A bustling colonial Friday — crowds in flowing white boubous, turbans, and European dress fill the sunlit plaza before Dakar's grand Hôtel de Ville, its French Second-Empire limestone façade and clock tower presiding over the animated street scene of French West Africa's most cosmopolitan city. Published under the prestigious "Collection Générale Fortier, Dakar" imprint, this is a textbook example of the work of Edmond Fortier, the most important photographer and postcard publisher operating in French West Africa in the early twentieth century; his numbered series documenting Senegalese life, architecture, and society are avidly collected worldwide. The wide-angle street view captures a newsstand plastered with posters at the iron fence, a European in a pith helmet, and dozens of Senegalese residents in daily dress — an irreplaceable social document of Dakar circa 1905–1910. The Hôtel de Ville shown was completed around 1914, suggesting this card may date to the early 1910s.