The Talibé boys of Senegal
Keisha talks about her connection with the talibé and how they inspired her novel No Heaven for Good Boys.
I moved to West Africa in late 2004 after the re-election of President Bush. In the days following the election the local news reported that New York City was collectively experiencing a depression after Al Gore had lost and I was faced with a decision: stay in the depression or leap outside of what I knew and take a break from America. I chose the latter and went to volunteer at the YMCA in The Gambia. After roughly two months there I leapt once again and moved to Dakar, Senegal to once again forge a new path. I quickly found friends who welcomed me into their pan-African community. I found work teaching English as a Second language and love even managed to find me.
Throughout my time in Dakar, I noticed persistently these young boys in the streets. Dirty, shoeless and oftentimes without any pants or bottoms, these kids were as young as three years old and as old as twelve, constantly begging for money. I asked my friends about them and learned they were called Talibé.
Often the job of a Talibé was to gain a religious education, they would be required to beg for a few hours a day to learn humility and raise a bit of money for their Marabouts (men who held the religious position comparable to a Pope).
My American friends who had lived in the country much longer than I, said they didn’t give the Talibe money, just food, as the kids were required to bring the money back to their Marabout. In their view, not giving the kids money was a way of rejecting the Marabouts and their alleged abuses of the boys.
I saw firsthand the hours these children worked, tramping through the city as early as 7am in the morning and seeing them scour for the last scraps of food and money outside the local food depots as late as 11pm at night. I followed the lead of my American friends, against my better judgement, giving food instead of money, and in time I became known as ‘the banana girl.’
The boys would spot me fifty feet away and their eyes would light up and they’d start toward me screaming “banane, banane!” in French, and before you know it, I would be surrounded by at least ten boys. Always, there was a boy who would huff his banana down in three bites and stick his hand out for another, but I was pretty broke at the time, making just two hundred dollars a month teaching English and with my rent costing me one hundred forty dollars a month, all I could afford was $2 for a ten-count bunch.
The boys in my story are based off of these boys in general, and two more specifically. And though I took some liberties with the specifics, the circumstances of these children were very real.
When I returned the states for a brief time in 2006, I used the skills I learned in business school to start a nonprofit company that would focus on helping the talibé back in Dakar, and a few months later I found myself back in Senegal for work and it was during this time when I realized that starting another local grassroots nonprofit was not the best way for me, personally, to
communicate the injustice that I saw. I needed to do something to bring attention to the story of these boys, one which all too often was reduced to a statistic.
When I first started writing I wanted the world to know about the talibé. To be angry about their treatment like I was. To feel passionate about caring and protecting our most vulnerable citizens, children. It does not matter what nationality, religion, race, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, ability or gender a child is – they all deserve our love and protection.
In spite of my conviction, I also felt immense guilt while writing about Ibrahimah and Etienne. Guilt that I didn’t give the boys like them money more often. I didn’t learn of the depth of the physical abuses the boys suffer until later when conducting my research for the novel, and when I did, I knew their plight needed a bigger platform. I decided to use fiction as the medium because it allowed me to extrapolate that which I was not able to witness first hand in my time there, while weaving in parts of my own firsthand experience in Senegal that were important context to represent.
There were so many stories I learned in Dakar and fiction allowed me to bring those stories to the page, so that a reader who did not see what I did could hopefully experience the beauty of what I saw, and feel in a visceral way the plight of injustice suffered by the talibé.
Additional information about the talibé can be found on the website of the Human Rights Watch, at www.hrw.org.