#DakarSoFar

If I make it through today I will have spent 10 full days without smoking. I don’t see the benefits of not smoking as of yet. But I’m very aware of all the disadvantages. Going out, for instance has been dissatisfactory. I end up too saddened by not being able to smoke that I leave early.

But the quit has coincided with good changes in my life so in general I feel pretty good about myself and I have not been overly moody. Except with my lover, who we shall call Prince for the duration of these entries. I have been extremely agitated by him. Suffocated, annoyed by everything he does.

Our relationship is built around and supported by our physical interactions and apparently no sex drive is a symptom of nicotine withdrawal. But deep down I think I resent him for smoking still. He smokes in my face, he smells of cigarettes and being with him reminds me of smoking together. And not being able to do so makes me sad and subconsciously I am taking it out on him and being a real witch about everything.

I’ve reached a point where I think I might burst with happiness. Every day goes the way I want it to go, I wake up and decide what the best way would be to spend the couple of hours that follow. On top of that I think I have found the sister-friend I’ve always wanted in Mami.

Yesterday we woke up, did our separate exercises and then she went cycling and I went running. After I had done some writing and she some massages and facials, we decided to go to the swimming pool. But first we passed a basketball court and played with the boys for about 30 minutes. Then we swam for an hour and spoke while we were in the water. We have a lot in common. She also rollerskates and she’s also a newbie at it like me. I told her I only got mine because I saw it on a music video. She was like “Gold!?” And I said yes, the music video for Gold by Chet Faker. She admitted that the same video was the reason she bought her skates too!

When we came home, Prince and Hadim were waiting to take me to a house-warming party at our friend Lolly’s place. On my way out I had one foot on the doorstep when Mami came and gave me the standard goodbye kiss on both cheeks. Standard except for the fact that the last kiss landed really close to my mouth.

Things are starting to look up and looking a lot more like how I imagined unemployed life would be. I feel healthy again. A bit weak but not sick. I’ve moved into an old white house with a masseuse-chef that we will call Mami, and a designer that we will call Ramzy and a small fluffy white dog that is actually called Grippy.

The vibes are amazing here. My house mates are lovely, there’s a breezy garden with cute antiquey designs and books everywhere and wood and a bathroom I can actually move in. It’s clear that it’s a women’ house. It always smells nice, it’s clean and it just has this nice female energy. (Talking of female energy, Wilough Smith’s Female Energy freestyle is a great song).

I woke up today because my body was done with sleeping, not because an alarm interrupted me. I did a sun salute, a couple of push-ups and some lunges. Then I went to the store and got breakfast. Now I’m sitting in the living room. Mami is smoking a joint and reading Les Mystères de La Havane by Zoé Valdés on the hammock.

I came to Dakar to work. But I’ve quit my job now. And someone asked me today why I don’t go back to South Africa. I told him I’m scared I’ll get stuck there. That if I go to South Africa I will slip into a South African life and never live anywhere else again. That’s scary. But it’s not as scary as the thought of going to South Africa and not being South African enough, which I didn’t share with him.

The reality is I’m not really South African anymore. I stopped being South African when my family moved to Tanzania. But I will never fully be Tanzanian either, or belong to any of the other countries I have lived in. But at least in other countries, I am actually foreign and I can excuse my inability to be one of them by saying I’m from South Africa (this usually gives me cool points, I’ll go into this another day). But what will I say when I am still foreign in South Africa?

I’ve been unemployed for 2 full days now and I have yet to do a single thing that will make me money. Mostly I’ve been sleeping, struggling to get all my medication down my throat and throwing up. One of my medicines has, under undesirable effects, anorexia....  They should add bulimia because not only can I barely get anything down, but when I do, I cannot keep it down. I won't tell you what medication that is because some of you are actually into that stuff.

Another tireless source of nausea today has been the smell of my armpits. Not only because I’ve been out of roll-on since I’ve been out of work, but also because my body is secreting really vile chemical smells from all these pills I’m popping.

If I may return to the being out of roll-on thing; I was actually okay with it, if it wasn’t for the chemical bit. I was still washing my body, still using my cocobutter, just not using roll-on. This thought disgusts black people, for the most part. In fact as black people we pride ourselves on being clean, cleaner than white people who sometimes don’t wash everyday. I’m with this sentiment for the most part and can attest to having white friends who would shower once, maybe twice a week. I even dated someone who did not use deodorant at all, until I got him on to it. The very existence of those French vagina-washers is a horrible thought. you are so against washing your whole body that you designed ways to only half wash it? There is an aversion to washing, associated with white people, that is too much. But the opposite obsession is also unhealthy.

I like nice smells, I like manufactured flower smells and I respect the work of perfumers who work hard to create amazing scents that linger in nostalgia long after the boy has a new girlfriend with a flawless weave. I think we should make use of perfumes and oils and incense and body mists and yummy lotions. It’s nice.

But when it comes to black people, the obsession with cleanliness may stem from years of being called dirty or compared to animals and so forth. The fact that white people even have the confidence to venture into the other end shows they don't have a complex about it. I know that the bald look that both South African men and women are well-known for, probably comes from being told our hair was disgusting, dirty and ugly. Right up until high-school (2006-2008) I was being told I could not have my (combed) afro because it was untidy. While all the black girls with relaxed hair or very short hair were fine. Not to mention the white girls who barely combed their hair at all and kept getting lice. But there’s a stereotype that black is dirty and white is clean. In black minds it is becoming reversed now but in response, I think, to that same stereotype.

The stereotype comes also from black people to this day doing more manual labour than whites. Black people work in mines, in gardens, on farms, sweep streets and carry heavy loads. What was that documentary where they asked Congolese people what they would do if they only had a couple of dollars and they all said they would buy soap? Not food, not sweets, not a dress; soap.

It’s 6am in the morning. I have been unemployed for 36 hours. The muezzin is screaming god is great, but in a voice so horrible that He can’t be. My current lover is in my bed tossing and turning and talking in his sleep about Hummers and normal people. He’s tired, He’s been staying at my place all week helping with the event on Sunday, and now standing on guard in case I have a mental and/or physical breakdown.

I felt so good on Monday, I strutted out of the office ready for my new life. Then I came home and, after my after-work nap, woke up with a fever and severe back ache. A doctor says I have a throat infection and a UTI that is spreading to my kidneys. So I’m on 3 antibiotics and 2 other things that all make me want to throw up.

I think maybe my body is just showing my anxiety. The throat and lungs thing is probably all the cigarettes I’ve been smoking, but even that has been as a result of my unemployed stress. I’m really quitting this time, smoking that is, but I keep thinking, what am I going to do with my hands when I’m hanging out with people?

I have to work on that and a couple of other things, immediately! Like patience. And being kind to myself and others, like forgiving myself for what seems like so many mistakes in so few years. Mistakes like boys who got far more than they deserved, like not making the most out of college and like selling myself so damn short all the time.

            I got stung by multiple bees this weekend. In the way of an explanation, I should introduce you to Binyavanga Wanaina who I met at an Akuwa Naru concert over a month ago. He originally came to Senegal for a conference but decided to stay indefinitely. I was mid-headbop when I recognized him walking past in the crowd. The experience of recognizing a face in a city I had only been in for a week was a little surreal and it took me a minute to place which one of my many homes I knew this one from. Twitter.

            That evening I approached a legend and instead found one of the most effortlessly genuine people I have ever met. Either because of his big eyes or because he is actually interested, you get the sense that Binya’s listening to you. We shared beers, talked about South African Traditional healers, the Senegalese Murids and the ancient Bantu migrations to the South of Africa.

            I bumped into him in St Louis during the jazz festival and we were both of the mind that we were simply not going to sit and listen to jazz. We preferred to dance. After that weekend he invited me to Saly, an hour South Dakar, where he is renting a beautiful, resort-like 3-bedroom house with a pool. There were several other friends spending the weekend when I went and this made for a lively house with flowing Gazelle and Marlboro reds. This time we discussed everything, from spirituality to the exchanges back and forth between Africans and the descendants of African American slaves, to new African states, all subjects Binya knows a great deal about. Here I was, chilling and talking to one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world, who easily refers you to twenty books in one conversation, casually mentions Chimamanda Adichie, his friend, and in the next second is talking passionately about hair and sex and football. We spent the rest of the weekend talking, chain-smoking, swimming and going out.

            I'm still getting to the bees. My trip was so relaxing and awakening and fun that I went to visit again this weekend. On my way back from the Saturday night party session, while drunk as anything, I saw the lit, aqua-blue pool. And it looked incredible under the full moon. So I stripped down to my underwear and jumped in. For about three seconds I marveled at the beauty of the world and the incredible order of things- and then I got a sharp sting in my arm. There turned out to be hundreds of half-dead bees floating in the water beside me. And behind me! And all around! I half swam and ran out of the water. With each step, a sting. Five stings on arm, thigh, back and most annoying of all, under foot.

            By the time I got back to Dakar and to work, I had developed a limp from the sting under my foot. It was swollen now and the itch was maddening. “What happened?” asked every person that saw me, since there is no such thing here as one’s own business. “Des abeilles,” I responded each time, “Bees.” Invariably everyone followed with, “Where!?” and a confused look.

         On Saturday I hitchhiked to the island of Saint Louis, some 300km North of Dakar. I was with Fanny, my Swedish companion who I met at a reggae party the weekend before last. The first few rides took us only to the next respective town so we changed cars about five times. But we never struggled to get some young or middle aged men to pick us up. When someone would stop we would run to the car, Fanny would use her French and the bit of Wollof that she knows and I would smile.

          It doesn’t come as a surprise that women are less likely to pick up hitch-hikers. Women are socialized to feel unsafe, just as we were warned by my male colleagues to not go hitch-hiking with strangers. Plus women don’t share the same feelings of male heroism and sexual attraction towards us.

         Of course men would stop for a blonde white girl and a métisse. At twenty years old, Fanny is a perceptive young woman and she says things like “people want to help those who need their help less. If they can help a blonde white girl who just decided she didn’t feel like spending money, they can still feel good about themselves whereas if they picked up a poor young black mother with two snotty nosed kids they would be put face-to-face with real social issues” and she points out that “I’ve easily hitched shorter distances than women have walked with kids and heavy bags but no one’s picking them up.” We agree sincerely to this fact and continue to enjoy our rides, one of which was in a BMW 4x4, all the way to the former colonial capital of Saint Louis.

          I began my work today at Niyel. I was extremely impressed with the team of ‘campaigners,’ a term they use synonymously with ‘staff members.’ They are young, bright and creative. The office is in Ngor in an airy colourful building with bright white, green and orange walls. At lunch the guys played fuzball (“baby-foot”), I must join them tomorrow. Niyel is a private agency that is consulted by organisations to help create their social, political and cultural campaigns. Their last campaign was for Paulo Gomes, candidate for the April Guinea Bisau presidential elections. Niyel is run by Valerie Traore, who I am yet to meet since she travels quite a bit. But I fancy she is something like the Olivia Pope of the development sector.

         I spent the day finding out about their projects and trying to figure out how I can be useful. I spoke to the graphic designer, Antoine, about a personal campaign that he’s doing called Love Your Skin aimed at eradicating the use of skin bleaching products in Senegal. The phenomena is extremely prevalent in this region where I have seen some of the darkest skinned people in the world. He asked me if bleaching was as common in South Africa and I said that luckily it wasn’t, but I also had to point out that by and large South Africans are not as dark as the average, unbleached Senegalese.

         In Senegal, it is said that upwards of half the women bleach their skin. I asked if men bleach and Anotoine told me that it is not common. If a man bleaches his skin, explains Antoine, he is considered gay. This shows how clearly the issue is about pleasing men. Women bleach because they feel they will become more attractive to men if they do. Antoine admitted that most of his friends would say they prefer a lighter skinned woman. And men, he says, will sometimes buy skin-bleachers for their wives.

         But things go in trends. Just as natural hair is becoming a fad again, so light skin is making a resurgence. In the seventies, Antoine tells me, if a woman bleached her skin she was assumed to be a prostitute. Most of Antoine’s campaign focuses on informing people about the health risks that come with bleaching. But I wonder if this is just the easiest way to persuade the public about an issue that is deeply about something else. Something much more psychological, something much more difficult to define and to solve. For all we know, the association of bleaching with prostitution may be fuelling Senegalese men’s desire for lighter skinned women just as much as any colonial complex. Perhaps those associations with sexual deviance have something to do with a modernizing society moving away from the conservative. Who knows? But certainly the current discourse on skin-bleaching is centred very much on white supremacy.

         I am very light skinned. Born in rural South Africa to a Swedish father and a Shangaan mother, I was teased by all the kids who would run after me calling me “mlungu!” As a result, I myself have a complex about my skin colour. I have always felt too light skinned and wished I was darker. My complex is no better than the women who wish they were lighter and who do something about it. After all, I use skin-tanning oil without SPF and sit in the sun to get darker. We both do not feel happy with our skin.

        I woke up and grabbed my third arm, it’s 1:45pm. I look around. This is not Anna’s apartment. I get up and walk to the window. Only desert sand and some desert trees. There are two round huts some meters from me. I look up inside my own room and it's also a thatch roof. I look out of the window again thinking what village am I in!? And how the hell did I get here!?

          When the memories started flooding back, last night rearranged itself as follows. I am in my room dressed up like crazy, make-up done, hair looking fresher than. Waiting for Mase to pick me up. I was put in touch with Mase by Babz, Akon’s manager who I met in New York the day before my flight to Dakar. Mase, amongst a range of other things I learnt, is the director of Akon’s energy drink Cintron here in Dakar. When he hadn't called me at eleven I sent him an annoyed text wondering if we were still linking up. Looking back, I'm quite embarrassed. It turns out people in Dakar don't go out before 1am! So I ended up looking like quite the eager beaver :( Anyway, when we finally linked up we went to a lounge called Five which turned into a club at around three.

Last night I had dinner with Lamine. We both had grilled Thiofe, a type of fish. It was delicious! I had mine with Athieke, an Ivorian couscous made of cassava. I was in food HEAVEN. Lamine and I chatted about African youth over live Cape Verdean music. He coined the term Africanity and we talked about a new generation of Africans who are actors, who are global and who in his opinion aren’t trapped by our colonial pasts. I had to note that of course those histories have shaped us but otherwise I could agree with what he was saying…with the exception of South Africa. 

             On our way to Tilene market Anna popped inside a grocery store to buy Orangina, a sweet Fanta-like soda that I’ve never heard of. It was a typical standalone grocery store. I even saw several kids that one could copy-paste right into IST (International School of Tanganyika) in Dar es Salaam without anyone noticing. Of course the store itself could pass as any over-priced-but-actually-trash grocery store in Dar es Salaam and it would be filled with the same bunch. You know the stores I’m talking about. In Anglo-Afrique they are the lowest range of South African stores exported and made to look like expat quality for triple the price.

               After that we got into a carrapide. I cannot explain this vehicle. It seats like a South African venture, looks like a little truck with no glass in its windows, and it's decorated like a Tinga Tinga painting. We drove down the crowded road past the University of Chiekh Antah Diop. My eyes were feasting on people's outfits! Of course there are plenty of your corny cheap Chinese-made Western clothes wearers. But the brilliant colours of the tailored dresses blew my mind. People really wear these African fabrics (and I’m cool with saying African because many of the exact same cloths are called vitenge in Tanzania), and today is Friday so people dress up even more!

         It’s my first real day in Dakar. Anna took me to her mother’s house, a typical Arabic style house with a courtyard inside. A style I haven't seen in the non-Muslim world. It’s airy with several stories and intricate patterns of tiles. The house is filled with extended family and at least twice while I was there, groups of women visited wearing their Thursday best. No, really though, they were extremely decked out in the brightest fabrics. The same cloth is used to make the bubu, the under skirt and the head wrap. Their fingers, necks, wrist and ears are weighed down with gold jewelery. Faces done up entirely in makeup never dark enough to look natural. They were a glorious sight.

          We all ate lunch from the same big round dish. It quickly became clear to me that people speak a lot of Wollof. All of the women were fluent in French and knew basically no English at all. I asked Anna where the ladies were going after this. Nowhere, she said, they’re just dressed up. “You’re never over dressed in Dakar.” This immediately inspired me. Tomorrow we must go to the market.

         I took a much-needed midday nap and woke up just in time for dinner, a huge plate of rice and Supu Kanja (a spicy okra stew with fish). The sun didn’t go down till past seven when Anna and I lazily walked out to catch a cab back to our apartment. I was filled to the brim with happiness and okra. But as we drove in the dimly lit streets, I couldn’t help but wonder what things were in front of me that I was not yet seeing. I wondered about the sweaty men hustling to get into the local buses and about the women pulling carts and sacks from their fruit stalls, did they have Supu Kanja brought to them in cool living rooms? Come to think of it. where was all the food coming from? Because all the decorated women sat in the living room the whole day or napped. And the food would appear as if by magic. I wondered where the men were and why Anna’s mother and one of the cousins had fairer but blotchier skin than everyone else.

          As the plane swoops into dusty Dakar, I can already see the bronze statue, La Monument de la Reneissance Africaine. Around the Leopold Sedar Senghor airport are dozens of unfinished triple story houses of the nouveau riche or are they the nouveau houses of the always rich? I come out of the plane my heart sweltering like the heat. LSS is a basic little airport, reminds me of the airport in Zanzibar. I was out very soon and I quickly saw, in the small crowd of sim-card sellers, my father’s friend Lamine. I will be staying with his sister Anna for the next three months. He took one of my giant bags, we got into a chauffeured SUV and entered the city that is to become my home for the next three months.

         My dad hangs out with Lamine as much or more than any of his friends in Dar es Salaam. They are part of a network of INGO people who meet for similar themed conferences all over Africa. And whether it be in Addis where they had been a few days before, or in Johannesburg, they always manage to fit in a drink and maybe a night of dancing.

         The first suburb we encounter is Almadies. Lamine explains that it is the home of my office, and of some of Dakar’s fanciest hotels. It was a village only 20 years ago. Today the main road cutting through Almadies is surrounded by a few shiny new buildings. The bulk of the scenery is many-storeyed constructions that have been unfinished for so long, or perhaps just so dusty, that I can’t tell if they’re being built or falling apart. But the main road is smooth. Spanking new cars share it with yellow run-down cabs and one or two horse carts carrying bottles of water and sodas.