In Photos - Gorée Island

One mile off Dakar’s southeastern coast, Gorée Island was once a hub in the Atlantic shipping route. Portuguese traders first settled the island in the 15^th century, but the French gained controlled two hundred years later and ruled until Senegal’s independence in 1960. Today, Gorée is mainly residential. No cars cruise its dirt streets, and the quiet island life is a welcome respite from the crush and bustle of Dakar.

Inhumane Relations

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.

La Pouponnière

During the week, I volunteer at an orphanage in Dakar with Lucy, another Rotary scholar. We help out in the nursery, holding babies and handing out bottles before putting everyone down for a nap. Sometimes Lucy convinces her husband Okwen to join us.

The lesser things

I spend my afternoons at the gas station at the end of the street, a mini-mart where you can buy corn flakes and imported beer. The store has plastic tables where customers sip café au laits and eat pizza ordered from the counter. There is wifi and a generator, which means a way to charge computers whose batteries have run dry in our days without power. Needless to say, the place draws quite a crowd.

Outside, too, there is a multitude. Young children who carry begging bowls made from tomato tins. They ask you for cent francs—100 CFA, which doesn’t buy much in Dakar. A few spoonfuls of yogurt. Four pieces of candy. With 300 CFA you can buy a mayonnaise and French fry sandwich. With 500 CFA, the man at the sandwich stand will add a fried egg. He leaves his empty ketchup containers in a tree beside the stand at night. The begging children fish down the plastic jars and pass them around. They scrape their hands against the inside walls and lick the residue from their fingers.

When I leave the mini-mart, I hand out my change until I am depleted of 100 CFA coins. It’s never enough. Each week there are new faces demanding cent francs. Lifetime staff in the international aid community talk of “compassion fatigue,” the way working in ceaseless poverty wears on them over many years. I’m not there, but my own reservoirs have run dry by the end of each day. I’m sorry for the children I see outside the gas station; I watch them watching the man next to meet eat a slice of pizza. My heart breaks for the woman who sings to her baby beside the road, displaced people who have no place to go. I’m sad for the teenager who sells cell phone cards outside the ice cream store. I can’t imagine he makes enough coins in a day to buy a cone. I pity, too, the lesser things, the new litter of kittens who lived in the trash pile on the corner. I watched them die, one by one, until there were none left. My roommate and I fed a kitten from an earlier litter for a while. We debated bringing her home, but we know we are both leaving within the year. Then what would we do with her? Now when we look for her, she’s no longer in the usual spot. I like to think some kind soul took her home, but it’s hard to fathom in this place.

Report from Abidjan

An article from the UN’s news service agency on the violence in Ivory Coast, where the Rotary West Africa District Conference is scheduled for April.

ABIDJAN, 8 March 2011 (IRIN) - As reports by Human Rights Watch and formal documentation from the UN Human Rights Commission decry the worsening human rights situation in Côte d’Ivoire, many Ivoirians IRIN spoke with in Abidjan are appalled by recent acts of gruesome violence.

“We are seeing any and all forms of killing,” said an Ivoirian human rights activist who requested anonymity. “It’s sheer horror we’re living here… People are being burned alive and hacked to bits with machetes,” he said, adding that the violence seemed to be spiralling out of control.

Lassina*, 29, a cybercafé manager in Avocatier-Abobo neighbourhood (part of Abidjan’s Abobo District), said he has twice seen people burned alive. The latest incident he saw was on 5 March. “I heard cries from outside. When I went to see what was going on, youths were brandishing the burned bodies of two gendarmes like trophies.

“Not only is the country far from exiting its crisis, we have to deal with horrifying scenes like this,” he said.

The “betrayal” of Ivoirians’ hope that the 28 November second-round presidential election could be a first step on the road to peace and stability is contributing to the level of violence, said Rinaldo Depagne, senior West Africa analyst with International Crisis Group.

“That door was slammed shut; hope has vanished and now there is an absolutely dreadful state of desperation,” he told IRIN. “This degree of violence is quite unusual for Côte d’Ivoire; we didn’t even see this during armed conflict in 2002 and 2003 [the height of fighting following an armed rebellion].”

With such open displays of violence, Fatoumata Diaby, a 32-year-old housewife in Avocatier-Abobo, said she worries about what children are seeing. "I am shocked at how young girls and boys are witness to these horrific scenes... Human dignity crumbled in this country some time ago now. I wonder whether human life even has any meaning for Ivoirians any more. People are so thirsty for vengeance that they will slit someone’s throat without giving a damn."

Fabrice Danon, 35, a mason in Anonkoua-Abobo neighbourhood, is among hundreds of Ivoirians who have set up community self-defence groups in the past two months. He said one night armed men came and attacked his post. “They shot in the air, then attacked us. The head of our group was shot; as he was dying the armed men slit his throat with a machete. His body thrashed about like an animal’s. I was beside myself. Things have completely crossed the line."

In Abobo-Dokui neighbourhood, 33-year-old bus driver Maurine Koné said he could not believe he was in Côte d’Ivoire when he saw his nephew’s brutal murder. “Youths pulled him out of a bus and slit his throat. When I saw his body my legs gave out on me. This human slaughter is inexplicable."

He added: "But the moment of revenge is near. One must be patient.”

Asked whether the violence is at a point of no return, the human rights activist said it is still possible to avoid the worst - but only with a commitment to a peaceful settlement on the part of Alassane Ouattara and Laurent Gbagbo. He said for now few people apart from some religious leaders are actively calling for calm, out of fear from both sides.

The problem, he said, is there is no neutral mediator. “Given that the UN and the international community have declared unbending support for Ouattara, they cannot move things towards peace because they are partisan.”

He said on the one hand the Ouattara camp does not think it has to back down, because they have the categorical backing of the international community; on the other, Gbagbo will not yield either, as he holds the reins of power. “And keep in mind, the electorate is split just about 50-50.”

Meanwhile, the sharply partisan media carry diverging accounts of the violence, depending on who is attacking whom.

“Moral collapse” screamed the headline of a pro-Ouattara newspaper on 7 March, for an article about women reportedly shot dead by security forces during a march calling for incumbent Gbagbo to step down. A pro-Gbagbo paper on the same day carried the headline: “Alleged murder of women in Abobo - a grotesque fabrication”.

(*not his real name)

Read the article online here.

More unsettling news

A second man set himself on fire in front of the presidential palace last Thursday. Local papers say Senegal is poised for an uprising like the ones sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, and many of us are holding our breath here in the capital.

Worrisome news from Dakar

Man dies after setting himself on fire in Senegal

BY RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

ASSOCIATED PRESS

DAKAR, Senegal -- A man who set himself on fire in front of the presidential palace in Senegal on Friday died from his wounds hours later in the latest self-immolation on the African continent.

Witnesses said the man stood on the sidewalk and doused himself with a flammable liquid, possibly paint thinner or gasoline. It was not immediately clear why he set himself alight, but Abdoulaye Loum, who was at a bus stop nearby when the incident occurred, said the man was holding a piece of paper in his hand which he held up as the flames swallowed him.

The man collapsed to the ground and was rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment. A statement read on state TV late Friday said he died at the capital's main hospital.

A private radio station said the man was a soldier and that he was wearing his military fatigues when he set himself on fire.

This self-immolation comes on the heels of similar protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and Senegal's neighbor to the north, Mauritania.

Tunisia's mutiny that ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was touched off by a struggling 26-year-old university graduate who lit himself on fire after police confiscated his fruit and vegetable cart in December. Other self-immolations then quickly spread elsewhere in northern Africa and the Middle East.

Senegal is a moderate Muslim nation with one of the most established democracies in the region, but the country is facing its worst power outages in a decade and the cost of living has spiraled. There is growing discontent over octogenarian President Abdoulaye Wade's attempt to run for a third term, as well as the increasing influence of his son.

A U.S. diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks warned that father and son appeared to be "preparing the way for a presidential dynastic succession."

An hour after the incident, traffic had gone back to normal. Pieces of the man's burnt clothing lay in a charred circle.

Read the story online.