November 4, 2007, Île de Gorée Ferry Terminal Waiting Room, Dakar, Senegal

Mixed chatter of a friendly crowd waiting to board a ferry from Dakar to Île de Gorée. On the island, we find the Maison des Esclaves (Slave House) where rich white people cavorted in luxury above a basement where slaves languished in cages. There is some debate about how many slaves were actually transported through Gorée—most historians now agree the bulk of the slave trade left for the Great Passage across the Atlantic from slave fortresses further southeast along the African coast.

The temperature is hot and muggy and I’m sweating a lot.

Some people in the waiting room wear colorful clothing, a grey-haired elder gentleman with a sky-blue jalibaya, a woman next to him who may be his wife wearing a brilliant dress, geometrically patterned white linen over a turquoise layer matching the scarf ingeniously folded on her head, along with a diaphonous white scarf around her shoulders, several gold bracelets on her right wrist and a wristwatch on the left.

As each of the locals enter the room, they greet each person they know, and even those they don’t know who are nearby, with what seem somewhat cautious, reticent, or self-conscious handshakes and big heartfelt smiles. Mothers carry children on their laps or pass them to older siblings to care for them.

Besides me, the only foreigners I could see in the waiting room at first are a small group of Italian tourists with a fellow who ma be their Senegalese guide with whom they seem on quite familiar term—perhaps a family member?

Two women on either side of me participate in a typical greeting ritual, chatting back and forth with standard greetings and almost choreographed responses, but most of the discussion is less structured, with less of a sense of societal obligation.

Last evening, I wandered out of the hotel after a long jet-lag nap to find an Internet cafe and to eat dinner. As a white foreigner, it’s difficult to walk the streets of downtown Dakar without young men approaching you to be your guide or for some paid service in one way or another. Since I’m not intrigued by activities that generally focus on how to transfer money from my pockets into theirs, these interactions can at times be annoying, especially because I fell that my naïve friendliness on new encounters turns into a more jaded suspicious attitude with most people who now approach me on the street. As I asked a bank security guard for the location of an Internet cafe, another fellow who he seemed to trust approached me and said he’d lead me there. As I discovered afterwards, he intentionally walked me past the nearest open Internet cafe at Place de l’Indépendence so he could extend his chat with me about the luck he had in purchasing a bottle of beer and the great reggae party he was going to that evening. I kept telling him I had not interest and he kept offering and suggesting until I basically thanked him once last time and walked away.

At the Internet cafe, I couldn’t accomplish much in a hour at CFA300 because the keyboard had a strange layout and the spacebar got stuck every other time I pressed it.

When I finished, I asked the propreitor if I could bring in my own laptop, but he refused without giving me a good reason. In the cafe, one could also make telephone calls. I met two Germans who there to make calls home, a diplomat and his friend. At first I thought they must be a gay couple, but they explained their wives were back home in Berlin. We all went to dinner at a nearby restaurant called Keur N’Doye (N’Doye House), which had excellent food at a reasonable price and took care to prepare vegetarian food for me. The diplomat had traveled a bit through Africa though not really much to places I was going. His friend was born to a missionary father (and presumably mother) in Namibia. They returned to Germany when he turned six and later visited Namibia for a vacation when he was a teenager.

After dinner, we went our separate ways. I wanted to check out Cafe l’Iguane, rumored to have some gay activity. I walked over to it and found a place closed for renovations. Disappointed, I wandered a bit more looking for another interesting place without success, so I bought a bottle of water at one shop and a packet of laundry detergent at another, then headed back to the hotel.

This morning, the hotel receptionist told me I could switch from the larger higher-priced room to a smaller room for the original price I had expected, so I did. Then, I walked from the hotel to the port, waited in the sun to buy a ferry ticket, and entered the waiting room. The Germans from last night are now here.