Each year in mid-June, this fruit called Kabaas in Malinke grow by the thousands in Nafadji. I do not know the word for them in English but they taste exactly like that candy Sour Warheads that I used to have contests over who could suck on the most before our ability to taste disappeared as a child. And children are universal in many ways and in Nafadji they are consistently eating them, they have a hard shell and inside there are seeds covered with the sour fruit which people cover in sugar and suck on all day long. I can eat about a half of one before tears start coming out of my eyes. One of the very few ways people make money in Nafadji is that each year the chief goes to Dakar (where Kabaas do not grow) to sell them.
The day before the truck came to bring the Kabaas and the chief to Dakar, our Imam went out one last time to collect Kabaas in the bush. Our Imam is not an old man, has young children and farms and searches for Kabaas just as most people in Nafadji do. (I have no idea how old the chief is, but I am guessing well above 70 and he farms and bikes every day, and I continue to be amazed at his toothless grin as he bikes with his machete in hand to the fields, every day).
The Imam was still not back by nightfall that night and the village became worried and organized a village-wide manhunt for him in the bush. This was scary, but also reassured me that if I am ever lost in the bush by myself for any reason, the entire village will come looking for me. I guess when a village is like a family of 800 people one small police force would be nothing.
They did not find him that night, so they decided to continue searching in the morning. Nafadji is quite the isolated village and there is a large expanse of nothingness around it, so the possibilities of where he might be were endless. People could only search with flashlights for so long.
The next morning, everyone was joking around, asking me if I am going to go into the bush to search; me replying that everyone would have to come looking for me if I ever went out there by myself. People seemed overall optimistic about the situation. Until about ten o’clock when we received word that the Imam had fallen from a tree picking kabaas and broke his neck and died.
Not only was this accident horribly tragic, but it was the first adult death I had experienced in the village. When someone dies, the women have this eerie, horrible wail that lets everybody know that someone has died. Everyone gathered around his family’s home and it was the first time I saw people not greeting each other or looking each other in the eye. One thing I have noticed about Senegal (and that people have told me about Senegal) is that Senegalese people generally do not do well with grief or tragedy and do not talk about it very easily. This explained the tragic, eerie feeling surrounding all of Nafadji.
After about an hour, people dispersed and went along with their regular days. Few people spoke directly of the tragedy and I found out details from my counterpart, who is generally not connected to the village so was able to speak about it more objectively. Also within hours, people began arriving from other villages to bid farewell to our beloved Imam. News travels quickly, even without Blackberries.
That afternoon, he was buried. The men go and bury him in the bush and the women stay behind and sing and pray. The songs were calm and gentle and when the men returned from the burial people dispersed calmly and quietly. As the people dispersed, ironically the truck to pick up the pile of thousands of kabaas in front of the Imam’s compound arrived. And that was it. For the next few days people visited the family to pray and cook, but other than that, nobody spoke of it. His young son, with whom I hang out on a regular basis went right along taking his school exams and everyone expected him to succeed.
I don’t know if it is because it happens so much more often, or the different religious beliefs or just a fact of the culture but it seems that death here is much more a fact of life than a tragic occurrence in Senegal. This is something that I will unfortunately have to get used to because I grew up with the “lets talk about it” system for everything. Unfortunately, I am sure I will experience more than one deaths in Nafadji in the next two years. I foresee the idea of death in Senegal as something difficult for me to be used to in more ways than one.
