Dakar

A city on the edge of the continent

Dakar sits on the Cap-Vert peninsula, the westernmost point of mainland Africa, and it is the capital and largest city of Senegal. The peninsula was settled by the Lebu, a fishing people, by the fifteenth century at the latest. The city that grew on their land went on to become the capital of French West Africa and then, in 1960, the capital of an independent Senegal.

In Wolof the name is Ndakaaru, which French rendered as Dakar. English speakers usually stress the second syllable — duh-KAR — which is closer to the French than to the Wolof.

Two explanations, neither of them settled

Nobody can tell you with certainty what Dakar means, and the honest version of this entry says so. The explanation you will meet most often is that the name comes from dakhar, the Wolof word for the tamarind tree, and from a Lebu village of that name on the coast just south of the modern city. Tamarind is a common source of place names in the region, which is what makes the story persuasive.

The other candidate is a phrase: deuk raw, sometimes written dekk-raw, glossed as "whoever settles here will be in peace", or analysed as dekk, "country", plus raw, "to escape". That is a meaning a city would very much like to have, and it deserves the suspicion that attracts.

Both explanations are recorded in reference works and neither has won. If you name a dog Dakar you are naming it after a place whose own name is an open question, which is either the best or the worst reason to choose it.

How a rally outlived its own destination

Dakar became a word that people who have never been to Senegal recognise, because of a race. The Dakar Rally was the idea of Thierry Sabine, and the first running left the Place du Trocadéro in Paris on 26 December 1978 with 182 vehicles on a route that ended in the Senegalese capital. For three decades the name meant the route.

That stopped being true. Security concerns in Mauritania led to the 2008 event being cancelled outright; from 2009 the rally moved to South America, and in 2020 it moved again, to Saudi Arabia. It has now run for longer without Dakar than it ever ran to it, and it still carries the name. So if you name a dog Dakar you are naming it after a desert race as much as after a city, which for a working or sporting breed is not nothing.

Dakar as a call sign

Two syllables, five letters, and a hard k in the middle: duh-KAR. That k is the useful part. A plosive inside a stressed syllable is the closest thing a name has to a click, and it cuts through wind in a way that a name built from vowels and fricatives cannot.

The name is a place name, which puts it in a particular category. It will be read as a travelling name, alongside Alaska, Kenya and Cairo, and it sets an expectation of a dog that goes somewhere. It also means you will be asked where it comes from constantly, by people who will then want to talk to you about the rally.

See also: Kenya · Cairo · Zanzibar · Savannah · Nile

Common questions