Senegal Statue Angering Locals Over Cost and Nudity

by Jordan Yerman | January 5, 2010 at 07:24 am

317 views | 32 Recommendations | 0 comments

The African Renaissance statue in Senegal is nearly complete, just in time for criticism on many fronts. The statue, built overlooking Senegal's capital city of Dakar, depicts a muscular man holding aloft a child and carrying a woman behind him. It has a Soviet aesthetic, which isn't too surprising, as it was built by North Korea. That the statue costs $27 million to build has angered many in Senegal, which is run by 83-year-old President Abdoulaye Wade. That it depicts a scantily-clad couple has angered the imams of Senegal, who have always had a contentious relationship with President Wade.

"Our problem is with the woman's bare legs," architect and Wade adviser Pierre Goudiaby Atepa told Reuters by telephone, referring to the thigh-length hemline of the female figure's tunic.

A larger issue, though, is that the statue depicts the woman as passive, which is not necessarily the African rennaissance imagery that Senegal should be going for.

A year or so in the building, the president's $27 million project is very nearly complete. Wade says the statue symbolizes the triumph of African liberation from centuries of ignorance, intolerance and racism, and he hopes it will rival the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower in Paris as a tourist destination.

I'm not sure, though, if tourists will want to stroll through trash heaps to get to the statue, which is pretty much what they'd have to do: $27 million is a lot to spend on a vanity project when your economy has collapsed. While he's the first democratically-elected leader in a long time, and an ally of Washington DC, Wade has been repeatedly accused of corruption, which his claims of being entitled to 35% of revenues generated by a statue built with national funds will only bolster.