Latest news with #Bouba
LeMonde
5 days ago
- General
- LeMonde
Senegalese sailors on French fishing boats: 'They have the maritime spirit in their blood'
It was nighttime, and a light drizzle soaked the docks at the Breton port of Lorient, in western France. In the city's cold fishmongers' halls, the first workers were already starting their shifts. Laborers prepared the conveyor lines, getting them ready to receive the day's catch. Outside, the crew of the trawler Côte-d'Ambre was about to set out for 10 days at sea. From April to the end of August, it was langoustine season. "Bouba isn't here, even though he's usually the first to arrive," said the ship's captain, Laurent Tréguier, 52, as he finished refueling the ship. The tardy crew member finally showed up, having been delayed by a broken alarm clock. Rushing onto the boat, Bouba Diouf Sagna, 47, took up his position alongside his four colleagues and began carrying out the routine tasks that came before setting out to sea. They had to leave the port at 3 am. Sagna, who hails from Bétanti, a coastal town in southern Senegal, has been part of the Côte-d'Ambre's crew for over five years now. "For about 15 years, we've been struggling to find staff because the job no longer attracts people. It's physical work, and the comfort is relative," said Tréguier. "We would still manage to find guys, more or less trained, but when my brother and I bought the boat in 2019, we needed to run more trips, so we had to hire. I noticed Senegalese men walking along the docks with résumés, and I first hired Doudou. He had already been working in France for several years."
New York Times
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Magic, Conspiracy and a Down-on-His-Luck Detective
Tochi Onyebuchi's latest novel, 'Harmattan Season,' opens as many a detective story has, with a mysterious woman seeking the help of a downcast private investigator. In an early-20th-century West African city occupied by the French after a devastating war, we meet Bouba, a 'chercher' making a tenuous living finding missing persons. As a 'deux-fois,' half-French and half-Indigenous 'dugulen' and generally able to pass as either, he's living in semi-squalor in his city's Ethnic Quarter, saddled with unshakable debt, hiding his past fighting on the side of the French and believing himself in possession of a permanent 'bad-luck radius.' When he opens his door to his mystery woman, she is clutching a bloody stomach wound and begging him to hide her. He shuffles her to a closet and moments later the police arrive, saying they need to take Bouba in for questioning. Under the guise of getting his sandals, he rushes back into his house and discovers the woman has vanished. Presented with such a mystery, what can a good chercher do but go searching? The case of the missing woman resolves quickly but not before leading Bouba to a larger conspiracy. As in prior noir-influenced science-fiction/fantasy fare, like China Miéville's 'The City & the City' or P. Djéli Clark's 'A Master of Djinn,' Onyebuchi employs the tropes of the detective novel not only to unravel a mystery but also to trawl readers through an imagined setting whose inventions reflect real-world historical issues. In 'Harmattan Season,' the deeper meditation is about the heavy cost of colonization and conquest. The woman Bouba seeks turns out to be a Floater, someone who can gain the ability to levitate after removing a particular body organ. This process is also used to create surreal explosives eventually employed, in the novel's most indelible image, to lift much of the city's French Quarter, suspending broken buildings in midair while their inhabitants tumble back to earth. This is guerrilla resistance fighting not with guns but with magic, as the dugulen literally eject their oppressors from stolen land. 'Harmattan Season' moves with a thrilling briskness but sometimes its pace works against its other pleasures. Onyebuchi's West Africa is compellingly imagined but the reader is so quickly rushed from locale to locale that one might struggle to stay grounded. Some of the novel's more intriguing characters get somewhat flattened by this haste. Most problematic is how Bouba often feels carried along by his investigation rather than the driver of it: There's a lot of coincidence here, and sometimes characters seem to make plot-crucial choices without clear or pressing motivations. Like many noirs before it, 'Harmattan Season' is about revealing the greedy schemes of the ruling class. Bouba's efforts eventually uncover French machinations to influence a crucial election, where, if the dugulen reform candidate wins, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission promises to expose any number of war crimes, including Bouba's own. If the puppet incumbent retains his post, the evidence of those atrocities will instead be hidden by lucrative building developments designed to house even more French settlers. To those on top, Bouba despairs, the want for more of the same can justify any crime. 'Men like him, they get their money and their desire changes form,' he laments. 'It's all about power.' In the end, Bouba's foes are not unlike the Harmattan, a dry season of blowing dust Onyebuchi cleverly uses to evoke the ever-present despair of oppressive colonization. 'The français,' one dugulen woman says, 'they are a Harmattan that never ends.' It's not easy to fight the wind, Onyebuchi argues, but it's not impossible. Maybe there is a way to change the weather. Maybe Bouba can help bring the sweet rain the city craves, and with it, a new hope.
