Reading time: 3 minutes
Company · Revelation
Episode #38
Reminder of the dilemma
A — You stay in Dakar, you survive for your family to survive.
B — You're going back to the village building an uncertain future but yours.
If you chose A
To stay is to accept being a transfer channel more than a human being. It's sacrificing your health, your dreams, your present, to maintain a vital flow on which your family depends. You become the diaspora from inside — present on Senegalese soil but absent from your own life.
If you have chosen B
Incoming is a long-term bet by accepting immediate fear. This is to believe that a local project can replace an urban wage, but it is also likely to deprive your sisters of school during difficult months of start-up. You choose the dignity of the builder at the cost of the brother's guilt.
This dilemma is that of millions of Senegalese — African — taken between the city that consumes them and the land that calls them. Behind the choice A hides a perverse economic model: Dakar aspires the living forces of the regions, crushes them in price and insecurity, then redistributes crumbs to the countryside in the form of money transfers. You're becoming a wheel. Your value is measured in CFA francs sent by Orange Money. Your fatigue, your isolation, your renunciation — All this disappears in the gratitude of those who receive without seeing what you endure. It is exactly the trap of the diaspora described on a larger scale: a consumed manna, a burned human capital.
Behind choice B is a political act disguised as a personal decision. To return to the village is to refuse Senegal to sum up in Dakar. This means that Casamance, Fouta, Sine Salum deserve to be built there. But the system does not help: little rural credit, high roads, limited market access. And above all, there is social pressure — This inner voice that whispers that starting from Dakar, is failing.
This dilemma also reveals deaf violence, the one that exerts on bodies and minds when a country concentrates all its promises in a single metropolis. The women of the cooperative who are waiting in the village also bear the weight of a system that invisibility them. Maybe joining them is weaving another economy. — slower, more fragile, but more human.
Baobab never chooses between its roots and its canopy. It grows in both directions at once — deeply anchored in dry land, widely open to the burning sky. Maybe your real choice isn't between Dakar and the village, but between continuing to feed a system that devours you, or planting your own tree where no one is waiting — and accept that it takes time to give shade.
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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