My time in Senegal is drawing to a close. I must admit I'm ready for a change. Especially if that change is New Orleans. I've never felt so tired in my life, physically and emotionally.
I recently completed my last round of traveling in West Africa with a close friend from college. We hit some relatively isolated beach areas in a separatist region of Senegal (Casamance) and stayed in a Serer village with a Peace Corps friend. It brought the usual joys and difficulties traveling in West Africa has always entailed. Somehow though, my brain conveniently suppresses the memories of any trouble until met with all the glorious forms of stress.
There's the never knowing what is happening, the waiting, the dangerous car rides, the sickness, the dirty food, the waiting, the discomfort, the aggressive men, the stink of burning garbage and human waste, the holes that acts as toilets, the lack of electricity, the waiting, the day long travel excursions to a location that should only take an hour, the heat, the bamboozling, and the fact that we are walking money-bags in the eyes of most Senegalese.
Most of this I can handle. In fact, most of this I love. This is real life. Away from a computer. Out in the world. Experiencing it. Not everyone gets to eat the oysters they watched being hacked off a mangrove root by a petite 40 year old village woman. Or play the jambes while the rhythm of the collective pounding accompanies the setting sun over a long stretch of deserted beach.
It's the hustling that gets to me. Senegalese men hustle us to buy trinkets, force us in to conversations, follow us down the street, surround us while we're sitting on a beach in our bikinis. I have no way of knowing if this is because we are white, because we are women, because they think we have money, or because it's simply cultural. I wish I could travel as a man to see what annoyances they encounter. If they feel a constant threat, a physical struggle for dominance and assertion that is like a losing battle when you're pitted against so many.
I know much of this hustle is a direct result of poverty. I've never been bothered by a wealthy Senegalese business man. At least not followed down the street (the bar is another story). I also know this hustle is a direct result of the disrespect this country pays to its women. Whether it is because of Islam, because of cultural tradition or because when you're at the very bottom you want to feel like your on top of at least something, so you choose the most vulnerable and powerless to force into supplication (don't get me wrong, America pays women its fair share of disrespect). I also know that the situation in general is a result of colonization and globalization and this time I'm on the winning side:
"Today, national independence and the growth of national feeling in underdeveloped regions take on totally new aspects. In these regions, with the exception of certain spectacular advances, the different countries show the same absence of infrastructure. The mass of the people struggle against the same poverty, flounder about making the same gestures with their shrunken bellies outline what has been called the geography of hunger. It is an underdeveloped world, a world inhuman in its poverty; but also it is a world without doctors, without engineers, and without administrators. Confronting this world, the European nations sprawl, ostentatiously opulent. This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil and from the subsoil of that underdeveloped world. The well-being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and the yellow races. We have decided not to overlook this any longer. When a colonialist country, embarrassed by the claims for independence made by a colony, proclaims to the nationalist leaders: 'If you wish for independence, take it, and go back to the Middle Ages,' the newly independent people tend to acquiesce and to accept the challenge; in fact you may see colonialism withdrawing its young State the apparatus of economic pressure. The apotheosis of independence is transformed in to the curse of independence and the colonial power through it immense resources of coercion condemns the young nation to regression. In plan words, the colonial power says: 'Since you want independence, take it and starve.' " (The Wretched of the Earth, 96-97)
While Fanon published this in the early 60's during Algeria's struggle for independence, his words are still relevant today. Resources are still exploited by the West, economic sanctions and political strong-arming are rampant.
I believe it is the struggle between my upper hand of being a Westerner and my lower hand of being a broke white woman that is causing me so much inner turmoil. And I'm finished.
I met a man on my travels, a Senegalese engineer and sanitation expert who had started an NGO to help the poorest of the poor in Senegal by bringing them clean drinking water, working infrastructure and education. Women and men like him are Senegal's future and while they might need our help for a little bit, they won't for long. When we can meet each other on equal footing, then perhaps my anger will recede slightly and my energy will return. Someday, but not today.
