One week after the tip of a lethal unrest that shook Senegal, the nation nonetheless counts its losses.
Volunteers and employees from Dakar’s Cheikh Anta Diop College try to salvage what can nonetheless be out of some 200,000 college archives.
Youths armed with Molotov cocktail allegedly set ablaze the constructing.
“…. till confirmed in any other case, [I believe] college students got here and deemed it essential to burn down the archives of the College of Letters and Humanities, a despicable end result, I am in need of phrases,” emotional Abdourakhmane Kounta, an archivist and documentarist on the College of Arts mentioned.
Cities throughout Senegal had been plunged into chaos after a jail time period was handed to opposition chief Ousmane Sonko. His supporters claim he was framed.
The Cheikh Anta Diop College archives included paperwork spanning from 1957 to 2010. The destroyed recordsdata are primarily scholar registration varieties, photographs, delivery certificates, report playing cards and theses.
Employees paperwork amongst which these belonging to professors and researchers’ had been additionally burned.
Pupil archivists comparable to Souleymane Diallo are serving to kind via burnt archives.
“We’re each saddened and devastated. Seeing archives like this burned down signifies that part of the historical past of the college, and specifically the College of Arts, can be lacking,” he laments.
“Lack of political will”
On the Nationwide Archives workplace additionally positioned in Dakar, the director admits Senegal has by no means had a nationwide constructing dedicated to housing its paperwork. Practically 20 linear kilometers of papers are saved in “tough situations” there. The oldest doc dates again to 1672.
Fatoumata Diarra argues the college incident ought to function a wake-up name to the authorities.
“The losses are immense, notably within the case of the archives. These are recordsdata that haven’t been digitised […] There are levels of destruction after all, when hearth consumes archives, typically some elements stay unhurt. however as for almost all, I’ve seen the photographs, it is appalling….
3 days had been essential to retrieve the paperwork from the burnt constructing. They’re important to retrace a scholar’s journey, difficulty a diploma or to authenticate it on the request of an employer, for instance.
Senegal lags when it comes to digitization of archives regardless of the launch of a mission in 2021 aimed to digitize 15 million delivery certificates. The mission price some 18 billion CFA Francs (about 27,5 million euros).
In keeping with skilled in digitization Issa Sy, the nation lack “political will” to kind this downside.