“Donne-moi un cadeau!”

Looking up at him under the hot press sun, I had to note that Louis Faidherbe didn’t look so great. Aside from the fact that he seemed generally out of place silhouetted against the water cut with large, brightly-painted pirogues, the plaque bearing his name looked like it had been scrubbed at least several times with steel wool, possibly to remove the paint jobs of citizens feeling less than loyal to their former colonial governor. Faidherbe’s general awkwardness was only augmented by the fact that his head was crowned by the plastic fronds of a glow-in-the-dark palm tree. Why this slightly chipped neon contraption was placed behind the esteemed governor between two rows of real palm trees continues to escape me.

We were visiting Saint-Louis, a northern port city and former capital of Senegal, and, looking up at the statue that, apparently, would have been removed long ago were it not for concern about damaging diplomatic relations with France, I couldn’t help but think, yet again, about the color of my own skin and what it means here. This, in Saint-Louis, is what people see of tubaabs: a mustached statue of a man who brought violence and repression to their homeland, and the slightly disoriented safari-hat-wearing tourists trickling off their cruise ships, whose idea of bargaining is insisting on 8500 cfa for a necklace for which I wouldn’t pay more than 2500 and which a black-skinned speaker of fluent Wolof could probably get for 2000 if not lower. We took everything, but we can give like deities. I was actually speechless for a few seconds when, on a street corner in Dakar, I purchased 10000 cfa (about $20 – out of which I know the salesmen receive less than a tenth) of phone credit from one of the roaming street vendors for the sole reason that this particular man was closest to me as I exited the ATM area. A different vendor, who had hailed me before I had acquired cash, started asking me sadly why I hadn’t purchased from him, and then raising his voice towards his luckier competitor.
“Calm down,” the first man said. “God wanted me to eat today. He chose me and not you.”
And I know I’ve talked about the power of money before, but – I decided which of those two men would be able to feed his family that night. That’s not a power I want, no matter what one ascribes to God.
At first, I occasionally gave coins, water or fruit to beggars on the street and felt nauseating guilt when I didn’t, or even for how comparatively little I did give. Granted, habituation can work frightening wonders at smoothing horrified pity into vague annoyance. Granted, the more poverty I see the more I am overwhelmed by the fact that distributing everything I own to those in need would hardly even dent the scene of a single street in Dakar. I’ve also, however, almost entirely stopped giving out food or money because I’m getting increasingly uncomfortable with the implications and broader effects of that action. Every time I’ve traveled in Senegal, when the vehicle pulls over for the driver to get water, relieve himself, or engage in confusing exchanges of small slips of paper, a crowd of people sprints over to shove their hands in the windows, offering nuts, fruit, small plastic bags of water, and random objects for sale. When I’ve traveled on CIEE program trips, like the excursion to Saint-Louis, when the vehicle is filled primarily with white people, the hands are often empty.
“Donne-moi un cadeau!” children will yell, often pulling our clothes or grasping at our personal effects. “Give me a present!” Even adults will sometimes directly demand food or money. And, as I mentioned in a previous post, they’re right: I do have the power to give that particular individual something to eat or money for clothing or amenities. And they’re right, too, that there’s a much better chance that I, a less-numbed foreigner, would give them something than that a Senegalese person would. And they’re certainly in need, much more than I am. I’m not yet so numb that it doesn’t make my chest contract to see skeletal kids, dust smeared across their faces and ancient American t-shirts, flies buzzing into the air around their feet and skin, lips chapped as they move at me. The full impact of the scene didn’t quite hit me until I watched it from the outside: a swarm of children around a pair of white tourists, who fished in their fanny packs and pulled out a few coins, onto which the children dived, their fingernails clawing each other for the precious several hundred francs cfa. It disgusted me. I couldn’t even specify, in my head, what part of the image made me feel so sick: the obvious physical suffering, the desperation, the self-righteousness, the constant expectation I’ve encountered that tubaabs not only can simply distribute things wherever they go, but that they should.
I don’t want to have that relationship with people here. I’m white; that doesn’t mean I’m a gumball machine.
Selfish? Maybe. I’ll admit that I’ve found exasperation at always being the one out of any crowd to be swarmed, yelled at, obstructed, and touched by strangers to be another potent anesthetic to pity and guilt. But, aside from my personal complaints, it doesn’t seem like it can possibly be good for the economy in the long run. I know that I absolutely cannot judge the actions of roadside beggars. I’ve never experienced anything close to that level of poverty. I’ve been uncomfortable here, sure, but I’ve never felt long-term uncertainty about my next meal or the availability of clothing or shelter. Like everyone, I’d like to think that I’d be different, but I know I can’t say that, in the same situation, I wouldn’t beg the person who seems most likely to help me for anything I could get. But, in a country in desperate need of infrastructure and business development, I seriously doubt that roadside tubaab-swarmer is a profession contributing much to national sustainability. On my rural visit, that was what the vast majority of the Peace Corps volunteers to whom I spoke cited as their biggest problem getting things done: people in their villages just expect that, as Westerners, they are there to simply dispense funding and create helpful stuff. If people don’t participate in the projects themselves, the volunteers said, there’s little chance the benefits will last much longer than the volunteers’ two-year tenure, and it’s hard to get people to contribute when those people believe that they should simply be receiving. But, at the same time, that expectation isn’t totally wrong: Peace Corps volunteers do apply for funding, do have some capacity to simply give things to their communities, even if that is very different from the actions of tourists giving out spare change. And if the primary relationship people here have with white foreigners is one of plain giving and receiving, it stands to reason that this is what they expect and solicit.
Of course, it’s lot more complicated than that. Begging in Senegal is not an industry developed primarily around tourists but around the Muslim faith, particularly in the form it takes here. Almsgiving is one of the five pillars of Islam; people are already required to give to the poor with some regularity. Add to that the fact that, upon consulting marabouts about their problems, people are often given prescriptions of elaborate sets of items to give to beggars in order to alleviate the trouble, and you get a segment of the population begging as a career that’s not only sustainable but important to the rest of society. If you’re interested in a very quick novel about this situation as well as some other interesting facets of Senegalese life, I would suggest Aminata Sow Fall’s La Grève des bàttu (in English, The Beggars’ Strike).
The idea that white people should give presents and share their belongings, too, has cultural aspects. Encountering this on the street has been difficult for me, but encountering it, even on a drastically smaller scale, within my host family has been even harder. It’s mostly, though not exclusively, the younger family members who ask for small amounts of money, to use my iPod, computer, or camera, or take my reserve painkillers. So desperate to please them that I couldn’t make myself say no to any request, direct or implied, within the vague outer reaches of reasonableness, I would occasionally get bitter behind my smile. Aside from the fact that I don’t have unlimited financial backing and it’s not terribly convenient to for me to let people use items that I also need, it made me question the entire family situation. They’re only using me for what they can get materially, I would think. They probably don’t even feel that they have a real relationship with me beyond that. For the record, I certainly don’t think that’s true, and there was never a time when I thought that even a majority of the time. It took me a while, though, to put it into the broader context of Senegalese culture. As I mentioned in another post some time ago, no one is ever alone here, physically or financially. A family member, neighbor, or friend in need will always receive help, no matter how difficult it might be for those giving. This is considered normal rather than noble. Similarly, those with more resources are expected to share them, as a way of demonstrating membership of and loyalty to a group. It’s a different form of community and closeness, not a show of shallow relationships. I don’t have to like it. I don’t have to think it’s a particularly strong social base for an effective capitalist economy. But I also don’t have to worry that giving and receiving as it’s practiced here means that I am not valued as a person by the people I value.
No; the relationship I’m really questioning is a more macro-level one. Being white has all kinds of implications here. For all that I am welcomed with amazing warmth into my family, my choir, my community, I won’t ever quite belong here. Taxis still honk at Victoria, one of my two program directors, who lives here with her Senegalese husband and their young son. Hadiel has lived in her village for many months and has an excellent command of the local language, and still children demand “cadeaux.” The most integrated white people I know are still the recipients of inappropriate romantic advances, still told directly by vendors who know nothing about them or their financial situation that they can afford to pay inflated prices and therefore they should. Being American, too, has all sorts of implications. The more intellectual set, at conferences and lectures I’ve attended, is quick to criticize American contradictions in human rights rhetoric and practice and imperialistic tendencies. Every person I’ve met within my own generation in Dakar, however, has a better knowledge of American hip hop music and clothing brand names than I do. Everyone adores Obama. Many times his name has been the first word out of people’s mouths when I say that I’m American. His face decorates t-shirts, public transit, and one of the cloths on which my family places our communal bowl at meal times. Pictures of Barack, Hilary Clinton, and Madeleine Albright adorned the walls of my bedroom when Aziz first hauled my suitcases up the stairs – though I did have to explain to him and my yaay what positions the two women occupied. American music videos alternate with Senegalese, French, and Arabic ones on TV. Once, watching a particularly extravagant, edited, sexually charged panoply by an artist Aziz knew but I didn’t, Aziz asked me if the U.S. was really like that. Oh, dear gracious, I thought, as confetti rained from the ceiling before us. I was once called to resolve an argument between Aziz and my host father about whether or not there are poor people in the U.S.

According to Hadiel, the few people she knows who made it to America ended up hating it, because they expected it to be this Mecca, this world out of a music video, and it’s not. Senegal had and, to some extent, still has, a problem with illegal emigration. Many Senegalese have died trying to take tiny pirogues up the Atlantic to Spain, and many more couldn’t find the jobs that they expected to be able to get there without effort, unable to speak the language and with almost no personal property or educational credentials. Then again, most of the better-off families here have at least one relative in the U.S. or Europe, making money there and sending some back. Here as elsewhere in Africa, economic development faces the serious setback of the flight of the best educated to the West. The opportunities for a person with a college or post-college degree are simply much better outside of Senegal. This means, however, that their expertise and most of their income goes to the service of states that need it much less.
It’s easy to argue that the West has done little good for Africa. I’ve been getting that message since elementary school, and it hasn’t stopped here. Professors, lecturers, students, authors and filmmakers are quick to hurl criticism at the World Bank, selective immigration policies, cultural takeover, and, of course, that toxic but adored buzzword, “colonialism.”
“Look at what they did to us,” Aziz said, gesturing at the movie about slaves in the American colonies that came on TV.
White people destroyed the lives, the homes, the culture, the economy of black people. Look at the chains on Gorée Island. Look at the gutted African financial situation. Look at the statue of Louis Faidherbe still standing in Saint-Louis.
I am a white person; what does that make me? People who looked like me committed real, massive, disgusting atrocities against people who looked like the people around me. Those people around me are still facing some of the consequences of those atrocities today. It’s hard not to feel guilty, especially when you’re reminded of this over and over again, in class and, now, on the street.
I don’t think that I’m responsible for the crimes of members of my racial group. I don’t think that my racial group was the only one to commit crimes. And I don’t think it’s indefinitely productive to find new ways to condemn “the West” for its crimes against “Africa.” But I still feel vaguely uncomfortable saying so in the face of my own education in the U.S.: the pointed history lessons in middle school, the African American History Month Assemblies in high school, the slam poetry at cultural events in college. I feel vaguely uncomfortable saying so here, where I can buy the health of a man’s family for the price of a few text messages, where people see my skin color and swarm me for my spare change, and where most of the prominent academics I’ve encountered stretch an accusing finger westward. What is my role in this place? Am I a criminal or a celebrity? Is it possible for me to be neither, for me to really carve out a place in Senegal as an individual among other individuals and not as a representative of repression or money or sex or Barack Obama?
I always thought it would be easier than this. I want to save the world. So, I’ll just show up somewhere where people need saving and… save them. Or, at least, I didn’t quite realize just how much my nationality, culture, and skin color would affect my ability to help fill basic, universal human needs. How can I – how can my country – help people here without continuing a cycle of intervention and dependence? Maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe it’s not our business. Maybe it’s only making things worse. But, at the same time, how can I see people sleeping in the street, dying of malnutrition or malaria, children stretching their dusty fingers towards my water bottle – and go back to my lattes and hot showers telling myself that it’s their business and I can’t do anything productive anyway?
I don’t want to be those tourists giving out change. I also don’t want to be Louis Faidherbe, much though I think an electric palm tree would look wonderful with my hair. I want to be a person among people. Dear God, I wish it were that simple.