By the Millennium Door

I sat by the Millennium Door on the Corniche Ouest in Dakar. A young politician, a Wolof, who had campaigned for the presidential party in the last referendum, parked his Jaguar and came and sat beside me. I geared up for a political discussion.

‘Writer,’ he said to me, ‘don’t you want to become a billionaire?’

You see Senegal had just been out of a politically-charged season. A referendum on reducing the presidential term from seven to five years had inspired vibrant debates. And during the campaign that led to the run-off, which was when I first met this young politician, the president himself had asked all his ministers to leave their offices for campaign rallies—for a ‘yes’ vote.

‘Remember what I told you at the launch?’ the young politician continued.

I nodded my head.

A few days ago he had attended the launch of my debut novel at the British Council, and before I had the chance to sign his copy pulled me into a thought-provoking discussion. How all the international funds into Senegal are political funds. How the nouveaux riches are either politicians or linked to a political party. How the president’s family, active in the state financial machinery, will enrich themselves and nothing will happen…

‘Let me tell you how to join the construction boom; how to own a tiled house in Dakar,’ he said. ‘Write our party chairman’s biography, launch it at our party convention and you’ll become a billionaire.’

I disagreed with him, arguing that I am not a griot, but a writer. That means involved in a writer’s mission in a time of political change; taking into account how writing should respond to the quest for nation-building in Africa. ‘My role,’ I said convincingly, ‘is not to sing the praise of your party chairman, but to educate, to show that reading is important for human development, to look and find where our continent is going wrong, where the rain is beating us. That means, as Wole Soyinka put it, being ‘the voice of vision’, an ambassador for the collective conscience of my people.

‘You don’t want to be a billionaire then,’ the young politician said disappointedly. ‘Save your eyes, save your back. How many stories will you write to afford a house in Almadies? Let it be clear to you, the only talk people are interested in here is the talk about money.’

As he drove off I raised my eyes to the Atlantic Ocean and mulled over his words. Senegal is not new to writers. Leopold Senghor, Mariama Ba, Chiekh Amadou Kane, Ken Bougul—all wrote from Senegal. French writer Saint-Exupéry flew the Casablanca – Dakar route, and Jean-Christophe Rufin, now a member of the French Academy, was Ambassador of France in Senegal. But we live in changing times, and I’m constantly harassed by place and time. I write in the English Language, so readers in Senegal will only read the French translation of my works—disregarding the irony that my first novel was published in English Language by a small press based in Senegal. But now, like most published African writers, my eyes turn also to the West, to connect with other writers, navigate the murky waters of publishing, reach a wider audience. As a writer the best gift I can give myself is the gift of freedom. I don’t have to be a griot, don’t need to write away my reputation.

Luck smiles to those who persist. A year ago, in response to an open call for submission, I sent in a proposal to contribute to an anthology of creative non-fiction from Africa. My conversations as a writer writing on Africa does not focus so much on the stereotypes of being an ‘African writer’; the burden of having to address ‘the burning issues of the day’ in fiction; the lack of a reading culture. I rather focus on the imagination and energy of creativity on our continent, perhaps the literary world’s most exciting space.

I am happy to have found a niche in Senegal’, a small West African Country, one of the ‘good pupils’ on the continent, with a stable democracy and economy. That’s not the case with most of Senegal’s neighbors. My concern now is how to disturb the comfortable of West Africa’s elite; and how to comfort the disturbed in places like Togo, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Rwanda and the Congo, where leaders seek to die in power.

I get up to go home; I look at Yaye Boye, the statue at the top of the Millennium Door. Something tells me that she’ll make a good story, about Mother Africa watching over her children.

- Written and recorded for The Cultural Frontline of the BBC World Service