Tour de Senegal/Casamance: The Village of Seleky

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Photos (top to bottom): photos 1&2: on the ferry crossing the Gambia River in the English-speaking, former British colony of Gambia; photos 3&4: Campement Seleky; photo5: dugout canoe being carved on the shore near tidal mangrove flats; photo6: rice fields nearby Seleky; photo7: on the road from Brin to Seleky, passing women carrying harvested rice at day's end; photo8: Randi birding; photo9: a hyena footprint discovered nearby the campement

We opted to tour southern and southeastern Senegal over this winter holiday, accompanied by our friend and guide/interpreter Almamy Badiene. Rather than hassle with driving, we arranged a 4-wheel drive vehicle and driver, Samba-the-Lion. Our first destination was the village of Seleky, located in the Casamance region of Senegal, where Almamy has many relatives from his mother's side of the family.

Seleky is a paradise, a garden, set amongst an abundance of palms, rice fields, and mangrove flats. It's pretty, picturesque, pastural, spotless, dotted with ponds where families of goats and pigs and birds of all kinds congregate. People seem happy, content, kind, welcoming.

We stayed at the lovely Campement Seleky, our comfortable home for several days, on the edge of the village, overlooking a vast expanse of tidal flats. The campement is constructed in the traditional impluvium-style, unique to the Casamance, with a funnel-shaped inner courtyard bounded by a double roof, for the collection of rainwater. The snug rooms included solar panel-powered lights, flush toilets, and showers. Were we served meals in a commons area. Breakfast was typically bread, butter, jelly, and coffee; dinner consisted of rice with fish or beef.

(The campement form of tourism began in 1974, based on the ideas of the French ethnologist, Christian Saglio, who hated westernized tourism, and believed it polluted the culture. The goal of his Rural Integrated Tourism system was to integrate visitors into the rural African life and offer them a realistic view of African culture. The profits, as is true for Campement Seleky, go directly to the villages. Visitors thus contribute to village life.)

As Almamy explained while trip planning, he would be expected to stay in Seleky, the village of his mother, and etiquette would require that he make the rounds to visit with his extended family. We were privileged to accompanied him on his sojourns around the village to meet and greet his extended family, offering Kola nuts as gifts of respect to the elders, as is protocol.

(As an aside, the Kola nut has some interesting pharmacological properties. See Wiki for an overview.)

For video clips, see clip1, clip2, clip3.