Undergrads and faculty share immersive experiences from the Dakar: African Civilizations program

This story is part of Dispatches from Abroad, a series highlighting UChicago community members who are researching, studying and working around the world.

Her first weekend in Dakar, thousands of miles from Chicago and her hometown of New York City, third-year student Talia Crichlow smelled something familiar while walking down the street.
After a moment, she realized the aroma was coming from women roasting peanuts in sugar—a streetside snack sold both on the streets of Senegal’s bustling capital and in New York. This experience was the first of many that Crichlow said made the city feel like a home away from home during her time in the “Dakar: African Civilizations” Study Abroad program in Senegal.

“I thought it was going to be more of a disparate experience to my life back home,” she explained. “But there are so many things that are so familiar.”

The Dakar Civilizations sequence was started in 2018 by Prof. Emily Osborn, a historian of Africa, and Prof. Francois Richard, an archaeologist in the Department of Anthropology. The program in Senegal, for which Osborn currently serves as the faculty director, is joined by two others on the continent, in Morocco and Egypt, but remains the first and only University of Chicago Study Abroad program in Francophone West Africa.

Senegal Abroad Group Photo

Over the course of nine weeks in Dakar, students live with Senegalese families in homestays and take classes with UChicago professors at the West African Research Center (WARC), a nonprofit education organization. Along with classes, students go on excursions and have opportunities to explore the city on their own, visiting museums, cultural sites and markets. Their classroom study of urban Dakar is further deepened by their daily routines: walking through city streets, meeting people in their neighborhoods and joining the activities of their homestay family.

Longer outings to other regions and cities further extend student perspectives. The student cohort and professors take weekend trips to places such as the former colonial capital Saint-Louis, the picturesque river delta Sine-Saloum and Gorée Island, a UNESCO World Heritage site and a historic hub of the transatlantic slave trade. Recent cohorts have also spent time in the interior border town of Karang, where students break into groups based on interest and visit local institutions, such as schools and healthcare centers.

Coursework built for immersion

The curriculum is divided into separate courses that focus on different elements of Senegalese and West African civilization, history and culture, while staying grounded in the sights and experiences of present-day Dakar.

“The whole sequence is premised on this idea of lowering the walls between the classroom and the city,” Osborn said. “We invite students to think critically about what they're learning about in their daily lives and bring it into the classroom, and visa versa.”

This year, the students took four courses. These spanned three weeks with Osborn, two weeks with linguist Prof. Salikoko Mufwene, three weeks on Francophone literature with Prof. Nikhita Obeegadoo and a one-week course on the history of slavery with Prof. Mamamrame Seck of University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar.

Senegal

Osborn noted that students read and discuss scholarly and primary source texts, and also complete written assignments and mini-research projects. But the wider setting offers opportunities for further enrichment.

“For example, we carry out readings on religion, focusing especially on the history of Islam in Senegal, which is the faith of the vast majority of the country," Osborn said. "Students learn from those texts, but then they also can consider how those insights relate to the faith practices and culture of their homestay family, to sites of worship in their neighborhood, as well as to the religious iconography that abounds in the city at large.”

As the program has grown and developed, Osborn has increasingly interwoven the curriculum and classroom learning with real-world experiences. She said the immersive aspect of the program is critical for learning—even for her, eight years into leading it.

“I've become much more explicit and much more open about really encouraging students to learn by doing," she said. "The stuff of daily life—conversations, observations, experiences—offer all sorts of opportunities for rigorous thinking and serious reflection, just as we expect in our standard classroom,” said Osborn, who herself studied abroad in Dakar as an undergraduate student.

She added that the program is still teaching her new ways to approach her work—lessons she's brought back to her teaching in Chicago.

‘Survival Wolof’ and other lessons

For fourth-year data science and economics student Dayo Oladitan, traveling to Dakar as a part of study abroad was a means to connect to his own cultural heritage. Having parents who immigrated to the United States from Nigeria, Oladitan was excited to visit West Africa.

Oladitan

“It gave me an opportunity to see a life different from mine and connect to Africa in a way that I've never been able to before,” he said. “And it gave me the insight to know that there are more opportunities to come to Africa in the future.”

While in Dakar, students face challenges and adjust to new cultural expectations, all while managing their studies. Crichlow, who is studying history and education in the College, had no prior experience with French or Wolof, Senegal’s lingua franca. So, although she took the program's "Survival Wolof" course, there was still a constant need to figure out how to move through the world, both at home and out in the city.

“There are points of difficulty and fatigue,” she explained. “It is tiring to exist in a language that you don't know all the time, but it’s balanced out well by being in a cohort of fellow UChicago students everyday so that you can learn and grow more when you’re at your homestay.”

Oladitan, who spent this winter in Dakar, emphasized the initial barrier that language posed with his host family and in markets, where urban Wolof—which blends standard Wolof with French and Arabic—is spoken most frequently and where many people do not know English.

However, language was also a unifying force in Oladitan’s study abroad experience. This past quarter, a few members of the cohort connected with a WARC program assistant and English professor at the Institut UniPro Senegal, a private university in Dakar. The professor invited students to join his class for a day to engage with students there who were learning English.

“It was nice just to break the barrier for them around the English language, and to show them that it's not this whole foreign, mysterious language that only certain people have access to,” he explained. “I feel like that's one of the most positive experiences I've had where my American identity has been used for something very good.”

As her program neared completion, Crichlow reflected on the ways in which the program impacted her trajectory at UChicago and beyond. As a third-year student, much of her near future is planned, whether it be the courses she has left to take or the internship she will work this summer. But her time in Dakar has been a well-placed variation from her routine.

“I've learned a lot about being more flexible and more open, just approaching the world with a greater curiosity,” she said. “You can still accomplish your goals, but you could do them in a radically different way than you'd expect.”

The program’s impacts after College

Samantha Taylor, AB’25, decided to study abroad in Dakar during her third year in the College because it was off the “well-worn path” and offered her the unique opportunity to travel somewhere she may not have ever gone on her own.

Taylor

“I thought, if I want to study abroad, and I want to grow and learn from it, I want to be the most out of my comfort zone that I possibly can be, and that's why I chose Dakar,” she said.

Taylor continues to carry these lessons with her as a part of a global scholarship program at Stanford Law School, where she is attending as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. She even wrote about her experience in Dakar in her graduate school applications, citing it as a transformative and eye-opening experience that shaped both her time at UChicago and her understanding of the world.

Given the small size of the Dakar Civilizations cohorts, students often form deep friendships with students whom they may not have met on campus due to being in different years or having different majors. Two years after her program, Taylor still regularly talks to Osborn and the friends that she made abroad.

“It's one of those experiences that has given me long-term friendships because of how challenging it was and how much we all had to grow together because of it,” Taylor said. “There were obstacles, but that's exactly what makes it worthwhile if you're looking for community growth.”