As is often the case with urban master plans, this ambitious undertaking never received a big enough budget to realize all its objectives. However, the French did spend enough money to make the port one of the leading cities in Africa, and the spatial model they imposed still shapes contemporary Dakar.
Other changes in French colonial policy promoted Dakar’s growth as well. In 1946 France established FIDES (Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Économique et Social), supposedly to develop their African colonies rather than exploit them.18 Between 1946 and 1956, 64 percent of FIDES’ budget went to infrastructural improvements in France’s African colonies, especially transportation.19 These improvements made the movement of goods to and from Africa more efficient, reducing costs and encouraging investment. The French also worked to improve urban housing for Africans, although their efforts fell far short of meeting local demand. At the end of World War II they founded SICAP (Société Immobilière du Cap Vert) to provide housing for both Dakar’s growing middle class and its large working-class population. In its first year of operation, it built 150 houses and 4 cités ouvrières.20
During this same postwar period, French business interests found Dakar and Senegal increasingly attractive areas for investment. French capital came in two waves. Between 1946 and 1949 francs flowed into Dakar from France because investors in the metropole feared a communist takeover of the French government. Two years later, in 1951, as the French commercially disengaged themselves from Indochina, there was another significant flow of capital into Senegal, which the French business class regarded as more politically stable. Initially, French investment in Dakar provided funds for the enlargement of already existing manufacturing concerns and the establishment of new ones, a change in strategy from the 1930s, when the French had been more likely to invest in trade in agricultural commodities. By the mid-1950s French merchants and bankers were especially drawn to projects that made more consumer goods like radios, phonographs, textiles, and soft drinks available to Africans at lower prices. While Dakar never became an industrial powerhouse like Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, its industrial zones in the late colonial period were bustling with a number of beverage and textile concerns.21 It is not clear how many new wage jobs were added in the immediate postwar period, but given that gainful employment has always been scarce in Senegambia, the creation of these manufacturing jobs had a marked impact on Dakar’s hinterland and beyond. Hopeful job seekers from all regions of Senegal flocked to the city in search of work in the 1940s, forming a multiethnic labor force.22 The fact that most of these migrants were disappointed did not reverse the flow. Even if they were frustrated in their search for work, the migrants felt that ultimately there were more opportunities for them in Dakar than elsewhere in Senegal.
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