Jolof, and the coast
The Jolof Empire held much of the region from the fourteenth century until it fragmented in the sixteenth into Cayor, Baol, Waalo and the Serer kingdoms of Sine and Saloum. Islam arrived early along the Sahelian trade routes and was consolidated by Sufi orders — the Tijaniyya, and the Mouride brotherhood founded by Cheikh Amadou Bamba — which remain among the most important institutions in the country and are consistently underestimated by anyone reading Senegal only through its state.
Gorée Island, off Dakar, is the place most visitors know. Historians differ sharply on how many people were actually shipped from it — the volume was far greater elsewhere on the coast — but the House of Slaves is where the argument is most often had, and the Door of No Return is a real door.
The Four Communes
Saint-Louis, Gorée, Rufisque and Dakar were governed as French communes, and their African residents held rights no other colonised Africans held. From 1848 they could elect a deputy to the French parliament in Paris. In 1914 they elected Blaise Diagne, the first African to sit in it.
That produced a Senegalese political class arguing inside French institutions a full century before independence, and it is the direct ancestor of the country's unusual civilian habit.
Senghor, and the handover
Léopold Sédar Senghor was a poet, a co-founder of Négritude, the first African elected to the Académie française — and Senegal's first president. He was also a Catholic governing a country that is around 95 per cent Muslim, for twenty years, without that being the central fact of his presidency.
In 1980 he resigned. Voluntarily, mid-term, handing over to his prime minister. In West Africa in 1980 this had essentially no precedent.
Abdou Diouf lost an election in 2000 and left. Abdoulaye Wade lost in 2012, after courts allowed him a contested third-term bid and voters ended it anyway. In March 2024, after an attempt to postpone the election was struck down by the Constitutional Council, Bassirou Diomaye Faye was elected — having been released from prison ten days before the vote.
What Dakar exports
Mbalax — sabar drumming pushed through a full band — is Senegal's own genre, and Youssou N'Dour its most recognisable voice anywhere. Ousmane Sembène, novelist and film-maker, is generally regarded as the father of African cinema; he turned to film because it reached people who did not read French.
Dakar also holds the continent's largest contemporary art biennale, Dak'Art, and the Museum of Black Civilisations, opened in 2018 and built explicitly with the restitution argument in mind.