by David Winner
August 2009, rainy season in Senegal, my friend Robert and I are trying to get from Dakar to Saint Louis, the former capitol of French West Africa. We take the taxi parked outside of our hotel to the Gare Routière where sept-places (old station wagons with their backs carved into claustrophobic seats) head to destinations across the country once seven passengers have assembled. On the way, the driver explains a problem to us, a difficulty that lies outside the realm of my limited French.
Inside the Gare, we see cars, drivers, and even the names of destinations (including Saint Louis) but something is off. There are hardly any people about.
Following us into the station, the driver repeats what he’s said before. And a word that I had not grasped, greve, strike, finally penetrates my foggy brain. No sept places are running today because they are on strike.
According to what I’ve read, police harassment, unlicensed vehicles, bad roads hound Senegal, transportation a chronic challenge.
What the driver wants, I assume, is for us to pay him to take us all the way to Saint Louis. But he seems hesitant when I make that suggestion. And when he finally agrees, he only asks for only a hundred dollars for the nearly four-hour drive there. And back, as he surely lives in or around Dakar.
*
Nearly four hours later, the taxi slows as we reach the outskirts of Saint Louis. It’s not a traffic jam, though, but a roadblock. About twenty men stand in the middle of the road. Neither soldiers nor policemen, they wear tee-shirts, jeans, dusty suit jackets, football jerseys. Some have on traditional African clothes.
There are a few cars ahead of us on the road, and the line of protestors parts, allowing them to pass. But when we approach, rather than get out of our way, they surround the white taxi.
And start to shake it from side to side. Not violently as to risk toppling us but rocking us gently as if we were on a carnival ride for children.
Nevertheless, this feels more like a scene from a documentary set in Liberia, Sierra Leone in their bad old days than peaceful Senegal. This does not seem good.
*
Was it my mother’s worsening Parkinson’s, her death on the horizon, some general sense of defeat, I wasn’t sure, but in 2009, my father passed on decades of American Express points to me that could be redeemed on Delta Airlines. I decided to use them to visit a part of the world that I’d never experienced, and to take a friend, Robert, with me. And the Sub-Saharan destination most easily achievable was Senegal, considered safe, requiring no visa, and only a nine-hour direct flight from Atlanta. But what we realized when we got there was that while there are certainly tourists in the country, no tourists seemed to just sort of show up like we did.
Our Atlanta/Dakar/Cape Town flight drops us off in Dakar almost like it was giving us a ride, and there is no indication of other tourists at the airport, no information kiosks or currency exchanges. Outside the terminal on this warm humid morning, there are dozens of taxi drivers offering us rides, but no official taxi line. And when we negotiate a price and jump into the taxi, several men jump in with us. Odd, but we don’t question it. I speak no Wolof, and my shitty high school French is nowhere up to the task of asking in any reasonable and polite way why all these other people are coming with us.
While the driver may not have been a model of honesty (trying to drop us off at an airport motel rather than our hotel in Central Dakar) the men who jumped into the car with us are dropped off at different places along the way. Standard operating procedure, and a pretty logical one once we think about it.
We had no reason to be alarmed when people jumped into our taxi at the airport, but two days later, in another cab, we are surrounded by a sea of protestors. It must involve the strike, but that’s about all we can figure out. Strange situations are so much stranger when you’re outside of your language zone, and you can’t really ask what’s happening around you.
Grandiose generalization, truism perhaps, most white people born in America may not have been inducted into racist thought but are inevitably inducted into racist instincts. In subconscious ways that may not always grasp. It may not be in the air we breathe, but it’s all over the media we watch. Often, I rewatch old films and discover racist tropes. The Caine Mutiny, for example, that old Bogart movie about a crazed ship captain on a rickety minesweeper, features black hands without black faces or even bodies serving the officers at mess. Ten or eleven when I first saw it, I must have taken it in in that sponge-like way that we learn when we’re kids : something about ships, captain’s tables, black hands.
“Your grandfathers killed a lot of people. Your grandfathers skilled a lot of black people,” sings Kenyan-born Jacky Cougar Abok, of Des Demonas, a fantastic Washington DC punk band.
I doubt either of my grandfathers literally killed anyone though my paternal grandfather, a reporter, traveled with Mussolini in East Africa where the Italians were murdering thousands of black people.
Just four days before, I was negotiating my normal life in Brooklyn, and now I’m in a car in West Africa, apparently under attack.
It is happening so fast, though. Before I even have time to panic, to try to assimilate this puzzling situation, to experience any kind of latent racist response, the driver has requested that we grab our bags, get out of the car, and proceed the rest of the way to Saint Louis on foot.
Will the men rocking the car shout at us, accuse of colonialism, rip us to pieces?
What happens in the next few moments of our lives would too sentimental to be believed if it were fiction. The protestors move out of the way of the taxi doors to allow us out. They smile reassuringly at us, clearly indicating that we should not fear them, that their beef is not with us. One man opens the trunk of the taxi, grabs our bags, and hands them to us. Then a couple of minutes later, a man manning a cart pulled by a donkey stops alongside of us, and we take him up on his offer of a ride over the spectacular Eiffel-designed bridge on into Saint Louis and our hotel.
*
I’m prejudiced against tours. I imagine myself being led from place to place with a group of Americans with whom I would not normally associate. But Saint Louis in 2009 is really not a place that we could transact effectively on our own.
Robert and I could hardly have made our way on our own to the tiny village a half an hour outside of town and met the Chef de Village inside his immaculate mud and thatched roof home if Ousmane, a young guide suggested to us by our English-speaking Ghanian/Senegalese hotel owner, hadn’t brought us. We would not have known to stop at a store along the way to buy dozens of trinkets and sweets, which we gave out to a large assemblage of villagers who served us tea as we sat in a circle on the ground. A useful thing about Islam from a traveler’s point of view is that the greeting, Assalamu alaykum, is understood in many corners of the Moslem world. The people in the village are neither English nor French nor Arabic speakers, but I have one word, at least, in common with them.
The following day our second tour is to culminate in a ride back to Dakar after two stops at tourist sites along the way.
Ousmane stays behind in Saint Louis, and an anxious-seeming man in his late sixties with white robes and a tiny cap, which suggests religiosity, drives us in a sept place with two other tourists, a Spanish couple from the nearby Canary Islands.
Robert anoints the Spanish man, “the Spanish Roberto Benigni” after we stop at an open market along the way, and he rides several children around on his back in a way that strikes us as annoying and performative as if he imagines himself in someone’s movie.
Having not understood what we were booked to see on the way to Dakar, I have no idea what to expect when the Spaniards, a few other tourists, and we are instructed to jump on the back of a four-wheel-drive pick-up truck.
We watch the palm trees, houses and wet vegetation of the bush give way to sand and eventually dunes, covering the horizon in all directions, a geographic anomaly in northern Senegal, the Lompoul Desert.
Back on the road in the sept place, we see that the sky is clouding over. August is rainy season, but thus far the rains have only come at night.
The driver speaks to Ousmane on the phone and turns around to address his passengers. A storm is coming, a big one. It is wiser for us to skip our last stop, some sort of salt lake, and head straight for Dakar.
Robert and I are perfectly happy with that idea, but the Spanish Roberto Benigni is pissed. He’s paid for the tour. The tour includes the lake, and he refuses to be ripped off.
The driver concedes. We are going to the lake, but that turns out to be pretty far away.
For the next hour or so, on the north/south coastal highway, the sept place with its four tourists switches back into its normal mode, picking up and dropping off passengers by the side of the road. Soon the sept place reaches its official capacity, Robert sharing the claustrophobic far back with another passenger.
*
It is already drizzling by the time we drop off the last of the local passengers and take a small dirt road to the lake.
And it is pouring by the time we get there a half an hour later. As Lompoul had been a mini-Sahara, Lake Retba is a mini Dead Sea. Intensely saline, it would be deliriously buoyant to swim in, but we barely get out of the car.
As the venerable old station wagon plods back on the small road towards the highway, the rain grows fiercer, and a deep darkness settles upon us. We can barely see out of the windows.
We ford a long, deep puddle, and when we approach an even larger one a few moments later, the driver guns the engine to try to get us through it.
Somewhere in the middle, we hit what may have been detritus on the road. The car flips slightly in the air, then crashes back down into water. And when the driver tries the ignition again, the car screams back at him in anger before going silent.
After several failed attempts to get it started, the driver gets out his phone and calls Ousmane back in Saint Louis. When the driver passes the phone back to us, Ousmane tries to sound reassuring, but there is not a lot of reassurance he can offer us. Our car has died on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere in a flood that feels Biblical.
Then we get out of the car to try to push it forwards.
Except the puddle feels like more of a pond. Memory exaggerates, but the water is at least up to my thighs, maybe my stomach.
The Spanish Roberto Benigni gets out on the other side and takes off his immediately-soaked tee shirt. I take off mine.
“Guapos,” says the Spanish Roberto Benigni’s girlfriend with gentle sarcasm.
As we try unsuccessfully to push the car forwards, our feet plunge farther into the mud, and I begin to wonder about quicksand, a danger that lurks, I imagine, in faraway places like West Africa.
Plenty of quicksand in the United States, as it turns out, and this is thankfully just regular old mud.
*
American cell phones didn’t necessarily work internationally in those days, but I’d purchased a cheap UK-associated one that did. Back in the car, I pull it out and dial the United States.
Angela, my wife, picks up the phone in Brooklyn. I describe what is happening. Am I underplaying it, overplaying it? I don’t know. At some point, it will have to stop raining. At some point the waters will have to recede. The possibility of drowning in a flash flood, the water rising above my waste to my shoulders, making me tread water for as long as I had strength does not occur to me.
Angela is calm, matter of fact, during our brief conversation, which maybe should have included some sort of goodbye, an “I love you,” just in case if that was not too melodramatic a gesture.
If there were such a thing as a Senegalese FEMA, they could hardly be alerted in time to rescue us. If this were happening now, Autumn 2025 in America, FEMA would barely be functional anyway.
The driver is on the phone again, with Ousmane or maybe someone else. Through the blur of language, I think I’d heard the word, tractor. Wishful thinking, auditory hallucination? After spending a certain amount of time surrounded by a language we don’t speak (my observation), familiar words start emerging amidst the strange syllables.
How can a tractor or any sort of vehicle make its way through the water to us, in any case? How can they even know where we were? There seems to be nothing to mark the spot except mud and water.
After some time, not even very much time, we hear sounds coming through the murky darkness. It is indeed a vehicle, a tractor. Quickly attached to the sept place, it drags the car and us very slowly down the road. The water is not as high as I had imagined. It does not come in through the windows and leak into the car.
And now it is lessening, turning into a drizzle. After twenty minutes being tugged slowly forwards, we start to see structures off to the sides of the road, a town that I did not remember passing on the way to the lake.
We get out of the sept place on the town’s main drag. Mechanics will soon attend to it.
*
We have been rescued. In the following years, climate change will bring storms to New York. Sandy will destroy homes and kill people. Living on higher ground in the middle of Brooklyn, we’ve escaped with minimal consequences. I had to go to Senegal to land in what felt like a natural disaster. There are several culprits, God, or nature, or the Spanish Roberto Benigni. And there are heroes – the purveyors of the tractor, the driver, and Ousmane who brought them to us.
The danger has passed, but I’m hit with delayed-reaction anxiety. Some sort of shock response had been keeping me relatively calm during the height of the storm, but that anesthetic is wearing off, presenting me with a series of hysterical questions. Can the station wagon really be fixed? Won’t that take days, weeks? If even a new car breaks down on Coney Island Avenue, a couple of blooks away from my home, it can take forever to fix, not to mention an ancient station wagon submerged in water. Robert and I don’t fly out of Dakar until the following evening, but where will we sleep if we can’t make it back to our hotel in the capitol?
From the car, we are led inside a small building where we wait as the sept place is being worked upon. The floor is ankle deep in water, but there are chairs propped up on wooden slats, so we can sit without getting our feet wet again.
On our way from the car to the building, I had glimpsed buses going back and forth down the street. Psychedelic magic buses that look as if they began their lives taking kids back and forth to school in America before getting brought to Senegal and painted magnificent multitudes of colors. We can maybe get on one if they can’t fix the station wagon. Some must surely go to Dakar, but how would we pay, how would we know where to get off?
*
I’m a drinker, a social one but also an anxiety one. As the aftereffects of the storm and our amazing rescue ratchet through me, I realize that it is now evening, cocktail hour. Senegal is a Muslim country, but all the tourist restaurants seem to serve wine. Excusing myself from Robert, and tramping through the water back outside, I slip across the street to what seems to be a food and goods store.
The kid at the counter looks puzzled when I ask for bierre in my atrocious accent. Senegalese certainly do drink it, but I have no idea in which sort of establishments it is sold. The young man may not have spoken French. Not everyone does, fifty years after independence from France.
Back across the street, Robert and I are escorted to another house a few doors down where lamb is being grilled on a fire pit. Delectable pieces are hacked off and handed to us.
Soon after we’ve finished our meal, we receive word that the car, like Lazarus, has been brought back from the dead, the uncanny mechanical abilities often in evidence in the global south.
*
As we approach the end of the first year of Trump’s second term, as our own nation lies tattered by racist xenophobia, I imagine what it would be like if the year were 2025 and the roles were reversed. How would two black, non-English speaking, non-Christian, foreign tourists with only tourist visas get treated in the midst of a natural disaster? Americans remain generally decent when not clouded over by ideology, but ICE lurks everywhere, and an entrance stamp in a foreign passport might not mean anything to them. In any case, we were treated with consistent kindness and acceptance in Senegal in 2009.
I don’t mean to sentimentalize the country and its people. Thousands flee it in leaky boats on dangerous journeys to Europe. I can only report on what I saw, what I experienced, the blurry glimpse my linguistic and cultural illiteracy afforded me.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.