Remembering and Restoration by Esteemed Educator, Kanjaba Sakeliba

The Remote Cause

Shiny, glimmering, flakes of yellow stone lie in the great Sahel basin, the affinity for which has rightfully been likened to a pathogen that gains entry into the body and promptly proliferates until its host is driven feverish and mad.

Maybe people knew it was there for a long time, or maybe they were unaware, but it is evident that for many centuries at least they were ignorant to its value. That is, until one day when some man, likely a young-ish Malinke man, who had travelled just enough beyond the limits of his village to know that this rock was in fact gold and that if he processed it in the correct fashion it might just make him into one of the richest and most powerful men in all of the Sahel, came and dug it up.

Not much is actually known about this man or about the day he installed the first vestige of artisanal mining in the region.  He might have told a few close friends so they would come to lend a hand in the manual labor; friends he thought he could trust. Likely he did not yell it to the world for mortal want of not wanting to meet his maker in cold blood as well as extortionate want of maximizing time for him and his buddies to extract the precious metal for their own before the area was over-run with smart-to-the-prospect prospectors swooping in from all directions and the even smarter retailers that came to sell them things.  Either way, in eventuality, people did come.

The consequences of this are multitudinous and diversiform. They include: a river of migrants and languages and cultures all flowing into a single, churning sea of greed and lawlessness; dirt, plastic and human excrement filling the streets, each day a layer higher; young bodies, once healthy but weakened by lack of nutrition, betrayed by their filth into the folds of grave fever, sweating, aching, puking, shitting illness in the form of typhoid and other diarrheal diseases; the presence of a crop of heavily make-up-ed ladies in tight pants that presumably have been stolen from their homes far away (i.e. Nigeria) or otherwise bamboozled and brought to Senegal under false pretenses promising more than the life of prostitution and disease they have come to know; extended families of subsistence farmers from small African villages that for the first time in their bantam lives are able to hold money in their hands and decide what to spend it on; alcoholism born in young male miners grappling for methods of coping with the solitary and grim life they have chosen far away from family and any notion of extending unmeasured trust to your neighbor; fights born from the rage that alcohol insights in these same young men that hate themselves for turning to alcohol when their religion strictly prohibits it and additionally who cannot handle their drink; pervasive, permeating , and potentially irreversible poisoning of the environment – soil, water and air – by the toxic fumes of mercury wafting out of the homes of the so-called “gold-washers” whose intended task is to distill gold from soil; rampant corruption on the part of police men who, like everyone else, seize the opportunity for personal gain; exploitation of people who once owned the land by common law but who’s government betrayed them through written law to sell expansive tracks of it to large, international mining companies; and a car accident in which a gold-mining truck belonging to one of these large, international mining companies struck a car carrying four hospital workers on a supervision trip, decapitated some, mangled others and sent all to a fiery death in a flipped automobile they could not escape from.

The Place

Saraya is a village of 3000 people proximally and equidistantly located to the borders of both Mali and Guinea in the southeast corner of Senegal. You could not justifiably claim this place is a common destination but neither could you argue against the claim that many people visit.  Its location on the national highway, the major route used to connect several landlocked African countries with Atlantic Ocean ports, and its proximity to the booming gold industry usher many people within its limits, if only for a short time.

              Houses are simply constructed, circular cement rooms with thatched roofs, a style that seems to have not gone out of style since it became a style somewhere in the early age of man. Surrounding the habituated space is many hectares of deforested African bush and rolling hills.

              Having recently been promoted to the status of “District Capital”, the village is now home to the offices and homes of the District Prefect and Sub-Prefect as well as the office of the Mayor, a police station, a high-school, a hospital and the offices of several mining companies and NGOs. That being said, not a lot happens there and nothing happens quickly. The high noon-sun will still sway people out of offices and into siestas while the limited water, limited electricity, limited education and limited opportunity may keep them from going to an office in the first place.

The Men

A significant majority of Sarayangolu, or the people of Saraya, are Malinke; peanut people, subsistence farmers. Their language dominates daily life and transactions but they are not alone. Pulaars, speakers of Pulafouta, are identifiable by their scars in double, vertical, parallel lines just over each of their temples, the grazing animals that are inevitably nearby, and their skin, just a shade lighter than the rest presumably due to friendly fraternization with their long-time livestock trading partners across the Sahara in the Arab parts of northern Africa. The Wolofs mostly come from Dakar, the country’s flourishing capital, and often come unwillingly as a part of a contract for government service as a soldier, doctor or teacher. Their fashion, with a greater western influence demonstrated by the jeans and suits they don in place of or in combination with more traditional tunics, makes obvious their alien-ness, as does their indisposition or inability to drive their tongue to navigate the local language. A handful of others are present as well: the estranged artisanal miners coming from other Francophone countries like Mali, Burkina Faso or Cote Ivoire; the estranged industrial miners coming from South Africa or Canada; the estranged prostitutes from Nigeria; and the estranged Peace Corps volunteers from Albany, New York and San Francisco, California.

The Woman

              Kanjaba Sakeliba is most assuredly one of those people that learned to talk and laugh loudly in order to fill the space her flesh and bones do not occupy.

              While she only attended school long enough to learn to read and write and a few other things, her subtle sagaciousness is undeniably evident. She speaks four languages fluently, weaving in and out of them with ease, holding simultaneous, multi-lingual conversations.  And there is a look in her eye, somewhere between a twinkle and a black hole, that acknowledges receipt of even the most inconsequential pieces of information and reveals her aptitude for critical thinking.

              She is the mother of several small children who she governs with an assumption of ridiculousness; all mal-intended or mal-consequented actions are met with a toss of the head, a swat of the air with her hand and a truncated cackle followed by an exclamative version of the child-in-question’s name with extraordinarily extended vowels (i.e. Diaabouuuuuuuuuuuuu!).

              She is also noticeably floppy. With muscles apparently loose like a yogi, she seems to regularly relinquish some control of the vast network of nerves and neurons that infiltrate her limbs to the incontestable power of gravity. This may make her initially seem un-sturdy but one would be wise to take a second glance and realize that her floppiness absorbs all shocks, like a Sealy Posturpedic, and nothing could ever detach her feet from the ground without her consent.

              She is a matrone, a minimally trained but exceedingly skilled midwife. And she regularly leads very liberal conversations in a conservative community with grace and ease to educate community members about sex and family planning.

The Severed Accord

              Some time back, Kanjaba Sakeliba was invited by a sage femme, a highly trained midwife whose job is comparable to that of an American OB/GYN, by the name of Madame Diarra, to attend a training about the intersection of HIV and sexuality.  For this training she would receive a free trip to Kedougou, she would get to stay in a (relatively) fancy hotel with air conditioning and eat (relatively) fancy food with fresh vegetables and meat in addition to receiving a stipend for participation. She would get all this on the condition that she would return to Saraya to herself lead a series of educational workshops with community members to disseminate further her newly acquired information.

              Kanjaba Sakeliba, being both passionate about sexual health and passionate about the health of her community, would have been willing to lead such discussions without all the perks, although the perks being fine enough to brag about among friends and neighbors also kept her from renouncing them.
Furthermore, Madame Diarra was going to accompany her in attending the training which assured the event would be most enjoyable given her gregarious personality, endless strings of jokes, contagious laughter and authentically unreserved compassion. While one was technically the boss and the other the worker, nothing in the daily interaction of the two women demonstrated that this technicality held any significance to either of them. They were friends as well as co-workers. And they had been both for many years.

Madame Diarra intended to help Kanjaba Sakeliba conduct the educational workshops upon their return from the training but she died just a few days before their planned execution in a car crash with 3 other hospital employees and a chauffeur, struck by a gold mining truck on their way to do a supervision trip.

The Option Play

              Kanjaba Sakeliba was stunned by the loss of one for whom she held such high esteem, had such great respect, and had shared so many fond memories. Like other friends and co-workers of the deceased, she spend several days, in and out of tears, expending all of her energy trying not to think about the accident while finding herself exclusively thinking about the accident from the break of day to the washing over of night. She was silent save for the moments she spent with the affected others when they would revisit details of the accident again and again to ensure its veritability.

              In one such session of pandering disbelief, this one intermixed with anecdotes relaying affectionate memories as well, Kanjaba Sakeliba happened to mention to a friend and co-worker, a strange white girl from a faraway place who had inexplicably decided to come live in her village for two years named Diabou Tounkara, the time that she had spent with Madame Diarra at the HIV training. Three days, she noted, were spent with the two of them rolling in laughter, inside and outside the classroom. They learned all there was to learn for as long as the instructor stood to instruct and then they would retire to one another's company.  Throughout the occasion, Madame Diarra’s kept a kind eye turned on Kanjaba Sakeliba to ensure she was more than comfortable as she was not so used to travelling away from home as Madame Diarra was. This deed did not go unnoticed by Kanjaba Sakeliba, nor did could their camaraderie be forgotten.  In a long string of resulting pities following the accident, one that Kanjaba Sakeliba expressed was that the educational talk could not now happen because Madame Diarra was not able to supervise.

              Diabou Tounkara, herself weighed down by loss of the same close friends and co-workers and feeling sheer helplessness due to her ineffectualness to effect any action that would rewind time and un-do the accident, leaped upon this verbal concession of Kanjaba Sakeliba as an opportunity simply to do something.

The Method

              One hot, but not oppressively so, Tuesday afternoon, Kanjaba Sakeliba summoned a group of 10 couples to her compound. She provided each individual with a chair in the shade and faced them all in one direction where she subsequently took her place to begin instruction. She began by reading through the material she received at the training in French and then translated everything to Malinke to begin the discussion.

              Together the group discussed items such as: sex; what is sex; the differences in male and female sexuality and sexual discovery; the interplay of sexuality and risk of HIV; and strategies for protecting oneself and their partner from HIV.

              At the end of this discussion when all threads of thought and discussion had been exhausted, Kanjaba Sakeliba invited Diabou Tounkara to give a demonstration on the utilization of condoms. Diabou Tounkara, unabashed by the conservative views or modest behaviors of the people in the community which she inhabited took the stage. She had spent the better part of the afternoon wandering the market place to identify and purchase penis-shaped eggplants, potatoes, carrots and nave which she distributed among the discussion participants along with condoms to have them follow-along in a hands-on fashion. She then lead the group through each step in detail.

The Donkey Dick

              The nave in particular garnered a great deal of attention for its sheer girth. While its shape was perhaps the most true to expectation, the size was as if someone has simply photocopied an appropriately-sized tuber at 200% magnification.

              Several participants noted that the condom wouldn’t be able to fit on the “donkey dick” because the dick was simply too big. Diabou Tounkara however, stubborn as an ass herself, used the attention and skepticism of the crowd as a teachable moment. After successfully pulling the condom on over the end of the enormous tuber, she reminded the disbelievers that no man they should ever meet can claim that a condom is too small for him after what they had just witnessed.

It Goes On

One can only speculate what exactly Kanjaba Sakeliba was thinking throughout this endeavor or how exactly she felt when it was completed; whether walking with a ghost of a friend in the steps of their unfinished work is plagued by a constant chill of the absence of their form en vie or whether that ghost may somehow use its substance to fill in whatever holes have temporarily been bored into you by grief and help you carry yourself to the finish line.

 What is clear is that action bore freedom. It proved that time goes on, work goes on and by no great leap of deduction, life goes on as well.