warning to readers. someone has been commenting on my postings, and in the comment they leave a link which contains a virus. So don't click on any links you might find in these comments! I have the feeling this could be a blogspot-wide trend soooo, as if we need reminding, best to not click on or open anything that looks suspicious ... 

quelles vacances

The mosque in Djenne, the largest mud-structure in the world. (why you should love mud architecture: highly sustainable, locally acquired, thermally efficient, and limitless in design possibilities)

Mali is a lot like Senegal, particularly areas of Senegal outside of its capital region. But the differences, of course, are there - understated, pale; like sisters.

Mali is immense, Mali unrolls the dusty tapestry of its territory in all directions interminably. Mali has so much space, so much void. And how we traipsed and retraipsed it ...

Salif Keita headlined the Festival on the Niger concert we went to in Segou. Salif Keita is an albino, and something about that suggested to me - irrationally I suppose - an infirmity. Which is why the strength of his voice and his heavy presence on stage blew me away. His voice is like a heavy harmattan wind that picks up all the murmurs and whispers and cries breathed across the Sahara and blows it at you with such a force, you’ve got no defenses against it.

I wish we had more time in the desert, but we only spent a couple days up in Timbuktu. We stayed with a young Tuareg married couple who were super friendly, if not a dysfunctional (arranged) match … we rode camels straight towards the red setting sun, as if we could meet it on the horizon. Spent the night in their cousins’ encampment, under a moonless sky and ten thousand stars. From the highest private dune I watched the desert come back to life in the morning. I thought about what it must be like to know your way through the desert by the stars and the dunes, so identical looking to me. The desert is like the ocean in many ways, fierce but traversable in the same way. Frightening and alluring in the same ways. The city of Timbuktu itself is really cool, a special blend of African and Arab. Magic lamps and flying carpets for sale. Definitely a trace of the grandiose center of learning it was so many many years ago. Getting there and back was a drag though! After the return trip, we crashed for 24 hours in a sleepy little town at the foot of a mountain that seemed made just for that purpose.

We spent a lot of time on the road, which was a really good chance to see the environment but tiring too because transportation tends to be a little uncomfortable … Laura and I spent a lot of time thoughtfully ranking the worst rides. The time we squeezed 13 people in a “public” 4WD vehicle and flew across the rocky desert might have been the worst. The busride from Djenne to Segou felt luxurious by comparison, until we got peed on by the sheep on the roof.

Mali is archaic and artistic and magical. It was incredible, really.

For those of you who didn't know (I didn't know), 2008 is the International Year of Languages. A fitting time to learn a new language and to ruminate over the babel that both separates and connects us.

When I studied abroad in Senegal, I was lucky to meet Boubacar Boris Diop, a Senegalese novelist who published for years in French before switching to his native language, Wolof. This is a really thought-provoking interview with him that touches on so many interesting, if problematic issues concerning African writers and readers. (For more on UNESCO's International Year of Languages: http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=41344&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html)


Interview by Jasmina Šopova

You wrote a dozen books in French before choosing Wolof, your mother language. Why this reversion?

Actually, my language was always there, inside me. The only problem I faced was the ability to write in my language. I was “corrupted” by French. I spoke everyday Wolof, but I didn’t possess it intimately.

Then there was Rwanda. A group of writers I belonged to went there after the genocide, in 1998, as part of the operation “Rwanda: writing as a duty to memory”. I said to myself that if we’d let 10,000 Rwandans get killed per day for three months, if nobody had done anything, this conveyed a certain contempt for Africa…

At that moment I felt even more strongly the desire to write in my mother language. It became essential. Oh, at first it was painful…I was very afraid of writing a French novel in Wolof. I had to fight against myself, but the Diops are stubborn! Then I began to hear voices – voices that came up out of the past. And writing became very easy. I am certain that my first novel in Wolof, Doomi golo (the she-monkey’s young), is my best piece of writing.

Is writing in Wolof therefore also a political act?

Absolutely. Coming back to the title of my novel The she-monkey’s young: what’s a monkey? It’s an imitation of the other. The passage that best sums up the book is the one in which you see a huge mirror in the middle of nowhere. Two gorillas find themselves in front of the mirror and they see their own images. They start fighting their reflections and as a result of hitting the mirror, they hurt themselves and die. What we call hatred of the other is in fact self-hatred. You have to be able to tolerate your image in the mirror, assume your identity.

At the moment I’m translating this novel into French. It will be published in France in September 2008.

Why didn’t you decide to publish it in French in Senegal?

Because now there are only publishers in national languages. That’s good news, anyway…even if their tongues are hanging out! They work with enthusiasm, but with immeasurable difficulties too: no way to make a profit, no distribution…True, the state occasionally steps in. The “Direction du Livre et de la Lecture” (book and reading administration) funded, for instance, a second edition of my book Doomi Golo after the first run of 3000 copies was sold out.

Besides my publisher Papyrus, there’s the « Organisation Sénégalaise d'Appui au Développement » (OSAD) that does remarkable work. And also ARED publishers, but they’re specialized in research and in education for development.

How many readers can you have in Wolof?

If I’d asked myself that question, I would never have started writing! It’s true that where I come from, many people don’t know how to read and don’t buy books. And they have other priorities: their children’s health, feeding their families….There’s also another phenomenon: rich people who live in poor societies generally prefer buying a fancy car, because you can’t show off a book….

We have to accept this situation and bet on the long term. It will take a while for books written today in the African languages to prevail, but they’ll eventually find acceptance. Thirty years ago, literature in national languages didn’t exist, except for a few isolated cases. Today the situation is the opposite: hundreds of books have been published in Wolof and Pulaar, definitely more than in French.

There are two writers’ organizations in Senegal, one composed of writers in French, the other of writers in national languages. The latter are far more numerous, but they have no visibility, because we live in a society where French is the language of prestige.

Do you count on diaspora readership?

A great deal. But although the younger generations of the diaspora speak their mother languages, they don’t know how to read or write them. This is why I had the idea of organizing a Wolof workshop with young people whose background is Senegalese immigration in France. At first the parents didn’t necessarily see any benefit in their children learning their mother language, but there was great demand from the young people. We’re starting in Bordeaux on 25 February. It’s an idea that seems odd initially, but if it works I’ll be very proud of it.

Often when one travels from one African capital to another, one has to stop off in a European capital. Does this also happen in the world of African literature?

It would be fantastic if I could translate the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo directly form Kikuyu into Wolof, without going through English and French….To my knowledge there’s almost no translation from one African language into another. My novel Doomi Golo is translated into Pulaar now. But who will translate it into Swahili? Do we have to wait two or three centuries? Not necessarily, but that’s what I fear, alas.

You know, Africa was divided up by the colonial powers in Berlin in 1885. Africans speak to each other through the colonial languages. And me, making fun of it, referring to the Berlin Wall of the Cold War, I call it our “Berlin Wall”. It is invisible but terrible – it separates the English-, French- and Portuguese-speaking countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

With Moussa Konaté, Malian writer who heads the French-speaking festival “Etonnants voyageurs” (amazing travelers) in Mali, I’ve often discussed the idea of organizing a big meeting of African writers who write in national languages. A way of at least making cracks in this wall. But it’s easier to find sponsors for French-language writers than for those who write in national languages. UNESCO could be the perfect venue for such a pan-African encounter, particularly this year, international year of languages. And it’s an international space. Without walls.

pause

This will be the last entry for a little. We found a swanky little music bar in Thiès - which is not so much a lucky find as an inevitable one. (New bar, small town). The more euphemistic of travelers call Thiès quaint, but really it falls somewhere between the giant, westernized Dakar and la petite ville africaine, but doesn’t much share the perks of one or the other. It’s quiet and easy, it’s a good place for R&R, for putting your head back together and on straight. It’s a good place to come home to, but a good place to leave. So hopefully the new Palais des Arts will add a new dimension to the nightlife thièsoise. The girl that sings there on Saturdays is unbelievable, her voice is like honey! So thick and sweet and golden.

Well leaving Thiès I am, and heading for Mali. Mali so deep in my Africa. I am traveling with a friend and possibly another friend, snaking our way along the Niger as far east as time lets us, and then retracing our tracks with the river then tumbling toward us. Bouncing from Ségou, Djénné, Mopti and Sevaré, the Bandiagara hills of the Dogon, and Timbuktu, tracing the centuries-old paths of travelers, dromedaries, and other beasts of burden who’ve gone that way before … it’s a little ambitious but dizzyingly romantic.

So farewell for a couple weeks, when I will return with a heart full of memories and a suitcase full of infinitely cooler if not kitschy treasures, insh’alla.

in the meantime, I'll leave you with: www.freerice.com, and

This picture has nothing to do with my journeys in Africa but everything to do with my amazingly intelligent and talented friend Natalia who took this picture during a flamenco-rendition of Carmen at the Theatre Champs-Elysées in Paris. Nevermind that it's black and white and not brilliantly pastel, something about dancers so absorbed in their own movements, so completely disinterested in the hyper-attentive eye of the artist capturing frozen snips of those very same motions, reminds me nostalgically (why? I don't know ....maybe it's that art history is - regretfully - so much a thing of my past) of Degas.
aaaaaah, Paris.

neither war nor peace

How much I took home from the Casamance, so far away from Senegal major. What I won’t ever forget is the nasally women’s songs at night and the golden dust - illuminated by a dozen gas lanterns - rising in clouds from the stomping of their feet. So loud the clack-clack-clacking in unison of their makeshift wooden percussion it made my ears ring. And so giant the trees down there; it's all so romantic when I put time between myself and that land. But, God, what it taught me about being lonely in urban Africa - what it showed me about my own limits in a wider sense … I still float back and forth between feeling like it was two months wasted and then feeling like what I took from that time is absolutely invaluable. But despite my mixed feelings about being there, or maybe due to them, I feel it got under my skin, I feel I owe something to the Casamance. And like my own unresolved relationship to that place, Casamance itself is sunk in an unsettled existence, between war and peace. I want to write this so whoever reads it knowsa little more about a conflict that’s received scant attention in its almost 30-year history. One of the modern world’s longest-running conflicts, the struggle in Casamance has ranged from violent confrontations between rebel and military forces to sporadic assassinations to long periods of calm, albeit the tense calm of peace in a land with mines interred shallowly beneath the earth’s crust. It has silently and permanently changed the landscape, waterscape, peoplescape, of the region, and the solutions that were inadequate before are at standstill today.

start. The Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques de la Casamance started in 1982 to push for an independent Casamance. (Physically, historically, and culturally, the region - specifically Ziguinchor* - differs significantly from the rest of Senegal). By 1990, MFDC’s tactics had turned into guerilla warfare.

displacement. Over 60,000 people are thought to have fled their villages. Many of them spread into neighboring Guinea-Bissau and The Gambia (these countries, until recently, freely harbored rebels too). 14,000 moved into the capital city of Ziguinchor itself, which due to strong military presence has remained untouched by the conflict, like the eye of a storm.

economically. "The climate of insecurity, principally the danger of armed robbery on roads or in villages by rebels or bandits, together with failing infrastructure, stifle much normal economic activity, particularly the sale of agricultural produce and tourism. Instead, combatants on both sides, together with actors in neighbouring countries, are exploiting the Casamance’s natural resources, though with no benefit to most of the civilian population.” (I quote Martin Evans, "The Casamance conflict: out of sight, out of mind?") The tourism industry has actually been slowly revitalized in past years.

international neglect. Compared to other west African conflicts like those in Sierra Leon and Liberia, that of the Casamance is essentially forgotten. Why? Well, luckily the violence has involved neither a six-digit death toll nor systematic mutilations or (debatably) the use of child soldiers - headline grabbers that have made the other struggles infamous. International intervention, particularly from France and the UN, has been almost nonexistent. Also, when the MFDC started planting landmines in 1997, many key aid organizations including USAID pulled out of the area, brining an abrupt end to projects underway, especially in agricultural development.

today. Despite the shocking but singular assassination of a popular peace-worker last month, the situation has recently been one of calm. Fragmented after the deaths of key leaders, MDFC forces have been nudged out of their safe-havens in Guinea and Gambia. Limited demining operations have encouraged many families to return to their homes, sometimes after 15 or so years of absence. But mines aside, the returning population faces severe underdevelopment of and/or damage to infrastructure (schools, hospitals, roads, wells and other water systems etc.) and lack of investments from aid donors.

In truth I guess you could say, what’s going on here is just a microcosm of what’s typical of struggles among the world’s marginalized populations. It’s all over the world. I risk pushing my analogy credibility (!), but it’s in our own backyard, in New Orleans. When did the world become this way, transformed into such a place that obstructs people’s return to their native lands? We, alone among the animals, who put so much value in home. On second thought, when was it any different?

* The Casamance is comprised of two regions: Kolda (the "high Casamance") and Ziguinchor (the "low Casamance"). While the conflict was concentrated in Ziguinchor, it often spilled over into Kolda.

jel ma photo!

This is something like a novice attempt at curating! What follows are a few favorites from the online gallery of African photography at africultures.com. In its fourth year, the site exhibits a growing collection of works regardless of genre but remarkably and refreshingly different and provocative. It is co-curated by one of the editors of Filigranes, a French publisher of some 300+ titles on modern photography and criticism, including 4 editions of Afriphoto, a compendium of work by African photographers on the continent and beyond.
the collection in its entirety: http://www.afriphoto.com/index.asp
and Filigranes: http://filigranes.revue.com/


(below) Thierry Boulgakoff, France, from the series "A Première Vie" (Sorry I couldn't find dates for the following photos).




André Loutsono Kinzenguélé, Congo, from the series "Mémoires d'un pays - Problème d'électricité"


Al Rashid Mahdi, Sudan, from the series "Le Studio Historique"


Germain Kiemtoré, Burkina Faso, from the series "Jeux d'eau"





Abraham Onoriode Oghobase, Nigeria, from the series "The Tunnel"


Emmanuel Mba Ondo, Gabon, from the series "Venez voir, mon quartier"




Donald Mouboga, Gabon, from the series "Bwiti"




Andrew Esiebo, Nigeria, from the series "Soccer World"

"About 1 in 7 Americans traces their origins to the African continent. And so the American legacy is really one of shared inheritance with Africa."

Africa Past and Present is a podcast about history, culture, and politics in Africa and the diaspora. The show highlights interesting and significant people, ideas, and discussions in African Studies from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. Our mission is to broaden the availability and accessibility of cutting-edge knowledge relating to African experiences and to do so in a down-to-earth and informed manner. Shows feature interviews with eminent scholars and persons, commentary on current events, and key debates for Africans at home and abroad. http://afripod.aodl.org/

hi from Tambacounda! a little too drained right now to be forming complete sentences ... I won't write much right now, instead a memo:

Attn: reader

Subj: Tambacounda is really what I imagined it to be! Maybe with more trees. I think it's the heavy Malian influence. Ethnically and linguistically, it's dominantly pular and mandinka. it's cheap eats, sandy streets, empty, dusty, yellow by day and electrified by night. Tambacounda is faces carved into trees, scars carved into faces, blue tattoos on black skin, and beads, and papayas, and parades. And blue-turbaned fulani herdsmen chatting in groups in the shade keeping watch on their flocks. I came down here to prepare some reports before the declaration of abandonment we hosted this weekend. (really stressfully last minute, typical). It did however give me the chance to meet and interview some girls from an adolescent association, Kamben ("union" in mandinka), who formed a dance/theatre troupe and performed at the declaration. Got to spend a lot of time with them, and their songs and stories really stirred me. All of a sudden I saw the present and future of Tambacounda for what it is and will be, which despite progress, is not easy for girls. instead, pathetic and inescapable in many ways

As usual my ride back to Thiès was delayed two days - which actually gave me a chance to get out of the office and deep into this town. I'm trying to upload some videos from the declaration weekend .. wait and see

Charles Piller and Doug Smith recently wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times on some startling discoveries into the global fight against the most ravaging diseases in the developing world. (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gates16dec16,0,3743924.story?page=1)
While I don't normally write about public health, I found this issue to be pretty compelling. And given the onslaught of attention paid to AIDS in today's pop culture and consumer culture, between Bono's One campaign, Project Red, and the more and more Hollywood stars joining the ranks of UNICEF ambassadors - the awareness it's generating is phenomenal, the funding even better. But there's a dark side of this crusade that even the experts are only just starting to glimpse.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given an astonishing $8.5 billion to fighting HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. Most of their money is funneled through two major combatant organizations on that front: the Global Fund and GAVI, a Geneva-based organization that finances vaccines. Rates of deaths from AIDS in Africa are finally leveling-off, but overall health and healthcare on the continent is worsening. Why?

Piller and Smith’s article begins with a sickening anecdote about the pathetic and almost morbidly ironic state of affairs in African healthcare. Thanks to anti-retroviral drugs provided by the Gates Foundation, a Lesotho woman was successfully living with AIDS. But when she gave birth to an asphyxiated baby girl and the roach-infested hospital lacked a tube to give the infant much-needed oxygen, it died not long after.

According to a report commissioned by the Global Fund and World Bank, “Health delivery systems in Africa are now weaker and more fragmented than they were 10 years ago … [The weakening has been] exacerbated as the Global Fund and other programs now promote universal access to [AIDS] treatment." Another study, this one done on GAVI, shows that while vaccination drives have been inestimably beneficial - for example, curbing the rate of death from measles across Africa by 90% - there has emerged a distressing relationship between GAVI funding for vaccinations in Africa and child mortality. “Overall, child mortality improved more often in nations that received smaller than average GAVI grants per capita. In seven nations that received greater than average funding, child mortality rates worsened.”

How can pouring billions of dollars into fighting diseases that kill millions, devastate economies, and debilitate entire countries possibly have such cruel correlations?

The Gates Foundation and others like it, with their strict focus on epidemic have contributed to a wider health crisis in a number of ways, not limited to the following (as I paraphrase from Piller and Smith’s article) :

- By targeting contributions into the fight against such high-profile killers as AIDS, Gates grantees have increased the demand for specially trained, higher-paid clinicians, diverting staff from basic care. So, aside from doctors and nurses leaving the country for higher wages and safer conditions elsewhere, within the country - within single hospitals - caregivers are diverted from child and primary health care to these higher-wage specialty positions that offer double or triple the salary.

(On a side note, Rosalie, a nurse I met in Ziguinchor, explained to me that in Senegal, on top of free HIV-testing and free anti-retroviral drugs, most HIV/AIDS patients qualify for small living stipends. Shortly thereafter she accepted a job offer in France).

- The focus on a few diseases has diverted funds from nutrition and transportation, undermining the effectiveness of the foundation's grants. Many AIDS patients have so little food that they vomit their free AIDS pills. For lack of bus fare, others cannot get to clinics that offer lifesaving treatment.

- Gates-funded vaccination programs discourage caregivers to screen for other illness. In effect, parents travel for hours to have their children vaccinated - often their only contact with health providers for years - and leave without worse medical conditions treated, or even addressed. Most of GAVI’s funding goes to vaccinations for children against hepatitis B, a disease they normally don’t contract until much later in life. Many die before they even reach that point.

So what are we left with, at the end of the day? Do we continue to pour resources into the fight against a few diseases at the expense of overall health care, and worse, survival? Luckily, though Piller and Smith’s article didn’t mention this, but Nicholas Kristoff’s (sigh) blog did, the Global Fund is beginning to allocate 20% of its budget to strengthening health care systems and infrastructure. (ie. equipping hospitals with $35 oxygen valves)

la fin d'année

New Years was as it should be, celebrated with good friends, good food, mediocre champagne, laughing to the point of hurting, dancing to the point to dropping.

But on a larger scale, the year came to a close in Senegal amidst overtones of blue. The joyfulness of the festival season was accompanied by the mourning of two major public figures whose passing lent a gravity to these weeks of celebrations. And I think the poignancy of it comes really from the significance of the two deaths, or better, of the two men, and what they represented to the people of Senegal.

The first was Chérif Samsidine Aidara, the well-loved religious leader and president-appointed ambassador of peace in the Casamance region who was shot to death in his village home on the eve of Tabaski. The four gunmen are as yet unidentified but are almost certainly members of the rebel separatist group Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques de Casamance (MFDC), which has already brought so much unwarranted grief to this otherwise quiet region of Senegal. After the deaths of some of its head figures and the increasing intolerance it's faced recently from the once-sheltering governments of neighboring Guinea and Gambia, the rebel group was thought to be largely weakened, if not fragmented. I think on the whole, the murder came as less a reminder than a surprise about the continuing problem in the South. A problem which has existed for 20 years teetering between conflict and peace, and which seems to be once again tipped in the direction of the worse. Adding to the bitterness of the deed, the assassination, too, occurred almost a year to the day after that of another peace-promoting consul to the region, Elhadji Omar Lamine Badji.

A less frightening, but equally shaking death occurred a little over a week later, when Serigne Salieu Mbacké, head of the Mouride brotherhood (one of 4 major Sufi sects in Senegalese Islam) passed away, peacefully as 92 year-old beloved religious leaders often do. The Grand Marabout was a direct hereditary descendant of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, a figure who not only created the vernacular Sufic tradition - but who also represented to the people of Senegalese a fixture of resistance against French imperialism. Millions of people traveled to the spiritual center of Touba this weekend to mourn his passing. Millions of people were touched by his insights, spirituality, and leadership. I think most people carry a sense of deep and emotional gratitude for his contributions.

Bear in mind, I meant this to be more reflective than depressing! And while the first death was very cruel and signaled the re-aggravation of a distressing situation; I think the second - like the natural death of any great leader - represented something more venerated. Mbacké was the face of a deeply cherished tradition: something that syncretized the tenets of Islam with the ways of the indigenous to create something profoundly Senegalese, and in that sense, almost nationalistic. His life and death touched almost all Senegalese people, regardless of their religious affiliations.

On a last note, I think this gives form to the idea, the feeling, that we are always fluctuating between these extremes of sadness and joy. The world has its ugly conflicts, galore, but it also has this rainbow of culture that offers us so much beauty and value and dynamism. Maybe one makes the other fuller, complete. And I think, also, this is reflected in the mood this time of year. New Years is all about second chances, rejuvenation, hope, and resolutions, etc. of course, but it also reminds us how quickly time passes. How one year fades so imperceptibly into another, and how unable we are to hold time in our hands and let it go at our discretion.