoms great, where justice was not an instrument but a temple.

Today, leading the government with his Pastef party, the Prime Minister navigates the troubled waters of real power. The promised judicial reforms – those projects awaited like rains after the dry season – have still not been launched. The political calendar fills with other priorities, while Senegalese people, from Dakar to Saint-Louis, from Tambacounda to Ziguinchor, watch this silence with growing concern. The question whispers in family courtyards and on social media: was this a sincere commitment or mere campaign rhetoric?

For our diaspora, whether you're in Paris, Montreal, or New York, this waiting resonates particularly. You who carry Senegal in your heart while living under other judicial systems, you measure the gap between promise and reality. Judicial independence isn't a technical matter, but the foundation of trust between a people and its institutions. Without it, how do we build the future we all deserve?

Some analysts murmur this might be a deliberate strategy – waiting for the right moment, like the fisherman watches the tide. Others see the complexities of power, where every decision must balance fragile equations. But time itself doesn't negotiate. It digs a chasm between the word given and the action expected. Our history teaches us that great nations are built on kept promises, on the honor of commitments. Tomorrow's Senegal watches today, waiting for justice to reclaim its place at the center of our common project.

Senegalese Justice: Pastef's Promises Tested by the Reality of Power

When a state chooses to conceal its debts rather than invest in its youth, it jeopardizes its own future. Today, thousands of young Senegalese – whether graduates from prestigious institutions, artisans inheriting centuries-old craftsmanship, or entrepreneurs with innovative ideas – find themselves facing a system that seems to turn its back on them. Their daily struggle for opportunities worthy of their potential reveals a deep fracture between national promises and lived realities.

Yet on the horizon of 2026, Dakar prepares to write a historic chapter for Africa by hosting the Youth Olympic Games from October 31 to November 13. This major event represents far more than a mere sports competition: it's a global showcase of our organizational capacity, our legendary hospitality, and our creative dynamism. For you, dear diaspora readers, whether you're in Paris, Montreal, or New York, these Games symbolize the renewed pride of a nation daring to project itself internationally.

But this celebration must not obscure the structural challenges facing our youth. How do we transform this fleeting event into lasting opportunities? How do we ensure that the built infrastructure will serve beyond the two weeks of competition? The answer lies in an integrated vision that places young people at the heart of economic development. The Games must become a catalyst for vocational training, technological innovation, and local entrepreneurship.

The economic urgency demands bold solutions that value our exceptional human capital. Our youth aren't asking for charity, but for recognition of their skills and access to ecosystems conducive to their growth. As a Senegalese community, both within and beyond our borders, we have a collective responsibility to build bridges between talent and opportunity. The Youth Olympic Games represent a unique chance to demonstrate to the entire world that Senegal knows not only how to organize large-scale events, but especially how to invest in the future of its youth.

History will judge us on our ability to transform this symbolic moment into tangible legacy for future generations. Between the brand-new stadiums and the dreams of thousands of young people, lies the economic future of our nation. It is now, in this pivotal period, that we must build the foundations for shared and lasting prosperity.

Senegalese Youth: Between Economic Urgency and Olympic Hope

Two years ago, Senegal held its breath. The slogan "DIOMAYE moye SONKO" echoed through the streets of Dakar and the living rooms of Paris, Montreal, and New York, carried by a youth thirsty for renewal. We believed in it, collectively, with that Senegalese pride that unites us across oceans. Today, the assessment is more bitter: promises of change have eroded against the complexities of governance, giving way to divisions that crack the social fabric we cherish so deeply.

Whether you've been following events from the Medina or from Paris's 18th arrondissement, you've likely felt this growing disillusionment. The hopes placed in this new political era have collided with a reality where divisions seem to have overtaken the promised unity. This isn't merely a political matter – it's a question of national soul, of what it means to be Senegalese in this pivotal moment of our history.

Our culture teaches us that dialogue and consensus are the pillars of any lasting community. Yet these two years have seen chasms widen where bridges should have been built. The youth who carried this change to power now face their own disillusionments, while the expectations of the diaspora – always connected, always invested – remain largely unmet.

As Senegalese, wherever we are in the world, we share this responsibility to look our reality in the face. These two years remind us that true change isn't decreed by a slogan, but built day by day with respect for our shared values. History continues to be written, and it's up to us to be its conscious and critical authors.

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