IV. In Saint-Louis
The nice thing about office jobs (and we are, to be sure, dealing with quite a short list) is that you get the weekend off. So, having packed up on Friday evening I was greatly looking forward to getting to know the city of Saint-Louis and its surroundings a little bit better. This post will be entirely dedicated to the events of Friday evening and Saturday, which were not particularly related to my work for the Centre des Arts et Cultures Africains, so if you’re only interested in that then this post isn’t for you, although I hope you'll read it anyway because I promise it's worth your time.
On Friday evening, with the team from the ABC Group who I’m working with on the website project, we went for some sightseeing. A trip to the view the local airport was followed by a journey to the estuary of the River Senegal, close to the Mauritanian border.
Having eaten a delicious dinner of chicken pacha, we also went for a tour of the old town of Saint Louis. In the colonial era, French Senegal included four administrative bodies, known as communes, where local inhabitants were granted full French citizenship and equal rights (at least in theory). Saint Louis was one of these communes. Combined with the fact that the city was briefly the capital of so-called French West Africa until 1902 as well as the capital of Senegal until just prior to independence, this means that the centre of Saint Louis, which was itself the first city in modern-day Senegal founded by colonial settlers in the 17th century) is heavy with government buildings. We briefly visited what has now become the governor’s mansion. Especially late at night, the city has a melancholy kind of beauty. Although vibrant by day, when the streets quieten down the sense of faded grandeur is hard to avoid - the quaint cobbled streets and dilapidated balconies above all testament to the story of a bygone colonial era.
On Saturday, it was time to relax. After a leisurely start we drove towards Gandiole, a seaside town where we spent several hours having lunch and relaxing by the swimming pool of a local hotel - including a spirited game of “Keep Away”.
Enjoying some time off
This was certainly a well-deserved break but it merits pointing out that that kind of lifestyle is inaccessible to the vast majority of Senegalese people. Indeed, having the Saturday off at all is a not insignificant luxury. As hard as I try to get an authentic picture of what life is like here, there is no avoiding the fact that I am living a comparatively well-off existence simply by virtue of being a traveller from a foreign country. I’ll touch on this a little bit more in my post reflecting on the trip after I return home, but it’s worth acknowledging now as well. Tomorrow, after another half-day of exploration of Saint Louis, it’s time to head back to Louga. There I’ll continue working on the website and adding the finishing touches over the next week, as well as finding out more about the work of the Centre des Arts et Cultures Africains and its successor, the Fondation Marleen van Aken.
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