Postcards from Dakar: Meet me in Saint-Louis, Day 1

This weekend was our group trip to Saint-Louis, an island city in the north of Senegal that used to be an important colonial city. It was the capital of French West Africa, which was the federation of French colonies (Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Cote D’Ivoire, and Benin) that existed up until everyone started getting their independence. It’s famous for its colonial architecture and its jazz festival.

We left on Friday and drove all morning through barren Sahel landscape. We saw animals, like donkeys, goats and cattle, that were seemingly wild and unattended. Every now and then you’d look out and see people walking through the bush even though there was no sign of a settlement anywhere. What could they possibly be doing out there? Sometimes we would see little groupings of huts made out of branches and dried palm leaves and there would be people working around the huts. We also saw a lot of dead cattle carcasses. In one case, it must have been a fresh one, because it was absolutely covered in gigantic scavenging birds with incredible wingspans. I don’t know if they were actually vultures, but they were certainly something in the same vein.

We finally got to Saint-Louis in the afternoon and then promptly drove right by it without stopping. That was a little disconcerting. As it turns out, we were staying at the University of Saint-Louis, which isn’t actually on the island of Saint-Louis- it’s farther north. Waly later explained to us that Saint Louis has lodging shortages because it’s a small city with a large tourist appeal. It’s also election season in Senegal, and all the politicians are campaigning in the bigger towns and filling up the hotels with their entourages.

Those are all good reasons, but nevertheless, it was a little disappointing to not be right in the city. It meant that whenever we had free time, and which there seemed to be a lot of in the schedule that they gave us, we wouldn’t be able to go explore the city on our own. The real bummer about the university housing, however, is that for most of the weekend there was little or no running water. Apparently the university area is growing faster that the infrastructure can be modified, and the water mains are now hooked up to more places than they can really supply. So sometimes the water would run and sometimes it wouldn’t, and there was certainly never enough pressure to take a proper shower.

When we got to the University, we settled into our rooms and had lunch, and then headed back to the city to take a tour, which had its pros and cons. WARC had hired four horse-drawn buggies with tour guides that belonged one of the hotels to take us around the city. It was nice to be in a reasonably comfortable carriage with a friendly tour guide, a horse named Barak Obama, and an explanation of the history and what everything was. Saint-Louis is a very beautiful city, or at least it would have been in its hey-day. The buildings are all painted bright, beautiful colors and have pretty wrought iron balconies on their second stories. There are also some interesting sights, such as the Point Faidherbe, which is named after Senegal’s most famous French colonial governor, was designed by Gustave Eiffel and must be the only mosque in the world that has a bell and a clock in the minaret. Apparently, although Faidherbe was an understanding governor who ate ceebujen, spoke some Wolof, and loved the Senegalese women, he couldn’t stand the call to prayer five times daily and had the bell installed so that he wouldn’t have to listen to it.

There were moments, however, that were a little less comfortable. The tour took us through the quartier where the local fishermen live, which was very busy and crowded with lots and lots of children in particular. The tour guide explained to us that there were so many children because pretty much all the marriages in this part of town are polygamous. We stopped and got out and walked around the fishing beach for a while, where the women make smoked and salted fish from whatever the men can’t sell to the merchants who come from out of town to take the fish all across Senegal and West Africa. The beach was covered in piles of fish heads, scales, and innards. As we were walking through here, women and young boys asked us for presents and money, and some played bait-the-toubab by shoving dead fish in our faces. That didn’t really bother me so much as the feeling that we were just a bunch of rich white people coming to gawk at a bunch of poor black people in their “natural habitat,” and that we probably deserved to have dead fish waved in our faces.

After our tour in Saint-Louis, we were taken back to the University. We had some time to rest, then dinner, then we headed out for our “cultural evening.” We went to a house somewhere not that far away with a large courtyard where we sat and watched a show. There were musicians, dancers, singers, actors, and a fire-eater, who each got up and did an act. They were all really good, but our enjoyment was somewhat hindered by the fact that we were all exhausted and terrified that they were going to make us dance at any moment, (which they did, at the beginning and end and once or twice during the middle for the unlucky people sitting up front). Watching Senegalese people dance is awesome because they move like no one in the US ever could, and dancing with them often totally fun as long as you don’t get too self-conscious, but it’s an activity that requires a lot of energy. Senegalese “cultural experiences” like that are always cool, but we were all pretty happy to crawl into bed at 1 a.m.