On the side of the busy highway that leads out of the city of Saint-Louis, in northwestern Senegal, is a site known as Khar Yalla. Its name means “waiting for God” in Wolof.
Around 1,000 people have been living at the site since 2016, coming from tightly knit, historic fishing communities on the Langue de Barbarie peninsula, located five kilometers from Khar Yalla. This area is one of the most exposed places in Africa to sea level rise and other impacts of the climate crisis.
A decade ago, the families lived in houses on the beach, within walking distance of their closest friends and relatives. Most men spent their days fishing, while most women cleaned, smoked, and sold the fish they brought back.
But in 2015 and 2016, coastal floods destroyed their homes, making them internally displaced peoples (IDPs). Municipal authorities temporarily housed the displaced families in tents in the Langue de Barbarie, then moved them to Khar Yalla into houses that had been constructed for an earlier, failed planned relocation project that was meant to protect other families threatened by flooding.
The families displaced by the 2015 and 2016 floods agreed to be moved to Khar Yalla, hoping that the site would offer temporary protection until they could rebuild on the Langue de Barbarie or be relocated by the government to new, permanent homes.
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Senegalese authorities still have not facilitated a durable solution for the IDPs through rights-respecting planned relocation or meaningfully consulted them about their needs and hopes for the future. The living conditions Khady and others face in Khar Yalla violate their rights to adequate housing.
There is severe overcrowding, most houses lack electricity, and there is no waste collection or disposal system. Every rainy season (June to September), Khar Yalla repeatedly floods, and septic water and garbage enter the houses. Additionally, households still have only the temporary, revocable occupation permits distributed by municipal authorities in 2016, which prohibit them from modifying the houses.
The people in Khar Yalla also endure other ongoing violations to their rights to an adequate standard of living, as well as their rights to education, health, and to take part in cultural life. Khar Yalla has no state-run, secular school, health clinic, or employment opportunities. There is no affordable transportation to schools, health care, or their jobs in the Saint-Louis city center or the Langue de Barbarie.
Authorities have made no efforts to help the people in Khar Yalla retrain for other professions and thwarted the community’s own initiatives. The authorities have also done little to help the people in Khar Yalla with access to other income or direct provision of essentials such as food to ensure an adequate standard of living.
Consequently, the people in Khar Yalla are dislocated from their culture, an estimated third of the children in Khar Yalla do not attend primary or secondary school, many people have foregone preventative care, and most breadwinners’ incomes have dropped to the point that families are often unable to put food on the table.
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The families are living in protracted displacement in Khar Yalla because authorities have failed to facilitate one of the three possible settlement options identified as durable solutions in international guidance: dignified return, local integration at a site of temporary stay, or permanent relocation to a site where living conditions are comparable or better.
The families in Khar Yalla cannot rebuild their homes in the Langue de Barbarie, because their land will soon become a no-build zone. Khar Yalla’s exposure to flooding and lack of essential services make it inappropriate for permanent human habitation, as Senegalese government and World Bank officials acknowledge.
Thus, moving the IDPs to Khar Yalla did not constitute a relocation that could offer comparable living conditions to what the IDPs had lost, and the site is not appropriate for local integration. Moreover, authorities have actively prevented local integration by only giving the people in Khar Yalla revocable, temporary occupation permits for the houses and disrupting several of their attempts to improve the site or find in situ sources of employment.
The families in Khar Yalla are not forced to live there, but they cannot afford to move elsewhere because of the depletion in income they have experienced since being displaced.
Meanwhile, the Senegalese government failed to include the Khar Yalla families in a planned relocation it is undertaking for other households from the same Langue de Barbarie communities, facing the same climate change impacts, including people who have not yet lost their homes.
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Coastal floods in 2017 and 2018 displaced hundreds more families from the Langue de Barbarie. In the aftermath, the Senegalese government requested and received a World Bank loan to launch the Saint Louis Recovery & Resilience Project (SERRP).
Through SERRP, the government has now permanently relocated the families displaced in 2017 and 2018 to new, government-built houses in a site located 10 kilometers inland, called Djougop. The government is also relocating approximately 11,000 other people who have not yet been displaced but who currently live in the houses closest to the sea on the Langue de Barbarie.
SERRP does not yet facilitate a viable durable solution for those being relocated through the program. Though a systematic analysis of SERRP is beyond the scope of this report, Human Rights Watch spoke to SERRP beneficiaries and local civil society leaders who criticized the consultation process and dissemination of information and described struggles to continue participating in their culture and earning an income from fishing.
These and other concerns with SERRP notwithstanding, it offers a relocation site with several essential services that are absent in Khar Yalla, such as electricity, waste disposal, schooling, and in the future, a health clinic and food market. The government officials Human Rights Watch interviewed failed to provide credible explanations for why the families in Khar Yalla were left out of SERRP.
Indeed, several local officials denied that these families had ever been displaced by climate hazards, even though it was the Saint-Louis municipal government that moved the families to Khar Yalla after the 2015 and 2016 floods.
Senegal is obligated under national and international law to respect and fulfill its people’s economic, social, and cultural rights and protect them from reasonably foreseeable risks to rights, including the impacts of sea level rise and other hazards intensified by climate change, in a way that does not violate their rights.
Senegal is also required to facilitate durable solutions for internally displaced persons. It is laudable that the Senegalese government has proactively pursued strategies to protect climate displaced people, including planned relocation. Senegal has taken these issues more seriously than most other states.
But its efforts should lead to durable solutions for those displaced by climate hazards, not protracted displacement leading to human rights violations, as has occurred for the IDPs in Khar Yalla.
As these families live through their ninth rainy season in Khar Yalla, at the time of writing, it is urgent that the government recognize that they were displaced by coastal floods in 2015 and 2016, meaningfully consult with them, and include them in an improved version of SERRP or facilitate another durable solution that ensures an adequate standard of living and respects their rights.
In the interim, living conditions in Khar Yalla must be improved. Given the Saint-Louis municipal government’s inaction, intervention from the national government is urgently required.
To prevent future experiences like those of families in Khar Yalla, the Senegalese government should become the first African country to develop a national policy on internal planned relocation aimed at protecting the rights of internally displaced persons and facilitating durable solutions for them.
It should also ratify the 2009 African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa (Kampala Convention). By taking these actions, Senegal can become a regional leader in climate adaptation and protection for internally displaced communities.
The World Bank should reform its policies as well. In SERRP and the other climate-related planned relocation projects it has been involved in so far, the World Bank has applied policies designed for resettlements driven by development projects, such as dams and roads.
But these policies do not reflect the unique nature of climate-related planned relocation. World Bank policies need to be replaced or updated to ensure that the climate-related planned relocations it funds are informed by consultation with impacted communities, based on comprehensive censuses, and anchored around the goal of protecting people and ensuring those living in protracted displacement can achieve a durable solution.
For Khar Yalla, together with regional and municipal authorities, plan relocation of the people living in Khar Yalla who were displaced from the Langue de Barbarie in 2015 and 2016, with their meaningful consultation and informed consent, to Djougop or another site where their economic, social, and cultural rights-including rights to an adequate standard of living, adequate housing, education, health, and culture-are respected and fulfilled.
Consistent with SERRP model, enable Khar Yalla families to choose between accepting new homes or receiving compensation for their old homes in the Langue de Barbarie. Compensate Khar Yalla families for the economic and non-economic losses sustained during the nine years they have been in protracted displacement, cut off from fishing livelihoods.
Ensure consultation of women, older persons, and persons with disabilities. In the absence of meaningful action by municipal authorities, dedicate maximum available resources to respect and fulfill the rights of the people in Khar Yalla while they await a permanent relocation elsewhere, including their rights to an adequate standard of living, adequate housing, health, and education.
Providing services and infrastructure: install electricity in homes and improve sanitation. Ensuring homes are habitable: construct a dyke to protect homes from riverine flooding during the rainy season and resulting health risks, and support community-led planning to reduce overcrowding.
Insisting that municipal authorities provide the IDPs in Khar Yalla with secure tenure: authorize people to make necessary improvements to their houses and the site to address overcrowding, lack of shade, and other issues. Facilitating access to work on-site: authorize the Khar Yalla women’s association to finish constructing their training center.
Formally recognize the Khar Yalla women's association as an implementation partner. Ensuring access to essential services: provide free transportation or, with the Municipal Development Agency (ADM) and transportation unions, install bus stops near Khar Yalla and Djougop and subsidize or otherwise incentivize bus operators to transport passengers at both sites to city center and Langue de Barbarie.
This is necessary to ensure access to essential services, including-Nearby public schools; Health care facilities, particularly for pregnant women, children, older people, and people with disabilities; Culturally significant livelihoods; and Other places necessary to realize their rights.
For national planning on planned relocation conduct and publicize a thorough review of past and ongoing planned relocation projects in Saint-Louis, including by documenting lessons learned from community members’ experiences through extensive consultations, and assessing the impacts of these projects on relocated persons’ housing, culture, education, health, and income.
Conduct a vulnerability and needs assessment of other communities in the Langue de Barbarie and elsewhere in Senegal who are displaced or at risk of displacement in the context of climate-related hazards, with particular focus on any communities who have self-identified as needing a planned relocation.
Prioritize currently already displaced communities such as Khar Yalla in future planned relocation decisions. Develop a national climate-related planned relocation policy to protect rights.
From an ethical perspective, the statue of Faidherbe that still stands imperiously over Saint-Louis presents a definite problem. What do I really know about this person standing on a pedestal, or whose name has been given to this street? Have I really been taught their history? Why are they here?
I am not the only one to have asked this question since the debates over Faidherbe’s statue began to rage. How, for all these decades, has this statue stood without anyone really taking an interest in its meaning? Is it because our struggles were focused elsewhere? Because one did not consider this symbol all that important? Because the demands of daily life prevented people from taking the time to wonder why this statue was presented to them? Because we cannot be engaged in all causes with the same intensity?
Each of these hypotheses have their element of truth, but there is one, I believe, that should be given more weight than the others, since it encompasses them all in its undeniable obviousness: if we were not so worried about the statue of Faidherbe, it’s because we didn’t really know Faidherbe.
I do not mean that nobody knew of the horrors committed by Faidherbe, nor do I accuse historians of failing to document the most gruesome aspects of what he did. What I mean is that those who knew this history were a tiny minority (and remain so overall). Unfortunately, the works of academics such as Iba Der Thiam or Abdoulaye Bathily, to mention only the best known, have not been discussed more widely.
It is in no way their fault alone. It involves a whole system which has not allowed these works to infuse or penetrate the social fabric so as to leave a more lasting mark. This process has, for multiple reasons, failed. The memories I have of Faidherbe from primary school-and Lord knows I had some excellent teachers, admirably cultured and pedagogically well-trained-vaguely involve a man who “pacified” a specific territory and “repelled the attacks” of some invader or other who attempted to conquer or break up the country.
And perhaps he did; but he also did other things. These other things, these terrible other things, took me years to discover. This is my point: as far as symbols are concerned, though it could also be said of anything else, the more specific knowledge we have, the better we are able to reflect and react emotionally.
This, in turn, defines our collective and individual relationships with the figure in question. As long as this knowledge continues to be mutilated, embellished, distorted, poorly taught (I would say not taught at all), apocryphal, or even mythologized, we can place any figure we like on a pedestal and most of the population will remain indifferent.
What is happening in this moment is a welcome opportunity to open a deeper debate about: the knowledge we possess about the major figures of our history (Faidherbe is but one of them); the manner by which this knowledge is adapted, communicated, digested, and reformulated so that it can be transmitted to the public; and the relation that the masses have with the very idea of using symbols in public spaces.
Make no mistake, I do not consider Faidherbe the same as, let’s say, Aline Sitoé Diatta. I also hope that the current debate can avoid seeing these problems only through the lens of colonialism-with all the polemical, emotional, and ideological baggage that comes with it.
Finally, I would hope that the current movements to take down old statues arrive at some end other than noisy and hollow symbolism. Overloading symbols with ideology or power with no concern for their impact on our collective situation would make no sense.
The ideological pride of renaming a university after one of our own eminent scholars (Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar) remains vain and superficial if, within this university, one is concerned with everything except knowledge for its own sake and the quest for truth. I will conclude with a more general and open reflection on historic figures, be they colonial or Senegalese.
Perhaps, most fundamentally, it is the act of “statue-fying” a human being that poses a problem today. As we know, a certain number of “great men” in our history were also ruthless conquerors who massacred other peoples, or they were notorious slavers, or schemers who, by allying themselves with colonists for strategic reasons, betrayed their alliances with “their own people” without hesitation.
