Technology and Power

Technology is power. Having just refamilarized myself with Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I am reminded that technology can be used as a powerful oppressor. Whether intentional or not. Where once being poor meant not having enough to eat, a place to sleep, access to education, today it denies you access to the cyber world. A world we live in more and more every day.

I was not surprised to learn that most of my colleagues don’t have PC’s. I was surprised that most of them had never had an email address and could not conceptualize navigating the web. It’s simply a matter of exposure.

Recently, the volunteer house in which eight tubaabs were living, awaiting regional assignments, was robbed. The burglars sawed the metal bars off the wall, broke the glass and then stole four computers and ipods, several cell phones and a pair of sandals right out of their rooms as they slept. I count myself as terribly lucky for having escaped unscathed. I had just moved to my Kaolack cave.

Upon hearing about such an incident, I was immediately frustrated by my organizations lack of security. I also thought it unjust when the organization hesitated to buy replacement lap tops for the victims to use for the remainder of their stay. Their justification: they can’t even afford laptops for their Senegalese employees (who make up 99% of the organization). I reasoned that those Senegalese employees were at least getting paid.

Now that the newly purchased laptops are residing with the volunteers, I question this line of reasoning. People get robbed here constantly. After the incident, a Senegalese friend explained how one night she came home to an empty house (even the couches were gone). And this is just one recount of the many stories that were offered up in sympathy. Whose responsibility is it really to secure your possessions?

It’s true that the volunteers have built their lives around computers. The West demands it. Some volunteers who were writing their thesis or in the midst of a university program, would have been forced to return home. Senegal is not yet so demanding. But of course the argument rises that a lack of PC’s is one of the reasons Senegal is still developing.

Listening to my Senegalese colleagues admit their ignorance about computers and the necessity for a computer in order to do their work well was quite compelling. So who deserves those new laptops more? The volunteers or the Senegalese staff?

This Pen Dwells on Guilt

"...The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt. " Martin Luther King, Jr.

Do you experience guilt? Does it debilitate and alienate you? Are you sometimes rendered an awkward ineffectual because of that existential weight? Or a ranting annoyance?

I think I've pointed out my guilt in previous posts. Dare I say, I've harped and grumbled and whined and beat a dead horse about my guilt? Well it hasn't gone away. I'm beginning to accept that it doesn't go away. My graduate diploma could read Guilt Masochist, MA.

And my anomalic pigmentation, my proficiency in both the colonizer and neocolonizer languages, my nationality, my profession, these are very visible brandings of why I might have cause to succumb to guilt in Senegal.

So why am I once again pontificating about my guilt?


Let the anecdote commence:

I went to the market in Dakar with a very unlucky friend. During her first month in Senegal she has parted with $100, an unwilling and unknowing donation to a smooth con-artist. She has lost a computer in a burglary. She has fallen victim to malaria and an intestinal infection. She wasn't born yesterday, but she is considering visiting a voodoo doctor to surgically remove her hex.

Shopping is not my favorite activity. I just don't like to buy things. When I do, I impulse buy. My money vomits out of my hand like bad vodka. It's too much stimulus, too many choices. Chaos. I've found large souks to be the worst. Large souks where people scream out foreign words, kiosks reek of rotting fish in blazing heat and buzz with flies, little children and grown men beg for money.

Combined with her bad luck and my shopping ineptitude, what did we expect?



But we should have known better. When the rasta-resembling Baye Fall (a Senegalese brotherhood of Islam based on Qur'anic and Sufi traditions) saw our polite response to his Wolof salutation (call: Nanga Def; response: Mangi fi) as an invitation to join us, as an interest in visiting his shop, we should have just kept quiet until he left us. But we couldn't shake him. Did I mention the market is stressful? He grew from one to three. All pursuing us for monetary compensation. When one man asked my friend for a kiss and pursed his lips, she snapped at him to leave us alone (in Wolof: Baima).

Unexpectedly, the man grew enraged. He called us racists (ironically, my friend's father is black). He became aggressive, screaming, specs of his spit hitting our wide eyes, veins popping out of his forehead, arms failing, pointing at his skin. He told us to go home. That we were no good.

Being called a racist is a big deal where I come from. Being loudly proclaimed as a racist in front of a market full of Africans is horrifying. We quickly jumped in a taxi and sped away.

The man was wrong to have done it. We later found out that this happens to tubaabs (foreigners) routinely in Dakar. Yet, I get it.



I not only represent a past of disgusting brutalization but a present of both visible and unseen exploitation (just in different terms such as food colonialism, resource extraction, structural adjustment policies, bilateral free trade agreements, the war on terror...).

God, all the reasons this man has to be angry with me. With my simple luck in being born an American in a comfy Midwestern "mansion" while he has to hustle in the streets everyday, begging young white girls for money, working for the Lebanese and French, imperialistic ghosts, watching American media and wondering why not him too?

Poverty is violent. Very violent. This man is a victim. I have guilt about this.

However, he's also a perpetrator. I have no doubt his anger was borne in some small way out of hurt pride. Like every other country in the world, Senegalese women are the man's inferior. He most likely didn't expect such a strong reaction out of my friend's mouth. Can he really expect us to allow such sexist insults? I have no guilt about this.

And funny enough, his spoken language, Wolof, and possibly his tribe, is a sort of African colonizer. It has become the national African language, even though there are hundreds. The Wolof tribe dominates the country. And it was the Wolof tribe that sold their Seneglese neighbors to the slave traders. Few people in this world have clean hands.

So yes, my presence in Senegal and my guilt is as horribly complex as the situation is horrible. My guilt though, is not a problem. In fact, my guilt, if channeled resourcefully, can be part of the solution. I would argue that the only way we will have real change is when a lot of us, a whole lot of us, start feeling really guilty. And start doing something about it.