Fingering his prayer beads, Seydou Tall stared at the neat rows of fresh anonymous graves dug into the red earth. ”I think my friends are here,” he said. ”But of course it’s difficult to know.” Like many in this West African nation, the 40-year-old coffee vendor is still struggling with the human loss from Africa’s deadliest ferry disaster, and the uncertainties that will haunt him forever.
Poverty-stricken Senegal doesn’t have high-tech forensic facilities for DNA identification and is having to bury victims from the MS Joola unidentified. Muslims, Christians, men, women and children are being buried side-by-side in hastily dug cemeteries.
Tall, was watching from dockside September 26 when the listing, overloaded ferry pulled out from the southern port of Ziguinchor on its last voyage to the capital, Dakar. Built for 600 people, Joola was carrying at least 1 034 when it capsized off Gambia in a gale that night. Only 64 people are known to have survived — many by clinging to the ship’s upturned red hull while those trapped inside cried for help.
The official death toll was drawn from the ship’s manifest, but many fear it is far higher. Soldiers and police were not listed because they rode for free, said Mbaye Diouf, a Health Ministry representative. Children under five also boarded without tickets. ”Oh, there were so, so many children,” Tall recalled. Ziguinchor’s mayor, Robert Sagna, said officials have tallied 961 presumed dead in his city alone. ”I estimate that the total number of victims will be between 1 500 to 1 600,” he said in an interview.
Some families identified their dead from photos of the bloodied, bloated victims posted on notice boards. Personal effects identified others. In all, just 112 were identified, of which 68 have been turned over to families for burial, said Diouf, at the Health Ministry.
But officials were unable to match names to hundreds of others, and buried them in communal sites. ”Muslims would have liked to have been buried in their cemeteries, Christians in theirs too,” Diouf said. ”But in this case we don’t know how to tell people apart.”
At Mbao, on the edge of Dakar’s sprawling suburbs, government authorities bulldozed a roadside cemetery and buried unidentified bodies last week. About 150 corpses, mostly brought in by navy ships, were in the ground.
Soldiers patrolled the barbed-wire fence around the site, which was littered with gloves and masks used by burial workers. The grave mounds, marked by black numbers stenciled on whitewashed wooden boards, baked in the midday sun as Tall murmured Muslim prayers.
”I had many, many friends in that boat,” Tall said. ”I came here to pray.” With so many dead in Ziguinchor, Tall said there was no one left to buy the coffee he sold to passengers and stevedores at the docks, so he was traveling through Dakar to his native Mauritania. The government has announced a crackdown on overcrowding in public transport, with fines for those who let passengers cling to bumpers and roof-racks of buses and trains.
Beyond that, the disaster has prompted sorrowful introspection. Senegalese compare it to the September 11 attacks on the United States in the scale of its national impact. Senegal’s 10-million people are proud of their peaceful transition from French colonialism to multiparty democracy. The scenes of distraught families weeping for ferry victims were in cruel contrast to the delight that erupted when Senegal beat France in its run to the quarterfinals of this year’s soccer World Cup.
”We must cry for the dead, pray for them,” President Abdoulaye Wade said in a nationally televised address. ”But at the same time, we must examine our conscience to ask why this happened and ensure nothing like it ever occurs again.” – Sapa-AP