Dakar

Two million people passed through a door on Gorée Island. The small volcanic outcrop in Dakar's harbour served as a slave-trading station from 1444 until abolition in 1848—four centuries during which Portuguese, Dutch, and finally French colonisers funnelled captives from West Africa's interior through holding cells and onto ships. Gorée became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, and the 'Door of No Return' facing the Atlantic remains one of the most visceral monuments to the transatlantic slave trade. Dakar exists because of Gorée, and Gorée existed because of extraction.

When France abolished slavery, it needed a replacement export economy. The answer was peanuts. French colonial authorities promoted groundnut cultivation across Senegal, and Gorée's tiny harbour (population 6,000) proved inadequate for the new bulk commodity. Traders moved to the mainland, established warehouses in Rufisque, and eventually consolidated in Dakar. In 1885, West Africa's first railroad connected Dakar to Saint-Louis, transforming the city from a quiet outpost into a logistics hub. By 1902, Dakar was the capital of French West Africa—governing territories from Mauritania to Ivory Coast. The slave port had metamorphosed into an imperial administrative centre, the way a parasitic wasp larva consumes its host and emerges as a fundamentally different organism.

Independence in 1960 made Dakar the capital of Senegal, but the city retained its regional hub function. With 3.34 million residents (96% Muslim, predominantly Wolof), Dakar hosts international institutions, serves as the intellectual capital of francophone Africa, and operates one of West Africa's most important ports. The city bridges Africa, Europe, and the Americas—a geographic position on the westernmost point of the African mainland that gives it literal proximity to all three continents.

Dakar's modern economy runs on port logistics, food processing, and a growing services sector, but the deeper economic engine is the Senegalese diaspora. Remittances from Senegalese communities in France, the US, and across Africa flow back through formal and informal channels, sustaining households and funding construction. The relationship between Dakar and its diaspora mirrors the mutualism between a fig tree and its pollinating wasps—each dependent on the other for reproduction, connected across distance by a biological contract neither party formally negotiated.

Senegal's democratic stability (one of West Africa's most continuous democracies) gives Dakar a credibility premium that neighbouring capitals lack. The city functions as a costly signal of institutional reliability—diplomatic conferences, cultural festivals, and international organisations choose Dakar because its stability signals low political risk. In a region where coups and instability are common, Dakar's democratic track record is its competitive moat.