Dakar: Senegal's booming sex capital

RNW - Every day at 7pm, 23-year-old Rama carefully packs her cosmetics in a lady bag and heads for a popular bar nearby. The bar is a regular for rich Senegalese men and expatriates with posh cars and big bank accounts.

By Sheriff Bojang Jnr.

"You have sex with some men and they give you a fortune. It's a real business. No one loses." Rama is one of thousands of young sex workers flourishing in the streets, bars and nightclubs of Dakar. Most of them say they are driven into prostitution by poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunities.

Bilkisu is a 31-year-old Nigerian who moved to Dakar in 2008 after her friends told her about the booming sex trade in Dakar.

"I was reluctant to come to Dakar because I did not speak French. But once I discovered the amount of money my friends were making and what kind of houses they live in, I packed my bags and moved. Today I say Senegal is my home, because I have better opportunities here. Men are interested in prostitutes and they mostly pay you what you ask for - I'm home!"

In Senegal, prostitution has been legalised for decades. The official reason for this is to keep track of the health status of the prostitutes. But others say legalising prostitution is just a way of attracting tourists.

Police registry
Any woman over 21 can become a prostitute as long as she is registered with the police, has regular health checks, carries a valid sanitary card and is discrete. But many of the prostitutes on Dakar's streets do not meet these requirements.

Rama, for example, thinks registering with the police is a waste of time: ""Why should I register with the police when I know that it will put me in funny situations? Lots of my friends who registered were discriminated against. The police would harass them, call them names and treat them like trash."

When Bilkisu arrived in Dakar, she was also advised by her room-mate and co-sex worker to register. It turned out to be a nightmare: "I was arrested. The police had a go at me for leaving my country. They said I was bringing disease and immoral behaviour to Senegal."

Rama's scar
Rights groups and NGO's have raised concerns over exploitation of sex workers. One group says sex workers are frequently victims of physical violence.

Rama once was a victim of an attack. She shows her scar in the back of her neck: "I was hit with a torch by a customer who refused to pay after sleeping with me. And sometimes customers deliberately break the condom because they don't like the idea it. They put both of us at risk."

For Bilkisu, however, customers aren't the biggest problem - it's the police. "They often pick you up from the street and trick you into bribing them. If you are unlucky, they take all you earned that night and warn you not to tell anyone."

Although Dakar is reportedly one of the biggest commercial sex capitals of Africa, it is unknown how many unregistered prostitutes work on the streets. So far the Senegalese government has no plans to outlaw prostitution.

So, as long as men are willing to flash their cash, no amount of risk or exploitation will keep Rama, Bilkisu and many of their colleagues from going onto the streets.

Book Review by Sheriff

I have always been madly in love with books and I'm gonna use this little space to review some of my favourite books. I start here with Dances With Devils, extraordinary book written by an extraordinary investigative journalist. Jacques Pauw is a white South African journalist who travelled across Africa compiling some tales of misery, sheer wickedness, arnachy and brutality at it its worst. His story will blow your mind.



Dances With Devils

Author: Jacques Pauw Publisher: Zebra Press

If investigative journalism is vampirism, then Jacques Pauw, the veteran, versatile and award-winning South African TV current affairs programme producer and one of Africa’s most celebrated, decorated, accomplished and intrepid investigative journalists, must have been the greatest human blood sucker across the African continent and perhaps a little beyond.

Whether he is pushed by sheer love for Africa or that journalistic thirst for being the breaker of breaking news, Jacques Pauw has trek Africa and exposes what eventually turns out to be one of the most gruesomely concealed evil, viciousness and ruthlessness on earth. He embarks on an expedition to volatile and pugnacious African states in search of anarchy. But anarchy is too puny a word to describe what confronts him in this expedition. He looks for political sanity but what he finds is the worst political insanity of its kind. He hunts for religious purity and what he gets is the most disgusting religious impurity ever. And he searches for truth but what he hears are perhaps the biggest lies ever told by man.

His new book, Dances With Devils: A Journalist’s Search for Truth, described by Nelson Mandela as one of the most important documents in the history of South Africa, narrates Jacques Pauw’s distressing exploration to precarious Africa in pursuit of petty criminals, corrupt security officials, murderers, drug addicts, prostitutes, human traffickers, racists, gangsters, brutal dictators, fake gods and war lords. Along the way, Pauw has seen it all, from fresh corpses to decomposed ones, hacking of legs and genitals to absolutely fake prophecy, child soldiers to trigger-happy war lords they serves, from dead persons to their killers, and he succumbs to all, from death threats to imprisonment and from restriction of movement to escaping death in the middle of a Congo River. Jacques Pauw truly dances with devils.

Charity begins at home and so does Jacques Pauw’s mission. Dances With Devils notes Pauw’s childhood and the rite of passage in the troubled, discriminatory streets of South Africa where minority whites are the sole beneficiaries of the nation’s wealth at the detriment of the vast majority blacks. Practising journalism and being liberal or even anti-apartheid in the brutal apartheid South Africa is what makes him come head-to-head with his mother who is not convinced about his new-found career and liberalism.

With the title journalist under his belt and Vrye weekblaad newspaper kicking, Jacques Pauw exposes Vlakplaas, apartheid’s police death squad, informing the world about the murders, attempted murders, arson attacks and other atrocities the squad commits day in and day out and how their dirty activities are authorised and sponsored by apartheid government. It is through Pauw’s courageous revelations that the world comes to know about Vlakplaas henchmen and their notorious, bloodthirsty commander, Eugene De Kock.

In the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, thanks to Jacques Pauw, many culprits confesses their sins and repents and key witnesses gives testimonies. Through his investigative journalism skills and sometimes mere obstinacy, he is able to convince apartheid thugs such as Dirk Coetzee to confess the crimes they commits such as the murder of the Pebco Three. In pursuit of the kind of news he wants, Pauw trades information and sometimes betray the informant’s trust in the name of public interest despite having the strong conviction that “An agreement between a journalist and a source or informant is no less sacrosanct that the privileges that attaches to communication between lawyer and client or psychologist and patient”.

In Rwanda, what confronts Jacques Pauw is well beyond his imagination, beyond human understanding. From the chaotic tribal hatred between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis, the broad-day-light lynching, hatching of legs, arms and genitals, mass graves to women and children running helter-skelter for help that never come, from culprits proudly carrying skulls of their victims, crying relatives searching for loved ones among laying corpses, religious Hutu leaders hiding runaway vulnerable Tutsis in their churches only to surrender them to armed Hutus for well-planned executions to hundreds of thousands of dead bodies dumped on the roads for collection just like rubbish bags, from sight of vacant, desperate eyes in their sockets, echoing voices of men, women, young and old wailing for help, pleading for mercy, exhausted women and young ones giving up running and eventually dying with dignity in one place, dead bodies floating down the river to tens of thousands of people dying as a result of hunger and starvation, Dances With Devils offers behind the scenes of this unforgivable and unforgettable genocide of all genocides on the African soil.

Jacques Pauw’s greatest achievement in Rwanda is certainly his exposé of the United Nations as a decrepit, flawed and purposeless organisation that deserves nothing but dismantling and burying under the pillars of the stupidly wasteful Arch 22 at the entrance of Banjul in Gambia. He perfectly narrates how UN betrays the million Rwandans who die, how UN chiefs in New York orders its troops on the ground to merely stand aside and watch while a million people perishes. He successfully tells the story of how UNAMIR Commander, Gen. Romeo Dellaire’s request for “just 5000 well-armed men from UN to stop the killing and restore order’ in Rwanda was heartlessly and horrendously rejected by so-called UN technocrats including African Kofi Annan, as UN Peace Keeping boss, citing heavy financial cost.

It is also in Rwanda that Jacques Pauw brings journalism to disrepute, greedily and arrogantly flouts the rule of humanity, of common sense, by deliberately influencing, in fact, ordering members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front to aimlessly open fire using RPG rocket launchers, mortars and machine guns, so that he can have the action on camera. He admits that this is “an inexcusable blunder”. Whether or not Pauw’s investigative success in Rwanda outweighs this “inexcusable blunder” and any culpability on his part for that matter, remains debatable.

In Sierra Leone, Jacques Pauw further brings to light the sheer wickedness and ferocity of war mongers such as Foday Sankoh and General Mosquito and exposes the ludicrousness and futility of their cause. He tells the stories of child soldiers, how they were drugged into killing and chopping of hands and arms, how they eventually enjoys executing their masters’ orders, how they are traced and chased in the streets by their victims in the post- war Sierra Leone and how their war time activities continues to haunt them.

In Nigeria, an Evangelist called TB Joshua emerges. He is widely known as Prophet Joshua and he heads The Synagogue, Church of All Nations. To his congregation and thousands of others from far and near, he is a messiah who among other things, liberates man from diseases such as HIV/AIDS and epilepsy and place an unborn baby in its right place in the womb by saying just a short, simple prayer. His clients includes presidents, royals, celebrities and ordinary people.

In Dances With Devils, Pauw unveils this so-called prophet as nothing more than a dupe, a con man who prey on people using the church and playing casino with God. He reveals how the fake prophet tries to bribe him and woo him into believing in his fake sainthood.

From human trafficking and prostitution in Mozambique to famine and drought in Sudan and from drug abuse and trafficking in Tanzania to corruption and deadly river transport in Congo, Jacques Pauw succeeds in telling his distressing tale with acumen and empathy, valor and vigor.

Dances With Devils is a book no one should miss.


Power Quote: O, let my books be then the eloquence And dumb presagers of my speaking breast; Who plead for love and for recompense More than that tongue that more hath more express’d. -William Shakespeare