Cultural instincts

A trip to a jazz restaurant with Amir prompts me to improve my opinion of Dakar a little more. I’ve never been anywhere in a developing country that has such excellent restaurant and bars. They’re a little repetitive: French with a preference for seafood, but all the decent ones have a lot of choice, aren’t particularly expensive, and generally serve very good meals. I may not have worked out where I can buy ingredients conveniently for cooking, but at least I can eat out well whenever I want.


Not many observations this week, as I spend much of it with Caitlin, an eloquent and pretty Harvard student, one of the two I met last weekend. A fine dinner in the Ethiopian restaurant, an evening with a bottle of wine on my roof: it’s a friendship crammed into the fleeting time we can spend together. On Thursday, she flies back to America and out of my life. My phonebook is surprisingly full, but I’m finding myself following up every opportunity for socialising, with an enthusiasm bordering on desperation. It takes more imagination to find people here, but the natural solitude of expat life (sadly, I’m no nearer getting to know any Dakarois outside the office) seems to make us all more open to spending time with one another.


I’m left with a vague feeling of unease by a friendly conversation with a middle-aged Brit during an education workshop. She warmly welcomes me to the continent, unboastingly talking about the 10 years she’s lived in Kenya. But something about the way she refers to Africa is unsettling: the image she conjures is one of an outsider, standing apart as a benevolent outsider in an undifferentiated land. I’m put in mind of the rural white settler, surrounded on his ranch by loyal servants and also of the godlike aid worker, adored by big-eyed children - the wife in The Constant Gardener. Yet this woman means nothing but to help, and no doubt is passionately anti-colonial and recognises the limits of Northern NGOs, and the importance of building up the capacity of local organisations. I wonder whether it’s ever possible, with our upbringing and cultural heritage, to break out from othering Africa, to realise that it’s no more suitable to being generalised about than is Europe.


Conversation with Caitlin turns to a friend of hers, who claims that she expects to have difficulties readjusting to eating with cutlery, rather than fingers, when she returns to America from Senegal. We make fun of the idea that whatever’s done in Africa must be more in tune with our natural instincts: as if it's artificial to do anything other than hiss to catch people’s attention, as is done here. But then I spend a morning with Amir in HLM market looking for fabric to get shirts made, and don’t fully manage to work out which are the materials that won’t look pretentious in Oxford. For her part, I suspect that Caitlin’s going to take a little time to give up her (newly-discovered, I assume) habit of using French words in English sentences, which seems natural here, but in America will come across as very affected.


At the risk of sounding a bit Daily Telegraph, my little street has reminded me how little sense of community spirit we have in Britain these days. Every day when I’m coming home from work, the kids on the street pause from playing football to say hi to me, and if I pass any of them on their own, they’ll put their hand out for a high-five: it seems no-one’s told them about Stranger Danger. I exchange asalamu aleikums with the adults, despite obviously being an outsider, and on weekend evenings, the street’s lined with people sitting outside their houses, enjoying the warm nights.