Dakar, Senegal

I was trying to talk to my Grandmother, but on the television three feet away from me was goddamn beautiful Plage de Princess, and everybody teachers, employees, bums on the street, talibes, Marabouts, scholars, Ex-Pats, Pivate Fredericks and his Wife Melanie and their three kids Susie Jonny and Freddie with their good dog Max and they’ve got that thing turned all the way up as if and I said “Do you think you can hear the television now?” and nobody said anything or moved a muscle cause nobody spoke any English and I said “Good!  Ah Ha!”

The man stood on the corner of the street beating the child who screamed constantly as I would scream only if I was being raped or being strangled by a giant snake (which is my greatest fear which will follow me forever and ever), or I was watching my mother being tortured by some deranged madman and there I was watching strapped to a chair with barbed wire, the kind the Nazis used to cut down decent men, the blades cutting into me, bleeding me like a million tiny metallic leeches.  I seriously doubt it was even his kid, but thus is Senegal.

The chairs, the cheap metal and plastic and fake leather ones made in China by Ying Po who gets fifteen cents an hour to send back to his family in the village with his sick child Ya who needs a doctor but all they can give him is tea because there ain’t nobody around, goddamn it, no goddamn doctors for miles and miles and miles, and there’s Po, living in some box car next to factory with fifty other Po’s with sick little Ya’s themselves and wives so far away they are so lonely and there’s no goddamned doctors for miles and miles and miles.

And these chairs, well let me tell you about these chairs on this hard shiny fake marble floor when you slide them the go screeeeeeeeecccccccchhhhhhhhxxxxxxxxf;lks ;lksjdfs;dlkfj ;lajkdf; lkj ;lkdsfj and goddamned it did you forget that those chairs made by Po and Ying and Yan and Yo are actually the Devil who’s out to disrupt all that is good and Holy in this world as Ya is lying in the village dying of a snake bite because there are no doctors for miles and miles and miles and the tea just isn’t doing it like it did for the ancients and won’t somebody get this poor kid a doctor and stop the street kid on the corner from screaming like his mother is being raped by Hitler himself!  Goddamnittt am I the only one listening!?!?!?

And here comes the Doctor riding in his cab that goes HONK HONK HONK HONK HA HA HA HONK BLAH BLAG BLAG BLAH HA HA HA HA HA HONK! but he is here in Dakar and not in the Village with Ya though he will not be helping the screaming child or his mother.

I am finished.

And thus is Senegal.

By Thomas Gilchrist

I entered the dining room, and was immediately thrust into a party atmosphere.  Tables, four of them, big, long, covered in white cloths supporting people eating to their hearts content and drinking good wine in each other’s thankful company.

The bounty was aplenty and people gayly laughed and hooted and stood up on chairs and the tables to give speeches, and Senegalese and Americans, and Haitians and Swedes and Brits and Malaysians and Mexicans and French all sat at the same table of heavenly host and tipped their cups to one another in a show of love and admiration.

I was late in arriving, and by the time I got there, the festivities were in full force, though I had received several phone calls encouraging me to come, but I never guessed I would come to this! 

Four turkeys! dismembered and peeled apart for lustful consumption!  forty pounds of mashed potatoes to feed the host of forty thousand! Stuffing! Greens! More stuffing! Mashed Potatoes behind the Mashed Potatoes! Macaroni and Cheese! Fruit!  The finest juices of West Africa!

I was somber as I ate, contemplative of my food, so good, so nourishing, so … as others went back for plate after plate, I ate only the one, but my plate was clean, spotless, revered. 

We sat and discussed life and joys, happy, just sitting, completely content with the world and everything in it and the food in our bellies.  People were sprawled out upon the floor as if there had been a great battle with many casualties–and their had been–and once again the humans had defeated the Turkeys, and the Turkeys had in turn defeated the humans, and thus is life: everyone wins.

As we were sitting there, a man pulled out a guitar and began strumming lovely folk songs he had written about love in Senegal.  The host choir sung to the guitar; things were at peace in the world, this Thanksgiving of good friends and food.

flickr.com image courtesy of roland

By Thomas Gilchrist

Dakar, Senegal

Right now, I am watching RTS 1, the main government-managed television network in Senegal.  I wanted to watch Freedomland, starring Samuel L and Julianne Moore, but my younger sister disagreed, and changed the channel to RTS.

“The main thing about government-controlled media,” said one Dakar-stationed foreign journalist, “Is that it is very boring.”

And it is.  Very boring.  A lot of this is the fault of M. Pres. Abdoulaye Wade, who he himself happens to be very boring.  This in and of itself is not necessarily a problem, but His Excellency, M. Wade is the star, co-star, and conflicted love interest of RTS.  

If Wade, were more like Hulk Hogan, or Jerry Seinfield, or Wayne Gretzky, RTS would have a legitimate chance at being a decently entertaining channel, kind of like watching the British Parliament scream at each other and jump up and down on the BBC.  But the 82 year-old M. Wade is more like a retired Ferengai who listens to live performances of Senegal’s national anthem, “Pincez Tous vos Koras, Frappez les Balafons” on various air strips.

What is interesting to me is how government-controlled media in Senegal compares to agenda-controlled media in the United States.  In the US, government-controlled media simply would not fly.  We would call them out on their bull-shit.  We cringe enough at the commercials seeking to gain volunteers for our military, and I can remember a commercial advocating support for The Wall separating the US and Mexico, which featured M. Pres. Bush riding on an ATB that made me scream and vomit at the same time. People react strongly enough to American Government commercials, and the response to an entire government channel in the US would be interesting, to say the least.

But in the US, we have agendas.  Everyone knows Fox News subscribes to a conservative slant, but people consider it more of a novelty than misguided journalistic principles.  We recognize it, we understand Fox News is owned by the conservative entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch, and we process accordingly the information we gleam from Fox News.  The same goes for the liberal-leaning CNN.

I suppose the thing is, that not everyone does take Fox News with a grain of salt, that there are Americans who consume its broadcasts at face value, simply because they don’t understand, or no one has ever told them, that it is more accurate to take socially conservative broadcasts with some liberal seasoning, and liberal broadcasts with some conservative sauce on the side.

In America, however, you are able to choose, and our liberally and conservatively-slanted private media is an extension of our two-party system.  But in Senegal, it isn’t conservative-liberal as much as it is whoever’s in charge-the rest of the scrambling masses.  The issue is that not everyone gets to choose.

Access to RTS is fairly universal in Senegal, either via television or the radio, but other perspectives come as a bit of a luxury, a luxury not all can afford.  For some, whatever RTS broadcasts is definitive, if, for no other reason, they simply don’t have access to any other media outlet.

People here, however, don’t even realize that RTS is a government-controlled network, just as some Americans (unbelievably) don’t realize that Fox News presents a conservative slant.  “Is RTS a government-controlled channel?” I asked my perfectly-educated, perfectly-cultured host mother.  “RTS is the national channel, but it is not controlled by the government,” she said.

It’s not that aspects of Senegal’s media aren’t free, but that people are yet to reject the the spoon-fed information the government gives them, and if and when they do, that grain of salt will have to be a decision they make as a society.

So for now, I’m going to sit here and watch the President listen to “Pincez Tous vos Koras, Frappez les Balafons” and shake hands with what appears to be around 100 people an hour, and I’m going to smile and nod when the picture of him hanging on the outside of his Ford Excursion going through the flooded parts of Dakar makes front-page news three days in a row in  le Soleil, the main government-controlled newspaper.

Who knows?  It could become exciting.  Maybe Hulk Hogan will make a cameo.  

flickr.com image courtesy of duram_friedman