Abstract
ABSTRACTPharmacy students at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar must research and write a thesis to graduate. Thésards who took topics in analytical chemistry and toxicology describe their thesis work as a temporary opportunity to perform ‘street-level’ public health research that they regard as ‘relevant’ to the quality of people's lives. Expecting futures in the private commercial sector, thésards regretfully leave the thesis behind. This article explores the parenthetical nature of this moment – its brief openings and more durable closures – as part of the history of ways of being a pharmacist in post-colonial Senegal. The thesis as an interlude in students’ biographies, curtailed by narrowed horizons of expectation, evokes other contractions: in the range of professional roles open to Senegalese pharmacists, and in the circuits of public health with which they might engage. For thésards, fieldwork, government work and commercial work entail spatial practices and imaginations; different ways of moving around the city and of tracing urban space that define pharmacists’ roles in terms of the modes through which they engage with broader collectivities. Mapping thésards’ parenthesis in Dakar is a means of capturing both their urban experience of work and the intertwining spatial, temporal and affective dimensions associated with this work. The past, probable and possible trajectories of pharmacy work are imprinted and imagined in the space of the city as field, market and polis. Pharmacists’ prospects and aspirations are caught up in broader shifts in how education, (un)employment and entrepreneurship animate relations of association and exchange in Senegal.
Highlights
The changing political and moral economies of African cities have led to the emergence of new modes of acquiring power, status and wealth
I focus on thésards (14 interviewees) and theses (217 reports) supervised by members of the laboratories of toxicology and of analytical chemistry in the Faculty of Pharmacy of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar
This forms a manageable sample of students and theses, and circumscribes a set of topics addressing the public health issues associated with these sciences
Summary
The changing political and moral economies of African cities have led to the emergence of new modes of acquiring power, status and wealth. Mobility and material visibility of the moodu moodu, the bul faale icon, the migrant or the modern seductress (disquette) stand in contrast with the circuits of instruction, service, civility and reward travelled by the functionary in the postindependence decades This route led from the university, often via advanced studies in France, to modernist administrative buildings and public institutions, and back home, riding in cars or buses to houses that were state-subsidized from the 1950s onwards, largely for the benefit of this category of earners (White 1985; Freund 2006; Lombard and Zouhoula Bi 2008). When graduating students speak about their thesis work and career opportunities, what do they say about the outdating and emergence of styles of success in Senegal? Do they feel that an entrepreneurial ethos has displaced older or alternative ways of being good or successful through pharmacy? Before providing a more detailed history of Senegalese pharmacy careers, I say a bit more about how my encounters with thésards generated such questions about loss and opportunity in the public protection and marketplace of health
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