Meet me in Saint-Louis

This weekend was our group trip to Saint-Louis, an island city in the north of Senegal that used to be an important colonial city. It was the capital of French West Africa, which was the federation of French colonies (Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Cote D’Ivoire, and Benin) that existed up until everyone started getting their independence. It’s famous for its colonial architecture and its jazz festival.

We left on Friday (which meant no class, yay) and drove all morning through barren Sahel landscape. Things we saw on the way that totally mystified me include:

Animals, like donkeys, goats, and cattle, that usually belong to people but which were seemingly wild and unattended. They would just be hanging out on the side of the road with no one watching over them. Maybe I just couldn’t see the people. Maybe it is okay to let your animals wander like that without keeping an eye on them (I don’t know a single thing about animal husbandry, after all). Either way, it looked to me like the bush was just full of unclaimed donkeys and such.

People. Every now and then you’d look out and see people walking through the bush even though there was no sign of a settlement anywhere. What could they possibly be doing out there?

Settlements. Sometimes we would see little groupings of huts made out of branches and dried palm leaves and there would be people working around the huts. I don’t really have any idea what I’m talking about, but they looked like they could conceivably be family compounds like the ones described in Things Fall Apart. Again, even with these signs of human society, I wondered what these people could possibly be doing. I imagined the villages in Things Fall Apart to be a bunch of compounds grouped around a common area or main street, but these were just single compounds. There we no signs of crops or herds of animals. How could people live there? How did they get food? Water? What did they do all day? How could life possibly work here?

Some things that we saw that didn’t mystify me included a lot of dead cattle carcasses. In one case, it must have been a fresh one, because it was absolutely covered in HUGE scavenging birds. I don’t know if they were actually vultures, but they were certainly something in the same vein. They were gigantic and had incredible wingspans.

We finally got to Saint-Louis in the afternoon and then promptly drove right by it without stopping. That was a little disconcerting. As it turns out, we were staying at the University of Saint-Louis, which isn’t actually on the island of Saint-Louis, it’s farther north. Waly later explained to us that this is because Saint Louis has lodging shortages because it’s a small city with a large tourist appeal. It’s also election season in Senegal, and all the politicians are campaigning in the bigger towns and filling up the hotels with their entourages, so there was really no place in town that could accommodate 30 people.

Those are all good reasons, but nevertheless, it was a little disappointing to not be right in the city. It meant that whenever we had free time, and which there seemed to be a lot of in the schedule that they gave us, we wouldn’t be able to go explore the city on our own.

The real bummer about the university housing, however, is that for most of the weekend there was little or no running water. Apparently the university area is growing faster that the infrastructure can be modified, and the water mains are now hooked up to more places than they can really supply. So some times the water would run and sometimes it wouldn’t, and there was certainly never enough pressure to take a proper shower. Most of us, or at least lots of us, have gotten used to toilets that don’t flush and washing out of a bucket, but when the taps stop running all together and 30 people want to get clean, it can be a challenge.

Anyway. When we got to the University, we settled into our rooms and had lunch, and then headed back to the city to take a tour. The tour was another aspect of the trip that had its pros and cons. WARC had hired four horse-drawn buggies with tour guides that belonged one of the hotels to take us around the city. It was nice to be in a reasonably comfortable carriage with a friendly tour guide, a horse named Barak Obama, and an explanation of the history and what everything was. Saint-Louis is a very beautiful city, or at least, it would have been in its hey-day. The buildings are all painted bright, beautiful colors and have pretty wrought iron balconies on their second stories. There are also some interesting sights, such as the Point Faidherbe, which is named after Senegal’s most famous French colonial governor and was designed by Gustave Eiffel, and what must be the only mosque in the world that has a bell and a clock in the minaret. Apparently, for all that Faidherbe was an understanding governor who ate ceebujen, spoke some Wolof, and loved the Senegalese women, he couldn’t stand the call to prayer five times daily and had the bell installed so that he wouldn’t have to listen to it.

There were moments, however, that were a little less comfortable. The tour took us through the quartier where the local fishermen live, which was very busy and crowded with lots and lots of children in particular. The tour guide explained to us that there were so many children because pretty much all the marriages in this part of town are polygamous. We stopped and got out and walked around the fishing beach for a while, where the women make smoked and salted fish from whatever the men can’t sell to the merchants who come from out of town to take the fish all across Senegal and West Africa. The beach was covered in piles of fish heads, scales, and innards. As we were walking through here, women and young boys asked us for presents and money, and some played bait-the-toubab by shoving dead fish in our faces. That didn’t really bother me so much as the feeling that we were just a bunch of rich white people coming to gawk at a bunch of poor black people in their “natural habitat,” and that we probably deserved to have dead fish waved in our faces.

After our 90 minutes in Saint-Louis, we were put back on the bus and taken back to the University. We had some time to rest, then dinner, then we headed out for our “cultural evening.” We went to a house somewhere not that far away with a large courtyard where we sat and watched what I guess I would call a show. There were musicians, dancers, singers, actors, and a fire-eater, who each got up and did an act. They were all really good, but our enjoyment was somewhat hindered by the fact that we were all exhausted and terrified that they were going to make us dance at any moment, (which they did, at the beginning and end and once or twice during the middle for the unlucky people sitting up front). Watching Senegalese people dance is awesome because they move like no one in the US ever could or will, and dancing with them often totally fun as long as you don’t get too self-conscious, but its an activity that requires a lot of energy. I think that Senegalese people have and organ in their bodies that stores a well of reserve energy that they can tap into specifically for dancing, so they can stop, drop, and groove at any moment, but middle class white Americans don’t really have that, meaning that late night sabar’s are a bit more challenging for us toubabs. Senegalese “cultural experiences” like that are always cool to be there for, but we were all pretty happy to get back to where we were staying and crawl into bed at 1 AM.

The next morning after breakfast and no showers, we piled onto the bus and headed even farther north up the Senegal River (which forms the border between Senegal and Mali) to the Parc National des Oiseaux du Djoudj. Even the bus ride there was like a mini-safari along a dirt road (that got so narrow and precarious at one point that we didn’t think the bus was going to make it). We saw monkeys, lots of families of warthogs, and two huge pythons on the side of the road. The park itself is on the river and is a wildlife reserve for lots of wetlands birds, and pirogue (boat) tours are given by the local park rangers and a nearby private hotel.

It is forbidden to fish and to hunt in the park, which makes it rather difficult for the people of the seven villages enclosed within the park to earn a livelihood. To try and compensate for that, the government (I think?) gave the villagers several pirogues and trained them to be the park rangers so that they could make some money off the tourism. This is why we waited a very, very long time for the local boats to show up instead of taking the hotel boat, which was sitting there empty the whole time we were waiting. There would have been more local boats, but apparently, not that long ago, a villager was found dead in the park. The other villagers blamed the rangers for his death and burned a lot of the boats in retaliation. That was another moment of mixed feelings, when we found that out. It seemed like it was a good thing to support the local people, but the local people don’t seem to be particularly in favor of that kind of support.

The tour was a nice, leisurely river cruise. We saw lots of birds, pelicans in particular. They would swim around in little groups and dive for fish at the exact same moment, like synchronized swimmers. We also saw lots more warthogs, some huge lizards, and a couple of crocodiles. All good stuff.

At the end of the tour, we bused back to the University and had a very late lunch. After that, pretty much everyone else made an impromptu visit back into Saint-Louis, but I stayed at the university. I had been sort of sick but still functional since Wednesday, but by Saturday night I really needed to spend some time working on getting better. All I had was the obligatory gastro-intestinal complaint that everyone who comes here has to have at least once, and I was fine by Sunday morning, but it was really bad timing. I missed getting to spend more time in Saint-Louis, which I desperately wanted to do, eating a dinner that I ordered off of a menu instead of just one of 30 identical meals, and going out dancing afterwards. I did, however, manage to scrounge enough water together to take a bucket shower, so that was a big plus.

On Sunday morning, we packed up and headed back towards Dakar. We took a sort of random pit stop at an old baobab tree on the side of the road. The whole center of the tree was missing, but it was still alive, so that was kind of cool. I’ve heard that baobab’s just don’t die, and this one sort of seemed to be living proof of that. We had lunch in Thèis and got back to Dakar in the early evening. Overall, it was a pretty good weekend, but if I get the chance, I’d like to go back and spend a little more time in the city. It seemed like we didn’t quite do it justice.