“Ancestors’ Land Does No Longer Exist?” Negotiations of Belonging and Ownership in the Context of Urban Land Governance in Dakar (Senegal)

Land governance has been for many years one of the most burning political, economic, social and cultural issues across the African continent. This blogpost shares some reflections on the concepts of belonging and ownership in relation with land governance. It follows Peter Geschiere’s argument that the notions of autochthony and allochthony are social constructs even though “to its protagonists, autochthony – the special link to the soil – seems to have some sort of primordial quality” (Geschiere 2009: 2). The blogpost is based on empirical fieldwork data on land governance in Senegal with a particular case study on Dakar’s former International Airport Léopold Sédar Senghor, which was closed to the public in December 2017. The airport was originally opened in the 1940s on a site, which was then outside Dakar, but which has experienced increasing urbanisation since then. Today, the site is surrounded by one of the most expensive neighbourhoods of Dakar (Almadies), some middle-income areas (such as Ouest-Foire) and several neighbourhoods which have been developed out of former Lebou villages (Ngor, Ouakam and Yoff).

Dakar’s former International Airport Léopold Sédar Senghor: urbanisation and contested spaces

In this blog post, I’m particularly interested in these former villages and their residents. The term “Lebou” is a colonial creation and does not designate a group, but a social entity based on a supposed kinship. According to Pape Demba Fall (1986) one can therefore speak of it as an ethnic group with many points in common, of which pride and hostility towards others are the main ones. In Dakar, different Lebou communities assert to be the autochthonous population of the entire peninsula. When the city was founded in 1857, several Lebou villages were spread over the area from the Atlantic coast in the west to what is today the city of Thiès in the east. These villages are closely interconnected with Dakar’s history of urbanization, which has become just one part of an urban agglomeration of around four million inhabitants. Throughout this process, Lebou communities have continued to live in their villages on the peninsula and expanded them. Driven by the idea of being “autochthonous”, they have claimed the land ownership over most of the peninsula.

This claim has been in conflict with the way in which the colonial and postcolonial administrations defined land ownership in Senegal based on a land register. The first steps of colonial land governance in Dakar go back to the code Faidherbe (11 March 1865). After independence, the Senegalese government introduced the Loi sur le domaine national (The law on the national domain) in 1964. From the immediate post-independence onwards, land that someone had not formally registered was automatically considered state property. Yet, in the past, most inhabitants of the Lebou villages and neighbourhoods were not familiar with these administrative processes and had no or only limited school education in French. While many ordinary Lebou did not register their land, only a few Lebou dignitaries took advantage of this formalization process in order to appropriate more plots of land on their name. In addition, increasing urbanisation has further increased the demand for land and has contributed to its commodification. This aspect plays into the tensions between Lebou claims of belonging to the land and the administrative approach to land-ownership based on land titles, but it will not be further explored in this blogpost. Even though the legal framework for land tenure regulations in Senegal is currently under reform, its implementation is still slow, and conflicts over land are widespread and persist.

With the increasing urbanization, the areas of cultivable land around the Lebou villages became urban expansion zones (Sidibé 2015). This is the case of Ngor, Ouakam and Yoff where I have been doing ethnographic fieldwork since 2019 in the framework of my broader research project on “Urban land tenure and the pluralism of governance logics in Bamako, Ouagadougou and Dakar”.¹  I’m interested in how the residents of Ngor, Ouakam and Yoff negotiate and claim their access to urban land by contesting the Loi sur le domaine national and using concepts of belonging and land ownership based on their view of being the endogenous population of the former Léopold Sédar Senghor airport site.

Urban land, Lebou and the state – contestations

Ngor, Yoff and Ouakam are each Lebou villages and the history of their residents is tightly linked to each other. In a narrative interview in Ngor Mrs. Ndoye asserted this in December 2018. She also sent me to Yoff to discuss with Mr. Ndiaga Samb. Samb was the president of the “Association des Jeunes Lebous” in Dakar from 1985 until December 2020, when he passed away at the age of 75 years. In an interview in November 2020 at his residence in the village of Yoff, he explained how owning land is conceptualised among Lebou:

The land is inherited from a great-grandfather who cleared the area and holds the right of axe or fire to grandsons. This description shows where the use of the word property comes from. Ownership goes to the one who set the fire, who has unleashed, who lived on it, who cultivated it, so to speak, the one who developed it. That’s where the word property comes from. And when the French colonialists came here in 1857, we stayed here until 1960.²

In the narrative of Samb, the concept of autochthony referred to the “right of axe and fire” inherited from generations to generations before colonisation. During the interview, he also argued that Mamadou Dia had originally drafted a different version of the Loi sur le domaine national, which would have considered the land-ownership of the Lebou.

Lamine Doumbia & Etienne Badji CC-BY-SA: Office of Freys

Since the closure of the Léopold Sédar Senghor Airport, residents in the village of Ngor, Ouakam and Yoff have been alerted and have increasingly mobilized to claim back the airport’s land by referring to their “ancestors” for legitimizing their claim of belonging. In an interview with the Freys in Ngor, which is a traditional Lebou office or court for intercommunity’s affairs, the general secretary explained in June 2021: “We have not been colonized. The colonizers had a tacit agreement with us. The land of the airport was loaned by requisition in 1940 by our ancestors to the Americans”.

When I asked the general secretary of the Freys if they had a copy of this requisition, he told me that it could be found in the archives of Nantes in France.  According to documents of the Association des jeunes Lebou de Dakar, state authorities argue “Suufu Maam Amatul” (translated from Wolof: There is no ancestors’ land) , but Lebou respond “Seen Maam Dafa Amul Suuf Famu Dekk” (Your ancestors do not have land where they live).³

Discussions and outcomes

In Senegal (as in most other francophone West African countries), the state claims to be the “guarantor” and owner of the land. This claim is based on legal regulations, administrative texts and their implementation. According to these texts, public services are allowed to expropriate and displace populations for the purpose of “development”. These populations, however, challenge and contest the enforcement of the administrative texts. Baller argued that “Bureaucrats, users, and intermediaries act in zones of uncertainty, which require processes of adaptation and negotiation” (Baller 2021: 414). Therefore, in Ngor, Ouakam and Yoff, residents basically follow in their villages customary land regulations. They argue that the land belongs to them because of “the right of axe and fire”. People have societal habits and the ability to organize and be organized in the framework of rights and regulations they identify with and treat as their laws (Tamanaha 2000: 313). In other but similar contexts, utilising the concepts of space and time opens up the way in which Griffiths perceives land and law, not as bounded entities cut off from one another, but as mutually constitutive domains involving flexible and dynamic processes of change (Griffiths 2024: 27).

From this reflection the following questions emerge: How do residents, communities and resident associations negotiate their relationship with state authorities, which claim the monopole over all land-ownership rights? Should the endogenous or customary form of land right be codified and considered in the practice of urban land tenure with the aim of involving as many citizens as possible?  In addition, how could such a codification of land ownership take place in an era of commodification, when in the past land was considered as a collective, common resource? Strikingly, Lebou people in Dakar currently claim the land based on the concept of belonging and “autochthony”, but on the ground their claims rather contribute to further commodifying land which is becoming more and more expensive and of which ownership is becoming increasingly desired.

Literature

Baller, Susann, The Bureaucratization of African Societies: Everyday Practices and Processes of Negotiation, in: Francia 48 (2021), 411–417.

Geschiere, Peter, Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion – Paradoxes in the Politics of Belonging in Africa and Europe, in: Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 18/1 (2011), 321–39.

Griffiths Anne, Transformative Spaces, Peri-urban Domains, Legal Pluralism and Land in Botswana, Legal Pluralism and Critical Social Analysis, 56/1 (2024), 13–32, DOI: 10.1080/27706869.2024.2312485.

Fall, Papa Demba, Du village à la banlieue : l’évolution des villages Lebou du rivage méridional de Dakar, Thèse de 3^e cycle, Géographie, Université Paris 10, Paris 1986.

Sidibé, Isabelle, Enquête dans des quartiers traditionnels du littoral dakarois, Sénégal : quelle action publique ?, in: Géocarrefour, 90/1 (2015), 73–82.

Tamanaha, Brian Z., A Non-Essentialist Version of Legal Pluralism, in: Journal of Law and Society, 27/2 (2000), 296–321. DOI: 10.1111/1467-6478.00155.

1. This project was partly conducted as a postdoctoral fellow of the transnational research group IHA-CREPOS, sponsored by the Max Weber Foundation, and continued at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) from August to December 2021, co-sponsored by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research and the University of Ghana. I am also most grateful to Susann Baller for her tireless effort in supporting and advising my research endeavour. [↩]
2. All translations into English are by the author. [↩]
3. Archives of the president of the Association des jeunes Lebou de Dakar shown by Samb. [↩]