Well today I should have been in Jeddah, at the start of a tour of Saudi Arabia, but like most other trips planned for this year, it was cancelled and I am spending this holiday period at home in Senegal. Fully aware that things could be a lot worse (I could be in the UK... ) and that I therefore cannot complain, but also aware that this is the first time in my working life that I have 'wasted' leave from work by staying at home.
We can still travel around Senegal, but with a recent spike in cases (78 new cases reported today - not many in a country of 17 million, but much higher than we had been seeing until around a month ago), the government has closed the beaches, gyms and swimming pools, prohibited all live music and large gatherings, and required all entertainment venues (including restaurants and bars) to close by 11pm. So a recent idea to take the bus to St Louis to see the Christmas parades was thwarted, and there's little to do here in Dakar right now.
However it occurred to me that I had never been to the big HLM market - the best place to buy fabric, and somewhere a foreigner can walk around without being hassled in the way that they are in the centre of town, although pickpockets and opportunistic thieves are apparently common. So I went there this morning, the market within walking distance from home at this relatively cool time of year - carrying nothing except a little money well-hidden in a tight jeans pocket under a long Tshirt. No camera!
I managed to find the famous fabric section, and looked in particular at the various wax fabrics on sale. Suddenly there was a bit of a commotion in the corner of the square I was in, with a few young men running into the square. "A battle" I heard someone say, but the young men looked reasonably happy and we all went back to what we'd been doing. Not long afterwards, however, when I was browsing along one of the narrow, twisting alleyways of the market, it started to feel a bit tense. People kept looking back in the direction I'd come from (although I could see nothing of interest there), and some were packing up some of the wares they had out the front of their stalls. I couldn't find out what was going on, as no-one around spoke French and I have only around ten words of Wolof.
It seemed to calm down again, and I continued browsing, but then noticed people packing up their wares again, and I was beckoned to the back of one stall. Whilst I was there, quite a number of young men ran past, and I noticed that many of them were carrying lumps of broken paving stones in their hands. But then they passed, and the hand gestures showed me that I could go back out into the alleyway. As I continued, however, I could see that people were still packing up, and looking anxiously along the alleyway. Some stall-holders were pulling down the shutters, and locking up - and again I had to duck into a stall as some stone-carrying youths ran past. I heard someone refer to lacrymogene (tear gas in French - I guess there's no Wolof word for that) - it clearly was time to either find my way out of the market or persuade someone to shelter me behind their shutters. I saw a local woman try (and fail) to persuade a stall-holder to let her hide inside, so decided to leave, and eventually found my way out to the main road.
There I saw stones all over the place, barricades lying on their side, and heavily-armed riot police around. No smell of tear gas, however, and no sign of all the young men I'd seen running through the market earlier.
Talking to the security guard on my building, and checking an online local newspaper, I later discovered that this had been part of an ongoing dispute between the (unlicensed) street-vendors and the authorities who kept trying to 'move them on' from the places where they tried to set up. There had (at some point) been an exchange of stones and tear gas from the two sides, as well as tires set alight. It seems that I had picked an interesting day to visit the market although, perhaps fortunately, had missed the main part of the action!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment