Category Archives: Senegal

Africa, MC Solaar, Senegal, Slave Trade, West Africa

MC Solaar on “Les Colonies”

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Tomorrow, on the first day of class, we’ll be discussing the song “Les Colonies” by MC Solaar. You can download the song on i-tunes, and can also hear it in the video below, accompanied by images of the slave trading fort in Gorée island, near Dakar, Senegal. The song early on evokes the “paysage de Gorée,” and evokes its history: the island was a major departure point for French slavers departing for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the fort is famous for a doorway leading out to the water, known as the “door of no retun.” Click here for a virtual visit of the island prepared by UNESCO, which has declared it a World Heritage Site.

MC Solaar makes a connection in the song between the past of slavery and contemporary forms of exploitation and migration linking Europe and Africa.

Below are the lyrics in French, and a translation of the first verse. Please share your thoughts and comments about the song in the comments section below.

MC Solaar, “Les Colonies” (2001)

On a connu les colonies, l’anthropophage économie

La félonie la traite d’esclaves, la dette, le F.M.I.

Bruno, Jean-Marie, si j’cours j’ai mes raisons

Les mêmes que les deux nègres maigres sous un avion

Avant c’était déjà grave de voir des fers qui entravent

Paysage de Gorée, Maisons des esclaves

Cave sans amour, sans retour ni recours

Sans cours de cassation, sans oreille pour entendre “au secours”

Où sont passés les baobabs et les hordes de gosses

Dans cette ère de négoce où ne vivent que le big boss

Rentablité – instabilité – imbécilité

N’ont fait qu’augmenter les taux de mortalité

Ce sont des larmes qui coulent dans nos artères

Psychose séculaire j’ai peur quand j’entends charter

Parfois je rêve de mettre un gun dans un paquet d’chips

De braquer la Banque Mondiale. Pour tout donner au townships.

C’est trop complexe. Où sont les droits de l’Homme?

L’Homme laisse l’Homeless homeless zigzague et slalome

Donc shalom à tous les gens qui ont connu la haine

Aux enfants de Bohême, Solaar Mamadou Cohen

En soliloque je développe des antidotes non-stop

F**k la parlotte et démenotte les brainlocks.

Je suis socio-poétique sur mike ou sur cahier

Sans brailler. On n’est pas frileux. Pas peur de cailler.

On a connu les colonies

Par le passé, y a beaucoup d’actes qui nous ont mis les nerfs

Frères et sœurs c’est l’heure du pacte pour ce millénaire

L’enfer gère la Terre Mère, Lucifer et Faust

Entrent dans leurs têtes dans le but de refaire l’Holocauste

J’ai vu des mecs parler de haine à la tribune

D’une façon scientifique. Élimination par l’urne !

Donc j’donne la paix à ceux qui me suivent dans l’OPA.

Face à la barbarie, cela sans mea culpa

Si on est là c’est pour toujours pousser l’amour

Pour que nos parcours, chaque jour, coupent la route aux vautours

Et va pas croire cette fois qu’ce sont des bavures

Je t’assure. S’ils ont la haine, on a la bravoure.

Une petite fille vient de naître, elle s’appelle Mélissa

Et si j’opte pour le vote, c’est pour pas qu’elle vive ça.

La vie est belle petite, malgré ces quelques pitres

Fin d’chapitre pour tous les gosses dès l’âge du pupitre.

On a connu les colonies …

Translation of First Verse:

We’ve known colonies, cannibal economies

Felony, the slave trade, debt, the I.M.F.

Bruno, Jean-Marie, if I run I’ve got my reasons

The same as those two skinny kids under the airplane

Before it was already sad to see the chains that locked up

The landscape of Gorée, the Maison des Esclaves

Caves without love, without return or recourse

Without a court of justice, with no ears to hear “help”

Where have the baobabs and crowds of kids gone

In this era of business only the big boss lives

Profit – instability – stupidity

Have only increased mortality

There are tears running through our arteries

A secular psychosis, I’m scared when I hear “charter”

Sometimes I dream of putting a gun in a bag of chips

Holding up the World Bank to give everything to the townships

It’s too complex, where are the Rights of Man?

Decolonization, Senegal

On “God’s Bits of Wood”

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To help you in your reading of “Gods Bits of Wood,” here are two pages that provide a summary and introduction to the novel.

Click here for an English page from Western Michigan University

Click here for a good French discussion of the novel.

You have already seen some of Ousmane’s work as a filmmaker in the selections from
“Camp de Thiaroye,” and you can find clips from several of his moves in Youtube. Here is a short video homage to him and his work:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/_UIOkmFPqUE" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

If any of you come across interesting online material about the novel or its author, please share them as a comment to this post.

Senegal

Senegal in the News

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Just as we started reading God’s Bits of Wood, Senegal inaugurated a $27m monument called “The Monument of African Renaissance. On Saturday, a 160 ft statue was unveiled to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Senegal’s independence. The BBC article I read about it raises a few points for discussion.

  • The “soviet-style” statue, created in North Korea has received criticism for several reasons. Cost aside, some claim the statue is sexist and idolatrous. Further, many believe that the statue disrespects Muslim beliefs as the female figure is scantily clad. This “African Renaissance” statue appears to be a mosaic of foreign influence. It seems nobody is quite sure what ties the statue to Africa at all. This article, published a few months ago by the BBC, articulates this confusion quite succinctly.
  • The author reports, “Supporters say it represents Africa’s rise from ‘intolerance and racism'”. What an interesting way to phrase this statement. The agents of intolerance and racism seem rather vague here…
  • I checked the NY Times to see what sort of coverage they had of this controversy but it turns out that there is none. The BBC has published several articles regarding the statue, starting on 11 Dec 2009. I wonder why these editorial decisions were made. Poke around the articles if you get a chance (they’re all linked to each other in the “See Also” column on the right-hand side of the page).

And finally, yesterday, President Wade of Senegal announced that Senegal will be taking back control of all military bases held by France. Click here to read more. I didn’t find any mention of this in the NYTimes either. I haven’t had a chance to check out any French newspapers yet. Has anybody noticed anything?

Africa, Senegal, West Africa, World War II

Des tirailleurs sénégalais

Après avoir vu des extraits du film « Camp de Thiaroye » en classe, je me demandais si les tirailleurs sénégalais ont véritablement enlevé un soldat américain.  Un article sur ce site Internet ne fait mention d’aucun enlèvement.  Cependant, il comprend les événements intéressants de ce jour fatidique.  Au bas est un extrait de l’article:

Sur ordre des autorités françaises, les « tirailleurs sénégalais », du camp militaire de Thiaroye, sont massacrés pendant la nuit (le 1er décembre 1944, vers 3 heures du matin) par l’armée française, parce qu’ils réclamaient leur solde !

La tragédie se déroule au Sénégal. Vers la fin du mois de novembre 1944, un bataillon de 1280 tirailleurs arrive au camp de transit de Thiaroye pour être démobilisés. Il s’agit d’un retour forcé en Afrique. Ces hommes se sont battus contre les Allemands pour libérer l’Europe et en particulier la France. Certains avaient été torturés par les boches. Leur fierté d’anciens combattants fait bientôt place à la désillusion devant les promesses non tenues par la France, concernant en particulier leur pécule, les humiliations et le racisme de la hiérarchie militaire au sein de l’armée française. D’énormes discriminations apparaissent dans le paiement de solde, à cause de la couleur de la peau. Les tirailleurs se mutinent et s’emparent d’un général qui finit par promettre de régulariser la situation. Enorme mensonge ! car à peine remis en liberté, il sera donné l’ordre de massacrer les tirailleurs. Pendant la nuit (le 1er décembre 1944, vers 3 heures du matin), plusieurs unités de l’armée française, appuyées par la gendarmerie, vont massacrer ces Héros Noirs, réveillés en plein sommeil et complètement désarmés et dupés. Ils ont payé très cher leur confiance en la France. Il y a très peu de survivants et les autorités françaises vont garder le silence sur le nombre exact des tués. Des chiffres farfelus sont avancés mais « il n’y a jamais eu de commission d’enquête indépendante sur cette affaire » précise Charles Onana.

Africa, Colonial Legacies, Senegal, West Africa

Memorial to the Tirailleurs Sénégalais in Dakar

This week’s readings described several statues commemorating the participation of West African soldiers in World War I. Yet another of these memorials stands in downtown Dakar, Senegal, the formal capital of French West Africa. Here are a couple of photos I took of it while studying abroad in Senegal last semester.

The statue is also accompanied these days by a rather jarring poster portraying the Tirailleurs and Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade. Here’s a photo of that:

(if you have trouble reading the text, you can click the photo to enlarge it)

Colonial Legacies, Islam, Politics, Racism, Senegal, West Africa

The Poet President: Leopold Senghor

At the bottom of the well of my memory, I touch your face
And draw water to quench my long regret.
You recline royally, elbow on a cushion of clear hillside.
Your bed presses the earth, softening the drums in the wetlands,
Beating your song, and your verse
Is the breath of night and the distant sea.

-Leopold Senghor (“Letter to a Poet: To Aimé Césaire”) **Translated by Melvin Dixon

Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor

In the interview with Aimé Césaire that we watched for Thursday’s class, the poet describes the first friend he made when he moved to France as a young man, a “short but well built” fellow with “thick glasses and a gray jacket.” It was Leopold Senghor, a Senegalese man who would soon rack up a dizzying and improbable list of achievements, becoming a world-renowned poet, the first president of Senegal, and the first black member of the Académie Française—a kind of George Washington meets Robert Frost meets W.E.B. Dubois in coastal West Africa.

But that pivotal day in 1931 he, like Césaire, was simply a talented student had come to Paris by way of a French colony to be educated. As young black men in Paris in the 1930s, straddling the strange cultural line between their homelands and metropolitan France, Césaire and Senghor became fast friends. Both were founding writers for L’Etudiant Noir, a newspaper that brought together the writing of students from across the African Diaspora. From amidst this dialogue on the black experience emerged a new idea, that of negritude. At its core, negritude represented a celebration of a transnational black identity in opposition to the racism of French colonialism, and it quickly colored the writing of both Césaire and Senghor.

But like Césaire, Senghor developed aspirations beyond the bounds of poetry. In the aftershock of World War II—a war in which he had fought for the French—Senghor was part of the call for increased autonomy reverberating across the French colonial world and soon became one of Senegal’s first black representatives to the French National Assembly.

This positioned him to become one of the leading political figures in Senegal, and when French West Africa became independent in 1960, he ascended to the role of president (although for his entire life he would remain steadfast in his belief that Senegal and France should remain closely tied). Senghor cut an unlikely figure for a Senegalese head of state. He was a Catholic in a 95% Muslim nation, a member of a minority ethnic group, and a man who had spent much of his adult life in France. But he was also a skilled negotiator and a shrewd political thinker, and he would go on to serve for 20 years before becoming one of the first African politicians to voluntarily cede power to a democratically elected opponent (even if in Senghor’s case it was a hand-chosen successor from within his own political party…but that’s another story).

Anyway, in the context of our study of Césaire, I thought others in the class might like to hear a little about another of the negritude poets to see how Senghor’s life path intersected with—as well as diverged from—his. And Senghor just cuts a fascinating figure in his own right.

Plus, you have to admit, this is a pretty spectacular hat:

Haiti, Senegal, Slave Trade

President of Senegal Offers Haitians a Return to their “Homeland”

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Among the many reactions to the earthquake in Haiti has been the fascinating offer on the part of the President of Senegal to welcome any Haitians who wished to return to Africa, which he referred to as their “terre natale,” or homeland. He said that if a few came, he would offer them land and a house. If many were to come, he would offer them an entire region of the country. Click here to read more about this.