My activities in Dakar

I had gotten it into my head to find two activities to do in Dakar: African dancing and djembe. I wanted to keep playing music since I was playing piano back in Belgium.

Djembe:

It wasn't too hard to find a djembe teacher thanks to my colleague. It was a member of his family who asked me and for once I didn't have the impression of being scammed since he was giving me the class for free, for pure love of art. I liked going a lot (2 hours per week), since it was new to me and my teacher showed me some nice spots. He lived on the outskirts of Dakar, in a bit called ‘les parcelles’. ‘Les parcelles’ are divided into many “units” which all have a number. Unit one, unit two, … thirteen, fourteen… To get there you have to take the multicoloured buses as the public buses do not go there. The outskirts have a way more “city of sand” vibe than the centre itself, as some units are by the side of the sea. It could be heavenly if there wasn't trash everywhere. I actually remember the first time I went to the seaside there, I saw the prettiest sunset with the sun setting on the sea. But there was a little mound of sand in front of me, I walked passed it and surprise! A big row of trash in front of the sea :s

And yet it was in front of this view that I was playing djembe and I got used to it. The kids played football in front of the ocean and sometimes I went swimming. I have great memories of it. Sometimes when they heard me playing lively rhythms they started dancing along! It was great!

Dancing

The second project I had was to learn how to dance. To be clear, lessons of African dancing in Europe are “embellished” or fitted to suit European culture. In Senegal, dance is everywhere: in school, once a week we would sing and dance one after the other in the middle of a circle made by the teachers and the students. Dance is also present in Church (the people I was associating with were evangelists and I pushed my curiosity a bit further and went in to see what was going on in Church). It was also very present in houses, on television, in Senegalese music videos and more.

But finding a dancing lesson was hard because it is something that people do naturally, they don’t have lessons and especially not for money. Another one of my colleagues (actually a teacher who had braided my hair) offered to give me lessons. I accepted with a bit of reluctance… She seemed to totally improvise and offered me to go to hers so that she could give me lessons on the roof of her house…lol (because the roofs are really low). And she asked for lots of money for the lessons. Well, probably what you would pay in Belgium let’s say so I didn't know if I would accept it as I didn't have that much money at the time and was saving up to travel over the week ends.

So, I hadn't made any commitments yet. In the end, I went there with an English friend. Sadly, the house was very very far away, we were on the bus for almost an hour and then we also had to come back to Dakar. I was thinking of her having to do this journey every day to go to school, horrible!

We therefore arrived at hers a bit later, around 2 pm. We then introduced ourselves to her family. They were all in front of the television, on a carpet. There were only two sofas as furniture. It’s a thing in third-world countries I think (I saw this in Asia and Morocco too): they don’t have furniture but they have a TV :s. The family was very kind, the dad had taken the sofa, you could see he was the master of the house, it was impressive. You can see them on this picture:

They invited me and my friend to share their meal with them, of course… No need to remind you of how generous Senegalese people are. We ate Thieboudienne, rice with onion, carrot and fish sauce. A delight. I laughed a lot seeing the kids attack the food with their bare hands full of sand because they’d been playing outside.

We then went straight to the point: dancing. We went on the roof for it because it was flat and big which made the perfect dance floor. However, the class wasn’t what I expected. There was no radio or anything so my colleague’s brother was playing djembe and we were learning the moves to the rhythm.

In the end, we only did an hour of dancing because it was already getting dark. A little bit disappointed so I decided to not go back because two hours of travelling and everything, it was long for basically nothing. And it was a bit embarrassing because the brother in question was in front of us and looking at us dancing, here’s a picture of the musician:

And the picture of the view from the roof. The houses in Senegal are low as you can see. What is odd, is that they leave the scaffoldings to finish the construction later…

So, I didn't have a dance lesson in Dakar in the end… But oddly, it’s not that hard to find the rhythm!

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