In Dakar, the great fear of building collapses

Sunday rest, observed by most workers, hardly seems to slow the activity of a bustling city. It's past 11 a.m. in the Liberté 4 neighborhood. Under a partially overcast sky, the sun's rays pierce the clouds and cast a soft light on the buildings, whose facades cast shadows on the roadway. Construction sites rise, floor after floor, reflecting the image of a city under construction. They also receive their share of sunlight. Sitting on a makeshift bench—made of stacked concrete bricks covered with a plank—Cheikh calmly carries a black bucket filled with sand mixed with cement up to the fourth floor of a building under construction.

Using a pulley attached to a rope, he steadily hoists the bucket, fighting against gravity. His colleague, stationed on the balcony, catches the bucket, empties it, then releases it, letting it fall noisily onto the mountain of sand on the ground. The light-skinned worker in his thirties shakes his head: “Ah, the collapse of buildings, that’s the news right now… With the tragedies in Touba [a collapse that left 11 dead on May 25 in this city in the center of the country] and here in Ngor [two dead on May 8 in this commune of Dakar], it’s really