Dakar
By HUGO CHARTERIS
ON the ship's chaise-longue an ageing colon (colonial) fans herself apprehensively : 'Ce n'est pas un pays de merveilles. .' The first marvel is that one's francs are divided by two, and are called a different kind of franc. But prices remain almost the same. 'How d'you like that?' I asked one fonctionnaire. 'AN—pour nou.s it y a une correction.' For us there was no correction. A bottle of cold beer-5s. 6d.
Let economists work out the point of this. As far as I could see it's merely a tough dis- couragement to all white visitors or settlers, except those with official correction.
The next marvel was on the wharf. Twenty young mothers as gay, garrulous and coloured as parrots. They laugh, suckle and deride. They
wear a vertical dress from the hips down, a horizontal dress across the shoulders and a third piled in a brilliant crow's-nest on their head bring- ing their height in all to seven feet. A fourth dress is used to sustain the baby in perpetual piggy back, and a fifth—a transparency of gos- samer texture—cloaks the whole body. All five dresses are brilliant and different. The effect of a group, with laughing teeth, is a chemical explo- sion of colour; and it is centred on more femi- ninity than Bond Street sees in a fortnight. (Fashions. Syrian and Lebanese traders take the 100 best-looking women of Dakar, most of them prostitutes, and dress them free. Cf. London, Paris. This ensures an annual turn-over of cloth. This year the second horizontal, upper dress is off one shoulder.)
The men (who don't pay much attention to the women, which suggests they have no such desperate term as 'sex appeal') are various. Up- and-coming clerks have inherited the topi, symbol of white magnificence. (Presumably the Syrians and Lebanese played this card well.) Chiefs with big bellies and amulets strut in bath- robes, one hand clutching an evening paper in the half-nelson position, the other permanently extended in the attitude of a shocked Cecil Beaton. Medieval scholars in purple nightgowns and topis carry briefcases with the secret, it seems, of how to make gold; and small, silent Moors with marksmen's eyes look out of blue turbans that include the mouth and neck in a hypochondriacal scarf. Between them all, the French habit of greeting by handshake ends in lingering daisy-chains, sometimes across half a street.
* * Where is there a sister for the United Nations building in New York? Not in London or Paris —but in Dakar. Two B-25s could taxi abreast into the inclined plate-glass foyer. Bentleys could fit in the lifts, cricket take place on its lawns.
And in the Administration Building at last white women have got a squeak of a chance. Outside they are moulting White Sussex hens beside Golden Pheasants. Here the cool is half dark and they profit, whereas the African woman in skirt and jersey eschews the splash of her market sisters and recalls the colour scheme of the now extinct governess. Worse, the expression on her face, of female Western bureaucracy, sits her eyes, as the clothes fit her body--bleakly and partly.
A triumph. In the foyer, in the lifts of the government building and in its offices—and out- side at the little tabled cafes, cousin to Fiore and the Dome in Paris, the African woman and the African man are treated exactly as rudely and formally as the French treat each other. Perhaps the French and English, like the Greeks, are by now virtually 'coloured' as far as international snobbery is concerned. Few would agree. Any- how—whatever the reason—it is a psychological triumph for the French. As a Governor's young private secretary said, 'We don't want to leave in a hurry. If given time there need be no trouble here. We wish to base our influence on personal relations.'
Cockcrow really is cockcrow. Houses next door, apparently innocent of livestock, break into rousing chorus long before dawn. Then cement- mixers and a hundred muezzins take up the warn- ing: day is at hand. Kites and huge crows with white collars join the dust wagons, and the kites, after a few castrati wails, fall like collapsed umbrellas and nip up a sliver of carrot skin on the half-volley, and then discard it on the driver's head. Memories of Java : the tired brilliant tree flowers—and the hoiking of the night's phlegm, close at hand, where, all night, I thought there had been no one.
But this day, which has begun, is officially a big day--the Minister for Outre-mer is going to make an important speech and in the evening the Governor will give 'un cocktail.' The speech is relayed over the restaurant radio. Black, brown, pale brown and white pay no attention what- ever. Even two petits fonctionnaires with heavy tribal tattooing, stiff white collars, bulging brief- cases and Edwardian-cut trousers, pay no atten- tion. 'Garcon!' one of them shouts without look- ing up, and a white waiter comes to his side.
At the cocktail no one mentions the speech or even the Minister. A detachment of Senegalese Garde Rouge in scarlet plus eights, scarlet mitres, stand, sabres drawn, in a red and black fan before the steps of the floodlit, snow-white Residence—a mouse's vision of a wedding Cake. There is lots of champagne. Chiefs as big as half '1 hippo, in crinkled sheets, talk about their fathers and their property and the past with the ecstatic confidence of English dukes. Their wives chew long, green sticks—for the gums. Everyone is very happy. The Marxist-trained deputy for
converses gravely with a white-clad white admiral, and an official says earnestly, 'We are very grateful for the Marxists. They are a relief after the humanitarian orations of some people. And they get things done.'
A hedge of sleepy blue flowers surrounds us. Trees, leafed like laburnum, are floodlit, and beyond them is a sky and sea of the deepest, blackest blue. The whites look keen, hungry and' uncertain. The petits fours and savouries have vanished, literally vanished, all down the long, thin white tables. Above us the wedding cake towers and blazes with bulbs set like luminous sequins in the roof of the perr,on.
An owlish, benevolent glow steeps the mind, and outside the giant Garde Rouge seem not to have moved a blade, a gleaming eyeball, since we went in.
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