I think Simba works for SonicWall

Before anybody who has never been to Senegal, or any other developing country, jumps to any conclusions about the country's infrastructure, it wasn't that bad. Sure, none of the cars would pass at the DMV (I could see the road through my taxi floor once, and sometimes had to ask passing pedestrians to open the door for me from the outside), but there are places in the US where that is also the case. A good example is Matinicus Island (Don't know what that is? Buy this book. It's excellent and written by the Island's Electorial Bakerclerksmithmedic).

Anyway, because electricity was scarce, we had a hard time finding Internet, but when we did, it was still better than ALA's. It was also less censored. And I think that’s an important point to make; no disrespect to Senegal intended, but the Internet in rural Senegal is better than the Internet at ALA, which is in Johannesburg. I have been wanting to make this point for a while.

To give you a sense of just how bad ALA’s Internet is, a month after graduation, I am still delighted that I don’t have to imagine the second half of Youtube videos for myself. Fully loaded Youtube videos at ALA were as unattainable as freehand circles. In fact, I now often find myself wrong footed by the speed with which web pages load. A year at ALA accustomed me to doing practical things in between clicking on a link and actually reading it, for instance going to the bathroom, making my bed, or walking to dining hall for a sandwich. Now, the page just appears, and I’m annoyed that I can’t eat something.

But of course, it’s not the speed of the tortoise that counts, it’s the number of places he can visit, and ALA’s Internet certainly restricts the number of places one can visit; the firewall, or "SonicWall", couldn't block better if it were Iker Casillas defending a shoebox. “Jokes/Humor” is a forbidden category.

There are many other banned categories, but I am unconvinced that ALA's firewall and the rest of society are working under the same definitions.

I once had to write a paper on market opportunity in Senegal for bowling alleys (weird, I know), so I researched bowling implementation online. Astoundingly, I found what appeared to be aProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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tep-by-step business plan, only to have it blocked under the heading “Adult/Mature Content”. Just in case someone working for SonicWall is reading this, that label does not normally refer to the meaning of “mature” that is a euphemistic heading for people in their middle ages and above. “Adult/Mature Content” does not mean “webpages to do with old people”. There is therefore no reason to ban me from looking at their favorite activities. And if you are going to do that, there are other activities, such as bridge, hair growth drugs, and Gene Kelly, that are far more specifically mature than bowling.

Anyway, I thought that was pretty funny until I looked for lion drawings online in order to do research for this cartoon (I posted it a while back):

I found one with an enticing thumbnail and I clicked on it. This is a screenshot of what I got:

Whoever programmed these parameters must either be a human with weird tendencies, or a very very conservative lion.

You do not do your own laundry.

Many of my friends have asked how my three week trip to Senegal was. The short answer is “unequivocally wonderful”, but here's something a little more:

There are many things that make Senegal different from the US or England. For instance, the milk is warmer than the showers. That’s not a bad thing though, because even if hot showers were an option, I would have preferred the Spanish Inquisition to taking them; the temperature in Dakar on the day that I left was a roasting 45˚C, or 113˚F. On the other hand, I still don’t enjoy warm milk.

Senegal is also the only place I have ever been where water comes in bags, and the peanuts come in bottles, although I'm told must of West Africa is the same.

There were also some infrastructural difficulties.

One of them was almost constant power cuts. I was already very used to them after 10months of ALA and Mr. Peter’s energy-sapping naps, but Senegal made me put on my rose-tinted glasses. The country is proof that the government should not be allowed to control a utilities monopoly. In Dakar we had power for around 15 hours of the day. When we went to teach in Joal-Fadiouth, that number went down. I didn’t mind too much, but then tragedy struck, and Linda was cut off mid-hair-straightening.

It was truly disastrous.

My trip also marked the first time that I washed my clothing by hand, and it is repetitive and unenjoyable. People who have been doing it for all their life are no doubt laughing at me now, but I will now try to give you an idea of my laundry background. When I first went to boarding school in 2006, I was offered a choice between using the dorm washing machines and paying for laundry service, and I chose the latter. For the next four years, my friends who had chosen to “do it themselves” infProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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med me with pride, and I always felt inferior. After my trip to Senegal though, I have come to realise that they weren’t really doing their own laundry at all.

This year, I too regularly using washing machines, and I too was proud of my independence. But was I manually soaping each part of the shirt and scrubbing it against other parts of the shirt? Were my hands raw from the friction, and did my forearms hurt from wringing everything out twice? Was I dying to hang my clothes up just so I could stretch out my back, which hurt from bending over a bucket? No, I was adding soap and pushing buttons; the machine was “doing the laundry”, not me.


Does it make me a less spoiled person that I have washed my shorts by hand once? Absolutely not. But there are billions of people in the world “do their own laundry”, and if you use a washing machine, you are not amongst them.

T-shirt Illiteracy must be stopped.

I apologise in advance for not including any cartoons in this post. The next one will have many, but I’m saving the ones I’ve drawn for later. I am also too jetlagged to find a scanner.

I am now in Hong Kong, and between it and Senegal, I have come to two conclusions:

The first is that no matter where you are, cockroaches can always be killed with a flip flop, even if they have a 2 inch wingspan and fly at your face. Make it so.

The second is a rant:

In many parts of the world, The West has been woven into the fabric of ‘coolness’; European and American products have become fashionable to wear, sing and drink. This is stupid, and should be stopped immediately. If you live in Dakar, 50Cent does not belong on your belt anymore than your underpants belong on the city lampposts. However, that is not my complaint, because there are, after all, some Western things that do have marginal worth, such as Sprite, Ron Weasley, and Wigan Athletic Football Club.

No, this is my conclusion: just because something is cool, it does not mean that you should be allowed to put it on your own body in blind faith. I am of course referring to one product in particular: T-shirts. The world is filled with individuals who cannot read their own clothing because it has a language that they cannot understand on it.

In many cases this is hilarious; my second cousin has a shirt without any vowels. All it has are consonants and punctuation, in equal and random parts. There are also people in Senegal whose shirts are not nearly as manly as they would have you believe. Yet in some cases t-shirt illiteracy is a dangerous phenomenon. Yesterday, I saw a man sporting the message: “F*** You”, but without the asterisks. It was a pity, because he looked quite cheerful.

And then today, I saw undeniable proof that something must be done. I saw the pinnacle of public indecency.

I saw a shirt that read: “YOU’RE DOING IT TOO SOFTLY”*. Now, I may just be very dirty minded, and there certainly is a possibility that the 15-ish year old girl wearing this message was simply crying out against poor massages, but I don’t think so.

I would therefore like to appeal to anybody, particularly at ALA, who may one day become some sort of commerce minister, or even president, to make t-shirt illiteracy an issue of paramount importance upon assuming office. In fact, I propose that we be legally required to successfully translate every single t-shirt that we would like to purchase before we are allowed to actually buy it.

And while I'm at it, the same goes for tattoos. The law should also force all Americans who decide to get a Chinese character tattooed onto their skin to seek out a native Chinese speaker and double check that it does in fact mean wind, and not petrol, bison, or nothing at all.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we need to be protected from ourselves.

If you made it this far, thank you for listening.


*I know I wrote "slowly" before; that was a mistake.

That'll be 30gazillion CFA francs, Mr. Toubap

Many months ago, I drew a cartoon with Boubacar offering me a shoe for “R500, with bargain”. It turns out that was only the tip of the price negotiating iceberg.

Negotiating prices in Senegal was not as simple as my previous bargaining experiences in Taiwan. In fact, I was useless. There were three main reasons why:

1) I can’t speak Wolof. Contrary to what I wrote in the previous post, Wolof is not easy to pick up. So in actuality, Linda did all of the bargaining during my trip.
2) Senegalese people practice price negotiating for all of their life, and are already better than me when they start primary school. I first realised just how early the Senegalese start when I was watching TV with Linda and her six-year-old sister, Souad. This is, word for word, the conversation that they had:

Linda: Sousou, one more cartoon, and then I’m changing the channel.
Souad: No!
L: Yes!
S: Five more.
L: One.
S: Four.
L: Two
S: Three
L: Three, including this one.
S: Fine.
L: Done!

And then they went back to watching Peppa Pig’s dad flip pancakes.

3) I am white. Unless you’re applying to college or trying to hide in a flock of ravens, being white is very rarely a handicap. Yet when you’re buying stuff in Senegal, it is, because salesmen automatically assume that you have money (which makes sense; you bought the plane ticket), and hike the price up 500%. They also salivate when they see you.

This was most obvious for one good in particular: taxis. We frequently had to wave taxis away because they refused to take the fare down.

We did however have one secret weapon up our sleeves (asides from Linda’s years of practice and fluent Wolof): Rima Tahini. For every inflationary percentage point that I had on taxi prices, she added a deflationary one. To explain why, I have drawn a diagram of what goes on in the typical Senegalese taxi driver’s head when he sees me and Rima:

The taxi fare seesaw faces pressure from two sides. On the left is an oblivious white person with backpack, most likely containing the crown jewels, gold bullion, or both. He provides huge incentive to charge at prices normally associated with private jets and space tourism. On the right is a pretty girl, and her knees are showing. She provides huge incentive to forget the left side of the seesaw ever existed and pursue marriage.

Faced with this choice, most taxi drivers went back to offering normal rates, but some did in fact ask if they could have Rima. Every time, she had the same reaction. She would laugh in their faces, and then return to her blackberry to continue texting Malick.


And now a bonus cartoon about bargaining that I definitely think ALA should use for publicity:

Can Mohammed Barry Feem?

Did you know that there are giant pictures of Mohammed Barry's mouth threatening to engulf an entire vehicle, all over Senegal? It's true! But more on that later.

When I was seven, I began taking French, and my teacher, Monsieur Grimal, showed us a map of the world with random bits coloured in red. Monsieur Grimal told us that they were known as the "francophone" countries. They were important, and had names such as Madagascar, La Martinique, and Guinea Conackry. It seemed to me like excessive boasting, and I was not won over by his argument that this made my homework all the more important. In fact, I was fairly certain that countries like La Guadeloupe and Morocco would have very little to do with my life. French was for France, and France only.

When I was thirteen, I dropped French so I could learn how to write Chinese.

I spent the last three weeks in Senegal, which is, amongst other things, 1) not France, and 2) francophone. The moral of the story is that when I was seven I was an idiot.

Thankfully though, I was able the get around. This was partly because I remembered something, but mostly because English and French are closely related, and many words can be converted. Some, however, can not. For instance, when someone told me I was disgusting (dégueulasse), I thought he was calling me Legolas. Instead of apologizing, I beamed with joyous and inappropriate delight.

The hardest part of learning a new language is the sheer exhaustiveness of constantly paying attention. The reason for this is something that I have decided to call “The Luxury 5-second Recall”. I shall now demonstrate how it works with a randomly chosen word, in this case grapefruit. (The French translation is pamplemousse.)

First, this how I hear things in English:

The word goes in one ear

I remain blissfully unaware while it exits via the other

I realise that something has been said, snap out of

my stupor, and force the word to do a U-turn

so it can re-enter my brain, where I process it.

This is The Luxury 5-second Recall, and it is only an option if you are familiar enough with a language to remember and instantaneously comprehend sounds that were said a while back. It is also, as its name suggests, not to be taken for granted. Because if you are not that familiar with the words being said to you, something else happens:

The word goes in one ear

You remain blissfully unaware while it goes out the other

You realise that something has been said, and snap out of your stupor,

just in time to see the word, which you don't recognise, waft off into space

Meanwhile the conversation has continued without you,

leaving your brain empty and sullen.

*It's gone!

Basically, if you’re fluent in a language, you can understand it not just when you listen to it, but also when you hear it. If you're not fluent, your brain has to remain alert all day, which is painful.

French is not the only language spoken in Senegal though. The country has around 7 main ethnic groups (if you include the Lebanese, which you should; they’re everywhere), and each one has its own native tongue. However, the two most widely spoken languages are French and Wolof. For many Senegalese people, French is for school and words that have yet to been translated into Wolof, and Wolof is for everything else. This includes, but is not limited to: bargaining on the streets for Chinese-made flip flops, telling jokes, swearing, and pointing out white people as they pass by.

On the surface, Wolof sounds incredibly alien. It is written with loads of x’s and full of sounds like “wek”, “nek”, and “buhguhnuhduhguh”. Additionally, nobody is really sure what the standard way to write it is.

Yet on closer inspection, it is quite simple to learn. My epiphany came after I saw an advertisement in Dakar that read, “Kan Mo Bari Feem?” On it was a man with his mouth open, and he was about to engulf an entire car. It was the Rosetta Stone that I needed, and my mind sprung into optimistic action. Here is a diagram of my hopeless yet somewhat brilliant thought process:

Mohammed Barry is a student at ALA. Who knew he was so famous?

In actuality, “kan mo bari feem” means “who has the most swag?” But of course, we already know the answer to that: “Mohammed Barry has the most swag!” After all, he eats cars. It doesn't get much more swaggerfantastic than that.

Boys' Night Out

My year at the African Leadership Academy is over, but I’m going to start blogging again.

I haven’t posted for months because it took time and I needed a break; a short comic strip consumes an excessive 2 hours.

Yet there was another reason as well. ALA’s vision is to create the next generation of African leaders, the next generation of Nelson Mandela’s. Unfortunately, the path to Madiba-dom appears to be structured around an authentic yet occasionally chaotic parody of Mandela’s Robben Island years, and the gap years are not really warned beforehand. This creates, amongst other woes, cabin fever. In February I came up with a new academy tag line: “Prison with a vision”. This blog was a funny way to keep in touch, preserve memories, and make observations, but it was also my effort towards creating a mindset that would help me to survive the frustrations of taking my year off in a startup company with so many rules.

Yet as I grew to love the people at ALA I did not need this blog anymore, so it fell by the wayside.

A conclusion to tie things up is coming, but there are events and jokes that I would like to record. As a quick update, I spent the last month in Senegal, and finished ALA before that. Posts shall vary between the two topics, and will also feature cartoons that I drew in my (lined) notebook during the Senegal vacation.

And now for a couple comics.

The first one dedicated to my father, who often jokes that I should give my children properly Anglo Saxon names.

If you didn’t get it, don't worry, you have company. Ethelburga was a popular name about 1500 years ago. In fact, there is still a famous school with that name in England. On the bright side, if you didn't laugh at the pun, you can now laugh at the hilarious new name you've learnt.

The second is hopefully more obvious, provided that you understand the following sentence: "Imagine that Monopoly had an ALA edition."

*There are three ingredients to success: talent, chance, and 10,000

hours of practice. At ALA, we replace chance with opportunity.

later that night...