Dakar for the senses
It begins with dust—the plumes, the piles, the grit that is always between your toes, in your hair, clinging to the backs of your arms and the ends of your eyelashes. Then there is the exhaust coughed from crowded buses and wheezed from the back of taxis—limping, barely serviceable black and yellow cars that will take you anywhere in the city for less than four dollars. Now the prickly warmth of a tiny, too-thin hand grabbing at your arm, asking for money or food, Madame, Madame, cent francs, s’il vous plait. Now the street dogs speckled with mud, shaking the flies from their coats, now the steam that rises from ice cream when you take it into the heat. There is that spicy, sweet coffee that costs 10 cents at the store on the corner, the hollow reverberation when you tap a coin on the inside of the bus to tell them to let you off, the constant, persistent refrain of Bonjour, toubab [hello, white person]. And overhead comes the roar of a plane landing at the airport, its underbelly white and almost close enough to touch.
I have never seen Dakar still, and rarely have I known it quiet. Once at midnight on a Saturday I wandered across an open-air shoe market, alive and busy, the vendors smoking and chatting amongst themselves as if this were a Monday afternoon. All night there are people in the streets, walking, sitting huddled in groups, begging for money, trying to steer you into their waiting taxi or restaurant or night club, until at 6 a.m. the imams begin the first of their daily prayer calls and the city flips again. Fruit sellers drag out their wares and delivery boys begin their rounds of baguette drop-offs. And suddenly there is sun again, bright and unblinking in the clear blue sky. It will be hot. It is always hot here. And so another day begins. Again and as always, the city churns on, rattling and rasping against you as it goes and it goes and it goes.
