Sénégal

Diary Sow, 20, a Senagalese woman hailed as a 'best student' star in her native country and who is studying at a prestigious school in France, whose disappearance in January led prosecutors to open an investigation, has apologised for causing concern after taking what she called  'a welcome respite from my life'.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne, a philosopher from Senegal who is currently living and working in the United States, has spoken out about the current global health crisis and the inequalities and prejudice that it has revealed and the outdated thinking it has exposed about Africa. In an interview with Mediapart's Rachida El Azzouzi the academic discusses why so many observers still only discuss the continent through the prism of disease and disaster. Souleymane Bachir Diagne explains that despite many of them having a colonial past, developed countries of the North do not really know modern Africa and the progress it has made in recent decades. He calls on African countries and people to proclaim their achievements to the rest of the world, and talks of the need to 'decolonise' our minds.

In Senegal, the West African former French colony, the fishing industry plays a major social and economic role. While it is a key provider of protein for the population, it is also a major sector for exports, employing around 600,000 people, representing 17% of the country’s labour force.    With the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the dive in air traffic, fish exports have plummeted, while emergency measures imposed to contain the spread of the virus, including a night-time curfew, add further to the crisis. This photo reportage in the port of Hann, one of Senegal’s biggest fish auction sites, situated on the outskirts of the capital Dakar, was led over two days in mid-April, shortly before the start of the Ramadan in this majority Muslim country. The port is normally bustling with activity and a constant toing and froing of ocean-going pirogues, the largest of which can spend weeks trawling the Atlantic. But already, the fishermen and wholesalers were facing a severe downturn in business, when even the most coveted fish, normally reserved for the Asian and European markets, were selling at knock-down prices on local markets.

In a ceremony in the Senegalese capital Dakar, French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, abiding by France's commitment to return artifacts stolen during colonial times, handed Senegal's President Macky Sall a brass and wood sword that belonged to the 19th century Islamic scholar and ruler Omar Saidou Tall, which was taken back to France after his death in 1864.

The probe centres on a 2-million dollar sum allegedly paid to son of former world athletics chief at time of the awarding the 2020 games.

On December 1st, 1944 dozens, perhaps scores, of African colonial troops who had fought for the Allies during World war II were shot dead by soldiers of the French Army in Senegal. The official story is that these infantrymen and former prisoners of war had staged an armed revolt because they had not been paid. Relatives of those killed or jailed for “rebellion” insist, however, that the French Army committed a massacre. Géraldine Delacroix reports on a recent court case that examined this grim episode in French colonial history.

Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow dedicated election to France’s Académie des Beaux-Arts to 'Africa...and Nelson Mandela'.