According to a 2020 research (data from the World Bank and the National Institute of Statistics and Demographics *) there are 25,000 taxis roaming the streets of Dakar every day, for roughly 400,000 travelers (in an almost 4,000,000 people city).
Taxis are easy to spot (they are yellow or black and yellow) and they are, according to that research, cars that average 23-year each, they make up 11% of the public transportation market ad account for 43% of the public transports expenses.
Taxis in Dakar are everywhere, at any point of the day or the night you can wave your hand and stop one. Prices may dramatically vary, based on distance, traffic jams/peak hours and, of course, on the bargaining skills of the user.
Generally speaking, taxis are expensive in Dakar, less expensive than in Europe or the US, of course, but still running a few errands around town can easily cost 20€ (roughly 10% of the average pay per month).
The state of the cabs is frequently precarious, it can often happen that the car breaks down while running, one in two taxis have doors that hardly function or the window that doesn’t roll down (which can be tricky when the exhaust pipe works funky and mostly indoors…).
No matter how old the car, it is always clean and shiny because, in this country sitting on the verge of the Sahara desert, dust settles in a matter of seconds, and one of the most common jobs is car-washer. At any widening of the road or open space you will see a bunch of young men washing cars for 2€ and taxis make up to 70% of the cars getting washed, at any given time.
Despite the questionable state of the cars, and knowing that 250 new cabs were registered in 2019, the cab remains the public transportation mean more reliable and efficient.
Senegalese taxi drivers pretty much only listen to two things, when it comes to radio:
1 – the press review from the angriest man in the country (he only speaks wolof, so I can’t really understand him but to me he’s the poster voice of “outraged”)
2- chants, religious dirges with scream pitches (it’s important to notice that Muslims can’t really sing the praises of the Lord and its Prophet, as it is considered a bit too mundane).
There are, in fact, only two exceptions that justify an alternative radio programming: soccer games and Senegalese Wrestling (Lutte Sénégalaise) matches.
Lutte is the national sport, it is a kind of wrestling, only it comes also with a complex apparatus of mystics that overlaps with the sheer sport performance. (Note to self: need to work on a post about Lutte).
Besides official cabs, there are the clandò (pron. klan-doh): private cars so old that they make 23-year old taxis look like next-generation sedan cars. They accommodate up to four passengers and take standard routes, just like a bus only they stop every time a passenger needs to get out (that is every 30 meters, regardless of where on the road).
Fun fact: clando’s are most of the times riddled with holes that make you think they were in a gang street fight. My husband says it can’t be that but hasn’t come up with any other reasonable explication.
I never dared to inquire with a clandò driver, among other reasons because I never saw one smiling or even just being moderately friendly. Those wholes remain a mystery.
In town, clando’s are used for short trips within the same neighborhood; or for longer commutes by people living in the outskirts of town, coming in for work.
As a tourist it is absolutely not dangerous to take a clando, it’s just not very common. I definitely urge you not to miss your chance to experience a slice of Senegalese life, if you find yourself in Dakar.
Taxi drivers make very little money, for the most part they don’t own the car they drive and they rent one every day. They spend 12+ hours in evil traffic, it is not rare for them to have to fix their car that just broke down ( I think that 23 taxi years is roughly 160 in human years). They have no social security, no sick days, no health insurance.
And clando’s driver are even worse off.
Over the years, I took many cabs in Dakar, and I had some pretty awesome conversations with taxi drivers who only spoke wolof (a language that after almost 10 years I still know very very little).
I killed time in traffic jams letting drivers lecture me about the absurdity of polyandry (a topic I like bringing up whenever given the chance, because sometimes, well… I am an a**hole).
Once I asked a taxi driver why there are virtually no women have his job (I never once met one) and his answer was “it’s a dangerous job”.
This thing of driving a cab being a dangerous job is evidently linked to the fact of sharing very limited space with strangers 10+ times a day.
Nowadays my taxi rides are few and far between, but my mind goes back to that cab driver each time I hail a cab, and I see that the driver is an old man, thin and bony, with his boubou and the fez on his head (all old taxi drivers are always impeccably elegant), only a few teeth in his large empty smile.
I think that he should be home with his twenty grand-children eating rice and enjoying attaya (Senegalese tea).
Instead, every day he pays someone to use their cab (if he had one, he would have someone else drive it for him) to be able to work a dangerous job and feed his twenty grand-children.
* Data source here