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.