So it’s up to the people to reclaim or indeed reinvent the public space, argues Sané. “Let’s get rid of our fatalism and meet the challenge to make our cities and our land clean. Set settal!” This last phrase is a powerful rallying cry in Wolof, the language most widely spoken in Dakar. It means “to render something clean.” The slogan was used by citizens in the 1990s to reclaim the public space the state had abandoned when it privatized garbage collection. One could see it as a step forward that it is now being used to call for such garbage not to be produced in the first place.