Dakar is the black race on the make.
Whatever walk of life they come from, the Dakarois are like those Broadway hoofers who rise each day with a grin on their face and run out into the city determined to succeed, singing Accentuate the Positive and I Will Survive.
Yes, Dakar is like a Broadway show, except that it’s for real and the curtain never comes down on the final act. In Dakar you see the most brutally disfigured people: men, women and children with John
twisted or missing limbs, racing along the sidewalks with the best of them, dragging themselves along by any means necessary, like Porgy on his makeshift trolley, off to find his Bess. There is no time for self-pity, or for any sense of inferiority.
Why not? God is great and Africa is bountiful. The Senegalese (if one is allowed to drift into racial generalisations) are for the most part tall, beautiful and effortlessly graceful in their bearing. Those who were not born with the full set of physical attributes shrug it off as the will of Allah and allow themselves to be beautiful by association. And those razor-sharp minds are always running at full throttle, vigilant and ready to strike. Just because the man who has accosted you is walking on his knees it doesn’t mean that he’s not about to take you for a ride.
The creative energy of Dakar seems to rub off on those who touch it. Its reputation spreads far afield, so that even those who have never been there are drawn towards its hypnotic possibilities.
Last week, while South Africans were making speeches about apartheid and racism, other Africans were finding ways of making Africa’s dark past make money. Dakar, inevitably, was the focus of the scam.
Here’s the scenario. A bunch of well-meaning, well-off young African Americans get together in Washington DC and decide to form an organisation that is going to bring focus to the issue of African development – the “African renaissance”, if you like. They make contact with various developmental organisations in Africa and plan a strategy conference in Ghana.
Why Ghana?
- Because Ghana still has the reputation of being the leader of the first “African renaissance” in the early 1960s.
- Because the Ghanaians speak English, which is important to people who grew up in the United States.
- Because the slave-trading castles of Cape Coast and Elmina are important places of pilgrimage for the descendants of slaves, the black people of the US who still haven’t been able to fulfil Marcus Garvey’s dream of returning to the mother continent, but feel a strong, if somewhat sentimental, pull to its distant shores.
One of the organisations the Americans get in touch with is a Cameroonian outfit with pan-African pretensions, led by a man who claims to be a professor. The professor had been having vague ideas about organising his own “African renaissance” conference in Dakar at about the same time as the Americans were thinking about having their junket to Ghana. (“African renaissance” is becoming big business, you will notice.) He proposed to the Americans that they change their plans and join in with his conference in Dakar. The slave trade connection would be supplied, he told them, by a special ceremony of reconciliation that he would organise for them on Gore, the tiny island a couple of kilometres off Dakar that has even more powerful historical associations with the slave trade than the Ghanaian castles. (Gore also happens to be where I live when I’m in that part of the world, which is how I got involuntarily sucked into the fringes of this thing.)
The Americans agreed to go with this programme, and duly arrived in Dakar. The conference was chaotic, the professor was enigmatic but everyone was exhilarated at the mere fact of being there and talking boldly about the future.
The ceremony of reconciliation on Gore Island was planned for the last day of the jamboree. The professor’s idea was that continental Africans should symbolically express their regrets to the children of their exiled ancestors for their part in sending them in chains to the New World, so that we could all get the past behind us and get on with building the future together.
I disagreed in the politest language. While some African pressure groups are arguing that Europe and America should be paying restitution to Africa to the tune of $777-billion for the destructive effects of the slave trade, I said here was a new scheme suggesting that, on the contrary, Africa should be making some kind of restitution to a section of the American community. A few African kings might have benefited in the short term from trading black captives to white traders. But while the millions of slaves who made it to the New World physically built the wealth on which the power of the West was founded, Africa suffered, rather than benefited, from the ravages of the slave trade. While there is still precious little reconciliation between white and black Americans, I felt that it was hardly appropriate to invent charades of reconciliation between small groups of black Africans and small groups of descendants of slaves who happen to be living in the richest nation on Earth. The image in my mind was nothing less than bizarre.
The professor and his American captives listened to me with polite and intelligent interest, but went ahead with their ceremony anyway. A self-styled high priestess from Nigeria (who is living a comfortable life as an illegal immigrant in America) chanted and sang in strange tongues, and led a collective washing of the hands with kola nuts in the House of Slaves.
The Americans were moved and satisfied. The professor, on the other hand, had secured a new stream of revenue. Americans love to be taken for a ride, especially if there are strains of African mumbo-jumbo throbbing in the air.
The professor was smiling into the middle distance. Black reconciliation safaris, he mused, could well be the up-and-coming boom business in West Africa. Maybe this really was part of the “African renaissance”. Or maybe it was just another beautifully executed hit on the streets of Dakar.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza