I was in the Peace Corps in 1977-1979. I spent February through May, 1977 in a training program with 2 months in Putney, Vermont and 2 months in Thies, Senegal. Only about 40% of those who started the training program survived the entire 4 months. Those of us that did scattered to our various assigned posts in June, 1977.
I was posted to Bafata, a village of about 60 people in the far southern part of the country, known as the Casamance region. Bafata was actually three villages, all called Bafata. I never did find out the why of that. To add to the confusion, there is a larger city called Bafata in Guinea Bissau, the country just south of Senegal. Of my 3 villages, one was Mandinka. These are the descendants of the largest tribe in West Africa. A few hundred years ago, their ancestors were running the Mali empire, a government that spanned all of West Africa and which rivaled the Roman empire in size and sophistication.
Their empire did not long survive contact with the west however. The first westerners to reach Senegal were the Portuguese in the 14th century (could have been 15th, I don't remember.) The Portuguese made contact with the Wolof tribe, a down on its luck fishing tribe that didn't get along with the Mandinka, and had been marginalized at the edge of the empire. But their new friends gave them guns, among other western gifts and suddenly, they weren't marginal any more. In the end, to make a long and complex story short and simple, the Mandinka empire collapsed and the Wolof are now the ruling tribe in Senegal.
The Wolof live in the northern part of the nation, an area known geographically as the Sahel. To my eye, it looks like the Sahara - endless miles of rolling beach with no ocean. Desert. But to a biologist, it is a far cry from the arid and lifeless Sahara. There is water to be found, if you know where to look, and the area is teeming with life. It isn't a good place for human life, but other critters like it just fine. And of course, the corpse of the occasional hapless human provides water and food for a lot of those critters for weeks!
Senegal is divided by two rivers running east to west, the Gambia and the Casamance. The Gambia river is actually in the nation of Gambia. During the colonial days, the British and the French divided up the area to suit their own political sensibilities and without any regard for the ethnic makeup of the locals. So the British got an area extending 12 miles on both sides of the Gambia River. The Gambians, while being from the same tribes as the Senegalese, speak English and The Gambia is modelled on the British political system. The Senegalese speak French and the government in Dakar is modelled on the French political system. The area is often referred to as "Senegambia," reflecting just how artificial the political division is.
Politics and colonialism aside, the Gambia River does divide major tribes as well. North of the Gambia are the Wolof, Serer and Fulani. South of the Gambia are the Mandinka, Djola, Malinke, Mankine, Balant and others. The Mandinka and the Diola are large tribes in the south. The others have only a few thousand members each.
Bafata
Bafata was divided into 3 villages. One was Mandinka, one was Balant and one was a mix of Malinke, and Mandinka. The Mandinka were Moslems, worshipping the one God, Allah and studying the word of the Prophet in Arabic. They were literate, and the children learned to read and write Arabic from an early age. I had grown up with the usual American stereotypes of the illiterate African. I remember one day as I was about to leave for a few days to do some business in a nearby city, I was very surprised when one of the teens in the village handed me a note and asked me to deliver it to a friend of his along the way. The note was clearly written in Arabic, but I couldn't make it out (I knew Arabic at the time.) He explained that it was Arabic script, but the note was in the Mandinka language. Just as we use the Roman script to write our English language, they had borrowed the Arabic script to write their language. I did some reading on the subject after that and learned that the Mandinka had been literate since converting to Islam in about 900 CE.
The Balant were animists. They worshipped their ancestors, and believed that trees, bushes, rocks and animals all had spirits, or "animus" (a Latin term.) Well, they didn't so much "worship" their ancestors as revered them. They believed that after dying, our spirits stick around and are available to help their descendants. Respect for the ancestors is a big part of their culture and their religion.
Getting to Bafata
My trip began in Thies, in the northern part of Senegal. I had to get to Ziguinchor (pronounced "zig-in-shore"), a long ways south. I took a "taxi," which is not like a taxi here. This is an old, beat up car that the owner uses to make money by carrying passengers for hire. You dicker over price, and the driver tries to squeeze in as many people as he can possibly manage. Plus the luggage, which goes on top of the people, on top of the car and in the trunk. It is not uncommon to ride with people who are taking chickens, goats or sheep with them - in the taxi. It is not a comfortable way to travel.
One of the hallmarks of Senegalese cabs is the fact that the shock absorbers are shot. That makes the ride a rather bumpy one. And being as hot as it is in Africa, and even hotter with all those people crammed together, the smell becomes a bit heady. The trip to Ziguinchor takes from 6 hours to 3 days, depending on the whims of the cosmos. The car may break down - make that "will" break down. How long it takes to fix it depends on whether it breaks down near anything, what breaks, and whether the driver actually knows anything about car repair.
There are two ferries to cross on the way, crossing the Gambia and the Casamance rivers. Both date from the 1950s. They can carry about 10 cars at a time, plus pedestrians, cattle, goats, sheep, chickens and children. They often break down in mid-river, causing the ferry to float with the current until the engine starts again, or the passengers are rescued. Rescue is in the form of locals putting out in their pirogues, or dugout canoes and bringing back everyone that they can. At least twice while I was in Senegal, the ferries floated a good ways down stream before they could be fixed. Fortunately, this never happened while I was on them.
As you can imagine, the ferries did not exactly adhere to a schedule. They just ran all the time until they broke. Then they didn't run again until they were fixed. Could be hours. Could be days. Could be weeks. Hunker down and wait.
On arriving in Ziguinchor, the taxi let me out in the taxi gare (pronounced "garr", meaning "station" in French.) This was a big, dirt lot in the middle of Ziguinchor. I had directions to the "Peace Corps house" about a mile away, so I grabbed my bag and walked through the sweltering afternoon heat, taking in the sights, smells and sounds. Ziguinchor was a lot different than Thies or Dakar, or any of the northern towns. For one thing, the north is all desert, dry and arid. The south is forested, humid and damp. In the north, pretty much everyone speaks Wolof. In the south, folks speak Wolof only reluctantly. The main languages are Mandinka and Djola. There was a lot of French in both the north and the south, but in the south, there is also an awful lot of Portuguese Creole as well. The people look a lot different than the northerners, and dress more colorfully. While Thies was built by French colonists, Ziguinchor was built by the Portuguese and the architecture is very different.
The Peace Corps house was a second floor apartment near the riverfront. It had two bedrooms, a bathroom, kitchen and large living area. A long balcony opened off the living area, overlooking a busy main street that led to the river in one direction, and the taxi garage and the open market in the other. The house was sometimes very busy with all of the rooms full, and people sleeping on the floor or sofas in the living area, but usually there were not a lot of people there at any given time. The Peace Corps house, or "animation house" as it was known (what we did is called "animation rurale" in French,) was a flop house for volunteers, not a permanent habitation. This was where the volunteers posted to remote areas stayed when they came into town to pick up mail, talk to government functionaries or just to socialize. It was also the first stop for new volunteers heading to their villages.
After a day in Ziguinchor, a couple of other volunteers who had been in-country for a couple of years took me out to Bafata in an old Peugot pick-up truck. We drove about 60 kilometers south of Ziguinchor on the only paved road in Senegal (at least, at that time.) After consulting some directions and talking to some passers by in the middle of nowhere, the driver turned off the road seemingly at random, and we started bouncing cross country. I later realized that we were actually on a well travelled "road," but you could have fooled me! Of course, it was well travelled by feet, but rarely travelled by wheel.
Another 15 kilometers and we came to an open area, then a cluster of mud huts with pointed, thatched roofs. We got out, they unloaded my stuff, and because it was getting late, they headed back leaving me standing alone, the sole White man in a sea of black faces smiling expectantly at me. I vividly remember being privately embarrassed that my first thought was, "I hope they aren't going to eat me."
When I first arrived in the village, despite the 4 months of intensive cultural training I'd just been through, I was still a bundle of stereotypes. There simply isn't any way to get ready to live in a culture so different from your own without actually doing it. And sometimes there is no way to get rid of - or even recognize the stereotypes that we carry with us until they smack us in the face.
They didn't eat me. In fact, I later learned that there are no documented cases of cannibalism in Africa at all. That's another of those stereotypes. Sometimes those stereotypes come from other tribes badmouthing their rivals. One day after living in the village for over a year, I was walking out to the road with one of the Mandinka village elders. He was disparaging the Balants and said (in Mandinka - I spoke the language decently by that point,) "They are bush people. They eat people." He didn't mean that literally, it was "just an expression," as we say. But I was surprised to hear the comment and broke out laughing. I think he was a little offended.
My introduction to the village was hampered by the fact that in training, they had taught me the wrong language. I had learned Fulani, the language of a nomadic tribe that is found pretty much everywhere in West Africa. There are Fulani (also known as "Peul") in every village. They usually run a store or engage in trade, buying from their nomadic relatives and selling to the locals. This means that they are always the minority and are outsiders, which means that they tend to be looked down upon by the other villagers. So when I had gone to Bafata a month earlier for my site visit and started speaking Fulani, the villagers looked a little miffed that I hadn't had the courtesy to learn their language. The Mandinka villagers spoke Mandinka and the Balants spoke Balant (two very different languages.) I did have a good time bonding with the one Fulani family in the village though.
The site visit lasted a week.When I returned to training, I brought this little problem to the attention of the training administrators. They were mightily embarrassed. Unfortunately, they couldn't find a Mandinka teacher for me, so they hired a Bombara teacher. Bombara is very similar to Mandinka, sort of like American English and British English. When I returned to the village for my permanent stay and started speaking Bombara to the villagers, they smiled and nodded their heads, saying, "Ah, Bombara." Unlike the Fulani experience though, they could all understandd Bombara and started teaching me how to say the same things in proper Mandinka. "The Bombara say it like that, but we say ...." It wasn't long before I was babbling away in Mandinka.
Bafata was divided into 3 villages. One was Mandinka, one was Balant and one was a mix of Malinke, and Mandinka. The Mandinka were Moslems, worshipping the one God, Allah and studying the word of the Prophet in Arabic. They were literate, and the children learned to read and write Arabic from an early age. I had grown up with the usual American stereotypes of the illiterate African. I remember one day as I was about to leave for a few days to do some business in a nearby city, I was very surprised when one of the teens in the village handed me a note and asked me to deliver it to a friend of his along the way. The note was clearly written in Arabic, but I couldn't make it out (I knew Arabic at the time.) He explained that it was Arabic script, but the note was in the Mandinka language. Just as we use the Roman script to write our English language, they had borrowed the Arabic script to write their language. I did some reading on the subject after that and learned that the Mandinka had been literate since converting to Islam in about 900 CE. Another stereotype gone!
The Mandinka language is nothing like Arabic. If find both languages to be beautiful when spoken, but they don't sound at all alike. Mandinka is comprised of a short, crisp words that I found easy to hear in a sentence. Even before I could understand the language, I could repeat sentences verbatim. That made it easy to learn vocabulary.
The Balant also have their own language, completely unlike Mandinka. I have read that Balant is a subgroup of the Diola language, but it doesn't sound anything like Diola, either. Balant is a very labial language, all spoken in the front of the mouth with lots of "b" and "p" and "th" sounds. I found it hard to understand because all of the words seemed to run together. After living there for several months and recruiting a villager to help me learn the language, I finally figured out that the language was semi-tonal - the inflection of a word changed the meaning. After that, even though I'm somewhat tone deaf, it got a lot easier to understand. I never did become fluent in Balant though.
One of the first decisions I had to make was whether to live with the Balant or the Mandinka, both of whom were lobbying for the honor of having the toubab stay with them. "Toubab" is a term for "White" commonly used in West Africa. Apparently, it is used as a slur by Africans living in France, so the French take exception to it. But in Senegal I never heard it used derogatorily and I never took offense at being called "toubab." It was simply a way to refer to white folks.
I finally made the politically incorrect choice to stay with the Balant. The Mandinka were the larger tribe and the village chief was Mandinka. But the Mandinka didn't drink alcohol due to their religion, and had some strict dietary restrictions. I chose the Balant because they were more laid back, and threw better parties. Back in those days, that mattered more to me than it does today.
The Mandinka live in square or rectangular houses with angled roofs that more or less resemble the way we build here. A Mandinka building can have several rooms in it, and can even have two floors. In Bafata there weren't any two story buildings though. The Balant build one room, round huts with conical roofs that taper to a point. They build them around a communal kitchen hut, where there is a fire always kept burning at least as embers and all of the kitchen gear is kept. Each extended family unit has a kitchen hut, with the family members' huts clustered around it. This is called a compound. There were several compounds in the Balant part of town. The Mandinka also eat communally in family units, but of course, their architecture is different.
I was given a round mud hut with a grass roof tapering up into a cone. I had a small back yard area fenced in with a fence made from palm leaves and fronds. A metal pail filled from the well served as a "shower," which was actually a daily sponge bath. The facilities consisted of a latrine they had dug just for me (they'd heard that toubabs preferred to crap into a hole in the ground, but couldn't figure out why.) The villagers sometimes used the latrine, but more often did as they had always done, which was to walk a minute or two out of the village and use a convenient bush. The crap vanished after a day or so because of all off the insect life in the area.
I have a lot of Bafata stories. After all, I lived there for two years. It was more than 25 years ago but I remember it fondly like it was yesterday.
