Saint-Louis, Senegal

Saint-Louis is an island at the mouth of the Senegal River. Called Ndar by local Wolof speakers, the island became the focal point of French (and for a time, British) commercial and political activities in the region. The French established a fort on the north side of the island in 1659. The island passed back and forth between French and British authority throughout the 18th century, with France regaining the colony finally in 1817, at which point it became the administrative center of the colony of Senegal. Men and women from the mainland also moved to the island, and by the late 18th century it had grown into an important commercial hub of the trade in enslaved captives, as well as, increasingly, gum. Crucial to the conduct of trade and the running of the island were the group of women called signares, many of whom were married to French or British traders, and their descendants, who came to be called habitants. As the slave trade was replaced by gum trading and, later, groundnuts, the habitants managed their position as middlemen and women between the hinterland production and French traders. Senegal’s commerce, and the role of Saint-Louis in mediating it, make up a large part of the literature on Saint-Louis’s place in the Atlantic world. By 1848, with the abolition of enslaved labor in the French empire, new debates about Senegalese participation in the governance of Saint-Louis were emerging. Habitants had participated in partial governance of the colony, with the first habitant mayor of Saint-Louis elected in 1778. As the capital of the expanding French empire in West Africa it became an important site of political activity, in addition to its military and (declining) commercial roles. The result of these debates was the partial enfranchisement of newly created French citizens in the quatre communes of Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar, and Rufisque in 1848. Senegal first sent an elected representative to the French parliament from 1848 to 1852, again from 1871 to 1875, and then from 1879 to 1940. In 1916, citizenship rights were extended beyond the évolué populations to the wider group of originaires who maintained legal protections under Islamic or African law. Participation and resistance in the imperial project thus emerge as major themes of the literature on later-19th- and 20th-century Saint-Louis. Throughout the whole period of Atlantic engagement, the existence of Islamic reform movements in the wider Senegambian region played an important role in the politics and social movements of Saint-Louis’s hinterland in ways that shaped the city’s relationship with both the French and the Islamic reformers.