Who ruled Dakar?

Dakar occupies the end of the Cap-Vert peninsula, which reaches further west than any other part of the African mainland, where the Atlantic coast of Senegal juts out towards the Americas. A sheltered bay on its southern side, protected by the small island of Gorée, made it a natural stopping place for ships sailing between Europe, Africa and the Indian Ocean. Dakar itself is a young city. It grew from fishing villages into a French colonial port after 1857, became the capital of all of French West Africa in 1902, and has been the capital of independent Senegal since 1960.

By the 15th century at the latest, the peninsula was home to the Lebou, a Wolof-speaking people of fishermen and farmers, whose old villages such as Yoff, Ngor and Ouakam survive as neighbourhoods of the modern city. The surrounding mainland belonged to the Jolof Empire, which had emerged from the orbit of the Mali Empire, and later to its breakaway kingdom of Cayor. Portuguese ships reached the bay in 1444, and in the 16th century fleets of the Portuguese Empire sailing to India often stopped there for water and supplies.

European traders made their base not on the mainland but on Gorée. The island passed between the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English and finally, from 1677, the French. It became a centre of trade in gum, gold, ivory and enslaved people, part of the Atlantic slave trade. Historians debate how many captives passed through Gorée itself, but its House of Slaves has become an international symbol of that trade. A village called Ndakaaru grew on the mainland opposite the island to supply it with food and water, and gave the city its name.

In the 1790s the Lebou of Cap-Vert rebelled against the ruler of Cayor and set up their own Muslim state, which the French later called the Lebou Republic. France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848 and encouraged peanut farming instead. In 1857 French forces built a fort at Dakar and took control of the peninsula.

The French built a deep-water port, and in 1885 a railway linked Dakar to Saint-Louis, the older colonial capital to the north. In 1902 Dakar became the capital of French West Africa, a federation stretching deep into the interior. Dakar was one of the Four Communes of Senegal, whose African-born residents had the right to vote in French elections, and in 1914 they helped elect Blaise Diagne as the first Black African deputy in the French parliament. After a plague outbreak that same year, the colonial authorities moved many Africans from the central Plateau into a new district, the Médina, laying down a segregated city plan that still shapes Dakar.

During the Second World War the colony sided with Vichy France, and in September 1940 British and Free French forces under Charles de Gaulle failed to take the port. In December 1944 French troops fired on West African soldiers protesting over unpaid wages at the Thiaroye camp outside Dakar, killing dozens or more, a massacre that remains a deep grievance.

Dakar was briefly the capital of the Mali Federation in 1959 and 1960 and then, from August 1960, of independent Senegal under President Léopold Sédar Senghor. It hosted the World Festival of Black Arts in 1966 and became a centre for West African universities, media and international organisations. Today the Dakar region has about four million people, close to a quarter of Senegal's population, and the government is building a new administrative and business district at Diamniadio to ease congestion on the crowded peninsula.