Reading time: 3 minutes
Company · Revelation
Episode #30
Reminder of the dilemma
A — You go back to Kédougou to run the clinic and find yours.
B — You stay in Dakar, hold your teeth and aim for Europe.
If you chose A
Choosing A is to accept that dignity can arise from return and not from flight forward. It is also a risk of being perceived as the one who failed, in a society where going far remains synonymous with success. You're becoming useful, but invisible.
If you have chosen B
Choosing B is betting on an uncertain future by sacrificing your present and your mother's. It is to perpetuate the myth that success is always elsewhere, that salvation will come from a visa. You're standing, but you're eroding from inside.
This dilemma crystallises three deep fractures that cross contemporary African societies. First, the cost of living: Dakar, like many capitals of the continent, has become a grinding machine for those who make it live. Rents are exploding, real estate speculation is turning every neighborhood into an investor hunting ground, and modest workers find themselves caught up in the mix of stagnant wages and galloping inflation. Staying in town is no longer a choice of comfort — It's a survival test.
Secondly, the question of diaspora transfers — whether or not inside — reveals a cruel paradox. You send money to the village, but this money does not build anything structural: it colmates, it feeds, it heals day to day. And while you're sending, you're getting tired. Family solidarity, however beautiful it may be, becomes a chain when it prevents the one who gives from building himself. The system is based on silent exhaustion of those who wear others.
Finally, there is this deaf violence to individual choices. Social pressure dictates that a man must move, ever further, ever higher. To return to the village is to go back in the eyes of the world. But staying in Dakar by destroying itself, is it really moving forward? Your cousin's European glamour from Milan prolongs this illusion: the value of an African would be measured at the distance between him and his starting point.
The truth is, neither of these two options is a solution. — These are two symptoms of the same evil: a continent whose interior territories are abandoned to the benefit of saturated metropolises, themselves turned towards another fantasy. The real choice, the one that does not appear in the dilemma, would be that Kédougou has a dignified clinic, a decent salary, a paved road. — that leaving or staying finally becomes a freedom and not a condemnation.
Like baobab, you don't choose between your roots and your top. The tree grows towards the sky only to the extent that it anchors in the earth. Cut one is to condemn the other. The real challenge is not to choose between Dakar and Kédougou — It is to build a country where this tree can stand, whole, wherever it grows.
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...
Next dilemma Next Monday
