I have just landed in my Dakar hotel room after watching the event of the year. It lasted about one minute. Two massive men — each at least 300kg of hard-packed muscle, in little traditional nappies and all manner of charms and amulets — fought a traditional wrestling match at the Demba Diop Stadium.
The Senegalese, who call themselves the nation of ”teranga” — or hospitality — have gone off their soccer team for being prima donnas, and for the spectacular misbehaviour of one El Hadj Diouf.
There were helicopters, rappers and griots singing louder and more plaintively than Youssou N’Dour. There were dancers in orange and lots of make-up, thousands of women dressed like Swiss confectionery and tens of thousands of young men in white T-shirts, supporters of the Dakar-based Gris Bordeux. There were marabouts, ministers and comedians. The event was covered live by 11 radio stations — this wrestling is more popular than soccer in Senegal.
I had lunch with a legendary old fighter, Birahim Ndiaye. He owns a five-storey building where his 11 children, his mother and his two wives live. Everywhere we went in his neighbourhood, we were told ”Ahh, Birahim, il est tres gentile.”
In true teranga style, he hosted us for lunch. He is a heavily muscled man who looks 10 years younger than his age, but for the cauliflower ears acquired in his fights. He had a reputation for fearlessness — he never let go. He won 31 out of 50 matches in a career lasting 30 years. Now he trains younger fighters.
All the major ethnic groups of Senegal still practise their version of traditional wrestling. But in Dakar, where for the past hundred years or so people have come and become more Dakar than Wolof, the Dakar style developed. Most traditional wrestling involves felling an opponent in a round ring of sand. It is a highly technical sport, and often lasts just a few seconds.
In Dakar, fist fighting entered the sport, and the style developed over many years, picking and discarding influences. Even so, in the strange way that things are in Senegal — where designer clothes and amulets cohabit happily — the sport remained traditional, but at the same time urban and edgy.
Senegal operates an almost unique system in Africa — civil and traditional structures don’t seem to clash with changing time. They adapt.
In the 1990s, one giant man who called himself Mike Tyson, a stubborn, loud, proud man who claimed he belonged to the brotherhood of the ”Don’t Cares”, brought the country to a standstill by introducing new dances and new fighting moves. He was media savvy and branded himself. Soon, his fights were commanding more than $100 000 and were televised. And a tradition over a thousand years old entered the media age with a bang.
More than a century ago, mystic and philosopher Cheik Amadou Bamba began a movement that helped convert most people in Senegal to Islam. Like almost everything here, the religious movement was very self-consciously Senegambian — and paid no heed to any sort of Arabisation. The focus was on finding an Islam that could cohabit comfortably with mostly Wolof cultural structures. The brotherhood, now called Mouridism, focused on work and spirituality.
It seems to me that at the heart of Bamba’s teachings was an idea that a new world was coming, and people needed a strong written philosophy and world view that could deal with this coming world — at the time embodied by the French.
Today, Bamba’s village, Touba, is West Africa’s fastest-growing city. And Mourides have spread out into the world, red-eyed and dry-skinned, working 18 hours a day in a sort of religious capitalism that says jihad is leaving home to create wealth and send it back.
What strikes me most about life here is how much family structures are venerated, even under the pressures of poverty. No child soldiers will come from here — nobody is really removed from family. There are brotherhoods for dope-smoking, drum-beating, Rasta-type people — the Baye Fall; there are brotherhoods for shopkeepers; there are Catholic families who quite comfortably marry Muslims.
In everything, big or small, great care is taken to make sure social relations remain good. So Senegal has voted for Catholic presidents and so on. After all, he is one of us, they seem to say.
You may have seen them. In Cape Town, in Johannesburg. Upstanding and tall dark men — who account to nobody, and who are all very gentile.
When a hundred thousand or so people spilled out of the stadium, after an intense moment of high violence, I felt utterly safe. I wonder whether the M-Nets and such of this world will one day cover this. Or visit Lamu during the dhow races and see some of the best sailors you will every see. And maybe Supersport can dish up something beyond Becks.