Approximately 230 million people worldwide are infected with schistosomes, and more than 90% of those requiring treatment live in sub-Saharan Africa. Senegal and Madagascar both have high prevalences of schistosomiasis, which has a significant impact on human health and on each country’s economy. In Africa, schistosomiasis is caused by Schistosoma trematodes with a life cycle that depends on a definitive human host and intermediate Bulinus or Biomphalaria snail hosts. Drug treatment kills adult stages of the parasite but does not prevent reinfection, and elimination strategies therefore require prevention or targeted control of the intermediate host snail. In Senegal, irrigation canals and rice fields often harbour schistosome host snails and are well-described potential sites of infection. In Madagascar, it remains unknown whether similar habitats harbour host snails despite schistosomiasis and rice cultivation being highly prevalent. This study presents results of a snail survey in Senegal in 2024 and repeated surveys in 2022 and 2023 in Madagascar as case studies to compare schistosomiasis as an aspect of human health in the context of rice farming in the 2 countries. To account for differences in sampling effort, total snail counts per site were normalized by the number of sweeps deployed. Detection of intermediate host snails for the parasite was significantly associated with country. While snails were found in fields and canals in Senegal, competent hosts were not detected in Madagascar, indicating possible differences in habitat and population dynamics and that geographic differences may require different research and intervention approaches.

This study addresses the empirical nexus between electricity unreliability, firm productivity and gender-based productivity for the case of Senegal. We analyse 437 small and medium enterprises from the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys, using an instrumental variable (IV) framework to investigate the effect of power cuts on the gender-based productivity gap. We supplement the IV framework with descriptive tools, including Combes' quantile approach and the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition, to further explore the gender–productivity gap. We find a significant negative effect of power outages on firm performance. Findings further suggest a significant association between power outages and the gender-based productivity gap. Despite male- and female-owned enterprises being equally affected by power outages, their productivity reducing effect is more pronounced for women. For policy-making, this implies that reliable energy services should be provided with the objective of concomitantly reducing the gender-based productivity gap.

Acceptance, faith, and duty are key for women navigating metabolic disorders in Senegal, West Africa. Senegalese women suffering from diabetes, hypertension, and kidney disease/failure found solace in Islam and their faith in Allah for navigating their disease experiences. Religion and faith are seen as sources of strength and agency rather than as foregone conclusions or as something “fated,” providing women ways to make meaning from their chronic illness experiences. Living with chronic illness in under- and low-resourced settings constrain women’s ability to navigate their disease. Religion and faith allow ways of making meaning from these challenging situations.

During the colonial period, Lebanese migrants in Dakar played a significant role in the local economy, benefiting from a historical and evolving French imperial framework in the Levant. From the 1930s onwards, their presence was increasingly perceived as a threat by white settlers, culminating in the post-1945 period when Maurice Voisin articulated a rhetoric of “Frenchness” to exclude them from Senegalese colonial society. This rhetoric, invoking economic, cultural, and political arguments, sought to defend a supposed imperial community uniting French settlers and African subjects. Yet archival evidence reveals that Voisin’s vision was increasingly disconnected from French imperial strategic interests, which recognized the Lebanese as clients and valuable intermediaries. Drawing on colonial administrative archives and press sources, this article examines how Lebanese migrants navigated these challenges, asserting their agency and negotiating their position both within Dakar’s society and the broader imperial order. By highlighting the clash between settler rhetoric, imperial policy, and migrant strategies, the study contributes to a nuanced understanding of Lebanese identification in French West Africa and the complex dynamics of colonial power, belonging, and transnational ties in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Senegalese drummers often recite improvised texts while playing, considering the texts to reflect the rhythms’ meanings. Unlike in other African traditions, drums are rarely used as a speech surrogate. It is shown here that Senegalese rhythms involve language-like grammar rules, which are partly independent of the grammar of the players’ spoken language. The rhythms do not acoustically mimic speech, and the speech-drum matching is based on a lexicon of rhythms and their meanings. Players use this lexicon to produce an unlimited number of meaningful rhythms. The analysis of complex rhythms shows nonlinear alignments with spoken sentences containing plurals, definites, and negation. It is concluded that rhythms are generated by drum-specific grammatical rules. The musical functions of the drum grammar make it especially relevant to current work on language and music, and to ongoing debates between functionalist and formalist approaches to grammar.

How do social hierarchies affect patterns of discrimination in democratic contexts? While studies of identity politics in diverse societies often focus on relations between groups formed around parallel identities like ethnicity, these same societies often feature hierarchical identities that rank individuals into stratified groups. This paper examines how culturally embedded caste identities, inherited at birth, continue to shape everyday life. Drawing on an original survey of 2,160 Senegalese citizens, we show that caste remains a salient axis of perceived discrimination despite its formal abolition over a century ago. Individuals from occupational caste and slave-descended backgrounds are significantly more likely to report experiences of exclusion such as the denial of basic services. Most respondents attribute caste-based discrimination to cultural norms rather than economic competition, religious instruction, or biological differences. Moreover, we find that high-status individuals systematically overreport tolerant attitudes in face-to-face interviews with lower-status enumerators, suggesting that social desirability can obscure the extent of status-based attitudes. These findings shed light on the persistence of caste hierarchies and their impact on citizenship in societies otherwise considered tolerant and democratic. These findings contribute to research on identity politics by highlighting the need to distinguish between ranked and unranked forms of social difference.

In the early 1980s, a group of radical African economists working at the Dakar-based Institut Africain de Développement Economique et de Planification (IDEP) were dismissed. Among them were three Ghanaian economists, Tony Obeng, Cadman Atta Mills, and Kwame Amoa, who applied a neocolonial analysis of global political economy to critique international development policies. Although the precise circumstances of their dismissal remain unclear, it was evident that their revolutionary approach to development clashed fundamentally with IDEP’s methods. Inspired by Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah’s theory of neocolonialism and the Latin American school of dependency theory, these Pan-African scholars refuted the dominant, anti-political, dehistorical, and simplistic Western explanation of Africa’s underdevelopment and urgently searched for better explanations. Drawing on institutional records, working papers, interviews, memos, and published and unpublished papers, this article centers Africans and African institutions engaged in development thinking in the larger history of economic thought in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1864, Umar Taal, one of the most consequential figures of nineteenth-century West Africa, perished in Maasina (Mali), a region he had conquered two years prior. Historians have studied the political and intellectual underpinnings of Taal’s last conquest, but not its ramifications inside families. Exploring colonial-era migrations and marriages in my own family in Mali, I suggest intimate history as mode of historical inquiry and writing to elucidate the afterlives of war. I provide a translocal and gendered microhistory of the aftermath of Taal’s jihad, showing how the ripples of past Islamic revolutions shaped the intimacies of twentieth-century family life.

The domination and exploitation inherent to colonialism entailed casting Africans as violators of European standards, expectations, and even aspirations. This article identifies messaging which permeated the everyday experiences of African wage earners by locating the ways in which employers embedded their understanding of Africans as potential violators into the employment relationship. It examines the records of the Tribunal de Première Instance in Dakar, Senegal, during the decades of high colonialism to reveal the nature of that dynamic, exploring implicit expectations among employers regarding their employees, particularly related to allegations of theft or abandonment of work brought against workers. Analysis of such cases particularly highlights domestic workers, who were overwhelmingly male. The interactions and claims in the justice records reveal clear constructions of violation within the attitudes and actions of non-African employers in colonial Dakar and present the court as a venue for perpetuating that rhetoric.