Over the years I told many many many African stories to my friends and family and I realized that they had misconceptions that would mystify the truth of living in an African metropolis in the 21st century.
Here are some of the ones I feel the urge to correct.
Living in Africa is cheap
That is just not true. Living in Dakar is as costly as living in Turin or Milan, Italy (if you expect to have some standards like running water, electricity, more personal space than in a refugee camp, varied and fairly fresh food).
An apartment for a family of 5 easily goes for € 700-1,000 and you need to add maintenance because more often than not construction standards are low. Buying a piece of land to build a house in Dakar is prohibitively expensive; Dakar is a peninsula, there is no way to expand it so the explosive cocktail is high demand and low availability. Buying land to build a house for a family of 5 is way over budget for any white collar or professional.
Grocery shopping is as expensive as in Italy, most fruit and veggies are imported (Senegal is on the border of the Sahara desert and a sizable portion of its land is pre-desertic).
Eating fresh grilled fish and sipping beer on the beach can be pretty cheap, I’ll give you that!
You spend most of your time at the beach
I don’t know who told you that, but nope. Also here in Senegal we have something called work and we tend to do attend to it when there’s natural light. But getting to the beach in ten minutes for a quick break is a benefit I would have a hard time to let go of.
If they are Muslims, women need to wear a veil
Again, nope. Women must cover their head only at the mosque (they also have to wear a long skirt, if they wear pants they can wrap a piece of cloth around their waist, the so-called pagne). Funeral services are the only other circumstance when women are invited to cover their head, but it is more of an act of consideration then an obligation. In both cases wear a veil means only gently cover the head; hair, neck and ears can be seen.
They are behind compared to Europe
No, it’s a matter of different mentalities and different trajectories of economic development.
The digital revolution is changing the country and the continent: many people have more than one telephone and at least one smart phone that they use with proficiency.
Only a handful of people here has a bank account but the payment systems via the (smart) phone has been alive and well now for more than ten years. The remittances of the diaspora can be claimed even in the farthest corners of the country, which made easier to transition to digital finacial transactions to pay for services and merchandise on a regular basis.
The word “credit card” here means “phone credit” that can be converted in cash or time (internet or phone).
Having said that, it would be hard to ignore that there still are pockets of poverty that live like my young grandparents when they were farmers with nothing in the countryside. Living in the villages often means not having electricity and/or running water (with limited access to certain hours and certain places), cooking on a wood fire, not being able to afford healthy and varied foods, not having access to a sewage system that complies with basic standards.
Africa is all abouth the community and not the individual
Here the very idea that the individual has a right to personal affirmation, even when this can override the rights of the community, is still premature. In Senegal the individual is in most cases subordinated and functional to the interests of the community, but over time I discovered that family is actually more accurate than community. It can be extra large, but it is always family.
A village easily consists in one only large family and family and community actually overlap, but things dramatically change in the city and you can easily see that the sense of family prevails over the sense of community. Recognizing certain family ties, no matter how loose, establishes that you belong to a group and that gives you some privileges.
A person socially exist in relationship with his parents, to whose will he/she is submitted until they are alive, and in relationship to when he came into the family (order of appearance): the first born has more rights and more duties than everyone else in the family, especially if it’s a boy/man. Normally a woman, even when she’s a first born, leaves the family when she gets married to live with her husband’s family and most of her right and duties towards her natural family become less relevant.
Even today one of the most horrible things a person can do is ruining the reputation of the family (by marrying without the blessing of their parents, living their homosexuality, choosing not to emigrate, just to give you an idea).
The sense of community/family is certainly very strong but the one of common good is non-existent: garbage get thrown on the street, drivers are arrogant (but with a smile) and the concept of paying taxes to get a service in exchange is still hard to grasp for most people.