It's a kind of magic

Last week there was a death. This week, a birth.

I’m secretly hoping they’ll name her after me but since I have only just got to grips with the mother’s name, Khady, it’s unlikely to happen. Tapha’s best friend, Ado, and his wife had a little girl yesterday morning. We went to visit them after dinner, at 11pm, and Ado was sitting outside his small house in Lindiane, practically in the forest on the edge of Ziguinchor, while Khady slept. We sat under the mango tree and shhhhhh-sh’d the dogs as they howled at eachother, and talked in Mandinka which I am now getting to grips with.

The next morning I went back to see the mother and baby. Khady was outside sweeping the mud patch infront of their one-room house, stoking the fire getting ready to cook lunch in a blackened pot. I asked her, through Tapha, is she shouldn’t be in bed resting. She had, after all, given birth just 24 hours before.

“There’s no one else here to help her!” laughed Tapha, without translating what I had said for her. So I asked her myself, in awkward Wolof, why she didn’t lie down. She shrugged her shoulders as if it were nothing. African women, I tell you, are strong.

Talking of naming, last night my family (the children of which are pictured) decided it was time I had a Senegalese name. One of the most special things that can happen to you here is that someone names their child after you. When you have their name, in some way you become them. So when Tapha sees the son of his name-sake, the man, older than him, calls Tapha ‘Father’. I have lasted five years without having to take on a Senegalese name, but about a year and a half ago, Tapha and I did do something in secret about my name so that when the time came I would be prepared. He gave me the choice of three names, one of which was his mother’s name, Siré. I said I would have it if he took my father’s name, Stephen (which cracks him up every time I say it).

Last night, the family were sitting outside in the compound, watching the TV through a door into the house. Mariam, Tapha’s older sister, was shelling white beans and his mother, Na Siré (Mother Siré), was picking the grit out of the rice. Papa was sitting smoking, wordless as ever.

“Why don’t you have a Senegalese name?” asked Mariam. “It’s time you had one. I’m going to sleep on it and in the morning, I’ll tell you what it is,” she joked.

Everyone joined in, calling out names to see what I responded to- Rokia, Rama, Aisha, Fatimata. I started to blush. Na Siré is a tough woman and I wasn’t sure how she would respond to the fact that I had taken her name. Also, I felt like a bit of a suck taking the mother’s name. I could have at least gone for a sister.

“There’s something you should all know,” said Tapha. “Rose has actually had a Senegalese name for a year and a half. Go on,” he prodded me, “Tell them what it is.”

I was racked with shyness so Tapha said it for me.

“Siré,” he said.

Before he had even finished the word, his mother, her head still bowed as she picked at the rice, said her surname, Sagna, without even looking up. There was rampant applause; it meant that she accepted and I was now, as much as we would ever be, like her.

“Siré,” said Papa.

“Sagna,” said Na Siré again, quickly.

She blushed and I think even tears came to her eyes. But perhaps as I would have done, she pretended it hadn’t touched her in the slightest and went on with the rice, her head, all wrapped up in a green cloth, bobbing in the low light.


I mentioned last time that I feel a certain element of spirituality missing from my life. Instead of bitching about it further, I decided I would do something about it and set out to find out what it is that makes Senegalese people tick.

I told Na Siré that I wanted to go and see a marabout. He is the spiritual guide, fortune-teller, healer, witch-doctor and everybody is afraid of him in some way, even if they don’t consult one. Supposedly he has the power to protect you from the evil spirits, by divining what it is you need and then writing out texts (from the Koran but also strange squiggles that look a little like maps) which you carry with you in the form of leather gri-gris. He also has the power to harm others, so it’s said, by setting the evil spirits on them, which is why you need your own marabout to protect you.

There are lots of things that people say aren’t right with the system of consulting a marabout for every ache and pain and desire for a job or a visa or the death of a neighbour’s livestock. The marabout are certainly unregulated and wield incredible power over people who don’t believe that they are in charge of their own destiny. They charge large amounts of money, often drive around in Mercedes (hence their nickname, ‘Mercedes Marabout’) while their followers struggle to get together enough for a meal, all the while promising to be able to do away with the evil spirit that’s making them poor.

They also prescribe muddy-looking water to sick people, meant to have healing powers if drunk or bathed in, and run Dakar’s music distribution network, public transport system and most big businesses. The president spent his first three days in power with his ministers at the feet of the country’s most powerful marabout, knowing full well that if he wants anything done here, then it has to happen through the marabout.

Well, of course I don’t believe in his powers. But then, it can’t hurt, right?

Na Siré gave us directions and Tapha and I went off on the motorbike, past the airport, down a little muddy road, past a mosque, past a vegetable patch where yam plants were starting to poke through the muddy soil and stopped outside a concrete house.

“Salaam aleikum” we cooed on entering the compound, and a young girl holding a straw broom showed us into the dark depths of the house.

A tiny baby chicken, the size of my fist, was narrowly avoided being trodden on as I stepped into a damp-smelling room and saw through a curtain to one side, an even darker, mud room. Again I said “salaam aleikum” and a voice told me to enter.

Inside was a tiny window, high-up, which looked out onto a pile of bricks less than a foot away. A metal bed, balancing on rocks to avoid it rocking on the uneven mud floor, stood to the left and a middle-aged man wearing a soft cotton boubou sat on a mat on the floor. Beside him was a copy of the Qur’an, some wooden prayer beads and a mat with a picture of the mosque at Mecca woven on it. He invited Tapha and I to sit down, which we did on the free part of the mat.

They started to speak in Mandinka, Tapha explaining that I was a friend who needed some protection while I lived and worked far from my family and felt particularly unstable at this time. I listened, and observed this holy-man, who was round-faced, wrinkled, and sat with one knee up, the other underneath him. They continued talking, and eventually the man pulled out a leather wallet in which were hundreds of dog-eared bits of paper with Arabic writing on them, as well as diagrams and drawings all done in black felt-tip pen. He leafed through them, eventually pulling one out and laying it on the mat.

The man asked me to think about what it was I really wanted and when I was done, to reach forward and pick up the prayer beads by one of the single beads, and hand it to him. I did so, asking that I find stability in my life in Senegal, particularly with regards to work. He took the beads, counted them and then consulted his paper.

He told me, through Tapha, that I must have a lot of dreams at night and that if I just relaxed a bit and was patient, everything would come to me. He said also that there were many people around me who wanted to use me for my ideas or to learn things, and that I needed to be protected against these people. He also said that since I was a foreigner travelling a lot, I should have some protection against bullets and natural disasters.

He told me to come back the next day and collect my ‘prescription’. On the iddue of money, because I am Na Siré’s daughter, he said, he wouldn’t charge me. But I should donate the equivalent of £10 to him, for good luck. I bargained him down to £5 and we were on our way.

The next day we went to pick up my gri-gris. We took them down to the market, three pieces of paper with Arabic and squiggles on it in the familiar black felt-tip pen, to the gri-gri maker camped out under a tin awning with his tools beside him. He is essentially a leather-worker, wrapping the pieces of paper in plastic and then binding them in leather, attaching them to piece of black string (which Tapha was dispatched to buy from the boutique) which are then tied around the waist.

For three hours we sat watching him binding and sewing, eventually by candlelight. In that time an old Joola lady came along selling mangoes, of which I bought four the size of my head to take back to Dakar, the gri-gri maker’s young son appeared, knocked over the candle and called me ‘toubab’ over and over again and I was bitten by a flock of muto-muto, a smaller and much more vicious mosquito who made a feast of my foot.

But much later, we did appear with my three gri-gris. I am now wearing them around my waist.

I suppose what I came to understand about Senegalese people from this brief foray into the mystic is that their spirituality, like everything else, is about today. It’s not about how one’s actions will effect them in the after-life, or the next life, but how the spirits rule and control the things going on now- crops, jobs, family, love, health. It’s a system based on fear- that the job is not to aim for good but to avoid evil.

As one clever reader commented on my last entry, I say that the Senegalese have no sense of the future; but maybe we Europeans have no sense of the present. I guess I’m looking for a balance.

The Razor's Edge

There is no feeling on earth like being out in the torrential rain, not caring that you are covered in mud, that people can see through the cloth that is barely covering your body, that you have nothing to dry yourself on afterwards. It is the beauty of being part of the world and the earth, of being a living part of the moment, of celebrating the African today.

***
Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.

We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing too.

The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

This is an extract from a book that time and time again has had had a great affect on my life. I was first encouraged to read it by a boyfriend when I was 20. I read it again when I was about 22, again at 24 and am reading it for the fourth time at 27.
The first time I read it I was struck by what a great storyteller Maugham is. The book is Maugham’s account of the lives of a group of characters in early 20th century Paris and America. One of them, Larry, bows out of ‘society’ after the first world war by refusing to get a job and marry his girlfriend and chooses instead to go on a spiritual quest that takes him all over the world, eventually to India where he receives enlightenment. The story is a beautiful account of Larry’s life, but also of the pretentiousness of ‘society’, as well as a vivid portrayal of what life must have been like in Paris at that time (which from a damp bed in Ziguinchor sounds very appealing).

Each time I read it I found something more profound in it and it acted as a marker of my own spiritual progress. I began to understand Larry’s search for the Absolute a little more than I had the time before and it went hand in hand with my own search for something more powerful than what I could see in every day existence. I also had the chance to go to India, with the person who had recommended the book to me in the first place, and although my experience there was very different to the India portrayed in the book, somehow it left a mark on me.

Then Africa happened to me and I became caught up in the every-day. Africa is nothing if not celebration of the here and now. The thing I like about Senegal is I feel physically connected to the earth, to people, because everything is tactile; it is shaking hands, it is feeling the rain on your skin while taking a shower in a storm, it is the raw knuckles from doing the washing by hand, it is the rattle of a broken taxi as you bump along a muddy road, it is eating a mango that just fell from a tree, throwing the skin on the ground where you sit and watching the water drip from your hands to the ground as you rinse them from a watering can.

Nothing is planned, no one thinks of the consequences of one’s actions because there is a total disbelief in the concept of tomorrow. If one day you decide you want a window in the wall of your house, you just knock a hole in it right there and then. If the wall falls down tomorrow, well, it doesn’t really matter. I have become caught up in this. I now buy petrol by the 50 pence-worth because if you fill the tank up, you can be sure that someone will take that as a ticket to drive around town all day using it up. If you buy a pot of coffee, the whole family will enjoy coffee for the day and tomorrow, well, tomorrow may never come.

Since I’ve been living here, I’ve stopped thinking about tomorrow, about the future of my spiritual development and instead have been concentrating on my work and on perfecting those things which are useful to me today- being able to speak Wolof and being able to dance Sabar. I don’t ask the questions that I used to ask about the nature of life and God and the soul, because I am too busy celebrating the African today.

But for someone who does believe in tomorrow, living just for today can seem pointless. Once again this book has left a profound mark on me and I ask myself if I’m not tired of being here with a people who have no sense of the future, who willingly destroy things and themselves by not building tomorrow into their today.

*****

This week the boys in my house were circumcised. They cried and wailed and it was a bloody, traumatising affair, for all of us. But they’ll get over it. What I was not expecting was to find out that Tapha’s sisters had also been circumcised, 28 years ago. Female genital mutilation (FGM), as it is now known (because the cutting and sewing up of the vagina has nothing to do with the relatively harmless removal of a boy’s foreskin) has been illegal in Senegal since the late 1990s and it’s slowly spreading that mutilating your daughters isn’t the things to do, not least of all because it often kills them.

While it rained yesterday, Tapha’s sister Mariam and I sat on my veranda and talked about FGM in general terms and I asked her if she knew of any people who still did it in Ziguinchor. During the discussion she started to tell me about an old woman in the town who was the ‘cutter’, a woman everyone was scared of. Before I knew it Mariam was recounting the day someone came for her, told her she was going on a journey, collected her sister Rama and four other girls from the neighbourhood, and took them over to the woman’s house. She remembers them taking her into a smelly outside toilet, laying a mat down by the hole, putting a cloth over her face, pulling up her clitoris and cutting it off.

She watched as the other girls went through the same thing, each one being put in a basin of hot water afterwards to stop the bleeding, until they were all done and could go home. She said for a month she was in pain but that everyone came and clapped and danced and told her she was a woman now. She was 7 years old.

Mariam is one of the loveliest girls I know here. In fact, her and Rama are my only female friends. While all the other Senegalese girls look down on me for my bitten nails and uncoiffed hair (but are secretly jealous because of my passport and long hair), Rama and Mariam have adopted me as their sister and would do anything for me. They share their children with me, they give me their best outfits when my suitcase is left on some run-way by Air Senegal, they rub my tummy when I am sick and hug me when I feel home-sick. Because of this I had forgotten how different I am from them, culturally, and from everyone here. It never occurred to me that the horror stories I hear about female genital mutilation was once going on in my own house and that my ‘sisters’ have been wantonly tortured because of a custom that appears to be about nothing but suppressing the female race.

Mariam and Rama both swore to me that they would never do the same thing to their children, even if it wasn’t illegal. Mariam rightly pointed out that they told her it made her a woman but that I hadn’t had it done to me bit it didn’t stop me from being a woman.

It’s made me realise how very different I am from these people. I wonder what it is that keeps me here. I think it’s safety, being able to understand the language and the way things are done (although some things I will never understand), having a ‘home’. I am blessed with cheap rent and it may be that it’s time to take a trip somewhere away from here, somewhere where I can start thinking once again about what happens to us when we die and why it is that we’re here at all.

*****

Since beginning to write this, my Senegalese mother has died. Mere Fouta adopted me when I moved to Ziguinchor, sending me bowls of rich oily rice and ripe mangoes just at the moments when I felt down. She was plump and warm and friendly and I liked going to see her at her little house just behind ours. She was Tapha’s mother’s best friend and we all loved her.
She died this afternoon of a lung infection. She hadn’t told anyone she was sick because she was afraid of hospitals. She had seen a marabout, a spiritual leader, but in the end it was in the hospital that she died. Her children came crying and screaming in their bright boubous down the road this afternoon and we all knew she had died. We all feel very sad here.

*****

Since writing even this last part, I have been informed that one of my clients has cut their budget for freelancers and I, in turn, have lost about a third of my work. I feel pretty shit.

Well, as one wise writer wrote, Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last. We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing too.

Almost Famous: Chapter 2

Dakar. Happy to be home. I ring one of the world's greatest drummers and ask him if I can come over to interview him for a magazine. "Sure", he says, he's be really happy to do an interview with me. I had already done one interview with him, in Toulouse, but in our fifteen minutes he didn't tell me enough to be able to write 2000 words about him. So I, off my own back, had to go back for more.

He told me to come to the police station in a neighbourhood deep in the belly of a hot and humid Dakar. there I would be able to ask a policeman to take me to his house. He's one of the world's greatest drummers, so everyone knows his house. Arriving at the police station, a gendarme did indeed take me to his house, where I met, guess who?, the fat man who I met in Toulouse who wanted to give me children. Turns out he's the son of the drummer. I was bizarely pleased to see him, a friendly face in a poky dirty neighbourhood. He takes me upstairs to the apartment of Wife Number One where the drummer is still sleeping. After twenty minutes of sitting in this incredibly gaudy sitting room, he comes out and starts to have breakfast. On seeing me he says, "oh, hi! The minister of Culture just telephoned me. I have to go down-town for a meeting. I'm going to finish my breakfast and then we'll go together, quickly."

Well, there's no reason on earth that I should believe that this meeting will happen quickly, but I decide that it might be a good story. So we get in his Mercedes 4x4 and we creep through the tiny streets of Dakar, stuck in traffic most of the way, and after an hour we arrive at the Ministry. it is incredibly hot and I am hungry and have a headache. He leaves me in the waiting room while he goes for his meeting. After 40 minutes, a guard comes in and says, hey, why are you still sitting here? I saw your guy leaving half an hour ago. So I call his phone, which is in the car with the driver. The driver has no idea who I am. Then a big man in a blue boubou appears and says that we have to go up to the 6th floor, to the Ministry of Women and Social Development, to find my guy. it is 2.30pm, two and a half hours after the original rendezvous time.

Well, up on the 6th floor, everyone is on their lunch hour so we sit while women lope around gossiping. At 3.30pm, a woman appears and says "Please be patient, the Minister will see you soon". I tell the drummer that I really have to be going because my head hurts so much I can harldy open my eyes. And, oh yes, it's not my job to go to meetings with him. He says, mmm, perhaps he should leave his phone number with the Minister and she can call him. Eventually, another woman appears and says that we can't leave, the Minister will see us in just one tiny moment. The drummer is called in to the office and when he comes out ten minutes later he looks bemused.

"The minister is in hospital. but they let me telephone her and she will see me when she is better." So she wasn't even there...

We climb back in the car. We drive to another part of town, stopping to buy a clock, a handbag and two phone chargers from the side of the road. We get to Wife Number Three's house where lunch is waiting for us. It is 4pm. We eat, very nice rice and meat and at 4.30 I ask if we can do the interview. Four random people enter the room and sit watching me while I interview my quarry. The interview lasts 18 minutes. Then I ask if I can take a couple of photos.

"Yes, but are you going to sell this article for money?"

"Well, yes" I say. "That's my job."

"So you should pay me something too," he says.

"Why?" I ask.

"Because you've taken up a lot of my time and I have told you all my knowledge. You're going to make money from me, you should pay me."

I explain my job. I explain that, for a start, it's against the principles of good journalism to pay for interviews. I also point out that I have to pay for everything myself and that spending a whole day trailing around after someone while they go to meetings at the Ministry is actually, suprisingly, not my idea of fun.

"But that's your job," he says.

Well, as you know I have just come back from Toulouse. Where the musicians were treated like royalty. I stayed in a brothel one night because I do not earn enough from my work to be able to stay in the same kind of hotels as my musician friends. When they are driven to soundcheck, they do not have to wait for anything or anyone. They are buzzed around by engineers and managers who get the job done quickly so that the musicians can go back to their luxury hotels. God forbid they should have to wait for anything.

Well, I got up from my chair and apologised for taking up so much of his time.

"No, please take some photos!" he cried. No thanks, I said, and went home. I was so tired by the time I did get home, tired, feeling miserable about my work, wondering if I would ever come away from a job feeling properly renumerated for my efforts.

So, wannabe music journalists. It's just no fun this week.