Anne Look's Notebook:

Move over, Monopoly

Pan-Africanism now has its own board game.

It's called Jekaben — which means "let's unite and decide together" in Bambara — and its Dakar-based developers hope it will foster a new generation of Pan-Africanists.

What is Pan-Africanism, you ask? It's a sociopolitical movement and philosophy that seeks to create a global African community and achieve a politically united African continent.

It's an interesting topic to talk about in Senegal, seeing as Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade is one of the continent's most outspoken champions for the creation of a United States of Africa (a federation 53 sovereign African countries, something along the lines of the European Union).

I can't wait to get my hands on a prototype of the board game. In the meantime, here's a good BBC story that includes some reaction from the game's creator and a brief description of how the game is played.

Senegal's President Wade is featured in the game's somewhat dubious deck of trump cards, called "Wise Leaders of Africa." Here's a tidbit of explanation from the BBC story:

The statesmen — including Col. Gadhafi, Mr Mandela and Senegal's Abdoulaye Wade — are regarded by Mr Ba as symbols of pan-Africanism.

"Their cards are used as trump cards, they allow the player to move faster towards the United States of Africa," he says.

But he is aware that not all of his "wise leaders" will meet with universal approval.

Included in the pack is Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military strongman.

The late Omar Bongo of Gabon, who was accused of massive embezzlement of his country's oil wealth during four decades in power, is also featured.

And Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, who was overthrown in a coup after his rule descended into authoritarianism, also gets a card of his own.

Mr Ba admits that the choice is a very personal one.

Indeed.

30 minutes well spent ... in Senegal

As payment for my long absence from this notebook, I come bearing a gift . . .

Binta and the Great Idea (2004)

This short film contains so many wondrous slivers of Senegalese life — the music, the countryside, the difficulties, the generosity. It's beautifully made with a great twist at the end.

"Javier Fesser's live action short Binta and the Great Idea (a.k.a. "Binta y la Gran Idea") — a Spanish-Senegalese co-production — concerns Binta, a seven-year-old girl who lives with her fisherman father in a small village on the banks of Senegal's Casamance River. Binta is fortunate and blessed enough to be able to attend school and receive an education, but her cousin, Soda, lacks the same privilege. Binta's humanist father suddenly has an idea that could change the world and ease the suffering of mankind, and he determines to implement it."

— Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

The longer I spend in this part of the world, the more I see how essential a girl's education is to breaking the cycle of poverty and furthering not just women's rights but also the overall development of a country.

A  friend sent me a link to the film this morning and it's only right that I pass it on. Funny, uplifting and thought-provoking, this film is 30 minutes well-spent.

Click on the photo above or watch it free here.
 

Iran election: The view from Dakar

The situation in Iran doesn’t seem to have sparked overwhelming interest in Dakar.

Senegal is literally sandwiched by two contentious upcoming elections in its own region: Guinea Bissau’s to the south on June 28 and Mauritania’s to the north on July 18.

In May, Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade — flexing his diplomatic muscles — brokered a last-minute power-sharing deal in Mauritania, after opposition parties threatened to boycott national elections, originally scheduled for June 6.

The tense political situation in Mauritania and the death of Gabon’s president, Omar Bongo, continue to dominate international news coverage, though wire stories about Iran have also been appearing in Senegalese papers.

Senegal and Iran are pretty chummy. They are both active members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and Wade and Iran’s Ahmadinejad have repeatedly pledged to strengthen existing economic and political ties, with Dakar offering Iran a natural gateway to African markets. An Iranian car manufacturing plant in Thies, outside Dakar, now produces thousands of cars each year for distribution in Africa. There has also been talk of Iran building an oil refinery in Senegal, among other energy-related projects.

So, the questions I’m left with are these: What could a regime shift in Iran have meant for that country’s investment in Senegal? Will those economic ties affect Senegal’s take on the contested election results?

President Wade is currently in Gabon along with 14 other heads of state for Bongo’s funeral. Wade is known as a diplomatic leader in the region, and I’m interested to see what, if any, reaction he will have to events in Iran, but nothing has come out yet.

See here for an overview of local reaction around the world.

Obama's speech: Speech ... what speech?

Despite the fact that Senegal is 95 percent Muslim, the global buzz building around President Obama’s speech sputtered out by the time it hit the country's borders.

I was hard pressed to find anyone, much less groups of people, planning to watch the speech.

After the address, I touched base with members of the Muslim Student Association of Senegal, a national network of university students that has been particularly vocal in its support for Palestine.

Though association member Mouhamadou Barro found the speech progressive — certainly nothing we would ever have heard from former President Bush, he said — it still left him underwhelmed.

“What we want are concrete actions. We’ve heard so many speeches,” said Barro. “I didn’t really feel the courage, the energy, of President Obama go to the end. He didn’t bring it home.”

Barro was disappointed with the way Obama addressed the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinean conflict. Obama talked about the thousands of Americans who died on Sept. 11, 2001 and the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust but then seemed to gloss over other casualities, other transgressions, he said.

Obama didn’t evoke Israel’s recent attacks in Gaza, which prompted the student association to organize marches and protests here in Dakar. Obama discussed democracy and reconstruction in Iraq, but didn’t address all the damage the United States had done there and the dubious nature with which that war started, Barro said.  

The overall lack of interest in the speech highlights a few key things about Senegal, most importantly its isolation with regard to the international Muslim community, Barro said.

“We don’t have a culture that is concerned with the global nature of Islam. That’s it,” Barro said. “A more global view of Islam should cause us to look beyond country borders or questions of skin color, but we have inherited an Islam that has closed us in on ourselves.”

Islam in Senegal is much more about prayer and dogma, he said. I'd say they pervade everyday life. Cab drivers pull over on busy Dakar streets to do their daily prayers. Photos of marabouts and religious sayings are plastered on cars and scooters. The night air is often filled with mens' voices chanting the poems of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, the founder of the Mourides, the largest brotherhood in Senegal.

But, lately, the religious community and local media have been far more concerned with denouncing homosexuality than discussing international issues. Senegalese Muslims don’t feel particularly close to Arab Muslims, and marabouts, local religious leaders, are much more concerned with money and political power than conflicts in the Middle East, Barro said.

The state of American-Muslim relations is pretty low on the priority list of most Senegalese, Barro said. Thanks to crushing poverty, chronic unemployment and energy shortages, daily survival doesn't leave much time for watching 50-minute speeches and discussing international politics.

“Certain Senegalese who saw the speech would have been seduced by the verses Obama delivered, the fact that he talked about Islam and its grandeur,” Barro said. “But there are plenty of people who don’t even know Obama is in Egypt.”

Welcome to the family

Last weekend, I was visiting with a friend and his family at their home outside Dakar. After polishing off a platter of yassa chicken, we sat sipping Fanta, watching the pre-match coverage of the day’s wrestling tournament — in Senegal, traditional wrestling is more popular than, ahem, soccer — and looking at family photos.

Moussa and his four younger brothers haven’t seen their father in more than 20 years, since he moved to the U.S. to support them. Their mother joined him in Chicago 15 years ago. The boys are all grown now, and Moussa is married with a son of his own.

This isn’t a bizarre situation in Senegal, or the rest of the developing world for that matter, and remittances from family members abroad constitute a significant part of the country’s economy.

Many see moving abroad as the best way to earn money and give their children a better future. For families left behind, those infusions of cash can mean another child going to private school — or getting to go to school at all — paying the electricity bill or simply having enough money to eat for the week.

That father, sister, or uncle abroad is the family’s ally in the first world, its ace-in-the-hole, its safety net.

We passed around enlarged photos of their parents’ wedding day and various family members now deceased or living in Europe. We laughed over a fuzzy photo of the five gangly boys taken before their father left for the U.S., and they each studied in hushed wonder a photo I took of their father last October in Chicago.

Though they all lovingly refer to their father — that voice on the telephone — as “le vieux” (the old man), they were amused to see his white hair. It was one of the first photos they’d seen of him in two decades.  

More photos circulated: their marabout (religious leader), their cousins, their mother radiant as a young woman, and an 8 x 10 portrait of Barack. Obama, that is. They have three copies, printed on cheap cardstock, of the president next to an American flag. Their father sent them from Chicago.

They marveled at how smart Obama seems, the way he just talks to everyday folks, his energy, his physical fitness: “I mean, have you seen that photo of him with his shirt off?” one son says. The general consensus: He’s really a different kind of American president, maybe a different kind of America all together.   

Moussa placed the Obama photos back with the others, added the shiny, new photo of their father to the pile and neatly put the family “album” away.

Wily Senegalese marketers haven’t missed the Obama boat. Boutiques are named after him in Dakar, there were quite a few variations on “Yes, we can” in March’s local elections, and the president even has his own brand of rice, le riz obama.

But it’s his inclusion in a family photo album that really encapsulated for me the Senegalese perception of the new American president, or Barack, as many here call him. One hundred days in, that's where he lives in Senegalese consciousness.

He’s another distant relative overseas. Sure, he’s far away and has challenges of his own, but he’s on their side. He’s an ace-in-the-hole, a powerful ally in a powerful country who, should the occasion arise, might just throw a little support their way, which is more than many Americans are doing. He's one of them. He's pulling for them. They're on a first-name basis.

One day, Obama will visit Africa, just as one day — insha’allah — their father will come home, Moussa and his brothers say.

Who knows what, if anything, Obama will actually do for Senegal, for Africa, but he’s there and that’s something. 

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