The commune of Téssékéré, located in the north of Senegal, in a Sahelian environment, is characterized by a major socio-economic activity : semi-nomadic pastoralism. Long practiced in this area, the mid-twentieth century ...
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The commune of Téssékéré, located in the north of Senegal, in a Sahelian environment, is characterized by a major socio-economic activity : semi-nomadic pastoralism. Long practiced in this area, the mid-twentieth century marks a turning point in the history of livestock farming. Indeed, the 1950’s are the subject of a vast campaign of borehole, reaching groundwater. If the official objectives of colonial public management policies were to meet growing water needs, the underlying ambition was to settle a population that was still mobile and difficult to tax. Subsequently, the progressive anthropogenic and bovine pressure, but also the episodes of droughts since the 1970’s, led to an ecological degradation of the environment. Qualified as sensitive, the Senegalese Sahel was invested by several development projects, which aimed to fight against this degradation and the consequent impoverishment of the population. Thus, the introduction of boreholes and development projects, understood as "exogenous" objects, have largely contributed to the modification of socio-economic practices and, more broadly, modes of living. The result is a complexification of the territorial configuration, which has become opaque for exogenous actors (state agency, NGO). Today, local development projects, still numerous, are subject to a diversion for personal purposes by local elected representatives taking advantage of this opacity. In reaction, the inhabitants, excluded from the network’s partisans, become territorial leaders to palliate the monopolization of the power by their elected officials. Thus, without a thorough knowledge of the game of internal powers, one cannot understand the current location of public facilities and the resulting spatial injustices. This thesis work leads the reader here in a deciphering of power networks who build the territory in Téssékéré.
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