At what point did this country of brilliant subjects start to believe that a President of the Republic and his Prime Minister should teach their constituents to sweep the streets, putting their money where their mouths are, forcing the regime’s new top brass to pose in garbageman’s outfits, each near his wheelbarrow, shovel in hand?

When France agreed to let us off the hook in 1960, we had one of the classiest heads of state on the planet. The epitome of the aristocrat inhabited by the mystique of the Republic, frightening in his culture, sparkling in his intelligence and dazzling in his savoir-vivre. His lieutenant, the head of government, is a spiritual ascetic, a pure intellectual obsessed with his mission: to snub underdevelopment, starve poverty and thirst ignorance.

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The pairing is surreal… the Catholic Sérère from a polygamous family who only gets along with Muslim religious leaders, unprecedented figures of feudalism; and the Muslim Toucouleur, son of a monogamist, who only trusts leftist ecclesiastics; the rich kid and the policeman’s brat.

But these two phenomena have one thing in common: they are former French subjects who have no tolerance for mediocrity. The least you can expect to do to rub elbows with this regime is to be well-mannered and well-educated…

The adversity of the ’60s and ’70s would ultimately prove to be the undoing of the Republic’s quest for excellence: the years of drought mingled with the turmoil of global geopolitics would erode the standing of the local elite after the iconoclastic tandem imploded on December 17, 1962. And the boat rocked in the storms to the point of losing its bearings.

People of little means are in disarray when a new breed of parvenus arrives on the public scene…

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More than fair-skinned Senegalese, who set off on adventures with only their bundles and a few abracadabra skills, and who return after tumultuous odysseys to flaunt their inexplicable successes and their fortunes that smell of sulphur…

A garrison of frustrated country folk who take care of themselves: these good people are rich and want people to know it.

They flaunt their money in the face of the hungry, court the griots and enrich the jewellers, subsidize the counter-culture of which Sorano will be the temple and Médina Sabakh the promised land. Ramadan is their annual virtuous break; Fridays, their obligatory day of sanctity, when authentic Senegalese are counted at the entrance to the mosques where they have to be noticed; and wrestling, the Sunday rendezvous of the vernacular elite.

Their pants are baggy, their boubous damascene embroidered; they have whimsical weddings, thunderous christenings and psychedelic funerals. As if that weren’t enough, their marabouts have become iconic, their superstitions a religion, their myths historical truths and their beliefs law.

A Senegalese MP, Mamadou Fall “Puritan”, from the rostrum of the National Assembly, preached in the desert when he denounced, in those years, “those who start chirping until four in the morning while people are asleep!”

No one took him seriously…

These Senegalese of the second kind will grow bolder and spread their flaws to all levels of the Republic, dragging the elite down and posing as masters of the country. They’ll storm uptown, invade the world of gossip and arm themselves with legions of praise.

In 2024 parlance, they’re the buzz.

It flaunts its nouveau riche shamelessness and wears arrogance as a badge of citizenship: it thinks of democracy in terms of its inculturation and recuts Senegal into a ghetto where ordinary laziness, insatiable greed and bestial concupiscence triumph.

Their legacy is one of resounding bankruptcies, dilapidated homes and soulless heirs.

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To top it all off, they invented a new institution, the informal sector, the guarantor of national resourcefulness, which establishes deceit, disorder and filth as absolute values…

Senghor tolerated them, Diouf recognized them and Wade institutionalized them.

By dint of backsliding, the Republic has become a jumble sale where virtue is sold for cash and bad manners are auctioned off. Speaking French is an ignominy, knowing how to behave, a flaw.

To my great misfortune, in my tormented youth, when I came across brilliant minds who speak to me as an equal, one of them transmits to me his implacable view of this motley fauna with its conquering airs and already definitive certainties. He can’t envy them, and even pities them, despite their monstrous efforts to arouse deference, covetousness, jealousy… His peremptory verdict marks me forever: “They eat too much fat, drink too much sugar and, what’s more, kiss the wrong arse!”

By Ibou FALL