Senegal

The westernmost country in Africa, and the one where French colonial policy went furthest and left the most. The four communes - Saint-Louis, Goree, Rufisque and Dakar - had inhabitants holding French citizenship from the nineteenth century, electing a deputy to Paris, and Blaise Diagne became the first African to sit in the National Assembly in 1914, decades before anywhere comparable. Dakar was the capital of French West Africa and educated the region's entire administrative class. Leopold Sedar Senghor, poet, co-founder of the negritude movement and the first African elected to the Academie francaise, led the country to independence in 1960 after the brief Mali Federation collapsed, and governed for twenty years before voluntarily standing down in 1980, an unusual act at the time. Senegal has never had a successful coup, the rarest record in West Africa. Goree island's slave house is a memorial to the Atlantic trade, though historians dispute how many captives actually passed through it. The Casamance region south of Gambia has had a low-level separatist conflict since 1982. Groundnuts were the colonial crop and remain important. Sufi brotherhoods, especially the Mourides, shape both religion and economics. Dakar sits on the westernmost point of the African mainland. The country has about eighteen million people. Wolof is the most widely spoken language, though French is official. The Dakar Rally began and ended here until it moved to South America in 2009. Teranga, a word for hospitality, is the national self-description. The Great Mosque of Touba draws millions of pilgrims each year.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history