Homes and the Right to the City in Plague-Era Senegal

Historians working on colonialism in Africa have long shown how infectious diseases, whether real or imagined, led to wide scale segregation across the continent. However, studies often overlook the physical locus of these struggles: homes. This paper focuses on one such case of this so-called “sanitation syndrome” in Senegal to show how colonial authorities and African dwellers competed over the meaning and values imbued into homes to reinforce or contest racialized processes of segregation. It does so by focusing on indemnity claims made by Senegalese residents who had their home destroyed by public health officials during bubonic plague outbreaks between 1914 and the early 1920s. In these petitions, residents listed and evaluated the dwellings and domestic objects colonial public health officials destroyed. Colonial officials then compared these lists to their own evaluations to determine how much, if anything, they would pay these residents. These petitions reveal how the evaluations of domestic spaces informed French authorities’ justifications for urban segregation as well as Senegalese urbanites efforts to resist or at least manage their forced removals. Furthermore, these petitions show how residents pushed back against colonial denigration of their homes by trying to make colonial agents respect the particular ways they built, organized, and evaluated their domestic worlds. In doing so, petitioners articulated their own visions of the possible relationship between race, space, family, and the right to the city in colonial Senegal.