For four weeks, the people of Senegal in West Africa showed up in droves at sites across the capital, Dakar, to view art. Some waited hours to get into exhibition halls. They flooded social media with selfies, attracting millions of views.
This burst of appreciation for creative expression, particularly among young Senegalese, came at least partly at the behest of President Bassirou Diomaye Faye. Elected in March on a wave of youth-led demands for change, he opened the Dakar Biennale of Contemporary African Art on Nov. 7 by acknowledging the relationship between artistic freedom and national well-being.
Art “feeds our imagination ... makes us dream and think; it teaches and educates,” he said. It breathes an “extra soul” into public aspirations “so that they adhere ever better to what we are and aspire to become as a people.”
Such sentiments are a sharp contrast to a debate in Africa over what the continent is due for past colonialism and the slave trade. On a trip to Angola last week, President Joe Biden paid tribute to “the stolen” Africans brought to America with “unimaginable cruelty.” In April, Portugal’s President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa suggested his country owed Africa reparations. For many Africans, those acknowledgments are long overdue.
Yet the art festival in Dakar, which brought together the works of some 3,000 artists, invited viewers to confront the past differently. One hall gathered pieces that depicted an alternative history of Africa untouched by colonialism or slavery. Others sought to awaken in visitors a sense of individuality and identity defined by innate dignity and worth rather than by how they are seen by others or what others had done.
The event transformed a neglected courthouse that once epitomized “the crushing justice of the French colonial empire” into a place where “we want everyone to feel legitimate,” Salimata Diop, a French Senegalese curator, told The New York Times.
Mr. Faye seems to be moving his country toward a similar shift in thought about the past and its bearing on Africa’s future. On Dec. 1, the history of a French massacre of Senegalese soldiers 80 years ago was added to school curricula. The purpose of history, he said, is to “reveal the truth ... to discharge a moral debt” to those who suffered. “We are not opening a door to arouse resentment, maintain anger or hatred,” he said.
The works of African artists that adorned Dakar, the president said, dissolve “the fears that inhibit” beauty and convey “the pressing need to cultivate peace and harmony among peoples.” For young Senegalese posing gleefully for selfies, an art festival that explored Africa’s independence from an inflicted past formed the backdrop of a future defined by self-worth, dignity, and equality.
