Crossing to shifting ground

The present reinforced-concrete crossing connects Saint-Louis Island with Langue de Barbarie, a sandy spit between the Senegal River and the Atlantic Ocean. The small river channel runs beneath it, and Guet Ndar begins on the other bank. Before the present structure, this same route ran over a wooden deck and then across a metal bridge; thousands of people were already using it in its first days. The name Mustapha Malick Gaye became attached to the bridge in honor of the city mayor.

The authorization from Paris for this crossing arrived as a refusal. The document reached Saint-Louis when the bridge was already complete.

In eighteen fifty-six, Governor and military engineer Louis Faidherbe was seeking a permanent route from the island to Guet Ndar. On the sandy strip of Langue de Barbarie lived fishermen who supported their families through sea fishing and supplied Saint-Louis with fish. Officials in Paris decided that a bridge was unnecessary: the village already had plenty of pirogues suitable for crossing.

Faidherbe did not wait for a reply. He gave the engineering service about twenty thousand available francs. The builders drove piles made from ronier palm trunks into the bed of the small channel and, in three months, laid a wooden deck more than one hundred fifty meters long. When the refusal finally arrived from France, they did not dismantle the completed crossing.

People quickly showed why it was needed. Five days after it opened, about five thousand people a day were crossing the bridge. In eighteen sixty-three, the market was moved from the square in front of the governor's palace to the western end of the crossing. The road north, the fishing district of Guet Ndar, and the route to the island met there; the former vacant lot between the neighborhoods became one of Saint-Louis's main trading hubs.

The wooden bridge stood until the end of the nineteenth century. It was replaced by a metal bridge and, in nineteen seventy-five, by the present reinforced-concrete one. It bears the name Mustapha Malick Gaye. This is the name of a mayor, not an engineer: the first bridge had already existed for seventy-two years when Gaye, after a struggle for control of the city council, became head of Saint-Louis. He remained mayor from nineteen twenty-eight to nineteen thirty-five; the new concrete crossing was named in his honor.

At the opposite end, the bridge meets Langue de Barbarie, a sand spit between the Senegal River and the Atlantic Ocean. Ocean currents carry sand along the shore, while the river alters the spit's inner edge. Measurements taken precisely along the line of this crossing showed that from eighteen fifty-six to nineteen twenty-six, the Atlantic shore retreated by about one hundred twenty-five meters.

Not a single ronier palm pile remains from the bridge completed before the refusal was received. The crossing point remains: from the island to Guet Ndar, onto the sandy strip whose ocean edge shifted over seventy years by more than the length of the present bridge.