20 The Nation. October 7, 2019
A source of livelihood in Bargny for generations, the sea
is to the Lebou what the plains are to a Kansan. “The sea
belongs to us,” insists Ndeye Yacine Dieye, the president
of the Association for Coastal Preservation in Bargny.
The fact that this relationship is now being reversed—
that Bargny increasingly belongs to the sea—demands a
brutal, perhaps impossible shift in the way its residents
understand the world. The sea has eaten more than
concrete and furniture and mosque tiles and graves. It
has consumed the ideas and values that those physical
objects sustained. These abstract losses are difficult to
document. But they are even more difficult to live with.
In Bargny, no one seems able to keep pace with them.
One problem with climate change, a common refrain
goes, is that it happens so slowly. Here the opposite is
true: The sea is undoing Bargny’s past faster than its res-
idents can reorient to the present. The result sometimes
seems to be a stunned helplessness. “We can’t do any-
thing else,” says Diouf, when I ask whether he will keep
fishing. To a group of fishermen, the question appears
absurd. “What? Where would I go?” says one. “Look,”
another says, “we’ll just keep building barriers” against
the waves. “We just don’t have a choice.”
While the sea ate the past, Bargny tried to build a
new future. In 2006 the then-mayor designated a tract of
land less than a kilometer from the coast—and right next
to the new work site where Bargny’s women processed
fish—as a relocation site for those displaced by the sea.
The site, named Miniam II, combined with an earlier
site, Miniam I, were divided into 1,433 plots. Diouf
remembers that government officials “took our names,
gave us the plots, and said, ‘You own this now.’”
At the time, he continues, “we didn’t have the means
to build there.” So he and most of the others began sav-
ing up. The few who had more to spare built foundations
for their new homes. But before anyone could move, says
Diouf, “the power plant took it all.”IV: “BARGNY IS SUFFOCATING”H
e means this literally. in 2009, abdoulaye
Wade, Senegal’s then-president, declared the
majority of land in Miniam I and Miniam II
necessary for public utility and sold it to Senelec,
the national energy company. “The state took
the land from the people,” says Fatou Samba, “and every-
one lost. Nobody was left with anything.”
The plant, residents learned, would be a complicated
international affair: a $228 million initiative financed
by the African Development Bank, the West African
Development Bank, and a Dutch development bank
called FMO. Since Senegal has no coal reserves, the
fuel—386,000 tons per year—would have to be imported
from South Africa, first by boat to Dakar harbor and then
by truck 35 kilometers southeast to Bargny. According to
officials, the plant would provide 12 percent of Senegal’s
electricity production by 2052. It would also “suffocate
Bargny” in the process, Gueye says. “Senegal gets electric-
ity, yes, but we’ll die little by little.”
A shift in national politics didn’t help. In 2012, Sall
defeated Wade in the presidential election. Sall, who was
reelected by a comfortable margin this year, called for a
modernized economy by 2035—a program he dubbed
Emerging Senegal. To get there, he promised “disrup-
tive changes” in energy policy. He aggressively pursued“The sea be-
longs to us,”
says Ndeye
Yacine Dieye.
But residents
in Bargny
are trying
to cope with
the fact that
their town
increasingly
belongs to
the sea.Water margin: A sea
level rise of just one
meter could destroy
much of Senegal’s in-
dustrial infrastructure,
90 percent of which
hugs the coastline.