When my sister came back home after living one year in Canada, in the glorious 90’s, she would tell me about something I considered fabulous: the dépanneur. This legendary dépanneur was a small shop that sold anything in small doses, at the weirdest times (for us in Italy at that time 7,30 pm was still the latest closing times for all shops, except for restaurants).
Many years later living in New York I knew the joy of late night shopping at the bodega and now my life revolves for a good chunk around the buutik.
The buutik (wolof pronunciation of the French word “boutique”) is the life-saver of people like me who always forget something when grocery shopping.
And not just me, a lot of Senegalese families can’t afford, or just are not in the habit of, buying in bulk. They buy for each meal, one soap bar at a time, one can of peas, one jar of mayonnaise; tomorrow it’s going to be tuna, diapers, one butter stick.
The buutik normally opens after the first prayer (around 6 am) and stays open until 11 pm or even midnight, it’s open 7 days a week, rain or shine. Only on Friday at prayer time it shuts down for about one hour, until the Imam tells the faithful to go in peace.
At the buutik you can buy tampons, canned beef, cigarettes but also eggs (already hard boiled, which is pretty pretty cool), fresh bread, hot coffee and breakfast sandwiches. Those deserve a little detour from the main topic of the post.
The typical Senegalese loves a late breakfast, at 10 am – 11 am, when most people are already out for the day. The buutik is, along with the tanganà (stay tuned, a specific post is coming up soon), THE place for breakfast. The best-selling sandwiches are: hard-boiled eggs-boiled potatoes-mayonnaise-hot sauce or the phenomenal pentòn (wolof pronunciation of the French for “bread and tuna”), which is no less than 30/40 cm of bread loaf filled with sardine dip bubbling with raw onion and the ubiquitous hot sauce.
For the faint of heart like myself, you can just order bread and butter sandwich or chocolate sandwich or butter AND chocolate, which comes with an oily brown sugary sauce that vaguely tastes like chocolate, but has none the less a place in my top-sandwiches list.
The sandwiches are made on the spot for immediate consumption, on the glass top layer of a shelf that is wiped clean once in a blue moon, and are wrapped in old newspapers. (I am always amazed at how quickly one can adjust to cleaning standards that are debatable to say the least).
An odd thing that I was never able to explain is that the newspaper that are used to wrap the sandwiches are always from other countries. The Brighton Gazette, The Buenos Aires Sentinel, The Chicago News. I know all the weekly grocery specials from around the world as my buutik prefers wrapping sandwiches in the foreign free press, which evidently fundraises through discount coupns.
The sandwiches are washed down with hot instant coffee with a few pounds of sugar (admittedly, the average Senegalese isn’t afraid of diabetes) or kinkelibà (hot beverage somewhat similar to tea, stimulants-free).
At the buutik you can buy sugar, coffee, dish soap, biscuits etc. in small portions (a very limited budget, on average, makes it only possible to satisfy the present need). When the shop isn’t busy you can see the vendor filling up teeny-tiny bags of sugar and coffee and carefully knot the bag closed. Interesting to note that also diapers are sold one by one, something I discovered during an emergency.
In Africa mobile payment systems have been around for over a decade now and where do you think you can top up your card? You got it!
The buutik around the corner from my house also sells cheap thongs and socks; in another one I bought kids panties and some buutiks also sell frozen fries and cheap ice cream (only the high-end ones have a freezer).
This West Africa General Store poses no limits to the imagination of a consumeristic mind but there are times in which some items (not only food) are not sold: that would be the sunset. You can’t buy salt, much less pepper and hot chili pepper, sewing needles and shaving blades; the strictes buutik won’t sell coal either (used mainly to make attaya). The sunset (called timìs in wolof) is the time of the 4th prayer of the day and is considered borderline between our human world and the other world, the one of spirits, so being careful is your best bet.
Sunset or no sunset, without the buutik there would be no Senegal at all: they are everywhere, in the most distant village in the middle of the bush at the end of the world. Because no matter where in Senegal, each morning a man, a woman, a kid wake up and know they will shuttle to and from the buutik at least once for each meal.