14
REVERBERATIONS from the tempest in Paris faded quickly and I am back again at my recently acquired hobby — pondering the waves from the Atlantic Ocean as they crash on the rocks that separate the sea from my temporary shelter in Dakar.
‘Pied dans l’eau’, the inhabitants of Senegal would describe any similar house on the waterfront, foot in the water. On a latitudinal trajectory across the Atlantic, my present room would correspond roughly to any small cabana on the northern tip of Venezuela.
All around me though are landmarks of historical injustices. Saint-Louis in northern Senegal was the French hub from where slaves were shipped en masse to the Americas. About a hundred miles to the south from my perch in Dakar is English-speaking Gambia inserted arbitrarily, as colonial enclaves often are, like an index finger into the Francophone territory of Senegal. For far too long a time in history, Gambia was the mainstay of slave shipments from western Africa.
A little over a mile into the sea is the Goree island, off Senegal’s — and Africa’s — western-most tip. Its main tourist attraction today is a colonial slave house from the Portuguese era. For all you know, soccer legend Pelé’s forebears were enchained there, before being carried off to Brazil, Latin America’s main Portuguese enclave.
The tradition of Pangool, or ancestor worship, cuts across all religions in swathes of western Africa.
I am told over 90pc Senegalese are Muslim, followed by Catholics and a cluster of animists. The first president of the country, however, was a Roman Catholic. A Paris-educated revolutionary poet, the late Leopold Sedar Senghor, is still revered in this largely secular Muslim-majority country. Last Sunday, I attended a Catholic mass on the remote island in the Sine-Salome delta near Gambia, where a Muslim boatman escorted me.
The three main communities on the island don’t only have deep-rooted respect for each other but are open to intermarriage. This intermingling is of a piece across the country. Apart from the church where the priest regaled his colourfully attired audience with anecdotes while a choir sang hymns in the local Serer dialect, people leaving the congregation bowed to a sacred tree.
In fact, they were two massive ‘fromage’ trees, so-called because they are made of soft fibres, a bit like the baobab that are more widely worshipped. The fromage trees have been interlocked in an embrace for centuries, I was told, which to the islanders represents the way human beings should be.
My mind, much as I have been trying to rein it, strayed away to India’s northeast. A whole spectrum of tribespeople, ranging from animists, Christians and a sprinkling of Hindus have lived there in harmony (or contrived disharmony) for decades, perhaps centuries. And there we go again, the latest on the Modi-led Hindutva menu being a huge project to claim, or reclaim as they insist, the hapless tribespeople to the Hindu fold.
It would be difficult for most South Asians to figure out what might have happened had the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh been born in Africa, or if the Jamaat-i-Islami had cast anchor in, say, Senegal. Yet the question deserves to be asked. How many golden periods real or imaginary would Hindutva have sought to conjure and reclaim from the bloody history of Africa? Should Pelé have given up soccer to seek revenge on the Portuguese as a gunman of African origin had so insanely striven to do in a Jewish supermarket in Paris?
As far as the Jamaat-i-Islami goes, and this includes its branches in all South Asian countries, how would its leaders respond to the fact that the Ahmadis are respected and not harassed or disowned in Senegal by the three dominant sects of mainly Sunni Muslims?
And what would Maududi’s or hardline Deobandi followers prescribe for the two largest orders in the region — the Tijaniya and the Mourides? The pan-Islamic Qadiri order and the smaller Layene brotherhood are also represented in Senegal.
In creating a brotherhood, a misunderstood word thanks to the Egyptian contribution, each founder often had the objective of uniting all Muslims. Mosques were created by specific brotherhoods, though individuals were free to attend whichever mosque they chose. And yet where did it all lead up to? As far as the Serer tribes go, no Semitic religion, though they may have converted to it, ever led them away from their belief in the Pangools.
The tradition of Pangool, or ancestor worship, cuts across all religions in swathes of western Africa.
The Pangools, I was told, are the ancient saints and ancestral spirits of the Serer people of Senegal, the Gambia and Mauritania. These spirits intercede for their followers between the living world and the ‘supreme being’ — Rooq or Koox.
The majority Wolof tribes are divided between strands of Muslim, Roman Catholics and Protestants, but they too are seated on the basic cultural furniture of ancient paganism.
It is not infrequent to come across the odd European individual who has settled down in some part of Asia or Africa either to pursue their colonial nostalgia, or due to a more urgent need to escape from the crush of their industrial nightmares.
I have already made two friends from Belgium and France who have settled down in Senegal. Belgian Benoit Warnotte enjoys organising tour packages when he is not in trouble with his Senegalese girlfriend. He financially supports a French school for the girls and boys of the fishermen on the southern coast. Bernard Magnan, who looks like Samuel Beckett but has the political demeanour of Albert Camus leads a quiet life having married a Wolof woman with two children from a former husband.
They both heard the story of the Paris outrage on the radio. And they both were happy to be marooned on a remote Senegalese island, away from the continents of madness.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, January 13th, 2015
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