Category Archives: Senegal

Senegal’s Mohamed Mbougar Sarr wins top French literary prize

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Prix Goncourt goes to 31-year-old’s novel The Most Secret Memory of Men, praised for its ‘stunning energy’

The Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr has become the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to be awarded France’s oldest and most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.

The award, announced on Wednesday at the Drouant restaurant near the Opéra Garnier in Paris, was hailed as “symbolic” by the French literary establishment, 100 years after the prize – presented since 1867 – was first won by a Black author.

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Two children among six killed by old landmine in Senegal

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The six people were in a horse-drawn vehicle when it hit a landmine left over from an earlier conflict in the Casamance region

Six young people were killed when their horse-drawn vehicle hit an old landmine unearthed by rain in Senegal’s southern Casamance region, according to the local mayor.

Casamance is home to one of Africa’s oldest ongoing conflicts, which has claimed thousands of lives since 1982, and the mine was believed to be a remnant from earlier fighting.

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Local Covid vaccines fill gap as UN Covax scheme misses target

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India, Egypt and Cuba among first states to develop and make their own vaccines as Covax falls behind

Developing countries are increasingly turning to homegrown Covid vaccinations as the UN-backed Covax programme falls behind.

While western countries roll out booster jabs to their own populations, Covax, which was set up by UN agencies, governments and donors to ensure fair access to Covid-19 vaccines for low- and middle-income countries, has said it will miss its target to distribute 2bn doses globally by the end of this year.

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For African nations, capital punishment is a grim colonial legacy that lingers on | Dior Konaté

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On the World Day Against the Death Penalty, the tide is turning in west Africa against this tool of colonial repression and racism

In July, Sierra Leone became the 23rd African country to abolish the death penalty. Although its use across the continent has dwindled – thanks to concerted efforts from human rights organisations and governments – the death penalty remains on many more countries’ statute books due to its strong colonial legacy.

During the colonial period, punishments that were being abandoned in Europe found fertile ground in Africa. Among them was the death penalty, which was deployed as a key element in the mechanism of colonial repression.

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Greenpeace stops fish oil tanker in Channel in protest over African food insecurity

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Fishmeal exports to EU from west Africa have grown sharply, depleting stocks and posing threat to livelihoods

Greenpeace activists have intercepted a 96-metre tanker in the Channel carrying fish oil from west Africa to Europe, to highlight the threat they say industry poses to food security and to livelihoods in the region.

Trade figures analysed by Greenpeace Africa show that fishmeal and fish oil exports from Mauritania alone have grown by an “alarming” 16% during 2020. Activists and locals say the industry pushes up prices and depletes stocks of fish eaten by local people across poor communities in Mauritania, Senegal and the Gambia.

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‘Ecofeminism is about respect’: the activist working to revolutionise west African farming

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Mariama Sonko is an unstoppable force who continued her work even when she was ostracised by her community in Senegal

Outside Mariama Sonko’s home in the Casamance region of southern Senegal pink shells hang on improvised nets that will be placed in mangroves to provide a breeding spot for oysters.

Normally, women collecting oysters chop at the branches – a method that can harm the mangroves. But these nets allow them to harvest sustainably, says Sonko, who is trying to revolutionise agriculture in west Africa.

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When shame kills: why do so many mothers in Senegal feel forced to murder their babies?

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Photographer Maroussia Mbaye spoke to women who said crushing social stigma, poverty and lack of traditional support systems had left them with no choice but to commit infanticide

Mbeubeuss is one of the biggest rubbish tips in Africa and Senegal’s largest open cemetery for murdered children. In the past three years, the bodies of 32 infants have been recovered from the site by the waste-pickers who work there.

Looking at the high rate of infanticide in Senegal, it seems the main reasons for it are shame about pregnancy outside marriage and a loss of traditional support for young women.

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‘Father of African cinema’ Ousmane Sembène at work – in pictures

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A look back at the career of Senegal-born film director Ousmane Sembène as his 1968 film Mandabi is released in the UK for the first time

•Mandabi is released on 11 June in cinemas, and on 28 June on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital platforms.

•Peter Bradshaw on Mandabi: classic about colonialism resonates today

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Barcelona street sellers take on Nike with own-brand trainers

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Ethical streetwear co-operative Top Manta says profits will help migrant vendors ‘become legal and work for a decent wage’

After years of selling cheap copies of designer shoes and handbags, Barcelona’s street vendors have set up a co-operative and launched a line of trainers under the brand name Top Manta.

Unlike an earlier attempt to establish a brand in 2017 by sticking a logo on shoes imported from China, the trainers are made in Alicante in Spain and Porto in Portugal.

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Amid the Covid pandemic, Senegal women find renewed hope in fishing

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More than a thousand women in Bargny, and many more in the other villages dotting Senegal’s sandy coast, process fish – performing a crucial role in one of the country’s largest exports

Since her birth on Senegal’s coast, the ocean has always given Ndeye Yacine Dieng life. Her grandfather was a fisher, and her grandmother and mother processed fish. Like generations of women, she now helps support her family in the small community of Bargny by drying, smoking, salting and fermenting the catch brought home by male villagers. They were baptised by fish, these women say.

But when the pandemic struck, boats that once took as many as 50 men out to sea carried only a few. Many residents were too terrified to leave their houses, let alone fish, for fear of catching the virus. When the local women did manage to get their hands on fish to process, they lacked the usual buyers, as markets shut down and neighbouring landlocked countries closed their borders. Without savings, many families went from three meals a day to one or two.

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‘It’s about self-love’: the black women busting beauty myths in west Africa

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From Senegal to Nigeria, a growing wave of salons and small cosmetic companies are challenging colonial notions about how to wear and care for hair

Women kick the sand from their slippers, and ease into the cool comfort of a natural hair and skincare store in central Dakar. On the shelves are jars filled with handmade supplements of organic shea butter, coconut, castor and olive oils, sourced from across west Africa.

In floral silk hijabs and abaya dresses, the women sit on sofas near the back of the store, discussing their hair beneath a mural of poised black women and men, wearing a mixture of classic natural black hairstyles.

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Death without answers: an agonising 24-hour hunt for medical help in Guinea-Bissau

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Bernardo Catchura spent a last desperate night seeking treatment in the healthcare system he had spent decades campaigning to improve. His wife is still unsure how he died

In their 15 years together, Maimuna Catchura had not known her husband to be ill. But one night in late January, 39-year-old lawyer, activist and musician Bernardo Catchura could not sleep, and complained of severe stomach pain.

The pain forced Catchura from his bed at his house in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau’s capital. That night he would navigate the country’s medical care maze, visiting pharmacies, clinics and hospitals. Before the night was through, he even considered crossing the border into Senegal to get help.

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Chariots of steel: Barcelona’s hidden army of scrap recyclers

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Thousands of migrants play a key role in collecting Catalonia’s waste but must live on the margins

They are everywhere and yet they are almost invisible, living below the social radar as they crisscross the city pushing supermarket trolleys piled with metal tubing, old microwaves and empty beer cans.

The chatarreros are Barcelona’s itinerant scrap-metal collectors, and there are thousands of them. Most are undocumented migrants and so there is no official census, but Federico Demaria, a social scientist at the University of Barcelona who is conducting a study of the informal recyclers in Catalonia, believes there are between 50,000 and 100,000 in the region. About half are from sub-Saharan Africa; the rest are from eastern Europe, elsewhere in Africa and Spain.

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‘I woke up, he was gone’: Senegal suffers as young men risk all to reach Europe

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As tourism plummets and fishing nets go empty, more are attempting the treacherous 1,000 mile journey to the Canaries

In the old Senegalese port city of Saint Louis, 12 women step off the sun-baked street and through a doorway draped with pink silk into a dim room beyond.

After greetings are over, one by one they recount their stories. Recent memories of husbands, sons and brothers they have lost at sea, revealing precious pictures on smartphones of moments when they last cradled children or kissed their families.

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What can we learn from Africa’s experience of Covid?

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Though a hundred thousand people have died, initial predictions were far worse, giving rise to many theories on ‘the African paradox’

As Africa emerges from its second wave of Covid-19, one thing is clear: having officially clocked up more than 3.8m cases and more than 100,000 deaths, it hasn’t been spared. But the death toll is still lower than experts predicted when the first cases were reported in Egypt just over a year ago. The relative youth of African populations compared with those in the global north – while a major contributing factor – may not entirely explain the discrepancy. So what is really going on in Africa, and what does that continent’s experience of Covid-19 teach us about the disease and ourselves?

“If anyone had told me one year ago that we would have 100,000 deaths from a new infection by now, I would not have believed them,” says John Nkengasong, the Cameroonian virologist who directs the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Incidentally, he deplores the shocking normalisation of death that this pandemic has driven: “One hundred thousand deaths is a lot of deaths,” he says.

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White Colour Black review – Dudley O’Shaughnessy is one to watch

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The boxer turned actor anchors this tale of a UK photographer who travels to Senegal after the death of his estranged father

British-Nigerian director Joseph Adesunloye’s feature debut – made in 2016 but only now seeing the light of day – is the story of a London photographer travelling to Senegal for his father’s funeral. It’s a drifting movie, not entirely successful but grounded by the undeniable screen presence of boxer turned model turned actor Dudley O’Shaughnessy. (He was in the recent season of Top Boy; in his modelling days he appeared opposite Rihanna in the video for We Found Love.)

Here he plays Leke, a fashion photographer living the dream in Hackney; home is a loft-style flat overlooking the city and Leke is about to open a major show in China. The film begins with a couple of fake-feeling gallery scenes, everyone head-to-toe in black and air-kissing with extravagant mwah-mwahs (this is the art world recognisable from other movies rather than real life). Despite his success, Leke seems detached from his life in London. He is also ignoring telephone messages from Senegal, where his father is seriously ill. When the inevitable call comes – his dad has died – Leke flies to Dakar. A family friend has arranged for a taxi driver to be his guide. “What do you speak? French? Wolof?” Leke shakes his head no. “Mon ami,” says the guy. “Tu est perdu. You are really, really lost.”

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More than 700 pelicans found dead in Senegal world heritage site

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Rangers are investigating mystery deaths at Djoudj bird sanctuary, a migratory pitstop for hundreds of bird species

Seven hundred and fifty pelicans have been found dead in a Unesco world heritage site in northern Senegal that provides refuge for millions of migratory birds, the country’s parks director has said.

Rangers found the pelicans on Saturday in the Djoudj bird sanctuary, a remote pocket of wetland near the border with Mauritania and a resting place for birds that cross the Sahara into west Africa each year.

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Papa Bouba Diop, Senegal’s World Cup hero and FA Cup winner, dies aged 42

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  • Former midfielder dies after reportedly suffering long illness
  • Diop played for Fulham and Portsmouth after 2002 heroics

Papa Bouba Diop, the former Senegal midfielder who scored the first goal of the 2002 World Cup against France, has died at the age of 42.

World football’s governing body posted a tribute to Diop on Twitter. “Fifa is saddened to learn of the passing of Senegal legend Papa Bouba Diop,” Sunday’s statement read. “Once a World Cup hero, always a World Cup hero.”

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The Guardian view on Tories and migration: stop the posing | Editorial

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The drowning of a family of five in the Channel and a fire on a ship off the coast of Senegal should prompt action – ‘thoughts and prayers’ are not enough

“We don’t see migration as a problem at all: we see people dying at sea as a problem and the existence of the mafias as a problem.” Such was the view expressed last week by Hana Jalloul, secretary of state for migration in Spain. Days earlier, more than 140 people had died off the coast of Senegal, after their ship caught fire and capsized, in the deadliest shipwreck recorded this year. Ms Jalloul spoke of efforts to support the regional government of the Canary Islands, which is struggling to cope with the number of arrivals, and stressed her determination to combat organised crime. She also pointed to migrants’ crucial role in Spanish life, including as care workers during the pandemic.

British politicians could profit from studying her example in the aftermath of the drowning of a family of four Kurdish Iranians in the Channel. (A fifth member of the same family, aged 15 months, is missing and presumed dead.) Reports of the deaths of Rasul Iran Nezhad, Shiva Mohammad Panahi and their children drew forth platitudes from the home secretary, Priti Patel, about “thoughts and prayers”. But nothing said by her or Boris Johnson did anything to dispel the impression that their attitude to people trying to reach the UK to seek asylum is chiefly antagonistic. While Ms Patel repeated her opposition to “callous criminals exploiting vulnerable people”, there was no serious attempt to sympathise with the migrants’ desperation – or acknowledge that their reliance on smugglers is a matter not of accident but of political choice.

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