Clearing Out The Streets

Somehow I have failed to take time to truly describe the anarchy that is downtown Dakar. Essentially, there are people everywhere. Everywhere. And not like New York or LA. They're everywhere. The sidewalks which were intended for pedestrians are filled with people selling all sorts of things… shoes, electronics, sunglasses, souvenir-type things (although I don't really understand who buys them because there are hardly any tourists here), etc. Those who don't have little stands set up lay their merchandise out on blankets. Those who don't have blankets walk around carrying the merchandise. They're everywhere. And always weaving between the cars and traffic are tons of guys trying to sell phone cards, girls selling water, and beggars of all sorts who approach car windows. At lunch and in the morning and around 5-7pm, Dakar is gridlocked with traffic… it takes forever to get somewhere that should take 10 minutes (forever meaning 45 minutes - hour). I remind you that this city isn't all that big. With the people selling things on the street, you never really know how the people actually acquired the merchandise to sell it. And there are rip-offs of every brand you could ever want… not Abercrombie, but plenty of Gucci, Prada, and D&G.

Do people go "home" and leave the streets in the evening? No. Sure, some do. But a good part of the street vendors are constantly there, sleeping next to their merchandise. Life is very very hard in Senegal, and those people need to take any opportunity available to them to make a sale and get some money. Not only do you walk by street vendors after midnight, but anytime after Dakar you can see people sleeping on the streets. Not just vendors or occasional homeless people like you would see on the streets of any city in the States; you will see mothers with five children lined up side-by-side sleeping. That is one of the most difficult things for me to see. It absolutely breaks my heart.

There are tons of handicapped people in Dakar. So among the thousands of street vendors you see people dragging their bodies along the ground (I'm not exaggerating) because they can't walk, and others limping, and groups of people in wheelchairs. Sometimes begging, sometimes not. There are also lots of women from other countries who walk around and beg. Not to mention the thousands of Talibe (little boys supposedly sent to live with holy men to study the Koran, but instead spend the majority of their day begging. They don't have shoes, their clothes are always the dirtiest, and they carry an empty tomato can to collect money and food for themselves).

Basically… the streets of Dakar are filled with lots of people who are trying to scrape by to sustain themselves. Of course those people live and "work" side-by-side with the Dakarois who have a lot of money. That's just how Senegal is.

The President, Abdulaye Wade, made an announcement that he was going to clean up the streets of Dakar. So last night, at midnight, the police, gendarmerie, and army met at Place de l'Independence (the main square in downtown Dakar) and started clearing out all illegal vendors and people on the streets. This is not the first time an initiative like this has taken place, but it is the first time that a program has been put in place to keep a place which has been cleared from filling up again. They started at midnight, so I figured that they'd be busy downtown all day. But that was not the case. By lunchtime some police had made it the 15 minutes from downtown to my house. When I returned home from class for lunch today, I found the shoe tree in front of my house gone. There is a big tree in front of my house that had hundred of shoes hanging from it. There were always people there selling the shoes. Sure, it's not exactly legal, but as you can tell from the paragraphs above, that isn't exactly unusual. Anyway, when I arrived home the tree was visible because there were no longer hundreds of shoes hanging off of it, and the stand is demolished and laying on the ground next to the tree. I also found out that my friend who lives next door to us was the one in charge of that tree and he has been taken in by the police. So I'm waiting to find out what's going to happen with him. There's tons of illegal activity here (vendors, taxis without permits, child labor, etc) and the police either turn a blind eye until something bad happens or they fine the people (pocket the money) and let them continue their activities. So this really is quite a change from usual.

Not to mention that I have no idea where all these people are going to go when they're cleared out. I've heard people say that they hope they go back to the villages. A lot of them aren't Senegalese, but are Malians, Guineans, and such without homes here. Not to mention that their way of making money has been taken away. I don't see how this program is actually going to work, but we're all waiting to see how things progress. It was a Presidential decree that the governor of Dakar approved, so it didn't go through the national assembly. (Sidenote: the governor of Dakar happens to be the brother-in-law of my morning French professor). The morning papers were filled with articles about the current situation, the decree, and the potential impact of all of this.

On the other hand, I'm very curious to go downtown later tonight and see the status of things. Some people I've talked to are excited because they say it will make the city more like what it used to be without all the overcrowding and the dirt, when sidewalks were clear and people compared it to European cities. We shall see...