Daytrip to Yoff

On Sunday I took a daytrip to Yoff, a "village" that lies along the northern shore of the Dakar peninsula, to visit U., a friend who I got to know when she was at Amnesty in London and I at CPJ. (I put "village" in quotation marks because Yoff feels more like a poorer, unpaved suburb of Dakar, though here the term is vague enough to be used for everything smaller than Senegal's main three cities.) U. is married to a Senegalese man whose family lives in Yoff, and the two of them share an apartment near the sea. To my delight, the day began with a delicious lunch of fish yassa (locally caught white fish roasted with onions and lemon juice), proceeded through a long walk on the beach, and ended with an elaborate preparation of mint tea at U.'s inlaws' home.

To get to Yoff you take the No. 8 bus from downtown (right around the corner from the apartment where I'm staying, in front of a ruined former movie theater and across the street from a posh air conditioned French-style pastry shop - Dakar's downtown truly is weird). An hour and a half, 175 CFA (35 cents), and some serious urban scenery later, you get off in the sandy streets of central Yoff. Immediately the ambiance is different from Dakar proper - people are much more laid back, and not a single person tries to hassle you to buy anything.

The town lies sprawled along the beach (see photos below), and many of its residents make their living from fishing. Additionally, the original community of Yoff is religiously and ethnically distinct from other Senegalese from the region (meaning those who lived in the area before it became a major urban center; today's cosmopolitan Dakar, which comprises people from all over Senegal and West Africa in addition to the expat community, can't really be said to have a main "ethnicity"). Those with deep roots in Yoff are known as the "layene," speak a particular dialect of Wolof, and follow a specific religious leader or "grand marabout"; marabouts head the "mourides," the Islamic brotherhoods that define much of Senegalese culture and lifestyle. (They're very hard to figure out from the outside however.) The descendent of the founder of the sect still lives in Yoff, in the beautiful seaside house pictured above.

All over Dakar there are murals depicting the founding Mourides on the walls of buildings, usually fairly schematic images in black and white. The ones in Yoff are particularly elaborate.