Tourist for a Day
Peter Forberg
In the northwest neighborhood of Ngor, the taxis stop at one roundabout and are not allowed any farther. This is a fishing village where generations of men have boarded boats and journeyed into the waves that spurn ambitious surfers at the island just off the coast. When we arrive, we navigate a maze of small, sandy alleyways until we find ourselves on the beach. Men unload thiof into ice boxes, young children scour the tidepools for signs of life, and adolescent boys slip and slide around a makeshift soccer field in the dry, unstable sand. We’ll return to this place, but for now we’re walking along the rows of fishing boats, skirting past small flocks of sheep, and interrupting games of jump rope—except it’s not jump rope. Instead, three girls stand equidistant from one another with a single long rope taut behind their backs, creating a woven triangle that can be as tall as the shortest girl, and then other girls jump over the rope into and out of the triangle, shoulders first like high jumpers.
A man on the beach approaches us and tells it to us straight: there are three ways to get from Ngor Beach to Ngor Island. You can swim. You can take a public boat. You can take a private boat. Opting for the option that is cheapest and least harmful to my body, we are soon strapping on life vests and climbing aboard a long wooden boat decorated with brightly painted nautical creatures and equipped with a small motor. As small, cold waves lap over the sides, I ask if anyone swims across. Only tourists, he says.
When I tell people here that I cannot swim, the reaction is always surprise. I expect as much, but today the reasoning is explained by a friendly surf instructor: “I know many black people who cannot swim, but your skin is white.”
Behind us, the quaint fishing village disappears, and ahead of us palm trees sway over long lines of beach lounge chairs and tropical umbrellas: Ngor Island. This is why the French come. The sun is high and little white children are romping around in the low waves. Tourists sit at restaurants built over the coast, downing fruity cocktails and stiff martinis. We’re immediately greeted by women balancing bowls of jewelry on their heads. The prices are laughable, but she still eagerly pulls out bracelet after bracelet, eventually offering a beaded thong “for the couples.” We push past the tourist sprawl to find ourselves once again winding down small roads, passing homes and hotels separated by high stone walls lined with the remnants of glass bottles. Here are million dollar homes hidden by the facade of earthy, handmade streets and ornate, “tribal” doors carved to depict the distant savannah or lion head.
Artists sell sculptures where the streets widen, and buildings are adorned with murals. These are resorts, gaudy buildings shaped like giant boats more reminiscent of slave ships than Senegal’s ornate fishing canoes, or open air restaurants paved with blindingly blue crude mosaic tiles that capture the vibrance of the sky without all the dust. Take a trip, see the shores, never leave your island.
There are wonderful long stretches of rocky coast where we can run around from tidepool to tidepool, and behind these homes the fine, creamy sand has been replaced by the discarded remnants of construction projects, more glass and shattered tile than rock. Between rocks sit both mollusks and a Jackson Pollack of a Home Depot ceramics section. There are random empty plots of land sectioned off with stone walls, as well as strange unexplained military signs. Luxury homes butt up against small dilapidated dwellings, and unfinished construction suggests that the locals are on the way out.
The carcass of a swimming pool (why even have one?) houses a sandy floor. Here, I made hundreds of friends. Tiny crabs, some no bigger than an ant, scurry out of tunnels which populate the ground’s surface. All at once, the hundreds of them will slowly creep out of their holes and start cleaning the beach, grain by grain. But as soon as they detect movement, they’ll retreat.
If you’re still, very still, you can crouch over their network of rooms and wait until they come back out, like little labor organizers gathering for a meeting, their claws a whirlwind of activity. Then, as your heel touches down and your leg cramps, they’ll suddenly stop, waiting for another sign of movement. Any more action will send them all scurrying back, lightning fast, into their holes.
We ate lunch on a restaurant overlooking the beach, drank cocktails on lounge chairs, and laid back in the sun alternating between naps and reading. We were tourists, blissfully unaware of the city’s deeper history, not thinking of our positionality, just taking a brief holiday.
Then we were back on the boat. We walked along the beach where we met Oscar, an injured pelican who lays with the boats and eats the fish that children and tourists bring to him. Mousa, a friendly middle-aged man dressed in cargo shorts and flipflops, introduced himself to us and became our unofficial guide to the last remnant of a traditional coastal life. Four families live on this beach in that little fishing village, and four types of fish are caught here. In a mixture of French and English, he explained the various forms of fishing, noting that in recent years, the younger generation has taken over, using motorboats and diving tanks and spears. Now the older men only come out at night to let fly theirs sails and nets. Young children will often grow up to become fishermen, learning not from their fathers but merely from practice, given a net and a boat and told to try it out. When they’re old enough to take wives, they will paint a boat with their family’s colors and name it after their beloved. If there’s a divorce, they simply paint over it.
Oscar isn’t the only pelican on the beach. Four others have been domesticated and are used for fishing. They’ll fly out with the boats, circle a school of fish invisible to the fishermen, and dive, giving the fishermen the best place to launch their attacks. The fish will be brought back in and weighed, then 75% will be given to the fishermen to sell and 25% will be kept by the community. Mousa will not accept our money. Instead, we are to give it to the mosque, which will buy rice for the children who cannot feed themselves. Children are not allowed to beg here; they shouldn’t have to. Instead, they sprint up to Mousa when they see him, and the littlest ones hug my legs and ask me how I’m doing but cannot respond in turn. When he walks us to the end of the village, where taxis are allowed, he thanks us for listening and then asks for a little change, enough for a drink: “This one is for Mousa,” he says.