ACADEMIA Letters The variation of nocturnal centralities in Dakar, Senegal: The case of informal trade at the edge of roundabouts François Singue Diouf, Doctorant, E.D. Etudes sur l’Homme et la Société (ETHOS), Universite Cheikh Anta Diop De Dakar (UCAD) Meisssa Birima Fall, Institut Fondamental d’Afrique noire Cheikh Anta Diop Introduction Centrality describes the action of a central element on its periphery (Choay and Merlin, 1988). Thus, it refers to the attributes of the centre, in other words to its content. This is what Bor- dreuil J.S. (1987) seems to understand when he says of centrality: “from the centre to the centrality, the gap is that which opposes the place to the function”. From these meanings, which make centrality an attribute of the centre, we can understand that there is not one cen- trality but many centralities. Thus, each era, each period, each mode of production brings about (or produces) its own centrality : a political, commercial, religious or leisure centre. In the case of Dakar, thinking on centrality means questioning “diferent scales of time and space” (Diop, 2007). Better still, today’s Dakar is characterised by diferent centralities, especially at night, the study of which motivates this research, that aims to understand the way in which commerce is deployed in the Dakar night space. Night-time trade in Dakar leaves traditional environments such as markets and shopping centres behind and takes over spaces whose primary function is not commercial. Indeed, the roundabouts are characterised at night by an efervescence resulting from the massive presence of small traders. Academia Letters, December 2021 Corresponding Author: François Singue Diouf, singdiouf@gmail.com Citation: Diouf, F.S., Fall, M.B. (2021). The variation of nocturnal centralities in Dakar, Senegal: The case of informal trade at the edge of roundabouts. Academia Letters, Article 4189. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4189. 1 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0