I trust you’ve all been waiting with bated breath to find
out how we fared on our pilgrimage to the holiest city in Senegal. Well you can all exhale now… Wait,
actually don’t exhale just yet.
Before I debrief on that, I’ll share a little bit about religion in
general in Senegal. (keep holding
your breath!)
The overwhelming majority of Senegalese are Muslim (I’m
gonna say around 95%). However,
Islam here is not the Islam of the Middle East. Widespread conversion was a relatively recent thing, so it
is not the sole fount from which all aspects of life/culture spring as it is in
many Middle Eastern countries. There
are instead, at the risk of generalization and over-simplification, two
cultural pools from which Senegalese draw. One is that of Islam, and the other is that of the
traditions/cultures that pre-date Islam.
In many areas these two cultural sources are pretty well
aligned (patriarchal societal structure and general subordination of the fairer
sex being the first thing to jump to mind). However, in some areas these sources are in conflict. When the sources conflict, people just
choose to adhere to whichever directive better suits their wants/needs (e.g.
few women wear head scarves, and aggressive make-up, fake hair, and suggestive
dancing are the norm rather than the exception for a “deviant” few).
Arguably the most important culture conflict (in terms of
Islam’s role in Senegal) that also fell in the direction of pre-Islamic culture
was the emphasis of a strict hierarchy.
A central belief in Islam is that all people are equally close to God
and commune with Him directly rather than needing to communicate through any
type of clergy. This didn’t jive
with North and West Africa’s pre-existing culture, which was heavily
hierarchical. Senegal used to be a
caste society (about as rigid a hierarchy as can be imagined), and in more
rural settings, still is today. For
Muslims here it felt more natural to have religious leader, ascribed with
divine powers, serve as a link between God and common practitioners. These men were, and are, called
marabouts (the “t” is silent), many of whom are revered as saints by their
followers. From this practice came
the defining structure of Islam in Senegal: Brotherhoods, or groups of people
who follow a specific marabout. Some non-Senegalese Muslims view
brotherhoods, in their veneration of people other than Muhammad, as heretical
departures from true Islam.
Senegalese Muslims view the brotherhood as a path within Islam, merely
providing a more specific route to communion with Allah.
There are a few very large brotherhoods, each with their own
head marabout, holy city, regional concentration, main holy day, etc. The largest (~3 million followers), and
most powerful brotherhood, and the one most relevant in our day-to-day lives,
as well as our recent pilgrimage, is the Mouride Brotherhood. A subset of the Mourides are called the Baye Falls, of which
our father is a member. The Baye
Falls are especially interesting in that unlike all other Muslims in the world, they do not pray five times a day
and they don’t fast during Ramadan.
Instead, their work is their way of praying/fasting. They are supposed to work incredibly hard
as their way of communing with God.
For many Baye Falls, this work ethic has gotten lost along the way:
obscured by clouds of marijuana smoke, or hiding in dreadlocks or begging
bowls. Our father has not lost track of the founding
principles of the Baye Falls. He
is one of the hardest workers I have ever met. In his words, “I care only for my family and my work.”
 |
| The sheer number of depictions of Mbacké and Fall (the founders of the Mourides and Baye Falls) as well as the number of graffiti-ed “Bamba Merci” give one a vague idea of how omni-present this brotherhood is. |
The Mouride holy city is Touba, which is a very interesting
topic in and of itself (it’s kind of like a Senegalese Vatican, in that it is
an independent religious state, run internally and totally separate from the
Senegalese government). For the
overall digestibility of this post, which I may have already endangered with
such a large chunk of text not really about our
experience here, I’m going to link to a few articles in Wikipedia so that
people who want to learn a bit more, can do so. Sorry to pass the buck like this, but attempting to distill
down such a large subject into a blog post feels like a bit of a doomed
endeavor. We’ll put up further
posts on aspects of this topic as specific holidays come and go, but for now, I
banish you to the hinterlands of wiki-link surfing.
The main day of celebration for Mourides (including Baye
Falls) is called Maggal. For those
of you too busy to scan the Wikipedia article, it commemorates their founder,
Cheikh Amadou Bamba Mbacké’s departure for exile, into which the French
colonizers forced him. (Unsurprisingly
his departure for exile only started being celebrated after his triumphant
return.) During Maggal, millions
(literally) of people go on Pilgrimage to Touba. This year, among those millions were two wide-eyed PCVs,
just trying to take it all in. Our
eyes weren’t wide for long, not because we became accustomed to the madness,
but rather because the amount of dust kicked up by two million people forced us
to squint the whole time and wear bandanas over our noses and mouths to try to
sift some if out before it entered our oral and nasal cavities.
Exhale.
Let me start in my description of the event, by sharing with
you the warnings we were given about it by our Safety and Security Coordinator
(SSC), Mbouille, via text message.
“All PCVs Reminder: Tuba Maggal on December 21/22. Transport will b difficult and xtremely
risky. Use caution and avoid
traveling 3 days b4 & 3 days after the event” –Sent Dec. 11th
“PCVs: Reminder, Tuba Maggal Dec 22- no PUBLIC TRANSPORT.
Also, remember to Safeguard VALUABLES everywhere, all the time; avoid
ISOLATION. Don’t trust any stranger.”
-Sent Dec. 18th
Since it was our plan to go with our father, (who speaks
English, so the odds of us getting in a scary situation we didn’t understand
was less likely) in a private car that he hired, and staying in a walled
compound outside Touba-proper with our father’s family, it honestly didn’t occur
to me that these warnings applied to us.
The morning we were to leave, we realized that we hadn’t made the
requisite call/text to the security team to tell them that we would be spending
the night away from our site. So
we casually texted in our plans.
Our text read…
“We will be going to Mbacké with our father and staying
there with his family for a night.”
In the tireless Safety and
Security Coordinator, Mbouillé’s, eyes, it likely read…
“Not only are we traveling when we’ve been warned not to
travel, we’re going into the very hornet’s nest that is the source of all the
craziness and while there will stand out as obvious foreigners and therefore
obvious targets for criminals. We
hear your warnings and dismiss them out of hand.”
Without the benefit of hindsight, I was unable to see at the
time how much of a shit I was being in both the timing, and the offhandedness
of the text. Needless to say, we
got a call from Mbouille about 10 seconds later. His first question was, “Did you not receive my text messages?” He went on to explain how he had left
Dakar at 3pm the previous day, and had not arrived into Touba until 1am (trip
that would usually only take a few hours), due to the huge volume of people
driving that route at the same time.
He also explained that along the way he had seen “many terrible things
that I would not wish for any volunteer to see.” I took this to mean horrible car accidents, and at least one
corpse. After explaining to him
why we would be okay (all the reasons stated above) the closest I got to a
thumbs up was his admission that he couldn’t stop me from going, and that I
should make my own decision. After
my gentle scolding, we spoke with Baay to confirm that all would be well, which
he assured us it would, as resolved to go.
The car we took was that of our father’s friend. It even came equipped with a person to
drive us! The car was a total
beater by American standards, but by Senegalese standards, we were going on
pilgrimage in the lap of luxury. (Overall
transportation in Senegal deserves its own blog post, so I’ll not go too
in-depth on this topic) We stashed our (admittedly huge) bag in the back, right
next to the frozen(ish) skinned
sheep our baay was bringing to sell to a friend in Touba (luckily the sheep
corpse was sort of wrapped in plastic and there was minimal leakage). Our bag was giant as we were bringing
our tent, two sleeping pads, and two sleeping bags, intending to sleep in our
tent in the courtyard. I would
have paid 10,000CFA (~$20, fyi) to have had the Wolof skills to explain this
quickly when we were heckled by baay’s family for having such a huge bag for a
single overnight stay. Maybe we’ll
learn snappy comebacks in our language seminar.
 |
| Off to Touba! |
Our drive was uneventful and we saw miraculously few dangerously
overloaded vehicles, and not a single corpse. This is largely because we were taking a route that didn’t
at any point coincide with the Dakar-Touba corridor that is bumper-to-bumper
for Maggal. After a few hours we
arrived at Baay’s sister’s house.
She lives in a walled-in compound within a walled-in Red Cross (Croix
Rouge) Health Center, where she is a midwife. The interactions that followed were a microcosm of sorts of
our social interactions in Senegal:
We met a dizzying number of people in rapid succession. We were told exactly how everyone was
related to everyone else (even when some weren’t technically related). We were told by different people at
different times that we either understood or did not understand Wolof, based
upon their two or three phrase exchange with us. We were quizzed on who was who, and how they were related to
each other (I miserably failed, but Kait often succeeded). As guests, we were offered chairs by
old women and nursing mothers, who insisted they would rather sit on the floor.
(We’re getting better at saying no to things like this.) We were offered much more food than we
could eat, and much more attaya (tea)
than our respective caffeine tolerances could handle.
We spent that afternoon just resting. Our only real activity was getting
haircuts. Muslim men here get
their heads shaved before religious holidays, and as both a lover of buzz cuts,
and a PCV endeavoring to integrate, I do as well. Luckily I now have the Wolof skills to avoid the facial hair
miscommunication that preceded Tabaski during PST. (For a recap of the Great
Tabaski Pencil-Thin Moustache Debacle of 2013, see the “Hair” section of our
“Big Changes” blog post.) I
managed to escape with just a standard buzz. Alhamdulillah (thanks
be to God) for Baay’s knowledge of tubaab hair, because the barber didn’t know
what to do with me, or rather attempted to say the haircut was over when I
thought it was just beginning.
Anyway, we essentially paid the barber to rent his clipper, as Baay did
all the real work.
 |
| Chez Baay: Tubaabs' #1 Touba Hair Salon since 1999 |
Our baay’s family is rather impressive. They all come together for Maggal (from
Europe and across Senegal) so we got to meet the whole gang. The most VIP of his family members is
his cousin, who is a captain in the Senegalese army. It was through his connections that we were able to have a
very VIP Maggal. The Captain
(which is what everyone actually calls him) has his own driver and his own pass
to drive his own vehicle into Touba proper. The vast, vast majority of pilgrims have to take public
transport into Touba, and then ride around on charets (horse-drawn carts). We had heard from a random charet owner
a few weeks previous that he planned to drive his charet to Touba to make money
as a taxi service, a sizable journey that would take two days each way. Apparently, every single person with a
horse/donkey and charet in Senegal had the same idea because the traffic was
INSANE! But I’m getting a bit
ahead of myself.
We were told that the plan for that evening was for us to go
with the Captain and his driver (a very nice and quite chatty man, despite his
very serious face and his wearing combat fatigues the whole time) into Touba
itself, from our base camp in Mbacké (a town just outside Touba). You’d think after all the experiences
we’ve had revolving around “evening” concerts, parties, etc. here, we’d have
realized that our perception of “late” and the Senegalese perception of “late”
are drastically different. Anyway,
around 9pm, we thought, “no way are we going to go into Touba now! Not with the super-busy day that awaits
us tomorrow!” We were especially
certain it wouldn’t happen because dinner hadn’t even been served yet. Ironically fast after we concluded that
it was too late for anyone to want to embark on an adventure, we were told that
the time had come, and we set off, without dinner, (rather un-Senegalese to be
in too much of a rush to have a leisurely meal and attaya!) for Touba. We didn’t know what to expect, neither
in terms of what we would see, nor in terms of what we would actually be doing
when we got there, as nothing had been explained to us.
To say it was a mad house is not doing it justice. I’ve never seen more people that we saw
there in Touba. Tragically, our
camera has no flash so we were unable to take pictures. No picture, or even set of pictures
could do it justice anyway.
Imagine photos you’ve seen of the Million Man March in DC. It’s like that, except 2+ million
people, and tens of thousands of horses and charets, and a few camels. It was horse-face to charet-bumper
traffic as far as the eye could see.
Luckily we were important, or at least that’s what the driver’s constant
blaring of the horn seemed to be saying.
“WE’RE IMPORTANT!”
“GET YOUR HORSE OUT OF THE WAY!”
“VIPs COMING THROUGH!”
“PEASANTS MAKE WAY!”
As awkward as I felt with all the people staring at us in
our nice truck as we blared the horn and nosed past them, without the vehicle,
our journey would have been impossible.
It took us about an hour and a half to get to where we were going, a
strange compound of houses, each occupied by a different marabout, no more than
7k away from our point of origin. Alhamdulillah we didn’t try to make it
all the way to the Grand Mosque.
We saw it at a distance, and that was enough, as between us and it was a
veritable sea of charets, without sufficient space to maneuver and make a way
through for the VIP car.
We spent the next few hours walking from one marabout’s
house to the next. We never had to
wait long for our audience with each marabout. This was probably another benefit of traveling with our
military man, but everyone seemed to know and esteem our baay too. All floor space (including outdoors,
which I guess it just ground space) was covered by bedrolls and sleeping
people. We had been curious where
2 million people sleep, the majority of whom don’t have a midwife sister with a
house in town, and now we had our answer: EVERYWHERE. The audiences usually began with a conversation, and ended
with a prayer led by the marabout.
Here (and I’m not sure if this is true across Islam) people don’t hold
their palms together or clasp their hands while in prayer, they rather hold
their hands in front of them, palms towards their face, fingers to the
sky. It’s almost like miming
reading a book. After the prayer
concludes, occasionally with an “Amin, amin,” but always by wiping the face
symbolically with one’s hands: from the top of the forehead to the chin.
Since our arrival in Senegal, we have faced a few challenges
revolving around gender; mainly that gender equality is not at all a thing
here. The gender gap seemed
perceptibly wider at this event, where there was stricter adherence, to the
additional Islamic gender gap, in addition to the ever-present Senegalese
one. This stratification took many
forms. The first of which was that
in Touba, unlike almost everywhere else in Senegal, women are expected to wear
a headscarf. There were countless
more, less obvious but more annoying/hurtful, instances on top of that. When speaking to us, people, who were
mostly men, didn’t really speak to “us,” but rather to me, occasionally about Kait, with her standing right next
to me. When she was spoken to, it
usually involved me, and how I was her borom
u kër. This literally means
“boss of the house” and is used here as synonymous with “husband.” Though I would describe our
relationship as a great partnership, if one of us were to have the title of
“Boss of the House,” I can say with confidence that it would not be me. As the night wore on, and fatigue and hunger increased, the
area of Kait’s brain in charge of culturally relativistic thinking began to shut
down, and she became less and less able to take these slights (by American
standards) in stride. This issue
has been one of the defining struggles of our experience thus far. I’m not dumb enough to think I
understand what it’s like to be a female here, and certainly not dumb enough to
write as though I know how American women feel here (I value my skin too highly),
so you’ll have to wait until Kait blogs on this topic, to get an in-depth,
insider’s perspective. Although
I’m physically here, my gender keeps me largely on the outside with regard to
this struggle. Meanwhile, back at
the ranch…
We met with at least four marabouts before it was time to
go… around 12:30am. “Tomorrow’s
going to be rough,” we thought, thinking the night was basically over. Hahahaha! On our way home, we hit even worse charet traffic. We didn’t
arrive home until around 2:30, where our hot dinner of ceeb u yapp (rice and meat) was waiting for us. It was delicious, but all we wanted to
do was set up our tent and go to sleep.
After dinner, after declining highly caffeinated attaya, which struck everyone
as strange, our hosts insisted that people had been rearranged to give us space
on the floor inside, so we needn’t set up our tent and sleep outside. We explained that it wasn’t a big deal,
and we would just set up our tent, they remained insistent. I think they thought we would rather
sleep inside, and we were just being polite by offering to sleep outside, so as
good hosts, they continued to insist.
In reality, we knew the nursing infants, swarms of mosquitoes, and
armies of mice (coupled with my allergies) in the room with two humans-worth of
floor space spelled a night of horrible sleep. Finally, when neither party was able to convince the other
of their point-of-view, we relented, rationalizing that at least we wouldn’t
have to set up and take down our tent.
The anticipated terrible night’s sleep came to pass, just as projected. Unfortunate timing considering the big
day we had ahead.
Mercifully, though we had a full
day planned, it would all be in Mbacké, which is the spiritual center for Baye
Falls. This meant that at least we
wouldn’t have to fight charets and dust all day as we had the night
before. After a breakfast of
leftover ceeb u yapp and café Touba
(basically dark roast coffee that is ground up along with cloves, and various
other spices, and is a national staple almost on par with attaya) everyone put
on their nicest clothes. Everyone
with the exception of a male cousin who was probably 12 years old, that
is. His “nice clothes” that he
would go on to wear for the entire day, as we met with marabouts and had a
generally pious day, said the following…
Kait had a bonding moment with
some of the young women of the house trying to (and succeeding at) explain what
the t-shirt meant. As we haven’t
learned all the necessary vocabulary for the explanation, it involved a good
deal of miming…
We took the requisite formal
photo (which was ruined by Kait and Baay smiling, which one rarely sees in
formal photos, much to my amusement) and set off for the house of Baay’s marabout,
where we would spend the day.
 |
| Fallou, Me, Baay's Brother (who lives in Italy), Baay, and Kait |
The marabout’s compound was
large and nice. Most of it was
open space in the form of a large courtyard. When I say open space, I mean it was totally filled with bodies. The most striking ritual taking place
was a large circular procession of Baye Falls all singing (shouting to a tune?)
in unison.
This continued all day. Again, we were with people of great
enough importance (Baay and the Captain) as to warrant floor space indoors,
where it was cool and shady, and a little less loud. There we sat for the bulk of the day. The marabout would occasionally come in
to sit and chat/pray, but for the bulk of the day, we just sat. Kait and I actually both fell asleep
sitting against the wall in the back of the room at one point.
 |
| At Baay's marabout's house: (L to R, Top to Bottom) Marabout leading a prayer, the view from the VIP, Kait with her headscarf, the chanting procession, Baay and I looking snazzy. |
Around 2pm we were ushered into
what looked like a bedroom, and served lunch. We ate ceeb u yapp
(the go-to dish for fancy occasions) literally on top of someone’s bed. It is impossible to eat greasy rice
with one’s hand, and not drop any grains.
I felt like quite a jerk for the amount of super-staining rice I
personally dropped on someone’s bed, but there was nothing to be done. After lunch, we were given more apples
and Clementine oranges than we could possibly eat (and encouraged to just
pocket the extras) as well as cold drinks. As we walked outside, to mingle with the non-VIPs, and
listen to the marabout address the whole crowd it seemed like the day was going
off without a hitch.
 |
| When a marabout speaks, people listen. |
We’d just eaten lunch, gotten
plenty of marabout face-time, and the agreed upon hour of departure (determined
in discussion with our baay regarding PC’s rule that we not travel at night, so
we needed to depart by a specific time, ~4pm) was drawing nigh. To say that we misunderstood the
situation, as well as where we stood in regard to the day’s activities, might
just be the understatement of the weekend.
Not only had nobody but VIPs
gotten lunch, it hadn’t even been lunch, but rather a second breakfast. We were told we would need to wait at
this house until lunch was served, because our driver hadn’t been in on the
second breakfast, and needed to eat, but after that we could head straight
home… just kidding! After that we would be going to three
more marabout’s houses! It seemed that
only an act of God would get us back to Guinguinéo that night. This realization had a slight fraying
effect on nerves that were already a bit frazzled after the previous night’s
lack of sleep. After expressing
our feelings to Baay, we ended up moving on before the driver could eat, at the
behest of the Captain… who would be delayed by no man! We visited two marabouts in rapid
succession, getting in, having our audience, and getting out with impressive
efficiency, largely thanks to the Captain’s status, I think. After leaving the second house, we were
assured by Baay that we had but one more stop, to have an audience with the
Cheikh of all Baye Falls: Cheikh Modou Aminata Fall. Judging from the number of people in his compound, and the
excitement of the Baye Falls in our party, this was a big deal. Much like our previous audiences, we
were led into an empty room with a big, important looking chair in the
front. We sat on the floor right
in front of the chair. Unlike
previous audiences, people continued to file in after us. This continued until the room was quite
full, with each person sitting on the floor. We waited there, packed in like sardines, for about 45
minutes. As the marabout’s
underlings came into the room, to prepare it for his entry, the people in the
front of the room were shooed back to create a path. This happened in concert with more people shoving into the
room from the back. I don’t think
I’ve ever taken up less space in my life.
As we became progressively more tightly packed in, the hour at which we
would need to leave in order to arrive home before dark came and went, and the
elusive marabout kept us waiting and waiting, Kait’s frayed nerves snapped and
a few tears were shed (quietly).
Luckily, the marabout made his entrance shortly thereafter, and we were
forced to wipe tears from eyes to see clearly, so as not to be trampled.
I had every intention of taking
a picture of the big cheese of all Baye Falls, but as soon as he entered the
room, there was a crush of bodies at our backs as everyone stood and pushed
forward. A female cousin in her
low teens who had joined us for the day said, in another notable
understatement, “it is not safe here.”
We shoved against the flow of the crowd to get to the door in which we
came, only to find it locked. This
was alarming at the time, as we just wanted to get out of the room, but in
hindsight, I can only imagine how much worse the crush would have been if the
main entry point had been left open to the huge crown outside. Sticking to the perimeter of the room,
we were able to escape through an open exit. It was great to be outside, and
even greater to be done with the last audience of the day.
We proceeded back to the Red
Cross, knowing that even an immediate turn-around would not get us home before
dark. To make matters more
alarming, we weren’t sure how functional the headlights were in our car, but
weren’t naïve enough, even after our limited experience with transportation
here to assume that they worked.
Our driver took this perfect opportunity to throw a temper tantrum
(apparently people who don’t eat all day get grumpy) and say that he didn’t
want to leave quickly, but would rather wait a few more hours, probably in
hopes of getting a good dinner at the house. Mercifully, our needs trumped his. I believe our very perceptive and considerate father picked
up on how frustrated we were, and how close to the edge of total freak-out Kait
was.
So we set of for home! Not to
worry, the driver got his dinner before we departed, and he took his sweet
time.
 |
| This is where the sun was in the sky when we started driving! |
The beginning of the drive gave
us beautiful views of the sun setting over the bush. After 30 minutes, the sun had set and our barely-functioning
headlights gave us beautiful views of… NOTHING! (until it was about 15ft in
front of us, that is). Reasonable
people, that is to say people who would like to live, would drive their
seatbelt-less cars a little slower under these conditions. Grumpy and pouting-for-being-over-ruled
drivers are not reasonable it would seem.
He drove angry the whole way home. Kait and I were white-knuckled in the back seat, waiting for
a donkey or cow to materialize from the dark, 15ft in front of our car, and
crash through the windshield, killing us all. This didn’t happen, as the existence of this blog post
illustrates.
We were happy to arrive home
alive, and with a much better understanding of PC Senegal’s “Don’t Travel at
Night” policy.
To wrap up what has already become a too long, and despite
its having a central theme, slightly convoluted blog post, I’d like to share how
religion in Senegal impacts our day-to-day lives. The most obvious impact is in all of the sounds. There is a call-to-prayer (adhan) that plays over loud speakers
from every mosque five times daily.
The first plays between five and six in the morning. I’m not sure what the application
process is to be the muezzin (the guy who sings/recites it), but it doesn’t
seem to be terribly discerning.
For an example of how beautiful it can be, see here.
I was unable to find an example of a less than stellar
rendition, so for your edification, consider the following… someone singing
with just as much passion as the previous example (and just as many trills,
etc), just with no vocal ability, and now imagine it being blasted unimaginably
loudly over a truly terrible sound system. This is the most generous way I can describe the adhan we
heard five times daily during CBT.
Alhamdulillah that the mosque
nearest our house in Guinguinéo has a muezzin with a nice voice who doesn’t
embellish too aggressively, and a sound system that’s relatively static and
feedback free.
The second major impact on our daily lives is that Muslims
don’t really like dogs, viewing them as very dirty. This is relevant in our daily lives… because we have a dog
now. (Slightly twisting the blog
theme to work this delightful tidbit in!)
She’s a beautiful stray that our site mate spotted near her house. Her name is Lady Obama (selected by our
family) and she is really coming into her own. When we found her, she hated humans, and was a really sorry
specimen. Now she’s a healthy
(dare I say a bit chubby?) and very energetic puppy. Our father has wanted a dog to protect the house, mostly the
sheep he occasionally keeps before slaughtering and BBQing them, for some time
now. We promised we could help
teach the family about dog care, and help train her. The family is warming up the, but it’s a lot of
work. Her barking and wanting to
play (i.e. running about like a crazy dog) still occasionally terrifies the
kids. It’s been an annoying and
challenging addition to our workload, but she’s also adorable and will
eventually be less of a little shit.
We love her despite it all.
 |
| Lady Obama at play (with her favorite toy, a goat leg) and at rest. |
Thanks for hanging with me for what I think is the longest
blog post yet!
Dama bari wax,
(I talk a lot)
Peter
