Being Muslim

Those of you up on your world religions have probably found it odd that I haven’t mentioned hardly anything about the fact that Senegal is an overwhelmingly Muslim country. This it certainly not because the Islam here is a negligible part of daily life that I personally don’t experience because my host family is Catholic. On the contrary, the Islam here is unavoidable and I’ve learned a lot about it since I’ve been here. I’ve been wanting to write about it for a while now, because to me, it is hands down the most fascinating thing about this place. It’s also the hardest to understand, because there are a lot of historical and cultural factors that I don’t know anything about. Islam in Senegal is a lot different from the Islam in the Middle East and places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, so a lot of the things that Americans “know” about Islam don’t even apply here. Sometimes I’ll learn something that clarifies things that have confused me, but nearly as often, I will learn something that contradicts what I thought I already knew and which just leaves me more confused. I’ve been very hesitant to write anything about what I’ve observed because I feel like I’m not getting the whole picture, and that I’m misunderstanding or leaving out crucial bits so that what I’m saying comes off as ignorant or offensive. This blog entry has been in the works for probably two months now, and I still don’t feel like its authoritative or complete. So take this with a grain of salt. The chances that I don’t always know what I’m talking about are pretty good.

To start off with, here’s a brief history lesson about how Islam actually got to Senegal:

Way back when (11th century or so), Muslim Arabs conquered North Africa and Islamized the Berbers, who in turn conquered many of the black empires of West Africa and Islamized at least the ruling classes. Most of the rest of the population stuck with traditional animist religions. The societies that inhabited the area that is now Senegal (because “Senegal” didn’t exist until some Europeans drew some lines on a map, and the modern borders in no way correspond with the territory of any African civilization) had highly rigid social structures. The tacit social contract was that the garmi, or ruling families of nobles, were supposed to protect the lower classes in exchange for their fealty, like European feudalism. It wasn’t a particularly egalitarian arrangement, but it was stable.

Enter the Europeans and the transatlantic slave trade (16-19th centuries). Suddenly, the garmi have a lot to gain by allying themselves with the colonizers, picking fights with their neighbors, and selling prisoners of war to the Europeans as slaves. Instead of protecting the people, the garmi began preying on them, which threw the centuries-old social order into chaos. Because they could no longer count on the protection of the garmi, the people sought refuge in Muslim communities lead by marabouts, or charismatic religious leaders. These communities usually consisted of a mosque, a school, and fields, and thereby provided a new faith, learning, and work for the people who flocked to them. Because the garmi were largely Muslim, the marabout communities were, by another tacit social contract, off-limits from war, pillaging and slave raids. This guarantee of safety effected the conversation en masse of the people in these regions.

That’s how 95% of the Senegalese population came to be Muslim. The small percentage of Christians in Senegal are, for the most part, grouped in cities on the Atlantic coast that used to be important colonial cites (Dakar, Rufisque, St. Louis, etc). Even in these places, Muslims overwhelmingly outnumber Christians.

The Islam practiced in Senegal is a very particular brand. Most Americans now know the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims (or at least know that there is a difference). Technically, Senegalese Muslims are Sunnis, but they are much more accurately described as Sufis. Sufism is a form of Islam that emphasizes mystical aspects and allows for the charismatic style of leadership exercised by the marabouts. African animism found common ground with Muslim mysticism, and as a result, Senegalese Islam is deeply infused and entwined with ancient practices and beliefs. My literature professor likes to say that Senegal is 95% Muslim, 5% Christian, and 100% animist. By way of illustration, he told us a story about an old man that he picked up on his way back Dakar after visiting his parent’s village. To show his gratitude for the ride, the old hitchhiker gave my professor the words to an incantation that would protect him from car accidents. Senegalese wrestling matches are also a good place to observe traditional practices in action. I watched some on TV once. Some of the wrestlers doused themselves in oil that had been blessed by their marabouts to ensure their victory. The camera also cut to a chicken on the sidelines a few times. I’m not quite sure what the purpose of the chicken was, but the chances that it was part of some sort of charm or talisman are pretty good.

Muslims here belong to brotherhoods, sort of the same way that Christians belong to denominations. There are technically four major brotherhoods in Senegal, but the overwhelming majority of people belong to one of two: the Mouridiya and the Tijaniya. The Tijaniya was founded by Moroccans a long time ago, but the Mouridiya was founded by a Senegalese, Cheikh Amadou Bamba, during the height of French colonialism in the 19th century. Its early history is closely tied in with the popular resistance against colonial rule. Today, the Mouridiya is the most important brotherhood in Senegal.

Cheikh Amadou Bamba and a devoted student of his, Cheikh Ibra “Lamp” Fall, are highly revered figures for Mourides. During his lifetime, there was only ever one photograph taken of Amadou Bamba, and it’s probably the most recognized image in Senegal. You can see it reproduced as decoration or graffiti on walls, signs, shops, and stalls. Some Mourides even wear pictures of Bamba, Fall, and the current marabouts as amulets around their necks, which is a holdover from the traditional practice of wearing grigris, or fetishes, charms to ward off evil. This isn’t just a Muslim thing; lots of Catholics here wear pictures of Jesus or the Virgin Mary the same way. You also see other kinds of grigris pretty often, too. They usually little pockets of leather, sewed up tight and mostly likely containing pieces of paper with verses from the Coran on them. You see them tied around little kids’ necks and waists all the time.

Back towards the end of the 19th century, France was feeling threatened by how popular Bamba was getting, so they exiled him from Senegal. In 1907, they let him come back, and this event is celebrated every year by the Mourides by a huge pilgrimage to Touba, which is a town that I think Bamba founded and which is definitely the seat of Mouride power today. This pilgrimage is called the Magal, and practically all of Senegal packs up and heads to Touba to go to the enormous mosque and see the marabout.

This year, the Magal was on Valentine’s Day, and I already know that my biggest regret about my semester in Senegal will be that I didn’t go to Touba for the Magal. I had a few friends who went and who invited me to come with them, but I declined the offer and stayed in Dakar. I was overwhelmed at the idea of all the crowds and traffic jams and the seemingly slapdash way this trip was being thrown together (though after 3 months in Senegal, what used to seem slapdash now seems totally legit). I then spent a monumentally boring weekend in an empty city, wishing I was in Touba with the rest of the world. Next time, I am totally there.

There is another pilgrimage that happened in the beginning of March, called Gamou. This is a big one for the Tijanes, who all get together and go to Tivouane, where the Tijaniya brotherhood is headquartered. It’s a celebration of the prophet Mohammed’s birthday, but it has its roots in traditional African religion. The guy brought Tijaniya to Senegal, El Hadj Malick Sy, appropriated the Gamou (which is a Wolof word) and applied it to the Mawlid (which is the Arabic word for the holiday commemorating the Prophet’s birthday).


One a more day-to-day basis, there are a lot of little things that let you know that you’re in a Muslim country. There’s a big, sometimes even huge, mosque on just about every major road, and you’ll see the smaller minarets of neighborhood mosques poking up between the houses in the more residential areas. There’s a mosque just across the street from the house I live in, and every day without fail, I am woken up before dawn when the muezzin starts calling everyone to the first prayer of the day. From what I remember from my 9th grade lessons on mosque architecture, mosques were built with minarets, or tall spires, so that the muezzin could get into a high place and sing the call really loudly so that everyone could hear, but in these days of fancy technology, the muezzin stays on the ground and sings into a microphone. His voice is then amplified to a volume much louder than any human could manage and played through the speakers at the top of the minarets. I read somewhere that some mosques even just play a recording. Whatever they do, they certainly succeed in making sure that everyone in the city knows that it’s time to pray, no matter where they are or what they’re doing.

If you can’t hear the call to prayer, then chances are you’re in the middle of a market where there is LOTS of noise and distractions. To make sure that you still know when to stop, drop, and prostrate yourself, you can usually find a poster with the prayer times on them on the side of a shop or a stall. I’ve also seen then posted on little pavilion thingys, which aren’t really mosques because they don’t have minarets (or walls, sometimes), but where people can go pray out of the dust and crowds. I think the prayer times are figured according to where the sun is in the sky, so they might change slightly every day. The first prayer, for instance, is a several minuets earlier now that it was when I first got here.

Sometimes, especially on Fridays, (which are to Muslims what Sundays are to Christians), you can hear services or something going on in the mosques just about all day long. When I first got here, it was sometimes hard to sleep through the night, because sometimes there would be singing broadcast sporadically from the mosques all throughout the night at well. There probably still is, but I just don’t notice it because I’ve gotten used to it and sleep through it.

Sometimes people will go into the mosques for the prayers, but if there isn’t one handy or the person can’t stray too far from their job or their companions, they’ll pray wherever they are. You’ll see brightly colored teakettles next to every shop or market stall, which people use for ablutions before they pray. The mats are little rugs just big enough to fit a prostrate body and instantly sacralize any space for prayer (there’s my shout-out to Carlin Barton with the word “sacralize”). This demarcation of a sacred space is very important. Tening, our old maid, was Muslim, and I don’t think she had a prayer mat. She’d never just pray on the floor, though. I used to see her pray on the shawl she’s wearing (which I think is not uncommon for women here) and once I even saw her use an empty rice sack.

Maybe it’s a little voyeuristic of me, but I love walking around Dakar during prayer times and seeing all the people washing their feet and faces with their teakettles and praying on their mats. Their devotion and their unity are really impressive. I’ve been in the Sandaga market a few times during prayers, and I’ve seen the men line up in rows and go through their prayers all at the same time, (synchronized supplication, if you will). I was walking home from school one day during a prayer and had to walk around a taxi that had pulled up on the sidewalk. The driver had stopped his cab and gotten out to pray on the side of the road. I thought that was so cool. Something I have noticed though is that the huge majority of people who pray outside are men. I won’t say I’ve never seen a woman pray outside, but I can probably count the number of times I have seen it on one hand. I have no idea why this is.

Islam gets into everything here. Even the language is infused with it. The future tense in Wolof is pretty much just present tense with an “inshallah” (or “God willing”) attached to it, and people even toss it in when they’re speaking French. If you pay attention to a Wolof conversation, especially if it’s just getting started and there are lots of salutations to get through (salutations are very important in Senegal), you’ll hear “Alhamdoulilai” (or “Thanks be to God”) as the response to lots of questions. The car rapides have blessings, the names of marabouts, “Touba,” and “Alhamdoulilai” written all over them. They also have pictures of the marabouts stuck to surfaces that are usually and, one would think, importantly transparent, such as the windshields. (I guess that if you’ve got a picture of a marabout to protect you and all your passengers from accidents, you don’t need much more than 6 square inches to look through). People walk around with chapelets, or rosary-like prayer beads, either wrapped around their hands or dangling loosely so they can flick through the beads as they whisper the prayers to themselves or say them in their heads.

Very, very rarely will you see a woman covered from head to toe in a burka like they wear in Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia (I’ve seen two the whole time I’ve been here). More often, but still not often enough for it to be common, you’ll see a woman wearing a Muslim headscarf. Many, or even most women here wear scarves on their heads, but a length of the same bright, printed fabric that your whole outfit is made out of and that lets your ears and braids or weave stick out is certainly not the same as a carefully wound scarf that reveals only a calculated oval of you face. Wearing the scarf is definitely a personal choice and not a cultural norm in Senegal. Also, the women who do wear the scarf don’t usually go for somber colors like black and beige. They tend to choose scarves that are neon pink and/or covered in sequins. Interestingly enough, women at the University, who you would think would be a little more liberal and liberated, dress more conservatively than other women their age. This would be the only place that I would say that young women wearing the scarf outnumber those who don’t. Some of the WARC girls who take classes there have said that this is probably because bescarfed girls get a lot less annoying attention from guys, and that for them, the cut of a t-shirt can make or break a day in class. Some of the WARC girls have even taken to tugging a scarf over their head and shoulders when walking home alone, which has the added benefit of cloaking their toubab-ness.

On the subject of education, Senegal is crawling with talibe kids. From what I’ve gathered (and this particular bit of knowledge has a LOT of holes in it), lots of Muslim boys (but not girls, I don’t think) go to Coranic school when they’re kids, which means they got to schools directed by the marabouts. These kids are called “talibe,” which means student, (and which probably has the same root as “Taliban”). Their schedule consists of a full day of begging with lessons in the evenings. They give the money from the begging to the marabouts, who use it to feed and house them, or at least, that’s what they’re supposed to do. I’ve heard people express suspicions that some of that money gets pocketed by the marabouts for their own personal use. It would certainly be a temptation, but I hesitate to call the whole arrangement a corrupt sham. The kids usually aren’t particularly clean or well dressed, but they don’t look like they’re starving to death. I don’t know when exactly kids start in these schools, or when they finish, but lots of high school kids here are a few years older than high school kids in the US, and I think it’s because they spent a lot of time in Coranic school.

It’s kind of a sensitive situation for an American to observe. Judging only from the sheer numbers of talibe, the system is an integral part of Senegalese Muslim culture and it’s definitely the kind of thing that people here would fight to preserve, but with my Western notions of the rights of children, a barefoot kid with a tin can and outstretched hand makes my exploitation-masquerading-as-a-cultural-norm-slash-religious-practice senses tingle. This could also have something to do with the fact that I don’t really know all the ins and outs of how these schools work. It’s something I’d love to know more about.

Marabouts of any brotherhood are very powerful, and the head marabouts of each brotherhood, or caliphs, are enormously powerful. They are also enormously wealthy. I think this wealth and power came together during the early 20th century, when the religious leadership and the colonial leadership started playing nicely together to each get what they wanted. One of the things that the brotherhoods got out of this deal was control over the vast fields of peanuts, which is Senegal’s cash crop, and they made and continue to make a lot of money from the peanuts. Another source of financing for the marabouts is the members of their brotherhoods. People pay their marabouts to pray for them. Here, personal successes that we in the US of A would chalk up to our own hard work are credited to the strength of the marabouts’ prayers, which work better than just your average Abdoul’s. The personal successes of Senegalese Muslims translate not just into their own family’s prosperity, but into SUV’s, palatial homes, and extra wives for their marabouts. The marabouts are widely criticized (at least, among my Catholic family and my professors) for amassing such staggering individual wealth while huge numbers of their followers are experiencing economic hardships if not downright poverty.

Another potentially (read: certainly) troublesome aspect of the power structure of the brotherhoods is that the caliphates are hereditary. When a caliph dies, his son becomes the next caliph. Because of this, certain surnames in Senegal carry a lot of weight. For the Tijanes, the caliph’s family is Sy, for the Mourides, it’s Mbacké. You see these names everywhere: on signs, shops, car rapides, t-shirts, whatever. If people can claim a connection to these families, they will. I’ve heard that there’s a lot of intermarriage in these families, and powerful marabouts can sometimes have dozens of wives (though technically you’re only allowed 4, according to the Coran and Senegalese law). The whole thing smacks of royalty, which is a reminder that the brotherhood system basically stepped into the place left behind by the ruptured feudal system, and I would imagine that it has a lot of the same problems that a monarchy has. To me, you’re asking for trouble any time you base your system of leadership on bloodlines rather than merit, but the mystic power of the blood of Serigne Touba (the Mouride caliph’s title; “serigne” means marabout in Wolof, “marabout” comes from Arabic) is a force to be reckoned with.

Even though the Senegalese people are all very devoted to their religion of choice, Senegal is religiously tolerant country. According to the Senegalese constitution, Senegal is a secular state. There’s no sharia law here, although there are bits and pieces here and there that show a decidedly Muslim flavor, such as the allowance for men to marry up to 4 wives and the option of unequal inheritances based on the sexes of one’s children. No political parties can be founded along religious lines (or ethnic ones, for that matter), and religious discrimination is also a no-no. Senegal’s first President was Catholic, which sort of set the tone for religious tolerance in Senegal. There is little friction between Catholics and Muslims, or between any of the brotherhoods. The different religious groups like to make public signs of their solidarity. The different brotherhoods will send delegations on each other’s pilgrimages, and the Catholics will too. Muslims and Catholics are friends with each other, and intermarriage, although rare, is not unheard of. Senegal’s discrimination problems fall more along the lines of gender, class, and sexuality (being gay is actually illegal here).

All that said, Islam is pretty bound up in Senegalese politics. It is hands down impossible for anyone to get elected in Senegal without the support of the marabouts. The caliphs have the power to issue what’s called an ndigël, which is essentially a command. When people join the brotherhoods here, especially the Mourides, they take an oath of allegiance to their caliphs and swear to follow the commands. I don’t know if it’s a common practice for caliphs to issue ndigëls about who to vote for, but the sheer fact that they have the power to control the votes of 95% of the population if they want is pretty overwhelming. The leadership of the brotherhoods has been instrumental in some of Senegalese policy-making. For instance, the government of Senegal passed a law banning excision, or female genital mutilation, which is an important traditional practice among several ethnicities within Senegal. It’s not a Muslim practice, but the sometimes the caliphs fancy themselves the guardians of not just the religion but the wider culture as well. One of the caliphs objected to the law and it was suspended.

When the current President Abdoulaye Wade was up for reelection in 2007, he was opposed by a guy named Kara Mbacké, who was part of Serigne Touba’s family and probably a marabout. I don’t really know much about Kara and the election, except that his challenge represented a significant threat to the separation of “church” and state in Senegal. Dakar is big on political graffiti, and one of the things that you see tagged most often around here is a leftover from the 2007 election that says “Pourquoi pas Kara?” (“Why not Kara?”) Clearly, he had a lot of support, but Wade was reelected and the secular state lived to fight another day.
There’s a whole lot more I could talk about and there’s a whole lot more that I don’t know anything at all about. In any case, I’ve gone on for more than 6 pages in Microsoft Word, so it’s time for me to stop. I’ve been thinking seriously about writing my senior thesis about Islam in Senegal or in Sub-Saharan Africa more generally, so if anyone is still interested in this in about a year, I might have an even longer paper for you to read . . .

Easter

Pictures from Easter and my birthday

This weekend I celebrated Easter with my host family. I started off Holy Week by forgetting that it was Palm Sunday and not realizing why my host mom seemed especially annoyed that I said I wasn’t going to Mass as opposed to any of the other times when I say I’m not going to Mass. Whoops.

As a side note, it’s not that I don’t like going to Mass with my family. In fact, I thought it would be something I would really enjoy. It would be a cool chance for me to get to see how another people worships, see some really fantastic Senegalese outfits, and get my host mom to like me. Unfortunately, every time I’ve gone I’ve nearly fallen asleep because I can’t pay attention. I can’t follow the service because there are no bulletins and no prayer books, and even though the services are in French, I can’t understand what the priest is saying. At this point, my listening comprehension is pretty stellar, but it’s crippled in places with less than perfect acoustics, or when there’s a lot of ambient noise. I can’t understand when I can’t hear clearly, and the church they go to is big and echo-y, a problem which is then compounded by the microphone/speaker system that they have going on in there. Plus, Fatima tells me that the priest is from Côte d’Ivoire and speaks French with an Ivoirian accent, which is apparently stronger than a Senegalese accent. She said that even she has trouble catching everything he says all the time, so there’s basically no hope for me. I did try, really, but when I can’t understand anything, it’s hard to appreciate.

On Good Friday, I participated in a Senegalese Catholic tradition that even Muslims look forward to, and that is ngalax. Ngalax is a really . . . interesting dish that Catholics make for Easter weekend in ridiculously enormous quantities and then distribute to everyone in their neighborhoods, even the Muslims. When I had class on Friday afternoon, all of us Americans with Catholic families were talking about how much ngalax was in our house and alerting those of with Muslim families that in all likelihood that’s what would be for dinner in their houses too.

Ngalax is kind of like soup, only its served cold. Its primary ingredients are bouye (called pain de singe in French, which is “monkey bread” in English. It’s the fruit from the baobab trees), pâte d’arachide (not peanut butter, but close), and mil (millet). On Thursday night, Moussouba and some female relative (who’s name I really should know by now but don’t, and who, for the purposes of this entry, will be called the Aunt) produced a couple huge sacks of pain de singe and put them in a couple huge buckets of water to soak over night. (Huge buckets, I’m telling you. We do laundry in these buckets. And there were three of them). Pain de singe has this weird Styrofoamy texture, and it dissolves in water, leaving behind a ton of big brown seeds, like beans, and a bunch of pink stringy stuff. In the morning, Moussouba and the Aunt sifted out all the seeds and strings and added sugar at least and maybe milk also (I wasn’t actually there for this). The cloudy white result is actually the form that pain de singe takes most often in daily life, as a popular beverage.

To the huge buckets of bouye, they added proportionally huge globs of pâte d’arachide, which they mixed with their hands. They then poured it all through a sieve, several times, until it had a smooth, uniform consistency and was almost as thin as water. Because there was so much of it, this sieving step took hours. I had to go to class before they were finished, which bummed me out because I wanted to go delivering with them. Judging from the final product, the last step just involved stirring in ton of cooked millet. It looks like tomato soup with couscous in it, sort of.

What does it taste like? Well, everyone here LOVES it, and you could tell that Moussouba and the Aunt, even though it was a lot of work, really enjoyed making it. Ngalax is their baklava; it’s the thing that they make together as a family and enjoy together on an important holiday, so it occupies a kind of mythic position. Just like it wouldn’t be Easter for me without some baklava and day-old Peeps, it wouldn’t be Easter here without ngalax.

I appreciate and understand all that, but I am a little . . . dismayed at the amount of ngalax still in the house. I don’t quite share their enthusiasm for this particular dish. For me, it’s a combination of three things that are difficult for me on their own, and don’t get any better by being mixed all together. Pain de singe is tangy and sour; pâte d’arachide is hauntingly like peanut butter, but a lot more bitter; millet is just tasteless texture, but they tend to pair it with the very few sauces that I don’t really like here, so I associate it with some of my rougher nights at the wire-spool. All together, ngalax is a cold, soupy, tangy, sour, peanut-y, bitter, grainy experience. It’s not awful, but I wouldn’t order it off a menu. And that’s what will be for breakfast for the foreseeable future, because not only do we have our own leftovers, but we also have samples from all the other Catholics in the neighborhood. Ngalax is like chocolate chip cookies, in that every family has their own recipe (or at least, their own idea of “this looks right.” There are no recipes for Senegalese food). I tried several different ngalaxs, and you can definitely tell when the ratios are different. One had so much pain de singe in it that they shouldn’t have bothered adding anything else.

So that was the thing that happened on Friday. On Saturday, everyone went to midnight Mass (which starts at 10, not midnight), but everyone left at a different time and went to a different church. My host mom and Fatima probably went to the Martyrs of Uganda church, I have no idea where Anita went, and Moussouba and I went to St. Christophe, Habibou’s church up next to the airport. Blaise, who was at home on vacation from his school in Thiès for the whole week, went to the big cathedral downtown, I think. I have no idea what Danny and Kiki did. They might not have even gone to Mass that night, because they went the next morning.

We got very dressed up for this. Anita and Fatima both replaced their braids with long, straight weaves (hairdressing in Senegal is a whole ‘nother blog entry), and Effie even did me up in some braids. My sisters have been planning to me tresser for Easter for months now, and I was a little nervous to let them take another stab at beautifying me after the Moussouba-does-my-makeup incident. But all they had Effie do were short cornrows not even half way back from my forehead, with the rest loose, and I like it. Alhamdoulilah.

Anyway, we got all dressed up and then took pictures together, like it was prom instead of Easter, and then went to church. I had an easier time understanding the service at St. Christophe because their acoustics were a lot better and their priest was Senegalese, but I still struggled with staying awake because the service was very long. I felt less bad about this when Blaise, who wants to become a priest, told me the next day that he had trouble saying awake at whatever Mass he was at too. Mass got out at about 1 AM, and then we said hello and Alleluia to a lot of people. We also did les bises a lot more often than usual, which is always sort of a problem for me. Les bises is the French cheek-kissing thing, which is a really common form of greeting in Senegal, particularly among Catholics in my experience. In addition to the fact that kissing strangers can be a little awkward for Americans in the first place, les bises are also dangerously unregulated in Senegal. You kiss people anywhere from 0 to 4 times and there is, as far as I can tell, no way to tell how many times you’re supposed to do it. I also never know which way I’m supposed to go first, left or right, because I’ve had people pull both on me. This means I often end up continuing to kiss people after they’ve finished kissing me, or pulling away before they’re done, or kissing parts of their face that I had no intention of kissing. I’m always so relieved to see a hand extended towards me, because I can usually be trusted not to look like an idiot shaking hands. Sometimes, however I do get teased for my firm American grip. Maybe it’s because the Senegalese shake so many hands so many times a day and they can’t be bothered to put in the effort every time, but the dead-fish grip is a lot more common here than at home.

After church we walked to Habibou’s house and had a 2 AM snack of reheated meat and goat-foot soup, and after that we took a taxi to a community center in another neighborhood, where there was a big dance party going on. It would appear that in Senegal, spending the night partying with your friends at Easter is just as important as spending the day visiting with your family. We stayed there and danced for a while, and then came home around 5 AM. It was a long night.

The next day, Easter Sunday, the first person I saw in the morning was my host mom. We said Joyeux Fête, and then she told me that she wanted me to stay at home this afternoon instead of going out with Moussouba, who had invited me to come along to visit her grandmother. I was a little surprised and didn’t understand why, but since she hardly ever asks me to do anything and seemed oddly insistent about it, I said okay. Later, when she had left for Mass, I asked Fatima why she wanted me to stay home. Fatima told me that there is some ill-will between the grandmother, who I believe is my absent host father’s mother, and my host mom. Apparently, the grandmother doesn’t want my host mom living in the house (which probably belongs solely to my host dad), and, I kid you not, my host mom thinks the grandmother wants to kill her. She won’t go there and she doesn’t let Kiki or Fatima go there, because she is afraid that the grandmother will put something in their food and poison them. She didn’t want me to go because she was similarly concerned for me. This revelation pretty much confirmed a suspicion that I’ve had for some time now: my host mom is a nut job.

I spent the morning hanging out with my sisters in the kitchen while they cooked yassa (a variation of the usual rice and onion sauce, usually chicken but sometimes with meat or fish, and my favorite Senegalese dish). Right before what’s usually lunchtime, Anita and Moussouba were in the back hall, clearly getting ready to go out somewhere. My host mom came around the corner and saw me standing around with them as was like, “Oh do you want to go out with them?” I didn’t know for sure where they were going, but Habibou had showed up and Moussouba had invited me to go and visit a friend of hers and Habibou’s that I had met the night before, separately from the invitation to see the grandmother. I thought that that was where we were going, so I said yes. My host mom was like, “Okay, go ahead then,” so I left with Anita, Moussouba, and Habibou.

And then we definitely went to the grandmother’s house. I have given up trying to understand my host family at all.

We spent the afternoon visiting with the grandmother and a slew of aunts and cousins. We ate yassa (which made me happy, because I thought I was going to miss it at home) and then I sat on the couch and listened uncomprehendingly to Wolof conversations for an awfully long time. Habibou, too, was similarly lost, because he is a Nigerian Hausa and doesn’t speak Wolof either. Everyone there knew this, but kept speaking Wolof anyway. The WARC staff has told us that we can and should ask people to speak French around us so that we can participate in the conversations, but clearly none of them have ever tried to impose the language of the colonizers on a family matriarch that they just met on an important holiday. Even if it seemed a little rude for them to ignore Habibou and me like that, it seemed even ruder to ask them to speak French. So I listened and tried to pick out whatever words I could. I heard “jëkkër” a lot, which means “husband.”

We left in the late afternoon and went to go to Moussouba and Habibou’s friend’s house, which was slightly dismaying to me because between my late night and my futile straining to understand hours and hours of Wolof, I was exhausted. We got to the neighborhood, made a pit stop at an uncle’s house, who wasn’t there, and then tried to find the friend’s house. In the time before we got there, Moussouba told Habibou that she was tired and wanted to go back home, so we did that instead. Thank God. I crawled into bed at about 7 with every intention of just taking a nap, and then slept until 9 the next morning. I was very glad that in Senegal, Easter Monday is a national holiday, so I didn’t have class. All in all, it was a very different Easter weekend than I would have had at home. I spent a lot of quality time with my host family and did new and different things, which was good, but I will be happy to be home for Easter next year. I missed the Anglican hymns and the baklava and the egg game and the jellybeans and the people a whole lot.

Spring Break

Photos from my spring break

Last week, during my spring break, I traveled to the southern region of Senegal, called Casamance. It’s known for its lush, green landscape, gorgeous sandy beaches, and the Diola people who live there who have carefully guarded many of their traditional cultural practices.

Also, the violent separatist movement.

Historically, the people of Casamance have not taken kindly to outside rule. The Diola people never had a hierarchical society, and so they didn’t appreciate it when the French moved in and set up chiefs over them. There were Diola rebellions against the French all through the 20th century, although none of them succeeded in throwing off French rule. The last one was in the 1940s, led by a woman named Aline Sitoe Diatta, who is still a regional hero. The boat that runs between Dakar and Ziguinchor (the largest town in Casamance) is named after her.

More recently, Casamance has been caught up in a secessionist movement that has often turned violent. In the 1980s, the Senegalese army started arresting members of the Mouvement des Forces Democratiques de la Casamance (MFDC) who were agitating for independence, which encouraged an anti-Dakar feeling among the local people. In the 90s, the MFDC started attacking army posts, and the army responded by attacking MFDC bases. At times the conflict spilled over the border in to Guinea-Bissau, who was giving support to the MFDC because it was involved in a dispute with Senegal over the maritime border. (Senegal ended up giving Guinea-Bissau rights to a percentage of the resources exploited in their waters in exchange for support against the MFDC). The conflict between the MFDC and the Senegalese army went on throughout the 90s. It was violent and unpleasant, and took a huge toll on the local people, who suffered not only from casualties from the fighting but also economically from the loss of tourist dollars.

There were a bunch of ceasefires and peace agreements that were brokered between the MFDC and the Senegalese government during the 90s and early in the 2000s, but the government was never willing to give Casamance independence or autonomy, which meant that MFDC hardliners often ignored the agreements and continued fighting. In 2001, the MFDC started fighting within itself after hardliners rejected a new peace deal, and many people in Casamnace became disenchanted with the movement, calling the rebels just bandits and thieves. There’s been a new peace deal in place since 2004, and things have been a lot quieter since then, although incidences of violence are not unheard of. The US State Department has a travel warning about Casamance that includes some delightful stories about land mines and local people who were rounded up and had their ears cut off last summer.

When I had decided that I was going to come to Senegal, I remember reading about Casamance and thinking about what a shame it was that I wouldn’t be able to visit this gorgeous tropical region. Once I got here, though, it became clearer and clearer that people were not overly concerned about traveling to the area any more. Most people that I talked to about it told me that it was beautiful and that I would love it if I went. The writers of my Lonely Planet guide said that they didn’t have any trouble when they visited, and even the State Department doesn’t tell you point-blank not to go, so I decided to do it.

I went with a group of six other WARC girls, (Melanie, Phoebe, Katie, Hanna, Marecca, and Alicia) and Phoebe’s host-brother-cousin-uncle-male-relative Amalaca, who is from Ziguinchor. Our plan was to take the boat from Dakar to Ziguinchor on Friday night and hang around Casamance until the boat went back on Thursday afternoon.

The Dakar-Ziguinchor boat service has a little bit of upsetting history to it, too. Of all the ways to get from Point A to Point B in Dakar, a bed on the boat to Casamance is probably one of the most safe and comfortable ways to go. This wasn’t always the case. From what I hear, the old boat, the Joola, would operate much the same way as other modes of transportation in Senegal – stuff as many people in as possible. It would get dangerously overcrowded in a way that is all too easy to imagine after riding around Dakar in buses and car rapides. They used to cram people on at the port and then stop along the river and pick up people who paddled up in their pirogues (how Senegalese is that). In 2002, the boat capsized and nearly 2000 people died. It was the worst disaster in the history of Senegal. Since then, the boat service has shaped up in a big way. The new boat, the Aline Sitoe Diatta, has comfortable sleeper cabins and slightly less comfortable airplane-like seating, but there are an exact number of places and not a single person in over that number is allowed on board.

Now, Abbie, I know what you’re thinking. I know that we vowed to never, ever, find our selves in a situation where we would be traveling on a boat over night. But this is nothing like the bus-ferry combo between London and Dublin, or London and Paris. This is one mode of transportation the whole way (if you ignore the comically short bus ride from the baggage check down the pier to the back of the boat), and if you spring for a spot in a sleeper cabin (18,500 CFA, or about $37), you actually get a bed, complete with blanket and pillow. There’s a restaurant and a bar on board as well. It’s positively swanky. The seven of us girls had most of an 8-person sleeper cabin to ourselves. Amalaca bought his ticket too late to get in our cabin, so the eighth bed was taken up by a woman named Fanta (like the soda) and her adorable tiny daughter, named Zenabu. We spent some time out on the decks, but it got chilly and windy pretty quickly, so we spent the rest of the night in the cabin, hanging out and eating junk food.

We arrived in Ziguinchor late the next morning. We got off the boat and Amalaca took us to his sister Awaye’s house (both of their names are probably spelled wrong, just as a side note there), where we had showers, watched some cooking show that was all in Wolof but involved something called “Obama rice,” and ate a huge and delicious lunch of shrimp and fish. After that, Amalaca and his brother-in-law Joe brought out a map of Casamance and started to plan our whole week out for us. Turns out that they have family or connections in like every major town in Casamance, so wherever we wanted to go, we had free lodging. Awesome.

I really wanted to go to this town/village called Kafountine, and as it turns out, Joe owns a house there. We decided that Phoebe, Amalaca, Melanie, Hanna, and I would go there that afternoon and that the others, who had promised to visit relatives of their host families in Ziguinchor, would stay there that night and catch us up the next day. After that, we would play it by ear.

The way one travels from town to town in Senegal when one does not have a car is by sept-place. Sept-places are cars that seat seven people in addition to the driver (sept-place literally means “seven seats”) and are in the typical state of disrepair of most Senegalese public transportation. To get a sept-place, you show up at the gare routière (which would be like a bus station if Senegal had Peter Pan and Greyhounds, and which is usually just a glorified parking lot) and announce your destination to the group of drivers and vendors who instantly swarm up to you. If you’re lucky, you’ll get lead to a sept-place that’s mostly full already, meaning that you’ll be on your way quickly. If you’re less lucky, you’ll get taken to an empty car and have to wait around for the rest of the seats to fill up, which could be a while, especially if you’re headed to an unpopular destination. The driver gets paid per place and won’t leave until he’s got all sept, so if you’re in a hurry, impatient, or need a lot of personal space, you can buy the remaining seats in the car and be on your way.

Amalaca found us a car that already had two people in it, so we brought the total up to seven and were on our way in a very timely fashion. The drive to Kafountine from Ziguinchor is about 2 hours long, and was very different from the other long drive I’ve experienced in Senegal (Dakar to Saint Louis). For one thing, the landscape is completely different. Northern Senegal is long, mostly flat stretches of sandy soil with lots of scrubby brush and the occasional baobab, none of which have any leaves at the moment because it’s the middle of the dry season. Casamance, though, stays green all year round and has thick forests of tall trees. The landscape is also studded with enormous anthills made by termite colonies, which were bright red in some places because that’s what color the dirt was.

The road from Ziguinchor to Kafountine is paved but not in great condition, and drivers tend to stick more closely to the path of least resistance than to their side of the blacktop. If avoiding a killer pothole means driving on the left side of the road, go for it. If it means driving on the dirt on either side of the road, feel free to do that as well. This doesn’t create that much of a problem because there’s not a lot of traffic on those roads, but we still managed to experience some near misses and some exuberant language and gestures.

On the road to Kafountine was the only time I ever saw any sign of “trouble.” (Okay, that’s not true. In Ziguinchor, I saw a huge truck with a proportionally huge and lethal-looking weapon of some sort mounted on the back of it. We don’t see those in Dakar. But it was followed down the street shortly thereafter by a nun on a scooter, so it was hard for me to feel concerned for too long). Every few miles or so there would be a uniformed guy standing on the side of the road holding a big gun. There weren’t any of those on the way to Saint Louis. None of them seemed particularly worried, though. In fact, plenty of them seemed to be absorbed in their cell phone games. It would be reasonable to assume that they were stationed there as checkpoints, but they never stopped the car or anything. The driver did stop a couple times along the way at places that clearly were checkpoints, but they seemed to be manned by civilians for the most part.

In any case, we didn’t have any problems and we arrived in Kafountine just as it was getting dark. The place where we were staying was probably little over a mile outside the main town, near the beach and some of the more far-flung campements (rustic, beachy lodging). Casamance, despite the State Department, is actually pretty touristy, and the coast is studded with towns, little and big, that are full of hotels and restaurants and things to do. The most well-known of these towns is Cap Skiring, which is about as far south as you can go without crossing in to Guinea-Bissau. It’s supposed to have stunning beaches and a lot of big, expensive resorts full of wealthy Europeans. Kafountine is like a more laid-back version of Cap Skiring on the Gambia side of the Casamance River. The beaches are just as nice, but there are no huge resorts here and the accommodations are a lot more welcoming to people on a tighter budget.

A lot of people we talked to in the town told us that it was getting a lot more developed in recent years. Joe’s house is probably among those that have popped up in what used to be the empty woods. I couldn’t really get a read for whether or not people there were excited that the town was growing, because more people means more business and more money, or annoyed that their home village was being invaded by people building big fancy compounds.

Joe’s house is definitely what you would call a big fancy compound, by Senegalese standards. There was a main house, two smaller cases (round hut things), a house for the caretaker, and lots of land that had been haphazardly landscaped with flowers and fruit trees. Like most things Senegalese, though, there were a few things not quite right. First, the roof of the main house had been badly constructed and as a result, had fallen in. So the house wasn’t being used at the moment, and because it wasn’t being used, they had turned off the electricity, meaning that we spent our nights by candlelight and had to carefully conserve the lives of our cell phone batteries.

But still, for free housing, it wasn’t bad. We had running water and showers that weren’t frigidly cold, something we’ve all come to appreciate, and the kitchen was fully functional because there was a gas stove (I have yet to see an electric stove in Senegal). We all stayed in one of the cases, which had two rooms and two bathrooms and enough beds for everyone. I think there were so many beds because all the furniture from the main house was being stored in the cases. I don’t think they routinely sleep seven people in there.

For our first night, Amalaca told us that there was a restaurant right near the house where we could have dinner, so we’d planned on just eating there. As it turns out, however, March/April is the tail end of tourist season in Kafountine, and as a result, there’s basically no one there. This is nice for going to the beach, because you feel like you’re on a deserted island in a tropical paradise, but it means that if you show up to one of the restaurants at the campements, they don’t have any food to give you. You’ve got to tell them in the morning that you’ll be coming around for dinner later in the day so they can be prepared for you, and you’ve got to tell them what you’ll want to eat so they can go shopping. We hadn’t done that, so we were forced to improvise dinner out of the groceries that we had bought for breakfast the next morning and the spaghetti that Amalaca had produced out of no where. This meant that we had a hilariously white but surprisingly tasty dinner of spaghetti, eggs, and bread. We spent the rest of the night hanging out together by candlelight, eating the last of the cake that Phoebe had made and brought with her, and gaping at how many stars we could see.

The itinerary that Joe had mapped out for us the day before had involved a night or two in Kafountine and then more traveling all around Casamance, but the longer we stayed there, the less we wanted to leave, and we ended up just staying in Kafountine for the greater part of our break. The rest of the girls arrived on Sunday, and we spent the next few days hanging around the house and the beach, buying all the bread from every boutique within a short walk (Kafountine bread is different, and better, than Dakar bread), checking out the town, cooking, and making friends with all the locals. It was really quiet, really peaceful, and really lovely.

It was a lot of fun to do all our own cooking, but because the mini marché where we had to get our groceries was a bit of a hike from the house and taxis usually come that far out from the main town just looking for fares, it could be a bit of a production. To give ourselves a little break, one night we gave one of the campement restaurants our advanced notice and had an awesome chicken dinner. We were the only ones there, and we hung around long after we’d finished eating. The building was open and airy with a traditional paillote roof (made from some local plant; all the buildings there were like that), and by the time we left, there were bats flying around the ceiling.

There was a batik workshop right near where we were staying, so we all made batiks at some point while we were there. Making batiks is sort of like doing tie-dye with wax. You brushed melted wax over the areas that you want to protect, and then dye the fabric, boil the wax off, and voilà, beautiful new fabric with your design on it. The workshop was owned by a Senegalese guy and his German wife, and people would just come around and hang out there during the course of the day.

We met a lot of people who seemed to just hang around the area, at the boutiques or on the beach. A lot of them were surprised and delighted to find out that we were American, and a few told us that they had never met Americans before. I was a little surprised by this, because I figured they’d get tourists from all over, but it seems that Kafountine is a gem that’s been discovered almost exclusively by Europeans. I guess European state departments either don’t get as fussy with their travel warnings, or European travelers just don’t pay as much attention to them. Everyone was sad to hear that we would only be staying for a few days and very insistent that we had to come back sometime, some to the point of laying quasi guilt trips. They would also play at being offended if you didn’t remember their names when you saw them the next day, but they never remembered our names either, so that was easy enough to turn back around on them, which they thought was hilarious. Some of them, like Kofi, a Togolese guy that I met as I was walking down the beach, offered to take us out on excursions to islands and villages nearby. Pako, a Rastafarian and djembe drummer, invited us to several drumming shows and soirées at one of the campements. Lamine talked politics with us for a while. He was the first person I’ve met in Senegal who said that he would have voted for McCain and not Obama, because Obama “hadn’t worked enough.”

Tuesday was a really cool and typically Senegalese kind of day. It started off on a good note because Melanie and Phoebe, those goddesses of the kitchen, made pancakes for breakfast. We even found some Aunt Jemima in the pantry that was seven years past the expiration date but that we ate any way. It didn’t look like there was anything wrong with it. After breakfast, Hanna and I walked into town and spent the whole day meeting people, beginning with this Dutch guy and his Guinean female companion (whose eyebrows were drawn on with a purple pencil) who picked us up about half way and gave us a ride into town.

In town, I bought some overpriced post cards and we talked to the first guy from Casamance who asked us what people in America know about Casamance, and whether we had been told not to come. We kept walking down the main street, bought some oranges from one woman and had them peeled by another, and said lots of Asalaam maleikums. At one point, we realized we were gathering an entourage of little girls who were following us at a bit of a distance and shouting greetings and “toubab!” at us. When we turned around and responded to them, they all broke into huge smiles and ran to us. When I pulled out my camera, they went crazy and started jostling around lifting each other up to get into the pictures. They were great.

We kept walking and were invited to sit and talk to a guy working at the gare routière, who asked us if we’d eaten barracuda yet, and then again by a guy who owned the boutique where we bought a bottle of water, named Souleyman. We actually stayed there for a long time, hanging out with him, his two daughters Fatou and Fanta, and a couple of his friends. He made us two rounds of ataaya (Senegalese tea) and taught Hanna some phrases in Bambara. Hanna is going to Mali for a couple weeks once our program is over, and Bambara is to Mali what Wolof is to Senegal (meaning the language of the ethnic majority that’s spoken by most of the minorities as well, the lingua franca).

This was an episode in our linguistic astonishment that persisted for the whole week. I don’t know if Kafountine in particular or Casamance in general is just a particularly diverse region, but I don’t think we met a single person who spoke the same group of languages as any other person, and I doubt that we met anyone who spoke less than three. For European languages, we met people who spoke French, English, German, and Dutch. For African languages, I lost track early on. People certainly spoke Wolof, but I don’t think there are a lot of Wolof people who live in Casamance. The biggest ethnicity there is Diola. The Diola people have their own language, but there are strong dialects within it that aren’t always mutually intelligible, so Diola itself might as well be four or five different languages. There are also a lot of Peul people in Casamance, so there’s another one, and Souleyman and his family were from Mali and spoke Bambara. There’s at least one more that we heard that I can’t remember the name of, and there are probably more that we heard and couldn’t distinguish and probably even more on top of that that we didn’t hear but that someone probably spoke in the next house over. It was nuts. Talking to very young kids was the craziest. If we addressed them in French, their parents or friend would tell us, “Oh no, she doesn’t speak French.” So we’d switch to Wolof. No dice. We knew about two phrases in Diola (Ka su mai, ka su mai kep!), so we would try that. If that didn’t work, we’d finally ask what they did speak and be given the names of at least two other languages. How cool is that?? These kids are already multilingual, they’ll definitely learn French in school, and chances are they’ll pick up Wolof too. I’ve been studying French for more years than they’ve been alive and I am far from fluent, and there I was, surrounded by a crowd of peewee polyglots. Africa is amazing.

Anyway, after we’d hung out with Souleyman for a while, we had a ceebujen lunch at a restaurant (which, because it was in the center of town, could safely make a dish or two and know that someone would show up to eat it) and then went to find this massage place called Chez Ouly. The map in my Lonely Planet didn’t quite correspond to the geographical reality of Kafountine, so we had to stop in a boutique and ask for directions. The guys there grilled us in Wolof for a while and walked us down the street and around the corner to Ouly’s house. She’s the only one who works there and she had someone coming in soon, so she told us to come back in about 2 hours. We didn’t really have anything to do for that long, so we went back to the boutique and hung out with the guys who gave us the directions, Ibrahima and Boubacar. Ibrahima own the boutique, and Boubacar was a Gambian friend of his. Ibrahima was a Francophone local, but Boubacar didn’t speak French because the Gambia was a random British colony in the middle of French West Africa. His English wasn’t perfect either, which made us think he would be more comfortable in another language. When that happens to us here, usually that means switching to French, so we’ve gotten into the habit of doing that sort of automatically. He had to tell us he didn’t understand what we were saying like five times because we’d slipped into French without thinking, or because we’d just been talking to Ibrahima in French.

In the 90 minutes or so that we spent with them, they fed us a second lunch of some spicy Guinean dish, Hanna planned extensive travel in the Gambia with Boubabar’s family and friends, and we were invited to come back for dinner with all our friends. We warned them that all our friends added up to eight people, but they said that was fine. They’d go down to the beach and get fresh fish and cook it up with some rice and onions. They were absolutely sincere, and since this meal was likely to be much tastier than anything we could throw together, we accepted.

After that we went and got our massages, which were veeeery nice, and went back to the house. We walked by the boutique on the way back and Boubacar was sitting outside with his entire hand inside a huge fish. He pointed to it, smiled broadly, and said, “This is your dinner!” Unfortunately, despite our best efforts to get people to come with us, the thought of delicious fish was not enough to tempt many of the others to take the long, dark, sandy walk back into town when they could make perfectly good egg sandwiches right there at the house, and in the end it was only Alicia and Amalaca who went back with us. The guys were clearly a little disappointed that more people hadn’t come, and when they brought out the food it was clear why: they had cooked enough not just for eight extra people, but for at least a dozen. There were two platters full of rice and at least six enormous fish. We sat on the floor in a tiny crowded room and ate by candle- and cell-phone-light, because even though this part of town had electricity, the power had gone out. It was indeed delicious, and we ate until we couldn’t stand the thought of another bite, but there was so much food left that it looked liked we’d barely touched it. They brought us cans of Coke after dinner and then walked us all the way back to our house. Ibrahima gave me his phone number and told me that we should keep in touch by email and that if I sent him my address, he would send me a necklace.

The next day was our last in Kafountine. We had a long and lazy morning and took a sept-place back to Ziguinchor in the late afternoon, or at least, the seven of us girls did. Amalaca would have made eight people in seven seats, which would have been really uncomfortable for two hours on a smooth road, let alone a bumpy Senegalese jungle road, so Amalaca stayed at the gare to wait for the next one.

In what was theoretically the least safe decision we made all week, Hanna, Marecca, and Alicia got out in Bignona, a town about 30 minutes outside of Ziguinchor. Hanna and Marecca’s host family has a relative there that they had planned on visiting, but all they knew about this guy was his phone number and that he owned a boutique. They weren’t quite sure of where his house was, or his name, or if they spoke a common language, or if he would be willing to let them stay there that night. Also, although Bignona seems like a pretty big town by Casamance standards, it wasn’t even listed in Marecca’s guidebook, and mine only had a short paragraph that gave the names of two hotels and said that Bignona had been a core area of the separatist movement, and this was the only place that the locals had told them to be careful. Also, nearly all of our cell phone batteries were dead. So dropping the three of them off at a gas station at sunset felt a little ominous. Everything turned out fine; they found the relative, who was very friendly and hospitable and spoke French, but (Mom) you’ll notice that I stayed in the car and was very relieved to be doing so.

The sept-place dropped us off at Joe and Awaye’s house, were we waited for Amalaca for about two hours (that’s how long it took for his sept-place to fill up). Katie went to stay with her host family’s family that night, and Phoebe, Melanie, and I went to Amalaca’s mother’s house, where we had dinner and passed out almost immediately afterwards. The next day, Thursday, we got all our stuff together to head back home, met the others at the port, stocked up on junk food at a supermarché, attempted an exploratory walk around the town of Ziguinchor but found that it was too hot (Ziguinchor is inland whereas Kafountine is on the coast, so it was MUCH hotter there), so we boarded the boat a little early and hung out there for a while. The boat ride back was not quite as fun as the ride there, because some of us had gotten tickets late and couldn’t get in to a cabin, the timing of the trip meant that you spent more waking hours on the boat, and the ocean was choppier, which is bad news for anyone who gets seasick. We got into Dakar at about 6:30 AM, took a taxi with an angry driver back from the port, and were quite happy to collapse into our beds at home.