Democracy on the Streets of Dakar

An RPCV heads back to Senegal 50 years after his service

It’s a story as old as the Peace Corps, which every generation of volunteers knows. No, not that one. Not the one about the tee-shirt, or blouse or sweater that Mom gave you last Christmas, which mysteriously disappeared when your house help returned with the laundry, minus one article. Which you eventually repurchased from the secondhand clothes stall in the market of your dusty provincial outpost.

Although my story is a story cut of common African cloth. On a much larger scale. It is the story, in part, of presidents and governance. If you served in Africa, you know them. Stories of presidents who overstay their welcome. Aging presidents long past their shelf life who cling to power. Presidents who steal or simply ignore election results. Or even change the Constitution to their liking. Presidents who became presidents-for-life. Or worse. It is the story of governance that enriches the elite, bleeds the country dry and diminishes the work to which tens of thousands of Peace Corps volunteers have dedicated two or more years of their life in the hopes of leaving their village, their town, their country of service a more educated and productive, healthier and more well-to-do place on Earth. In a word, better.

Fortunately, the country in which I served in the 1970s – Senegal – has escaped that plummet into autocracy. There have been scrapes and bruises along the way in six decades of independence from France. None more closely watched than the delayed election scheduled for February 2024, when the incumbent, term-limited and ineligible Macky Sall suddenly postponed the vote indefinitely by decree. Until people took to the streets and the Constitutional Council quickly and sagaciously stepped in and ordered elections to proceed. Barely a month later, on March 24, 2024, the 45-year-old Diomaye Faye – who only 10 days prior had been sitting in jail on charges of “spreading false news” and “incitement to insurrection” – was elected by an overwhelming majority of Senegal’s predominantly young electorate. Faye, the protégé of Ousmane Sonko (the presumed opposition party presidential candidate also released from prison but ruled ineligible to run due to the nature of alleged charges against him) promptly appointed his mentor, Sonko, as prime minister.

The author and his wife, a former French volunteer, in Marché Kermel, Dakar

In November last year, just as the Senegalese were heading back to the ballot box to validate President Faye’s popularity by handing him a convincing majority in parliamentary elections, I arrived back in-country with my wife, Marie-Hélène. She served as a French volunteer in Senegal with Volontaires du progrès. (“Volunteers for Progress” was crafted by Charles de Gaulle in 1963, in response to JFK’s creation of the Peace Corps.) We “came home” to celebrate in the place where we met fifty years ago during my Peace Corps service, and to witness what Senegal had become in this past half-century. On the eve of elections, we found the Senegalese enthusiastically embracing its democracy with an animated campaign. And while Dakar, the vibrant political and economic capital, had undergone a building boom the likes of which we could have hardly imagined, much of the countryside we toured in those two weeks remained eternally familiar. Dakar was choked by traffic – from gleaming late model Mercedes with entrepreneurs behind the wheel to decades-old Peugeot taxis, cobbled together with spare parts, wire and tape, and somehow still running on fumes. Yet, in rural towns with familiar names like Kébémer and Louga, Diourbel and Toubakouta, the horse-drawn calèche and car rapide overstuffed with travelers of modest means were ever present.

There were other familiar sights, too. Sandy passageways. Goats on the loose. Pirated electric wires running everywhere. School-age kids (who should have been in school) wandering the streets. There were things that made me both happy and sad. The sad is still the lack of sanitation. Dakar and Saint Louis (the 2 largest cities) are still littered with trash. Maybe even more littered with trash. Plastic bottles, plastic bags. Omnipresent plastic everything everywhere. Even pastoral villages in the countryside that we crossed were not spared this epidemic. On the 30 miles of dirt road to Djoudj National Bird Sanctuary one day we crossed village after village along the Senegal River. As there is no sanitation service en brousse similar to the trucks that make rounds of our cities and towns, trash disposal consists of heaps of garbage piled in open ground adjacent to huts or flimsy village walls… left to blow across the savanna in the wind. The sad is the myriad of kids wandering streets far from the encouraging gaze of a caring teacher, a book, a pencil, a chance to learn.

Despite global warming threatening the future existence and livelihood of fishermen on a spit where the River Senegal meets the Atlantic, the fishing industry persists in its low-tech form, supporting thousands of family incomes and feeding a nation whose signature dish is “thieboudien” or literally rice and fish

The happy is the warmth of the Senegalese people. The pride in their culture, so evident in the way they dress. The way they carry their heads high. The work ethic we see in the young girl who served us in a restaurant, the receptionist at the hotel desk. And even the tenacity (as annoying as it sometimes is) of Senegalese women in selling their wares to provide for their families. A week into our visit, walking through the old colonial capital of Saint Louis I followed a young man – perhaps 17-18 years old – across the bridge that spans the river from Fisherman’s Village to the mainland. He was neatly dressed and groomed, carrying a backpack, head held high with intent. Headed to class? Taught by a Peace Corps Volunteer? And I wondered what dreams he was dreaming as he walked that bridge. Perhaps some day this young man would be a teacher? A government minister? The head of an international company? An NGO? A scientist working to fight climate change? The president of Senegal? I wanted to believe there are hundreds and thousands of kids like that in Senegal because many were inspired at one point in their lives by a Peace Corps volunteer. Or maybe inspired by the student of a Peace Corps volunteer who was in turn inspired to teach the next generation of his or her fellow Senegalese.

I wanted to believe that the more than 4250 Peace Corps Volunteers who have served in Senegal over the past six decades have in some way contributed to the fact that today the country holds fast as a relatively healthy democracy and capitalist economy that is attractive to economic investment. Volunteers who have served as teachers, midwives, health care workers, forestry specialists, agricultural advisors. Rural development animateurs. Sports trainers. Small business mentors.

I wanted to believe there are hundreds and thousands of kids like that in Senegal because many were inspired at one point in their lives by a Peace Corps volunteer.

I awoke our last full day in Senegal on November 22. It’s one day of the year I rarely overlook for its historical magnitude and personal significance to me. I was just 12 years old and in 6th grade in 1963. To my memory, it was a pleasantly sunny fall day in Southern California because I was eating my sack lunch outside when a classmate came running with the news that President Kennedy had been shot. It was Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, the “ask not…” entreaty, which inspired my dreams of the Peace Corps. At breakfast this November 22, 2024, I sat pondering how I had, in some sense, come full circle, back to the place where my service had begun – a half century ago – after stepping off a plane in the wee morning hours of July 15, 1973. This day was both bittersweet and pleasantly filled with memories of our nearly complete two-week visit.

As dusk settled that evening, our taxi arrives as scheduled. We pile our bags in and head off for the 30-minute drive to Blaise Diagne International Airport. I still have time to dream. My attention is out the window, staring into the eventide at the last scenes of Africa. There are so many recurring sights in passing small villages that line the road. Women sit patiently under mango trees with vegetables and sachets of peanuts, hoping for one last sale before calling it a day. Adolescent girls appear in silhouette, painted against the light of a globe hanging by a wire from the ceiling of a ragtag stall. One of them totes an infant on her back. A boy, perhaps 8 or 9 years old, walks along the roadside clutching a soccer ball, with a half-dozen friends in tow. Scenes of Senegal that come back to me again and again. And again. In the distance I see the lights of Blaise Daigne. They float like beams of light on a ship in time, rising on thermal waves of heat radiating off the desert landscape. Off to my right, I see the lights of an aircraft descending slowly towards a runway veiled in dark. I imagine a plane full of passengers in its belly. Senegalese diaspora flying back to the homeland for a visit? Businessmen in suits and ties come to do business in a country booming with population growth and emerging markets? Students flying home after schooling abroad, hoping to help build the Senegal of tomorrow as doctors and teachers and IT engineers? A Peace Corps volunteer returning to her post after a break to visit a sick family member? Or a new volunteer arriving for his assignment, not yet knowing how much over the space and time of two years hence he will be sucked into the deep hole of Africa. An Africa full of warts and waste, bribery and trash. And, also full of nervous restless youthful energy. Seductive culture. Hope. Hope that, like an African mosquito, doesn’t quite register immediately. Having slipped under the protective netting of your cultural biases and upbringing it finds its way under your skin and spreads its sweet toxin through the bloodstream. A slow-moving affliction that eventually disturbs and permanently alters your perception. It itches like hell. And it never goes away.

Timothy Rake (Senegal 1973-75) is a retired educator and freelance translator living in the Oregon wine country.