Ile de Goree

Another post to catch you all up on my time in Senegal:

I spent a day on Ile de Goree, a tiny picturesque island just off the Dakar harbor with about 2000 permanent residents, most of whom are small-scale innkeepers during the tourist season and many of whom are artists of one form or another. It was one of the initial strongholds of the Europeans in Senegambia and served as a key administrative base for hundreds of years for several European powers (the Dutch, the Portuguese, and the French all had their turns) as well as a holding center for slaves waiting to be shipped to the New World.

The historical museums were interesting (and provided a reason to discover that with my Spanish, English, and very rudimentary spoken French, I can read French reasonably well -- I'd say better and faster than most West Africans I've met can read English, even those who've been all the way through secondary school), the art was quite good, and being in a place so central to such a horrific phenomenon as the slave trade is of course sobering at best. But what I actually enjoyed most about the island was finding the "hidden" corners of the island where the villagers were just living their lives with only the occasional observation of tourists.

The second picture is of a group of girls playing a game that seemed vaguely familiar to me -- I think that in elementary school I might have played something similar. They had a long elastic band that three of them stood in the corners of to form a triangle. Three others stood inside the triangle, one on each side, and then in synchronized fashion jumped over the band on their side, jumped back over, and moved to the next side.

I watched for a while (not daring to get too close and distract them), but couldn't figure out what the rules were for when you got kicked out of the jumpers. You were definitely allowed to touch the elastic; the height wasn't being consistently raised or anything, but there was clearly something you could do wrong that would result in your turn being over -- and I couldn't figure out what it was. Ah well, another one of the humbling mysteries of life, reminding us that not everything is knowable...