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Company · Revelation
Episode #10
Reminder of the dilemma
A — You stay in Dakar: money flows, but your family dislocates without you.
B — You go back to Thiès: you rebuild the home, but the precarious lookout.
If you chose A
Choosing A is accepting the silent pact of the inner diaspora: sacrifice at a distance, become a bank transfer rather than a presence. It also recognizes that Dakar, despite its suffocating cost, remains the only currency pump in the home.
If you have chosen B
Choosing B is a bet on the link rather than the feed. This is to think that a standing family is worth more than a regular Orange Money account. But it's also the uncertainty of a local project without a net, in a territory where access to credit remains a mirage.
This dilemma crystallises three fractures that cross contemporary Senegalese society. First, the migration model: the diaspora — from Thiès to Dakar — has become the financial pillar of millions of households. Transfers keep families afloat, but they create a structural dependency that de-charges the state and exhausts those who send. You become indispensable and invisible at the same time.
Secondly, the violence your sister is experiencing is not a detail of the setting: it is the symptom of a society where the absence of men who are going to earn their living elsewhere leaves women alone in the face of relationships of domination that no one comes to arbitrate. Your money is schooling the kids, but it doesn't protect your sister. Financial transfer never replaces the transfer of dignity.
Finally, there is Dakar itself, this capital that aspires to the country's living forces and spits them in small rooms with indecent rents. You survive Parcelles Assanies so that others will survive in Thies. The cost of living in the capital consumes a growing part of what you earn, reducing every month the share you can send. You run faster and faster to stay in the same place.
The family land, on the other hand, embodies a fragile promise: that of a local, productive, anchored economy. But without support, without access to rural credit, without infrastructure, this land remains an open dream. Senegal is full of these aborted projects, due to the lack of a serious return and settlement policy.
Neither option is bad. None is sufficient. The real trap is the system that forces you to choose between feeding and being there. Like baobab, you can't bear fruit if your roots are cut — But we can't ask your roots to feed the soil if the trunk doesn't stand. The challenge is not your personal choice: it is to build a country where there is no longer any need to decide between presence and subsistence.
To go further
The Senegalese diaspora: between consumed manna and unexploited capital
Every year, the Senegalese diaspora transfers more than 1,500 billion CFA francs to the country — equivalent ...
Fractured humanity: what violence against women says about our societies
Everywhere on the planet, women are killed, mutilated, raped, silenced or confined in roles and...
Dakar, expensive city: how the Senegalese capital stifles its inhabitants
Between rising real estate, import pressure and rampant speculation, Dakar has become one of the most c...
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