“Dakar is like modeling clay, smiles the Senegalese painter Mbaye Diop, whose paintings show the permanent transformations of the city. Every day, a part disappears and is reborn in another form. » Indeed, most of the historic buildings of the Senegalese capital, whose agglomeration concentrates a quarter of the 17 million inhabitants of the country, are struggling to survive. The lack of a coherent urban policy and the appetite of developers who build concrete towers as they please constantly threaten the history of a city in turmoil.
The old courthouse, located at the southern tip of the Cap-Vert peninsula, is an emblem of this endangered heritage and a symbol of the little-known architectural wealth of Dakar. The brutalist building, built in 1957 by Daniel Badani and Pierre Roux-Dorlut, evokes the aesthetics of Le Corbusier, and in particular his administrative city of Chandigarh, in India. From the outside, it is a long rectangular block, an austere façade which contrasts with the interior: on the ground floor, the Salle des Pas Perdus is a huge space covered by 99 columns, brightened up on the floor by a mosaic of blue-green tiling, and with, in its center, a magnificent skylight. In the garden, as an oak of justice, sits a mango tree.
Rubble, paperwork
In April 1966, in this same Salle des Pas Perdus was held, on the initiative of President Léopold Sédar Senghor, the exhibition “Trends and confrontations”. She was unfolding as part of the first World Festival of Negro Arts – as they were then called – which was to “to affirm the contribution of black artists and writers to the great universal currents of thought, and to allow black artists from all walks of life to compare the results of their research”, the statesman then aspired. The event had, according to Malick Ndiaye, curator of the Théodore-Monod Museum of African Art, in Dakar, “confirmed the central place of the city in African cultural life”.
This building, built three years before Senegal’s independence, came close to disaster. Closed in 1992, when cracks raised fears of a collapse, it sheltered for twenty-four years only rubble, paperwork and snakes. In 2016, the organizers of the Biennial of Contemporary African Art in Dakar obtained from the authorities to make it their regular exhibition space. Although rid of its waste, its condition remains alarming.
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