Since sitting on the roof terrace of the lovely Hotel Djoloff in Dakar last night, I have taken ten contrivances in series to get home
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If I were the kind of person to take pictures, they would not have been of the truly titanic but somewhat Stalinist and characterless Monument de la Renaissance Africaine, but of girls in jeans wearing headphones over their headscarves (the population is 95% Muslim), goats in the street, goats on the beach, the amazing fish market starting in the early evening when the pirogues come in in their hundreds and hundreds from fishing, the yellow and black Peugeot taxis which will fall apart if you so much as breathe hard while sitting in them, kids playing football in sand roads, girls on skateboards (I don't remember having seen that in Cambridge), men in the rather fine-looking boubou (a loose long shirt and loose trousers in matching fabric), and not the confrontational alien and obnoxiously expensive Radisson hotel with the pool by the sea but the Djoloff itself, a stylish but unassuming and inviting building in a local idiom, with the staircase in a covered internal courtyard leading all the way up to the third-floor roof terrace with the friendly bar and good food and the views over the city and the sea. The Djoloff is a tantalising vision of how the city might look if it were prosperous instead of poor, full of empty lots and crumbling buildings and shacks and concrete blocks.
The weather was perfect: I expected it to be far too hot, but it was warm and lovely, though people say it becomes uncomfortably hot for three months or so in the rainy season, which starts soon. There are downsides: there is not much to see, no cafe culture, no public transport apart from the pestilential taxis, and the place is much too big and a bit too too hot to walk from place to place. The food is not very varied: there are plats européens, few of which are any significant distance from steak and chips, and plats sénégalais, which are one of three or four dishes - chicken yassa, fish skewers, grilled fish and some kind of stew. (There are no vegetarians and precious few vegatables.) I was lucky enough to meet quite a few hip young people doing cool things, such as running Jokkolabs, a co-working space for social enterprises (where I was dragooned into giving a talk during my stay). But I met far more people who rushed up to me in the street hoping to sell me something with invented friendliness, which quite often turned a little unpleasant when I didn't want to buy anything or have a free look ('just look, looking is free') at their paintings or wood carvings.
All in all, a wonderful place to visit, but to spend much longer there it would be essential to do two things: (i) learn to drive and run a car, and (ii) learn a bit of Wolof. One does not need Wolof to get by, as everything is done in French. But speaking French, naturally, is not enough to convince the touts that you are a local and will not be interested in their wares. In fact, despite my limited command of the language, they were as often as not quite happy to assume that I was French.
One of the youth of our church spent a year two years ago living in a village in Senegal--he took some amazing photos both there and in Dakar, so I have images of what you're talking about, but the additional sensual imagery is visceral and vital.
The oppressive salesmanship is something we saw in Egypt--worse than anywhere else we've been. We spent quite some time trying to think how they might be encouraged to back off and thereby up the odds of us actually buying something.
I was surprised how much worse it was than I've seen elsewhere. At the marché artisanal, one guy had a t-shirt of Dakar I would actually quite have liked. But he was so relentlessly and unpleasantly adhesive that I couldn't bring myself to buy it from him. All the same I dare say you had it even worse in Egypt, since so far as I know US officials haven't released a travel advisory about the scale of the problem in Senegal.
Living in a village would be a completely different and, I'm sure, amazing experience. Are his photos online?
The weather was perfect: I expected it to be far too hot, but it was warm and lovely, though people say it becomes uncomfortably hot for three months or so in the rainy season, which starts soon. There are downsides: there is not much to see, no cafe culture, no public transport apart from the pestilential taxis, and the place is much too big and a bit too too hot to walk from place to place. The food is not very varied: there are plats européens, few of which are any significant distance from steak and chips, and plats sénégalais, which are one of three or four dishes - chicken yassa, fish skewers, grilled fish and some kind of stew. (There are no vegetarians and precious few vegatables.) I was lucky enough to meet quite a few hip young people doing cool things, such as running Jokkolabs, a co-working space for social enterprises (where I was dragooned into giving a talk during my stay). But I met far more people who rushed up to me in the street hoping to sell me something with invented friendliness, which quite often turned a little unpleasant when I didn't want to buy anything or have a free look ('just look, looking is free') at their paintings or wood carvings.
All in all, a wonderful place to visit, but to spend much longer there it would be essential to do two things: (i) learn to drive and run a car, and (ii) learn a bit of Wolof. One does not need Wolof to get by, as everything is done in French. But speaking French, naturally, is not enough to convince the touts that you are a local and will not be interested in their wares. In fact, despite my limited command of the language, they were as often as not quite happy to assume that I was French.
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One of the youth of our church spent a year two years ago living in a village in Senegal--he took some amazing photos both there and in Dakar, so I have images of what you're talking about, but the additional sensual imagery is visceral and vital.
The oppressive salesmanship is something we saw in Egypt--worse than anywhere else we've been. We spent quite some time trying to think how they might be encouraged to back off and thereby up the odds of us actually buying something.
Thanks for sharing!
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Living in a village would be a completely different and, I'm sure, amazing experience. Are his photos online?
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