by Keisha Bush
Walking down Avenue Cheik Anta Diop, Ibrahimah and Étienne approach a nightclub, Just 4 U. The club is hopping every night of the week. The clinks of glasses and the aroma of good food float from inside along with music from live performances that range from local hip-hop bands to international megastars such as Youssou N’Dour. The club draws large diverse crowds of locals and expats alike, a perfect recipe for begging. During the daylight hours though, the space is still and empty.
“Ibrahimah, watch out!”
Étienne yanks his cousin by the arm as a hail of rocks showers the streets, flying above their heads, streaking against cars, and landing at their feet. Dakar University students are commencing an all-out attack on the pedestrians and traffic. A rock sails across the sky and crashes through the passenger-side window of a taxi. Taken by surprise, people run for cover. A short, stocky Senegalese woman is knocked to the ground after getting hit in the head with a rock. Anything the university students can find flies through the air and onto the road in front of them: chairs, wood, stones, pieces of the cement foundation from the dilapidated buildings on campus. Cars parked near the main entrance are flipped. Tires are burned. Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop becomes a war zone of disaster and havoc. Étienne and Ibrahimah run along with a crowd of adults toward the nearest side street.
Students line up inside of the black iron fence that protects them from the repercussions of the outside world. On the far western side of campus another large mass of students has strategically lined up along the inside of the fence facing La Corniche and launches a coordinated attack onto the passing traffic. Anyone foolish enough to try to pass by the university bears the burden of the angry assault. Busted car windows, dented rooftops—bleeding bodies stagger away. Backed-up traffic leaves those unable to maneuver fast enough in harm’s way, and the energy of the rioters reignites with the sound of every window breaking or pedestrian screaming out in pain.
Ibrahimah is enthralled by the movement and chaos. It reminds him of the cartoons he watches on television at Moustapha’s house, but now the action is right in front of him.
“Étienne! This is better than la télé at Moustapha’s house!”
He and Étienne duck down behind a car, watching in fascination as a group of eight male students exits the campus gate, eyes darting in all directions. In one deft move the group flips a car over, busts out its windows with their feet, and throws pieces of lighted wood inside to set the vehicle on fire, along with several old tires and a mound of days-old trash waiting to be picked up by the sanitation department. The massive crowd of students lets loose a resounding cry of victory. The perpetrators run back inside the gates as the shower of debris from the other students resumes onto the emptying streets, damaging the business facades directly across from the school.
“Étienne, look there.”
Ibrahimah points to a student throwing a chair from the balcony of a dormitory.
“I see. Look!” Étienne points to another student jumping over the fence to return back to the safety of the campus.
“Why are they doing that?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is fun!” Ibrahimah says.
“It’s not fun. They’re going to get in trouble. Look!”
Big black Hummers roar down the road and military men in riot gear, strapped with large black guns to match, pour out of the vehicles. The soldiers shout at the small groups of nosy pedestrians to clear the area immediately. Large bazookas are pulled from the vehicles and pointed toward the gates.
A bazooka fires off. Boom! Silence. Boom! Silence. Boom! Large fireballs shoot out over the campus gates toward the massive crowd of students. The students fall back. When the fireballs cease, the students resurge with more stones and debris. A second bazooka is brought to the front line. Boom! Boom! The students scream as they choke and cough, the gas constricting their air passages. The students run away, toward the center of campus, away from the soldiers’ line of sight.
“I want a gun like that.”
“Me too. That gun is bigger than you!”
“It’s not!”
“I’ll shove you into the gun and shoot you off into the sky!”
Ibrahimah crosses his arms and pouts at Étienne. “No! I’m big. Don’t shoot me!”
“Don’t cry! When you get big, you’ll shoot a gun like that.” Étienne pats his cousin on the shoulder and smiles at him. “Don’t be a baby. Look! They’re trying to stop the fire.”
Ibrahimah forgets his anger as he watches the car burn; fire shoots up into the air from the blaze and disappears before his eyes. He has never seen anything so fantastic. The abandoned road is littered with destruction and debris.
The winds shift and push the tear gas back onto the soldiers, but face masks help protect their eyes and lungs. The invisible gas hits Étienne and Ibrahimah with a start. Ibrahimah begins choking and coughing, his eyes aflame with the burn of poison. He and Étienne’s hiding place is no longer a refuge from the violence before them.
“Étienne, it hurts!”
“Let’s go!”
They run down Boulevard de St. Louis with other startled pedestrians on their heels.
“What’s going on? Why are my eyes burning?” an older woman asks.
“Tear gas to run the students off. The wind pushes it back onto us!” a man says, rushing past her.
The older woman starts to cough and leans over to spit. Ibrahimah and Étienne walk for a while in search of cleaner air to breathe as they wait out the pain in their throats and sting in their eyes. The sounds of rebellion can be heard throughout the neighborhood. When silence washes over the city for ten minutes or more, hearts skip a beat in hope that the students have retreated. Étienne and Ibrahimah pass by a woman selling peanuts and buy themselves two packets. Ibrahimah’s heart is still racing with adrenaline. An old man sits with his transistor radio on, listening to the newscast.
“Citizens should stay inside. Traffic is backed up on both the Eastern and Western sides of Dakar. Travel between downtown and the rest of the city is impossible. Reports from the local hospital have estimated more than two hundred and fifty people have been rushed to the emergency room with injuries, several of them severe.”
“Those troublemakers should be shot! Business has to go on! People have lives. Those students create a ruckus over every small issue there is to complain about,” the old man says.
“I hear they were fed rotten meat and many students got sick,” the peanut lady says.
“So, that makes it okay to throw food into the streets and attack innocent people? The military should be allowed to go on campus. That would immediately end this charade.” The man scoffs and waves his fist in the air.
The woman shakes her head. “Before the law was enacted the police brutalized the students. It is right the president does not allow the police on campus.”
“But the students take advantage and we are the ones to pay! Remember when they hijacked a bus full of people and kept them hostage on campus? Or when they kept the chancellor hostage in his office for several days? They should be jailed, not given scholarships for their silence.”
“I agree, it’s a problem. They should just stop giving the scholarships,” the woman says.
“Hmph, if it were that easy. These bastards will riot until the president breaks. Police force is what they need.”
Ibrahimah looks at Étienne with his eyebrows raised as they walk away.
“Students should be shot!” Ibrahimah mocks.
“One day I’m going to be a soldier. I’ll shoot big guns and drive a big car,” Étienne says.
Ibrahimah finds this amusing and laughs.
“Why are you laughing?” Étienne says, frowning.
“You’ll never drive. You’ll crash into the students and they’ll go flat!” Ibrahimah doubles over in laughter.
&nb
sp; “I will drive one day! But I like the idea of making stupid people flat with big car tires!”
By nine o’clock the students calm down and the boys spend the evening begging and comparing notes with Fatik and the others about what they saw and heard. But by noon the next day, the students commence rioting again and for the next six hours havoc rains down onto Dakar; citizens are caught in the crossfire. Again, the military fires shells filled with tear gas to subdue the rioters.
“The students are stupid. They hurt too many people for no reason,” Étienne says as they make for cover.
Ibrahimah learned his lesson when the tear gas hit them the first time, so today, they visit Moustapha in hopes of eating a decent lunch and tapping into their stash of money. With the raised quota of four hundred francs, along with the difficulty of getting money post-Ramadan, and in addition to the chaos of the rioting students disrupting the flow of life in Dakar, the boys have been feeling the pressure more than ever. Many of the boys have been coming back short, and Marabout’s wrath has been seemingly at an all-time high, so Ibrahimah and Étienne keep to themselves more than ever. Often, they are the first boys back home in the evenings and have found that this allows them more ease because Marabout is not so angry yet. The radio plays while Marabout Ahmed counts their money.
“In a highly strategic move the students have pushed the bar. Four days of riots, causing millions of francs in damage, cutting off businesses, and causing foreign investors and local NGOs to threaten the president with flight if something is not done to rectify the matter. The word from the president’s office is that there will not be a tuition hike. The matter first surfaced when the university’s bursar’s office, supported by several banks, requested an eighteen-hundred-franc hike in tuition, to a total of sixty-eight hundred francs. The inconvenience for the bursar’s office and the burden on local banks to produce the outdated and low-circulated coins twice a year caused a massive and brutal uproar on the campus of fifty thousand students and caused a pushback never seen before from students at the university. The chancellor is in the process of trying to determine who is responsible for the riots, as several dozen students have come forward claiming responsibility, in hopes of the scholarship offers that would allow them tuition at any school in the world outside of Senegal. The—”
Ahmed turns the radio volume down and shuts his door after collecting their money. Ibrahimah and Étienne go outside and bump into Caca and Scarface, who are just arriving back to the house.
“Boy, where you been?” Scarface asks, towering over Ibrahimah.
Ibrahimah looks over at Étienne. “I’ve been right here. You’re the one just showing up—where’ve you been?”
“He has no money. Our day is hard just like yours. Someone stole from him earlier,” Étienne says, stepping in between Ibrahimah and the older boy.
Scarface puffs up his chest but then dismisses Ibrahimah with a wave of his hand and walks away.
Slow to fall asleep that evening, Étienne overhears Scarface whispering.
“Marabout wants to know why they’re never short money anymore.”
“How we find out?” Caca asks.
“We’ll follow them tomorrow.”
Maimouna’s crying fits continue. She has lost track of how long she has been in this state and is sure that someone has gone to a spiritual doctor and put a spell on her. Under no circumstances can she stop sobbing; she cannot think of what else could cause such a malady, other than the work of dark magic.
Both Fatou and Idrissa confirm her eyes still produce tears in her sleep, as every morning her pillow is wet. Drinking and eating are almost impossible, as is going about her daily chores—but it is not just the crying alone that is the problem—it is the heaving and deep sobbing that she cannot control. She is thankful sleep comes so quick, or she may have lost every one of her senses by now. Light invades the room and she brings her hand up to shelter her eyes.
“Maimouna, it’s me, Idrissa.”
She sits up in bed, sobbing.
“I’ve brought the doctor with me.”
A noise escapes from the back of her throat that sounds like a muted howl of pain.
“Young lady, you have a sickness,” the old man says.
The old man stands at the foot of the bed, his brown skin wrinkled and leathery, black eyes piercing straight through to her core. His upper body bends over in a curved arch. He taps his cane against the floor.
“Bring me a chair.”
Fatou drags a white plastic chair into the room. “Where do you want it, ton-ton?”
“Just here,” by the side of the bed.
He sits down and stares Maimouna in the face. She closes her eyes, wishing for all of this to be over. His presence compels her to open them again. She hopes he does not give her another bitter or pungent tea to drink.
“Bring me my things,” he says, turning to his grandson, who’s been standing at the door silently.
The boy brings him a sack and then sets several containers on the dresser behind him. Fatou hands the old man a cup of gingembre. He takes a long drink before handing it back to her. His stubby fingers fumble with the sack until they find their way inside, retrieving the shells and pieces of animal hair.
“Grandpa, you have everything?”
The man grunts in approval and the boy quietly walks out of the room behind Fatou. Idrissa stands at the foot of the bed.
“You have to open your heart and submit yourself fully. If you don’t believe, the magic will not work; it will turn on you like a cancer that eats the body.”
She wants him to return the dark magic back to Madame N’Diaye, surely the person who has placed this curse upon her. The old man begins to burn several sticks and sets them aside as smoke fills the space. He reaches over and drops white cowrie shells, along with the separate pieces of animal hair, into a shallow bamboo basket. He reaches into the pouch hanging around his neck and then drops several twisted and gnarled roots on top of the shells and hair. He holds the basket with a torn piece of Maimouna’s clothing out to Idrissa, who dutifully places several silver francs into it. The doctor shakes the basket to a rhythm only he knows as he mumbles indecipherable prayer verses. His eyes flutter involuntarily.
A flash of hope washes over Maimouna. She visualizes Ibrahimah coming home to her after breaking free of the chains of suffering as a Talibé. She sees her family together, healthy, with bellies full of food. Her daughters marry good men. Ibrahimah is strong. Her family is proud, God-fearing, righteous. Marabout Ahmed is dying, writhing in pain and distress, and Madame N’Diaye loses all of her children to death and sickness.
“Keep your thoughts pure, my child,” the old man says under his breath.
He lights a match beneath the basket. The cloth inside ignites and he blows on it to create smoke. He stands and walks around in a circle with the basket, then places it on the ground between himself and the bed, and stamps one foot. He sits and picks up the cowrie shells and some of the silver coins, then tosses them to the ground beside the basket, looking down at them with deep intent. He repeats this process several times, studying the manner in which the shells move and the positions in which they lie after each toss. When he is satisfied, he places the shells back into the basket. His head falls forward, then back. Within the thick smoke in the room Maimouna sees Ibrahimah appear from behind the doctor.
“My love, you’re home!”
Ibrahimah shakes his head no as he stands there looking at her with his red tin can clutched tight to his chest. The old man stands up again, and the image of Ibrahimah breaks apart within the white smoky cloud. He walks over to her dresser, where several unmarked glass containers lie, and grabs a small plastic bottle, mixing liquid from each of the three containers together. He takes powders out of several plastic bags and drops them into the mixture he’s concocting.
The old man sits back
down and sets the bottle next to him.
“Set five thousand francs into the basket.”
Idrissa walks over and places the money inside. The old man shakes the basket while he chants, then spits inside and lights the fire beneath the basket again but not as close. He hands Maimouna the five thousand francs. The money is warm to her touch.
“You are to buy food with this and feed a poor child or family. Also, buy soap and give to someone like the Talibé or those without a home. Then buy two packets of peanuts, in the shell, and give them away.”
He hands her the liquid potion.
“This medicine has many functions. Rinse your hands and feet in it while thinking of the well-being of your family.”
Maimouna grips the bottle tightly.
“Sprinkle drops throughout and around the perimeter of your home to repel evil spirits from entering.”
The old man rises.
“You understand all of my instructions?”
“Yes,” Maimouna says, the sobs ceding.
“Where is my grandson? I take my leave now. I am tired.”
Idrissa helps the elderly man gather his things and walks him out of the room.
“Fatou,” Maimouna calls out in a weak voice, attempting to get out of her bed.
When Marabout doesn’t open his door to lead the morning prayer, the boys who wake with the sun stay on the cement floor to eke out more sleep.
“Have you seen Ibrahimah?” Étienne whispers to Fatik, sitting up on his mat.
Fatik gives a knowing look and motions toward Marabout’s bedroom just as the door creaks open for Ibrahimah to slide out before it slams shut again. Ibrahimah walks over to Étienne, his eyes sleepy, his face pained. Étienne puts their mats away and rests his arm around Ibrahimah gingerly as they leave the house together. The morning air is thick with dew.
“I don’t feel good,” Ibrahimah whines.
“Let’s find food.”
They pass a large rock and Ibrahimah leans up against it, refusing to walk any farther. He has no interest in begging or walking around Dakar today. His mother pops into his mind and he wonders what she is doing. It’s too early for her to be cooking yet. He imagines clinging to her leg or drinking her milk but then he remembers: she is dead; his father too. It’s like a punch to the belly, sadness grips his body, depleting him of oxygen. He then remembers the man in the morning and the basket. He clings to the idea that his parents are better in Paradise than on Earth, but he still cannot help but yearn for his mother this morning. Just seeing her face would make everything better.