Has it always looked like this here? I asked 1 Gambian acquainted with the terribly dirty and crowded city of Barra. Not always – Lamin, an alleged descendant of Kunt Kinteh, a slave national hero of Gambia, replied (I travelled across Senegal twice over the Gambia River and the territory of this tiny country). First the whites came and chained us up, decimated our clans, and drove millions out for the large water. erstwhile they had had adequate slaves, they took care of organizing life here. They robbed us, made us rich, and they softened us. They started talking to us like people, asking us, but it was just appearances. They had no good intentions. They always utilized our innate confidence. A white man doesn't even trust his family, no substance what. Black trusts anyone who hasn't yet failed his trust. The whites have failed my ancestors many times – he said by taking me for a tiny fee to the village of Albreda, where we sailed by boat to the island of James Island, which erstwhile was a place of transshipping slaves to ships sailing to Europe and America. There utilized to be hundreds of crocodiles here, but they moved up the river erstwhile human meat ran out (it was about the bodies of slaves who, by terrible conditions on the island, did not make it to loading, so they were thrown into the river, as well as those who tried to flee to the mainland).
On the way back, he besides told me a communicative not as terrible as the ones told on the island, about times closer to us. It sounded like this: White comes to a Negro village and asks the landlord how much he earns. This 1 has respective cows or goats, surviving from what it grows: millet, sorghum, manioc or grenades, which it shares with people from the village. From what he sells, he will gain 5 pounds a period (a pound is simply a contractual unit here, as well as a franc, escudo, brand, dollar or another currency of colonizers). White tells black people (there is no negative connotation in my speech, due to the fact that I have large respect for these people): give me your land, I will build roads in your village, a school, a church and a large farm of cows, chickens, bananas and corn. You'll all find a job. You're gonna make a month, not 5, but £100. You'll live like a chief. A black man (as well as almost all his neighbors) agreed and 10 years later on the black land a white man built what he had promised. According to the contract, he paid everyone £100 a month. There were shops that offered various products. 1 that a black man has never seen in his life, as well as 1 that a black man had made with his own hands 10 years earlier. The problem is that today, apart from working for a white man, he was practically no longer producing anything. For this he supplied mainly in shops where the monthly bill was not 5, not 100, but 250 pounds. So a black man sent a white wife to work for him, but even then he was incapable to feed his family, so he shortly moved to a close town to look for a better job. Eventually, most of the household abandoned the village and moved to a town resembling Barra.
The communicative told by Lamina may and powerfully simplify the reality in which the Gambians (and Senegaleses came to live, due to the fact that they are mostly the protagonists of my story), but the fact is that about 60% of the population of Senegal and Gambia are crowded in cities (an increase of 30% in 50 years) and there would be nothing unsettling about it if, contrary to planet trends, they live in worse conditions than before. In the Dakar agglomeration itself, the capital of Senegal already lives about 4 million people, which accounts for 1/5 of the country's population. The noises of crowds moving in different directions coming from the city's arteries covered with clay dust and sand carried from above the desert, mixing with the sounds of horned cars giving the impression of haste and any purpose, yet obscures overwhelming masses of human inertia. Most people live overnight. Abandoned by their French occupiers, the Senegalese have their own state, but this did not importantly improve their surviving conditions. The fresh State is fighting for its uncertain future by facing debt, socio-political tensions, crime or corruption.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans to present-day Senegal, this area was not just a land of savages whose local warlords sold white on slave ships after a tobacco pack per head. It was an area divided between respective well organized kingdoms with rich culture and religion and an economy based on trade with prosperous North Africa. These kingdoms have long defended themselves against European colonization. As you know, they lost. The French, who settled there in the 19th century with a tough hand, imposed their education and language strategy on the local people, erasing local traditions and leadership structures for a central administration (the area along the Gambia River, which present is simply a separate state in the mediate of Senegal's territory was subject to the British during this period, and they were mostly liable for the transport and trade of slaves from the hinterland). In addition to the infrastructure to drain material resources and the human region, The French besides created local elites, which later (in the 1960s) contributed to the country's independence. Similarly, the communicative was in the case of this Gambia (an integral part of the region) ruled by the British. More than half a century later, Senegal is simply a different country: without its erstwhile tribal identity, but with its developing economy, with independent European government supervision and free, though mediocre people, with a highly ethnically diverse but tolerant society, with a good, though damaging infrastructure and storms, but inactive persisting democracy. This in combination with the hot climate and the sea creates an highly interesting mix.
Crossing the country, I saw thousands of those who work from dusk to dawn trying to last in various ways, patching holes in the road and holes in the tires, repairing old chairs and old prostheses, roasting in ash nuts, cutting their heads, painting scratched walls, catching fish, or transporting or selling anything that can be transported or sold. I have besides seen thousands of those for whom there is no class, who from dusk to dawn sit in front of the porches of their homes, wasting their human potential. Officially, the unemployment rate in Senegal is 3%, but due to the seasonality of work, it can be 10 times higher. Almost half of the population are minors, as the demographic boom and difficulties in uncovering fresh human masses in the labour marketplace are forecast in the close future (a situation akin to that of Gambia, though somewhat worse). The fact that 1 in 3 citizens doesn't finish simple school is just multiplying problems. poorness is seen at first glance, but poorness cannot be said to be universal. Nobody's starving, no one's missing drinking water. There are no shoes on the children's feet, no shirts with the logos of European football clubs. Most importantly, however, the country does not digest any crucial local armed conflicts. Power is passed on almost voluntarily, which is alternatively uncommon for African standards. Senegal is 1 of the fewer unchangeable states in the region (this besides applies to Gambia, despite the fact that in fresh years attempts have been made to take over power – in order to prevent this, soldiers of Senegal and Ghana, countries belonging to the West African economical Community, are stationed in its territory).
The existence of the average inhabitants of Senegambia is accompanied by considerable regular challenges and does not comfort that they do a small better than the remainder of the continent, which populates faster and thus poorer and plunges into crime. The causes of today's problems request to be looked for in the past. Although the age of incapacitation of a black man in Africa ended long ago, it left a lasting trace of his inactivity and dependence on others. I felt like the white occupiers had left just yesterday. The reason for this is most likely a lot, but the first 1 that comes to mind, I could describe in 1 conviction from Kazimierz Wyki's book "Life for Pretend" (which I read shortly before going to Africa): "The exclusion of the most crucial collective life processes from work and effective participation must have caused deep depravity of its participants, depravity mostly innocent, caused by the very necessity to last in a strategy based on fiction as a service to the rulers, to harm as a principle." Kazimierz Wyka in his book did not, of course, describe French and British governments in the 19th century Senegambia, but German governments in Poland in the first half of the 20th century. Time and place other, but the mentality of people forged by the occupier's iron hand, struggling with brutal slavery and its consequences similar.
Although we regained our independency earlier than the Western Africans, the liberation from the grip of the USSR came much later. Nevertheless, we are at a very different level of improvement than African countries specified as Senegal or Gambia. Therefore, my comparison may make a bit of a mistake for those who today's success of Poland respect our character as specified as courage or industriousness, but they think in Africa that their backwardness is due to cultural and racial factors. The truth, as usual complex – decades of exclusion of black people from the organization of social, political and cultural life have done their part. Of course, traditions, patterns of conduct, whether the geopolitical situation is of large importance, as well as the randomness that governs our lives (determining the time and place of birth) or the occurrence of uncommon events specified as crises, wars and natural disasters. The colour of the skin is secondary. In another words, all the enslaved people of this planet have 1 color, 1 set of traits and behaviors created as a reaction to long-term or multigenerational physical and intellectual degradation: Russians terrorized by Stalin, Cambodians decimated by the Red Khmers, Palestinians isolated and starving by Israel. The complexity of the human situation, the origin of his position or behaviour, is well expressed by Czesław Miłosz in 1 sentence: “Everything that people live is the gift of the historical formation they have found themselves in.”
It's a historical mark that you can see in Africa at all turn. From the position of the observer (I trust mainly on cognition from the street alternatively than on data) to the reality found in Senegambia I am well suited to the word "economically excluded" coined (or possibly only used) by Mr Kazimierz Wyka in the aforementioned book. He described Galicia’s life during planet War II as saying: “Commercial mediation was trampled into a immense chain from which a disproportionate number of people lived. Around the ankle, which the pre-war dog would have lifted in 2 teeth, they were dredging hundreds of ants and naturally seemed to the ants to be highly active.” 80 years have passed, and the above strategy works just as well, in a completely different environment, but in akin but non-war conditions, in which distrust of the authorities and the continuing conflict for livelihoods makes people function according to the principle: “Now there is simply a war, too, who is trying to live.”
The easiest way to describe this is to take my ride by local means of transport (i.e. overcharged with an 8-man van) in the morning in the Casamance region. Among the women, from morning to evening scratching after a crowded roadside parking lot with nut baskets (in hopes of selling them), there is simply a stalker who sees me and pulls consecutive to the driver to save me from standing in line and paying a commission to the station's office. The driver's sidekick takes the money, fires 200 francs to the chaser and puts me in the vehicle. The next hr (by driving distant from the sellers of loaders, bananas and hats) I anticipate co-passengers whom the hound seeks throughout the area. During this time, the baggage stack on the roof is unknown whose baggage reaches the first floor. The driver and his assistant, patiently smoke cigarettes, have their tasks. The second (for money collected from tickets) must pay for the fuel at the station, which is not a station (and a fewer kegs of fuel in the back of someone's junkyard), must besides pay the mechanics during the next 2 stops to pump the wheel. The erstwhile (driver) has an even more hard task: do not teardrop off these wheels on a hollow road and convince the cleaning services (while crossing the next checkpoints, and on the 50-kilometre way there were 3 of them) to let us to proceed driving. For this purpose, the driver went to the defender box twice, and erstwhile the formalities were done straight under my window – a pink 1000-frank banknote (i.e. about 6 Polish zlotys) went from hand to hand. On the way, we stopped respective more times (fluid replenishment, broths in composition and packages), but that's a different story. After 3 hours with a hook (since taking the place) rich in fresh cognition of the planet I reached the goal. So more or little on this dried-up land, day by day.
It was during this ride that I remembered the "economically excluded" described by Mr Kazimierz Wyka. specified chains of ant work and tiny bribes, which are as natural as tipping in Tunisian hotels, let millions of people in difficulty to survive. A large part of this "turnover" works outside the taxation system, which is, in any case, essential for the country to develop. However, it is hard to blame the people facing the wall for not worrying about you, and for the laborious process of enriching Senegal, they are liable to a tiny extent, in comparison with even Western and east interest groups draining its resources as effectively as before the country gained independency (although formally the State owns natural materials, it is mainly abroad corporations that own them. Corruption at the tops of power, the deficiency of consistent rules and, above all, the deficiency of its own infrastructure to procure natural materials, not to mention their processing, makes natural wealth leave the country in a harsh state with small profit for the Senegalese to return in the form of many more costly products).
This neo-colonial policy of today's powers (not only national, but besides institutional) affects not only Africa, but, to varying degrees, most countries of the planet whose sovereignty is contractual (there could be another analogy between Senegal and our country). The Senegalese, who over half a century ago managed to free themselves from their shackles, rapidly fell into the snares of economical neocolonialism. Now they are trying to get out of them (The current government over the past 2 years has reviewed many abroad mining contracts and concessions, resulting in the denunciation of respective twelve of them in March that year. May the "foreign pressure" not be swept distant by the current Prime Minister of Senegal (Ousmane Sonko), who dares to say that the conditions under which these agreements were concluded are definitely unfavourable for Senegal.
It is hard not to go down about politics (what I wanted to avoid), but the situation of all man on the globe starts with it and ends with it, whether he lives in a European city or an African village. However, not all of us are equally affected. Improving the surviving conditions of societies (which is simply a side effect of the greed of capitalists) in places specified as Senegal is slower than it would require, in relation to people surviving there. These, however, do not number on the kindness of the fresh masters, together with their representatives they must fight for it, so as not to overturn the fragile balance and bring fresh suffering to this troubled people. The recalling of slavery times can be considered sentimentalism (especially in the face of fresh global threats, fresh wars and no little widespread human rights violations), but it is essential as long as people inactive live who endure its effects. It besides seems that hundreds of millions of people trampled down by the roller of past in the name of power, profit or creation of a “new man” are not a adequate informing to our civilization, possibly due to the fact that we do not remember. So let the memory of them, the awareness of their senseless torment, be a drop that may yet set us all free, which will make everything that created force pass without a trace.
