Spirit of St. Louis

St. Louis, the New Orleans of Senegal. The Jazz capital of all of West Africa. I just returned from spending four days there, celebrating Tabaski with some Senegalese friends. In colonial times, the French laid out a perfect grid of streets on this island, with classic French architecture, buildings of 2-4 stories with beautiful wrought iron balconies overlooking the pedestrians who would be walking down below. St. Louis was named a World Heritage Site by the United Nations in 2000. Today the UN is threatening to take away that honor. The reasons being: the neglect of the buildings, the noncompliance with historical preservation codes in rehabilitating the structures, the absence of infrastructure support by the state, and the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of dollars given by UNESCO for such purposes. So, what does St. Louis look and feel like? The ghost of its former self. It would be as if Hurricane Katrina wreaked its havoc on the French Quarter of New Orleans (one section of the city that was relatively unaffected). It’s sad. Everyone from the rest of the country believes St. Louis is a beautiful historic city. Although many have never left their birthplace in Senegal to visit their own country for lack of financial means, they still have pride in St. Louis. Moreover, their pride in French architecture goes beyond the fact that as colonial powers, the French exploited thousands of local citizens to achieve such beauty. The Senegalese are intelligent, yet simple and forgiving people. Unfortunately, I have now heard the broken-record story more times than I can count: corrupt, bad governance. A leadership that lines its pockets at the blatant neglect of its people. A historic city crumbling; teachers not paid their salaries for one to two months; the monopoly electric company gouging the poor with bills for consumption levels that are physically impossible in their humble dwellings; a taximan, after a fender-bender with the wife of a government official, loses his car because the official extorts him--with pressure from the police, to produce money he physically doesn’t have, while the official has at his disposal more money stolen from the citizens than he knows what to do with; the guards--my friends--here in the building not being paid their monthly salary right before the biggest holiday of the year because the government building manager just didn’t feel like it and left town for a week when payday came around; classes canceled at school last Thursday when kids from another school came by with rocks threatening to stone us if we did not let our students go with them for a citywide student strike--for no apparent reason other than to make the holiday break longer, and we having to comply because there are no locks on school property doors, no hall monitors or guards, and no police to call if such an event occurs. When I came here, I expected to see underdevelopment because of poverty. What I did not expect to see is such abject corruption. These people, hard-working, faith-filled, and family-focused, deserve better.