Senegal

Before the Europeans, the Senegal region held the Wolof Jolof Empire and its successor kingdoms, the Fula theocracy of Fouta Toro, and the Mandinka-linked states of the east. From the seventeenth century, French trading posts at Saint-Louis and on Gorée Island off Dakar became centres of the Atlantic slave trade — Gorée's "House of Slaves" is now a world memorial to it — and Saint-Louis went on to serve as the capital of French West Africa. In four coastal "communes", including Dakar and Saint-Louis, residents held French citizenship and, from 1914, elected an African deputy to Paris, and Senegalese tirailleurs fought and died for France in both world wars.

Independence came in 1960 under Léopold Sédar Senghor — poet, philosopher of Négritude, and member of the Académie française — who governed for twenty years and then handed power over voluntarily. Senegal became one of the very few African countries never to suffer a military coup, with peaceful changes of government in 2000, 2012, and 2024.

A sharp political crisis ran from 2021, as prosecutions of the popular opposition figure Ousmane Sonko brought deadly protests, and President Macky Sall's abrupt 2024 postponement of the election triggered a constitutional showdown. It was resolved when Sonko's little-known deputy, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, was released from prison and won the presidency in the first round at 44, the youngest president in Senegal's history, and appointed Sonko prime minister. The new government moved to renegotiate resource contracts, reassess ties with France — whose troops left in 2025 — and audit public finances, just as newly discovered offshore oil and gas came on stream. The audits exposed far bigger public debts than had been declared, and in May 2026, amid the debt crisis and stalled talks with the International Monetary Fund, Faye fell out with Sonko, dismissed him and made the economist Ahmadou Al Aminou Lo prime minister.

Senegalese culture is defined by teranga, a byword for hospitality that the country makes central to its self-image, and by Sufi Islam: the great brotherhoods — the Mouride, centred on the holy city of Touba, and the Tijaniyya at Tivaouane and Kaolack — shape social life, politics, and the economy, and their annual pilgrimages, the Grand Magal above all, draw millions.

Music is a national art: the mbalax of Youssou N'Dour, built on the sabar drum, and the griot tradition of praise-singing and history-keeping, with the kora played across the south. Dakar is a fashion and art capital, home to the Dak'Art biennale, and Senegalese cinema, from Ousmane Sembène onward, has an outsized reputation. Laamb, traditional wrestling with a mystical build-up of amulets and drumming, fills stadiums.

The boubou robe, elaborate for celebrations, and matching family outfits for weddings and naming ceremonies are worn with pride, and the extended family and religious community remain the bedrock of daily life.

Senegal is young and urbanising fast, with around a quarter of the population in Greater Dakar, a crowded peninsula city of markets, mosques, and traffic, ringed by suburbs that flood in the rains. About two in five Senegalese still live rurally, farming groundnuts, millet, and rice, or fishing from wooden pirogues along a coast where foreign industrial fleets and overfishing are a live grievance.

The economy leans on that agriculture and fishing, on phosphates and gold, on remittances from a large diaspora in France, Italy, Spain, and the US, and, from 2024–25, on new offshore oil and gas. Youth unemployment is the central social problem, feeding both the protest movements that shook the country and the dangerous migration route to Europe via the Canary Islands.

Senegal's stability, its free press and courts, and its record of peaceful transitions stand out in a region of coups, but the government is grappling with debts far larger than the official figures had shown — reassessed in 2025 at around 119 per cent of GDP — and with high expectations.

Senegalese cooking is among the most celebrated in West Africa. The national dish is thieboudienne — fish simmered with tomato and served over broken rice cooked in the same sauce, with vegetables — the dish from which jollof rice is thought to derive, and itself on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage. Yassa, chicken or fish marinated in lemon, mustard, and a mountain of onions, and mafé, a groundnut stew, are the other pillars.

Street food runs from fataya and nem to grilled dibi mutton eaten with bread and onions, and the coast has superb grilled fish. Sweetened couscous with curdled milk and rice pudding are common desserts.

Hibiscus bissap, baobab bouye, and ginger juices, and strong sweet ataya tea poured in three rounds, are the everyday drinks, and Café Touba, spiced with grains of selim pepper, is a Mouride institution.

Dakar has the pastel colonial houses and quiet lanes of Gorée Island, a short ferry from the port and a World Heritage Site; the vast African Renaissance Monument; the IFAN museum and the Museum of Black Civilisations; the Corniche and the Soumbédioune craft market; and Lac Rose, the salt lake about 35 km north-east of the city that lost its famous pink colour to flooding in 2022 and has since partly regained it.

North, Saint-Louis — the former colonial capital on an island in the Senegal River, with wrought-iron balconies, a famous jazz festival, and the Guet Ndar fishing quarter — is a World Heritage town, and the nearby Djoudj bird sanctuary is one of the world's great sites for migratory pelicans and flamingos.

South of Dakar, the Petite Côte resorts and the Sine-Saloum Delta — a maze of mangrove channels, islands, and pirogue villages — lead toward Casamance, greener and culturally distinct, with the beach of Cap Skirring, Jola villages and sacred forests, and Carabane island. Inland, the far southeast around Kédougou has waterfalls and the Bassari and Bedik hill cultures, and the holy cities of Touba, with its great mosque and the tomb of Ahmadou Bamba, and Tivaouane welcome respectful, appropriately dressed visitors.