All semester long, my friends and I have been talking about taking a trip to Joal, the coastal city that is the hometown of Senegal’s first president, Leopold Senghor. The trip has gone into the planning stages several times (unsuccessfully), but this weekend Shannon, Allison, and I finally made the trek.
I’m not usually one for recapitulating the entire contents of a weekend in blog-entry form, but I think this time around it’s worth it. Plus there will be pictures, lots of pictures.
Alright, so Friday morning the three of us met up and took a taxi to La Gare Pompier, Dakar’s sept-place station. I had never been there before, but the place was essentially hundreds of limping, rusted station wagons idling in a giant dirt lot. This being Senegal, there’s no such thing as parking spaces or neat orderly rows, so the cars are just crammed in where ever there are a few free feet of space. Anyway, after a few minutes of wandering through that madness, we found a car headed for Joal and climbed inside.
The way sept-places work is that they leave once all sept of the places have been filled. So the three of us settled in to wait for the next four passengers to arrive. But our very presence in the station had set off a mini-frenzy. Suddenly there were ten vendors crowded around our little car, reaching their arms inside with Senegal’s usual random assortment of products. There were pirated documentaries about riots in guinea and fake gucci sunglasses and bananas and apple-scented dish soap and pineapple cookies and phone cards. And a hundred salesmen all insisting, “my sister, my sister, a good price for you, a good price.”
Soon four more passengers had arrived, each of us paid our 2000 francs ($4) and we were off. The three hour drive was uneventful, except for the usual bottleneck of traffic on the one (!) highway that leads out of Dakar. At the station in Joal we hailed a cab and told him the name of our hostel. We drove for a few minutes until suddenly he abruptly veered and pulled over on the side of the road.
“Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” I asked [what’s happening?]
“C’est sama yaay,” he said calmly. [It’s my mother] Sure enough, there was a woman in a bright blue Senegalese dress jogging towards the car. She poked her head inside, greeted us all (the Senegalese never fail to greet everyone in the room—or in this case the car—before starting a conversation) had a quick exchange with the driver in Wolof, and then bid us all farewell and walked off. Oh Senegal.
Anyway, after tossing our things down at the hostel, we headed out to wander around the city. Apparently the site of three white girls with cameras was hugely entertaining for the under-15 population of Joal, because kids would run up and point at us or shyly shake our hands and then scamper off. And throughout the whole day, a constant refrain of “toubab! toubab!” [white person, white person] followed us where ever we went.
Our first major stop of the day was the childhood home of Leopold Senghor, Senegal’s first president after their independence from France in 1960. Senghor is a kind of west African George Washington meets Abe Lincoln meets Robert Frost (did I mention he was also a world-famous poet?), so seeing his house was a good end-of-my-stay-here experience. Plus, I got this whole series of epic photographs of me with the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Leopold Senghor himself.*
*or a lifelike facsimile thereof
We are in love. What can I say?
So after Mr. Senghor’s house, we somehow found ourself wandering through a mangrove forest when suddenly a gaggle of senegalese children in life jackets appeared with two white camera men in tow. I don’t really have any more of an explanation than that, so here’s the photograph:
But the real highlight of the day came in the evening, when we rented a horse-drawn…well, a horse-drawn platform would probably be the most accurate way to put it, to drive us to the largest baobab tree in Senegal.
We had the world’s most hilarious driver, who told us his horse was named Michael Jackson and demanded to know if we didn’t think America was a better place than Senegal “because there aren’t mosquitos there.” [not sure where he got his facts on that one?] His French wasn’t good, but neither is mine, so it took the pressure off, and he loved our stumbling attempts at Wolof and our apparently bizarre level of giddiness at riding around on a horse-drawn cart.
The baobab itself was rightly epic. You could actually climb inside of the trunk and walk around. And on the way back we caught a great sunset over the mangroves.
The next morning we woke up, crawled out of our mosquito nets, and walked to Fadjoute, an island near Joal that is actually just a deposit of seashells. It used to be a big seafood trash dump for the people of the city, and now it’s it’s own little town connected to the mainland by a long bridge. The highlight there was a cemetery with the graves of both muslims and christians (a rarity in senegal) and where the bodies were buried under piles of shells.
The seashell graveyard marked our last real stop in Joal. After eating and wandering a bit more, we sept-placed it back to Dakar. And that, friends, is the story of my voyage to Joal.
Over and out.
Joal
Leopold Senghor
Joal !
Je me rappelle.
Je me rappelle les signares à l´ombre verte des vérandas
Les signares aux yeux surréels comme un clair de lune sur la grève.
Je me rappelle les fastes du Couchant
Où Koumba N´Dofène voulait faire tailler son manteau royal.
Je me rappelle les festins funèbres fumant du sang des troupeaux égorgés
Du bruit des querelles, des rhapsodies des griots.
Je me rappelle les voix païennes rythmant le Tantum Ergo
Et les processions et les palmes et les arcs de triomphe.
Je me rappelle la danse des filles nubiles
Les choeurs de lutte - oh ! la danse finale des jeunes hommes, buste
Penché élancé, et le pur cri d´amour des femmes - Kor Siga !
Je me rappelle, je me rappelle…
Ma tête rythmant
Quelle marche lasse le long des jours d´Europe où parfois
Apparaît un jazz orphelin qui sanglote sanglote sanglote.
