How the 'Venice of Africa' is losing its battle against the rising ocean
By Monika Pronczuk in Saint-Louis Senegal
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It used to be the town square of Doun Baba Dieye, a vibrant fishing community on the outskirts of Saint-Louis in northern Senegal. The village has been wiped off the map, with only the tree and crumbling walls of an abandoned school remaining as testament to its existence. Everything else is 1.5 metres under water.
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In Saint-Louis, the consequences of climate crisis are tangible: thousands of people uprooted; houses destroyed; hundreds of children attending classes in the evening instead of in the morning because their school has been swept into the ocean. The World Bank, which recently allotted €24m (£20m) to combat the effects of climate change in Saint-Louis, estimates that 10,000 people in the city are either already displaced or live within 20 metres of the waterline, the high-risk zone.
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Ameth, along with more than 800 former inhabitants of Doun Baba Dieye, are among the victims forced to move away from the peninsula without any support from the state. “We are fishermen, we know the ocean, so we left at the good moment – and nobody got hurt,” says Ameth, before correcting himself: “We were fishermen.” Since his community was dispersed, Ameth’s fishing boat, a pirogue, remains largely unused: “We live too far from the ocean now. I was not only deprived of my home, but also of my livelihood.”
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Ameth is counting neither on the World Bank, nor on Macron. Thanks to financing from the UN, he returns once a year to the place where his old village stood, and plants trees. He hopes that mangroves and filaos, an exotic species of pine, can stop the destruction of the shoreline.
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