Slowing Down in Senegal
A 30-minute flight south of Dakar is enough to get you flying over an entire country (The Gambia) and into the lush green palms of the Southern part of Senegal, called Casamance. Suddenly, the weather is warm, the sun constant, and the breeze off the sea a calming companion to an evening’s caipirinha. It’s tough.
We rented a house in a slightly surreal place called the Baie de Boucotte (think Swiss visions of African village, complete with vivid colours, thatched roofs and long alleys of elegant palm trees). It’s a hop, skip and jump from Cap Skirring airport, built to ferry French folk to the local Club Med, a short walk from the landing strip. A blissful garden explodes with palms and flowers, trees bent under the weight of oranges and grapefruits, and houses beautifully crafted and tastefully furnished. A long stairway leads down to a largely deserted beach, dotted with an occasional cow, and a tiny destination café, La Cabane Sauvage, serving some of the best meals I’ve had in the country.
That’s the frame for a week cuddled up en famille. Glam’ma, Glam’pa, boy, baby & babysitter. My hard-working daughter-in-law joins us mid-week. Slowing down is the stated name of the game. There aren’t that many options, anyway. My serial entrepreneur son takes this literally and makes an impressive stab at catching up on a year’s sleep deprivation. Between the business and the baby he’s created, he’s dug deep into his reserves. Here, amid the quiet and the waving palms, he naps far more willingly than the baby does, morning and afternoon, dropping off with a kind of starved abandon. Five days in, he starts to refill the tank.
The daily rhythms take me back three decades to when baby’s dad was the one who was one. When we were in the crazily intense, juggling years childing, parenting and working. When entire holidays were predicated on the naps, the needs and unpredictable moods of still somewhat illegible little humans. Meals, and play and a dip in the pool. The focus of the day here leans to the post-nap, midday meander to the beach where we play in the sand, admire the cows and wonder about their wanderings, and coo over the dog parked in front of our little café. We rejoice in fresh sea bass or a celebratory catch of glorious crayfish.
When baby tires, and the cows start their familial migration to their evening fruit-chomping grounds, we do the same and head for home. For a couple of quiet hours, we will read and write until it’s time for baby to bathe and bed. When dark has settled and we can plausibly claim some renewal of appetite, we’ll drive into town for a meal at La Paillotte, run by a French couple who spend five months here running their resort and spend the rest of the year taking care of their grandchildren back in Paris.
I’m reading the appropriately paced and holiday-lengthy Colm Tóbín novel, The Magician. It’s a fictionalised biography of Thomas Mann, the German Nobel-prize winning author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain. The gay-leaning son of a rich businessman, Thomas marries the quietly comprehensive (and very wealthy) Katia and has six children, who take up much of the story and his attention. They too create the rhythm of his days and his life, except for the morning hours before lunch, where the absolute rule is uninterrupted writing in his study, surrounded by his books. Much of his life is described secluded behind wealthy walls of imposing homes and contained within the rather chaotic travails of his large and extended family. He is late to recognise the rise of Hitler, late to emigrate, late to get his family to safety. Still holidaying in Sweden when war is declared. Wrapped in the protected coating of family and writing, the real world can seem less real.
I get it. I can’t help but feel the parallels as I sit contentedly twinkling toes with Zoe in the shallow end of our pristine pool, cleaned every other day by the ‘pisciniste’ who arrives in the dark before dawn, along with the gardener and his cleaning lady wife who arrives with 2-month old Philippe bound to her back. They wipe and clean and dust and water. If you drive to nearby Oussoye, as we did en route to a day trip to the end-of-the-world island of Karabane, you’ll cross truckloads of soldiers patrolling about in the inland, 37-degree heat, in full military gear. They are the remains of the not-very-distant separatist fight that tore this region apart for decades.
Karabane is 20km and a million miles away from the Baie de Boucotte. The gloriously luxurious houses that surround us here are mostly owned by foreigners, and the French still have their colonial pawprint firmly imprinted across the country – from education and economics to politics. Today, it’s Russia that horrifies us claiming Ukraine as its own – at seemingly any cost. For Thomas Mann (and my mother) it was Germany that tried its hand at hegemony. But not so long ago, it was us – the French, the British, and the rest – who raped and pillaged people and continents for power and politics. Who redrew maps willy-nilly, creating nation states divorced from the dreams of families and tribes centuries in the knitting. Imprinting them with set-up-to-fail decades of unrest.
Senegal is only on its 4th President since independence. That might lead to a comparison with America’s 4th, James Madison, sometimes called the father of the Constitution. Senegal’s economy is set for what the World Bank calls “impressive growth” of some 10% next year. Half the population here is under 18, compared to the UK where I live where half the population is now over 50. An energy you can feel in the streets of Dakar and see in the building cranes that dot the horizon.
So much promise and potential. So much trauma and unfairness. As our week wraps up with baby Zoe delightedly discovering the astonishing joy of fresh-squeezed orange juice from the garden, husband Tim finishes the book he’s been reading, Africa Is Not a Country by Dipo Faloyin. It tries to end optimistically, he says. But, as ever, bigger global forces are impacting this continent. Six of the world’s countries predicted to be most affected by climate change are African, despite having contributed almost nothing to the problem.
As Putin sends his warships to Cape Town, and Nigeria votes in a tight, significant election this weekend, the future – like the birth - of our species seems somehow embedded here. It holds our young – and our proven potential for self-annihilation. What will my grand-daughter witness in her lifetime, which will likely stretch well into the 22nd century? Her Senegalese grandfather says “the future of humanity lies in ‘le métissage.’”
I watch as two sea eagles soar in front of me. A long grass trailing from their beaks. They are busy building their nest. And so are we.
