“The Cité Is Yours”: Colonial Modernization and Dakar’s Postcolonial Suburban Dream

Abstract

This article explains the postcolonial endurance of colonial modernization plans by examining the history and memory of Dakar’s postwar SICAP suburbs. In 1950, Senegal’s French colonial regime made the Société Immobilière du Cap-Vert (SICAP) which built thousands of homes on the edges of Dakar, primarily for African salaried workers. French leaders claimed SICAP houses would help “modernize” the city and its inhabitants. After independence, Senegalese leaders and dwellers used these “modern” suburbs to create new urban landscapes, new families, and in theory, a new modern African nation. However, SICAP’s preference for salaried workers meant it failed to serve the vast majority of Dakar’s population. This article argues that Senegalese planners and urbanites alike embraced these kinds of modernizing programs, despite their inequalities and colonial ideologies, because they gave aspirational middle-class urbanites access to the status associated with globally circulating visions of prosperous postwar suburbs.