Suchergebnisse

The relationship between language and politics in the African post-colony remains obscure and underexamined. Here we withdraw into a
poorly lit area, an area of potentialities, where new political shapes
may
emerge as the outcome of half-conscious choices made by very large
numbers of people. 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
Africa: 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 these individual language choices cast their
political shadow.The political consequences of this socio-linguistic phenomenon are as

yet indistinct, but to see a little more clearly one should in the second

place relate it to the subject of the politics of ethnicity. Language is
of
course an important element in any definition of ethnicity, and there is

an evident overlap; but the politics of language is also a distinguishable

subject in its own right. Where the assertion of ethnic identity can be

identified as a possible weapon in the individual's struggle for power

and recognition within the colonial and post-colonial state, the choice

of a language is that of the most effective code in the individual's
daily
struggle for survival. Language choice in such a setting may be less a

matter of assertion, the proud proclamation of an identity, than it is
one
of evasion, a more or less conscious blurring of the boundaries of
identity. And in Senegal the government itself by its inaction has
practised its own shadow-politics of procrastination.

Since the separate independence of Senegal in June 1960, after the breakup of the Mali Federation, organized political opposition in Senegal has not been able to maintain the position which it enjoyed before independence. The failure of the opposition can be explained only in part by reference to the repressive measures adopted by the government over this period; it should also be seen as a result of the internal weaknesses of the opposition itself. The purpose of this article is to outline the various conditions which have enabled the governing party, the Union Progressiste Sénégalaise (UPS) of M. Leopold Sédar Senghor, to remain in power until the present time, despite its own lack of strict internal discipline or general sense of purpose.