The Senegalese Autoroute A2, a highway financed by the Chinese government and completed in 2018, links Dakar’s Blaise Diagne International Airport on the coast with the holy city of Touba, some 180 kilometers eastward. Extending toward the horizon, the flat landscape along the route is dotted with cultivated patches of land floating in expansive plains, where animal herds graze between isolated baobab and acacia trees. Once a year, Autoroute A2 swells with droves of pilgrims headed to the Grand Magal, a celebration honoring Amadou Bamba, founder of a Sufi Islamic order known as the Mouride brotherhood. The festival, occurring every year on the 18th and19th days of the Islamic month of Safar, inundates Touba with up to four million pilgrims, almost quadrupling its population.
