Bare Minimum

On Sunday I finally moved into the youth hostel I should have booked earlier. It was classic youth hostel, with bunk beds, shared rooms and facilities, kitchen, chill-out area and internet service, and the usual crowd of early twentysomethings backpacking through Europe. I am not a fan of hostels, mainly because I don’t like sleeping with several other random strangers. It’s not that I am prissy like that, I just feel like some people weren’t raised right and have no matters and other folks are just weird and I don’t feel like sleeping in the same room as them. Furthermore, it’s pure capitalism. They charge you the most money for the least possible. It’s like they ask themselves, how little can we give people while still follow the health and building codes (the only stopping them from giving you a mat on the floor in a tiny box and calling it a night, as I saw later on my trip) and then how much can we charge them so that it’s barely preferable to sleeping on a park bench. Shit, you pay 16€ and some places won’t even give you sheets. Don’t dream of a towel. Still, it’s the best way to meet people, and it’s at Los Amigos Backpackers’ Hostel in Madrid that I met Tracey over breakfast and convinced her to follow me to Morocco over lunch. Although I think it was the sharp cut that sealed the deal.

Self-Hating but I Love Them

As much as “The Most Self-Hating Group of Black People on the Planet Earth” annoy me, I love them. It’s one of those “can’t live with them, can’t live without them” type deals. They’re my people, what can I say? My only goal in Madrid was to find my tribe, get some food and chill with them. I quickly got my wish. After the rain let up, I went out for another calling card. I wanted to say hi to the nice lady from the day before since she had saved my life, but her kiosk was closed so I went down to the next one. After buying the card I was so busy lamenting the price, 10€, that I didn’t notice that the man who sold me the ticket was black. Was he one of mine? I asked him if he was Dominican, and he said yes so I chilled with him and his friend who was there to keep him company. After being flummoxed when I tried to explain what it was that I was doing in Senegal and why I would ever go to Africa (remember the title of the blog), they were even more shocked that I hadn’t had platanos in four months. How had a survived? I had often wondered the same thing. The friend pitied me that he invited me to his house for a home-cooked Dominican meal. We took the bus to the bodega, and I felt like hugging the platanos, and yuccas and Goya cans and never letting go. He made platanos sancochados and huevos revueltos with way too much oil, the way Dominicans do it; I bought us two forties to wash the food down. We sat on his plastic covered couches, and I heard his sister-in-law curse at her children in Spanish. It felt like home. Then he got up to get some more oil, his platanos needed more grease he explained.

On the Importance of Learning Your Lessons

Saturday morning I woke up, took my first warm shower in four months and was ready to get to know the city, when the hostel staff told me that since I had only booked my room for one night I would have to pack my bags and leave in less than an hour. Someone else had reserved my room. This time I was serious about crying and the lady saw the distraught looking and told me she could hook me up with a friend of hers who ran a hostel a couple of streets away. So me and some middle-aged Swedish tourists who had just completed the Santiago trail—who apparently were just as stupid as me and had forgotten to book their room for the whole weekend too—went to a dingy looking spot three or four small side streets from Gran Via. Finally I went out to get to know Madrid and of course it rained, and I was forced to return to the hostel and watch Friends and Dragon Ball Z reruns in Spainish.

On the Importance of Planning Ahead

It’s important to plan ahead people. I was going to book my hostel in advance online, but didn’t feel like paying the four or five euro online fee. I figured that whenever you speak the language and have money you are fine and that I would just land, check some places out and pick the one I liked most. That was a truly dumb mistake. Instead I arrived to Madrid’s Barajas Airport at 5 AM to find everything closed. I had to wait for one of the bookstores to open so that I could leaf through a travel guide and get some phone numbers. Then I had to wait for another store to open before I could even get a calling card. All of the places I called were booked for the weekend. Out of ideas, I stopped by McDonald’s to see if there were any Americans who could help me. I saw some valley girls who told me to go to Plaza Callao, and that there I might be able to find something. I had to wait for the Metro to start (If you don’t get it, waiting for things to open was the theme of the day) and finally I arrived at Plaza Callao at 7 AM cold, hungry, lonely, sleepy and tired. I had breakfast at Dunkin Donuts (the only place open) and contemplated my own stupidity until the internet place opened. Online I found a bunch of numbers but everyone I called was booked solid. I started to panic. Would I have to sleep on the street? Finally, the Spainish Barnes & Noble La Casa del Libro opened and I paid up the ass for the Lonely Planet Spain guide. It was actually the second-largest expense of my entire trip. I was going to cry, but then I got myself together and figured that if it came to that it was still early as fuck and I could just take a bus out of Madrid, and find a hotel elsewhere. Finally, the lady who I bought the calling cards from told me to just check the hostels across the street and sure enough the first one I knocked on had a room available for 20€, more than I wanted to pay but at least was clean. After not having slept at all the previous night all I wanted to do was go to bed anyway.

Last In

Before surviving the Sahara I had the even harder challenge of surviving my first Senegalese summer, AKA the rainy season AKA the fucking hot and humid season, when it seems it’s always about to rain but really it only rains like six times. A couple of hours before my flight to Madrid, the rainy season decided to go out with a bang. It poured. The coordinator for my program was supposed to take me to the airport but was late due to the rain (and probably also due to a mild case Senegalitis) and showed up to my host family’s house less than two hours for the flight. He and I had some outstanding business, and I was pissed enough that I didn’t care about missing my flight (and I figured they would have to delay the flight due to the biblical rain) so we started beefing. We argued all the way to the airport in the rain, and in the end I had to run with my bags in the rain through puddles hoping my flight wouldn’t leave without me. Fortunately although my flight was in 55 minutes I made it, barely so, as they closed the flight the moment I stammered in, wet and winded. On the bright side, there was no waiting, I went right through security and directly onto the plane.

Eating Colonialism

So clearly there are a couple of things I always complain about like relaxed and fake hair, food, TV, music videos, etc. and I will always blame them on capitalism, racism, patriarchy and colonialism. It’s time to complain about food again. The eating patterns here were thoroughly colonized by the French. I have already complained a lot about the bread, butter, cheese, Nescafe, chocolate spread and powdered milk for breakfast. It is just too French for me (although it is low-budget French). I would prefer an American breakfast, eggs, bacon, toast, pancakes, waffles, cereal, fruit, etc. or some platanos sancocha’os o mangu con queso frito o salami. Although, I knew that rice was also introduced by French I was happy eating it until one day I stopped to observe the grains before putting them in my mouth. I realized that they were much shorter than the rice we eat in the US. I figured that rice wasn’t the same everywhere until I remembered something Oke mentioned a long time ago. They eat broken rice here. Broken rice is basically the waste produced from preparing and packaging white rice for market. Some brief online research (and you know you can always believe what you seen online) revealed that in the US broken rice was mostly used for brewing beer and is now used for pet food. We’re eating dog food. It’s all imported from Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries and it’s advertised as 100% quality broken rice. Why do they eat it then? Because it’s cheap. According to the website it’s low in nutrients and fiber, but high in “energy” content, i.e. it’s empty carbs meant to fill the tummy as quickly as possible.

What I have to do more research on, is why they don’t eat more Senegalese couscous which is already the most feeling substance I have already put in my mouth. Made from ground millet, a little bit of Senegalese couscous (it’s brown rather than yellow like Moroccan couscous which they also eat here) with some stewed fish or beef is guaranteed to put you to bed and make you forget any thought of hunger for several days. Millet is the traditional grain that was the main staple (they would have it with real milk for breakfast, I have no idea how they got through their days eating this stuff more than once daily) before the French introduced them to rice and bread. The imported rice is cheaper than the native produced millet although I get the feeling that there is also a social status aspect to it in that people associate millet with villagers and rice as more urban and therefore prefer rice.

But the French really did a good job overall here. Their influence is all over the cuisine. For example, people here love everything here super-sweet even though sugar is also something they didn’t know before the French. I can go on, they love mustard, mayonnaise, and gruyere. Could anything be more stereotypically French than mayonnaise, mustard and gruyere? Could the French colonial policy to “educate” and assimilate West Africans in order to create “black Frenchmen” have worked any better?

Gaïnde

The lion is the national symbol of Senegal. The national football team is called The Lions of Teranga. In fact all of the national teams are the lions of something. Lions are used to advertise everything from butter to politicians to TV channels. The latest hit song from Youssou Ndour encourages people to be tenacious like a hungry lion when they encounter life’s obstacles. I have even heard stories of Presidents’ parading lions through the streets of Dakar for major state holidays. In other words if you are like me and think Americans have an infantile obsession with the bald eagle you should know that the Senegalese obsession with lions proves that the fixation with “national animals” can get much worse. In the US it’s ironic that the bald eagle would be the national symbol given that until recently it was endangered and can be found in Canada and Mexcio also. Then again what could be more American than destroying the environment and causing the extinction of species? But at least I am sure that the US has most of the world’s bald eagles, while I always clown the Senegalese because there have to be at least 20 countries in Africa (and yes there are that many African countries) that have more lions than Senegal. Shit there might be more lions in US zoos than in all of Senegal. Therefore I think it’s funny that they took an animal that many more countries have more “valid” claims to and have turned it into this central national symbol.

I am torn as to how to interpret it. On the one hand, it seems an admirable attempt on behalf of an impoverished group of people to venerate what little they have rather than focusing on how others have much more (i.e. Senegal may not have as much money or lions as other countries but it insists on being positive and focusing on what little it has rather than what it hasn’t). Analogous to the country seeing the glass as ¼ full rather than ¾ empty like it really is. On the other hand, it could be similar to the national obsession with fake hair and it’s like the exaggerated attempt to take what you would like but is denied to you because of your low status in the world system, a system that is rigged against you because the standards for success are arbitrarily set by those in power to meet their needs (in this analogy white people see lions and long, straight hair as cool and the Senegalese then want long, straight hair and lions even though their hair is short and nappy and they have few lions).

When I ask them where I might go as an American tourist to see lions in Senegal so that I can therefore better understand the national psyche, they all stammer and reluctantly concede that Senegal has few lions. At this point, if they are clever they point to the fact that Senegal is also shaped like a lion’s head, and hence the symbolism. This factoid aggravates me on many levels. First of all, it reinforces just how childish the obsession with lions is. Are we nine-year-olds giggling about why Montana has a face and why it’s staring at Idaho, or whether Florida is the US’ boot or its penis? Secondly, I think Senegal looks more like a fish (which to me makes more sense considering that they eat so much fish here) than a lion’s head (which I guess is like penis or boot, I say boot by the way). Third, Senegal’s shape has nothing to do with the “national” anything; its borders were drawn up by a French bureaucrat to meet the needs of the French colonial administration. Jokes aside, I am talking of how much more absurd nationalism and the idea of the “nation” seems in the younger nations of “post-colonial” Africa.

Senegal makes no sense as a country. To varying extents that is true of all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa (I would even push it to say that “nations” everywhere are a myth and we should have no national borders, kumbaya yall). The borders were drawn arbitrarily by colonial administrators and the results of intra-European rivalries in the 1880s and 90s. For example, the mouth of the Senegalese Lion (or Fish) is The Gambia. The Gambia (and yes, it’s always “The”) was a former British colony that basically just encompasses the Gambia River. It is tiny country, with less than 2 million inhabitants and being something ridiculous like only two miles wide at some points. Gambians are the same as the surrounding people in Senegal, except that instead of French the highest sectors of society are English speaking. There was a failed attempt at a Senegambian union several years ago, but I guess the idea just makes too much sense for politicians to make it happen. I would think that the weak argument of behalf of Senegalese nationhood—the fact that no notion of Senegal even existed before the French created it less than 120 years ago—would make it easier to merge countries like Senegal and the Gambia into Senegambia or (if God were just) all of sub-Saharan Africa into a United States of Africa. Instead it just means that the politicians have to exaggerate even more and pull out more of the usual tricks to convince people that “Senegal” actually exists. We end up with a national obsession with lions and notebooks for schoolchildren emblazoned with patriotic messages.

And like I said the case for nationhood truly is weak. There are several languages spoken, and even though Wolof is dominant it is still not spoken by all Senegalese (many of the villagers where I was for example spoke only Sereer). There are many ethnic groups so that contrary to say Somalia that is 90% ethnic Somali, no ethnic group has a majority. At least there is a unifying religion. But there wasn’t even an independence war around which to build a national mythology. It’s telling that the memorial at Independence Plaza while a tribute to fallen soldiers (always the military-nation connection, another reason to despise nationalism, kumbaya yall) is homage to martyrs who died for France. Imagine if the Washington Memorial was a memorial for American soldiers who died for England. The Senegalese are not as annoyingly or frighteningly jingoistic as Americans, nor do they insist on putting their flag everywhere from sidewalks to scandalous swimsuits like Brazilians, in fact they are no more patriotic than “average.” I just hoped that people would tone it down since it is an even more obviously fake country than all of the other already obviously fake countries. It’s like how you will often see black women in the US and wonder if they are wearing a weave, but you don’t want to say it because although it’s clearly fake it could be her hair. Here if you see a woman with hair below her chin it is definitely not hers.