Dakar

The Cap-Vert peninsula was Lebou country long before it was a city: a federation of fishing villages at Ngor, Yoff, Ouakam and Hann that declared its own republic in the late 18th century. Offshore, Gorée had been a European trading station since the Portuguese arrived in the 15th century, passing between Dutch, English and French hands and dealing in captives, gum arabic and wax. The mainland settlement that became Dakar was founded by the French in 1857, when a fort and a wharf were built at the harbour sheltered by the island.

Growth came with the railway to Saint-Louis, opened in 1885, and with the deep harbour that made Dakar the best Atlantic port on the coast. In 1902 the city replaced Saint-Louis as capital of French West Africa, and it was one of the four communes whose residents held French citizenship and elected a deputy to Paris. In 1914 Blaise Diagne, the first African elected to the French parliament, won that seat. The authorities laid out the Médina after a plague outbreak the same year and moved much of the African population into it. During the Second World War the port was fought over between Vichy and Allied forces in 1940.

Dakar became the capital of independent Senegal in 1960 under Léopold Sédar Senghor, who staged the First World Festival of Negro Arts here in 1966 and made the city a centre of African intellectual life. It has since grown many times over, absorbing the old villages and spreading into the suburbs of Pikine and Guédiawaye, and in recent decades has expanded eastward towards the new town of Diamniadio and the airport at Diass.

Dakar is the cultural capital of French-speaking West Africa, and music is the clearest expression of it. Mbalax, built on the sabar drum and carried worldwide by Youssou N'Dour, was worked out in the city's clubs in the 1970s and 1980s, and rap in Wolof has since given Dakar one of Africa's strongest hip hop scenes, closely tied to civic protest. Griot families keep the older tradition of praise-singing and genealogy.

Visual art has an institutional home here: the Dak'Art biennale has run since 1989, the Village des Arts houses working studios, and Senegalese fashion designers have an international reach. The film tradition that began with Ousmane Sembène remains a point of pride. Laamb, the traditional wrestling that mixes sport with drumming and mystical preparation, is the sport that fills arenas, though football is followed just as closely.

Religion orders much of daily life. The city is overwhelmingly Muslim and largely Sufi, with Mouride and Tijani networks running businesses, mosques and mutual aid societies, and the Layène brotherhood based at Yoff and Cambérène, where the Lebou keep their own dignitaries and the ndëpp healing ceremony. A Catholic minority is long-established, with the cathedral on the Plateau a short distance from the Grand Mosque in the Médina. Teranga — hospitality — is spoken of as the national virtue, and greetings, shared bowls and family obligation are taken seriously.

About 1.28 million people live in the department of Dakar and some four million in the wider metropolitan area, a quarter of Senegal's population squeezed onto a peninsula of about 550 square kilometres. The Plateau holds government and banking; Médina, Grand Dakar, Pikine and Guédiawaye are dense residential districts; the Almadies, Ngor and Fann are wealthier and westward.

The economy is the port, the public sector, banking, telecoms and construction, with a very large informal sector of hawkers, tailors, mechanics and market traders, and fishing still practised from the beaches at Soumbédioune, Ouakam and Yoff. Sandaga, on the Plateau, was long the largest market in the city. Offshore oil and gas production that began in 2024–25 has brought new activity to the wider region.

The day starts early to beat the traffic, with bread and coffee from a street stall, and pauses for the long midday meal eaten from a communal bowl; Friday prayers empty offices at lunchtime, and the Corniche fills with runners and footballers at dusk. The pressing issues are congestion, the cost of housing, flooding in the low-lying suburbs during the rains, coastal erosion, and the shortage of work that pushes young people onto pirogues bound for the Canary Islands.

Dakar eats fish. Ceebu jën — thieboudienne in French spelling — is the midday meal: fish stuffed with a herb paste, simmered with tomato, cassava, carrot and cabbage, and served over broken rice cooked in the same sauce, eaten from a shared platter. Thiof, a prized grouper, is the fish of choice when the budget allows. Yassa, chicken or fish marinated in lemon, mustard and a great quantity of onions, and mafé, a groundnut stew, complete the trio of everyday dishes served in the gargotes where office workers eat.

Street food is its own economy. Ndambé, a bean stew in a baguette, is the standard breakfast; accara, black-eyed-pea fritters in a hot onion sauce, and fataya, fried pastries filled with fish or meat, are sold from stalls all day; and dibiteries grill mutton over charcoal into the night, serving it by weight with mustard and onion. Fish landed at Soumbédioune, Ngor and Yoff is grilled on the beach within sight of the pirogues.

Sweet things are millet-based: thiakry, couscous with sweetened curdled milk, and lakh, a millet porridge with curd. The drinks are bissap, made from hibiscus flowers, bouye from baobab fruit, ginger juice, and ataya, strong green tea brewed and poured in three progressively sweeter rounds. Café Touba, coffee roasted with grains of selim pepper and associated with the Mouride brotherhood, is sold from flasks on the street throughout the day.