The Road to Dindefelo (Part 1)
Peter Forberg
I’ve run back to the mud hut and cut out a ruler’s length of towel, teal cheap thin towel, which I’m now wrapping around my freshly cut palm and pulling taut, one end between my teeth and the other between the fingers of my left hand. It’s 104 degrees, and I’m running down hillside to the hollowed-out tree burned clean through by lightning, clean through by lightning its empty husk of ashen trunk is overgrown—overgrowing—with the fresh leaves of young life. Someone says people would empty the trunks of these trees to make room for live sacrifices and then burn them to the ground. We don’t know if that’s true. Adjusting my makeshift bandage, I mount a child’s mountain bike, its seat ratcheted to the maximum height, and my friend stands precariously on the struts that hold the back wheel in place, gripping my shoulders hard. The ground shifts, both feet in motion. A trio of motorcycles are racing down a winding dirt path, women and children carry baskets of dirty laundry over their heads, and I am peddling for two along the banks of the Gambia River. Bloody hand, brake lines out, the road is paved by foot.
This is Kedougou, 430 miles from Dakar and counting.
Catch the Monkey in the Bush
At 8 PM on a Thursday evening, we toss out our Pizza Time Senior Mexicaine pizza and get ready to board a night bus to Tambacounda, a small town to the southeast about halfway across the country. The station itself is a junkyard-garage-depot at the base of an overpass roundabout, covered in stiff brown dirt and littered with cats who prowl from suitcase to suitcase for scraps of food. It’s a coach bus, and over the course of the 10 hour journey, I will find new and innovative ways of organizing my limbs to avoid cramping. We will arrive before the sun has risen.
The first station toils in exhaustion. 35 people mill about, grabbing suitcases, negotiating with taxi drivers, and marching off into the darkness. And it is darkness.
This station consists of a series of stalls with stick walls and tin roofs. Bright blue fluorescent lights are scattered on sporadic streetlamps and hung from trees. The nighttime world doesn’t announce itself; instead, it arrives slowly. The ground shifts from asphalt to concrete to dirt, and new pockets of light reveal isolated scenes. Here a group of men refill bathroom wash pots as travelers disappear into cement buildings. There a man carves receipts into a long wooden paddle, carefully monitoring clients while his buddies joke over an upturned milkcrate coffee table. As our eyes adjust, the scene widens. We glimpse in and out of these pockets of light, attracting vendors like moths. From the darkness emerge salesmen, drivers, and beggars, vanishing again with the wave of a hand.
A man approaches, “Where are you going?”
“Kedougou.”
He nods and leads us to the milkcrate where we exchange some cash and pack our bags into the trunk of disemboweled hatchback. This is a sept-place, a pay-as-you-come form of private transit that offers discount tickets from garages across the country. There are actually “eight places,” but with one reserved for the driver, seven are up for sale. When all are sold, we begin our drive into the breaking day.
You’ve probably seen the African sun depicted in movies. As David Attenborough explains the precarity of savannah ecology, a perfect orange sphere rises over long, wide fields of swaying prairie grass. His voice quickens with that telltale curiosity, and you look at the ball of light with equal amounts awe and suspicion. What trick of the camera has calmed its heat? What lens has smoothed out its features? What filters have filled its body with such soft, mellow orange hues? But it is as filmed. On a cloudless day, in the back of a rusty 1990s Volkswagen station wagon ripped clean of seatbelts and outfitted with fold-down seats, the African sun is perfectly circular, its edges visible to the naked eye for 20 minutes as it gives the landscape light. Like the intense heat above an outdoor grill, it wavers a little, then explodes. You can’t look anymore.
I find new ways to arrange my limbs and am given my first ounce of sleep before we arrive in Kedougou, an even smaller town even further to the southeast, the last stop before Guinea or Mali for international travelers. We’ll return to this place, but for now we are searching for a sept-place to our first true destination: Dindefelo.
Dindefelo, occupancy 1500, is not exactly a hotspot for daily travel. Most visitors live there, and they have little riding on when they return from the “big” city after a day of restocking. We, however, had hotel reservations. But, as Nick pointed out in his sole and luminary post, the Senegalese laugh at that American motto “time is money;” for them, time is worth much more than that. Ndank ndank mooy japp golo ci naay. “Slowly, one will catch the monkey in the bush.”
We sat at the depot for 4 hours. After the first hour, we offered to buy the additional seat needed to move the sept-place along. We miscounted and misunderstood. After the second hour, attempts to get an ETA gave us new Senegalese names and landed us in the middle of a difficult conversation about why we spoke so little French and absolutely no Pul, the regional language. We were also questioned (for the third or fourth time) about our marital status. By then, we had just accepted that everyone will assume that my two travel companions (both women) are my wives. In fact, such assumptions were less jarring than when people asked if we were siblings. They are both clearly Asian. I am not. After the third hour and a phone call to the hotel, we learned that the man organizing our sept-place was the nephew of our hotel manager but not much else. And after four hours, following prayer and lunch, we boarded the car.
This sept-place differed from other sept-places in a significant way. See, the defining feature of a sept-place, really at the core of its identity, is that pesky little number, 7. But this sept-place, uninterested in labels and following trends, held 16. Not only this, but it fully embraced the rustic charm of a decades-old automobile by requiring a team of people to push it as the driver cranked the ignition in order to get it started and into gear.
To clarify: 1 man drove the car, 2 men sat in the passenger seat. 3 toubabs1 sat in the middle row, and 3 women with their 2 children sat in the backseat. On the bumper, 1 man held on tight, and on the roof, 4 men hunkered down. If we stick to the naming scheme, a quinze-place is born. Over rough terrain and clouds of dust, our husk of metal screeched and sputtered until we arrived at our final destination. Nearing a full day of transit, we were finally there.
1 “Toubab” results from a Wolof re-pronunciation of the French word “toubib,” which means doctor or medic. Nowadays, it is used to mean “foreigner.” Thus, I am a toubab. It comes from a group of French doctors who traveled to Senegal for work, and the name of their profession became codified as the name for all foreigners.
A Picture Is Worth Too Much of My Prosodic Labor
We stayed in a circular mud hut with a conical stick roof and a toilet, something we had not seen since leaving Dakar (most bathrooms were outfitted with a hole in the ground and a bucket of water).
I drew water from a well. I woke up before the sun rose. We needed well-water to shower. A shirtless, faceless man assembled trash and sticks and burned a small sun into the ground. He gave me a bucket. The air hummed with hundreds of bees. I lumbered over to the rows of bricks that encircled the ground water. I stared deep. I could not see the bottom, but I felt the bucket gain weight and I pulled hard. It splashed and dirtied the sand at my feet. I let go of the filling bucket and let it swing back over the stone, swaying with no witnesses. I drew water from a well.
Dindefelo is known for its waterfall. We were led there (and to other places) by an inaffectual guide who didn’t even feign interest in our existence. First, we hiked a mountain to a plateau where we saw fields of peanuts, a savannah, teeth-like rock formations, mushroom-like rock formations, and a cave forest hidden in hollowed out stone. Then we went down to a freezing cold waterfall. I took pictures, so I won’t expend my limited vocabulary describing these places, but I will say, as a Midwesterner, that things are more interesting when they’re on a giant mountain plateau. Still, rough on the calves.
Pictures displayed in the order in which they were taken.
When we got back to the hotel, we were greeted by a hearty plate of spaghetti and omelets. We ate with Terry.
Terry
Terry laughs at his own jokes before he finishes his sentences. Terry smokes three cigarettes in 20 minutes. Terry lugs around a beer belly and sports dusty cargo pants. He looks at home on a golf course, he looks good for his age, and he looks tired. Terry is a white 70 year-old consultant for a gold mining operation from Australia and he has been stranded in Kedougou for 6 weeks waiting for customs. Today he took a vacation to Dindefelo.
We first notice Terry because of his thick Australian accent. While I almost always speak English to my friends here, the students on the program have become non-English speakers. When they speak English, it is a non-event. They are not speaking English so much as they are speaking us, the language of the Americans abroad. But when other people speak English, it is a gut punch. It is a siren song over the picnic tables, and it makes my friend blurt out: “Wait are you Australian?”
Terry is, but Terry is not. At age 16, he left the island to explore the world. While he still lives in Australia for a few months of the year, his true home is nomadic. Today, two Liberian men of identical stature flank him like Indiana Jones diversity-pick henchmen. They speak English but here they do not, and Terry laughs and gestures to them with no response. They barely glance up, so Terry continues his travelogue. Under her breath, my friend corrects his pronunciation of Chinese mining villages, and as he downs another beer, Terry reveals that the New World has been left untouched. He’d love to go to South America, but he could never bring himself to the US. “It’s just Australia,” he says, “but everyone wants to own a gun.”
Many things about Terry puzzle me. But one thing is clear: this is a man who has lived his life in diaspora. He knows many vague, shallow things about the countries he has passed through, and equally many deep, cultural values about the places he has lived. He is proof of one’s ability to skirt across cultures, taking from others what one finds interesting or desirable and neglecting what one couldn’t care less about. He makes and remakes China and Western Africa in his image: what he enjoyed he kept, but many things he didn’t notice. Perhaps, this is what happens when your primary raison d’etre is the pursuit of gold, not the pursuit of people. This is the distinction between Terry and I, sitting in a small town in a remote African region.
Kedougou [Reprise]
After watching Terry board his jeep, we paid our bills and went in search of a sept-place. Ironically, one was leaving soon, and we were hurried to it quickly, barked at by our hotel manager to pick up our pace. By the time we arrived, the driver had sold additional seats, which meant that once again the sept-place was overcrowding. However, this time, there were not young rural teens willing to hop on top or hang off the back. Instead, a group of education activists we had met by the waterfall were squeezed inside. As the only toubabs, we stood idly by as the driver, owner, hotel manager, activists, and a bitter woman negotiated seating. After some elevated voices, the woman agreed to give up her seat. As we boarded the sept-place, we watched her wave giddily from the back of a pick-up truck.
We were not allowed to ride on top or on the back. Women are never allowed, and I am the most toubab of all (with my snow-white skin).2 They first tried seating me in the passenger seat with a 200 pound wrestler. I sat with one leg in the driver’s foot-space, spreading my legs to reveal the gearshift. This system of reaching between my legs to change gears would not fair well, so me and the wrestler were relegated to the back seat where he crushed my bones to dust, fee fi fo fum.
Our travel companions found us striking. To journey nearly 24 hours across the country just to see a small town—insane. They asked us questions that few Senegalese had asked before: Yeah yeah yeah, you’ve come to Africa to see another culture, but why? Why here? Why come to Kedougou? Why Dindefelo? What are you actually learning? They complimented and critiqued in turn. First, I was given a new name that means “strong man king,” phonetically, chem-uh-kho kah-tay. And then they pried deeper: why is your French so weak, why can’t you speak Wolof, why are your classes taught in English? Like Terry, we were fed Africa through the language of the colonizers and with the privilege of white American university students. But that’s why we came to the country, by which I mean the countryside. To be seen and thus see through the eyes of those whose home we were invading. To become the object, the subject, the question of the local population–to see ourselves through different eyes.
The interrogation turned into comradery, and soon they were hailing me as the Senegalese Harry Potter and throwing these toubabs on Snapchat stories. When we arrived in Kedougou, they wished us well and left for Dakar.
This is getting long, and I haven’t posted in a while. So this is Part 1. Stay tuned. It will likely be the next post.
2 I want to take a moment to clarify something. It has been suggested that I tan. I do not tan,2.1 I just have many more freckles that make it appear that I have tanned when I have not. It is an illusion, my skin.
2.1 Except for the back of my neck.