Always Someone Else to Shit On

• I am always amazed by how people everywhere are willing to blame all of their society’s problems on whoever is from some place else. Scapegoating and xenophobia seem like human universals. Here in Senegal, for example, any idea of Pan-Africanist unity goes out the window when you hear folks talk about les ñaks, the Wolof term for non-Senegalese Africans. The immigrants are mostly from other francophone African countries like Mali, Guinea-Conakry, and Niger, but also come from as far away as Gabon and some Anglophone countries, particularly Nigeria. I mention Nigerians because every day I have to hear from my French teacher about how Nigerians have taken over the internet spots in his neighborhood in order to carry out their online scams (hating on Nigerians also seems to be a human universal). But it’s not only the online scams that are blamed on the ñaks, whenever I ask Senegalese about the street children here they all say that the children are all from Mali or Niger and that the government is doing its best to deport them (cause of course, that solves everything).
• Last week I was feeling especially guilty about being so white and so rich here. It felt wrong to sit around reading a book about the oppression of women in the peripheral countries as all around me there were a bunch of poor, African women working really hard (like maybe I should have put the book down and done some of the arduous household labor, including washing everything by hand, ironing with charcoal, cooking with only one BURNER, sweeping, dusting, etc. It’s not like I don’t wear the clothes or eat the food.) Then apparently they got some ideas from me about the value of paying others below you on the global socioeconomic hierarchy to do all of your necessary labor for you and decided to get themselves a maid. Here I was feeling all bad about having my host mom and sisters be my maids and they went out and hired a TEAM of maids. So now we have two young women that come to the house who for pennies (US$55 per month plus breakfast and lunch) do all the work, while the women in the house are—like the men—free to do nothing now. I don’t want to imply that my host family is ballin’ by any means. If they did we might have a regular electrical supply, and they would have fixed the faucet or installed some lighting in the toilet or have bought a closet instead of packing all of their clothes into boxes and suitcases. They all sleep on the couches and floor in the living room in order to be able to host two whiteys that can pay bills as well as for the new cabinets in the kitchen and (hopefully) a telephone line. Their new found wealth, however, is like all African economies dependent on how whitey feels and how he is doing economically. No whiteys to host, no money. Still, the moral of the story is no matter how low you go (and, let’s admit it people it doesn’t get any lower on the global hierarchy than broke sub-Saharan African women) under global capitalism there will always be someone lower than you that you can exploit in turn (an even broker African woman).