Pac, Che and Bob

• On Friday I visited some of the dorms of Cheikh Anta Diop University, the main—and until recently, the only—public university in Senegal. Much of what I saw was typical of students everywhere: posters of Ronaldinho, El-Hadji Diouf (the best Senegalese footballer ever, pictured above. He led the Senegalese national team, “The Lions of Teranga,” in its epic victory over the then-defending world champion French team in the inaugural match of the 2002 World Cup. It was 5 years ago and Senegal didn’t even qualify for the 2006 World Cup but they still talk about how they defeated the colonizers, even though the French team was all black and Arab. In fact, I remember my father asking me in 1998 if there were any French players on the French team; I had to assure him that there are people of color of France. He didn’t believe me until Univision showed him images of some pissed-off ghetto youth burning Paris down in 2005. The Senegalese also swear that the Brazilian team was terrified of having to play The Lions in 2002, something I highly doubt, and that they didn’t qualify for the last World Cup because the refs stole it from them. Nationalism can be a funny thing when it is not being used to exploit or murder enemies of the nation, internal and external.) and other footballers or of the Holy Trinity of Tupac Shakur, Che Guevara and Bob Marley, in addition to other accruements of student life like small refrigerators, empty trays of food on the floor, computers, unmade twin size beds, and piles of textbooks lying everywhere. But that is where the similarities ended; the beds were made of foam, the computers were ancient—nor did everyone have one—the clothes were washed by hand and there were clotheslines tied between the trees and windows in front of the dorm building (I can only imagine what the quad would look like crisscrossed by clotheslines), and there were mosquito nets knotted in bundles above the beds. The students complained about the difficult conditions. In fact, days before I came to Senegal the New York Times published a story on the poor state of African universities focusing primarily on Cheikh Anta Diop (I would link it, but the bastards make you pay).
• The school is also a lively center for politics, and I saw a lot of graffiti advertising different slates of candidates for the student union. The elections are a big deal and the national parties have proxy organizations on campus with many student leaders going on to careers as successful politicians. In general, however, the students are an anti-establishment group and are more often warring with the government than joining it. And I say warring literally, like violent armed clashes with police where people die on a frequent basis. The relationship between the government and the students has gotten so bad that on two occasions (1968, a good year for revolution, and 1984, I think) the government declared an annee blanche, or a blank year, where the schools were shut down, and the government basically “locked out” the students like an employer might do a militant union. And Republicans think that American universities are centers for left-wing indoctrination and activism.