Africa Archive

NYT:

DAKAR, Senegal — From the air, this sprawling city looks like a metropolis on the move, a buzzing quadrilateral jutting into the Atlantic. Cars speed along a supple, newly reconstructed four-lane highway that hugs the rugged coastline. Cranes dot the seaside, building luxury hotels and conference centers, as investors from Dubai revamp the city’s port, hoping to transform it into a high-tech regional hub.

But on the ground the picture shifts. Jobless young men line the new highways, trying to scratch out a living by selling phone cards, cashews and Chinese-made calculators to passers-by. The port is full of imported food that is increasingly out of reach for most Senegalese.

Dakar will soon have a glut of five-star hotel rooms, but rising rents have pushed the city’s poor and even middle-class residents into filthy, flood-prone slums. Shortages of fuel mean daily blackouts.

It is hard to escape a sense of malaise that has settled over Senegal, one of Africa’s most stable and admired countries, a miasma of political, economic and social problems as unmistakable as the fine dust that blows in from the Sahara every winter, blotting out the sun with an ashy haze.

This month the sense of crisis reached a head, when a coalition of political and civic groups began a national conference to reassess the country’s direction. The government, seeing it as a provocation, refused to participate.

All of which raises the question: If hardship and tension are vexing Senegal — a former French colony that has never known a coup d’état or military rule, and for 48 years has been one of the most stable, peaceful and enduring democracies in a region so long beset by tyranny and strife — what could that mean for its more troubled neighbors?

This question has become all the more pressing with the implosion of Kenya, once East Africa’s oasis, into ethnically driven electoral violence earlier this year, and South Africa’s recent descent into anti-immigrant rage.

Senegal’s chattering class is increasingly worried that the country’s long run of relatively good luck could also run out.

“After years of sunshine, we have so many clouds gathering over us in Senegal,” said Abdoulaye Bathily, secretary general of Senegal’s Movement for the Labor Party, one of the parties that joined with President Abdoulaye Wade’s coalition in 2000 but have since broken with him. “We are lost, adrift. And if we can’t make it, what country can?”

There’s a fantastic piece in today’s Times about the sad, sorry state of universities in Africa, and particularly, Senegal:

Africa’s best universities, the grand institutions that educated a revolutionary generation of nation builders and statesmen, doctors and engineers, writers and intellectuals, are collapsing. It is partly a self-inflicted crisis of mismanagement and neglect, but it is also a result of international development policies that for decades have favored basic education over higher learning even as a population explosion propels more young people than ever toward the already strained institutions.

The decrepitude is forcing the best and brightest from countries across Africa to seek their education and fortunes abroad and depriving dozens of nations of the homegrown expertise that could lift millions out of poverty.

Having attended one such African university, the Université Gaston Berger, which was repeatedly touted as the “best in West Africa,” I can attest to the fact that the conditions are not great. We didn’t have the same overcrowding problems that Lydia Polgreen reports are going on at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, although there were reports of a shortage of rooms. That said, there’s terrible mismanagement, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t have a roommate (remember I said there were room shortages) for the bulk of the year — in a room designed for two.

But I think one aspect that the article doesn’t articulate at all is the fact that African universities, from my experience, doesn’t facilitate critical thinking at all. All of my classes were taught by rote — the professor would lecture, and we’d copy, verbatim, what he said. The exam? An oral exam where we’d have to basically spit back what he’d said. I still have no idea what my grades were from my Senegal days. There was no discussion, no dialogue, no real learning of any kind.

I still can’t tell you one bit of information I recall that I got in a Senegalese lecture hall — but I learned a heckuva lot while being there.