Around 11 p.m. on a recent Friday, a modest yellow building in San Francisco's Mission District overflowed with couples dancing to bass-heavy Latin and African music. Pressed together in a small, humid room, the air around them was an intoxicating mix of colognes and perfumes, light sweat and body heat.

Strobe lights flickered off people’s clothes to the cadence of drums, giving the space a virtual heartbeat. Lingering above it all was the faint aroma of West African food — the seared lamb of dibi, and the mustard and pepper of yassa sauce.

It was a normal Friday night at Bissap Baobab, an African restaurant and dance hall created in the mid-1990s by Senegalese-born Marco Senghor. The business remains one of the few places in the Bay Area highlighting black culture through an international lens.

Now, there’s a chance it could all disappear.

Senghor was arrested on Aug. 1 on charges that he illegally obtained his U.S. citizenship three decades ago. He pleaded not guilty on Aug. 2 and was released on $50,000 bail.

This week, Senghor could learn his fate in court — a decision that could end in the revocation of his citizenship, placing him back at the immigration status he had before his naturalization, or potential deportation.

Meanwhile, Bissap Baobab is being sold to new owners, and will close in the coming weeks. It’s a financial decision by Senghor intended to help fund his legal defense. Little Bissap, the smaller, sister space next door mostly known for late-night grab-and-go items, will remain under his control in the short-term, but like Senghor himself, its future remains uncertain.

While the sun sets on Bissap Baobab’s time in the city, Senghor, and a small number of those closest to him, are pondering its place among the Bay Area’s pantheon of unique establishments.

If a high-profile immigration case is casting a pall over Bissap Baobab, it’s not apparent. On this night, Senghor is holding court at a table in the restaurant’s dining room over a plate of sauteed prawns while speaking to everyone within earshot.

“People come here to enjoy themselves. They come here to eat, to dance,” he shouted as music blared through nearby speakers. He paused for a moment to wave over to his table a small group near the restaurant’s bar.

“They come to see Marco.”

There’s truth in this. The charismatic Senghor, a Senegalese native and son of Senegal’s first president, easily commands a room. He speaks with a lilting French and African accent. During any conversation, he maintains a disarming level of eye contact, often with a smile as though there’s a joke being told only he can hear. It’s equal parts rakish and honest.

“He’s the mayor of the Mission,” said Debbie Miller, who co-owns nearby Mission organ lounge Royal Cuckoo. “What Marco has done for this area over the years, the way he just built this community from nothing, there’s really no way to describe how important he is to the city.”

These days, compared to its surroundings near the corner of Mission and 19th streets, where tasting menus (Lazy Bear, Commonwealth) and hot restaurants (Prairie, Media Noche) abound, Bissap Baobab is an intimate, more humble alternative. The bar serves vibrant ginger- and hibiscus-based cocktails in plastic cups, most of which are priced under $10.

Bissap Baobab’s kitchen serves a compact menu of Senegalese comfort foods, most of which are a flavorful mix of rice, spicy seafood and vegetables. This isn’t a white tablecloth place. An order of jolof rice might be served on a white plate one night and then in an orange bowl the next. It’s this laissez-faire nature that has served as Bissap Baobab’s appeal for decades.

For people who ate dinner there earlier in the night, there’s no $5 cover charge to enter the dance hall once it opens. That’s when it hosts one of the city’s liveliest dance parties from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. most nights of the week. Jamaican dance hall music can be heard playing at Bissap Baobab just as often as salsa and Afrobeat.

But it’s not the business model that makes Bissap Baobab unique in the Bay Area, and especially San Francisco. It has more to do with cultural scarcity.

There’s an overall lack of African restaurants in the region. When wading through the complexities of this notable dearth, there are signs of East African countries like Ethiopia, Eritrea and Morocco in North Africa as having at least a subtle presence in the region.

Cafe Eritrea d’Afrique in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood, for example, still draws a crowd of regulars to Telegraph Avenue more than 30 years after opening its doors. There’s Cafe Ethiopia on Valencia, and closer to downtown, Mourad, a fine-dining Moroccan blockbuster with award-winning aesthetics.

West Africa, on the other hand, isn’t really represented. This was also the case when Senghor opened Little Baobab in 1996. By 2009, the business had grown from a small West African spot with good music to a formidable dance hall and restaurant as it spilled into the larger space next door. Little Baobab spent the next few years as a snack spot while Bissap Baobab shouldered the load for the dance parties, World Cup matches and DJ sets.

Then in 2013, a fire at Little Baobab shuttered the space for roughly three years. Little Baobab re-opened in 2016, but by then, Bissap Baobab had gone on to garner national attention as a beacon for San Francisco’s West African community.

Senghor himself was unique, too, not only because he was a brown success story, but because he had a way of using his own culture as a bridge to bring together people of different backgrounds.

“When I first opened, the gangsters that were around here were my customers. The prostitutes were my customers,” Senghor said. “I helped clean the neighborhood. And I made friends, so many friends. That’s how the restaurant came to be. People just wanted to support me.”

Behind Senghor’s efforts, Bissap Baobab became the block’s major draw. He would hang with artists who traveled here from across the country, wooed by a siren song of spicy food and fruit-based drinks. They’d leave and share stories from the night’s experience. Bissap Baobab’s legend grew.

Senghor rarely divulges easily traceable stories about his past. His tales come in short bursts, sometimes weaving between past and present, often with a dash of notable hyperbole. A favorite story of his revolves around his former ginger juice business — and how he made so much of it in his Mission apartment that the ceiling collapsed one day due to water vapors.

It’s within this cloak that his true feelings about his immigration case can be found. Suffice to say, it’s complicated.

“I’ve been scared since it all started happening,” Senghor said about his legal issues. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know if people take advantage of me, what will happen next or anything.”

Senghor’s arrest in summer 2018 came right around the time U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers swept into Northern California and arrested more than 150 undocumented immigrants. The incident garnered national attention and stoked fears ICE agents would be raiding restaurants in the area.

The Department of Justice is accusing Senghor of falsifying or omitting information relevant to his citizenship. It did not respond to requests for comment.

Senghor’s position in the neighborhood made his arrest extra jarring last year. Sure, Senghor was a public figure, but few even knew his last name (he spent years just going by Marco) let alone his immigration status. As such, rumors swirled. Was he some kind of criminal mastermind? Did he have a fake marriage?

“There were things said about me that just weren’t true,” Senghor said. “I’m not some criminal.”

Neither Senghor, nor his legal team, have chosen to speak directly about the case since August, when attorney Jeffrey Bornstein of San Francisco’s Rosen Bien Galvan and Grunfeld, released a statement: “It’s unfortunate that the U.S. Attorney’s office has chosen to bring charges against Mr. Senghor relating to his citizenship process that was completed many years ago. We will be contesting these charges vigorously in court.”

Senghor has been working toward a plea deal in his immigration case, a process that began in January. His next hearing was slated for March 21.

“In these situations, you just never know what’s going to happen or what decisions will be made,” said Michael Nolan, a longtime friend and adviser to Senghor.

While that is happening, Senghor is in the process of selling the Bissap Baobab liquor license and property at 3376 19th St., which he bought for $1.6 million in 2016. The buyers are the folks behind El Porteño, a Peruvian restaurant in the Excelsior.

There is no final date for when the business will close. The sale price is over $2 million.

So, a countdown has begun, until the last mafe peanut stew slides onto a table, and Senghor makes his final stroll through the restaurant greeting people, laughing, dancing, maybe even serving a drink or two.

Bissap Baobab was a confluence of moments. Senghor opened it long before the Mission was trendy and well ahead of the city’s restaurant boom. His menus and music highlighted the culture of a West African community before its presence dissipated in the region, making Bissap Baobab as much an educational space as a restaurant and dance hall. It is one of a kind. It is irreplaceable.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I’m going to make sure the people who come here to see me, to see Marco, I’m going to make sure they have a good time,” Senghor said. “Hopefully that’s what people remember about Bissap Baobab, that it was special. It could never happen again.”

Justin Phillips is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @JustMrPhillips