The author Breyten Breytenbach said Senegalese police moved in on Friday morning to evict the Gorée Institute, of which he is director, from its offices on the former slave island of the same name.
Though he said he does not know the reason for the eviction, it comes amid privatisation of state properties in Senegal, and fears that the government is seeking to turn the island into an upmarket tourist destination.
”I doubt if the staff are going to be able to withstand if they try to physically remove us from the premises: I anticipate they will take the keys and lock us out during the course of the day,” said Breytenbach, who is on holiday in South Africa.
Gorée is a small island just north of Senegal’s capital, Dakar.
It was the centre of the European slave trade, and an estimated 20-million Africans passed through between the mid-1500s and the mid-1800s.
The island is now considered a memorial to the black diaspora. A former slave house there is now a museum.
The island has about 1 000 permanent residents and is a popular tourist destination.
The Gorée Institute is a pan-African non-profit organisation that engages in community planning and cultural programming. It runs a ”peace academy” focusing on democracy and governance.
The institute, with its roots in the 1987 Dakar Safari in which Afrikaner figures met exiled leaders of the then-banned African National Congress, has been quartered on the island since 1992.
Its offices are in the historic Maison de Soudan, a state-owned building allocated to the institute under an ”accreditation”, an agreement with the Senegalese foreign minister.
Breytenbach said the arrival of gendarmes on Friday morning followed repeated threats by the Senegalese government, and was taking place despite protests from the diplomatic community in Senegal.
Asked why the government is seeking to evict the institute, Breytenbach said: ”The only legal contact we’ve had is a letter from the minister of foreign affairs in December 2003 informing us they are withdrawing the country agreement [the accreditation] — without any justification.
”There was no motivation, no reasons. We then tried very hard to find out what was happening.
”We tried to have a meeting with the President [Abdoulaye Wade], because the minister said it’s out of his hands, it comes from the president. The president refused to see us.”
However, Wade did say in a letter that the government is in fact not withdrawing the country agreement, and that the government is ”just exercising their option to activate one of the clauses which says they can take back their property… and then he said, rather cryptically, the state does not have to motivate its actions”.
”To the best of our knowledge, there is no political motivation for this. We haven’t crossed swords with the Senegalese government,” he said.
Breytenbach said if the institute is ousted from the Maison du Soudan, it will still have a presence on the island as it also occupies a residence and buildings where it conducts workshops.
”But this is taking away from us the building with which the Gorée Institute has been identified. That’s our working tool, our offices, our conference centre.” — Sapa