Street art in Dakar: Mural painting with a social mission – culture

Mamadou Boye Diallo shakes a few hands every few meters. How’s it going? high five wave. The 31-year-old in a patchwork jacket and sandals knows everyone here in Medina, one of the oldest districts of Dakar: the street artist who builds chairs out of wood and cow horns. The mothers washing clothes in the yard. Or the old man in the plastic chair: “That’s Youssou N’dour’s father, he boss you quarters.” Diallo, whom everyone here calls Modboye, is a kind of district boss himself – at least as far as art is concerned. Since he founded “Yataal Art” together with artist colleagues in 2010, many of the old walls here are brightly colored, resplendent between rocked-out residential buildings and Clotheslines, ingeniously designed murals, wall paintings They bring art to people who have never visited a vernissage or seen the inside of a museum.

Modboye leads through Medina like a museum director through a meticulously curated exhibition. In fact, in addition to local hip-hop matadors like Dix Milles Problémes, North Africans, French and Americans have also immortalized themselves on the walls. Thanks to Yataal Art’s connections to the global sprayer community, the Senegalese capital has emerged as the new mecca for graffiti art. New York, London, Berlin, that was back then. Today, graffiti and street artists from all over the world flock to Dakar to collaborate with their Senegalese colleagues. “It’s about raising awareness among the population,” says Moodoye. The messages are clear: faces with banknotes as mouth and nose masks. A toddler pulling a boat of refugees out of the sea. Or women who repair a bicycle – a challenge to gender stereotypes.

“Look around and you see our own traditions everywhere”

But why is graffiti, a pillar of hip-hop, finding a second life in West Africa? “Our murals want to express more than aesthetics,” explains Modboye. “We don’t do imported street art. Look around and you’ll see our own traditions everywhere.” Almost every store advertises with a hand-painted sign. Heads with hairstyles adorn the hairdressing salon. Painted goats and fires are displayed in front of the street grill. Or X-Box players painted on the wall of the internet cafe. Modboye leads into a house entrance. As soon as your eyes get used to the semi-darkness, you can see hundreds of charcoal drawings on the walls. Stylized Islamic Preachers or Marabouts. But also mythical creatures between animals and humans: “That comes from Pape Diop, a madman. For many years he has been painting walls, old wooden boards and cardboard in the whole district.” Modboye has already documented 4000 of Diop’s Art Brut drawings and exhibited them at the Institut français in Dakar and Paris, among others.

Modboye, a former breakdancer and sprayer who ended up distributing flyers in the gallery scene in Dakar, sees himself primarily as a curator today. TV and video crews covering Dakar like to capture a, well, “exotic” street flair here between art and poverty. the New York Times reported on the lively “open-air museum” Medina. For Malick Ndiaye, the artistic director of the Biennale Dakar 2022, the graffiti boom is proof that “art in Africa always has a social mission”. Because it reflects everyday life. Unlike in the west, where street art often only provides decoration for a fully air-conditioned educated middle class, the smells of open coal fires, washing water and goat shit are part of it. On the other hand, according to Modboye, there are hardly any complaints about vandalism: “On the contrary. The residents are happy to allow us to paint their walls. They appreciate our work.”

Open detailed view

However, the two dozen artists and around a hundred sympathizers who have come together to form “Yataal Art” are about more than that. Gentrification and rising rents are endangering the whereabouts of the long-established population in Medina. Most of the grandparents here, says Modboye, grew up on the plateau to the south. But then, in the first half of the 20th century, the colonial government moved them to the newly created medina to make room for white authorities and shops. A similar fate is threatening his district today. Investor architecture instead of old walls. “We’re defending our neighborhood. If someone wants to remove one of the graffiti, the boys here will go on the barricades.”

Street art also serves as a wall newspaper for unofficial news. For example on the wall around the soccer stadium in Medina: Docta, a graffiti pioneer in Dakar and all of West Africa, and his colleagues portrayed some of Senegal’s most pressing social issues: illegal migration by pirogue towards Europe. The integration of wheelchair users and disabled people into society. Or after the anti-government demonstrations of March 2021: the faces and names of the youths killed by police bullets.

Open detailed view

“Of course the government would like to have some of my graffiti painted over,” says Docta. “But we graffiti artists are seen as mouthpieces for the population. If I threaten to inform the media, they’d rather not do it.” The 47-year-old with the tied turban receives Blaise Diagne in his studio in the Center Culturel. A few canvases, boxes full of spray cans, covers of Senegalese hip-hop bands pinned to the wall, an Apple computer. Docta, whose real name is Amadou Lamine Ngom, founded Africa’s first and most notorious graffiti crew in 1994. They call themselves the Doxandem Squad. In German: The Wanderers. Twenty years later, he and his colleagues would launch the Festi Graff, a graffiti biennial, a model for similar events in Congo, Togo, Benin and Cameroon.

Copying the graffiti colleagues from the west? Out of the question

It all started in the late 1980s: at the time, Senegalese television was showing a documentary about graffiti in which the sprayers were demonized as vandals and their works as a copy of western decadence. Docta was still hooked. He studied crumpled issues of the American hip-hop magazine with his teenage friends TheSource, brought by travelers from the west. The pages reserved for graffiti had the status of scriptures. But copying the colleagues from the West? Even praise your own name? “That ego thing didn’t work for us. Instead, we adapted to the Senegalese reality.”

Docta painted his first graffiti in 1987 on his grandmother’s house in Guediaweye. A district committee donated the colors to the young people on the condition “that our frescoes depict honorable people, i.e. a deserving athlete or a respected elder”. Docta chose his grandfather. He was one of the intellectuals in the neighborhood, handing out books to the children and asking them to discuss what they had read. The sprayer first cleaned the wall and removed rubbish. That has something to do with respect. respect for the elderly. Respect for tradition and religion. As a result, the residents of the neighborhood adopted the plant. And kept the square in front of it – a small miracle in the garbage-filled Dakar – meticulously clean. Docta was not only perceived as an artist, but also as a chronicler of the quarter’s history.

Since then, Dakar has shone in its very own way: Here the African idea of ​​the collective collides with our Western idea of ​​the art market and the exaggeration of individuality. When Docta says he draws his strength from community, he doesn’t just mean his neighborhood – but also the Islamic Mouriden Brotherhood to which he belongs, he embraces the world from a spiritual perspective. Consequently, many of the best graffiti in Dakar revolve around community issues – or promote education and health, for example on behalf of an international organization such as UNESCO. Covid, for example, is immortalized in a flood of murals. In a country with more than 50 percent illiteracy, what else could educate more effectively?

“In the West,” says Docta, “you choose to be an artist. But we say: It’s society that gives me my role.” This sometimes even includes those who make life difficult for street artists in the West with special departments and penal orders. “You Germans don’t know that”. The godfather of African graffiti claps his hands in amusement. When he and a sprayer from Hamburg were painting the outer wall of a prison, a police officer approached them from the other side of the street. “My colleague ran away in a panic. But the policeman just wanted a cigarette. We smoked together, looked at the work of art in progress, then he gave an appreciative thumbs-up: Keep it up!”