The Jijiyaabe and the Rimbe of Southern Senegal. The rural predicament of the legacies of slavery

Scholars, state officials, development experts, and the population itself describe the eastern side of the Casamance as an enclave. Dakar, the capital city of Senegal is far. The roads are poor, the transports bad and expensive. The only urban settlement is Velingara, an ill-planned agglomeration in proximity of the international border with The Gambia. The prosperity of the town has declined together with the decline of The Gambia export economy in the last two decades. Besides smuggling, the two most flourishing economic activities of the Eastern Casamance- the irrigated rice project of the Ananbé basin and the weekly market of Diaobé – are under the control of external investors and entrepreneurs. It is against this background that one has to study the legacies of slavery. Until the beginning of the 20th century, this part of Senegal served as a ‘slaving zone’, i.e. an area ravaged by raids that fed the internal and external slave trade. The traces of this not-so remote past loom large in the memories and daily lives of the population. Jiyaado (plur. jiyaabe) is the local term that roughly translate the idea of ‘slave descendant’. Dimo (plur. rimbe) identifies the offspring of nobles and slave-owners. There is tension between the two social categories as much as kinds of collaboration that help counter the hazards of rural life (droughts, lack of health and educational facilities, the increasing prizes of seeds and fertilizers, cattle epidemics). By drawing on the methodologies of oral history and ethnography, this case study casts light on two levels of analysis of the legacies of slavery: the macro level of national and international political economy and the micro one of people’s life trajectories. Their scale and scope are different but they overlap and influence each other. Both relevantly shape the rural predicament of southern Senegalese peasants.