Families across frontiers The city of Touba sprawls into the arid scrublands of central Senegal, each year a labyrinth of new concrete walls and half-built houses subsuming outlying villages of thatch and mud.
With barely 5,000 inhabitants, Touba was a village itself at independence from France in 1960. Today, after three decades expanding at 15 per cent a year or more, it is Senegal’s second largest city, the centre of a global network of street traders, merchants and wage labourers, with a population closer to a million.
