A tall man in a white robe wanders around calling out ‘Me bank!’ and waving a wad of notes.
To begin with, the roads this side of the border are much rougher. Tarred but severely pot-holed, they ensure a jolting, punishing ride towards St-Louis. Then, quite suddenly, we appear to have time-travelled to provincial France. The road surface becomes smooth and white-lined. Every village leading into St-Louis has speed restrictions and signs warning us to belt up, back and front. And there are cyclists everywhere, turning out of leafy lanes and emerging from the university campus on drop-handlebar bikes, wearing Tour de France T-shirts. I can’t remember seeing bicycles at all in Mauritania. Basil agrees.
‘Beat-up old cars and donkey carts and nothing in between.’
Shortly before six we cross a wide estuary onto a narrow island with a cathedral and cinemas and draw up beside the clipped hedges, shady balconies and colourful awnings of the Hotel De La Poste, where a long line of Monsieur Hulots is waiting to sign in ahead of us. I can even use my mobile to phone home. This is more than culture shock. It’s cultural convulsion.
SENEGAL
Day Thirty-Three
ST-LOUIS
I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours in France. It was unadventurous, but it was easy, pottering around the hotel from bar to restaurant to the Piscine Jardin with its wrought-iron flamingos, or just sitting on my hibiscus-clad balcony watching the majestic River Senegal sweep beneath the majestic seven-span girder bridge built by Louis Faidherbe, Governor of Senegal, in the 1860s. After a bit, the Frenchness became almost suffocating, from the check tablecloths to the endless pictures and models of the colon, the caricature of the Frenchman in Africa, complete with pipe and pith helmet.
The overriding obsession of the Hotel de la Poste is with the 1920s, when St-Louis was the most important town in French colonial Africa and a company called Aeropostale launched a regular mail service from Toulouse to Dakar. The pilots flew their fragile planes alone, often through the night, without radio or radar, in all weathers. They became national heroes, with one of them, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, writing bestselling books about his experiences. On 12 May 1930, a young man called Jean Mermoz took off from St-Louis and headed out across the Atlantic Ocean to make the first successful airmail connection with South America. The sky was no limit. Soon they were flying as far as Buenos Aires and even over the Andes to Santiago, Chile. Then, in December 1936, Mermoz left St-Louis in his sea-plane ‘Croix du Sud’ to make his twenty-fourth crossing of the Atlantic. He was never seen again.
Mermoz-mania still grips the hotel. Paintings of the planes and the epic route they covered are spread across the walls and even on the ceiling of the restaurant. In reception there are framed press clippings and evocative posters, and in a mural halfway up the stairs the head and shoulders of Mermoz rise from the cold grey waters of the Atlantic, as if gasping for one last breath.
Before flying he always stayed at the Hotel de la Poste, and always in room 219, on the corner, with the river on one side and the Art Deco post office on the other. It’s the room I’m in now.
Today I venture out of this tempting haven and take a longer look at St-Louis. No sooner have I stepped out into the street than a score of voices compete for my attention, crutches and wheelchairs race towards me and arms beckon me towards the pony and traps that wait listlessly by. I hire one for the morning and we set out across Faidherbe’s bridge, which clangs and rumbles beneath a constant stream of foot, car, bicycle and hoof traffic.
One book I’m reading describes its builder as ‘a visionary’, a man who more than anyone embodied the ideal of a West African empire built upon the virtues of French culture and the French way of life. Faidherbe believed unquestioningly that la mission civilisatrice, if decisively and compassionately applied, would benefit the indigenous people, enabling them to set aside their ancient superstitions and divisive tribal loyalties and share in the Gallic enlightenment. They would become les evolues, the evolved.
It was already too late. The mixing of French and African cultures had been going on long before Faidherbe. Soldiers and traders from Bordeaux settled the town in the mid-seventeenth century and many married the local Fula women, creating an aristocratic class of mulattos, or metis, as the French called them. Many of these women became powerful and successful matriarchs, known as signares, and they wielded great influence in St-Louis.
My thin and straining horse, his coat worn black by the harness, seems happier when we are off the bridge, on which he slithered awkwardly. As we explore the quieter backside of the island, along by the wharves where the warehouses for the rich trade in gum arabic were located, it becomes clear that the French dream of urban orderliness is not shared by the majority of the Senegalese. The roofs of the old, red-tiled, balconied colonial buildings are full of holes. Their once neat shutters are missing and the rutted dirt streets beneath are full of people, talk, small-scale enterprise, food and rubbish.
Another, shorter bridge takes us onto a long thin finger of land between the river and the ocean. Having water around is such an unfamiliar experience that I hire a pirogue to take me back to the hotel. On the way, we pass an extraordinary Dickensian scene. Stretching along the banks of the river is a great concourse of fish smokeries. Long racks of darkening fish stretch across a fuggy landscape of makeshift ovens, tended by fierce and grimy women. They scream abuse and wave their arms at us when the camera turns towards them.
Eat a late lunch at the house of Jacob Yakouba, one of the best-known Senegalese artists. His house is surrounded by a pinkwashed wall covered in bougainvillea and there is a large tent in the garden, where friends, fellow artists, writers and politicians can hang out. Here Jacob, like a cultural Godfather, dispenses advice, encouragement and artistic protection to a considerably extended family.
He’s a stocky bear of a man, a Senegalese Picasso, with a massive head and thick calves emerging from capacious navy-blue shorts. He’s been painting since he was seven. Despite his bull-like size, his gaze is gentle and his speech unexpectedly soft. I watch him working in his studio on a disappointingly conventional portrait of a pretty, loosely clad woman. The walls of the studio are thick with similar paintings, all quite joyfully sexy.
‘I prefer to paint women, first because of my mother, who helped me to become an artist. Then, because of my wife Marie-Madeleine. When I meet her it give me strength to focus my work on women.’
He admits that painting women so explicitly in a Muslim country could be a problem, but he has an international reputation and, anyway, fanaticism doesn’t exist so much in Senegal.
‘In St-Louis all the big families are Catholic or Muslim. We have always lived side by side. At Christmas the Muslims celebrate with the Catholics and during Tabaski, the sheep festival, the Catholics celebrate with the Muslims.’
He completes a last, long brush-stroke, caressing the outline of neck and shoulder, and stands back, head cocked.
‘Anyway, women are beautiful. I was born from a woman so I don’t see why there should be any taboos.’
At that moment there is a swirl of pink at the door and the aforementioned Marie-Madeleine makes a modestly grand entrance, to see if we are ready to eat. I realise that not only is she a formidable presence, but also her formidable figure is the subject of many of the paintings.
We sit round the table and all dip into a single dish containing a powerfully delicious concoction called domoda. Fish balls, made with green onions, parsley, garlic and spices, are served in a rich stew with sweet potatoes. When I ask how long it must have taken someone to prepare all this Jacob beams at the womenfolk.