Reading time: 3 minutes
Company · Revelation
Episode #14
Reminder of the dilemma
A — You stay in Dakar and sacrifice your presence to finance Fatou.
B — You go back to the village to raise the orchard, even if you stop Fatou.
If you chose A
Choosing A is to perpetuate the model of the silent sacrifice of the inner diaspora: feeding its own people at a distance while exhausting in a city that devours every franc won. It's about Fatou's education as a long-term investment, but it's also about accepting to remain an anonymous drive in a capital that doesn't recognize you.
If you have chosen B
Choosing B is to bet on rooting, on the earth as a productive heritage, and refuse to be forever exiled who sends tickets without ever reaping. But it is also imposing on Fatou a renunciation that she did not choose, and risk replicating a cycle in which women in the family pay the price of decisions made by men.
This dilemma is that of thousands of young Senegalese caught up in the city of Dakar. On one side, Dakar promises access to cash — this vital flow that keeps whole families alive — But the cost of living has become so fierce that he swallows wages before they even produce savings. On the other hand, the land offers a promise of autonomy and dignity, but in a long time that the urgency of family needs does not tolerate.
Behind Option A is the dominant logic of the transfer economy: the diaspora, even inside, becomes an infusion pump. We value the one who sends, we forget the one who suffers from sending. The monthly transfer masks a deep precariousness: no decent housing, no personal project, no stable emotional life. Dakar consumes as much as it pays. And Fatou, carried by this money, also bears without knowing it the weight of an immense moral debt.
Behind Option B is another tension: gender and decision-making power. Returning back to the orchard is an act of economic courage, a refusal of urban dependence. But who decides that Fatou must stop? Rural development should not buy at the cost of women's education. That is what this choice requires, however, revealing how family arbitration in Africa continues to weigh more heavily on girls' shoulders.
There is no good answer. There is a system that forces individuals to decide between presence and subsistence, between land and diploma, between today and tomorrow. The real scandal is not your choice. — That's why we have to do it.
Baobab does not choose between its roots and branches. It grows in both directions at once, because the soil that feeds it is generous enough for it. As long as our societies do not offer that soil to their youth, the dilemma will remain an open wound.
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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