“In May 1968 the student protests in Dakar led to the greatest government crisis in the history of independent Senegal. The protests had local causes, but were globally networked. This was not least due to the fact that the University of Dakar itself was a transnational place: two thirds of the students came from abroad, including 1,300 from Francophone Africa and more than 800 from France. President Léopold Sédar Senghor accused the protesters of merely copying their white fellow students in Paris, the toubabs - the disputes over the financing and organization of education in Senegal in 1968 had not only a transnational but also a post-colonial dimension.
When the democratic Senegalese student union UDES invited to the general assembly on May 24, 1968, the meeting had been preceded by months of negotiations with the university administration. The stumbling block were the drastic cuts in scholarships, which had only been paid for ten months since the academic year 1967/68 and which had in fact been halved due to further cuts. The UDES also fought in vain for official recognition as a student body.
In terms of scholarships, the student representatives were fobbed off with the note that the same would be done in other African countries. At the General Assembly it was decided to go on an indefinite strike - as in Paris on May 27, 1968. The protests in Senegal were not just copies of the French, but had a specifically Senegalese component. The historian Françoise Blum has developed this transnational dimension of Senegalese May 1968 in various publications, for example in the article "Sénégal 1968. Révolte étudiante et grève générale" (in: Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, Volume 59, Issue 2, 2012 / Cairn), and repeatedly called for African countries to be given an appropriate place in depictions of the global dimension of 1968.
The demands of the students made public on May 26, 1968 went far beyond the topic of student financing. The "Africanization" of university administration and curricula was also demanded. The University of Dakar, which was founded in 1957 during the colonial era, was based on the French model in terms of course administration and content, was led by a Franco-Senegalese commission and 70 percent financed by France. The majority of the staff was French. The University of Dakar, so the criticism read, is a French and not a Senegalese university. But the students also expressed general political criticism of Senghor's government, which had assumed increasingly authoritarian features since the elimination of Prime Minister Mamadou Dia and the introduction of the presidential regime in 1962.
After the strike began on May 27, this was also felt by the students and high school students who had joined the strike. On May 28, the government closed all schools and the now occupied university. On May 29, police and paramilitary units stormed the student dormitories. Foreign students were immediately deported to their home countries, students from Senegal were arrested, between 400 and 500 were interned in military camps, and 48 were suspended from the university. Seventy people were injured and one killed in the action. But it was precisely this insubordinate violence against the students that led to the solidarity of the trade unions, which decided on a general strike on the same day, which even Senghor's radio address on May 30th could not prevent. On the 31st On May 25th, there was a general strike in Dakar, which also spread beyond the capital. The arrest of union officials led to mass demonstrations so that the government was forced to negotiate and released all detainees on June 9th. The agreement with the trade unions also provided for the minimum wage to be raised by 15 percent and further wage increases.
The students went on strike for another four months. With the protests, they met Senghor, the co-founder of the Négritude movement, as a poet and promoter of education, practically on his Achilles heel. Burleigh Hendrickson recently pointed out the rhetorical role of colonial history in the disputes ("The Politics of Colonial History. Bourguiba, Senghor, and the student movements of the global 1960s", in: The Global 1960s. Convention, Contest and Counterculture, edited by Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, London 2017). In the radio address on May 30th, as well as in other statements, Senghor accused the students of having their protests directed from outside and expressing foreign imperialism.
The protesters turned the tables of anti-colonial criticism and, for their part, described the poète-président as French, with whom the demanded separation from France was not possible. Here the difference between the generations came to light: Francophonie and Négritude were no longer central points of reference for the students in Dakar, their framework was culturally and politically both African and global, but no longer primarily oriented towards the former colonial power. The protests are thus both an expression of the colonial history of entanglement as well as the progressive and cultural decolonization.
- BIRTE FÖRSTER, “Paris–Dakar – und nicht wieder zurück.” Frankfurter Allgemeine. June 3, 2018.
