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Company · Revelation
Episode #46
Reminder of the dilemma
A — You go back to the village to revive the cooperative and rebuild the roof.
B — You stay in Dakar, sign the CDI and increase transfers.
If you chose A
Choosing A, it's betting that dignity is built on the spot, where the roots crack. It is refusing to be a monthly transfer and wanting to become a son, a neighbour, a builder again. But it is also to accept the uncertainty of an agricultural project in a forgotten region of investors.
If you have chosen B
Choosing B means recognizing that the system needs your francs more than your arms. It's protecting your family by the only tool Dakar gave: salary. But it's still choking in a city that costs you almost everything that it gives you, and staying an exile from inside.
This dilemma is that of millions of young Africans trapped between two geographies of survival. Dakar — and with it all the capitals of the continent — aspires to the living forces of the regions, crushes them in the price of housing, transport, imported food, and then transforms them into transfer machines. You become the diaspora from within: physically present in the capital, emotionally anchored in the village, financially separated between the two.
If you choose to go home, you face a cruel paradox. The village needs you, but it has no roads, no bank loans, no safety nets. The agricultural cooperative is a wonderful promise — But promises do not repair a roof before wintering. You may come back with your hands full of intent and your wallet empty, and you may plunge your family back into a precarious situation that your transfers from Dakar kept at a distance.
If you choose to stay, you accept a form of silent violence. The one in a city where your rent eats up your salary, where your promotion doesn't bring you close to any property, where you live four in a room so that others live a little better at eight hundred kilometers. Your mother will get more money, yes. But she will not receive your face in the morning, your hands on the bricks, your voice in the courtyard. And your sisters will grow up seeing that success is leaving.
The real scandal is that this choice exists. That a country requires its children to choose between presence and subsistence, between roots and incomes. Let the capital be both the only hope and the first prison.
Baobab does not choose between its roots and its branches. It plunges into the earth exactly where it grows, and it rises. But he needs a soil that feeds him. — Not a soil that leachs from itself. The real choice is not yours: it is that of a country that must stop emptying its villages to inflate its capitals.
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 ...
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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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