So there i was, just off the plane, in Dakar Senegal. It all seemed so normal, yet "surreal"...i am actually "in" Africa. It was dark early morning as we got off the plane and took the shuttle to the terminal. One terminal. One small, quiet, dusty terminal in the big crowded cosmopolitan city of 2.5 million, Dakar. After getting my passport stamped, and smiling my way out of paying the ten us dollar bribe tax, i went to get my two duffel bags from the luggage carasol. They didn't arrive. Never mind...Ken and Naomi were there to greet me! Adama Ken Doumbia, one of Senegal's great dancers from years past, my good friend and drum and dance teacher for 10 years. Ken had been inviting me to come visit his family in Dakar for since we met...finally here. And Naomi, my good friend from America, Kens wife...
Kens life story is remarkable...(then again, whose isn't?)....born and raised in Dakar as the eldest child to parents of mostly Bamana descent. The Bamana are one of the ethnic cultural groups that are part of, or inside, the larger Mande people...Mande, Manding, Malinke, Mandinka, Mandingo, Mende...many variant names for people who are part of the same basic ethnic and cultural nation. Once there was an actual nation called the Mali empire...pre-colonial times. It stretched from Timbuktu in eastern Mali to Dakar in the west...from the Saraha desert in the north to the rain forest mountains of Guinea in the south...it covered all or parts of probably 8 different modern day countries of West Africa. Senegal in the Mande language is pronounced Sunugal...which means "our boat". So an entire modern day nation was named by the Mali empire "our boat" because it was on the coast. That's a big empire. The empire was rich with gold. They built mosques so finely engineered that the mud walls still stand strong after 600 years! They controlled the river, trade routes...they created music that is admired to this day...they farmed cotton and invented unique and fascinating fabrics such as "mud cloth"...every famous African animal roamed the land (it was wetter 500 years ago...there was more rain, bigger lakes, it was greener)...the very name Mali means Hippopotamus. The capital city of Mali is called Bamako...Bamba Ko...which means the Back of the Crocodile. Bamako lies on the banks of the Niger river...one of the worlds longest and largest rivers...a river which flows from the Guinea highlands all the way to the delta of Nigeria probably 6000 kilometers downstream. The Bamana are from the Bamako region...Bamana is an interesting word that was translated by one of my djembe drum teachers as meaning "We not join". Join what? Islam. Many Bamana resisted Islam when it was first introduced some 1000 or so years ago...and maintain a somewhat ambivalent relationship towards Islam to this day.
So Ken was raised by his father to speak Bamana in the home...and he learned French and Wolof in school and with his friends. Wolof is the main ethnic language of Senegal...and of course French is taught because Senegal was colonised, economically exploited, culturally disrespected and politically tyrannized by France for many decades. Senegal gained Independence in the early 60's, those heady times for the African continent when freedom was a sweet dream that came to fruition...only to be tempered by the sour bitterness of despotic military leaders who in turn tyrannized their own people (with Western support of course) in the 70's, 80's and 90's...and continue in this the 21st century.
Senegal avoided the atrocities of the Idi Amin (Uganda), Aparthied (South Africa), and Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire) style political system however, and its first president (Leopold Senghor) was a poet nominated for the Nobel prize in poetry...his party dominated politics until early this century, when the candidate for the opposition party, Abdoulaye Wade, was elected. His election was considered the first democratically achieved (that is to say, through a fair popular election) change of party leadership in post colonial Africa. So that is something to take note of.
Yet and still, there is a violent conflict in the southern region of Senegal called The Casamance: a rebel army that is fighting for annexation and Independence from the nation. We begin to hear of government sponsored militias (can you say Janjaweed?) who are "disappearing" people in the Casamance. Incidentally, Casamance means the "house of the kings". The neighboring country to the south is called Guinea Bissau. It was colonised by the Portuguese, who were actually the first European slave traders in West Africa. Casa means house in Portuguese. Mansa, or Mance, means King in the Mande language. So its a kind of creole word... the geography of Senegal fuels the separatist movement of the Casamance. Senegal is split almost in half down the middle by the country of Gambia, which runs up the Gambia river from the sea almost to the Eastern border of Senegal and Mali. The Casamance is the southern half, shielded from Northern Senegal (and the capital) by the border of Gambia.
When Ken was a young teenager his father passed away and he moved to Mali to live with his extended family. There he was taken under the wing by his elder relative who taught him the ancient ways and traditions of the Bamana people...and then back to the big city of Dakar in his early 20's where he developed into one of Senegals brightest dance stars. He joined the national dance company of Senegal, a group which traveled the world performing the wonderful traditional dances of West Africa set to the fantastic music and rhythms of the Djembe and Dun Dun drums... and other amazing instruments such as the Balafon and the Kora...eventually he settled in the USA. 11 years ago Ken was teaching djembe drum in Oakland California and i started taking classes with him. And then djembe dance classes. We became friends...and late March of 2007 he and Naomi picked me up at the airport in Dakar to take me their house in the suburbs!
About five years ago Ken and Naomi bought a piece of property in an area of Dakar called Parcelles Assaines. It is literally a suburb, in that it is almost purely residential and set far from the downtown area...yet still part of the continuous urban sprawl that is called Dakar. Parcelles runs east to west along the north shore of the city, pushed up against a long broad flat beach that reminds me of Ocean beach in San Francisco. Ken and Naomi paid for and supervised the building of a brand new modern style house, with four bedrooms and a garage...and then moved Kens entire family into the place. The family, consisting of Kens mom, two sisters, two brothers, one sister in law, and six children, had been renting and living in a small compound in the crowded "inner city" for years. It was a dream come true to move out to the suburbs away from the hubub, the noise, the energy of the inner city, to the fresh air and a nice house...
So we drove by taxi the 6 or 7 kilometers from the airport to the house...all through the first day i met all the family and friends, and was able to use the Wolof greetings i learned while living with Ken in Oakland for two years back in the day...JAI JEFF OTAY!...Ken and Naomi had gone ahead and built a second story onto the house a few years after building the house proper, but the second story wasn't divided into rooms yet...just one big floor with a roof, large rectangular windows and a bathroom. So i pitched my bug proof mesh tent on one side and settled in.
My first impression was how cool and quiet the area was. As i sat observing in the afternoon of my first day i noticed the predominant sounds were the crashing of the waves from the ocean 600 meters away...birds chirping, the voices of neighbors and people on the street conversing and laughing, and the shrieks and shouts of the many children playing on the street. The unpaved street...all sand. Very few cars even passing by. Most people don't own cars...they walk to market, they walk to the main street where the buses run...if they have a bit of money they take taxis, which run everywhere all the time...just as many horse drawn carts pass in front of the street as cars...
In Parcelles the houses are flush against each other and there are no trees...nothing green really growing at all! Its like a big concrete jungle built on a beach...so its all sandy streets and hundreds of blocks of concrete two and three story houses. The houses are built literally by hand. Across the street from our house is an empty lot. I watched for days as guys would mold large bricks out of sand and water by hand, and then leave them to bake dry in the hot sun. Later they would cart the bricks by horse to the building sites where they would build the houses. No machinery. They carry each and every brick, lay them with mortar...they also use metal rods as a structural matrix to hold the whole thing together. Its quiet as they build, like watching construction from another time period. The men move steadily but unhurriedly. In the US they would be required by law to wear steel toed boots, and hard hats. Here they wear baseball caps and flip flops. Flip flops!
The electricity, or current as they call it, all comes from a central source (oil burning plants somewhere in the country, thank you very much big oil corporations)...the sewage is not central though. Houses use large sort of septic tank holding areas that get vacuumed out by big smelly sewage trucks once every six months or so...and the water all comes from large reservoirs fed by the rivers flowing into Senegal from the high country to the east....
So that was my first day. I slept most of it...and wrote down all the names of the family in my little book so i would remember everyone. First is Fanta, Kens mom. We call her Yai, which means momma. Next is Sekoba, Kens brother, and Seko's wife Fatoumbai, and their three daughters Aji (12), Fanta (8) and Nayhadee (6). Then comes Kens sister Aji, and her daughter Abi (11) and son Mohammad (4). After that is Kens sister Marietou and her daughter Tida (9)...last is Kens little brother Salif who is about 25 years old. Sekoba and Fatoumbai's daughter Aji is nicknamed Aji Boondao, which means little Aji, and Fanta is nicknamed Yai Boondao, which means little momma because she is named after her grandmother, but also because she is bossy just like a little momma.
My first week in Dakar was school spring break so the children were around the house all day. And you know me, the teacher...just enjoy playing with the kids...I especially bonded with Tida the first two weeks or so...Tida accompanied me to market, to the beach, she enjoyed tagging along. We couldn't communicate very well with my no Wolof or French, her no English...she we used sounds and sign language, and laughed alot. Kids are great with people who don't speak the language...they adapt quickly to facial expressions, body language and simple words...
My days quickly settled into a rhythm. Wake up, bathe, go across the street to buy a cup of coffee touba, and sit with Ken and his friends in the garage learning a bit of Wolof, laughing and just watching the life on the street. Then go the beach, swim a bit, lay in the sun...then return for lunch with the family...maybe walk to the market to buy something or just wander around...return for more sitting in the garage, or on the street, meeting the neighbors, playing with the kids...conversing with the men, Kens friends...until late at night...drinking tea called attaya...then a late night dinner around the communal bowl, and sleep. My first couple of weeks i would lay in my tent with the fresh cool sticky salty ocean air blowing through the windows, listening to the sheep in the next door house backyard bleating, and think...wow...i am in Africa. What a feeling...on the continent...the big vast island of Africa...the red sandy soil...the history...the sun kissed days...
OK. More tomorrow. Much more.
