The Shadow-Politics of Wolofisation

Abstract

Here we withdraw into a poorly-lit political area, an area of potentialities, where new political shapes emerge as the outcome of half-conscious choices made by very large numbers of people.1 Language choices in the first place: the expansion of the Wolof language in Senegal, principally though far from exclusively an urban phenomenon, is to be seen in a context where the individual may speak several languages, switching linguistically from one social situation to another. Such multilingualism is general in Africa2: the particularity of the Wolof case at least in Senegal is the extent to which this language has spread, far beyond the boundaries of core ethnicity, of a historical Wolof zone from the colonial or pre-colonial periods. And diese individual language choices cast their political shadow.

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