Dakar’s colonial-era French street names persist in the city center.

Evidence

It is January 1985, and I have just arrived in Dakar, Senegal, to continue research on France’s mission civilisatrice under the Third Republic. Dakar is a sprawling and dusty African city, not as modern as Abidjan, or so I am told. The financial and governmental center remains much as it was under colonial times, when Dakar was the capital of France’s West African federation. At independence, the gleaming white palace of the former governor general became, with only slight modification, the presidential palace. In this, the oldest planned part of the city dating back to the beginning of the century, streets still bear names such as Avenue Faidherbe, Avenue Roume (after French West Africa’s third governor generall, Rue Jules Ferry, Rue Victor Hugo, and Avenue Pasteur; outside the downtown, African names dominate: Avenue Lamine Gueye, Avenue Mohammed V. But the official city center has not bothered to divest itself of these markers of its former subjugation to republican France. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1

Categorization

• CANDY: A concrete, observable example of colonial legacy: French names kept on Senegalese streets.
• ADDENDUM: Offers a walking/cityscape example of lasting colonial infrastructure, tangentially related to the trees-as-infrastructure essay’s concern with enduring built worldbuilding.