Last month, 44-year-old Bassirou Diomaye Faye of Senegal was sworn in as the youngest president on the African continent following a dramatic election win. Diomaye, a former tax inspector who never held public office, was elected directly from the first round, the first of any opposition candidate in Senegal’s history. Diomaye’s election follows over a month of protests and at least three deaths as a result of the former President, Mackey Sall postponing the elections. Sall had served as incumbent president for 12 years before this election.

Diomaye stood in for  Ousmane Sonko, a tax-inspector-turned-whistleblower-turned-politician,, who was disqualified because he was facing criminal charges of rape and disturbing public order at the time, though later acquitted. Sonko is the founder of the PASTEF party, which was banned in 2023 for allegedly calling for insurrection. Diomaye ran under the slogan of “Diomaye is Sonko”, and now Sonko is Diomaye’s prime minister in the new government.

Senegal’s new president himself was released just a few weeks before the elections after being detained by authorities on charges of contempt of court and defamation after writing a social media post critical of the justice system.

Diomaye, a leftist pan-Africanist, is expected to lead Senegal away from the influence of western powers. He aims to forego the CFA Franc as Senegal’s currency, fight corruption, and vitalize an economy suffering from high youth unemployment.

To discuss these important developments in a country which is seen as a bastion of democracy and stability in the African continent, the Cairo Review interviewed Mark Deets, a professor at the American University in Cairo’s history department and a social and cultural historian of modern Africa, with a focus on the Senegambian region of West Africa.

Transcript Below

Omar Auf: Professor Deets, it’s a pleasure to have you with us on the Cairo Review’s podcast. As you are a social and cultural historian of modern Africa, and specifically the Senegambian region, I very much appreciate the opportunity to discuss the recent presidential elections in Senegal with you. Personally, I found the elections very interesting for several reasons, and I became even more fascinated as I dug further into Senegal’s rich modern history.

So, before going into the elections themselves, I’d like to quickly lay the groundwork by having you educate us about the social, political, and economic context in which they took place. Senegal is seen as one of the leading democracies on the African continent.

What are the factors that led to it emerging in such a way? And, additionally, what are the colonial legacies that continue to permeate Senegalese politics today?

Mark Deets: Yes, those colonial legacies are still very important. So, Senegal was one of the very first regions of the entire African continent to be contacted by Europeans during the age of discovery or the age of exploration, if you will, in the 15th century. And so, there was a long history already of interacting with Europeans, conducting trade and commerce, and various kinds of exchanges, cultural exchanges, commodity exchanges between West Africans and Europeans.

And eventually, the French will become the colonial power in the region. There’s somewhat of a tussle in the late 1700s between the French and the British over this. And so, for a while, actually, Senegal was being claimed or thought of as sort of a British colonial territory.

But this is actually before the installation of formal colonialism after 1885. So, after 1885, though, and actually from the early 19th century on, it’s basically being controlled mostly by French trading interests. And so, there’s a long history, is what I’m trying to say, of a French presence and of various kinds of cultural mixing, including biological mixing between French people and Senegalese people along the coast of West Africa.

And the recent election of Bassirou Diomaye Faye, I think he mostly goes by Diomaye, is seen as, first of all, it’s seen as a transition in many ways to a younger president who is being thought of or being expected to reject even more the French kind of neo-colonial presence, if you will.

The French, probably more than any of the other colonial powers, kind of held on to their colonies and kind of installed…well, they didn’t hold on to their colonies. They gave them all their independence, at least political independence, in 1960 for the most part. This was kind of the height of the Algerian war, the Algerian Revolution. But they wanted to basically very quickly install what becomes known as the France-Afrique, you know, these structures of France-Afrique, and kind of installing a French presence and influence even in the post-colonial period.

So that’s why we kind of have these charges of neo-colonialism, especially for the French, because there was this idea that there would be this, what was known as la plus grande France, which was the French Union, which would be kind of this sort of overarching imperial French structure or like imperial nation state, to use the term of one Francophone scholar, that would manage all of these former French colonies.

And so you still had a very significant military presence in a lot of these countries, including Senegal. So I was living in Senegal as an American diplomat from 2005 to 2007. And at the time, there was a reinforced French battalion of ‘la troupe coloniale’ they’re still kind of referred to sometimes. And so that was there. The currency there was still tied to the French franc. And so all of these ways, like those roots, those colonial, the kind of colonial entanglements are still there. And this is a part of what the younger generation of Senegalese people who elected Diomaye and put him into office, this is a part of what they want to change.

And by the way, the other thing about Senegal is that it’s in a rather kind of coup-prone area for the last several years, where there’s been a lot of military coups in West Africa and in the Sahel region. Senegal has always been this pole of stability. And what are the reasons for that? I mean, I think some of this goes back to some of the early leadership and some of the early legacies established by leaders like Leopold Senghor. But some of it also goes to the investments of French colonialism in terms of institutional investments, in terms of nation building and things like this.

So that’s just kind of an introduction to, I think, why this election has been very heavily watched by a lot of people around the world. And especially because Senegal was that pole of stability in the midst of all these coups that are going on everywhere else, like Mali and Burkina Faso and Niger and Guinea and even in Guinea-Bissau, which was not Francophone. But anyway, like in the region, there were so many coups.

And Senegal has always been looked to as that pole of stability, that kind of anchor. And yeah, I think it makes sense that people have been interested and have also been quite worried and kind of apprehensive about what this could mean, the way things were going until we had the election and the inauguration of Diomaye.

OA: I want to ask you, during the transition phases between the last two presidencies of Senegal, from Abdoulaye Wade to Macky Sall, and from Macky Sall to Bassirou Diomaye Faye, there were moments that could be described as sort of moments of doubt regarding the democratic transition, with Wade vying for a third term that opponents deemed sort of illegitimate and Sall then postponing the elections for the first time in Senegal’s history.

What is the driving force behind this phase of uncertainty, but ultimately democratic transition?

MD: Yeah, great question. This has been something that it does seem a bit different since the presidency of Aboulaye Wade.

Abdoulaye Wade is not the first, certainly not the first African president, maybe not necessarily the first Senegalese president that has had to deal with these constitutional questions and propose changes to the constitution. But it does seem like there’s been more of that since him. You know, I’ll never forget what one, I think he was actually a Senegalese gendarme officer told me once when I was living in Senegal. He told me that occasionally the Senegalese like to walk up to the edge of the precipice and look over into the abyss to see what disaster they could be walking into. But each time so far, alhamdulillah, they have turned around and stepped away from the precipice of the abyss. And I think that’s kind of what’s been going on for the last 10 to 15 years.

And where Wade was known to be kind of messing around with the constitution and proposing running for a third term. And this led to great protests at that time in 2012. And it led to the Y’en A Marre protest movement, which basically meant that, you know, “no more”, that we’re like, we’re fed up.

And then you get the same thing then. And by the way, Macky Sall came to the presidency as one of the guys, one of the opposition candidates to Wade in 2012. And he was criticizing Wade for messing with the constitution and trying to change these things around.

And he also made the promise that he would change the presidential term to five years, which was what it had been before, but then Wade changed it to seven years. And so he did. He eventually did. Originally, like the first seven years, because the last election that he won was in 2019. This is kind of when Sonko first kind of comes into the national limelight, because Sonko was this new, fresh, youthful candidate who I think came in third in the voting in 2019.

And so you have Macky kind of messing with the constitution and making people upset. And this is going to lead to these very intense protests. And another very important part of that, of course, is also the arrest and the detention and the charges against Ousmane Sonko, the leading opposition candidate who came in third in the voting in 2019.

And then eventually also this guy who was kind of considered eventually his lieutenant, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who ends up then eventually becoming the president. So again, I just keep thinking about that statement that that Senegalese gendarme officer said to me that one time about looking into the abyss and turning away from the precipice. And I feel like that’s exactly what has happened again.

The Senegalese people walked up to the edge of the precipice, they looked into the abyss, and alhamdulillah, they turned around and they have a new youthful president, the youngest president on the African continent now.

OA: It seems to be a very significant moment for Senegal. You have the presidential elections in March, it saw Diomaye emerge as the youngest head of state at 44, winning directly from the first round with 54% of the vote. No prior experience in office, having just been released from incarceration a few weeks prior.

It’s very impressive. And he’s seen as this leftist, pan-Africanist, anti-establishment candidate, which in recent years globally, we’ve seen the anti-establishment candidates actually come more so from the right.

MD: Right.

OA: And so I want to ask, how significant of a moment is this for Senegal? Can it be considered a turning point of sorts? And if so, towards what exactly?

MD: I think it’s definitely a turning point. To me, it’s more of a generational turning point than an ideological turning point.

I mean, there’s a long sort of Jacobin tradition in Senegal, again, because of this long relationship with the French. And, you know, the first president, Leopold Senghor, had this saying, assimilé ne pas être assimilé, which meant, like, assimilate, don’t be assimilated. In other words, because of the French colonial policy of assimilation, this idea that, you know, the French were going to to basically give their African colonies French language, history, and culture, and that they would become basically black-skinned Frenchmen, to use the term of Leopold Senghor.

But they didn’t get the rights and the benefits of citizenship, even if there was this discourse about them having it. You know, that’s kind of a part of what I think is going on here, where they’re trying to figure out the parts of the French system that they like, that they want to keep. And I think they’ve been doing that for quite some time.

And I don’t think that Diomaye necessarily wants to get rid of all of that. There may be some good parts. And exactly, when we’re talking about some of the Pan-African ideals, when we’re talking about some of the democratic ideals that come from the French and the French Revolution and all of that, you know, I don’t think that we’re talking about necessarily a rejection of all of that.

And by the way, I would also say that in some international fora, I think that that actually gives…that history with the French actually gives the Senegalese a certain amount of prestige, because they do have some incredibly accomplished scholars and poets and historians in their own right who’ve contributed not only to a Francophone African world, but to a Pan-African world in a larger sense. And, of course, Leopold Senghor is kind of the prime example of that, who was, he was actually a member of the Académie Française that, you know, that determines what’s going to be considered legal as far as the French language is concerned. And he was a poet.

And, you know, I think the Senegalese are proud of that heritage, but they want to get rid of the neocolonial stuff where they feel like they’re…basically where they feel like they don’t have freedom to do the things that they think are in their best interest. And so I think that there’s been an understanding that they need to somehow displace themselves from French business interests and certainly from, like, a French military presence, which has been in the region for quite some time and has been especially unpopular with a lot of these new regimes that have come about from all of the coups, who have…who basically, they’ve kind of put up their hand to the West, including the United States, and said, thank you very much, but we’re fine on our own. Could you just leave us alone? Go away.

So I think we’re to that point. And I think, like I said, I think it’s more of a generational change, really, than an ideological change, because certainly it’s not the first time that there have been Pan-African leaders from Senegal. And Leopold Senghor, again, is the prime example of that, amongst others like Cheikh Anta Diop, who’s, you know, the namesake of the University of Dakar.

But I do think it’s a generational change. I don’t really think that the ideology has changed as much as being very much more interested in decolonial ideology and the ideology of decolonization, true decolonization, more than just what Walter Rodney called the flag independence, but, like, real independence in terms of their institutions and their culture and language and currency. So the fact that Diomaye wants to bring in their own currency and take it away from being pegged to the French franc is also very significant.

OA: Yes, it’s a good thing you brought this up. I wanted to ask you about this, actually. The economic dimension, I think, is very important, not just for Senegal, but for African countries at large to be truly independent in their own right.

And here, a lot of interests are at play from foreign debt, investors, natural resources, and then there’s the people of Senegal themselves. And Diomaye made a campaign promise to replace the West African franc, which is pegged to the euro now, I think, with a national currency.

But then investors expressed some concerns, and he changed that promise slightly to first seeking a regional solution, possibly referring to the Eco, which is the promised currency of ECOWAS that’s still in the works. And it’s uncertain where or when it will be rolled out.

So I want to ask, with big hopes for progress, particularly with emerging or newly found resources like oil and gas fields, how do you see Senegal’s newly elected president balancing these “radical ideals” that have been reported in the press as such, with the economic interests of international and domestic investors, as well as the political interests of allies and partners, including Western states?

MD: Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah, the question is, how much of this can Diomaye actually accomplish?

OA: Exactly.

MD: Basically, you know, he’s got some great ideas and they really sound wonderful. But as you and I were also discussing before we started the interview, we were talking about the history of the Senegambia Confederation, where you look at the geography of Senegal and the Gambia, and you think, why don’t they just become one country? And like I said, they tried for seven years from 1982 to 1989, and then it fell apart and they went back to being two separate countries. And so and the reason I would argue is because of the history of these institutions which had been developed over time, because there’s a history there. And so, you know, you can’t just wind back the clock and try to start over.

You know, you have to deal with the situation that they’re in now, and I think that they’re trying to do that, especially with the currency, and yeah, you’re right, it is pegged to the euro. I said it was pegged to the franc before. That was one of the things that changed, I think, since I lived there in 2005, which is basically just when the euro was first coming out.

But anyway, the issues of debt, this new currency that you’re talking about, the oil and gas development, all of this points to a hopeful future. And one of the things that I really like about Diomaye and about Sonko is that they do represent a new generation, and they do represent, I think, hope. And you know, there was a time where African leaders were feeling a similar kind of hope, basically, as they were coming out of the colonial era, looking at independence.

And then those hopes came crashing down in the post-colonial period with ethnic conflict and with increasing debt, as you said. But I would hope that these new leaders have learned some lessons from that history and will be eager not to repeat necessarily the same things and to make smart decisions that are based on the current context of what’s going on today. I will say, I guess I have a kind of a wait-and-see attitude about the development of oil and gas.

When I was there from 2005 to 2007, they were kind of talking about the same thing. But it sounds like maybe it’s developed to a little further down the road, making progress with that. And so I really hope that’s true.

And I certainly hope that they can profit from being that pole of stability that they have historically been in French West Africa to give this idea of the Eco or whatever currency they decide to go with to really give it a fighting chance and to help them get away from debt, which has also been this crippling economic problem since the days of independence. And this is why there’s a very famous economist from Zambia who calls it dead aid, who has talked about the need for Africans to just resist basically all forms of Western aid because Western countries give aid and assistance for the interests of Western countries. Whether it’s America, whether it’s France, whether it’s Britain, whatever the case may be, they’re not giving aid and assistance out of just the, you know, a spirit of generosity or the goodness of their hearts. They’re giving aid in order to have influence in those countries in various ways as everybody else. By the way, the Chinese, they’re doing it for the same reason, right? Let’s be honest. But this is why Dambisa Moyo, that Zambian scholar, economist, that I mentioned, why she wrote this book, Dead Aid, because she’s saying, look, as long as most of the budgets of these countries is coming from foreigners, those governments are going to have to basically act in the interests of foreign governments instead of their own people.

And that’s not right. They should be acting in the best interests of their own people as they’re trying to form these new nations that are not so new anymore. I mean, you know, we’ve got well over 50 years of independence now.

But yeah, the question is, how much independence can these countries truly have? And this goes back to that question, again, that we were talking about a little bit before the interview when we were sitting outside, when we were talking about the various forms of federation that could be possible. And so you kind of see that with some of these sub-regional organizations like ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States, which has seen a little more success, I think, in terms of real influence in various parts of West Africa. But again, like with all of these federations, and by the way, the reason that the West African Federation didn’t work out to begin with is because you have all of these different countries with their own interests.

And at that time, when the Senegalese were looking at this question after World War II and trying to establish basically a West African French-speaking federation, one of the reasons that it didn’t work out was because you had these competing interests between the different countries of West Africa. So these are great challenges that this younger, this new generation of leaders like Diomaye and like Ousmane Sonko are going to have to deal with. They’re still trying, they still, to a certain extent, have to do some nation building.

The Senegalese have been probably better at this than a lot of African countries. They’ve had a pretty stable political situation, but also stable armed forces. They’re known for having a very professional army that respects the rule of law.

And again, this is thought to be, by some historians, would be considered a part of the legacy of Leopold Senghor and his leadership. Other historians would disagree with that and say, well, no, it wasn’t about this one leader, but it was about the socioeconomic structures that benefited Senegal as the capital of French West Africa to be able to have some degree of stability. Anyway, I don’t discredit any of those factors.

I think they’re all important as a historian. You know, I would not ignore any of them, but I do think that it’s an important part of the legacy in Senegal that points to the reasons that Senegal has been a leader in the sub-region. But also, we’ll see what happens with, like you said, with these changes that Diomaye is trying to bring to the country, and especially in terms of the currency.

I think that’s something that we should all be paying very close attention to as Senegal tries to make these changes. How much will they be able to benefit from the oil and gas exploration that they’re talking about? Will they develop the oil curse like some of these West African countries, like Nigeria? Or will it turn out to be a real boom for the economy? Will it be managed well, like it has been in some Scandinavian countries? That remains to be seen. And of course, the other player that we haven’t really talked about yet is China. And they’ll have a role to play as well.

OA: For sure. I think the currency and the oil fields are pivotal.

I’d like to take a moment to talk about Ousmane Sonko, who has been mentioned several times, Diomaye’s sort of mentor.

He was supposed to run for presidency, but then was barred because of criminal charges. He was a tax inspector turned whistleblower who exposed tax evasion in the system in Senegal. And he’s now prime minister of Senegal.

So how do you see the dynamics of leadership playing out between the president and the PM?

MD: Yes. I think this is the million-dollar question that everybody’s wondering about, whether they’re actually saying it or not.

I do think this is the question. And I think that there’s, underlying it is a suspicion that they cannot peacefully coexist. That there’s going to be eventually the development of a rivalry. That eventually Ousmane will be unsatisfied with being the prime minister and not having some of the greater powers in a presidential republic like Senegal that Diomaye has as the president. But like I said, it’s a new generation. And I don’t think that this idea of this sort of realpolitik that drives people to conflict necessarily has to be the way it is today.

I think with this, again, maybe I’m being somewhat ignorant here, but I think with this younger generation of leaders, there’s somewhat of an understanding of the need for cooperation and the need to work together and the need to occasionally sacrifice one’s ego for the good of the community or the good of the nation. And I’m not saying that leaders like Senghor and others before them didn’t have that. But eventually politics came into this and it leads to this very sort of cynical, narcissistic take on Senegalese politics.

And look, until we see evidence to the contrary, I want to give Diomaye and Sonko the benefit of the doubt and see what they can do together. But I would also imagine that his desire to be president is not gone and that he would love to succeed, even though he’s the prime minister now, that eventually he would love to succeed Diomaye as the president, as the head of state, as the commander of the armed forces of Senegal, you know, all the powers that come with being the president in a presidential republic like that.

OA: Yeah. Who doesn’t want to be president?

MD: Right.

OA: And I know you’re an expert on the Casamance region in particular. How do you see the government policy going with respect to the region in the next few years?

MD: Yeah. Well, I hesitate to call myself an expert on anything. I think that can get me in trouble. But I am a historian of the Casamance and of the Casamance conflict. And Ousmane Sonko was the mayor of Ziguinchor, the regional capital of Casamance, you know, before he started running for president and being considered for president. And so he, yeah, he comes from that area and he’s got family ties that come from that area.

But I think one of his parents is from the Casamance and the other is from northern Senegal. And so he was considered, I know that a lot of Casamance look at him as kind of their candidate, right? They definitely wanted to see him succeed based on that. And so, yeah, one hopes that having somebody who’s bringing some kind of Casamance perspective anyway can help with nation building in terms of, you know, bringing the Casamance more and more into the Senegalese nation so that they think of themselves less and less as a separate nation from Senegal and think of themselves more and more as a region of Senegal and proudly taking their position in the Senegalese nation.

I know that there are a lot of Casamance leaders who would like to see that, but there’s still some of that old generation and even some of the new generation, actually, of people who’ve always felt ignored by Dakar. They’ve always felt rejected. They’ve always felt discriminated against.

And, you know, they will be looking to see how the Casamance will be treated by a Diomaye presidency.

OA: Allow me to change, to switch gears a little bit and broaden the focus of our discussion As a historian of Africa, you are well aware of the richness and diversity throughout the continent’s many countries, and you’re also undoubtedly also well aware of the stereotypes, racism and the dismissal that the continent is often approached with, even from within Africa itself.

You wrote an article about this, about how the 2019, during the African Cup of Nations, you sort of had the impression that Egyptians or North African Arabs see themselves as not entirely, not as African or not as African as much as we are Arab. And there is obviously a perceived divide between the North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.

This is quite a personal topic for me, these questions of identity. I consider myself both African and Arab, in addition to being Egyptian, Muslim, and a host of other things.

MD: Sure.

OA: And personally, I believe that we need both a strong pan-Arab network and a pan-African one, regardless of the way it manifests politically or otherwise. So I want to ask you, how could the people of the African continent use these ideas of intersectionality and the common struggles against colonialism and neo-colonialism and the yearning, the universal yearning for prosperity to navigate this complex overlay of identities from the local to the national, to the regional, to the ones independent of geography and so to achieve their diverse goals across the continent?

MD: Well, I think that may be one of the advantages of social media.

Of course, social media brings its problems, but in some ways, I think the fact that your generation feels so connected around the world is, you know, it portends well for the future. You know, you just mentioned all of these different identities that you feel and that you come from and, you know, to some extent, you can kind of build on the ideology, the work of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was both a pan-Arabist and a pan-Africanist.

And you have, like, literally the marriage of the two in some ways because of the Egyptian wife of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and their children, which are produced from that marriage, right? And so, again, I’m thinking of this somewhat as in generational terms, that a lot of those old divisions that my generation and perhaps the generation or two before me were dealing with because of the colonial legacy, hopefully a part of true decolonization, which has been a popular term in the discourse now, can be not just rejecting the colonial legacy and not just rejecting colonial culture, but actually welcoming all of the different cultural inputs into this region.

And by the way, I can’t think of a better place actually in the world to bring about all of this than Egypt, which has historically been a borderland and a mixing bowl of cultures from the Mediterranean, from Europe, from Southwest Asia, from Africa, from other points east in Asia. You know, like, I think about this all the time and what’s going on right now with the conflicts surrounding Egypt and all of the refugees who are here. Egypt has been a place of refuge for many, many people throughout time. And I mean, if we want to, we can even go back to like the Old Testament and the Christian Bible and how, you know, it was a refuge for the Jews and also for the Holy Family.

So, if all of that is, if that’s going to continue to be a part of the legacy of Egypt, I actually can’t think of anybody better placed to help lead that, to help lead that kind of a movement of people like you who identify as African and Arab and, you know, with all, and Muslim, with all of these other kinds of identities that are overlapping and connecting,. You know, all of the people who are coming from here, from Southeast Asia, for example, to be in Cairo, to go to Al-Azhar or whatever they’re coming to Cairo for. It really is an amazing place.

And to me, it’s hopeful that Cairo can kind of regain the place that it had in the 1960s when it was in many ways, partly because of the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser, it was the capital of third worldism and third world ideology and third world kind of thinking and politics. It was an intellectual and cultural capital of the third world. And you had people coming here from Asia. You had African-Americans like Malcolm X coming here in the 1960s. And then in 1967, everything changed. And a lot of those people left for various reasons because of the 1967 war.

And so I think that’s very hopeful that people like you can kind of help recapture and sort of help reestablish that reputation for Cairo and Egypt.

OA: Yeah, I do share your hope. And I’d like to thank you, Professor Deets, for this wonderful discussion.

MD: It’s been my pleasure thank you.

OA: Yeah, may we see Egypt continue to play the role you say and Senegal achieve all of the aspirations it desires through electing its new president.

MD: Inshallah.

OA: Inshallah.