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...

Unwritten blog posts

I'm still doing way more bloggable things than I have time to blog about. So, here's a partial list of things that I haven't gotten a chance to really tell you about yet!

1) The press conference I stumbled upon by the CPP -- a minor political party that currently only has a single seat in Parliament but was the party of Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana after independence. Also, the old woman who sat down next to me and turned out to be one of Ghana's first female MPs, during the Nkrumah era -- we talked for almost an hour before the press conference actually started.

2) Nkrumah mausoleum -- fascinating memorial to Ghana's first president and one of the most influential Africans of the 20th century.

3) The courts/law firms -- I shadowed Sarah for half a day, through two court cases and at her very prominent law firm. Most surprising: The judges and lawyers still wear white British-style wigs when court is in session. Sarah and I are pictured; I'm holding the wig.

4) The Accra mall -- it's new and shiny and if you squint you'd think you were in Tyson's Corner.

5) The Burkina Faso embassy and visa-acquisition experience -- remarkably smooth and fast.

6) The voluntary service scheme -- I stumbled across the final round of the national selection process for the voluntary service year (kind of like Americorps).

7) Cape Coast and its castle -- 3 hours west of Accra, the Cape Coast castle is one of the dozens of remaining monuments to the horrors of the slave trade. Fewer than 7 in 10 of those held in the castle survived to make it through the door of no return onto a slave ship; even fewer made it to the New World alive. Pictured is the "Door of No Return" -- through which, after an average of 3 months packed like sardines in underground dungeons, you were herded onto a slaver. (Sorry about not being able to rotate the picture...)

8) WEB DuBois memorial & museum -- The house where DuBois lived out his last few years at Nkrumah's invitation is just a few blocks from my host family's house.

9) The National Theatre -- I stopped by this imposing Chinese-built structure to ask what the performance schedule was, and the guys sitting outside guarding the entrance had the schedule for the next few weeks printed on a single piece of paper in a binder, and didn't even have any way of telling me what the names of the movies coming up were.

10) Parliament House -- I toured Parliament House and observed Parliament in session for about an hour as they were debating a proposal to borrow money from other countries to expand Ghana's ambulance fleet.

11) Kakum rainforest -- one of the small surviving slices of rainforest in Ghana, Kakum is home to hundreds of species and has the sketchiest and most rickety-looking canopy walkway I hope I ever traverse. Pictured...