I Will Go

“J’irai à Louga saluer mon papa”, “I will go to Louga to greet my dad” Except that my dad is waiting for me in Saint Louis. The wool ball unfurled a little more when Oumou confessed that she had been seduced by a handsome student who had a great future ahead of him. Had she known she was bearing the germ of this short-lived, budding love? She couldn’t be certain. All she admitted that he was tall and beautiful, with a face exactly like mine, which made our confrontation even more painful. He left for England to finish his agricultural engineering studies and forgot this young lady who wasn’t meant for him faster than she had wished.

The train swallows kilometers of tracks. The rattler easily moves on after its stop at Louga, on rails that must be as old as Lat Dior[17], or almost. Louga. The journey is nearing its end. Passengers have boarded, others have left. All along I have watched with indifference the movement of the travelers. One gone, another takes their place, and the trip goes on.

A long whistle shakes me out of the paralyzing torpor in which I have been coiled up for a long while. The train slows down, hiccups, its breath shortens. A new breakdown? I lift my head in anxiety. We are in the middle of nowhere. A few stunted trees, an herbaceous carpet as far as the eye can see. Nothing else. Will we make it to the end of this trip? A few shorter whistles, the pace goes diminuendo, then the Express completely stops after a long shriek coming from the wheels. The passengers flock to the windows with eyes shaded with worry and slightly nervous movements. Nothing. A few minutes pass. It is hot. In the dampness of the car my skin sticks to my blouse as I sweat against the imitation-leather seat. Not a breath of fresh air comes in or goes out. In the car, silence finally falls after a long murmur of unanswered questions. One cow, then two, then ten, then the whole herd crosses the tracks. The last cow chews on a rebellious tuft of grass stuck right in the middle of two rails. A few more minutes. The sand of the hourglass has coagulated in the surrounding humidity. Then the train starts again, and my thoughts with it. I gradually fall back into my lethargy. I lose myself in the contemplation of the flat and monotonous terrain.

When I talked to Omar on the phone four months ago he first thought it was a practical joke. Someone was pulling his leg for STV channel’s new show, which was losing audience to France Z. In Africa, no need for imagination. Cut-and-paste works marvelously well. Why re-invent the wheel when everything has already been invented somewhere else? These are the shortcuts of underdeveloped countries.

I must admit that I would have found the joke tasteless, except that it was not a joke and he had to face it. Extremely suspicious, he then thought he was the victim of one of those unscrupulous young women who are anxious to find for a tonton, a sugar daddy as the Americans say, in order to climb up the social ladder faster. His life was stable: he forgot his youthful indiscretion and focused on his studies until he became an agricultural engineer, and has been leading a prosperous gentleman-farmer’s life with the same wife for the last twenty years.

“J’irai à Richard Toll, cultiver le sol”, “I will go to Richard Toll, till the soil”. Richard Toll. On the fertile banks of the Sénégal river. It is not on the railroad’s path. I must stop before, in Saint Louis where he has promised to come and pick me up. Tired of fighting, and undoubtedly curious too because he probably wants to meet this headstrong young woman who doesn’t leave him a choice anyway. After that, he can return to his quiet life. And me, to mine?

“J’irai à Saint Louis…”, “I will go to Saint Louis…” No, this one isn’t in the song. I can’t find a rhyme anyway.

Will I go? Will he be there? Will he not be there?

Today Omar owns acres and acres of horticultural crops, E.U. certified and, to top it off, ‘organic’ labeled. It’s the case for most of the agriculture along the Sénégal river valley, the farmers are too poor to buy chemical fertilizers and resort to compost and horse and cow manure. The Sahel’s ‘Monsieur Jourdain’ are potentially rich without knowing it now that the West is turning back to the ancestral know-how they never gave up on. Omar had had the flair, an access to bank credits, and a tad of opportunism.

The know-how of his ancestors, his mother’s blessing, and some automation enabled him to sell his organic tomatoes, ripe with sunshine, three times the price the other farmers were asking for in the valley, yet nothing compared to the European market prices where his out-of-season production sold beautifully well. Not a cloud on this idyllic picture, in his smooth and predictable life, until this famous phone call.

But we were still far away from Richard Toll. We were at Gandiol, at the gates of Saint Louis, the sleeping beauty.

Will I or won’t I go? Will I or won’t I dare?

Gandiol, last stop, last chance to take the train which will leave in a minute on the opposite track, last chance to go back to my previous life. The reassuring one, the one I have always known. At this very moment, I wished I was in Fongolimbi, at Salemata, at Kédougou.

“J’irai à Kédougou, laver mon boubou”, “I will go to Kédougo, to wash my bubu”

But I am veering away here. And not only geographically. The rhyme in mind, my thoughts embark on another route, a sidetrack, a way out. I have always found this part of the song too unrealistic. Why travel so far away to wash your bubu? This, for me today, would be a godsend. On the border between Senegal, Guinea and Mali, you could as well say on the border between the tundra and the taiga, in an infrastructural no-man’s land where the inhabitants are always suspect. Suspect of bearing cross-border names. It’s the paradox of the country of teranga[18]: if you’re not Sérère, Lébou or Wolof, your origins are considered dubious.