The Casamance

Of course the Casamance has its own name: though technically it’s part of
Senegal, it’s not just another region, it’s practically another world. And that
yin-yang of belonging while remaining separate is at the heart of the Casamance
experience.

We flew into Ziguinchor in a ten-seater turboprop under whose spinning
propellers I watched pass the Petit Cote, the dust-strewn roofs of Banjul, and
then the yawning, immense Casamance itself. The Casamance River twisted and
snaked back on itself through a labyrinth of mangrove thickets, brackish
backwaters, oxbow lakes, and broad silty plains riven with the tracks of
animals crossing what might have been hardpan dirt or meters-deep quicksand,
all in a landscape that spanned from horizon to horizon in infinite flatness.
If the bold landscapes of mountain ranges speak of majesty, flat riverine
landscapes whisper “impermanence.” The river moves from year to year and season
to season, haunted by the ghosts of swollen rainfall or the pressing heat. As
it writhes, the stains of salt trace its thrashing, and trickles of rainfall
cross the mudflats to join the watercourse, lined on both sides with the
emerald greens of the young mangroves that will ultimately strangle them. At
the edges, small villages and the squared plots of subsistence vegetable farms
crouch, speckled with the canopies of the infinite trees that make not forest
but savannah. How to build and plan when everything is in perpetual motion, and
always will be?

We landed, and the pilot came around to throw the door open. A blast of humid
air flooded the cabin with the smell of vegetation and moisture. The Casamance.
How can this possibly be part of the same country whose Sahelian pre-desert
landscape I was wandering just weeks ago?

The Casamance – whose very name betrays its Portuguese origins (“The Peaceful
House”) – remains a sliver of society pressed on the north by the bulbous,
intestinal tract of the English-speaking Gambia, and on the south by the
Portuguese-speaking Guinea Bissau. To the east, it also shares a border with
French-speaking Guinea Conakry. But ethnically, it was – and still is –
essentially part of what’s now called Guinea Bissau. No wonder then that I
learned as much about the Casamance while traveling in Bissau as I did in
Senegal. The city in which we spent our first two nights (Ziguinchor) comes as
well from the Portuguese: “Chego e Choram” (“I arrive and they cry,”) the
arrogant declaration of the first slave-trading explorers of this waterway.

But in my opinion it was the French settlers who brought on the madness, by
forcing their early colonial settlements south of the river into the land that
would eventually become Guinea Bissau, and then fighting for that grim slice of
territorial expansion. When European governments met to decide, the French got
the Casamance slice off the top of Guinea Bissau, and Bissau was “compensated”
by getting a slice, in turn, of Guinea Conakry at the south. Divide the region
along ethnic lines and you get a totally different map. The Casamance remains
to this day, culturally part of Guinea Bissau, but geopolitically part of
Senegal, which struggles to integrate it because of the cultural boundary but
also because the English stuck the Gambia in between the Casamance and the rest
of Senegal. No wonder the Casamance is a place unto itself. And a fascinating
one, too.

We traveled by car the length of the Casamance, departing just after breakfast,
as the river emerged from a morning haze that only slowly revealed the far
banks. Birds called from the canopies of the massive mango trees that blanket
the area, but the air was thick with the smell of rotting vegetation and moist
earth. We stopped again and again, for bounding goats, wandering cows, and the
occasional road-traversing pig. We shared the road with donkey carts carrying
all manner of merchandise and straw and usually driven by small kids; usually a
happy dog trotted alongside. As the rising sun clipped the shadows and as we
left the coastline, the landscape began to change around us. At first the
horizon was a mirage of treetops, distant hardwood forests or knots of
mangroves. The savannah crept in, a carpet of sharp blades clipped short by
cattle and evanescent in every possible combination of grey-green-yellow ever
seen by human eyes, ringed by individual coconut palms that stood like
soldiers, and the massive Baobabs whose presence among the fields was
wizard-like. Only after spending significant time in the Sahel can you begin to
appreciate the immensity of the trees. Left unmolested to grow to their natural
shape and size, they towered against the sky: stands of mango trees standing
cathedral-like and hanging thick with ripening fruit, Neem, breadfruit, and
Cashew. Underneath them pools of shade harbored resting farmers, troops of
goats and sheep, and happy, fat cattle. Nowhere else in Senegal have I
witnessed any of those things – and especially the shade!

As we left the coast behind us though, the landscape dried, and so did the
smell. The thick, red African dust grew more oppressive, and our cars kicked up
huge plumes of it into the roadside vegetation. The river pulled back from the
roadway and with it went the mangroves and the grasslands until we were in some
sort of thin, dry forest. So, too, went the neat Diolla gardens, replaced by
little villages of the round, thatched-roof huts of the Peulh. The Casamancais
are among Senegal’s poorest, but with poverty comes a relative dearth of the
plastic litter that fouls the rest of Senegal’s landscapes. Instead, I saw
neatly swept courtyards separated by sheafs of plaited, rattan fencing. From
the treetops Vervet monkeys leapt from branch to branch and occasionally leapt
down to earth to dart across the roadway in a sort of audacity that stood my
hair on end every time.

Traveling in the dust at the tail-end of the dry season is deceptive: the deep
channels we crossed had clearly been cut by raging rainwater, and I knew
firsthand the rainwater can rise knee-deep before it makes its way to the sea.
That the land and the sea are so close here, that they’re so entwined, and that
they’re both so transient and impermanent, make the Casamance what it is. Never
mind the long-running separatist rebellion, the landmines, the economic
struggles: You’re just here on earth for a while. Then the river moves, the
rains flood or stop, and you are done. In the short term, you don’t need much:
a plot of land, a roof of thatch over your head, the comfort of your family,
and the knowledge that on this trip, everyone is together – and everyone is
alone. In the Casamance, like anywhere, our isolation and our connection make
us who we are, here in the peaceful house.