abbey is not clever

universallypopularandwellliked:

mikadoo:

The eyesore Monument de la Renaissance Africaine up close.

Goddamn. This. Fucking. Statue. I remember almost two years ago this October coming up to Ouakam in that van we took up from Mbour and hearing Keely from the back saying, “Oh my god it has a head!” That piece of the statue (the man’s head) had been sitting on the ground next to his legs from before we arrived and this “monument” was finally starting to resemble Wade’s copyrighted “idea”.

Abbey and Kiersten told me about how they attended the grand opening of this statue the following semester during La Jour de l’Independence. Kids waving the Senegalese flag, women in skirts made of fabric with Abdoulaye Wade’s face on it, Ouakam packed with people. Apparently Akon was there too.

Senegal is a predominantly (95+%) Muslim country. This statue rests next to Ouakam, one of the poorest neighborhoods of Dakar, and my home for four months. There was a controversy over the immodesty of the statue’s dress. None of the three figures look particularly African. It cost millions to build.

Millions.

Yet still, the power would go out almost every day for the first two months I was there. And the talibé were always on the street.

 AND the jobs created during the construction of this stupid thing didn’t even go to the Senegalese people. Instead, President Wade outsourced the project to North Korea. It was designed and constructed by North Koreans. Why not inject some of that money back into the Senegalese economy by hiring local people to build the monument? I’m sure there are qualified people in Senegal. Hell, I probably met some of them while I was there. So at the inauguration of the statue, which was also the 50th anniversary of Senegalese indepedence from France, you had Abdoulaye Wade sitting next to a bunch of North Koreans (and Akon… of course) celebrating this huge, monstrous, ugly, resource suck that they had built.

You can see this thing from almost everywhere in the city. I could see it from my roof and I lived in Sacre Coeur 3, which is multiple neighborhoods away from Ouakam. Also, if you pay money you can go inside it, up into the head, like the Statue of Liberty. And then all that money goes right back into Abdoulaye Wade’s pocket… because he claims to have “designed” the statue. Terrible.