Footprints in the Sand
Did these children know that they had just aided in an archaeological dig whose findings could, possibly, transform the past of Senegal?
his past summer, I traveled to Senegal to work on an archaeological field project led by Francois Richard, a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, and Ibrahima Thiaw, a professor of archaeology at Dakar’s Université Cheikh Anta Diop. Senegal, a small country tucked into the western-most region of Africa (the so-called “dark continent,” depending on the textbook one reads), has something of an under-appreciated archeological history. At the time, my largest goal for this experience was to shed light on the history of a people for and about whom few historical documents exist—it was, in this spirit, an opportunity to make real-world use of my academic skills. Yet the lessons one learns in the classroom, I quickly found, do not easily translate to the field.
After managing to lose twenty American dollars in the midst (and confusion) of my arrival at Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport, I had the dizzying realization that I was not in Kansas, or at least Chicago, anymore. I was in an unfamiliar country, my knowledge of French was, at best, sub-par, and I didn’t know anyone other than two other students whose flights would not arrive for many hours. The burden lay solely on my shoulders; I was to make friends and learn to communicate with the people in Dakar—the same people whose ancestors were to be the object of my study.
From the start, the smallest tasks were made strange. Taking a taxi, for instance, required a bit of patience: After flagging down one of the many dilapidated cabs that circled the city, I had to bargain for my rate (It is a rite that seems to be inscribed onto the character of almost all sectors of business in Senegal). There was no digital ticker that slowly climbed as I’d waited at a stoplight; there was no direct fare from the airport to important landmarks; there was just bargaining. Yet as much as we tried, it was hard to haggle for good prices: Everyone in my group stood out as Americans—even me, despite my Jamaican heritage. Stranger yet was living at a Catholic mission in rural Ngasobil, not far from the city of Joal, where running water rushed sporadically through the pipes and the electricity hummed in and out as it seemed pleased to do—this not because of a lack of infrastructure, however. It’s the politics of the place: Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade, makes an absolute priority of Dakar, achieving sometimes a complete absence of water and electricity from the marginalized Serer population on the coast.
Yet I learned to adapt to the conditions, carrying flashlights to dinner for when the power would go out, and storing water so that I could take a bucket shower and have something to drink. Coming from a country where a blackout (in 2003) could be met with widespread hysteria, it felt strange to realize, firsthand, that blackouts were a fact of life. Of course, we were there to do archaeology, and we’d endure what we could to accomplish that goal.
And archaeology we did. We had been laboring for days in the blazing sun when, during one of our mapping phases, something happened that I shall never forget. While we mapped, the many local kids who played around on the beach near our site – always curiously watching our work and shyly asking questions – helped one of our groups refill an excavated unit. It was welcome help: With the addition of twelve extra pairs of hands scooping sand into a two-by-two meter pit, the team was able to finish well ahead of schedule. Yet I was deeply impressed by the innocence, and the accompanying naiveté, of their actions. Did these children know that they had just aided in an archaeological dig whose findings could, possibly, transform the past of Senegal?
When I posed the question to Professor Thiaw, he told me that the people of Senegal recognized their past only insofar as it was convenient; fieldwork like ours has the potential to raise issues involving slavery, issues that many Senegalese prefer to de-emphasize because they don’t mesh well with their contemporary view of their society. I realized that, although I had grand ideas about giving a voice to the subaltern, to re-interpreting a dominant historical narrative, the people of Senegal were largely uninterested in the history I was trying to reveal: their own. Yet this disregard does not seem unusual when one puts it into the greater, and sometimes conflated, context of Africa and its attitude towards the past. There has been a push in recent years to distance the continent from its history so that it can compete in the global market economy, unencumbered by historical politics. This act of forgetting obscures, of course, the reality that today’s Africa is a product of its past—colonial or otherwise. Without working through the pain that this past has inflicted and still inflicts on the present, Africa threatens itself with stagnancy.
