A Day in Africa

Today I have decided to leave the comfort of the Institute of Mathematics in Mbour, where I have been spending a few weeks, in order to venture out to see something of the ‘real’ Africa. I hail a collective taxi in the street, squeeze my diminutive self between a couple of well-built ladies in tight-fitting colourful clothing, and reach the centre of Mbour with a ride costing a hundred African francs – the equivalent of less than fifteen European cents. Before leaving the coast, I take the opportunity to have a look at the market. It is much bigger than I expected: the place is swarming, pungent, colourful and grimy, covering a seemingly endless quarter and becoming increasingly dense the closer it gets to the beach, where dozens of small fishing boats unload hundredweights of fish that are carried off in every direction. With some effort I manage to extricate myself from this unsmiling, toiling sea of humanity and let another taxi take me to the only tarmac’d crossroads in Mbour: the one where Route Nationale 1 branches off from the coastal road and heads towards Mali. I’m aiming for the village of Sandiara, twenty kilometres inland.

After a few negotiations I find a car willing to take me there for one thousand francs; less than two euros. The landscape turns out to be dreary savannah, dotted with baobab trees, and on arrival I find that Sandiara is more like a small town. A large group of people is clustering around something. I approach discreetly and manage to catch a glimpse of what is at the centre of the crowd. It’s a man sitting on the ground, covered from head to foot in mud and dust. He seems distraught, desperate even. His hands are tied behind his back, and his feet are bound. His eyes are fixed on the ground. The crowd surrounding him is noisy, commenting loudly as it watches him. A young man informs me that he is a madman. Then quickly corrects himself: he is a ‘killer’. A few particulars emerge: he has knifed someone. I ask what will happen now. Now he will be taken to the next village. ‘Now’ in Africa, it seems to me, is an imprecise term that can be more accurately understood to mean ‘sooner or later’. There is no one here in uniform, just the small crowd watching and commenting. Nothing happens. I feel pity for the man. He seems more than just desperate: annihilated, rather. As if he had yielded completely to this crowd and the way they were looking at him. I find myself thinking that I am the only white man for twenty kilometres and that, as a stranger here, there is not much that I can do. I wander for a while in the sandy streets of the village, observe the children playing, the blacksmiths, the small mosque, the dirt that covers everything – then return to the road and find a bus that takes me to the next village, Tiadiay. I buy some bread from one of the countless women vendors who teem in every street, and head in the direction that I’ve been told will lead to Sao.

I chose Sao for its name, because I liked the sound of it. I saw it on the map. It was away from the major roads, but not too far away. As I walk towards the end of the village, a sweaty-faced man in a yellow robe asks me where I am going, and I tell him that I’m going to Sao. Generally speaking, I’m wary of anyone who approaches me, and especially of those with sweaty faces, but it simply won’t do here to be too stand-offish. ‘Sao?’ ‘Yes, Sao.’ He offers to take me there for three thousand francs. I suggest two thousand, and he gestures for me to follow him to his car. It is an incredibly old yellowish Peugeot, even more dilapidated than the wrecked bangers of Mbour. One of its doors doesn’t close, and for half the journey Barri (I have discovered that he is called Barri) holds it shut with his arm. The other half he spends attempting to close it by opening and slamming it shut again. In vain. After covering a few kilometres, he slows down, pulls over and tells me that we have to take a barely visible track in the sand, to our left. I don’t say anything, even if I have a sudden moment of apprehension. Barri hardly says anything either, and I do not like this. He answers only with monosyllabic non sequiturs. In an attempt to make conversation, I had pointed to the clouds and asked if it was unusual to see such a sky in Senegal in January. He replied: ‘the sky’. He does not seem very sharp, and I find this reassuring.

And then we arrive in Sao. A Sao that turns out to be completely unlike the one I was expecting. I’d expected another teeming village black with dirt. Instead it is a half-empty, scattered affair, consisting for the most part of huts studding the savannah between the baobabs, suffused by the golden hue of the sand and the straw. As soon as I get out of the car a band of wide-eyed children rushes up, as if a flying saucer had just landed. An old man appears, a few women. They can’t understand what I’m looking for. I try to explain that I’m curious, that I would just like to look around the village, if they don’t mind. This strikes them as pretty strange. They offer to accompany me, to guide me. The old man beckons an extremely beautiful young woman and tells me that she will be my guide. If it wasn’t for the puritanism of Islam, perhaps this would have seemed to me like some kind of ambiguous offer. As it turns out, what I needed more than a guide was someone to keep away the crowd that had formed. A small man in festive mode pops up with a drum which he beats like a madman, and everyone breaks into laughter and claps their hands. A young woman begins to dance.

They tell me they are pounding the millet, taking for granted my knowledge of the fact that the village exists thanks to millet, and that I know everything about how it is cultivated and prepared. They take me to see the women who pound it with enormous wooden pestles in equally outsize wooden vessels. They are the same kind of pestles you find throughout Africa, but every time I have seen one being used it has been working to grind a different substance. I ask how many people live in the village and am told that I should enquire at the school. Great, a school! I ask to be taken there, and Barri, together with a muscular, kindly young man who had been following us, guides us across the sand, past the goats and the baobabs, towards the school. It isn’t far to go. It consists of a few huts and sand-coloured walls. We go to see the head, who immediately busies himself dusting a chair for me to sit on. He is an intelligent man, passionate, devoted to his school, lively and engaging. He tells me about the educational programmes that fall here from above – the latest from Canada, no less – about the teaching of Arabic and of religion, of the many challenges but also of the desire to study that all of the boys have, and all of the girls too, he is keen to emphasize. The environment here is good, and Africa is like this, he says with a smile: always disastrous, but always elated. We give only a passing glance at the children ‘who sometimes don’t pay attention because they don’t get enough to eat at home’. He speaks with humility, but with awareness too of the crucial importance of what he and the other four teachers are trying to do for these children. I would like to ask him more about the teaching of Islam in primary schools, but fear that this would be a sensitive subject. He shows me on the timetable the hours given to the teaching of Arabic and religion: one hour per week, more or less. ‘Are there any Christian children?’ ‘Yes, a few,’ he tells me: during the hours devoted to the teaching of Islam, they leave the room. Just like in Italy, only the other way round: in Italy the Muslim children leave the room when the subject is Christianity. My heart sinks at the thought of the stupidity of humankind, but I prefer to avoid the subject. I begin to take my leave, and thank him sincerely; he is visibly pleased by our meeting. Before leaving I mention that I would like to contribute something, to help with buying materials for the school – exercise books, pens, and so on – and ask if I can leave it in euros. I produce a worthwhile sum; he promptly calls one of his assistants so that he can be witnessed receiving it. We part so cordially, almost emotionally, it seems to me. Even if I’m not sure exactly why.

Barri, with more forethought than I’d had, has not gone anywhere. It’s hard to see how I would have left otherwise, given that the only other form of transport I’d seen in this village half lost in the savannah was an ancient-looking donkey. I suggest that he should drive me north, up to Route Nationale 2, the road that goes towards Mauritania. From there I should be able to return to Mbour with public transport. We haggle for a while before agreeing on a reasonable fare. We head off with Barri holding the door shut with his hand. The route is long, on a dusty and sun-baked dirt track. The car seems to be made of only encrusted sand, rust and vestiges of antique-looking plastic. And yet despite this, between arid expanses and isolated, desolate villages, it continues to move.

There are no other cars. I watch the country sweeping past, through the wide-open window from which the glass has long since gone. It occurs to me that the majority of humankind lives more or less like these men and women, like these dust-covered children – and not at all as I do. We are the exceptions, sequestered and well defended in our gardens of wealth and hygiene.

A few hours later we arrive at Khombole, and I see again the dirt that accumulates in roadside villages along so many of the main roads in African countries. Here it is particularly bad. I wonder if there is any relation to the fact that France is the country that, as they frequently say here, ‘colonized us’. I lack the courage to eat any elaborate food, and make do instead with oranges, bananas and bread. I look for somewhere to eat in the shade and alone, but my solitude is short-lived: in no time at all I am surrounded by a band of children. I play with them, taking photographs and displaying them on the camera screen. The young girls smile coquettishly; the boys laugh loudly and show off. I make the mistake of giving them some biscuits, and am forced to retreat when they fall over each other to grab some more …

I catch sight of a broken-down overcrowded bus that is heading in the right direction and board it. I arrive at Thies quite late in the day and realize that that I need to hurry if I am to avoid getting back in the middle of the night. A kindly old man wearing a long white tunic accompanies me to the gare routière, where I ask if there is a bus to Mbour. There is one. All I have to do is sit and wait to see if anyone else is going to turn up wanting to go to Mbour. This is how so much of public transport works in Africa. You wait. Perhaps for hours. Sitting on the bus, or a stone, in the midst of unspeakable rubbish and flies, in the gare routière. Half a continent spends an inordinate number of hours just waiting. I take advantage of the time to read. I’ve brought with me a short book I found in the only shop in the region where there was food that did not seem coated in dirt. It tells the story of a young Senegalese educated in a Koranic school before the arrival of European teaching, who is subsequently sent to a French school and eventually ends up in Paris, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. It is a sad story, of the hesitation between different worlds, of the estrangement of being African in a Western global culture – or perhaps, ultimately, of the estrangement of being human. When the bus finally starts, after hours of waiting, I am far into the book and am perceiving the country around me from its disquieting point of view. I look at the savannah rushing past the open window. Nearby, huts; in the distance, in the smoke, the outline of a factory.

It is dark when we arrive in Mbour. Mbour is the metropolis; after a day spent in the vastness of the interior, it seems almost Dante-esque. There is manic traffic filling the only surfaced road. Clouds of dust are illuminated by car headlights. It is thronging with noises, darkness and light, confusion, the haunted eyes of passers-by; it is like the antechamber of an inferno. The bus arrives in the gare routière. I get down, buy some oranges and realize that the price has doubled due to the colour of my skin, but am not particularly bothered. Then I become aware that the gare routière is just behind the big candy-pink mosque that I had glimpsed a couple of times in passing. It had seemed to have the air of being self-enclosed, unreachable. When I had mentioned the mosque to the owner of the restaurant I sometimes went to, the only white man I had met in the area, and asked him if it was possible to visit it, he mumbled a half-hearted ‘no’. But now there were people coming out after evening prayer. I decided to take a chance and try to go in. The worst that could happen is that I would be refused admission.

There is a thin chain delimiting the area occupied by the mosque, and on the other side of this chain there is something resembling calm. I reach the railing. The people coming out are putting on their shoes. I take off my grimy sandals and carry them with me across the area. I feel the soft rug of fake grass beneath my feet. The faithful are coming out in groups, as happens in European churches. Except that here they are all men – and nearly all of them of a certain age, or very old. I’m surprised that they have such an immaculate, dignified, serene air about them. When they pass, they greet me. Many of them smile. In this country people don’t smile much, but it seems that here they do. I wonder what I must look like to them. I’m quite obviously dirty after a day spent travelling, and my arms are bare, whereas everyone here has long sleeves. I’m carrying a rucksack and wearing a basic straw hat, conspicuously not dressed to enter such a place as this. And I am white-skinned: so white, in contrast to everyone else, as to actually shed light. But they are smiling at me, nodding in a kindly way. Apparently, they are pleased to see me going to the mosque. I had feared that I would be unwelcome, or regarded with hostility … I arrive at the door. Cautiously, bare-footed, I step inside and look around. A young man is hurrying towards me with a worried expression on his face. He says something that I can’t understand. It is clear that I have overstepped the mark in some way. He points to the sandals that I’m carrying and I realize what it is: the rule is not that you shouldn’t wear shoes in the mosque, it’s that shoes shouldn’t enter it. I quickly step back through the door and leave the shoes with the others. I’m about to go back in when an old man approaches, gives me an encouraging smile and says something to the young one who had stopped me. He takes my shoes, places them in a black plastic bag and carries them into the mosque himself, then hands them back to me. With embarrassment I try to explain that I’m not worried that they’ll be stolen, that I’m quite happy to leave them outside … but he smiles, and the young man smiles as well. In response I pick up my shoes, thank the two men with my eyes and carry on into the interior of the mosque. I am speechless: there are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness.

Nearly everyone has left by now. There are a few still lingering, but the space is so vast that it gives the impression of a great void. Of a great calmness. Of a great silence. I sit on the floor, on rugs, and lean back against a wall. The contrast with what’s outside could hardly be greater. Outside it is infernal; inside we are in paradise. Everything is spotless, impeccably clean. The walls and columns are painted a shining, clear white. The long, simple, elegant, inviting carpets are patterned with a dignified green and black arabesque. They are arranged in parallel, regular rows. The light is diffuse but clear. The arches and columns lift one’s gaze and heart upwards. The few people still inside are not speaking quietly, as they do in churches, but are talking to each other normally – but their tone of voice is calm, one might even say noble. There are no furnishings, glitz, ostentation of wealth, images of agony on the cross, candles, obscurity, old paintings of ecstatic faces, gold leaf. There is just a large, serene space. A welcoming space. Something human, terribly human, where the core of being human seems to be to gravitate towards the essential, the absolute.

And suddenly it seems as if I have glimpsed for a moment something of the heart of this place. This labouring, impoverished, dusty, chaotic Africa conceals within itself, in a place that seems to me the most inaccessible, the calm dignity of these men, the wonder of this perfect space offered to man so that he can be fully himself and at peace with himself, as I have never found anywhere else. Profoundly at peace. And for a moment, despite being a fully-fledged atheist with no hesitation, I feel that I understand what it means for so many people to abandon themselves to the total omnipotence of a God who is not a father, but is the true and complete Absolute.

I leave with my own sense of serenity. Perhaps these are simply physical reactions to the day’s heat, travelling, dehydration, encounters, stress and general fatigue. Or perhaps I have actually learned something, one small additional thing, about the complexity of being human.