I’ve just returned from a one-month trip to Senegal. Of all the images now lodged in my memory bank, that of the almudos flashes up most frequently. I had read about the talibés, and knew their plight was a chief concern of several organisations including UNICEF, but emotionally I was ill-prepared. There were hundreds of boys, most of them under 10 years old, clustered on the central Place de L‘Indépendance, and the more touristy streets such as the Avénue Georges Pompidou, which leads up to the Marché Sandaga. Undernourished, their skin covered in sores and caked in filth, the ragged remnants of a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, carrying a rusty old tomato-paste tin that served as a begging bowl, the little boys would surround us, their eyes imploring - just give me a little something, something to see me through today. As one older boy said to me later in Ziguinchor: “You have everything, I have nothing. Can’t you spare me a little of what you have?” A recent UNICEF study claims that 150,000 children live like this in Senegal alone.We travelled by train from the capital to Tambacounda in the east, and there were talibés at every stop, competing with women selling cloth, tea kettles and foodstuffs. But the problem appeared especially acute in Kaolack, the main city of the Siné Saloum region, where we saw hundreds of almudos at gas stations and the main taxi-brousse terminal. Often, the boys would take it in turns to board the crowded buses and sing (verses from the Koran?). The locals gave them sugar cubes, little plastic-wrapped cones of green tea, or a couple of coins. I had read about physical punishments meted out by marabouts to boys who failed to earn their keep by begging. The almudos we saw were all obviously in very poor health, a result of neglect and exploitation at the hands of their so-called teachers.
The issue appears to me to be a highly sensitive one. Any project to improve the lot of the talibés must challenge the traditional view of marabouts as learned men of integrity, previously held in high esteem by much of the population, and tackle head on thorny issues such as the overall decline of the region’s Koranic school system, the unhealthy relationship between religious leaders and the government, corruption and exploitation leading to an erosion of traditional values and community structures. Whereas in the past, a village family may have given their male offspring to a marabout as a way to gain blessings as well as an education for their child, nowadays the decisive factor is perhaps an economic one. Certainly, what may have been in the past a mutually beneficial relationship based on the ascetic practices of Islam, the disciples of today’s marabouts clearly have nothing to gain from the arrangement, which sees them degraded, destitute and with no prospects for a better life.
My friend and I chose Senegal primarily because of the music we'd heard, and a burning curiosity about what kind of place spawns such energising, uplifting sounds. We were lucky enough to see Youssou N'Dour and Thione Seck in concert, and experience something of their god-like status. Now I regret that I was just there on holiday. That I just passed through as an observer, unable to give something back to the talibés who defined my experience of Senegal. I hope to be able to put that right someday.
