With my dad all concerned about his little girl going away to Africa on her own (um… its not the first time I’ve left the country… but gotta love parents for caring), I wondered about the stability in Senegal.
Apparently there is a little tension down South. So Senegal is separated in two with The Gambia, which surrounds a river (more on that in a latter blog). South of Gambia is Casamance.
Casamance was subject to both French and Portuguese colonial efforts before a border was negotiated in 1888 between the French colony of Senegal and Portugese-Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau) to the south. Portugal lost possession of Casamance, then the commercial hub of its colony. Casamance, to this day, has preserved the local variant of Kriol known as Ziguinchor Creole, and the members of the deep-rooted Creole community carry Portuguese surnames like Da Silva, Carvalho and Fonseca.
The Jola is a specific ethnic group who’s sense of economic disenfranchisement within greater Senegal contributed to the founding of a separatist movement advocating the independence or autonomy of the Casamance, the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC), in 1982. The MFDC’s armed wing was established in 1985, and since 1990, the Casamance Conflict, a low-level insurgency led by the MFDC against the Senegalese Government that has been characterized by sporadic violence and frequent but unstable ceasefire agreements. An illegal shipment of weapons hailing from Iran was seized in Lagos, Nigeria in October 2010, and the Senegalese government suspected the MFDC of having been the intended recipients of the weapons. Senegal recalled it’s ambassador to Tehran over the incident.
In recent news, the border between the Gambia and Northen Senegal had a blockade that was just let up on May 9th.
Root.ED
