Again I'm wrapping up another mission in the field.

Darkness falls as soon as the sun slips under the horizon, and the unlit room around me has as sunk silently from the blue shadows of evening to pitch black stain of night in as little time as it took me to write it. Up and down the corridor fluorescent light spills out of doorways. The cry of the muezzin marks the end of day as always, it just briefly interrupts the white noise of the quartier - bleating animals, tvs blaring soccer matches and repeated soaps, hushed, fast voices of women. I can hear Coumbis, the little girl who lives next door, suffering some awful fit of giggles. She has a barbie doll she calls Madame Toubab … something like the equivalent of Mrs. Whitey. Her little brother Abdoulaye is about as small as a peanut and he imitates everything she does.

I’m writing this from Tambacounda. Work has brought me once again out in the bush, and though I wasn’t much looking forward to this mission, it’s been pretty good. I’ve really been on the go since New Years, moving from here to there, never staying in one place for place for more than two weeks. It’s been wonderful to see as much as I’ve seen of the country but I’m looking forward to staying put for a while when I finally get back to Thiès. It’s getting hot, too.

I spent last week in in the northwestern region of Matam, right up there on the border with Mauritania in a small town called Ourosogui.

Old Ourosogui with your vaguely Japanese sounding name,
You old stomping grounds of traders and herders and tumbleweeds,
You dusty truckstop prelude to the three and a half million square miles of desert beyond you.

The winds are hot there and when there is no wind, the sitting heat warps the view into the distance. There is another volunteer who lives out there - a super Argentinean girl with a bad back but beautiful in all other regards. A breath of fresh air as they say if you can imagine … we spent one night up on the roof, sleeping under the stars, though I didn’t do much of that after all the café touba we drank beforehand. The people that live in the region are mostly Pular, it’s as if the border with Mauritania might well enough not exist. Islam and tradition weigh heavily in these villages that bake in the sun. A great many people have been resistant to our NGO’s presence in the area. You have to understand the education program that we implement in each village; while it brings truly great changes, in terms of health, literacy, alleviation of poverty, etc. - the image it’s gained within Senegal, and even more so internationally, is primarily as a combatant against female circumcision. A lot of people see that as an attack on their traditions, on Islam; a lot of people just don’t want to abandon a custom so integral and so meaningful to their cultures, histories … so not everyone welcomes our presence warmly and unconditionally.

Tamba was really good. Despite my protests, I left the village of Lounthji loaded with presents - calabashes, wooden spoons, indigo cloth, and a SHEEP! Oh little baby, he was soo cute and dyed BLUE. They must have cleaned him to where he was white as the day he was born, and then wrapped him up in indigo clothes because his wooly coat glowed in this lovely iridescent way. He had Xs carved into his ears. He cried a lot :( When I brought him back to the office, they asked me when we were going to eat him, but I told them as a rule I don’t eat anything I’ve known for over a half hour. I’ll have to leave him here, because he wouldn’t do so well on the long trip back west.

while we're on the topic photographer Antonin Kratochvil has produced a really moving series on African AIDS patients and their treatment with antiretroviral drugs. Haven't yet found the work in full online, but here's an interesting CNN segment on it: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIhd3UuHbrk.

Bush & Africa

It seems a president in his final year of office is a little innocuous. We can almost disregard all of his delusional worldviews and warviews, his inadequate response to a drowning New Orleans (and a drowning economy), his nod of approval to secret prisons, massive infringements on privacy, and funding for faith-based anything. As well as his multi-billion dollar cuts in domestic spending on health care and education, even his goofy pride in his one great domestic success (no child left behind) in face of sinking educational achievement rates as our peers in Europe and Asia outperform us.

That being said, Africa-wise he hasn’t done all too bad. Not outstanding either.

During his six day tour of Ghana, Liberia, Tanzania, Benin, and Rwanda, Bush visited several AIDS treatment centers that his own investment initiatives have helped fund. Writing for the Nicholas Kristoff (aah, my heart flutters ...) blog, Josh Ruxin claims the US has invested over $19 billion to date, 4 billion higher than what Bush committed in 2003. But who can really say which numbers are rosy and which are realistic? The breakdown isn’t as luminous as it may seem. PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) spends only about 55% on treatment of individuals infected with AIDS, mainly through the distribution of antiretroviral drugs. 20% goes to prevention programs; of that, an absurd 33% is spent on programs that promote abstinence. (One of the several reasons abstinence education is so futile in Africa is that in societies that condone men's polygamy and infidelity, and silence women's voices, married women contract the virus all the time.) None of the funds are expressly apportioned to improving the health systems in Africa which, in their crumbling state, have dangerously thwarted the good intentions of donors aid organizations.

On other fronts … While Bush hasn’t sent American troops into Darfur (should we, could we?), he has announced just this week he would free $100 million from his foreign aid budget to assist African countries that send peace-keeping troops to the region. He needs to back this kind of military support with harsher diplomatic efforts with the government in Khartoum. It might be too little too late, but it’s more than the Clinton administration did for Rwanda.

Africa's never been a fast-lane kind of place. Love it or hate it, the pace of life, maybe the pan-African philosophy, is ndank ndank (slowly, slowly). That's not how our country rolls, but it seems we've let it define our foreign aid.

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/