Those who have spent many years in Africa complain that journalists often tell the same story about the continent: Poverty, violence, corruption.
Of course, if these stories exist it’s because they spring from some truth. There is much violence here. Corruption by the carload. And poverty. Poverty in the streets of Medina, Dakar’s old city, and poverty in the back alleys of Plateau, downtown, once you step away from the sushi restaurants with their $60 plates of raw fish. There is poverty in Les Almadies, the rich quarter in the northern section of Dakar, where mansions go up daily and glossy Mercedes cruise through pot-holed streets. But you have to know where to look. Or, really, you can look everywhere, because the poverty is there, right smack in the middle of the bright new homes and fancy cars. It’s just easy to forget about.
We go out on a Monday night to a swanky restaurant done in straight angles and gleaming silver. We order $10 cocktails and sip them slowly, like we belong in the place. We are mostly foreigners, UN staffers and NGO administrators, people who are just passing through. In our hometowns—in New York or Brussels, Montreal or Oslo—we would never go to such a nice place. We would never fit in. And in Dakar, we don’t fit in either. Because places like this, places with names like Alkimica and Alcove, done in chrome and glass tile, they are not for us. They are for the Senegalese upper class, the men who rule the government, who own the businesses that run Dakar. The restaurant is packed with these men. Their Porsches are parked out front. Most of them live nearby or downtown, in the chic quarters where the power never goes out. They rarely pass through Medina, hardly ever stop to see how the other half lives.
So, yes, there is poverty in Senegal. Unsettling, seemingly irresolvable poverty. But there is wealth, too. Wealth so great it makes you catch your breath. Makes you ask how the two coexist, this vast richness alongside deep scarcity.
The great literary journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski spent a lifetime on the African continent, chronicling the beauty and complexity of this place. In The Shadow of the Sun, he writes about the famine in Ethiopia during the mid-1970s:
I walked to the center of the town, to the market. On the square stood stalls with barley, millet, and beans, ones with lamb, and beside them others selling onions, tomatoes, and red peppers. Elsewhere, bread and goat cheese, sugar and coffee, cans of sardines, biscuits and wafers. A market is usually a crowded, bustling, and noisy place, but here all was silent. The vendors stood motionless and idle, now and then only swatting half-heartedly at flies. There were flies everywhere. Dark, thick, churning clouds of them, irritated, frenzied, furious. We fled to the side streets to escape them, for they had instantly thrown themselves at us, and there we encountered a different world — empty, in final agony. On the ground, in the filth and the dust, lay emaciated people. They were the inhabitants of neighboring villages. The drought had deprived them of water, and the sun had scorched their crops. They had come here, to the town, in the desperate hope that they would be given a sip of water and would find something to eat . . . We returned by way of the market, with its sacks of flour, slabs of meat, and bottles of mineral water: for the great famine was the result not of a shortage, but of inhumane relations.
