Entangled lives: Land, property and guardianship in a changing Dakar

Dakar is replete with incomplete houses that are often viewed pejoratively to denote the supposed ‘failure’ of African cities. However, this perspective occludes analyses of the popular economies and socialities emanating from these same structures. This article explores the everyday lives of property guardians (known locally as gardiens ) living in the unfinished diaspora-built homes of Ouakam, Dakar (Senegal). Combining a critical historical analysis of post-colonial and post-socialist land and property arrangements in Ouakam with three ethnographic vignettes, the article unravels everyday articulations of property on the ground and develops the notion of entanglement to explore how property is produced, enacted, negotiated and re-arranged by gardiens . It shows that a propertied landscape characterised by opacity paradoxically enables gardiens to hold their place in the city and argues that entanglement illuminates different registers of agency, prompting us to re-imagine the politics and possibilities of life in the interstices of property.