Forty people have drowned in the first three weeks of the summer holidays as residents seek respite from a cramped city

In the middle of the afternoon almost every day of Senegal’s summer holidays, hundreds of young people descend on the beaches around the capital, Dakar, which sits on a peninsula jutting into the Atlantic.

They wrestle in the sand, play football and leapfrog up and down the shore, spending their spare francs on peanuts and madd, a sour tropical fruit.



But this year going to the beach is exacting a deadly toll, according to the city’s firefighters: 40 people have drowned in the first three weeks of the holidays. Many have drowned in areas where swimming is banned, but the ban is not enforced.



Baye Xali Lo, 16, slipped out of the house with his cousin Mohammed last Sunday after lunch. His mother, Ngilane Sawo, who had warned him not to go to Guédiawaye beach because it was dangerous, did not see him leave, but that was not unusual.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ngilane Sawo, whose son Baye drowned last Sunday. Photograph: Ruth Maclean/The Guardian

“His brother went to the beach at around 7pm and saw their shoes lying there. He thought they were just playing somewhere in the crowd,” she said, sitting on a stool in the family’s flat in Gadaye as her young daughter crept under her arm for a cuddle. “Usually, when the kids go, they don’t say anything – and they come back later with sand all over their legs. We were a bit worried, but they were big boys.”

When they weren’t home by 1am, however, the family got really worried. After a fruitless night searching hospitals and police stations, they found the two bodies washed up on the beach.

They were not the only ones who drowned there that night, said Mbagnik Ndiaye, the neighbourhood chief in Gadaye.

“There were 11 deaths this weekend alone between Malika and Malibu. Usually maybe there are one or two,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The shoes Baye Xali Lo left on the beach before he drowned. Photograph: Ruth Maclean/The Guardian

Ndiaye said the problem was that there were no alternatives for young people in a fast-growing city with limited space, where endless blocks of flats spring up on any empty plot of land. One main park serves the whole city, so children head for the only space where there is no construction: the beach.

“The places reserved for kids get sold off,” said Ndiaye. “They built a mosque on our football pitch. The state has to take responsibility for this. They have to make space for young people.”



Sawo agreed. “There’s nowhere else to go, there are no other activities for young people. The only other thing they can do is study the Qur’an. It’s a big problem,” she said.

Dakar has an unusually vibrant beach culture: while children in other parts of Africa often keep clear of the sea, here they splash each other and squeal in the waters that lap against Ngor, one of the city’s oldest communes, and Gorée island, thought to be a key point during the Atlantic slave trade.



Makhary and Ousmane Ndiaye have fished in Guédiawaye since 1986, when their brothers set up a beach camp there. With bits of driftwood and a three-legged dog lying around, it is a little ramshackle now, but provides them with the only shade there is for many miles while they wait for the right conditions to cast their lines.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ousmane Ndiaye, a fisherman, says there have been more drownings this year. Photograph: Ruth Maclean/The Guardian

“Every year it’s a little hotter, so more people come. Where they live it’s too crowded, but here there’s space, you can sit peacefully,” said Ousmane Ndiaye, slouching back in his deck chair, leafing through a magazine.



But as the numbers rise, so do the deaths.

“Every year there are cases, but this year there are a lot more,” said his brother. “I was fishing three days ago when I saw a body floating in the water. I brought it out – it was a big guy of about 40. That’s the first time I’ve had to do that.”

Looking out at the Atlantic, he added: “The water is unpredictable and people don’t understand the tides. However good a swimmer you are, it’s dangerous here.”

Additional reporting by Thomas Faye

