Bees in the baobab

The Bedik people came to south-east Senegal from Mali in the thirteenth century. They now number around 8,000 people, living in and around seven villages in the hills of this remote corner of Senegal. I came to spend a few days in the ‘capital’ of the Bedik country, the village of Iwol.

Bees are an important part of the history of Iwol. When Alpha Yahya attacked them from his base in Guinea to convert them to Islam, they fled into the surrounding hills, hiding in the caves. But realising that they could not defeat Yahya and his army, they offered their 12 fittest young men as a sacrifice to the village’s guardian spirit so that the village could be saved. The spirit accepted this offering and sent a swarm of bees to attack Yahya’s soldiers. The stings were so bad that they all fell down dead on the spot (only Yahya himself survived), and the Bedik got their village back.

At one side of the village is an old, gnarled baobab tree, some 23m in circumference. This sprouted, many centuries ago, over the burial place of some members of the Camara family – which somehow makes it sacred. As the bees now nest in it I suppose it is doubly sacred.

A nice by-product of this is the honey, which the Bedik add to palm wine to make a delicious mead drink.

Whilst many of the Bedik are now Catholic, they are at the same time still animist – having decided, apparently, to maintain this alongside their Catholicism so as not to lose their traditions. An important part of those traditions is the annual initiation ceremony by which the boys of this and nearby villages come of age. Whilst the whole initiation takes some five months, much of it taking place out in the sacred forest, it begins with a public ceremony in the village and it was this I had come to see.

It starts with the presentation by each boy of a cockerel to the village spirit. The cockerel is slaughtered, cut open, and the colour of the inside of its testicles checked – a healthy white and the boy may be initiated, but if this is black then further consultations with the spirits are required. In the worst case it may be decided that it would be bad luck for the boy to be initiated and he has to come back again the next year. Thankfully this possibly traumatic experience (for the boy) is rare, and this year all 18 boys were able to continue.

The cockerel is plucked and cooked over the coals, then skewered with a big stick that is placed in the roof of the initiate’s home, to mark his location. Then the masks appear from the hills – men from the village in a mask costume made from raffia and leaves – carrying big sticks and hunting for the boys. They find the huts with the chickens and try to take the boys, but the villagers are prepared and protect the boys whilst fighting back against the masks with their own big sticks. It is all quite chaotic and it seems some people do end up with some big bruises, but everyone involved sported big grins – it is obviously an event that the villagers really enjoy!

Over the following few days one can hear occasional drumming and shrieking coming from a specially built little hut in the middle of the village, and the boys emerge from time to time to parade around. Their appearance is suggestive of girls at this point, with an elaborate hairdo and earrings, and they stamp their feet rhythmically as they move, so a bunch of iron hooks dangling on their backs jangle loudly. I didn’t get the whole of the story behind these parades, but the boys move as if exhausted, and have one or two villagers who support each of them – although occasionally the boys throw off that support and try to make a run for the church at the top of one hill, from where the girls are watching the ceremony. They are always caught and pulled back before they get there, however.

This goes on for some four days but everyone told me I should stay as the ceremony ends with a massive celebratory dance which the whole village attends in their best attire. This dance was supposed to start Tuesday afternoon and go on all day Wednesday, but on Tuesday nothing happened (my guide told me it was because the women had work to do, both the regular work such as the long walk to the well to collect water but also the preparation of food to give to those organising the initiation). On Wednesday the atmosphere was a little different, and there was plenty of millet beer being drunk all around. So much millet beer though that the final dance never happened. I was disappointed, but had to remind myself that it was a part of the village life, and that it was this real village life (rather than dances put on for tourists) that I had come to see. Perhaps if they were better at organising things they would not still be living in a picturesque village without a water supply, holding traditional animist ceremonies, and the women would no longer be wearing porcupine quills through their noses.

Living in the light

It rained on Wednesday. Now I realise that this won’t sound particularly momentous to those of you living in rainy London, but this is Dakar. We don’t have winter and summer, we have a rainy season and a dry season and right now we are in the dry season. In the dry season it doesn’t rain. It is usually hot and sunny with blue skies, though sometimes the harmattan blows in from the Sahara desert and a white haze of dust hangs over the city, but it doesn’t rain.

So when I woke on Wednesday morning I thought I must be dreaming when I heard rain sounds – thought it was some strange trick, perhaps the leaves of the mango tree tapping against the roof in the wind – but then I heard thunder and knew it was for real. & it was the day I was moving house.

With my northern European background I groaned inwardly at the rain, thinking about all my books, clothes and CDs getting wet as the removal men carried the boxes out to the lorry. But in a semi-desert country like Senegal such unseasonal rain is considered good luck, especially for new ventures, and this portentous rainstorm was even mentioned on the evening news. Locals associated it with the presidency of the newly elected Macky Sall, but I knew better – it was for me, for my move to the new apartment.

& so far it seems to have worked. My only loss on the move was one small glass. But more importantly I now live in a beautiful apartment. It has two bedrooms and one open plan lounge/diner/kitchen, with both the latter room and the master bedroom having large French windows opening on to the enormous south-west facing balcony with its sea view (OK, the sea is behind the rooftops and a big road, but I can still see it and its cooling breezes still reach my balcony). The contrast with the old house I moved out of could not be greater as this place is flooded with light – and I realise now how I suffered from the dark, gloomy interior of the house, built in the typical African way to face north and so avoid as much as possible of the sun.

I didn’t set foot outside the apartment block for the whole weekend as I couldn’t bear to leave it. Just a trip downstairs to the shared swimming pool, which I had all to myself.

The place does have its faults (otherwise it wouldn’t be within the budget of an NGO), but the planes flying overhead in the night have not woken me once. There is no generator, only little machines that keep the lights on during power cuts – but not the fridges, the hairdryers or the cookers. So far we haven’t had any power cuts but I’m sure they’ll come once we move into the hot and steamy rainy season. But I don’t think I’ll care because I am truly in love with this apartment. I don't know at the moment how long I have left in Senegal (as a management restructuring of my department is looming) but in a way that is making me treasure each day there even more.

Culture shock

For the first time in my 5+ years in this job, I was asked to do some work at one of our fundraising offices in the developed world – our US office, which is split between Washington DC and Warwick Rhode Island – for a three-week trip.

I had hoped to get a weekend day or two to get out and see something, particularly in Washington, but it wasn’t to be. Too much work, combined with back-to-back heavy colds, coughing and associated temperature and chest pains (it seems I’ve had bronchitis), meant no time out at all. Daytime in the office, evenings and weekends in the hotel room either working or lying in bed feeling sorry for myself.

But from my sick bed I ended up watching quite a lot of the domestic US version of CNN, and was surprised by the insight it gave me into American culture, certainly more than I would have got from visiting the African Art Museum at the Smithsonian…

Campaigning for leadership of the Republican Party (or the GOP as they seem to call it now) was well underway. There were televised debates between the candidates, interviews and various analyses by TV pundits.

Until this trip I had always thought that the UK and the US were pretty similar culturally, with a few exceptions (their gun culture and antagonism towards the welfare state). But it turns out that there is a whole chunk of their population whose beliefs and attitudes are a universe away from ours. Or maybe a couple of centuries away would be a better way of describing it.

Rick Santorum, one of the Republican nominees, does not believe in evolution, in climate change, in gay marriage, in abortion, in contraception (he has seven children), and even derides college education as being “for snobs” and dangerous as many who begin college life as Christians apparently leave as non-believers. Can you imagine someone like that getting anywhere near a position of power in the UK? I’d say his views are closer to those of the Taliban than to those of the average British citizen, yet he is a serious contender for Republican Party presidential candidate.

TV adverts backed up this strange world view. They alternated between medical adverts (for erectile dysfunction tablets and catheters, mainly – surely your doctor should be prescribing such things for those who need them?), legal adverts for those who had used medical products that now turned out to have dangerous side effects (yes, go to your doctor for prescriptions in the first place), and adverts by lobby groups, mostly for the drilling and use of more oil.

There was also one advert for a factory full of machines that not only make cars but also fix themselves when they go wrong (I suppose if you don’t believe in a welfare state then you won’t care about unemployment), and another advert for “Christian Mingle”, where single Christians can meet eachother. To talk about a world free of homosexuality, contraception and higher education, perhaps?

Just for balance, I should say that the colleagues I met there seemed nothing like those portrayed by the TV, but still, I felt a long way from home.

Hostile Environment Training

My new boss felt quite strongly that our department had not received the security training that we need to operate safely in the various places we visit in our work, so decided that we should all attend a three-day hostile environment and first aid training course.

The East and West Africa teams decided to hold ours in Kenya following a regional meeting there, so I packed old clothes as instructed and early last Wednesday was waiting with colleagues in Nairobi for transport to a ranch somewhere south of the city. We had the itinerary - but it did not really prepare us for the three days of gunfire, explosions, rebel checkpoints and moaning accident victims needing first aid that was ahead of us.

Unfortunately, when faced with face-painted, bandana'd rebels in camouflage gear touting AK47s and an empty gin bottle at an unexpected checkpoint on the road you cannot start taking photos - so I can't show you quite how realistic the role-play situations were. But I now know far more about how to react to gunfire (whether from a pistol or an assault rifle), to kidnappers, to rioting crowds and to checkpoints, not to mention having received a well-needed refresher on emergency first aid (CPR, bleeding wounds, etc).

An added bonus was the location of the course, so a mock evacuation under rebel fire was done with a herd of zebra on the airstrip and an ostrich wandering about just behind us. Not the kind of distractions I would face in West Africa, but I remembered my UK-based colleagues doing the same course somewhere in southern England (wind, rain - sleet, perhaps? certainy no zebras...) and was grateful to be living in Africa!

I returned from the course to a week-long meeting with fellow managers in Nairobi. Staying at an Israeli-owned hotel and wondering if the recent UK government warnings about terrorist threats in Nairobi would be realised - would I get to practice my new skills? But no, all went off safely, thankfully.

While there, however, I had several interruptions by phone and email from Senegal. Alerts. Both the Embassy and the office warning me about the growing tensions in Senegal in view of (a) repeated protests about rising fuel prices and (b) the forthcoming election. The Embassy told me I need to keep a "grab bag" ready containing such items as ID and travel documents, cash, clothes, medicines, torch, etc, and have enough food and water at home to survive on for 4 days should the protests escalate. Then an email followed from the office telling me to keep enough for 7+ days. & to keep my mobile phone on at all times, and my radio tuned in. Then another email, telling me that the Dakar office was closing for the afternoon for security reasons (planned demonstrations likely to turn violent) and advising vigilence over the weekend.

I fly home tomorrow and wonder if I shall get to put any of my new skills into practice. Almost certainly not, but I am glad that we covered crowd situations in the training - not that I will be going out of my way to get into the thick of the action, in fact I shall be doing my best to avoid it - but I do feel better prepared after the course. Between now and the 26 February election there is certain to be plenty of trouble, and as my house is near the University, the private house of the president and the headquarters of his party, there is a reasonable chance of trouble near home. Indeed I recently found out that some of what I have assumed to be firework noises was in fact the sound of stun grenades being thrown in my little suburb to disperse protestors.

Senegal is the only country in West Africa not to have experienced a coup in the 50 years since its independence, it has a free (and vocal) press, and it has already had two peaceful transfers of power from one president to another. But the incumbent president has followed recent African tradition by seeking a third term in office even though the constitution restricts him to two, and I've heard that one of the main opposition candidates is planning to allege electoral fraud should Wade get back in... It will be a sad day for West Africa if the situation in Senegal deteriorates into the sort of violence we've seen elsewhere in the continent.

The Bou El Mogdad

Every second Saturday an old ship moored in St Louis fills up with passengers, and starts a six-day cruise up the River Senegal to Podor. A couple of years ago I looked up enviously at the passengers sitting around the wood-panelled bar listening to a jazz band playing on the deck, and decided that one day I would take that cruise.

So this year, on Christmas Eve, I joined some thirty other people on board the Bou el Mogdad in St Louis. I’d gone for the basic cabin, so no en-suite bathroom, but it was comfortable and well-appointed, and I changed into the smartest clothes I had packed ready for a special dinner, as the French have their main Christmas celebration on the evening of the 24th. It didn’t disappoint: a free cocktail to start, followed by foie gras and then a plate full of langoustine and giant prawns…

Most of the other passengers were, as I’d expected, tourists from France, but there were also a few Germans and a Pole who all spoke good English, so thankfully I didn’t have to spend the whole week struggling to make myself understood in French.

It was a leisurely week. There are not too many tourist sites in this part of the country, but there were excursions to the Djoudj bird sanctuary with its enormous colony of nesting pelicans, to the sugar refinery at Richard Toll, to a couple of traditional villages and to the old fort at Podor. Much of the time we just sat around on the boat reading, chatting, drinking, looking out at the passing scenery – Senegal on one bank, Mauritania on the other – and trying to find shelter from the cold wind blowing off the desert to the north (I think this cruise would be better outside of the cold months of December and January).

After disembarking in Podor the other passengers went back to St Louis but I had decided to carry on, to see what I could of this little-visited corner of Senegal before going back to work in the New Year. Luckily one of the other passengers – the Polish guy – wanted to do the same, so I had company.

We started off touring the Ile a Morphil, a long windswept peninsula in the River Senegal once full of elephants but now noted for a number of old Sudanic style mosques and the remnants of a village destroyed by a sudden flood 15-odd years ago. From there we continued to Matam, and finally on to Bakel with its wonderful old French fort on a rocky promontory overlooking the river.

The plan was then to return to Dakar, but we managed only the first stage to Ouro Sogui before we were stopped in our tracks by a national transport strike.

Ouro Sogui is a small crossroads town some 890km from Dakar, with a couple of small hotels, a couple of petrol stations, and not much else. But so far from the capital and tourist centres, the local people are friendly and hospitable, and we were soon offered a place to wait in a local house. We spent a relaxed few hours there starting with a big shared tiep-bou-djen lunch (the rice, fish and vegetable mix which is generally considered to be the national dish of Senegal), followed by a few glasses of delicious Mauritanian-style mint tea, and then a reading of the cowrie shells by the old next-door-neighbour. The shells are thrown, together with a token monetary donation, and the initiated can read in them something of your situation and future. Apparently.

In my case, the man 'reading' the shells wanted to say something about my son, but when I explained that I don’t have one he told me that I will have – and a daughter too. When he found out that I also don’t have any cattle, or any goats, he was quite surprised and told me that I should get some as they would bring me happiness. I’m not sure that my landlady would be so keen on that idea... He also read in the shells that I had recently seen a big snake. When I recalled that I had seen a small snake in Chad in October he beamed with satisfaction – “see how the cowries can see everything!” Unfortunately they could not see when the strike would end.

Back at our hotel, having declined the offer of a room for the night (my travel companion not being too keen on their outside village-style toilet) we were told that there was a rumour the strike would end at 8am the next day. So we set our alarms and were up and packed ready the next morning, but there was nothing again except for horses and carts.

Finally, however, a man told our hotel manager that a van driver was going to Richard Toll (halfway to Dakar) and was prepared to take us for a – reasonable – fee. We jumped in and seven squashed hours later, during which he had managed to kill both a pigeon and a dog on the road, we arrived in Richard Toll. Just in time for a pizza and a couple of martinis in the roadside fast-food restaurant, then a night’s sleep before getting up to a fully-functional transport system the next morning. & finally, around 8pm the next evening, I was home.

A regular Sunday

I realise I should do more posts about my everyday life, or there is a danger that my readers think I spend my whole time looking at Bissauan islands, Chadian deserts and Congolese rivers… Some of you probably also think I live in a big villa with a swimming pool, which is equally far from the truth.

In fact I work pretty hard. I’m drafting this on a Sunday afternoon and have already done three hours of work today. So OK, as today is probably a fairly typical non-travelling Sunday, I will share it with you.

As usual I woke early, as the first call to prayer comes before 6am. The nearest mosque is a few blocks away, but they all broadcast their prayers pretty loudly and can’t really be escaped if you live in town. I could also hear my guard saying his prayers outside the window, and then just after 7am I heard him lock the gate behind him as he finished his shift; I persuaded the office long ago that I can do without daytime guards at the weekend.

Unable to go back to sleep I got up and showered and dressed. Trousers as usual, as some protection against stray mosquitoes in the house. Breakfast was porridge with a chopped up banana stirred in. Porridge brought back from my last trip to the UK – oats are not grown at this latitude so they are imported and therefore expensive here, also they are not part of the typical French diet and so a bit hard to track down. A banana because it’s about the only affordable fruit here that goes with porridge. In summer/autumn I get very nostalgic about the plums/peaches/nectarines/berries of the UK – they are sometimes available here, but expensive and always disappointing. I think they pick them before they are ripe in order to get them here undamaged, as they never seem to have any flavour – I’ve given up wasting money on them.

I had a glass of fruit juice with it too. Another thing that is not that easy to buy here, as the Senegalese tend to like sugar added to their fruit juice – even those labelled as ‘100% natural’ often have sugar lurking in them.

After three hours or so of work, I noticed it was after midday, which is when the sun comes round to the little enclosed area beside my house. Most Sundays I lie in the sun, sometimes for a couple of hours until the shade moves round, but often the heat drives me back indoors first. Even today, with a strong gusty wind, there was only an occasional light breeze that made it around the corner to my little suntrap.
But the rest of my garden/yard is overlooked, and it wouldn’t be acceptable in this conservative Moslem country to lie out in a bikini in view of the neighbours, so I have to make do with this airless bit of concrete between the washing machine and the guards’ toilet.

I listened to my iPod while I was out there – on the old stuff today, starting with Donna Summer, then Elvis Costello and finally a bit of the Doors. I mostly listen to African music (I have an enormous collection of it) but wanted a change today.

Lunch was a jam sandwich! Sometimes I have a salad, but often make do with the quick and easy sandwich. Not an English-style sandwich though – here the bread comes in baguettes, and the jam was made from mangoes that had fallen from my trees more quickly than I could eat them.

After doing nothing much for an hour or so while my lunch went down I went for a swim at the Olympic Pool. It’s ten minutes’ walk from my house, and only a $4 entrance fee, so a great amenity to live near, although being olympic-sized the water can get quite cool (too cold for me) as we get into the Senegalese ‘winter’. Today it was still warm enough, just an initial gasp as I got in. The wind made the water quite choppy, and probably was the reason why there were only seven of us there: me, two American women, three Chinese men and a Frenchman. The Senegalese stop going once the water temperature falls below about 30°C.

I did twenty lengths, then stood in the sun (and wind) for a few minutes to dry off before putting clothes back on over my bikini – the changing rooms are badly lit and smell of urine – and wandering home feeling virtuous!

Another hour’s work, then some personal ‘admin’: editing a few photos, adding a couple of CDs to my iTunes library, and now drafting this post. Dinner will be a mix of onion, garlic, cumin, tomatoes, pumpkin and rice, all stewed up together, with a few stoned black olives thrown in. I don’t eat meat at home, and rarely even eat fish, as there tend to be so few vegetables or salads available when I’m travelling that I usually come home with a craving for them. There’s an element of laziness in there too, as I find vegetable dishes (or at least the type I eat) generally quicker and easier to cook than meat. I may have a glass of sangria with it – they sell it by the litre carton here and it’s easier to store than wine, which sometimes goes off in the heat.

Finally I’ll either listen to the BBC World Service or read a chapter or two of a book – probably the one I’ve started on my Kindle, as with the little reading light I have in the cover I find it more convenient than a physical book, easier to find a comfortable perch somewhere (whether in bed or lying on the settee) without worrying about getting enough light to read by.

You will have noticed the solitude. I spoke to the cashier at the pool, and said good evening to my guard when he turned up at 7pm, but otherwise saw no-one all day. & that is how I like my Sundays.

The Chadian desert

Our guide had focussed our attention on the chance of seeing the Saharan nile crocodile in the pool at the end of our two hour scramble through the gorge - a pretty special sighting as there are only 7 or 8 of this specialised type of nile crocodile left alive in the world, now confined to this small pool.

However after seeing one of the crocs I turned my head to look down the gorge to my left, and found myself almost speechless as I gazed on one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen in my life. We were at the Guelta d'Archeï in Chad, one of the very few places in the whole of the Ennedi Massif (a region of eroded sandstone mountains covering an area the size of Switzerland) where there is a guaranteed year-round supply of water. In this year of low rainfall for Chad, it meant that camel owners came from far and wide to water their animals and as I looked down the Guelta from a ledge high in the mountain-side I could see and hear some 120 camels happily splashing about in the water.

I was with a party of 11 other tourists in this difficult and little-visited country. I say 'difficult' in terms of permits, etc, but also in terms of the lack of infrastructure. Only a few hundred kilometres of the 3,300 we covered in our trip were paved; mostly we were driving through sand, stone and rocks. When we made it to one of the few small towns there was virtually nothing to buy, so our breakfasts consisted of rock-hard dried up bread with jam, with milk powder in the tea or coffee. We were camping so toilets were open-air behind bushes or rocks (or on occasion just sufficiently far from the rest of the group for some privacy), and our daily ablutions were from one small bowl of water.

But lying on my mattress at night looking up at all the stars, listening to the eerie sound of the jackals calling, felt very special even when the wind was blowing desert dust and sand into my sleeping bag.

As well as the stunning Guelta d'Archeï we saw many other wonderful desert vistas (eroded pillars, camel trains on the dunes, etc) and the region is famous for its many rock arches as well as it's 3,000-year-old cave paintings of horses, camels, people and cattle, which seemed to be everywhere.

Encounters with people were difficult, as the nomadic Tubu tribe do not like visitors. When we went to look at a salt pan we were approached by three Tubu men with knives in their hands - they were only checking up on why we were there but it is the usual way in which they approach strangers. We were repeatedly warned, though, that they can be quick to use their knives, particularly if they see that they are being photographed.

We saw a surprising amount of wildlife, ranging from an amazing Saharan spiny-tailed lizard to my favourite, the beautiful little fennec foxes, as well as patas monkeys, baboons, dorcas gazelles, jackals, a sand viper and all kinds of impressive-looking insects. We saw quite a number of birds too, including nubian bustards, various storks and the national bird of Chad, the black crowned crane.

But that view down the Guelta d'Archeï, with the sound of all those bellowing camels echoing around the gorge, is one of those that I tried to burn into my brain, so I can close my eyes and imagine it again whenever I find myself in a stressful situation. I would say it is in the top three views that I have seen in the whole world.