John Rapley, Contributor 
A young man holds a poster of Cote d'Ivoire rebels during the third anniversary of Cote d'IvoireÕs civil war, at Yopougon in Abidjan on September 19. Presidential elections set for October 30 are likely to be postponed, prompting fresh efforts by African leaders to shore up a faltering peace process and prevent a resurgence of violence. - Reuters
I THOUGHT it might feel a bit like a homecoming. Almost a dozen years had passed since I had last been in West Africa, and here I was returning.
Dakar was always a different city from Abidjan. Ever since Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire won their independence from France in 1960, their respective capitals represented two poles in the region. If Abidjan was the commercial capital of French West Africa, Dakar was its cultural centre. Abidjan was prosperous, crawling with Mercedes Benzes, dominated by modernist buildings, and populated with businessmen in suits. Dakar, if less rich, was cosmopolitan and vibrant, its fame propelled in no small measure by its most famous son, the musician Youssou N'Dour.
Much has changed over the last decade. Abidjan's fortunes sank with those of its country. After its founding president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, died a decade ago, the country slowly descended into a downward spiral of faction-fighting that ultimately gave onto a civil war. All I had now of a land that once besotted me and countless others were memories of a city that was bustling and a magnet for migrants from all over Africa, and indeed the world.
From the moment I stepped off of the airplane, I saw that Dakar would be a different experience. Unlike Abidjan, which sits squat over the Gulf of Guinea and swelters in tropical haze, Dakar is dry. Closer as it is to the Sahara, it
carries a permanent layer of sand about it everywhere.
It stands out in other ways. The bustle of Abidjan is there, but the vendors are more relaxed, and hands do not come thrusting through car windows at every intersection. Highly cosmopolitan, the city is home to a wide cross section of people from throughout the region. Women in traditional garb and head-dresses stroll alongside girls in tight jeans and spaghetti-strap tops.
Such paradoxes mask the fact that Senegal is a Muslim society. Scratch the contemporary surface, and the strength of tradition becomes apparent, yet in subtle ways. Alcohol is consumed freely, but usually not on open terraces. There are countless night clubs in Dakar, but few theatres. And in many ways, a gradual moralisation seems to be occurring in Senegalese society. As is the case in so many other countries, religion is gaining more confidence in expressing itself in politics.
FUNDAMENTALIST UPSURGE
Nonetheless, the conventional paradigm of a fundamentalist upsurge holds little relevance here. Senegal stands as an interesting repudiation of what has become conventional wisdom in the West: that at best, Islam and democracy coexist uneasily. According to this line of reasoning, Islam never recognised a division between sacred and profane realms, as did Christianity. Accordingly, it has failed to accept the sovereignty of a secular state rooted in a separation of religion from politics.
But in fact, democracy has survived in Senegal not in spite of Islam, but because of it. Senegalese Islam is dominated by Islamic brotherhoods, atop which stand civil leaders known as marabouts, a French corruption of an Arabic word which means, roughly, a hermit or holy man. Ordinary Senegalese owe loyalty to a marabout, whom they support financially. Indeed, the marabouts have prospered as Senegal has globalised, sending a diaspora into far-flung places like New York and Paris, from where it continues to patronise its leadership.
During the colonial period, the French came to see that they would secure the region not by opposing, but by co-opting the brotherhoods. So began a long policy of currying the favour of the marabouts, a practice that was continued after
independence. In return for the state's tolerance of their power, the marabouts counselled their followers to support Senegal's democratic system.
Some strict Muslims see these brotherhoods, which exist in much of the Muslim world, as sometimes veering from the tenets of the faith, much as Christian churches sometimes accuse one another of straying from the true soil of Christianity. Indeed, followers of the largest brotherhood of Senegal, the Mourides, tend to quote their founder more readily than the Prophet Mohammed, something which to a strict Muslim borders on apostasy.
Yet while militant Islam is present in Senegal, the brotherhoods retain a secure hold on the loyalty of ordinary Senegalese. Pragmatism continues to colour their activities, and so at key points in Senegalese history, they have shored up civil authority. The brotherhoods have put brakes on religious militancy, ethnic politics and what they see as overzealous ideology.
That is not to say that there are no threats to this happy order. Among them are the challenges that have overwhelmed other states, but which have so far been kept at bay in Senegal. The era of structural adjustment eroded the state's patronage and distribution capacities just as rapid urbanisation was boosting demand for services. The resultant vacuums were left to be filled by private agents.
Sometimes, as we know all too well, drug gangs have planted themselves in such receptive soil. In cities from Kingston to Lagos to Rio de Janeiro, criminal gangs have built up states-within-states by providing citizens with access to resources a retreating public sector has found ever harder to provide: security, housing, school fees and the like. As the state becomes less present in the lives of ordinary folk, new non-state actors have sometimes filled the breach.
INEFFECTUAL POLICE FORCES
Such changes are evident in the landscape of Dakar as well. One gets the impression that the Senegalese state is always engaged in a game of catch-up with events on the ground, racing to bring order to communities which have cropped up of their own volition. Ineffectual police forces have led to the multiplication of private security agents and vigilante organisations. The Islamic brotherhoods themselves have taken on the tasks of dispensing patronage sometimes drawing upon the resources coming to them from their diaspora and enforcing security.
Indeed, some neighbourhoods of Dakar, once rife with crack houses and drug dealers, have since been cleaned up by vigilantes connected to the brotherhoods.
In that respect, Senegal is like many other Muslim countries, where Islamic charities have secured money from
supporters overseas, then used them to provide comfort to citizens who feel themselves abandoned by a state unable to keep up with their needs.
Nevertheless, more sinister presences are beginning to surface. Senegalese criminal gangs have not yet become as developed as they have elsewhere in West Africa. Still, gangs from Cape Verde, which trans-ship drugs from Latin America to Europe, have begun using Dakar as a node for their operations. Moreover, migrants from elsewhere in the region, including those fleeing the problems in Côte d'Ivoire, have sometimes imported their own criminal organisations with them.
To date, religious traditions have
created a culture of resistance to the drug trade among the Senegalese brotherhoods. Organised crime has not sunk deep roots among the Senegalese, and independent gangs are rare, confined largely to street youths and petty criminals. But it would perhaps be hoping for too much to expect that this wall of cultural resistance will operate indefinitely.
"Religion is losing its hold over people," lamented one senior police officer to me. It was not obvious to him that the resistance of the marabouts to the drug trade would keep ordinary Senegalese out of it forever. Moreover, as the experience of Islamic charities elsewhere has revealed, they can be exploited by criminal elements to their own ends. On the other side of Africa, in Somalia, the collapse of the state in the 1990s revived ancient networks of commerce. The Somali diaspora has used this hawala system to send money home to relatives suffering through the country's implosion. But hawala, which remarkably relies entirely on trust and so leaves no paper trail, has allegedly been used by al Qaeda to transfer funds throughout its own network.
Thus the vectors of communication established by Senegal's diaspora, along which legitimate commerce already moves, will likely prove irresistible to transnational criminal and terrorist networks. Indeed, some research suggests that Senegal is already getting drawn more deeply into this underside of globalisation.
As I sat lazily one evening with a Mauritanian friend, drinking the local beer at a seaside café, we pondered what this might mean. A refugee from his neighbouring country's violence, he had found Senegal to be a welcoming and tolerant home. The thought of it being carved up among gangs seemed as far removed from him as he did from the troubles of his homeland.
But then, I reminded him, we used to all say that whatever happened
elsewhere in West Africa, no evil could befall Abidjan. How wrong we had been. Senegal represents the remarkable triumph of an Islamic pragmatism over the temptations of political extremism. One can only hope that the past provides a guide to the future. But as my experiences elsewhere in West Africa have taught me, there is a lesson for politics in that time-worn adage: in life, there are no guarantees.
John Rapley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government, University of West Indies, Mona.
