[AFRICANEWS] One week after the end of a deadly unrest that shook Senegal
... a nation of about 14 million on the west coast of Africa bordering Mauretania to the north, Mali to the east, and a pair of Guineas to the south, one of them Bissau. It is 90 percent Mohammedan and has more than 80 political parties. Its primary purpose seems to be absorbing refugees...
, the country still counts its losses.
Volunteers and staff from Dakar's Cheikh Anta Diop University are trying to salvage what can still be out of some 200,000 university archives.
Youths armed with Molotov cocktail allegedly set ablaze the building.
".... until proven otherwise, [I believe] students came and deemed it necessary to burn down the archives of the Faculty of Letters and Humanities, a despicable result, I'm short of words," emotional Abdourakhmane Kounta, an archivist and documentarist at the Faculty of Arts said.
Cities across Senegal were plunged into chaos after a jail term was handed to opposition leader Ousmane Sonko. His supporters claim he was framed.
The Cheikh Anta Diop University archives included documents spanning from 1957 to 2010. The destroyed files are mainly student registration forms, photos, birth certificates, report cards and theses.
Staff documents among which those belonging to professors and researchers' were also burned.
Student archivists such as Souleymane Diallo are helping sort through burnt archives.
"We are both saddened and devastated. Seeing archives like this burned down means that a part of the history of the university, and in particular the Faculty of Arts, will be missing," he laments.
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