The Teranga Road: Travels in West Africa, #1

By Ann Thérèse Oram

A solo cycling trip in the tropics during the rainy season might not be everybody's cup of tea.  But it opened doors to a deeper insight into real-life Senegal and Gambia.  Armed with a rabid dog-scaring device and basic notions of the Wolof language, the author set out to explore the homeland of immigrant friends and to investigate why they risked everything on frail wooden pirogues on the ocean to seek a new life in Europe.  But she discovered so much more.

Teranga, the African welcome, a concept of hospitality which constitutes an unwritten code of honour in this corner of the continent, never failed to ease the aching muscles of a tired cyclist, and inspired admiration and affection for the region and its people.  The question arises: why is the 'developed' world so condescending towards Africa when Africa has so much to teach us, if only we would listen?  Lessons of dignity, respect, sharing and many other 'old-fashioned' values which we have lost or no longer make time for as well as an exuberant outpouring of gratitude for the gift of life. 

'The Teranga Road' is the account of the author's first foray into West Africa.  Other books in the series are:
'The Village On The Edge Of The World', her experience of living in a traditional Gambian village, and
'Between The River And The Sea,' in which she sets out once more with the bicycle to the little-visited interior of the Gambia and Senegal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A. T. Oram
• Release date: Oct 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386277385

Book preview

Teranga in Wolof means ‘welcome, respect, hospitality’.

NOTE: MANY WORDS HAVE alternative spellings, from names like Lamine or Lamin, places like Kartong or Kartung, and traditional dishes like thieboudienne or chebu jen.  I have used the variations I came across most frequently or that my friends use and apologise if they are different from what you are used to as I know this is irritating. West African spelling is broad-minded to say the least, as you will soon discover if you ever play Scrabble with a Gambian...

Prologue

It's a surprisingly balmy evening in early spring. We're sitting on the beach to watch the full moon rise over the Mediterranean, casting a sparkling trail of light across the water.

Mamate reclines on the sand beside me, propped up on one elbow, gazing into the distance. He is a farmer's son from Senegal, now working illegally in Spain on a building site. He has an airy laugh-it-off charisma and is so handsome he can break hearts just by walking down the street. 

'You know, I didn't come here by plane,' he says suddenly, interrupting our companionable silence. 'I came in one of those boats.' 

That was a revelation. I'd always thought he'd flown to Spain with a false visa. 

'The false visa was too expensive.' I knew he'd been working in Dakar to save up for it. 'I didn't want to wait any longer so I took a pirogue. Didn't tell my parents till I got here.'

I had met other Senegalese who had made the dangerous journey in small wooden boats, most poignantly Mohammed, a quiet gentle lad who had turned up in Mamate's flat a couple of days after reaching Spain. For some reason he seemed traumatised, unable to join in the noisy joking and horseplay of Mamate's other friends, so many that you were never entirely sure who lived there and who didn't. One day Mamate told me why: Mohammed's pirogue had overturned in a storm. Out of forty passengers, he had been one of just four who survived.

'We took the boat from a wild part of the coast, north of Dakar,' Mamate went on. 'I had bought a life-jacket and took food, water and cigarettes to last some days. Our pirogue was very big: it held about eighty passengers, men and women. It was moored offshore and we were ferried out in smaller boats at night. I'd been in little dugout canoes on the Saloum delta, but never in a big one on the sea and I can't swim, but the sea was very calm that night.’

He paused to light another cigarette. The stub glowed orange in the darkness of the quiet beach.

‘We went along parallel to the coast of Mauritania, then turned north-west into the ocean towards the Canary Islands. We were supposed to take about four days, but the engine broke down and we were drifting. Sometimes the waves were big and people were crying or praying. All our food and water ran out and eventually even the cigarettes. The nights were better as it was so hot in the daytime. But we knew that with the engine not working, if we missed the Canaries we'd just drift and drift further into the ocean. One of the men died; there was nothing we could do. We had to throw his body overboard.'

'Mamate, that's terrifying,' I said, aghast.

'I never felt afraid really,' he said, turning to stare at me in the moonlight. 'I knew that if my time had come there was nothing I could do.  And if it hadn't, I'd get out alive. Anyway, after a long time drifting, we managed to get the engine working again. We reached La Gomera - it’s a very little island near Tenerife - and headed for a beach which was full of white people. When they saw us they were scared stiff and ran away. All except two older women, who stayed and helped us to get off the boat. We could hardly walk – you can imagine, after nine days at sea, several of them without food or water, packed together on the hard wooden seats of the pirogue. As soon as I got onto the sand, I fell on my knees and thanked God. The second thing I did was ask for a cigarette.

Then the Red Cross people came. They checked us over, gave us water and took us to a kind of hostel to recover. We soon got our strength back, and me and some other guys played football with the policemen. Finally, I came here to Barcelona.'

Chapter One: Sowing the Seed

It was 2008; spring was just round the corner and it was time to make plans for the long summer break. As I spoke fluent French I'd always wanted to visit somewhere in francophone Africa. Côte d'Ivoire had been an early contender until civil war tore it apart. Senegal, meanwhile, was a stable democracy with a low crime rate, a peaceful part of Africa sandwiched between the more unpredictable Mauritania, Guinea, Guinea Bissau and Mali. But actually my choice of Senegal was simply the result of immigration to Spain. I made friends with Mamate, a tall, big-hearted twenty-something-year-old, a farmer's son who had found a job as a construction labourer in the Iberian building boom. He introduced me to his friends and I bought a phrase-book of Wolof, his mother-tongue and began to study it on the train to work. This led to more contacts with Senegalese intrigued by a toubab (white person) who wanted to learn their language. I'd travelled in a number of countries in southern and eastern Africa and had tried my hand at Zulu, Xhosa, Swahili and Amharic. But I'd never before found native speakers I could practise with before I arrived. Wolof rolled off the tongue nicely: 'Nanga def?' meant ‘how are you?’ 'Dama contarn' was ‘I'm happy’. I even learned to say 'Achaa!' in case of attack by a xenophobic dog.

I soon had quite a circle of friends and acquaintances who patiently acted as guinea pigs for my first steps in Wolof. They were almost all Muslims, smoked like chimneys but touched no alcohol or pork. I learnt that they were kind, respectful, scrupulously clean and very proud. They regarded the toubabs with a mixture of friendliness and disdain, along with astonishment at their distasteful habits, ('Do you really eat that stuff?' referring to Spain's cherished cured hams.) Many of them had risked their lives in small boats 'deep inside' the ocean to reach Spain, yet they loved their homeland passionately. I wanted to know what made them do it.

Mamate was all for me visiting his homeland and assured me that it was safe and everyone would treat me well, especially as I spoke a little Wolof. He was the eldest son of ten children; his father, being relatively well-off, had four wives and still lived on the farmstead near the Sine-Saloum Delta where Mamate had grown up. They had cattle and horses, and Mamate told me he used to love riding bareback round the countryside. Once he fell off and broke his arm, which he swore had been healed by a marabout with prayers and incantations, and no medical attention whatsoever. He loved his home and was annoyed that his friend Issa's village nearby appeared on the road-map I'd bought, but not his own.

'My village is much bigger and much more beautiful,' he grumbled. 'These mapmakers don't know what they're doing.'

I wondered what their villages were really like. I knew that Issa's brother-in-law had just been killed by snake-bite and the father of a childhood friend of Mamate's had recently been gored to death by a bull. Mamate had attended Koranic school only. He told me the little boys sat round a fire in the bush until they could recite the day’s lesson by heart to the teacher’s satisfaction. Only then were they allowed to go home. As soon as he was old enough, he helped his father herding cattle and taking their horses to market. Later, after a stint over the border in Mauritania, he moved to downtown Dakar to work in his uncle’s shop. He sold women's make-up and creams, working all hours, and was soon earning enough to save up, little by little, for the journey to Europe.

Spain was hardly an Eldorado, but it was known for being less stringent with its immigration laws than other European nations. There had been a time when a large amount of manual labour was needed. The Spanish were enjoying a boom, their children were going to university as never before, and nobody wanted the menial jobs. 2004 had seen an amnesty when it was made easy for immigrants to acquire legality and although subsequently the official gates had closed, the country's ubiquitous submerged economy ensured a good deal of underground employment. Those who didn't find work on building sites, in the fields or behind the scenes in restaurant kitchens for instance, turned to other means of making a living. Whereas ten years earlier it had been unusual to spot an African in a provincial town, now it had become a familiar sight. In pedestrian streets or country markets and most of all on the beaches, you could see them spreading imitation sunglasses, watches and t-shirts, pirated CDs and DVDs or fake Gucci handbags on carefully crafted blankets which could be rolled up and closed with their wares inside at a moment's notice should the police turn up.

Here in Spain Mamate was one of these 'sin papeles', an illegal immigrant, driving a beaten-up Honda Accord on his Senegalese driving licence, always wary of the traffic police, who tended to stop any car with a black face at the wheel. He'd been arrested more than once for driving his friends to the big market in Lleida to sell their illegal sunglasses and CDs. When caught, all their merchandise was taken by the police and they spent the night in the lock-up, where they were told off for laughing and joking so loudly that the policeman on duty couldn't sleep. In the morning, Mamate told me, the police had brought them a chicken sandwich each and let them go. So technically these polite, decent men I was getting to know and trust were delinquents. But they caused no trouble, paid their rent and their bills, if not their taxes, and lived very modestly as they sent home every penny they could to support their families. As they made their own entertainment, I was invited to shared suppers of traditional dishes in flats which were kept spotlessly clean by the half dozen inhabitants, usually all male. They watched West African TV, prayed unselfconsciously to Mecca on mats laid out behind the sofa in a crowded living room, and were unfailingly respectful to me, offering advice and contacts for visiting their country.

After choosing Senegal for my summer trip, I made two key decisions which might either make or break it.  One was to travel alone.  I could have invited a friend to join me or looked for other people doing the same thing on the notice-board of Barcelona's best-known travel bookshop. Although this is one of the dilemmas you face when you find yourself without a partner after nearly two decades of travelling as a couple, something urged me to go it alone. I wanted to get inside the real Africa, the Senegal of Mamate and his friends, and solo travel would be the best way to do it. Also, I felt the need to spend some time with myself away from work, away from home, to deal with some of the personal issues you inevitably bang up against when you're in your forties and separated. And I knew that if I pulled it off, I could dare to feel proud of myself.

The second decision was to cycle. As I wanted to move around rather than staying in one place, I had initially considered renting a car, but with poor conditions on the roads in the rainy season and my lack of mechanical skills, that seemed too much of a liability. Then I thought of paying a couple of Mamate's friends with a car to drive me round the country. But some stubborn streak of individualism prevailed and I started to chew over the idea of cycling. I'd read some books of travellers' adventures by bicycle. Later, my worried father told my mother, 'Stop giving her those books and putting ideas into her head.' 

Cycling definitely had appeal: you could go where you wanted including off-road, if the bike broke down you could get it fixed easily and cheaply; if you got tired you could sling it in the back of a taxi; you could enjoy nature at first hand. Best of all, the bike would be a great social equaliser, a simple means of transport which was familiar and used by Africans themselves. Somehow I felt this could be a great door-opener and well worth the discomfort. In order not to worry my family, I didn't tell them. I only really worried myself when I told Mamate.

'You're completely mad,' he said when he realised I was serious.

As he knew what I was going to, this reaction cost me more than a night's sleep. But by then it was too late, my mind was made up.

If you go to Senegal, you might as well visit the Gambia as well; in fact, you may well have to as this tiny former British colony, the size of Yorkshire, lies in the middle of it like the mouth of a profile portrait of Senegal, a bite-sized sliver following the river Gambia inland and the result of an uneasy agreement between the British and French as the colonial powers carved up the continent in their own best interests. From the guidebooks it sounded poorer and more backward than Senegal and equally intriguing.

I mapped out a route I hoped I could realistically achieve by bike in tropical heat with short distances of between twenty and forty-five km per day, allowing for rests, changes of plan and unexpected contingencies. I planned to start in Dakar on Senegal's Cap Vert peninsula, then a quick trip up to Lac Rose, the old finishing point of the Paris-Dakar rally at the start of the long barren stretch of coast leading to Saint Louis, the former colonial capital and World Heritage site now apparently falling apart. One possibility was to go on from there into Mauritania and then to follow the River Senegal to the Malian border, but a coup and some kidnappings made the Mauritanian situation unstable, so it seemed more advisable to head south from the capital. The beaches of the 'Petite Côte' sounded inviting and the coastal towns were spaced at