Friday, October 14, 2011 Saint Louis

Before daybreak, I caught a ca b to the transport station.  I call it the transport station because it includes taxis, 7-ater Peugeots, minibuses, and apparently some buses (didn't see any).  Although it seems that tere are people everywhere you turn in this place, Senegal's population is only 12 million, and it's hard to find enough people who are traveling to different places and can afford it.  Therefore, these 7 seater Peugeots (sometimes called bush taxis) are the most common.  I'd take a bus any day; these things are from 1982, they're completely battered, I don't consider Peugeots to be reliable in general, and when you factor in potholes these things are miserable.  Not to mention they are 7-seaters, meaning there's a third row of seats where the trunk should be.  Getting out of Dakar going north it got progressively hotter, as it was more inland (and closer and closer to the hottest place on earth, the Sahara Desert).  And that means, everyone's BO got progressively smellier.  I swear, some of these people go 18 rounds of sweat before showering, such that there is a constant tangy BO smell everywhere.  The ride to Saint Louis took 5 hours, which is pretty long considering it's pretty close.  I took a cab to the city centre, which is an island at the mouth of the Senegal River.  I had to go to a couple of hotels because the first was full.  Don't ask me how it's full in the middle of October when it's super hot and when there wasn't a single white person in town except for me.  Whatever.  I checked into this ridiculously expensive place right on the water, which was pretty posh, well, by African standards.  I went walking around and absolutely no one was out and about because it was 100 degrees with burning sun.  I was so hungry and thirsty, so I bought a watermelon and paid to have it cut up, which was absolutely amazing in that heat.  Immediately after that I retired to my room for a standard 2-hour siesta.  I kind of lack motivation to do anything here because I'm always uncomfortable; tired, hot, sweaty, don't speak French, nothing really to see except for piles of trash and poverty.  I'm painting such a great picture, huh?  Saint-Louis is the first French settlement in Africa, and while it's nicer than most other African cities I've visited, I feel that the only reason it's a Unesco Heritage Site is that West Africa doesn't have any others.  It still has trash everywhere, buildings are in disrepair, and most of the roads are dirt.  Kids were playing football in the street, and loved my camera, and girls were braiding each other's hairon stoops, much like in the South.  I walked across the river, where tons of canoes, and of course, piles of trash, lined the river banks.  The most evocative sight for me was the poverty in which these people live.  After all, West Africa is probably the poorest region on earth.  Basically attributable to the European influence.  I don't understand how West Africans like white people.  For 500 years, Europeans have basically raped this place.  Mali used to be the richest place on earth; now Mali ranks lower than 100th place on the Human Development Index.  Basically, Europeans drained the region of all its gold, then of course the Portuguese took preexisting slavery to a whole new level with the Transatlantic Triangular Slave Trade, which was one of the most brutal and inhumane events of modern history.  Oh, not to mention the fact that it plunged West Africa into warfare and robbed the region of young productive generations.  This reason in itself would be enough for me as an African to be racist against anything Western.  But then don't forget colonization and the Scramble for Africa, whereby every European country claimed part of the African continent, extracting every last bit of diamonds, gold, ivory, and rubber on the backs of native laborers.  Oh, and when that brutality was over, there was independence whereby Europeans created arbitrary borders and then massive civil wars and genocide ensued.  So yeah, I don't see why Africans all think it's cool when I say I'm from the US (and the West in general).  Oh well.  I had some shrimp for dinner and as I was walking back to the hotel, I happened to stumble upon this drum session in the middle of the town in the dark night.  These rasta dudes were drumming it up while a chorus of women dressed in white robes chanted, and little boys strutted their dance moves.  These 7-year old boys, who had no lessons or anything, were better dancers than anyone I've ever seen at any given nightclub back home.