Vital archives at Senegalese university destroyed in protests
Archives containing students, staff documents destroyed when building set ablaze
KIGALI, Rwanda
Vital archives containing thousands of students and staff documents were destroyed in a fire set by protestors last week at Senegal’s Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD) of Dakar, an academic official said Saturday.
Violent protests erupted in the national capital of Dakar and other towns after opposition leader Ousmane Sonko was sentenced to two years in prison on June 1.
The school turned into a battlefield where groups of youths pelted police with stones. Police responded by using tear gas.
A building that stored the archives was set on fire and several vehicles from the university were torched.
The archives are mainly student school records such as registration forms, photos, birth certificates and dissertations, potentially making it hard to authenticate degrees of the university alumni, Abdourakhmane Kounta, an archivist at the Faculty of Arts, told reporters.
Most affected were the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences.
Also destroyed were staff documents, lecturers, researchers and administrators, as well as archives of former students, he said.
Kounta believes student protestors deliberately burned the archives which spanned from 1957 - 2010.
The university’s rector, Ahmadou Aly Mbaye, deplored the destruction, noting that almost the entire university fleet was set on fire.
He “regretted” the attack on the university and said it is “the point of convergence of the Senegalese nation because everyone needs knowledge.”
The university staff, through their union, denounced the “acts of barbarism that deeply impacted the university.”
In several areas of the capital, groups of young people attacked public and private property, including banks and set up barricades on the streets during three days of fighting which left 16 dead and more than 350 injured.
Sonko, president of the PASTEF-Patriots party, was accused of rape and making death threats against Adji Sarr, an employee of a beauty salon in the capital in 2021.
But judges at the High Court in Dakar acquitted him of those charges but he was sentenced for “corrupting youth” on June 1.
The 48-year-old refused to accept the verdict and claims the trial was politically motivated to foil his presidential bid in 2024. He was third in the 2019 election against incumbent President Macky Sall.
