by Aimee Molloy
The most popular book among the children of the center was one that Molly wrote herself, after a particularly painful experience at a party she’d attended in Dakar. Throughout her life, Molly had grown distinctly aware of the destructive effects of racism, at least as much as any white person growing up in America can be. While she’d always been in the majority, she was admittedly most drawn to people different from herself. She fondly remembered a time in junior high school when the students in her art class were assigned the task of choosing someone in the room to draw. An African-American student named Charles chose Molly, and when he showed her his final product, she saw that he’d drawn her as a black girl. Something about this really moved her and she asked Charles if she could keep the drawing. She brought it home to show her mother.
“Molly, this is a black girl,” Ann said.
“It does look like that, doesn’t it?” Molly said. “I really love it.”
Ann probably didn’t like it quite as much, and she liked it even less when Molly proudly announced to her parents during her sophomore year in college that she was in love. His name was Victor and he was a creative writer, who also happened to be African-American. Molly dated him for four years. She truly loved him, and when they walked down the street together and she noticed the glances and stares they received, she never thought it was because people felt uncomfortable by the sight of a biracial couple, but instead because she and victor made such a handsome couple. Her mother struggled with the relationship, attempting at first to dissuade Molly from continuing it, informing her that couples who “share many things in common” have a better chance of staying together, that she’d get along better with someone with a similar background. Molly knew what Ann meant, but she chose not to address this. It didn’t bother her that she and Victor were different; in fact, she preferred this.
“Why would I want to date someone who is the same as me?” she asked her mother every time the issue arose. “How utterly boring. Life is full of possibilities to learn new things, and being with someone different means I’ll just learn so much more. It means I’ll have the chance to see things differently, to take on a whole new perspective of what life might be.”
Trying to be subtle, Ann eventually hinted to Molly that if she kept dating Victor, she and Al might stop paying for Molly’s college tuition. Molly was furious and didn’t have to give a second thought to her response. She applied for work at Marshall Field’s and the Shoreline Hotel the next day and told Ann she would no longer be accepting another dime from her. The situation caused a serious rift in her relationship with her mother, but Ann did try her best. “Just a note to say that every day I am improving my attitude about your relationship with Victor,” she later wrote to Molly in a letter. “Al has helped me so much to see that I have been keeping you tied to the umbilical cord. It is your life and I am constantly working toward the reality of you being an entity unto yourself.”
Given this worldview, it was therefore never uncomfortable for Molly to be, as she often was since arriving in Senegal, the only white person in attendance at most functions. But at a birthday party for a Senegalese friend attended by some visiting African-Americans, Molly sensed an unfamiliar tension. Eventually, without any provocation, she was approached by one of the Americans and loudly asked to leave.
Confused, she asked this person to explain. “Why would I leave?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“No, not to me. I was invited,” Molly said.
“Well, you don’t fit in,” the woman said. “Hurry and eat, and then get your fat white ass out of here.” Molly was mortified. She looked at the friend who had invited her, hoping he would intervene and defend her. When he remained silent, Molly discarded her plate of food, hot and untouched, and left the party.
She stayed at home and cried for three days. “I wasn’t even so much crying for myself,” she says. “It was just that for the first time I understood what discrimination feels like … what it does to people. It made me feel awful. Just because of the color of your skin you’re told to leave by a person who’s never seen you before, who knows nothing about you?” After allowing herself three days of brooding over what had happened, she sat down at the small table in her room and began to write a story.
In a village very far away lived a people with necks so long that everyone called them the Longnecks. They lived in peace in their small village until one day, to the great surprise of all the villagers, a little girl named Anniko arrived. She looked very strange to them. “What a short neck she has!” they whispered. They’d never seen anyone with a short neck and they didn’t know what to make of her, but she seemed like a kind and sensitive girl, and they invited her to stay. Anniko accepted their invitation. She was a hard worker and a good dancer, and she made friends easily. But what the villagers liked most about Anniko was that every morning she walked through the village, awakening them with her singing. The Longnecks had never heard singing before, and everyone came to love the sound of her beautiful voice. Well, everyone except one man, who grew jealous of the way people loved Anniko.
“Why are you here?” the Mean Man asked her one day as she pounded the millet. “You have a short neck, and clearly you don’t belong with us.”
Anniko was devastated by his words and, without thinking, she ran far into the forest. By the time night fell, Anniko realized she was lost. The next morning, the people of the village started to worry when they didn’t hear Anniko’s beautiful morning song. When they learned that the Mean Man had insulted her, they confronted him. He was forced to admit what he had done and said that Anniko had fled to the forest. Not knowing what else to do, the Longnecks decided to try to lure her back home by attempting to sing as she had. At first, they were not very good at it, but they kept on trying and finally their voices rose from their long necks high above the trees and deep into the forest. Eventually, Anniko heard their singing, and she followed the sound of their voices until she found her way back home. “Anniko, the depth of your heart is more important than the length of your neck,” the villagers exclaimed. “Don’t ever leave us again!”
When Molly finished writing the story, she drew pictures to accompany it—elaborate, colorful images of Anniko and the land of the Longnecks. It took her a few weeks to finish the book, and afterward she sent it to the New African Editions publishing house, which chose to print and distribute twenty thousand copies in West Africa. When she finally read Anniko! out loud to the children at the Démb ak Tey Center, they sat quietly listening, inching closer to her with each page to better see the pictures. Molly knew how much they loved these experiences—hearing a book read aloud in their own language, filled with drawings of people who looked like them. When she finished reading, they remained quiet for a few seconds.
And then they asked her to read it again.
DESPITE HOW CROWDED THE center became, Molly never turned children away, and soon she expanded the center’s offerings to include theater, puppetry, art classes, and drawing instruction. With the help of an artist named Malick Pouye and a theater student named Bolle Mbaye, who had both begun as volunteers at the center, she organized daily cultural and educational activities based on African oral traditions of songs, legends, theater, poetry, and proverbs. She and Bolle also started the first weekly Senegal radio program in national languages for children, broadcast for two hours each Saturday. Traveling to different villages in a Volkswagen bus she’d bought with funding support, she recorded the history and cultural traditions of the villagers. In the course of each broadcast, Molly inserted information on health and hygiene. The work allowed her to continue to get out of Dakar and into the villages, to better understand the problems people were facing in the communities and to experience the joys of rural life in Senegal. She truly loved spending time in the villages. Even though Dakar had its share of problems, the city at least offered access to health care and other social services; in the villages, there was almost nothing. Yet what Molly felt most was an incredi
ble warmth and welcoming, a sense of exuberance and optimism.
In 1981, after six years at the center, the funding for activities ran out, and Molly started to question what might be next for her. The answer came to her on a day that had started simply enough, on her way to run errands in Dakar.
She met a woman she knew named Rama, who had recently given birth to twins. Rama was with her infant son, who looked dangerously ill. His eyes were hollow, his ribs protruded from his tiny frame, and his fontanel—the soft spot on his head—was depressed, as if the water had been sucked from his body.
“My son is very sick,” Rama said, in great distress. “I’m on my way to see the marabout.”
“Maybe you should also see a doctor,” Molly suggested.
“No, I’m going to see the traditional healer because the baby has a sunken soft spot, and everyone tells me this is a sign that he’s been possessed by evil spirits.” Rama explained she was taking her baby to the best healer she knew, hours away by bus, who could help get rid of the spirits. Molly knew not to argue or judge, having come to understand just how deeply rooted the belief in the spirit world was in Senegal.
Upon her arrival in Senegal, she had immediately noticed many people wearing gris-gris, as they are called, small well-worn leather pouches usually tied around an upper arm or waist. Molly had been curious, and she’d asked a student what they were.
“The whole world is full of spirits, some good and some evil, bringing either great blessings or bad luck to people,” he’d said. “Everyone here has a marabout, someone they consider to be a specialist in controlling these spirits. Often a marabout will write verses from the Koran, which people then sew inside the pouches for protection, to help ward off the evil spirits.” He explained that other gris-gris are used for calling forth the good spirits to bring about healing or good luck.
Molly learned more about the spirit world during her work translating for Dr. Henri Collomb, a well-known French psychiatrist working in Fann University Hospital Center in Dakar. He’d become famous for being among the first in his field to take into account the cultural specificities of treating psychiatric patients in Africa. Like Cheikh Anta, he encouraged Molly to put herself in the minds of the people she encountered. “This is a different culture with a very different belief system and worldview than the one you’re used to. When you see something in this culture that you don’t understand, you must never judge by your own belief system, because it will only lead you to great frustration,” he advised her. “Try to truly understand the people and the deeper reasons why they do what they do, and you will soon learn they feel they have no choice but to conform to certain practices and beliefs for fear of the punishments that could follow.”
Molly kept this advice in mind, but a few days after meeting Rama, her concern for the little boy lingered and she decided to pay Rama a visit. When she arrived at her house, Rama was inconsolable.
“The marabout gave us blessings and a gris-gris,” she said with great sadness. “But the baby died not long after we returned to Dakar.”
Molly left Rama’s house and went directly to speak to a Senegalese nurse she knew. She needed to understand what had happened to the baby. When she explained the symptoms, the woman shook her head in sadness.
“Molly, it’s simple. The baby was dehydrated. He had diarrhea and desperately needed to be rehydrated.” She explained that there was a simple, inexpensive remedy: a solution of water, salt, and sugar that can replace the lost fluids and rehydrate the body. “When the fontanel is sunken, the dehydration is severe,” she said. “The baby should have been brought to the health post immediately. You should have insisted, Molly. You could have saved that baby’s life.”
Molly was distraught for days, unable to shake the idea that if she had only known that something as simple as identifying a sunken fontanel could have diagnosed the problem, for which there was an easy remedy, the boy would still be alive. She was devastated, acutely aware of her own failure to save the baby.
SOON AFTERWARD, MOLLY VISITED a small village an hour and a half from Dakar called Saam Njaay. None of the villagers spoke French, nor could they read or write in Wolof. Of the thirty-six villages in the surrounding rural community, there was only one public school, too far away for children to attend. The closest option for education was a Catholic school that was a one-hour walk away. But, Molly soon discovered, the residents of Saam Njaay were eager for education. She began to discuss with them an idea that intrigued her: creating an experimental program in their village, using African cultural activities to contribute to developmental education. Ready for another undertaking, she viewed this as an opportunity to combine the experiences of her eight years in Senegal and the materials she’d developed at the children’s center into an educational program in national languages geared specifically to villagers, both children and adults. What she had in mind would be more than a literacy project; it would be an entirely different approach to development—a holistic program that encompassed not just reading and writing but discussions on problem solving, skills to build confidence, and an understanding of health and hygiene. She thought of a proverb she’d heard that referenced the pagne, the long, traditional skirt worn by Senegalese women: “No matter how beautiful one strip of cloth, it takes many strips to clothe a woman.” Wasn’t the same true when it came to the best way to approach development? Maybe if she could bring holistic, nonformal, basic education to the people of this village—people who’d never gone to school—offering it to them in their own language, she could prevent unnecessary deaths like that of Rama’s son.
It was daunting to think of moving to this remote community and away from the relative comforts of Dakar, but she knew by now that life in the city was no longer best suited to her ambitions. “To go to villages and see people who have so little and yet never complain, who always seem to have the right attitude—I knew I had a lot to learn from them,” she says.
So, she made a decision. She would move to the village for a short time and try to develop a program whose aim was teaching people based on their goals and desires, not what she may have thought best. And once they were given the knowledge, maybe they would, as Cheikh Anta had envisaged, spread it to others.
9
Njàng mu Xoot (Deep Learning)
Molly arrived in the village of Saam Njaay, population three hundred, in September 1982 at the age of thirty-two with a plan to stay for a few months. She would end up living there for three years, in a ten-by-ten-foot adobe hut with a thatched palm roof and a packed earth floor. During this time she would live without electricity, experience a severe drought, contract malaria, and discover during an eventual doctor’s visit that her body carried so many parasites the list was six pages long. But she would also come to view her time spent living in this village as among the most important, interesting, and enlightening of her life.
The day Molly arrived in Saam Njaay was hot and clammy. She parked her Volkswagen bus in front of the small mosque in the center of the village and was delighted to find a crowd of people gathered in anticipation of her arrival. Dozens of children—boys in cutoff shorts and girls with tight braids—peeked shyly at her from behind their mothers’ skirts. At first, the villagers seemed unsure of what to make of this Wolof-speaking American woman dressed in an African boubou, arriving with a small suitcase filled with educational materials, but they were gracious and welcoming.
A few young men carried her bags, as several girls escorted her to the hut the villagers had taken great care in preparing for her. It was furnished simply with a small cot and a wooden table, and woven straw mats covered the dirt floor. After she unpacked her bags, some women arrived with a bowl of food for her.
“We’ve made this especially for you,” one of the women said, setting it on the table. “Enjoy.”
“Thank you,” Molly said. “I appreciate this, but I’d really like to come and eat with everyone.”
The woman looked surprised. “But you’re our honored
guest. And we thought you might like to enjoy this here in your room.”
“Not at all,” Molly said. “I’d much prefer to join everyone else around the bowl. I’d much prefer to eat with you.”
After dinner, Molly returned alone to her hut. As she lay in the stillness under a mosquito net, listening to the sounds of the village sinking into sleep, she felt as if she’d arrived in another world. It was the hottest time of year in Senegal, when the daytime temperature can reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit and the nights feel even hotter. The heat was intense in her room. She longed for fresh air but had been duly warned upon arrival to never leave open her door or small window, unless she wished to allow admittance to evil spirits known to enter homes at night.
Soon after falling asleep, Molly was awakened by a strange noise coming from the roof of her hut. In the darkness, she feared that it was one of the hyenas known to roam the area, or perhaps a human intruder.
“Hello! Hello!” she cried out in Wolof. “Who’s out there?” When nobody answered, she yelled more loudly. “Help! Someone is breaking into my hut through the roof!”
Several young men, roused from sleep, rushed to help.
