This is a political story, but it is also a personal one.  Because of that, I thought a lot about the judgement that taking public positions brings about, and how ironic it was to fear public judgement for rendering your own judgement public. I also thought about family members, friends, and various acquaintances; some of whom have unfortunately drifted away over the last few years. However, what I mostly thought about was the feeling of frustration and impotence I endured following the year 2016 and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. The only poor analogy I could come up with is the feeling of watching a car crash in slow motion, without the ability to hit the brakes nor steer off the collision.  As a political observer in the US during that time, I watched family links grow weaker, I saw friendships abandoned and replaced by a constant airing of grievances about those who had now become perceived enemies.

If you know about American political history, then you know that division had always existed, and could be retraced along various eras. Twenty-sixteen, however, felt different because we knew it was a history-defining moment as we were living in it. 

« Don’t talk about politics during holiday dinners » is a saying you would often hear in the USA, and for the first time in my life, the same can also be said about Senegal. It is a morbid realization, especially for a country where debate tended to be at the heart of social life, whether it was about football, arts, or politics. We have always been able to see ourselves in the « other » despite our differences, but I’m afraid that gone are the days where true meaningful relationships could survive political ‘misalignments’. We haven’t gotten to this point by accident, and if the first stage of recovery is acceptance; then we must recognize as much as this:  we are a fractured society at this point in time. For those who expect an indictment of any one Senegalese political actor, I apologize in advance for the disappointment. If anything, this is an indictment of all of us Senegalese and a look-back on how we’ve set ourselves up on this crash course.

Air Senegal Crash: the Price of our Laxism

The present toxic political environment in the US and around the world wasn’t born in the last decade, but for the first time in the 21st century came Donald Trump and with him a complete upheaval of what we thought were established political norms. For the most part, men like him rose to prominence at a time of great distress, a distress that economic indicators couldn’t quite describe.  It could even be argued that this sort of turmoil tends to materialize especially when those indicators are detached from the everyday reality of the people. One can also imagine how the average working person would feel if they were constantly being told news of prodigious progress, price indexes, GDPs and whatever other fancy acronyms that meant very little to their day-to-day lives. 

If this was true of America, it was even more so the case in Senegal. Since the “alternance” of 2000, there appeared to be an obscene influx of money in the country, especially in Dakar. A myriad of new luxury buildings started popping up in all corners of the capital, and the luxury cars routinely driving up and down the Corniche started rivaling those of Monte-Carlo. The disconnect couldn’t be any starker because whilst all this opulence was being flaunted, most of the working people were experiencing stagnant wages and a rapidly increasing cost of life. Young people, who represent the lion share of the demographic pie, were faced with a shortage of job opportunities and a badly out-of-touch housing market. Owning a house was becoming nothing more than a pipedream for most of the Senegalese workforce. 

New Seizure of 3 Billion 447 Million Fcfa: Sénoba, Hub of Counterfeit Banknotes

                                                                                             

As it turned out, people can’t eat or drink positive economic reports. This is not to say that legitimate progress wasn’t happening in Senegal, but the perception (and the reality in some instances) was that progress was happening at drastically various rates for different people. And therein lies a major fracture point: the feeling of betrayal. Whether the feeling was warranted has almost become irrelevant because conversations about politics are now often poisoned with presumptions of bad faith from one of the participating parties.

Without good faith as a lantern guiding our interactions and our evolution as a Senegalese people, I come to ask myself questions I never thought would cross my mind.

  What do we expect will happen to us as a nation and as a people if we stop seeing ourselves in each other, even at the most basic level? Do we just expect to impose our worldview on each other through sheer force? And if that was somehow possible, I ask again, what is the expected outcome for us as a nation? 

One very likely outcome is that we transform into the current version of the United States, a country where division sits atop division, where polarization and distrust have gone so far that your own neighbors are no longer just neighbors, they’re also potential foes or traitors. 

Now is probably a good time to make clear that I currently live in America, and that I love the idea that America represents. I love the idea of a melting pot of people and cultures, which is the very best thing that America has to offer in my humble opinion. I take no pleasure in making this comparison, but as heartbreaking as it is, I can’t help but notice that Senegal is taking on the lesser attractive aspects of the United States.

Palestine: The awkward silence of Senegalese universities

This sort of transformation doesn’t happen all at once, but we’ve already begun a dangerous slide towards our own version of the worst of what America has to offer. For starters, we are becoming desensitized to political violence, and just violence altogether. Political deaths, which were only far and few between throughout our history, are not just accepted but expected. There have been so many of them in such a short amount of time that it is reminiscent of how America has gotten numb to school shootings. At 32 years of age, I’m still relatively young, but I am old enough to remember the attack on Idrissa Seck’s campaign procession during the presidential quest of 2007. That attack happened down the street from my childhood home and resulted in the tragic death of an individual. I also remember it being a moment of national consternation. But ever since then, we have engaged in a systematic race to the extremes when it comes to violent rhetoric and actions. To be clear, this doesn’t only apply to police and protesters, but it is also true of the press, especially television pundits, internet influencers, politicians at campaign rallies, and most importantly all of us in our daily lives. Once we get used to both verbal and physical violence, we are plunged into a dark spiral that is difficult to stop until it hits rock bottom.

We are also seeing the nascent flames of a xenophobic, pseudo-nationalist movement that seems to have aimed its ire towards immigrants of Guinean origin. Though not formally organized yet, it is only but a matter of time before Senegal has its own version of MAGA. And if history is any teacher, that is almost certainly going to push the country towards even more violence.

One of the main catalysts of this polarization is the digital revolution and the ways in which we now consume information. With this revolution came a disruption to the gatekeeping role that only a select few institutions possessed. While it certainly is a good thing that people no longer depend on only a select few to be informed, most of the world was not ready to cope with the new mechanisms in which this information is disseminated. Misinformation and disinformation have always existed, but it has never been able to reach so many people in so little time than it has in the smartphone era. It’s all the more dangerous because even people with an advanced education have revealed themselves vulnerable to this overexposure to information, one deepfake video and WhatsApp thread at a time.

This is all of course happening while ECOWAS, our most critical alliance group, has all but imploded, and exists only in name following recent coup d’états in 5 of the member states. Senegal itself has just come out of its own constitutional crisis, but it has not come out unscathed. Our nation is going through its hardest test yet, and instead of fortifying our resolve, we have hardened our hearts and halfway closed our minds. « UN PEUPLE, UN BUT, UNE FOI » seems painfully far from our current reality.

This is eerily reminiscent of the current American political discourse where cynicism is the default attitude and partisanship reigns supreme. I am not naïve enough to believe it will be a smooth ride for our country in the next few years, but I do hope we’re able to avoid an American Carnage.

By Babacar Déma SANE

PS: The title of this essay was a tip of the hat to Tim Alberta’s book American Carnage.