Looking toward leaving

My time here is quickly wrapping up, just as the Dak'art Biennal of contemporary African art is opening here. Duma is interning with them, which means that I have an in to all of the opening events, and may be able to crash the big gala on Wednesday, right after my program's farewell dinner.

I'm thinking daily about what I've accomplished here, and what I've learned, split between excitement to be home and inability to comprehend the fact of being gone. I will be departing from Senghor airport at 2:45am the morning of May 24th, arriving JFK at 7:10 the same morning, then transfering to LGA to fly to Toronto that afternoon. Will arrive in Edmonton after a short stay in the land of the CN tower on May 29th.

Am trying to eat up every last second of being here, so this may be my last posting before arriving on the other side of the ocean.

Dahira El Hajj Abdoulaye Sow Gamou 2006

Last saturday morning, Duma and I departed with our older sister Fama (early thirties, secretary to the Minister of Urbanism), Doudou (older brother who wanted to convert me to Islam, also early thirties, about to be married to some poor cousin who will have to deal with how spoiled he is for the rest of her life) and a family friend to Dagana, a mid-sized town along the Senegal river, half way between Saint-Louis and Matam, just across from Mauritania. We travelled in a government-owned quatre-quatre (4x4), with driver, on gas paid for with government vouchers. In other words, Fama hooked us up.

Let me pause a moment to describe how Fama is really all that. She is a queen of San-sai, the practise of dressing up, that is part of the very aristocratic habit of la femme sénégalaise, or rather the urban woman, possibly really no more than la Dakaroise that one learns early: eg. Our little cousin Ndeye Fatou, aged three, gets her hair breaded with a weave every three weeks, always wears earrings, is dressed up every morning and lathered with lavender water to make sure that she is appropriately dressed for nursery school. As I was saying, Fama is a queen at this. Never have I seen her when she didn’t have a bag to match her shoes, which match her outfit, so that if the dress is gold, so is everything, if the dress is coral, the same principle follows. Her sunglasses are Dior, her hair is delicately twisted so that it looks and behaves like straight toubab hair, her nails are french manicured, and she travels in style.

The journey was to celebrate the life of El Hajj Abdoulaye Sow, our host mom’s grandfather who was the marabout to Abdoul Aziz Sy, founder of the holy city of Tivaouane, whose lineage now call themselves the khalifs générals of the Tijannia sufi order. As the story goes, the father of Abdoul Aziz heard that there was a wise man in Gayé who could teach him the Koran, and became the disciple of Abdoulaye Sow. Before he departed, he fell in love with Abdoulaye Sow’s younger sister and the two were married. Not long after the marriage, Sy left Gayé and told Abdoulaye Sow that when his child would be born, he should carry his marabout’s name, and so it came about that the child was named Abdoul Aziz Sy.

What this means for the lay person is that the Tijani order in Senegal owes great respect to the family who are the marabouts to the khalif général (ie. The spiritual leaders of the spritual leaders). Essentially, I live in a family that is like an obscure religious royla family. These facts are largely forgotten, however, especially as some of the Sow lineage have come to bow themselves down to Tivaouane, to the fury of Fama and my mother. During the celebration, which is an all night affair, the singing of histories and praises were coopted by the Tivaouane camp, prompting my family to leave early.

When I was told that the gamou was an all-night singing of prayers, I don’t know why, but I imagined a tchourai-incense-filled mosque, dark and contemplative, and was surprised that I would be allowed to go. How wrong I was - the event took place under a concrete arcade outside the mosque, bathed in white, green, blue and red neon lights, with flashing Christmas lights strung between the pillars, and foldable chinese-lantern-style, shiny new years decorations hanging from the roof. We sat in the front row (!!!) of the women’s side, where everyone was dressed to the nines in fancy boubous (in yellow, hot pink and royal blue, and especially white and gold), foulards masterfully tied on their heads, matching shoes and bags compulsory, and of course big bling gold earrings and bracelets, minimum three per arm. Most of the young men joined into the group of singers in front of us, chanting “la illaha illalaaa, la illaha illalaa” for hours, at times reaching high points of energy when even the demure dames waved their arms and snapped their fingers alongside. The event started at half-past midnight and we left at around four when it was in full swing.

Wassadou-Dialacoto and Touba

Reading over my blog a bit, I find it funny that I talk very little about what I do most, but classes being as they are, I don’t get excited enough to talk much of them.

Two weekends ago now, for the Easter long weekend (yes, it’s a holiday despite the fact that less than 5% of the country is Christian), my environment and development professor took us to the region where he did his masters research, in Senegal Oriental, near the Parc national de Niokolokoba. We stayed at a surprisingly gorgeous campement (I suspect that it was the only place that could fit 25 students in the area, and only for that did we get the royal treatment).

We went to document the degradation of protected forests by bush fires, illegal farming, migratory herders and honey-gatherers, as well as to talk to the local residents about the challenges they face with agriculture given an ever-increasingly dense population and greater dependence on natural resources.

There being no monitoring in the protected forests, and with local residents having the impression that the forest is the property of the state in Dakar, and not their own, there is a lot of abuse of the land. We saw fields cleared for growing cotton in areas that were meant to be protected. We saw the remnants of honey collection from the hollow of a tree that was chopped up badly enough to be killed by the next season’s bush fires. We also saw more than one tree killed for marketable wood, but not yet removed from the forest.

In Senegal the government has begun a program of “community forests” where the government will sign over an area to the local community under a contract with usage regulations, developed in consultation with the village and enforced by them. The forest is then signed over to the control of the local direction committee. I was skeptical that giving this type of communal ownership would be sufficient to overcome the abuse of the forests, especially because there are many users of the forest who are foreign to the direction committee, but in our discussions with village chiefs and local members of the “friends of nature” society, it really does seem that the authority of the local committee is respected, even by migrant herders.

We also visited a sharecropping banana plantation, right on the banks of the Gambia River. The plantation is owned by a private individual, and the farmers, of which there were 528 receive 40% of the selling price of what they grow every six months, from which is deducted any credit given for food. The local residents were happy with the plantation nonetheless, because the money it brought in was much better than what traditional agriculture affords them. However they did mention that they were trying to get together enough credit to try to purchase land to develop themselves, but that the bank would only finance 50% of the project, and they were not willing to sell their entire cattle herds to risk on the project. The current plantation was bought with a loan from the government and was subsidized during three years of flooding with lower interest payments and food aid to the workers, making me think that the owner must be very well connected with a few ministers in Dakar. The village would certainly not be able to swing getting their risks absorbed by the state.

This Saturday, we also visited Touba, the birthplace of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, founder of the Mouride Sufi brotherhood. The Mourides have the largest following of all the brotherhoods in Senegal and a very recent history. Bamba founded the brotherhood around the idea that physical labour could help spiritual growth (very Gandhi-ji!), though cynics say that this ideology was nothing more than his way of making a killing through peanut farming and commerce with proto-colonialists. The currently popular historical reading is that Bamba was not only a religious leader but also a fighter against colonialism, an interpretation backed up by his exile to Gabon, his return from which is celebrated by a huge pilgrimage.

The mosque itself was begun after C.A.B.’s death in 1927 by his eldest son who became the first Khalif of a legacy that today rests under Cheikh Mbacke, Bamba’s fifth son. It’s really not like any mosque I’ve ever seen, with big purple domes, which their guide said was a colour chosen only for its beauty, and a huge minaret that was built with an elevator. It is the biggest mosque in West Africa, excluding Morocco.

We had the opportunity to visit one of the great granddaughters of Bamba and to talk to her about her position as a woman in this dynasty. She starting learning the Koran at the age of 7 at the Koranic School, and now is the teacher to many talibés, children and adults included. Her first and strongest comment was that in Islam, women can do anything men can do and more, an assertion she said was based in the Koran. Regarding polygamy she gave a very typical answer that there are more women than men in the world and that polygamy is therefore important so that no women get left without husbands.

Sine-Saloum and Saresonia

It’s now two Saturdays ago that I sat with a sleeping child in my arms inside an arena formed of sewn-together rice bags in front of a village mosque, watching young men in bright pink hot-pants wrestling à la sénégalaise. The lutteurs made tours of the arena to the sounds of jembe playing and singing mothers picking up bits of the sand said to contain the essence of their ancestors and mixing them with water to wash themselves and to drink. Had the feeling that the event was the sort of thing that a girl of my age should have used as a means of distinguishing the pecking order for husbands.
This episode was from an exchange program organised weekend get-away to an island in the Sine-Saloum river estuary, home to pretty pelicans and supposedly also to baricudas.

This holiday was cleverly designed to ensure we were all at maximum strength for our departure to our village stays Monday morning. As planned, I departed with Duma and three other exchange students at 7am on our way to Kolda via Tambacounda (the faster road through The Gambia we were told not to take because the Gambian president accused Senegal of being behind the recent coup d’etat attempt, causing some hassles on the border and the withdrawal of the Senegalese ambassador). The journey itslef was eventful – we tore our tire in the middle of nowhere, where the hot sun beat down on us as I guiltily looked on at our driver replacing the tire by himself, and thinking one the one hand that I should learn to do useful things like that, and on the other hand that this was not the time to learn. We also overheated a few times, had to push the car, and when we seemed finally to be getting on our way, hit a goat crossing the road.

I arrived at my village stay of Saresonia around 11pm, to a crowd of children, clapping and singing, excited at the prospect of a guest, and the peace corps volunteer hosting me, Allison Arnold a.k.a. Kajjatou Teli Balde. Saresonia is a village of approximately 200 people, 15 compounds or 18 households, depending on how you’d like to look at it. There are two wells in the village, one near the compound of the chef du village (with whom I was staying), and a new one financed by the peace corps near a not-as-yet well accepted fenced in community garden. There is no electricity, one shopkeeper, and the nearest telephone is 2km down the road in the bigger village of Bagadadji.

The livelihood of the village surrounds a few cash crops and subsisdence agriculture. Rice is grown exclusively by the women of the village in a wetland area not a kilometer from our compund, peanuts are grown in the fields ajacent, cashews are grown in the forests to the opposite side of the village, mango trees flourish, and market vegetables are grown in the off-season in the wetland. Kajjatou Teli is trying to get concrete beehives for her village, where they already collect honey from wooden hives that quickly become obsolete due to monsoon rains or annual bush fires.

Unlike some of my fellow students, I found my stay in the village to be quite a natural episode. I was too excited to be shocked that what I took to be like camping was actually a week much cushier than the everydya life of my hosts, who did not have the luxury of flashlights, filtered water, vitamins to suppliment their diet and energy, and who had to work while I rested the afternoon heat away with the three-year olds under the mango tree, drinking tea.

I beg you to forgive my necessary brevity in listing some of my comments:
1. Women work very hard, from gathering wood in the morning from the forest, to hauling water from the well and carrying it back to the village, to tending their fields, to grinding millet and corn into couscous, to cooking and caring for their children. My host’s namesake was apparently in the process od trying to convince her husband to take a second wife to share the work.
2. There were tons of children! 18 households means 18 father figures, which means that it takes quite a few kids to come to 200 people.
3. People in the south of Senegal are generally less intensely religious than up north. No one greeted eachother by “Assalam Alaykum” in the village, nor did i hear prounced alxamdulilla, inshalla or bismilla even once. During my séjour I saw only one person pray once, and the village mosque is nothing but a storage-shed-like building erected the year before by an NGO who put up half the funds.
4. On the 4th of April, the fête de l’Indépendence, there was a bicycle race and a soccer match in Bagadadji, but no flags waving or anthems sung.
5. The food we ate with my host-family made me feel malnourished very quickly. We ate rice with a peanut sauce for breakfast (a special treat for guests), couscous with a mucous-like sauce of okra and pounded eucalyptus leaves for lunch, and finer couscous with a watery sauce made from wild clovers called gersogal faaro.
6. a kilo of cashew nuts raw and still inside their toxic coating sells for as much as a kilo of rice. They are mostly exported to India to be roasted and shelled. The honey sells for 500 fCFA/kg (~$1) totally raw, while cleaned honey sells for 300fCFA/kg according to the producers.
7. There was only one adult woman in Saresonia who could read Pulaar, though most of the children now go to the French school until 5th or 6th grade. A high school was just recently built in Bagadadji and is taking their first class of students.
8. Roles seem very clearly defined in the village. There are no unmarried adult women, work is divided by age group and gender, and there do not seem to be any need to discuss who will take up what task.
9. families do not usually work the same market garden. Each wife will have her own garden, separate to her husband’s and her co-wife’s, and will be in charge of the income it generates
10. My first day in Saresonia, I saw a young man get off his bicycle, fall to the ground and go into convulsions. The chef du village said that it was a djinne (a spirit, the koran says that there are on this earth as many djinns as people) that descended upon him. He said that it sometimes would come to him, and he knew just before and could either lay down and wait or fall in convulsions. I do not know how to diagnose epilepsy.
11. My host became chief of the village not by being the most wealthy or strongest member of the community, btu because it was his father that founded the village. A rather unimposing man, from what I could tell, the title meant little more than that he recieved guests and strangers, and that he was in charge of the marriage rituals for any girls with absent parents.

There are so many thoughts that I have left, but as this is already getting too lentghy for bullet form I will save them until I see you all next.

Instability, Solar Eclipse and Rural visit

I forgot to mention in the last posting a note on instability in the region. During my spring break, around the 13th of this month, there was firing across the southern border with Guinea-Bissao in the region of Casamance, which is cut off from the rest of Senegal by The Gambia, a former British colony that runs along the river Gambia. Salif Sadjo, the most intransigent of rebel leaders from Guinee-Bissao is being saught inside Senegal by the Guinee-Bissaoan and Senegalese armies. Also in the region, last week there was an attempted coup in The Gambia while the President was out of the country, the leader of which also fled to Casamance, and is the second target of the army's man hunt.

In recent class discussion with Koumba Toure, a key figure involved in educational advocacy, a disquieting notion came out that people are losing confidence in the value of education because of the high levels of unemployment here (approximated as 48% by the CIA), and that certain quarters are turning to careers in politics as the fastest way to get rich. In the context of regional instability, if true, this is a very disconcerting trend.

Politics aside, I probably burned my eyes this morning looking up at a partial solar eclipse. The total eclipse of the sun happened in Libya, and here it looked like a little bite taken out of the side of a cookie. Nonetheless, the sky had an eeriness about it, and there was a larger than usual conglomeration of vultures on the school's soccer field.

Next week, all the students on our program will be dispersing on rural visits. I am heading to the southeast and will be staying with a peace corps volunteer in her village and following her project. The instructions given me are as follows:
"Meet at Suffolk University at 7:00am on Monday morning. Go to the Gare Routiere Pompiers where you will find a sept place (read: old Pugeot station wagon that has seven seats, a.k.a. bush taxi) to Kolda (about 12000cfa). Ask to get out at Bagadadji, whcih is 30km before Kolda. Call the telecentre from around Velingara to let Allison (the PCV) know your ETA. Allison should be waiting for you there. If not, tell them you are the guest of Kajjatou Balde and they'll help you find her. The village is 2km from the main road. Bring a kilo of kola nuts."

Coupures and St Louis

Poor governance has been the cause of much frustration and some loss in Senegal in the past week. Senelec, the state-owned electrical company had been in back-payments to their petrol suppliers, such that these companies were no longer able to buy crude oil from abroad, and the country has for a week now been left with uncertain electrical supplies. My house was out of power Monday and parts of Tuesday, while campus was out of power for most of the week, excepting a few mornings and evenings. President Wade has freed up funds in large amount recently to pay the bills, showing that it was certainly not the complete incapacity to pay that caused this crisis (note that consumers do pay for electricity, and therefore funds are coming from somewhere), but sheer mismanagement. There has been no talk of anyone being compensated for the "coupures."

I profited from a weekend where it was not certain that I'd be able to accomplish much to take a trip to Saint Louis, a colonial city in the north of Senegal, capital until 1904 to all of L'Afrique Occidentale Francaise. The city was the first established by France on the African coast, nestled on an island at the mouth of the Senegal river, prime location for insularity/protection from locals who will have to attack by boat, and commerce. The main sight to see is the pont Faidherbe, a bridge first constructed over the Danube and moved to Saint Louis under the direction of the region's former military Governor whose name it retains.

The weekend was for me a great chance to relax, be outside of the city's bustle, and enjoy some wonderful scenery in the company of two friends, Courtney Keene and Jini Kades. We saw some Jazz at a little "tapas bar," the city being known for its Jazz musicians and festival which takes place in May, enjoyed a great meal at La Saigonnaise, a Vietnamese place run by the slightly egotistical Madame An, whose photos adorn its walls, and got some rest.

Séjour au Mali

Being someone to forget quickly passing hardships, it's hard for me to begin writing about my recent trip to Mali, which did not turn out the way planned to say the least.

The difficulties got underway Saturday night around 3am, when I was awoken on our bus to Bamako to find that we had pierced a tire. It was magical to walk out in the haze of a foggy night and realise that not 50m away was a village worthy of a fairytale or national geographic article. There being no possibility of finding our way out but by doing it ourselves, everyone who could did not hesitate to help with the bus jack, the tools, etc. and we were out of there in 45 minutes.
Yet this was not the end of our trials.

At the border with Mali in the morning, we passed 2 separate check points on the Senegalese side, and then two on the Malian side, where each of us was obliged to pay an "administrative fee" of 1000fCFA ($2), thus racking up a pretty sum for the border official who did not dispense a single reciept.

The road from Kayes, near the border in Mali to Bamako was finished according to my guidebook in 2004, but in actuality was not paved, but merely packed with fresh dirt, and replete with detours onto the gravel road beside due to work that was to be accomplished soon. The countryside is severly dry in Mali, and through the drivers window and the door which remained open while we drove along the highway to permit some wind to enter into the otherwise smolderingly hot bus, through these openings the red dust of the soil kicked itself in and promptly clung to all exposed skin and clothing like a terra cotta film. The infrastructure in this area seemed rudimentary at best, the villages we past exhibited few brick or cement buildings, and water was collected from wells. Think of the last time you saw a picture of a young girl carrying a huge bucket of water or a woman with a big pile of wood on her head and baby on her back crossing a desolate-looking plain being used as an advertisement for charitable cause, and that would not be a bad starting point for what the paysage seems like from the road.

Our bus went on to have 4 more tire-related breakdowns, and we arrived in Bamako after 38 hours of hot, sweaty travel to find ourselves unable to make it to the market in Djenne before the set of sun on Monday. We elected therefore to rearrange our plans and push our stopover in Bamako forward.

Bamako, the capital, is not at all like Dakar, lacking place as the former capital of Afrique Occidentale Francaise, and the international commercial presence and cosmopolitan urbanism that seems to accompany it here. The city seems much more like a provincial town. There are but two buildings that stand out in the sky - the central bank building along the Niger, and interesting, though not fantastic 60s building, and the sombre Sofitel. The streets are often lined with trees, and the river is a beautiful green that reminded me of the Rockies, but the 40 degree Celcius heat, the red dust, and the lack of wind, coupled with the exhausts of old, poorly maintained vehicles burning leaded gas, made the air unbearable.

What is remarkable, however, is the Musée Nationale du Mali. The collection includes some truly extraordinary pieces, which are preserved remarkably when compared to the IFAN museum in Dakar, in a new building built to copy the Sahelian style in 2003. The museum is truly worthy of the heritage of remarkable art and archeological wealth it holds, and would be able to properly care for more pieces that may one day be given back from museums abroad, such as several in France that have repatriated objects pillaged under the colonial yoke.

Taking up the bus story once again, our trip to Djenne was no less trying. Told that we would depart at 9am, we realised that we were flat-out lied to by the ticket salesman when the driver told us at 10 o'clock that we would be leaving at 11. Hotter, drier, noisier than the last ride, exhaustion and menstrual stress made this journey terribly trying for me emotionally. The buses here run such that after having loaded passengers, you drive immediately to buy gas with the money just garnered from their fares, then stop 10 minutes later to pick up other provisions, so that you're not on your way truly for at least half an hour after leavign the bus statrion. When you're already two and a half hours late according to your expencations, this can be source fo just that extra amount of frstration needed tp push one over the edge of utter disappointment. Our fellow passengers were nonetheless terribly welcoming. Whenever we stopped and were bombarded by vendors, they would offer us some of their exotic fruits and unknown snacks. And when I thought we were lost for certain, two lovely people helped us make arrangements on our way.

We were told we'd arrrive at the Carrefour de Djenne around 5pm, when in actuality we arrived there much past nightfall, and were only lucky enough to have been able to call our hotel and arrange for a car to come pick us up to take us the 30km from the highway turn-off to Djenne proper. The ride went past picturesque villages at 80km/h, and involved fording a river (water reaching our feet, and mechanical messing under the hood!), since the moveable bridge is out of operation.

Djenne itself is beautiful. The mosque was so impressive upon arrival as we looked at it from our hotel terrace under the light of the not-quite-full moon. In the day, the town was quiet, the kids pushy to ask you to take their picture so that you will be obliged to give them some change for it, and the older men are just as quick to yell at them in a manner that made me understand that an exapseration about how well behaved their (grand)children might be if it weren't for all these toubabs coming through.

Faced with the choice of going on to Dogon solo, since my companions were returning to Dakar Friday night, or coming back with them, I chose the second. I have no regret of not pushing forward alone to see Dogon, as the trip has given me the feeling that quick travel has given me no insight that a good photo book, documentary or academic paper could not give me from the confines of Dakar or New York.

So last night I flew back on Air Senegal from Bamako Sedou Airport to Leopold Sedar Senghor airport Dakar, and was happy to find people speaking Wolof and a cool breeze off the ocean obliging me to put on a sweater.

Spring break approaches

Dear all,

Summer arrived a few days ago, by which I mean that the winds have been coming not over the Atlantic from Europe, but over the Sahara from Libya, bringing with them heat and sand. In geographical terminology, the Alizé Maritime has been replaced the by Alizé Continentale, a.k.a the Harmattan. The sky is now dusty, and the winds have ceased to be refreshing.

Tomorrow I will be leaving on Spring Break to Mali with my roommate Duma and her friend Zoe from Barnard. We are taking a 25 hour bus to Bamako, then catching another immediately overnight to Jenne, so that we can arrive in Jenne on Monday for the weekly market. Jenne is the site of a fantastic sahelian style mosque, rebuilt under French support at the end of the 19th century, and the source of some stylistic controversy. ( http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ind/hd_ind_1.htm )

Tuesday we will be travelling to the Dogon country, where we will be meeting a guide to take us trekking around the cliff villages of this fragile, relatively protected traditional society. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon )

We will return to Bamako on Friday early morning, and spend a couple days in the capital before making our way back to Dakar on Sunday.

In local news, the President of the Republic threatened the student's union with cancelling the school year if they did not cancel the strike. The students will be going back to class on Monday, which is great for me since I will be able to take my course after all, though it seems that their issues are not going to be resolved any time soon.

Best wishes to all.