Jarreng
Last weekend I travelled to Jarreng, 250km up the South Bank highway, for Charlie’s leaving celebration. Louise and I took Friday off and woke early in order to get a place on the first geli-geli heading that way. The taxi garage for the South Road is quite near my house, and we arrived in good time with the minibus half full and the apprenti stacking all kinds of luggage and goods (boxes, rice sacks, a mattress, corrugate sheets…) on the roof. We waited an hour for the final places to fill and then departed, south first towards Brikama, and then turning East to go upcountry.
This was my first trip of any distance on the South Bank road. This was once the main artery running upcountry but has deteriorated over time, and in places contains more potholes than smooth road. The North Bank road was finished two years ago and is now a much superior route, though most maps still show the South Road to be the main one. A programme of repairs is underway on the South Road and I am told it is much better than it used to be. We passed a number of stretches where machines were grinding and smoothing and flattening the gravel into a reasonable surface, which means that vehicles can travel faster and the journey to Jarreng no longer takes all day. I have previously written enough about roads and travelling, so I won’t go on about that…but suffice to say that you would not believe the dust. It permeates inside the vehicle and we arrived completely covered with orange dust on our clothes and faces and in our hair. Many locals use cloths to cover themselves completely for the entire journey, or tie a towel across their mouth and nose.
Charlie has lived in Jarreng for two years and has been supporting schools and teachers in that area. She has been living in a large friendly compound housing several families (with seemingly hundreds of children) in a number of buildings. They were working hard all weekend to give Charlie a fitting farewell party. We were made welcome and were introduced to Dinner, an affable goat that would self-sacrificially be providing meat for the party the following day. I knelt down to greet the goat but she shied away from me; perhaps she knew that something was up. I also made friends with some newly-hatched chicks that were scurrying around the compound. One boy told me I would not be able to catch them…but I grew up with chicks and chickens in our garden and catching a chick is not impossible. Perhaps I set a bad example, as chick-catching then became a game for children in the compound. It is unusual for local children to pay any attention to the animals they have around them. Goats, sheep, chickens and donkeys are always there, and there is no local comprehension that these things are cute or can be petted – they are simply ignored most of the time. It’s an understandable strategy given that you are likely to eat your pet goat or chicken at some point.
That evening we walked to a roadside restaurant and enjoyed either omelette, or fish and rice. Jarreng has no electricity so we sat there in deep darkness and gazed up at the stars whilst the food was prepared by candlelight and cooked over charcoal. It amused me that we were sat by the second-most important road in the country, and in an hour or more that we were there just one truck passed by. And next to us, a woman was ironing clothes using a traditional charcoal iron, the coals glowing orange in the gloom. You don’t often see that on the hard-shoulder of the A1.
Saturday was the day of the party. We sneaked off during the morning and sat by a large pond where a man was fishing with a net. Two pied kingfishers repeatedly dived into the water, and had more success than the fisherman. A group of bee-eaters carried grass and leaves into their burrows in the bank. And a herd of cows arrived to drink at the pond.
We returned via the school. Like many, this school has a garden in which women grow vegetables to supplement school meals or to sell to raise funds. Rice for school lunches is provided by the World Food Programme. The school is awarded an allocation of rice dependent on their roll (this leads to inflated figures claimed by some schools), and children are supposed to be given a meal every day. Towards the end of each term it is common that some of the rice has gone missing. Where salaries are low and where schools receive no money from central government (that’s right, none – schools have no income from government) then headteachers will use whatever resources they can to cover their needs (personal needs and school needs). Even if that means using World Food Programme rice to pay for a favour, or to fund minor repairs to roofs or furniture, for example. A friend of mine was recently in a conversation with a headteacher about school meals. The head asked about school meals in the UK, about what the children would eat, and how the food was prepared. When my friend said that sometimes there would be meat available the head was surprised. ‘But who is responsible for slaughtering the meat?’ he asked.
In the afternoon we slaughtered Dinner the goat. Well, I didn’t, but the men of the compound did. This was not a comfortable thing to watch, but I figured that if I was willing to eat Dinner then I ought to be strong enough to see her be killed. It took four men to hold her down and her blood ran from the slice in her neck and created a pool of red in the sand. She was taken away to be butchered, and I went to comfort Louise, who is a vegetarian.
The party began in the early evening, with the arrival of a Kankurang. These are ritualistic beasts mainly associated with the circumcision of boys. A group of boys from the village are currently away at manhood training camp for a month (very much as described in Alex Haley’s Roots); they stay at the bush camp for a month of lessons, trials and training, and return to the village as men. The Kankurang roams the village from time to time and is best avoided, but it is OK if he is invited to a party. He comes dressed in leaves, fabric rags or strips of bark, and may have cow horns. In fact three Kankurangs came to this party, and took their turn at the centre of the dancing.
Everyone from the village packed into the compound to dance or watch the dancing, and enjoy the drumming and the antics of the Kankurang. Gambian fabrics are beautiful, and for this party both we and the people of the village had dressed in fine local outfits. Mandinka dancing involves a lot of stamping and arm waving. Individuals or pairs take their few moments in the limelight before they are pushed aside, or escape apparently embarrassed back into the safety of the throng. We danced on an on. Somewhere there are pictures of my own efforts, but they will not be appearing on this blog!
This first phase of the party continued until dusk when the drummers and Kankurang abruptly left, and the crowd dispersed to their homes. We then enjoyed a lull whilst a man arrived with his disco equipment: a CD player, some very large speakers, one lightbulb and a generator. The disco got going and once again the compound heaved with dancing people. At some point we ate Dinner. The music continued until 2am. And at 6am we woke, exhausted, to find a geli-geli back home.
