To Senegal with Said in the bag

Already as you get to Dakar's more run-down suburbs – along the railway line leading to Mali's capital Bamako and along the main thoroughfare that connects Dakar with the rest of Senegal, the motorway via the dirty small town of Rufisque and the slightly larger Thies, you can see goats in droves in the streets. They are tied with half a meter of slack in the sun roast, where they break and smell like goats.

In Saint-Louis, north of Senegal, only the sleepy tennis club is spared the four-legged ravages. Everywhere else on the narrow island of the Senegal River, a river that marks the border with Mauritania, the former colonial capital of the French is dominated by the presence of the goats.

Outside one of the many mosques, from which the imams call the inhabitants of the city to the first prayer of the day every morning at five o'clock, lies a cannon race and rust in the heat. From 1659 until Senegal won its independence in 1960, the cannon may have helped to strengthen the French bastion in West Africa – the fort of Saint-Louis. Now it lies there, like the tennis club, as a slowly weathering testimony to a violent colonial history.

The bus trip

This is what I'm on my way away from, as the ragged minibus stops for the twentieth or thirtieth time at an intersection to drop off a local madam, or pick up a poor farmer on his way to a relative in Dakar. Soon here, soon there. It will be a good time to read Edvard Said's classic Orientalism, and think about the experiences in Saint-Louis:

The four parallel streets, which stretch from the top to the bottom of the island that make up the city center, and the diverse streets that cross these four, have been flooded for months, throughout the rainy season, which stretches from May to November. They have become a breeding ground for malaria mosquitoes and other insects. Now these float in large numbers over the wet streets and contribute to a feeling in the visitor that nature is about to recapture the city which in its entirety is characterized by colonial architecture. The book Saint-Louis du Senegal: Mort ou naissance (Saint-Lois in Senegal: Death or Rebirth) by French Régine Bonnardel testifies that the city has also had a negative development in the economic field since the end of the colonial era. Unemployment has risen, as has poverty, partly due to Spanish and Russian overfishing in the once rich waters off the coast. Lack of maintenance of the city's buildings, and filthy streets as a result of lack of garbage, is just the tip of the iceberg.

This is what happens when European civilization leaves the Africans to themselves, one might think. The paint peels off, the goats conquer the streets. The culture disappears and is replaced again by pure nature. And something like that is actually what I think, where I am sandwiched between the madam and the farmer. In the encounter with the foreigner – I have never been to Africa before, and do not speak French, or any of the local languages, such as wolof, which contributes significantly to the alienation – you get a good opportunity to feel your own prejudices.

Wallet

Just before this bus trip, which is about to bring me to Dakar, and a pending interview appointment with journalist Latif Coulibaly, a French-born intellectual, who this summer has created waves in the Senegalese political landscape with a book that reveals corruption in President Abdoulaye Wade's government, I visit the village of Lompul.

The visit is organized by the tourist office in Saint-Loius, and represents the self-presentation the country wants to offer foreigners visiting. It is a self-presentation that is undoubtedly meant to serve precisely the prejudices I have now managed to become aware of, by presenting the exotic traditional and untouched village community.

But this was before Said's book came out of the bag. And there was most disgust in this village meeting. The guide said that you could take as many photos as you wanted, and that it was not necessary to ask the permission of those you took photos of. There was no communication across the vast cultural distances, just a routine tea ceremony, which the villagers had been through countless times before. Every time some tourists got lost on the tourist agency's guided tour to "The real Africa".

That the Western representation of the Orient, as it has expressed itself in everything from classical literature to scientific studies of the area, has depicted a complex and multifaceted reality, yes it even carries with it the ideological basis for both racism and colonialism, is a thing. Today, this lives on in the universities' "area studies", in the Western media's portrayal of Islam in the age of terrorism, and thus in my very first encounter with Africa. That's how deep it is fixed.

But at the same time, says Said, the Orient itself has taken over this interpretation, and uses it in its own self-presentation. It was well visible in Lompul.

However, that is not the whole story. For this has also become the village's survival strategy in a country where the soil is eroded due to one-sided agriculture, mainly peanut production, and unemployment in 2001 was up to 48 percent. It is poverty that drives these people into the integrity-destroying tourism business. You can always live with the tourists' lightning rain, as long as it brings food to the table, the idea seems to be. And it is not difficult to understand when few can read and write, and the level of education is low, so that other opportunities rarely present themselves.

interviewed

The bus has wound its way into Dakar now, and in the newspapers you can read about a young political leader who has been beaten up in the street by the regime's supporters. I meet Latif Coulibaly at the journalism school where he is the principal, and he can tell that his book exposing corruption in the Wade government was met with threats. "We have to break mr. Coulibaly's Satanist pen," the Minister of Agriculture is said to have said. Nevertheless, Coulibaly is undaunted.

"We must establish a political public where it is possible to say what one thinks about those who rule the country. That's why I wrote my book about Wade,” he tells me.

With that, he focuses on the lack of a middle class, and how the middle class in a country that by the World Bank has for many years been refused to hire new officials, teachers and so on over time disappears. And a middle class is important for democracy to work. In addition to access to the western markets, these are the most important prerequisites for development, Coulibaly believes.

Modernization

Despite an illiteracy rate of 60 percent, a population where half of the people are under 15 years of age, and a declining standard of living after, among other things, a doubling of the population during the last fifteen years, Senegal has been a relatively stable country since independence. With the exception of a military conflict between the government and a group of separatists in the Casamance region in the south, which has lasted for many years, Senegal has been spared from civil wars, coup d'états and the like. In terms of democracy, Senegal therefore appears to be an African epitome. In an African context, this must be quite good, I think – but I am met with the following harangue: "Why do we have to compare ourselves to the other African countries, which have stagnated in terms of developing democracy. I will not compare Senegal with Liberia, Sierra Leone or Congo, but with your country, or France or the United States. I hater people who advocate that Senegal is an example to follow in Africa. Senegal must be an example to follow globally.”

It is Coulibaly who raises his voice, and I wonder if he is not right that there is a hint of the Orientalism Said is attacking in my assumption that the Senegalese must be well pleased, all the while many other African countries are having a much harder time.

Touba

In another part of the country, an imam calls in for the second prayer for the day in what is said to be the largest mosque south of the Sahara. He does this every day, but this day the imam invites home for dinner after prayer.

In black Africa. In the city of Touba, the stronghold of the West African variant of Islam. The cultural distance, which in Lompul was kept within the safe framework of the tourist agency's staging, is now in free flow.

After the fried fish and the cooked rice, served on a large platter, and ideally eaten by hand, but which I consume with a spoon that the hosts in a hurry pick up, we are left silent. Neither the visitors nor the hosts know how to handle the situation.

And the host in this context, she is one of the imam's four wives. He himself is sitting in an adjoining room, without talking to us. As the trip continues, however, he is in place with his forest laughter. A rolling laugh that makes the tense and unconnected situation less threatening.

The abyss between the Imam of Touba and a secular Western journalist can be closed with the universal human smile.

Goats

Yet it is these phenomena that make it so difficult to say anything solid about development in the world's poorest continent: The postcolonial ambivalence coupled with my own difficulties in separating developmental needs from cultural traits when cultural understanding is so reduced by an oriental spinal reflex, even after a year in the liberal left's multiculturalism, do just that the to a risky affair.

My thoughts go back to the tennis club in the French colonial capital of Saint-Louis, where I, at least at this time of year, was one of the very few guests. Whether the goats that characterize the street scene in the future will also be tied to the poles that keep the tennis net up in the tennis club, and thus occupy the last bastion of colonialism, therefore need not be another sign of the continent's deteriorating condition. It is not only a question of lack of development, but also a question of cultural features. As the Touba's Grand Mosque gradually disappears on the horizon of a new minibus ride between a new local madam and a new farmer on his way to a relative in Dakar, I realize that the more goats, the better, perhaps, for the Western style need not be the answer. Africa's challenges. And a goat or three is probably a kind of wealth – even if they smell like goats.