It’s hard to capture in a photograph just how much the African Renaissance Monument looms over Dakar. Standing at 160 feet (49 meters) tall, it’s the biggest statue in Africa and sits on a hill on the western coast of the city, making it even more imposing. Dakar is also not a city of skyscrapers by any means, so it’s far, far taller than anything else in sight. You can get a bit of a sense of the statue’s size if you peek at the tiny little people walking up the stairs in the photo.
The monument has an interesting and controversial history. It was finished in early 2010 and came with a hefty price tag of around $27 million USD (though some outsider estimates put it more around $70 million) and was constructed by a North Korean company famous for building “affordable” monuments around the world. Senegal certainly couldn’t drop that kind of cash on a statue, so instead, the country gave a piece of land to North Korea in exchange for the monument – a piece of land that brought North Korea a nice payday when they re-dealt to someone else.
Many Senegalese were incensed at the transaction, especially given that such a large sum of money could have been used for much-needed things in Senegal, such as disease prevention, education, road projects or a host of other causes. In addition, the construction of the monument, which took around four years to complete, could have gainfully employed quite a few needy Senegalese workers, but the jobs went to North Koreans instead.
And who was behind such a series of seemingly ill-conceived decisions? Senegal’s own octogenarian president, Abdoulaye Wade – who also insists that he should personally receive 35 percent of any tourist-driven profits from the monument, since the project was his idea.
Rachael Cullins is a twentysomething American girl living in Dakar, Senegal, with her husband and two dogs. She blogs about her adventures in Senegal and travels elsewhere in West Africa. She will reside in Dakar until summer 2013, when she and her family will move to another foreign post as part of her husband’s career with the U.S. government. In addition to West Africa, she has traveled to France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy and Costa Rica and plans to continually add to that list.
