Franglais and colonial French

As I’m walking towards the Artisan’s Market with Tendayi and Aaron, we’re attacked by a viciously noxious smell. A mix of sewage, rotting seaweed, and traffic pollution – and who knows what else – it bites at our throats and lungs to the point where it’s impossible to think of anything else. The only option is gambling with held breath, terrified that I’ll have to inhale before we’ve escaped. I’m lucky, and my next breath is dominated by the relatively harmless odour of the petrol- and garbage-strewn ocean. On the way back, even with forewarning, it’s hard not to be sick.


Someone in the office organises an afternoon-long session titled ‘Myers-Briggs Personality Test’, which I do my best to avoid. But she asks me four times to go, and eventually I turn up out of sympathy. When I eventually creep into the meeting room, an hour late, I’m the only expat among 10 staff who’re being led through group exercises by an early-middle-aged Brit. The tubab (turns out that’s the Wolof for a foreigner) is clearly enjoying being the centre of attention, and he’s milking it by speaking an amazing franglais. Granted, some of the local staff aren’t fluent in English, but I’m not sure their understanding is really helped by sentences like: “Ok, regardez le projector, et vous can decidez whether vous avez un sensory ou un intuitive type de personality”. My compatriot at least has the decency to look embarrassed when I arrive and he avoids making eye contact with me. But when he reverts to speaking English, I feel I’ve spoiled his fun enough, and quietly leave.


When there’s not much to do in the evenings and weekends, work expands to fill the spaces. I’d expected the long hours in the office, but it’s the change to my life outside work that I hadn’t planned for. When I’m not studying French (which is pretty much all I do on weeknights except eat and sleep), I’m generally thinking about work. For the moment it’s a novel and fun challenge: the chance to plan more creatively than I ever can when I’m in the office. But I don’t know how long I could keep it up with so little else in my life.


My French lesson takes a turn for the surreal when the Mme Diagne pulls out a 1950s textbook, originally designed for teaching French to the natives. It’s packed with valuable phrases along the lines of: “the weaver weaves bundles of cotton” and “the ploughman ploughs the field”. I feel my vocabulary expanding in a wholly unexpected direction, and I wonder if it’s a rite of passage my teacher puts all her European students through: a sort of post-colonial revenge.

I’m reminded of the risks of making assumptions about people when I go for a drink with Tommy and a couple of his Citibank colleagues. They’re all new to Senegal, and surprise me with their conviction when one of them says he plans to ‘sort out’ this country before he leaves, and the others agree. Later, one of them corrects me when I refer to the people attacking oil installations in Nigeria as terrorists. The conversation then turns to Shell, and they’re indignant at its inhumane behaviour in West Africa.