One of the advantages of taking so much time off the bikes is that both Ramadan, which started just as we first arrived in St Louis, and the rainy season are nearing an end, meaning that, when we finally do leave, our cycling lives will be a lot easier. Ramadan ends this weekend, and we’ve been persuaded to extend our time off just a little bit longer to go around to a neighbour’s for the feasting and festivities.

One way or another, we’ve spent quite a bit of time in St Louis. So much so that this tiny island – with its cobbles and shutters and mosques and cathedral and tourist touts and tat shops – is starting to feel a little like home. We have a local shop, a favourite restaurant and a little group of acquaintances here. Like everyone else, we’re woken every morning at 4am by the drummer who walks through town to rouse sleepers so they can eat before sunrise and, like everyone else, we’re blasted by an alarming siren every evening, signalling that it’s finally time to eat again.

But there are plenty of reminders that we’re not quite like everyone else; here, we’re very much tourists, part of the throng that wanders the streets taking pictures of the picturesque colonial buildings in whose colonial courtyards people sleep, wash clothes, keep goats, pound millet and generally go about their lives.

Half of St Louis’ younger generation – those that don’t fish or trade goods – seems to make their living from tourism. “What is there to do for work here?” we’ve asked a few people. “Fishing or tourism. There is nothing else”. And, unlike in much of East and Southern Africa, tour guiding here isn’t formalised; anyone who can persuade a tourist to walk with them for a while is a guide and deserves payment. Between the tourist low season and the approaching end-of-Ramadan feast (an expensive business), the tout-to-tourist ratio can get tiring.

There’s a kind of poetic justice in this though; Europeans used to come to St Louis to extract wealth from Africa. This island town was France’s first trading post in Africa, established in the second half of the seventeenth century – before Africa’s 10,000 kingdoms had been forcibly united into 50-odd (and mostly arbitrary) nations. In fact, St Louis’ history offers such a good metaphor for Senegal’s (and to a lesser extent French Africa’s) colonial history that I can’t help shoehorning in the historical blog I’ve been meaning to write for some time.

St Louis was a hub of trade and import and export; within a few blocks of our room there’s an old slave market and an old gum arabic warehouse (later a colonial postal depot and now an expensive hotel). Later, the town was a colonial administrative centre, at one time the capital of Senegal and Mauritania. Hence, also within a few blocks of our room, there’s a French-built prison (still used), a military garrison, a French school and all sorts of other judicial and administrative buildings.

St Louis was also one of France’s four ‘ communes ‘ in Africa – places whose inhabitants were considered, essentially, French; they were French citizens, they elected their own councils and they sent African deputies to the French National Assembly. (That these communes were centres for Senegal’s intellectual elite is very much in evidence in the lively conversations we’ve had with the older generation here, and that French and Africans worked and lived together is evidenced in the large number of mixed race people who live here today.)

This policy of ‘assimilation’ in Africa was part of France’s post-Revolution ideals. Later, when France acquired huge stretches of the continent, it started panicking at both the idea that African French people might outnumber French French people, and at the logistics involved in ‘assimilating’ and granting citizenship to every African in French West Africa.

So, like Britain, France rethought its colonial policy and moulded it into something so hypocritical and internally contradictory that you have to wonder how they got away with it for so long. People from the communes kept their special status but other Africans had to prove that they were sufficiently ‘evolved’ (the word used was evolué ) to deserve citizenship. Few did, and most Africans remained ’subjects’ (subject to taxes, compulsory labour, restricted movement and oppressive laws). While still claiming to want to improve the lot of Africans, France set about gearing all of its policies towards holding Africans back from attaining the education and skills needed to become French citizens – or from making awkward political demands. Much of this was going on in my grandparents’ lifetime.

My parents’ lifetime has seen St Louis becoming a city-port in independent Senegal – a process that was very different in French Africa than in British Africa. For a long time, many African nationalists in French Africa argued for an extension of the privileges enjoyed by those in the communes to the whole population, or for a cautious and conditional autonomy, rather than for all out independence:

“In Africa, when children have grown up they leave their parent’s hut, and build a hut of their own by its side. Believe me, we don’t want to leave the French compound. We have grown up in it and it is good to be alive in it. We simply want to build our own huts.” (Francophile, poet and ‘evolué’ Leopold Senghor in 1957, not too long before he became Senegal’s first President.)

And in my lifetime, St Louis has become a tourist centre, with ‘nothing else’ apart from fishing. There were high hopes for Senegal’s economy at independence, so why is there nothing else now? At and after independence, Senegal was extremely reliant on groundnut crops for its income. We’ll write more on that soon (I bet you can’t wait…) as we cycle through groundnut country but, for now, I’ll just say groundnuts aren’t drought resistant and, grown as they have been here, exhaust and degrade the soil they’re grown in. The groundnut scheme hasn’t been an all out success. But groundnuts provided pretty much the only revenue for the Senegalese government; thanks to Senghor’s policies, imports, exports and industry stayed firmly in the hands of French businessmen, who happily repatriated the profits to France, for several years after independence (meaning Senegal was a net exporter of capital for a long time). Pretty much the only strategy put in place for diversification was to encourage tourism. Thankfully, the tourists come (although I wonder sometimes whether tourism as an industry can’t be as unreliable – and as degrading – as the groundnuts. But that’s another story.).

As I say, in a few days’ we’ll be heading through groundnut country and Senegal’s interior to Touba, Senegal’s holy city and home to the most important of its Muslim brotherhoods. After that, we’ll pedal along the Gambia, and then cross back into Senegal’s Casamance region before cycling into Guinea Bissau and Guinea. But first, I have to run – we’ve accidentally invited half of St Louis around for a casserole tonight, and there are chickens to be plucked.

[Sources for historical information: Africa since Independence (Paul Nugent), The State of Africa (Martin Meredith) and The Shadow of the Sun (Ryszard Kapuściński).]

One of the advantages of taking so much time off the bikes is that both Ramadan, which started just as we first arrived in St Louis, and the rainy season are nearing an end, meaning that, when we finally do leave, our cycling lives will be a lot easier. Ramadan ends this weekend, and we’ve been persuaded to extend our time off just a little bit longer to go around to a neighbour’s for the feasting and festivities.

One way or another, we’ve spent quite a bit of time in St Louis. So much so that this tiny island – with its cobbles and shutters and mosques and cathedral and tourist touts and tat shops – is starting to feel a little like home. We have a local shop, a favourite restaurant and a little group of acquaintances here. Like everyone else, we’re woken every morning at 4am by the drummer who walks through town to rouse sleepers so they can eat before sunrise and, like everyone else, we’re blasted by an alarming siren every evening, signalling that it’s finally time to eat again.

But there are plenty of reminders that we’re not quite like everyone else; here, we’re very much tourists, part of the throng that wanders the streets taking pictures of the picturesque colonial buildings in whose colonial courtyards people sleep, wash clothes, keep goats, pound millet and generally go about their lives.

Half of St Louis’ younger generation – those that don’t fish or trade goods – seems to make their living from tourism. “What is there to do for work here?” we’ve asked a few people. “Fishing or tourism. There is nothing else”. And, unlike in much of East and Southern Africa, tour guiding here isn’t formalised; anyone who can persuade a tourist to walk with them for a while is a guide and deserves payment. Between the tourist low season and the approaching end-of-Ramadan feast (an expensive business), the tout-to-tourist ratio can get tiring.

There’s a kind of poetic justice in this though; Europeans used to come to St Louis to extract wealth from Africa. This island town was France’s first trading post in Africa, established in the second half of the seventeenth century – before Africa’s 10,000 kingdoms had been forcibly united into 50-odd (and mostly arbitrary) nations. In fact, St Louis’ history offers such a good metaphor for Senegal’s (and to a lesser extent French Africa’s) colonial history that I can’t help shoehorning in the historical blog I’ve been meaning to write for some time.

St Louis was a hub of trade and import and export; within a few blocks of our room there’s an old slave market and an old gum arabic warehouse (later a colonial postal depot and now an expensive hotel). Later, the town was a colonial administrative centre, at one time the capital of Senegal and Mauritania. Hence, also within a few blocks of our room, there’s a French-built prison (still used), a military garrison, a French school and all sorts of other judicial and administrative buildings.

St Louis was also one of France’s four ‘ communes ‘ in Africa – places whose inhabitants were considered, essentially, French; they were French citizens, they elected their own councils and they sent African deputies to the French National Assembly. (That these communes were centres for Senegal’s intellectual elite is very much in evidence in the lively conversations we’ve had with the older generation here, and that French and Africans worked and lived together is evidenced in the large number of mixed race people who live here today.)

This policy of ‘assimilation’ in Africa was part of France’s post-Revolution ideals. Later, when France acquired huge stretches of the continent, it started panicking at both the idea that African French people might outnumber French French people, and at the logistics involved in ‘assimilating’ and granting citizenship to every African in French West Africa.

So, like Britain, France rethought its colonial policy and moulded it into something so hypocritical and internally contradictory that you have to wonder how they got away with it for so long. People from the communes kept their special status but other Africans had to prove that they were sufficiently ‘evolved’ (the word used was evolué ) to deserve citizenship. Few did, and most Africans remained ’subjects’ (subject to taxes, compulsory labour, restricted movement and oppressive laws). While still claiming to want to improve the lot of Africans, France set about gearing all of its policies towards holding Africans back from attaining the education and skills needed to become French citizens – or from making awkward political demands. Much of this was going on in my grandparents’ lifetime.

My parents’ lifetime has seen St Louis becoming a city-port in independent Senegal – a process that was very different in French Africa than in British Africa. For a long time, many African nationalists in French Africa argued for an extension of the privileges enjoyed by those in the communes to the whole population, or for a cautious and conditional autonomy, rather than for all out independence:

“In Africa, when children have grown up they leave their parent’s hut, and build a hut of their own by its side. Believe me, we don’t want to leave the French compound. We have grown up in it and it is good to be alive in it. We simply want to build our own huts.” (Francophile, poet and ‘evolué’ Leopold Senghor in 1957, not too long before he became Senegal’s first President.)

And in my lifetime, St Louis has become a tourist centre, with ‘nothing else’ apart from fishing. There were high hopes for Senegal’s economy at independence, so why is there nothing else now? At and after independence, Senegal was extremely reliant on groundnut crops for its income. We’ll write more on that soon (I bet you can’t wait…) as we cycle through groundnut country but, for now, I’ll just say groundnuts aren’t drought resistant and, grown as they have been here, exhaust and degrade the soil they’re grown in. The groundnut scheme hasn’t been an all out success. But groundnuts provided pretty much the only revenue for the Senegalese government; thanks to Senghor’s policies, imports, exports and industry stayed firmly in the hands of French businessmen, who happily repatriated the profits to France, for several years after independence (meaning Senegal was a net exporter of capital for a long time). Pretty much the only strategy put in place for diversification was to encourage tourism. Thankfully, the tourists come (although I wonder sometimes whether tourism as an industry can’t be as unreliable – and as degrading – as the groundnuts. But that’s another story.).

As I say, in a few days’ we’ll be heading through groundnut country and Senegal’s interior to Touba, Senegal’s holy city and home to the most important of its Muslim brotherhoods. After that, we’ll pedal along the Gambia, and then cross back into Senegal’s Casamance region before cycling into Guinea Bissau and Guinea. But first, I have to run – we’ve accidentally invited half of St Louis around for a casserole tonight, and there are chickens to be plucked.

[Sources for historical information: Africa since Independence (Paul Nugent), The State of Africa (Martin Meredith) and The Shadow of the Sun (Ryszard Kapuściński).]