Festival of Jazz - 20th Annual - St .Louis Senegal - May 2012

St. Louis Jazz Festival Senegal

Festival of Jazz  - 20th Annual  - St. Louis - Senegal May  24th - 28th,  2012

St. Louis Jazz Festival 2012 will be showcasing Jazz, blues, gospel and related music. More than an event, the Festival International de Jazz de Saint-Louis has become a must in the cultural and musical landscape of Senegal,a major African Festival, but which is always something unexpected!Past musicians who took part in the Saint Louis Jazz Festival include Herbie Hancock, Randy Weston, and Joe Zainul. The African Festival is also an excellent platform for new jazz groups to perform infront of an international audience. At least 30 new groups perform each year. Enjoy some of the world’s best jazz, exotic food, art and crafts, culture exhibits and also some African drum-beat dancing. 

St. Louis Jazz Festival Senegal

The proposed programming for the 20th Edition Saint Louis Jazz Festival will be electric, bringing together big names of jazz from all  generations.

Featured Artist 2012

• Kate Winter Sextet

Will keep you updated on confirmed artist for event

Featured Artist in Past

• Mike Del Ferro  
• Malouma Duo 
• Enjhambre Quartet
• Chico Correa 
• Sonja Kandels
• Michaela Rabitsch
• Kenny Barron Trio
• Jean-Pierre Como 
• Mina Agossi



St. Louis Jazz Festival Senegal

• Ablaye Cissoko

Art Show
During this African Jazz festival of St. Louis, all the artistic expressions are invited.There will also be a Art show featuring artist for all over Senegal and the children of St. Louis.

Official Website: Festival of Jazz 2012

Saint-Louis- Senegal -UNESCO World Heritage Site

Saint Louis - Senegal

Saint-Louis- Senegal -UNESCO World Heritage Site

Saint-Louis, or Ndar as it is called in Wolof, is the capital of Senegal's Saint-Louis Region. Located in the northwest of Senegal, near the mouth of the Senegal River, and 320 km north of Senegal's capital city Dakar, it has a population officially estimated at 176,000 in 2005. Saint-Louis was the capital of the French colony of Senegal from 1673 until 1902. From 1902 until its independence from France the capital was Dakar. From 1920 to 1957 it also served as the capital of the neighboring colony of Mauritania. 

Geography

Saint Louis - Senegal Map

The heart of the old colonial city is located on a narrow island (just over 2 km long and about 400 m wide) in the Senegal River, 25 km from its mouth. At this point the river is separated from the Atlantic Ocean to the west by a narrow sand spit, the Langue de Barbarie (300 m wide), which has also been urbanized (the seaside neighborhoods of Ndar Tout and Guet Ndar). Yet a third part of the city, Sor, lies on the eastern mainland and is nearly surrounded by tidal marshes. Saint-Louis is situated on the Mauritanian border, though the border crossing is at Rosso, 100 km upstream.Three characteristics give Saint-Louis its distinctive geographic appearance: the Sahel, the marshes and the Langue de Barbarie.

Saint-Louis only has two seasons, the rainy season from June to October, characterized by heat, humidity and storms, and the dry season from November to May, characterized by cool ocean breeze and dust from the Harmattan winds. Saint- Louis unfortunately is known for its floods. 

Saint Louis - Senegal

History

Saint-Louis was established in 1659 by French traders on an uninhabited island called Ndar.It was the first permanent French settlement in Senegal. Saint Louis became a big trading post for the Senegal River. Slaves, hides, beeswax, ambergris and, later, gum  were exported between 1659 and 1779. As in Gorée, a Franco-African Creole, or Métis, were important to the economic, social, cultural and political life of the city. They created a distinctive urban culture characterized by public displays of elegance, refined entertainment and popular festivities.  A Métis mayor was first designated by the Governor in 1778. 

Saint Louis - Senegal  Faidherbe Bridge

Louis Faidherbe, who became the Governor of the Colony of Senegal in 1854. His large-scale projects included the building of bridges, provisioning of fresh drinking water, and the construction of an overland telegraph line to Dakar. Saint-Louis became capital of the federation of French West African colonies in 1895, but relinquished this role to Dakar in 1902. Faidherbe Bridge is the the symbol of the city.

Saint Louis - Senegal

Tourism

Following independence, when Dakar became sole capital of the country, Saint-Louis slipped into a state decline.Saint-Louis, however, has remained an important tourist and trading center and the city's economy, though not entirely recovered, is gradually reviving.Today, rich in three centuries of history, in cultural background, geography, architecture and other characteristics, Saint-Louis is a bridge between the savanna and the desert, the ocean and the river, tradition and modernity, Islam and Christianity, Europe and Africa.

Saint-Louis' colonial architecture along with its location on an island at the mouth of the Senegal River and the system of quays.This gives Saint-Louis the distinctive appearance and identity that has made it since 2000 a UNESCO World Heritage Site.Home to a society with a distinctive lifestyle, Saint-Louis has retained its unique identity. “No one comes without falling in love with the city," proudly say its people who consider Saint-Louis as the birthplace of Senegalese Teranga, the Wolof word for hospitality.

Saint-Louis remains the most characteristically French colonial destination in West Africa along with Gorée Island.

Attractions and Events

Saint Louis - Senegal

• Saint-Louis’ Research Center
• Governor’s Palace
• Historic airport at Dakar-Bango 
• Grande Mosquée
• Faidherbe Bridge 
• Servatius Bridges
• Fanals, which are night-time processions of giant paper lanterns, take place at Christmas time.
• The Saint-Louis Jazz Festival
• The Festival Métissons
• Annual Reggata
• The Magal of the Niari Rakas

Saint Louis - Senegal

The People

The Wolofs and Lebous who are the main inhabitants of Saint-Louis are mostly fishermen that live in fishing communities like Guet-Ndar on the Langue de Barbarie. The Fulas live in the inland and practice pastoral farming. The Maures who are migrants from Mauritania (Saint-Louis Senegal is less than six miles south of the border with Mauritania) are mostly merchants, traders and shopkeepers found everywhere in Saint Louis.

House of Slaves - Goree Island Senegal

House of Slaves - Goree Island Senegal 

House of Slaves - Goree Island

House of Slaves and its Door of No Return is a museum and memorial to the Atlantic Slave Trade on tiny Goree Island, 3 km off the coast of the city of Dakar, Senegal.It is said to memorialise the final exit point of slaves from Africa. Historians differ on how many, if any African slaves were actually held in this building, as well as the relative importance of Goree Island as a point on the Atlantic Slave Trade,but visitors from Africa, Europe and the Americas, along with world leaders, continue to make it an important place to remember the human toll of African slavery.

Door of no Return - Goree Isand

Its museum, opened in 1962 and curated until his death in 2009 by Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye, who was a tireless advocate of both the memorial and the belief in that slaves were held in the building in great numbers and from here transported directly to the Americas. Eventually he becoming curator of the Museum, Ndiaye has claimed that more than a million slaves passed through the doors of the house. This belief has made the house both a tourist attraction, and the site for dozens of state visits by world leaders to Senegal.

Statue Des Esclaves - Goree Isand

Since the 1980s, academics have downplayed the role that Goree played in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Ndiaye and other Senegalese have always maintained that the site is more than a memorial and is an actual historic site in the transport of Africans to French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese colonies of the Americas.

Built around 1776, the building was the home in the early 19th century to one of a class wealthy colonial Senegalese Métis woman trader Anna Colas Pépin. Researchers argue that while the houseowner may have sold small numbers of slaves and kept a few domestic slaves, the actual point of departure was 300m away at a fort on the beach. The house has been restored since the 1970s.

Slave ship

Academic accounts, such as the 1969 statistical work of historian Philip D. Curtin, argue that exports from Goree began around 1670 and continued until about 1810, at no time more than 200 to 300 a year in important years and none at all in others. Curtin's 1969 accounting of slave trade statistics records that between 1711 and 1810 180,000 enslaved Africans were transported from the French posts in Senegambia, most being transported from Saint-Louis, Senegal and James Fort in modern Gambia.

Even those who argue Goree was never important in the slave trade view the island as an important memorial to a trade that was carried on in greater scale from ports in modern Ghana and Benin.


Visit the Page for the Woman's Museum on Goree Island

Visit page for other Senegal Destinations

Senegals New culture and tourism minister Youssou Ndour. What can he do to promote tourism?

Goree Island - Senegal

Goree Island

Goree Island 

Île de Gorée is one of the 19 communes d'arrondissement of the city of Dakar,Senegal. It is a 0.182 square kilometres (45 acres) island located 2 kilometres (1.1 nmi; 1.2 mi) at sea from the main harbor of Dakar. 

Goree Island

Its population as  of 2005 of was estimated at 1,056 inhabitants. Gorée is both the smallest and the least populated of the 19 communes d'arrondissement of Dakar.Gorée is famous as a destination for people interested in the Atlantic slave trade and the slaves that were processed or transported from there. The more important centers for the slave trade from Senegal were north, at Saint-Louis, Senegal, or to the south in the Gambia, at the mouths of major rivers for trade.

Goree Isand

Gorée is a small island 900 metres/3,000 feet in length and 350 metres/1,165 feet in width sheltered by the Cape Vert Peninsula. Now part of the city of Dakar, it was a minor port and site of European settlement along the coast. Being almost devoid of drinking water, the island was not settled before the arrival of Europeans. ThePortuguese were the first to establish a presence on Gorée ( circa 1450 CE/AD ), where they built a small stone chapel and used land as a cemetery.Gorée is known as the location of the House of Slaves, built by an Afro-French Métis family about 

House Of Slaves

1780–1784. The House of Slaves is one of the oldest houses on the island. It is now used as a tourist destination to show the horrors of the slave trade throughout the Atlantic world. Gorée was relatively unimportant in the slave trade. The claim that the "house of slaves" was a slave-shipping point was refuted in 1959 by Raymond Mauny, who shortly afterward was appointed the first professor of African history at the Sorbonne.

Catholic Church St. Charles Barrome

The island of Gorée was one of the first places in Africa to be settled by Europeans, as the Portuguese settled on the island in 1444. It was captured by the United Netherlands in 1588, then the Portuguese again, and again the Dutch. They named it after the Dutch island of Goeree, before the British took it over under Robert Holmesin 1664.After the French gained control in 1677, the island remained continuously French until 1960. There were brief periods of British occupation during the various wars fought by France and Britain. In 1960 Senegal was granted independence. The island was notably taken and occupied by the British between 1758 and 1763 following theCapture of Gorée and wider Capture of Senegal during the Seven Years War before being returned to France at the Treaty of Paris.

Statue Des Esclaves - Goree Island

Civic franchise for the citizens of Gorée was institutionalized in 1872, when it became a French “commune” with an elected mayor and a municipal council. Blaise Diagne, the first African deputy elected to the French National Assembly (served 1914 to 1934), was born on Gorée. From a peak of about 4,500 in 1845, the population fell to 1,500 in 1904. In 1940 Gorée was annexed to the municipality of Dakar.

Ferry Goree Isand

Gorée is connected to the mainland by regular 30-minute ferry service, for pedestrians only; there are no cars on the island. Senegal’s premier tourist site, the island was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978. It now serves mostly as a memorial to the slave trade. Many of the historic commercial and residential buildings have been turned into restaurants and hotels to support the tourist traffic.


Visit the Page for the Woman's Museum on Goree Island

Official site of the mayor of Gorée