A siege of herons flies unperturbed above the futuristic curvature of an oddly solitary white concrete building in Mbodiène, a coastal village in Senegal. In theory it will become the “welcome centre” of Akon City, a $6bn (£4.7bn) metropolis inspired by Wakanda, the fictional African country from the Black Panther films.
The plans were first unveiled five years ago by the US-Senegalese R&B singer Akon, and the first phase of construction was supposed to be completed by the end of 2023, but the project has been riddled with delays and controversy.
Since childhood, Jean Charles Édouard Sarr, a 55-year-old maintenance engineer and self-confessed cryptocurrency aficionado, has visited his ancestral village of Mbodiène, where his mother is buried.
As a graduate, Sarr left Senegal to establish his career in France, where he lived for five years. Unlike many, he chose to return to Senegal, where he relocated near Dakar. When Akon City was introduced to the world in 2018, Sarr became enraptured by the plans, which carried a promise of economic resurrection and self-sufficiency for Mbodiène’s residents.
“If the youth have the opportunity to have a good university, they will have more chances to find a job here,” he says. “As an African, if you have a nice life, the beach, a good job and healthcare, what else do you need? Why would you go looking for it in Europe?”
For Mbodiène’s 70-year-old village chief, Michel Diome, who has met Akon several times, the project could be a goldmine for the local economy, which has been damaged by a decline in the fishing industry.
“Every village chief would desire a project like this, because we are expecting jobs for men, women and the youth in Mbodiène,” says Diome, who gave Akon his blessing for the project.
Akon has said in the past that his eponymous city would not only provide employment, but would also be a sanctuary for African-Americans seeking to reconnect with their African roots.
The country has already become a pilgrimage destination for the African diaspora, who take the short ferry ride from Dakar to the island of Gorée, the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast from the 15th to the 19th century.
“I wanted to build a city or a project like this that will give them the motivation to know that there is a home back home,” the singer said at a press conference in 2020.
Much of the international response has been centred on the city’s Afrofuturistic aesthetic, and Akon’s stated plan for its economy to run primarily on his Akoin cryptocurrency. There has also been a great deal of scepticism as to whether it will ever come to pass, fuelled by a lack of detail around the plans.
In 2021, Devyne Stephens, a music executive and Akon’s former business partner, brought a $4m lawsuit against the singer, claiming that he still owed him money from a 2018 settlement agreement.
In March 2022, Stephens asked a judge to freeze Akon’s New York assets, claiming that without the measure Akon would have difficulty repaying an alleged debt. Stephens’s lawyer, Jeffrey Movit, alleged in his affidavit that Akon City and Akoin exhibited “many of the trademark characteristics … of fraudulent business ventures such as Ponzi schemes and pyramid schemes”. Akon City was “likely a scam”, Movit alleged.
Akon denied the allegations about Akon City. The following month, he paid $850,000 to settle part of the ongoing lawsuit. He said the motion to freeze his accounts had been made “out of spite” to damage his reputation.
Stephens, Movit, and Akon’s representative did not respond to requests for comment. In December 2022, Akon said the Covid pandemic was to blame for the delays and that plans were “100,000% moving”. In a podcast interview in September he said he was working on a 10-year timetable to complete the project.
State support for the project, once zealous, has also recently soured.
The scheme initially had backing from Senegal’s outgoing president, Macky Sall, and the Society for the Development and Promotion of Coasts and Tourist Zones (Sapco), which loaned the singer $2m for the project.
According to local media, Sapco has sent Akon a formal notice that if the project has not advanced by next year, its contract with him will be terminated.
Akon City has also been embroiled in land rights issues.
Extolled for its pristine beaches and surfing spots, the land near Mbodiène earmarked for Akon City was ceded to the Senegalese state in 2009 for future tourism development by Sapco.
The first phase of Akon City was supposed to be built on 55 hectares of land secured by Sapco – eventually expanding onto a further 500 hectares by the end of the decade. That land belonged to several hundred people who were owed compensation from the Senegalese government.
More than a decade later, some residents have yet to be compensated, according to Diome. “My problem concerning the land is not with Akon,” he says. “My problem is concerning Sapco, because it is them who took the land from the villagers.”
Sapco did not respond to the Guardian’s request for a comment.
Apart from the Welcome Centre, the only other tangible sign of construction work is a recently-built youth centre, financed by Akon as part of a contract in which Mbodiène’s residents stipulated conditions the singer had to fulfil before being given the village’s blessing to build the city.
As teenagers play basketball on the court next to the centre, Diome shared a photo depicting him with Akon, and spoke highly of his own interactions with the singer. “I judge people according to the way they are with me,” he says. “In Akon’s case, all that he has said he would do, he has done.”
• This article was amended on 4 December 2023. In an earlier version, Michel Diome’s age was incorrectly given as 53, rather than 70; and the locator map was corrected to show Mali as the country to the east of Senegal, not Burkina Faso.
