A few months ago, my friend Pape Samba Kane kindly sent me his latest two-volume work, corrective memory, published by Harmattan Senegal. Since then, I’ve been regularly picking out nuggets from the 750 pages of this book, written with particular care for language and style. It’s a collection of satirical portraits published in a major newspaper that marked the history of the African press, the now defunct Cafard Libéré, under its Profile section. The journalist has done the meticulous work of an archivist to unearth these texts, published between 1987 and 1996, in order to offer them for publication, to the delight of his readership.

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Pape Samba Kane sketches the personalities of the Senegalese public scene with accuracy and precision, without ever lapsing into the vulgarity and coarseness that have unfortunately become journalistic practice in the land of Mame Less Dia. Because of my inclinations, certain texts spoke to me more than others. Those on Jean Collin, Fara Ndiaye and Mamadou Puritain Fall, for example. I was touched by the portrait of the late Mbaye Diack, a brilliant and rigorous Marxist. PSK recounts his reply “Very far away” to the question of where he lived. These two vague, imprecise words say a lot about the people of that era, about those politicians who, in addition to having read their classics, had a sense of repartee that revealed their finesse. They had substance and knew how to discourse in an elegant and refined manner.

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Some of the texts, as the preface to the first volume, the late Mame Less Camara, points out, are premonitory. He gives the example of Idrissa Seck, whom the author saw as the future Cabinet Director of the Pope of Sopi when the latter came to power. And so it was, before the heartbreak, disgrace and ups and downs of the police and then the courts.

PSK’s portraits can be very funny, forcing the reader to pause for a refreshing laugh. The art of making people laugh is a talent, among those that certainly touch me the most. A person’s ideas may be hateful, but humour remains for me a quality superior to almost any other. PSK is one of those journalists with a sharp, caustic pen. Unfortunately, we don’t make them any more in our country, and public debate is devitalized as a result. To quote Mame Less Camara again, PSK knows how to be “fierce” without ever being “mean”. He is aided in his task by the pencil strokes of TT Fons, Joop and Odia. Odia, that talented cartoonist whose aristocratic pleasure of displeasing I note with sadness. A cartoonist who, out of cowardice, tries to please the Princes’ loses that pleasurable feeling of irreverence.

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PSK’s book is an immense museum representing a world of yesterday that our country doesn’t want to remember, because it reminds us of its former greatness and its current level of stupidity. Some of the departed figures that PSK is resurrecting were the embodiment of a Senegal that was dignified and restrained. We may not have shared the political leanings of Jean Collin, Fara Ndiaye, Lawyer Babacar Niang, etc., but they had a sense of state and a high idea of what politics should be. Dignity must never be sacrificed.

Yesterday’s worldly behaviour stands in stark contrast to the outrageousness and insults that are now sacralised and installed as the rule of conduct. The heirs are not worthy of Senegal’s political heritage. And the worst is to be feared…

Read the column – The Savana Conclave

PSK tells us a story that our generation didn’t know very well. I personally keep snippets and slices of stories, because as a child, I regularly saw Le Cafard hanging around my house. This is also the relevance of this work of memory, to keep traces of a past that many are unaware of, because our demographic structure means that Senegal is a very young country. Admittedly, politics has always been practiced with violence. Our political history is punctuated by deaths. But Senegal has enjoyed a quality of public debate that was the envy of the whole of Africa. Between the men and women politicians of a bygone era, there was mutual esteem, despite differences of ideology and program. High-mindedness, urbanity, intelligence, erudition and bearing are essential qualities in a politician. Otherwise, as the other acrobat Ibou Fall would say, with his ferocious voice and feather, it’s a free-for-all for scum.

I love this book by PSK, whose talent as a portraitist is unrivalled. The two volumes have been sitting on my bedside table for several months. I’ll continue to pick through these little gems, so as not to despair of Senegal and Senegalese people…

In the portrait “The Albatross”, PSK says of the luminous Asak, “He’s annoyingly talented”. I have the same reproach for him.

By Hamidou ANNE / hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH / Serigne S. DIAGNE