“Don’t call me at this time, I’m not looking for anyone close to me,” replied Yacine, irritated, to a caller with an unknown number, one evening in February 2022. On the line, Ibrahima Seck, member of the Facebook group “Found or Lost”, with a photo of an elderly person wandering in a street in Keur Massar, in the suburbs of Dakar, and valuable information provided by an Internet user. A few days later, the stupor having passed, Yacine found her mother, mentally disturbed, whom she had nevertheless “mourned” since 2017. Her family believed they had lost her forever.
This reunion would not have taken place if Moustapha Sané had not lost his identity card in 2018. With no alternative to find it, he created a Facebook page to facilitate mutual aid between users of the social network. The private group created in the process has since exceeded its original vocation. From now on, images of children or elderly people sought by their loved ones or found by members flood the group’s feed, which today has more than 100,000 active members and 173,000 subscribers contacted in case of emergency.
The notoriety of this network, now essential on the Senegalese Web, has been built over the years by the frequency of happy endings of wanted notices sometimes launched with texts imbued with despair. A success which is reflected in the number of requests received. The volunteers organize themselves as best they can. “We receive requests 24 hours a day,” says Abdourahmane Dème, one of the group’s seven administrators. For Aicha Rassoul, 28, it only took a day to find a father “lost sight of since [his] birth”.
The wanted posters (around 2,000 in 2023) concern missing relatives, unidentified deceased people, but also lost animals, stolen means of transport and even identity documents. Each request is carefully examined to find leads, with the greatest discretion for “complicated” family situations, explains Abdourahmane Dème. The restricted circle of administrators sometimes ends up holding meetings on “very sensitive cases” to decide whether or not to publish a search notice.
Imprisoned migrants
Made up of different commissions, the group has an administrative secretariat, a social commission and even a field team, which collaborates in particular with the firefighters in cases of reporting of mentally ill people. “We are called for people who are in poor health because the firefighters do not have the time to accompany them, especially since we sometimes have to spend the night and pay for prescriptions,” explains Ibrahima Seck, member of the team. ground.
In Bène Tally, a working-class neighborhood of Dakar, Ndeye Penda, a young girl just released from internment in a psychiatric hospital, stares haggardly at the familiar face of Ibrahima Seck, who has come to visit her. “Many times,” she replies, in a moment of lucidity, when he asks her how many times he brought her back to her parents. Her aunt hopes not to have to resort to the Facebook group for a fifth disappearance.
Other wanted notices have recently appeared in the group: they concern candidates for emigration who left without warning or who did not give news to their loved ones while in recent weeks, hundreds of Senegalese have landed on the Spanish Canary Islands aboard canoes, reminiscent of the deadly departure waves of the mid-2000s.
The migration hypothesis became a question systematically asked by administrators upon receipt of a search notice for young men with no mental history. “We sometimes manage to have information on people imprisoned” in transit countries, confides Abdourahmane Dème.