I miss Senegal

I’ve come back to an immense pile of disagreeable chores like unpacking, doing my laundry, gathering the papers for my annual trip to the Préfecture to renew my residency permit, and figuring out why Microsoft billed me twice for Microsoft Word and how to get a refund. (I bet that will require at least an hour of waiting on hold and in the end, they’ll still nick me for the 120 bucks.) I don’t want to do any of it. I miss Senegal.

I miss the bright light, the big clean white apartment looking out over the Atlantic, the pink and yellow flowers, the tall glasses of ginger and bissap juice, the excitement of seeing completely new things, the game of trying to figure out what makes Senegal tick, and my family.¹

We had such a good time.

I don’t want to know what happened to this little guy on Eid.

I can’t remotely style myself as a Senegal expert after a week. The trip was a family vacation, not a work visit. We made no effort to see anything but pleasant local attractions. I didn’t interview anyone important. In the brief exchanges I had with Senegalese citizens, my penetrating questions about the country were limited to things like, “So, do you like it here?” (Everyone said, “Yes.”) What I know about the place remains exceedingly limited.

Still, seeing a place, no matter how briefly, always gives you more of a feeling for it than you can get by reading about it in the news. For one thing, you come to believe that it really exists—it’s not just an abstraction you’ve read about that basically occupies the same ontological status in your mind as Wakanda. From now on, whenever I see an item about Senegal in the news, I’ll be especially interested in it. I’ll know who those people are. I’ll be able vividly to picture what’s going on in my mind.

Here’s a misimpression that visiting Dakar corrected for me: that Senegal is exceedingly poor. It’s not. The IMF claims that Senegal’s per capita GDP is US$4,515. In 2021, the World Bank put it at US$3,840, and the CIA gave a similar figure: US$3,500. That’s what I was expecting to see. But those numbers don’t seem right. Not from what we saw.