The Road to Toubakouta
Peter Forberg
Last weekend, we were given 3 days off to explore Senegal. A friend and I decided that we wanted to head south to a national park on the Saloum Delta. We would stay in the small town of Toubakouta, where our program advisors could recommend a guide and hotel. This is the story of that trip. This will be long.
Also, hey! I’ve been sick. More posts soon. Including a post about being sick.
Ma Petite Chef
Behind every great road trip planner, there is a small sardonic Vietnamese woman with a knack for bargaining and an encyclopedic knowledge of Trip Advisor. Because this blog is necessarily to be kept secret from anyone on this study abroad program, we’ll call her MPC: ma petite chef. Together, we set out to organize a small, logistically simple trip to the Sine-Saloum region. Our closest friends, like Nick, the absentee father of this blog, were immediately invited, while others were left to fend for themselves unless we suddenly were able to accommodate even more people. We weren’t, but we did.
A fun fact about study abroad programs hosted at a small research center in which a group of complete strangers have limited social options for 9 weeks: everyone wants to fit in lest they die of social isolation. Unlike in larger social settings where people can retreat to familiar groups of friends, search for new social outlets, or spend extended periods of time fading in and out of social interaction, the city of Dakar locks you into a rigid social circle where acceptance is a must. You don’t have the luxury of 4 years to get to know these people, abandon them, or find other folks. You have 9 weeks together, and you want to get the most out of it.
That’s how MPC and I ended up in charge of 12 other people. Once word spread of our weekend getaway, the sudden accusations of being exclusionary forced us to expand our troop to include over half of the program. The plan was as follows: leave Dakar on a Dem Dikk at 7 AM on Friday, arrive in the city of Kaolack, get picked up by our guide and driven to Toubakouta, spend the next two days in Toubakouta, reverse the directions to get home. After hours of messaging AirBnBs, combing through Booking.com, and translating our plans to our advisor who then translated them to the phone-operated bus station, we were ready to leave. Hours of driving, boating, and hiking awaited us.
Kaolack or Bust
At 6:30 AM, our small battalion marched from a local bakery to the Dem Dikk station, the morning sun still slumbering beneath the horizon. Unlike the Megabus stops sporadically distributed on city streets in the US, this bus station was comprised of one big sandy lot pulled together by fences where Nescafe carts and taxi drivers waited to greet weary travelers beginning or finishing their national excursions, rows of gently idling buses lined up next to one another with little to no order. Once aboard, most passengers were overtaken by sleep, but for those who stayed awake, the urban terrain of Dakar gave way to new landscapes with the rising light. The red dust disappeared and was now replaced by wide, endless savannahs, tall prairie grass peppered with the occasional low, shady tree. Baobabs cropped up more frequently, eventually creating small forests of those grey, solemn trunks and leafless canopies.
As we approached Kaolack, this vegetation died off, leaving in its place sand pits and small, dried up riverbeds. Ponds maintained themselves with only a few inches of water, and the histories of rain and currents and ebbs and flows were etched into the Earth’s surface. Towns appeared at the edge of the road, mostly compounds consisting of thin thatched huts surrounded by jump-able concrete walls. There were some homes more reminiscent of the colonial architecture, but the majority were just round, one room structures made of straw and mud and wood. Clotheslines connected them, and people sat outside in the winter heat, tending goats and carrying bushels of tinder on their heads. Drifting smoke clouds rose from burned trash heaps, and the air felt dry and empty.
When we passed through larger towns, they seemed similar enough to Dakar. Though an absolute fraction of the capitol city’s size, the economy of cornerstore boutiques and market stalls were present on the sidewalks; however, the full scope of life was noticeably limited. People lived on subsistence, without cars or taxis or cellphones or WIFI. While there may be concrete homes or pharmacies, these spaces were devoid of the modern luxuries that filled Dakarois apartments. Windows were no more than empty concrete holes, streets unanimously made of sand, mattresses perpetually without bedframes, and even the freshest of fruit not aesthetically appealing enough for imperfect produce. People pulled water from crumbling wells affixed with wooden pulleys protected by legions of flies, while pigs romped beneath horse-drawn carriages.
The city of Kaolack is merely a bigger version of these countryside towns, equipped with modernity’s ATMs, hotels, and cellphones. Pigs now ran through the wheels of semi-trucks, none of which seemed operational with their hoods overturned, and windows became adorned with curtains or even glass. Brutally reminded of our outsider status, we were swarmed by taxi drivers offering to deliver us wherever we needed to go, and it was at this moment that I called our guide.
Malang was given to us by our host institution, recommended as a good friend who could easily show us around. However, we weren’t aware of the fact that he isn’t actually a tour guide. He is a university student who lives in Toubakouta when he can’t afford to pursue his degree. He also speaks very little English. After many brief, poorly translated phone calls, he told us to wait by a main road where a 14-seater would appear in order to pick us up. The only catch to this agreement was that the driver spoke no French. In the South of Senegal, Wolof is our only friend. Luckily, we’re not a difficult group to pick out, even in a crowd, so we waited under a water tower where local kids questioned us until a charming short white bus with fold-down seats rolled up, confirming that we were the right people when I yelled his Senegalese name and he yelled “Toubakouta!” As we squeezed into place, we found ourselves on the road to our final destination.
To Be Stuck Outside a Mobile
We were 30 minutes into our hour long trek when the driver pulled over to the side of the road. Here, a man with a notebook marked down the number of people in the car, though there was truly no discernible reason why he should have that authority. A few meters from the bus, a slant tin hut slouched beneath a tree, the only source of shade for horizons. There were saleswomen and whittlers, people on phones just relaxing at this vacant patch of plastic-filled desert miles from any homes or towns in the heat as if this was a fun place to be. The longer the bus sat, the more the onlookers met our eyes.
Now women approached the bus, platters of peanuts and water bags on their heads. Now our driver conversed with the notebook man, pointing at each of us. Now we politely dismissed the saleswomen. Now the driver turned the key. Now something was wrong.
For a few fortuitous minutes, we assumed that perhaps this was some sort of routine, a common side effect of long drives out in 100 degree weather with old buses. Surely the driver, like all Senegalese workers, had an intimate relationship with his vehicle and would soon remember its oft-forgotten quirk of not starting the engine. But more soon we were piling out of the bus, and he was lifting up the driver’s seat which hid the engine beneath. Having no way to communicate, we stood idly at the side of the road waiting. MPC and I decided to hike a little way back to a baobab tree to take pictures, thinking the detour would waste enough time before the driver fixed the problem.
We were wrong. When we returned, our friends had all slumped against the shady side of the shack, hidden from the sun. At this makeshift checkpoint, an increasingly delirious group of stranded Americans replayed their favorite middle school games, clapping to elementary beats riddled by memory, digging our heels into the quickly disappearing sand to prepare for offensive attacks, and reciting familiar rhymes somehow dispersed across the entirety of the US. We peeled carrots to be dipped in cooking peanut oil—another mistranslation—and took photos with the locals, who, again, spoke no French and were not gifted with photography. Using my knowledge of interrogative grammar in Wolof and a printed list of verbs provided by our professor, I asked our driver if he could fix the problem. Multiple phone calls and reassurances later, and we had travelled into the brush of prairie grass. One girl sat cross-legged on the roadside, catcalled by a troop of teenage boys who materialized from the literal desert, apparently able to sense and locate the most inappropriate time to display their fledgling toxic masculinity, while another group commiserated beneath what was either a very large bush or a very small tree, talking excitedly as a herd of goats marched through our makeshift encampment.
In the midst of this midday delirium, we were suddenly all called over to the bus, rushing out of bushes and grass and dust, and we eagerly repacked our bags and bid farewell to our temporary hosts. It was then we realized that the engine was still fully exposed.
We would not be taking the bus to Toubakouta.
Of course, no one could explain this to us. Instead, we would pile into a car rapide, which our driver had given the name of our hotel, and ride with rural Senegal’s daily commuters until we arrived at our destination. The cost, distance, and duration were unimportant. What was important was that I was seated on a sack of onions, someone else’s fanny pack in my hands, with a toddler sucking his thumb and wrapping his other arm around my shin, staring at me like the alien I truly am.
I’m writing a post about transit, but a brief overview of car rapides: brightly painted husks of half-buses, these public transport stand-ins are outfitted with rows of seats or benches facing either the windshield or the doors. In this case, our car rapide was a mixture of all those things. Women, children, and tourists are given priority seating, with some people standing inside, but when it gets to overcrowding, the men will stand on the bumper in the rear, hanging onto the double van doors. The driver is assisted by a man in the back who pounds on the ceiling when someone needs to get off. In Dakar, they take many forms and many routes, but it was evident that in rural Senegal these vans were being used in place of public buses, thus many passengers were women returning from the bigger towns loaded up with vegetables and bread. Packed like sardines, we held children in our laps, squeezed three to a seat, and forced some regulars to wait for another bus to come, much to their ire. And as we neared our destination, unsure of how to finalize things, a motorcycle pulled into view, first trailing us from behind, then dragging up alongside us, until it eventually led in front, commanding the bus to stop. Our guide had arrived, and so had we.
La Kora: Le Chef
Our hotel consisted of a series of cabins enclosed by a sky-blue plastered concrete wall. Named after a popular Senegalese instrument, its rustic appeal certainly made clear that it was intended for those visiting on a budget, which is to say: it was a very nice place; it just wasn’t the seaside treehouse accommodations provided to wealthy European tourists whose hotel staff would collect sand from the shore to fill handmade glass candles in celebration of foreigners’ birthdays. The staff was warm and kind throughout our stay, frequently asking us questions and giving advice about where to go. The boss, Am, quickly latched onto MPC and me as the leaders of the group, which is where she gets her nickname: “This is my little boss,” I would say, “She has the brains, I just speak French poorly.” A fair assessment.
Later, Am would notice us all milling about a baobab pod curiously and offer to open it. A man of ducked doorframes and second-helpings, we would watch his towering frame thrust the pod into the hard cement, sending it sun-bound until it crashed back at his feet, where he would take a rock and pound its woody shell over and over and over and over again until pith and seed unwound from their tight casing and erupted into the air. Holding the mangled form in his two grizzly hands, he would present it to MPC and say, simply, “It’s not ripe.”
I’m running out of prose.
Given lodging, student prices, and perfectly inoffensive Senegalese meals, we cherished our accommodating hotel staff. More than that, we were grateful. Grateful that they didn’t complain when we bought cheaper water from the village, grateful that they gave us knives and spoons to host our island picnic, and grateful that, after a little wine, they didn’t condemn our singing of early 2000s pop hits, instead remarking in the way that only grown men raised in a strictly Muslim country who had thus never drank let alone to excess could, “You all look possessed.”
We slept on thin mattresses and ate fresh jam. La Kora was good to us.
A Hard-Headed Boy
If this is supposed to be an educational blog, I guess now is the time. The morning after our day of travel, we readied ourselves for a trip to the mangroves: low, water-rich trees with roots that criss-cross over one another, veins exposed when the tide is low. The beach of mud held our pirogue, which is a traditional form of boat used widely in Senegal but familiar to much of Africa and Latin America. In our bags, MPC and I held 10 baguettes, chocopain (a nutella-like ambrosia), and bissap-banana jam. Bissap is a Hibiscus flower commonly used to make delicious, sugary drinks in West Africa. In this case, it was used to make delicious, sugary banana jam.
Our captain, who spoke little and little French, marched us through the mud into his ornately colored vessel, and we were soon lost in a maze of wide, shimmering rivers leading out to the open ocean. The Saloum Delta is not known for overwhelmingly confusing geography, but at 100F and language-starved, our sudden ascendance into a vast network of islands mostly inhabited by monkeys, birds, and hyenas made the low hanging clouds that shrouded the mangroves all that more haunting. One could imagine the boat crashing into a log hidden by the midday sun’s staunch reflection and being catapulted into the bramble of roots, climbing from branch to branch as the tide rose, keeping bare feet away from the sharp oysters that line the river bed.
But we were fine, and the mangroves were beautiful.
We first stopped at a larger fishing island where villagers harvested oysters and then piled up their shells, drying them in the sun in order to later turn them into white paint, making art to sell to tourists.
The island also had a queen, an apparently 104 year-old woman of great wisdom who every visitor must greet. Every visitor, that is, who is coming from the treehouse-birthday candle-beachside resort. With our local guide, we skirted past the village and swam along a steep beach, eventually making our way into the trees where I would see this absolutely massive baobab (MPC for scale).
Again, we butt heads with the tourists, who were having a fresh-caught meal prepared for them at a seaside patio by some local followers of Senegal’s more laidback Muslim brotherhood. We chatted about the island until it was time to pamper the guests, and then we hiked back to a picnic spot for that wonderful bissap-banana jam. These are the perks of knowing people instead of paper.
Another perk is that your boat captain is willing to lead you into the shallow waters of the mangroves where the canopy begins to puncture the sun. More than that, he’ll pull the boat into a tight, claustrophobic network of jailcell branches and shut off the engine, allowing the islands to speak for themselves. When you ask if people walk on the mangroves, he’ll say, “You can,” and then you’ll climb over the side of the boat and enter into the world’s most at-risk-of-disappearing-due-to-climate-change jungle gym. In broken English, as you jump from root to root, surprised by everyone else’s lack of balance, your guide will call you a “hard-headed boy,” and while you’re not sure what to make of that, you’ll take it as a compliment.
At another island, this time made of seashells, we disembarked and were led down a shell path through a thick forest of baobabs and brush. Mounds of dirt marked the tombs of kings, supposedly buried with riches now protected by dark spirits (and UNESCO). A sacred baobab split down the middle made for the perfect hiding spot, and MPC collected her fateful baobab pods. There’s nothing else to say about this island other than that it was perfect and heaven.
Papaya Jam Just Tastes Like Baby Food
On our way back we saw a big beautiful bird, a seafoam heron who ignited his wings on our approach, and a monkey who played in the mud. I took no pictures and have few words.
After a break, we went to Toubakouta’s annual festival, a celebration of Senegal and Gambia’s friendship that invites local villages to come perform, sell, and eat together. For those who don’t know, Gambia is a funky country tucked inside of Senegal, a result of competing colonial powers. It exists along the highly resourceful Gambia River, and it divides the southernmost part of Senegal into two regions: Sine-Saloum (where we were) and Casamance (where the State Department will not allow us to go).
The merchants had a wide array of products ranging from street standard (like peanuts and dresses) to local grown (like bissap jam and special dissolving green tea). I was torn between a grapefruit and papaya jam, but a friend went with papaya so I made no choice. See heading.
In Toubakouta, while everyone speaks Wolof (the language), not everyone is Wolof (the ethnic group). A large number of people are Serer and thus speak Serer. So for a while we listened to a Serer band jam out in Serer, a crowd of people politely leaving space for passersby in the street, until a wall of activity blocked off the road behind us. Malang stood his ground and commanded me to tell everyone to stay put. Dust was being kicked up into the air. As the song wrapped up, the people on stage began glancing backwards to where the commotion was taking place, eventually giving up and turning around to watch in stunned silence. Officers and soldiers pushed us to the sides of buildings and entered the fray.
There was no shouting, only footfall. A ring of people defined the circle’s interior, mostly young men, and, with hands on knees in athletic poses, hollering from time to time, falling and jumping and climbing backwards into the crowd to escape the movement. From the outside, one could only see a massive wooden spike adorned with hay and charms bowing and bending over the heads of the excited onlookers. A spirit, a creature of the savannah’s grass and straw, had appeared in the crowd, and with defenses high had challenged the officials to combat. This was all staged, a fake showdown between nature and man. The creature was a living haystack, 7 feet tall, with no discernible figure or form, and when it moved, it absorbed the spike into its mass, then somersaulted on the ground, appearing like a live tumbleweed, a fast-motion hurricane, a spinning top set loose from its string. It kicked up sand, tornadoes of it, and sent the whole crowd into a fit of coughs and covered mouths, teeth dug into the sleeves of forearms.
From outside the crowd emerged new rivals. With costumes similarly made of shaggy colored grass, these had forms and faces, a massive gorilla of jet black hay with a paper mache face and a rainbow suit meant to represent the birds of heaven. As they competed with the grass in rounds of dance, little skirmishes cropped up at the sides of the circle. At one point, two completely orange beasts wearing the masks of demons entered into combat with a woman in red, both parties made giant by their costumes, and they would clang massive machete knives together and beckon to each other, pushing one another to the perimeter where children would scream and flee backwards, but even adults would recoil and make space. There was a palpable, playful fear.
Soon, the beasts of nature vanished, and instead a gendered dance took center stage, wherein women would come forward and, with knees bent low and arms bent high, kick up dust like pistons, their ankles shooting straight up in rapid relay. The men would counter with their own dancer, and a duel of affection played out in flat-footed flashes of drum and rhythm, pounding each other into the ground by sound and motion. Someone felt sick and we left.
Seeing the Birds
The next morning, I woke up to see the birds. Sitting on my cabin porch before the sun had risen, only a few pilots cued their morning songs; instead, the world was burdened by a loud, low hum of hundreds of bees collecting pollen from the abundant flowers.
By the time the first signs of light touched the canopies of nearby palms, an orchestra of birds had started warming up. They spoke stilted, they spoke sweet: they spoke lilted, and they spoke meek. Overhead, large birds of prey glided over the small town, doubtless heading to the river for early morning snacks, and in front of me an array of intrepid craftsmen took back the trees. Bullying the bees, faux-hummingbirds overburdened by fattened wings and plain beige bellies hovered in front of flowers; meanwhile, some long-beaked, pear-shaped songbirds flew into the tops of palm trees and bit down hard on the tops of those tall leaves. They would flutter for a second, trying to clip a spot in the veins, and then let their wings stop, plummeting a few feet to pull a single, thin strand of leaf loose from the full form, an ingredient for a nest with which they would triumphantly fly away, back into the orchestra.
Deep blue onlookers perched on top of buildings, and chickens hobbled across the road. On wingspan, the colors of the sun were carried to town in order to set the day in motion. MPC and I decided to actually visit Toubakouta.
The City (Redacted)
In Senegal, a commonly held value is teranga, which means “hospitality.” People speak of teranga the same way that Americans might speak of democracy or justice: more than just an ideal, it is present in not only the nation’s travel brochures but also in the way that people live their lives and politicians make their pitches. People want teranga to be true.
While I am frequently given the tourist treatment, the general conceit that people here are overwhelmingly friendly and accommodating is noticeable. On the beach, strangers will ask about my work or country of origin, and soon a small crowd of random folk will be locked in conversation that slips from French to Wolof to English and back again, joking and swapping stories. At home, guests will refuse to visit only one person, insisting that everyone joins in the conversation. The man who I buy bread and toothbrushes from knows me by name, and if we see each other outside of his shop, he’ll make sure to say hello.
And so I wandered. We walked into town, past the pregnant goats milling about piles of burning trash, over the fleets of chicks stumbling after their mother, around the tourist trap market stalls adorned with authentic merchandise imported from the same seller as the ones in Dakar, and across the road from where the lone police car guarded the slumbering Europeans. We entered the back passageways of concrete homes unpainted and undecorated, the overgrown fields of garbage and reckless brush, and the clothesline mazes of wooden huts. We were greeted with “peace be upon you” and “how are you doing?” until we encountered a young girl and her albino rabbit tucked between a few houses where men were whittling and cooking. I asked her, “Is this your rabbit?” and she replied, bluntly, “This is a rabbit.” Awa and I talked a little in French while MPC took pictures of the bunny, the first we’d seen since coming here, and then the men became interested in the foreigners conversing with a little girl in their backyard.
I explained that we were students staying a little ways down the road and had just gone for a walk. I mentioned, protectively, that we knew Malang, a local who lived around here. At that, their ears perked up.
Another fact about Senegal. You have two names at a minimum. Last names distinguish ethnic origin, and there are only a dozen or so that one commonly hears. First names memorialize family members, and there are maybe 30 or so that one commonly hears. Sometimes, first names recall multiple family members, which means that people have multiple first names, and sometimes, people want to preserve their ethnic history, so they keep their maiden ethnic names. Thus, full names are often 2, 3, or 4 of the most common words you ever hear in Senegal grouped together. Fatou Maguette Fall, Maguette Fatou Kasse, Awa Fall Diop, etc. What this means, ultimately, is that everyone has the same first name as everyone else. Once, after meeting a man on the beach, he gave me his full name to look up on Facebook. It garnered hundreds of results, most without profile pictures.
So when I said Malang, they immediately pointed to a house behind us and said, “Oh, Malang!” Someone said something to someone, and in a few minutes, a Malang, but not our Malang, appeared in front of us. We said hello, and I joked, “A different Malang.” “Oh!” someone exclaimed, and pointed to another home, at which point I started to describe our Malang, who was notable for his university education, and they quieted down. Had I not, we might have become witness to an endless stream of Malangs, each equally uninterested in knowing us. With an awkward French “We’re just going to be on our way,” we bid farewell to the rabbit and fled.
There is No Authority
We took a bus back to Kaolack. Luckily, there is no story there. After paying (our) Malang, packing our things, and saying goodbye to our hotel staff, we piled into another 14-seater for a short trip back to Kaolack. Again, we were stopped by a random man in a robe who penned down the number of occupants, and while this would happen multiple times, no one would explain why to us.
When we arrived at the bus station, which is not where we had originally been dropped off, we found ourselves at the base of someone’s apartment building, someone who presented himself in a yellow and red track suit and drank from a coffee mug.
In an upcoming economy like Senegal, distinctions for legal authority or occupation are really uncommon. The only people who wear uniforms are police officers, the military, and fast food workers at Western chains. Otherwise, people are always plain clothes, always relaxed. The only reason we knew this place was the bus station was the bus parked outside of it. Otherwise, it was just the first floor of a man’s apartment building. Across from his office was a kitchen, and in his office was a mattress. Random inhabitants entered and left, and we took his fancy handheld ticketing device as proof enough that he must be the guy in charge.
I slept on the bus ride back.
As for us, there is no authority. After organizing the cross country trip, dealing with tickets and hotels and translators, and navigating the trials and tribulations of a French-less casual economy, I immediately took a wrong turn as we walked back from the Dakar bus station to our respective host families. From there, MPC took the lead.