Par: Thato Magano
Où: Dakar, Senegal
Quand: Juin 28 – Août 12, 2018
Pour l’été, J’ai visité le Sénégal pour apprendre le Français à l’Institut de Français pour les Étudiants Étrangers (I.F.E) de l’Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (UCAD). Le cours était un cours intensif pour débutants, offert du lundi au vendredi, de huit heures du matin à midi et demi, pendant six semaines. Parallèlement aux études de langues, j’ai effectué des recherches sur les Cultures Matérielles de l’Afrique de l’Ouest ainsi que l’activisme des droits des LGBTQ/Queer. Mon voyage au Sénégal est venu d’une étude indépendante sur la Migration Bantu avec le Professor Ousseina Alidou au Printemps l’année dernière.
[For the summer, I visited Senegal to learn French at the French Institute for Foreign Students (I.F.E) of the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar (UCAD). The class was an intensive beginners’ course, offered Monday to Friday from 8 am to 12:30 for six weeks. Along with language study, I did research on the Material Cultures of West Africa and LGBTQ/Queer rights activism. My trip to Senegal came from an independent study on Bantu Migration with Professor Ousseina Alidou in the Spring last year.]
The study explored how cultures, customs, traditions, and languages of the Bantu gave rise to similar or distinct markers of community and citizenship, and to determine if and how these markers have endured the legacies of colonialism in order to provide space for comparative study of sub-Saharan African life in contemporary time. As a result, I began to reconceptualize my conception of comparative studies as it related to Africa, increasingly thinking about what is lost culturally and what remains across time, space and history as a result of this balkanization.
J’ai choisi d’étudier le Français against this backdrop of history, understanding how French and Portuguese colonization continue to impact the borders of the continent, and the reach of French as a language on the continent in order to access the breath of literature produced in parts of Francophone Africa for the purposes of comparative study. The Postcolonial Laboratory project at UCAD hosted me while I was at the university, and former Rutgers Fulbright Fellow, Professor Saliou Dione’s hospitality was indulgent in its allowance. Each day, after class, the schedule was different as I mainly invested my time in investigating the cultural similarities to be found between parts of West Africa (Senegal, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Mali) and Southern Africa (the ethnic groups of the Zulu, Xhosa, Tsonga, Vhavenda, Ndebele in South Africa, Zimbabwe).
“….
What is the price of water when your family’s history is still unaccounted for, lying at its source from the beginning of colonial time only to find you walking around with bottles of Kiréne to your hearts content?
In Flint, Michigan, the water from their taps is golden.
It’s a metallic luminance that marks their graves with names borrowed from the South.
Children die in multiples in Bolivia while Nestle is maximizing profits and expanding its footprint
….”1
At the Postcolonial Laboratory, I was involved with organizing the third annual African and Postcolonial Studies Laboratory International Conference, themed “Migration, Literature, Society”, and I also presented my paper, “Fucking [With] The Family: The Queer Promise in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions.” I also attended the West African Research Center’ (WARC) 4th International Conference themed, “Bridging the Gap: Black Studies Across Social, Geographical, Epistemic, and Linguistic Lines” where an array of presenters across the diaspora spoke to the kaleidoscope of the experiences of racialization and race across temporal and geographic planes. I also delivered a lecture to the Year III Baccalauréat Postcolonial Studies, titled ‘‘Overview of South Africa’s Literary Landscape: An Alternative Archive.’’
Visiting Musée Theodore Monod d’Art Africain de l’Ifan Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (Musée IFAN), which houses the largest permanent collection of customary ceremonial artefacts of the Bantu, ranging from the observation of fertility rites, circumcision and marital initiation, and harvest time celebrations, en conversation avec le conservateur Malick Ndiaye, I explored the parallel and complex philosophies of being human as it relates to the uses of the artefacts. I also learnt about Senegal’s involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. It seemed not coincidental then that musée IFAN is located in the arrondissement Dakar-Plateau, next to Assemblée Générale, dans un quartier appelé, PLACE SOWETO. South Western Townships (SOWETO), is arguably South Africa’s most famous anti-apartheid resistance symbol, being the site of the 1976, June 16th Student uprising, and home to the Mandela and Tutu families, and many anti-apartheid activists.
“…
What does unhappiness look like in an unspoken country?
…”2
J’ai aussi visité les archives nationales to investigate the masquerade cultures of the Diola, and how the cultural significance of the Kumpo Masquerade forms a long-standing tradition of collapsing the gendered taxonomies that have been imposed on the body, as well and its role in mediating the metaphysical, as the Kumpo represents an encounter with the divine. I was also fortunate to witness a Kumpo ceremony in the South of Dakar and fully participate in the cultural symbolism of the encounter. I was also able to visit Monument de la Renaissance Africaine, standing at 49 meters, atop Collines des Mamelles outside of Dakar, it is the tallest monument in Africa currently. Overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, depicting a family negotiating the future and the past, the monument is a remembrance of the lives lost to the Atlantic Slave trade. Perhaps the grandest highlight of my time in Dakar were my successive visits to Île de Gorée, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that houses Maison des Esclaves, built by the Afro-French Métis family, estimated between 1780–1784. Maison des Esclaves is deemed one of the oldest houses on the island and is now a tourist destination that shows the horrors of the slave trade throughout the Atlantic world.
“…
In my father’s house there’s a chain in a cabinet whose strings tighten my feet from moving.
The neck braces mutilate my throat when I look into the Atlantic.
I want to scream, like the little boy, I want to purge my heart, but my eyes refuse to let my mouth open. They muffle my screams into dried sockets that hold their tears from the wooden floors refusing to make them shine.
My grandmother says if I even let one escape, master will come pleasure himself so now I keep smiling and taking photographs with my sunglasses on and I write on the walls stitching broken pieces to hold myself together
…”3
J’ai aussi visité au Musée Léopold Sédar Senghor, Ancien Président de la République du Sénégal et au Président Poète. A personal highlight was watching two world renowned Senegalese musicians in concert, Youssou N’Dour and Ismaël Lô, and meeting the renowned Burundian singer, Khadja Nin, whose music formed a substantive soundtrack to my formative years in Bophuthatswana, before South Africa’s homelands were integrated into the landscape of its provinces upon its first democratic vote in 1994. My encounter with Khadja Nin was in attendance at the Universite Populaire de l”Engagement Citoyen (UPEC, The Peoples University of Citizen Engagement), themesd “Citoyenneté et Droit Décider”, a five day conference that focused on citizen movements and popular forms of activism across the continent, to create a space for activists to share best practices and community for issues ranging dictatorship, neoliberalism, corruption and media freedom. The South African started, anti-neo liberal and colonial university movement, #FeesMustFall, was represented. I had the opportunity of sharing the activist collection I co-curated with two other activists in South Africa, Publica[c]tion, which is now freely available for download on Amazon.
“someone is calling my name at the edge of the earth
my mother said I must never respond to these voices
because, I will never come back to her if I do
I’ve resisted for so long, I lost my body in her eyes
now in the water I can see what my face was meant to look like
when I put my foot in the water, the sky commands the earth and a storm is brewing
the strikes of lightning charge into my veins and overwhelm my body, and my heart stops for minutes I do not know how to count
my friend once told me that often while driving, they imagine what the impact of crashing against a wall would feel like on their body
I wake up in the deep of the water and I scare myself at how I delight at my death every time this happens.”4
Avec l’apprentissage du Français, j’ai écrit de la poésie de la lourdeur de visiter l’Île de Gorée,
which I share with you, embedded in this reflection. All of my extra-curricular learnings and meetings with Professors was facilitated by the hospitality of former Rutgers Fulbright Fellow, Professor Saliou Dione, and the Postcolonial Laboratory project at Cheikh Anta Diop University. Je veux remercier ma famille d’accueil, Madame Cisse et ses enfants, qui m’a permis de saisir le langage aussi vite que je l’ai fait. I also thank the Rutgers Center for African Studies and Program in Comparative Literature for their generous support with funding to undertake this project.
Notes
1 Magano, Thato. 2018. Water as/is Commodity. Unpublished.
2 Magano, Thato. 2018. Spoken Silences. Unpublished.
3 Magano, Thato. 2018. The House of Métis. Unpublished.
4 Magano, Thato. 2018.The End of the World is Pleasure. Unpublished.