eviction


I was just starting the last week of my assignment in Mali when I received an awful message on the WhatsApp group of my flatshare in Dakar.  There are four flatmates: a Senegalese lady who rents the entire flat from the owner, and three of us who have individual contracts with her - the sub-tenants.  So we each pay her rent on a monthly basis for our rooms and use of shared facilities, and she pays rent to the owner.

Or at least she should do.  It turns out that she hasn't been paying it for some months, perhaps as long as six months, and so the owner turned up on Monday last week with some strong men, forced entry, and removed all of the contents of the flat.  From curtains and furniture to food and clothes - all of which was dumped in the street outside.

Thankfully a friend of mine in Dakar was on hand to take a taxi to my building - above her photograph through the from window of the taxi - to try to gather what she could of my possessions, to be stored in her flat.  I owe her a lot...

It turns out that during my absence the situation in the flat had been worsening, with days with no electricity, or no wifi, because she wasn't paying any of the bills.  So my two fellow sub-tenants had each given notice, and neither had paid their final month's rent (so as to recover their one-month deposits), leaving the prime tenant with no funds to pay the rent - although how relevant this is I don't really know, given that she hasn't been paying it for some months.  During this time she has been unemployed, and there have been problems with her ex-boyfriend who is apparently a former drug addict who stole money from her, and she was mugged in January, losing her identity papers and her phone.  Or at least, that is the story she told me but I cannot say I'm 100% sure that she was telling the truth.

Now I am back in Dakar, sleeping on the settee in my friend's one-bedroom flat.  Going through the stuff she recovered, throwing out the things that got broken and trying to separate the rest between things I really want to keep and things I can get rid of now that I do not have a home here.  & having to accept that there is no realistic hope of recovering the rent I'd paid until the end of the month nor of the one-month's rent I'd paid as deposit.

Deposits, which are often the equivalent of two months' rent, are rarely returned here, and so I'm not keen to seek another flatshare for what would only be a relatively short time.  I had in any case planned to leave Senegal in July, to move on to some other part of the world - Covid and wars allowing - so I am now trying to look forward rather than backward and to prepare for an earlier departure rather than mourn what I have lost.

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