Five - The grassroots

Summary

Introduction

The farthest rural edge of Pikine, just outside Dakar, is home to Senegal's largest solid waste dump, Mbeubeuss, a steaming mountain chain of waste. In Pikine, now a city of over 1 million, residents confront a staggering array of environmental problems on a daily basis, to say nothing of poverty, extreme overcrowding, crime, violence, or social unrest. The urban heart of Pikine experiences chronic, severe seasonal flooding, which leads to lakes of standing water that, in turn, generate a cascade of human and environmental health calamities. One encounters few waste or sanitation services in Pikine; much confronting of environmental crises happens not from government action, but from local initiative. Yet, even this can prove elusive. As Abdurahmane Diallo (2012) has said: “normally initiatives would come from the people, from the ground up, but not necessarily in Pikine.”

At the same time, it is unfathomable to have political-environmental action in Pikine that creates meaningful change without networks that arise from this “not necessarily” circumstance. In Diallo's (2012) words, in Pikine, “you have to be connected. You have to have relations. Your capital should be in people, not money. If you don't have people, you have nothing. This is where the solidarity works.” By contrast, as Alasse Elhadji Diop (Diop, A.E., 2013) of Djidah Thiaroye Kao neighborhood in Pikine put it: “the government basically doesn't give a damn about what happens here.” Where the government “doesn't give a damn,” people at the grassroots often seek to do so, and we see this on the Trash Mountain. Mbeubeuss has a very entrepreneurial union of informal waste-pickers, Pikine as a whole has an association of informal sector workers and a strong contingent of the Y’en a marre movement discussed in Chapter Four, who collaborate in the expression not only of just how “sick of it” Pikinois are, but of how to work together to change it. Yet, they do not necessarily succeed, either in working together or in the changing of their environments.