Let's start with a depressing story, shall we?
During the time I spent in Dakar, in between village trips, I tried to get to the beach as much as possible. I love to swim, but it was also nice just to be somewhere where I could see and hear the ocean. Very stress-relieving. Of course, nothing in Dakar is completely stress-free, especially for a toubab who is out in public. Walking down a street can be mentally hazardous, let alone hanging out in bikini next door to a mosque. Even so, it was worth it to have the brief respite from work and French and Wolof to head to the beach in Yoff with my fellow interns. Luckily for me, the beach was only about 15 minutes walking from my homestay, so it was easy to head over for a few hours after work or on the weekend.
I’ve been to quite a few beaches in Dakar, and all over Senegal, but for being so close to me, Yoff beach was beautiful and fairly clean. At the main entrance there seemed to be millions of people crowded into a few hundred yards, but head down the beach a ways and it was practically empty. My friends and I would “rent” one of the “huts” for the afternoon, to have some shade and a safe place to put our stuff. My friend Jane went to the beach practically every day, and we always went to the same establishment. They knew us very well, especially since it was the tourist off-season and they didn’t often have many customers. We’d buy food or drinks from them sometime, but mostly we just paid the $3 for the mat and hut and talked with them a little.
As I mentioned before, there is also a mosque on the Yoff beach. I don’t know if I wrote here about the time when I was exploring Yoff, walking near the mosque, and a woman came up to me and told me that “one didn’t wear pants here”. I explained that I wasn’t going inside the mosque, and she said, ‘No, the whole neighborhood. You can’t wear pants here.” I was coming from work wearing long khaki slacks that were neither very tight nor very revealing, and a “work” shirt, so I was completely taken aback and angry. However, when I went back to my homestay mom and complained about the whole thing, she told me that there was some sort of neighborhood ordinance that had just been passed banning pants on women. The mosque that I had been near is located just down the beach from the place where my friends and I spent our time. I’d never really noticed the irony of Senegalese and foreign young people cavorting about in scanty bathing suits right next to the mosque, I have to admit. And the area where my friends and I planted ourselves day after day was certainly more popular among tourists than Senegalese women. However, the beach was always covered in Senegalese men working out in the sand. Other than feeling awkward about being watched and approached all the time (which seemed no different than anywhere else in Dakar), I honestly hadn’t thought twice about our presence on the beach, or near the mosque.
That is, I hadn’t thought about it much until the beach burned down.
Sorry to be melodramatic. But that’s how the information was given to me, as well. I’d just returned from a village stay and proposed going to the beach. “Okay,” said Matteo, “but we can’t go to Yoff, because it burned down. How ‘bout a different beach?” [except imagine that with a really thick British accent, of course.] I was just as surprised as you, trying to figure out how a beach could burn down. I’ve always thought that sand and water were two excellent substances with which to put OUT fire.
Apparently, on the night of a semi-important Muslim celebration, some local men showed up at the businesses on the beach with knives and fire (Torches? Lighters? No idea, so I’m obviously picturing the mob scene from Beauty and the Beast. But it’s probably more like a drunken frat boy mob, actually.)
From what I can piece together, the owners tried to stop them, but were threatened with knives. So instead the owners took their stuff hurriedly out of the main building and watched as the men burned their livelihood to the ground. I thought maybe everyone was being over-excited, and it had just been a small fire. When I got to the beach, everything looked normal as I headed down towards our normal place – but a few businesses down from ours the hut/beach cabanas just disappeared. Instead, all I could see was some leftover burned logs, blackened sand, and torched shacks. Depressing, horrifying, doesn’t even begin to cover it.
My host mother told me that, on the positive side, they had caught the men almost immediately. She said it was the women who had grabbed three of the men that very night, before they could run off. Others had been caught later, and 22 men were in custody by the time I was hearing about it. When I got to our normal spot, the owners were cheerful and friendly as always. I heard their story and tried to tell them how sorry I was for what had happened. “Don’t worry!”, they said, “Please, don’t worry. We’ll have this all back up for you in no time. We’ll rebuild them very fast! Everything for you, we want you to be happy here!”.
Which, although an overwhelmingly nice sentiment, only makes you more guilty when you are already contemplating whether the arson was an act against scantily-clad swimming tourists like you. The owner seemed to imply to us that the men who had burned down his business were doing so on the orders of the marabouts (religious leaders). Obviously, I can’t say one way or the other. My host mother scoffed at that idea, and seemed to think that it was just unemployed young hooligans with too much time on their hands and violent tendencies. However, the businesses that were burned were next to the mosque, and the arson ended further down the beach, away from the mosque.
The upside to this story (okay, there isn’t really one), is that, as mentioned, the area was already being rebuilt by the time I was there. When we worried outloud about how they would pay for this (insurance probably not so much) someone vaguely said something about a relation in France helping pay for it. Although it was a pretty depressing sight for the next few weeks until I left Dakar, we kept going back to them. The Senegalese men and women in bathing suits did not seem deterred either, although the crowds were much less after the arson.
I don’t really have anything else to say about this, without getting too philosophical or tangential. It was certainly the closest to any kind of religious fundamentalism I’ve ever seen in Senegal, and it was completely shocking for me and the people I was with. I think it was fairly shocking to my Senegalese family and friends as well.
I can't seem to find many pictures from before the fire. Here's one from afterwards. The mural on the wall is still there, but you can see the building behind is all burned out. They've already constructed a few new structures for shade, as you can see, and one of the owners is sawing wood for more in the picture.
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