Anger of architects in Senegal after the destruction of an emblematic market in Dakar

The Sandaga market, a building of Sudano-Sahelian architecture built in 1933 in the center, housed hundreds of stalls and was one of the main ones in Dakar for nearly a century until it closed in 2020.

The central building of the market was in danger of ruin, with its cracked flagstone and rusty irons. The authorities had announced that they wanted, for security reasons, to rehabilitate and rebuild it identically, in particular by installing an underground car park. The date of the start of the work was not specified.

If the stalls bordering the market had been destroyed in August 2020, the central building had remained intact, until its demolition on the night of Thursday to Friday.

"It is really regrettable. This destruction was not justified", denounced to AFP the president of the National Order of Architects, Jean Augustin Carvalho.

Sandaga is "a heritage and an identity of the city of Dakar. It was necessary by all means to see how to preserve it", he underlined. "This building could still stand with a rehabilitation, but who wants to kill his dog accuses him of rage ...".

"Technical solutions for the conservation of this heritage exist", assured Papa Dame Thiaw, another official of the Order of Architects.

This involved in particular, according to him, by "the reinforcement of the structure, the creation of new posts".

"Buildings more degraded than Sandaga have been rehabilitated," he said.

For Annie Jouga, also a member of the Order of Architects, the Senegalese authorities "do no better than the (French) settlers who demolished the identity of the first inhabitants of Dakar", the former capital of French West Africa. "It is a scandal".

"It is a bluff to say that we are going to rebuild identically. We cannot reconstruct a 1933 building identically with modern techniques," she added.

The Sandaga market, which takes its name from a tropical tree, no longer housed stalls.

The Ministry of Urban Planning had set up in 2020, two km from the Sandaga market, a site for a "temporary resettlement" of traders. Rehabilitation of Sandaga is expected to take two years.

The mayor of Dakar Plateau, Alioune Ndoye, also Minister of Fisheries, who provides administrative supervision of the market, announced that he would speak on the issue on Monday.