A dust plume spanning hundreds of kilometers blew off the coast of western Africa on February 6, 2012. Click to enlarge. (Photo: NASA)

For the Geo Quiz, we are not looking for a country, but for the name of a weather phenomenon.

It is a dry and dusty trade wind that is causing a vast Saharan dust cloud to hover over West Africa.

Yellowish-brown dust falls like rain and covers the sidewalks and drivers have to use headlights to see through the haze.

So, there won’t be picnics in Dakar, Senegal anytime soon.

Locals are used to this. It is seasonal, but this year’s sand storm is worse than usual.

Harmattan is the answer to the Geo Quiz.

It is blowing from the Sahara Desert across a swath of West African countries including Senegal.

The Environment Ministry of Senegal said Wednesday the air quality in the crowded capital Dakar was “bad” and poses a public health risk.

Anchor Marco Werman talks to journalist Hamadou Tidiane, who lives in Dakar.

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Emmanuel Dolo is trying to apply on-line for a scholarship, but he’s not having much luck.

“The Internet here is very slow. Sometimes you pay for 60 minutes and you only get to use 20 minutes. It just keeps loading and loading,” Dolo said. “It’s frustrating.”

In Liberia, businesses and internet providers must pay for expensive satellite service, which is far beyond the reach of most Liberians.

Elliott Blidi, a project coordinator in Liberia for the West Africa Regional Communications Infrastructure Program, said Liberia has the lowest access to internet penetration in the region.

“In West Africa, Africa in general, our penetration is very low – about 0.02 percent. During the civil war years, the cables that were available, the financing and political will were not there to bring it in,” Blidi said.

But eight years out of war after the end of Liberia’s civil war, that is finally starting to change. Last week, a French ship arrived on the Liberian coast, carrying with it a fiber optic cable, two inches thick and 10,000 miles long. The ship is dragging the cable from France to South Africa.

Spectators watch the fiber optic cable being brought to shore in Liberia. (Photo: Bonnie Allen)

The Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) cable system, run by a consortium of telecom operators led by French Telecom, will provide broadband connectivity to more than 20 countries in Africa and Western Europe.

A crowd gathered on a sandy beach near downtown Monrovia, watching as a diver emerged from the sea, pulling a rope. Eventually, the underwater cable popped out of the ocean onto the beach, which prompted cheers from the crowd.

It was a moment of celebration for Ciata Victor. She’s a Liberian businesswoman who returned home after the war ended in 2003, armed with a degree in computer engineering technology. But she said it’s been difficult to work here.

“I moved my company home from America to Liberia and internet access has been extremely challenging. I have paid as high as $449 a month for internet access,” she said.

After lagging far behind, Africa is on the verge of an internet boom, according to a recent World Bank study. As of 2010, there were 12 submarine cables in sub-Saharan Africa and another five under construction.

For Liberia, as well as Gambia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the ACE submarine cable is the first connection to a fiber optic system.

Elliott Blidi is confident that internet use here will increase by 75 percent in the next four years, even though many here have never used a computer.

Blidi said the explosion in cell-phone use proves it’s possible.

“Any illiterate person, any farmer who has never sat a day in school can use a cell phone. Any old mother sitting in the market can use a cell phone. If you can use a cell phone, then it’s just a next step to going online,” Blidi said.

The entire ACE cable must be in place before broadband service can begin in Liberia. That’s expected to happen by mid-next year.

Meanwhile, the Liberian government and local companies must do their part — install wires, cables, and towers to share the technology with the country.

Hazmat Modine – Cicada

Hazmat Modine – “The Tide” – Live at the BBC

Bushmeat (Photo: Amcaja)

By Genevieve Oger

It’s Friday night in one of Paris’s many African restaurants, but thirty-something Congolese immigrant Roger won’t be having anything listed on the menu. He called ahead to arrange a special order – porcupine in a black sauce, with a side of cassava.

At 34 dollars, the porcupine dish is twice the price of regular menu items. But Roger says it’s worth it. He says eating French food seems like eating the same thing all week.

“You can’t make the difference between fish or chicken or beef,” Roger says. “But in Africa, you can make the difference between porcupine, snake, crocodile. All animals have got a unique taste.”

Roger says he eats what’s known as bushmeat twice a week — that is, animals killed in the wild from his home continent. His favorites are porcupine, snake and the anteater-like pangolin.

The three animals are among a dozen species that are commonly smuggled into France to cater to the country’s African community. The meat often ends up for sale at the African market, near Chateau Rouge metro station, where bushmeat is hawked by illegal vendors who sell only a small number of items from bags or baskets. The bushmeat is generally hidden from view. You have to ask for it, and have an African face to get any kind of positive response. Street sellers risk a fine of up to 100 thousand dollars and four years in jail for selling illegal bushmeat.

Not everything considered bushmeat is illegal in France. But the illegal market is big enough that it worries French authorities.

Paris health inspector Serge Hauteville, whose beat is the 18th arrondissement, the heart of the city’s African community, says it’s a problem because the products often don’t live up to European health standards. In particular, health officials worry the animals aren’t killed or transported in hygienic conditions.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, have their own concerns. A 2010 study by scientists from the Zoological Society of London, and published in the journal Conservation Letters, monitored seizures of illegal African bushmeat at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport over a three-week period. Based on the results, the researchers estimated that more than five metric tons of African bushmeat is smuggled through that one airport every week, or 260 tons a year.

None of the meat seized during that period was from threatened or endangered species, but the authors argue that this traffic still poses a threat. Zoologist Marcus Rowcliffe is worried about the potential conservation impact. In other parts of the world, Rowcliff says, very vulnerable species have become luxury food items, with high prices driving extremely unsustainable hunting.

Rowcliffe says that hasn’t happened with any of the species most commonly smuggled into Paris, but he adds that even if the animals aren’t yet endangered, hunting them can harm local ecosystems because the animals play an important role in dispersing seeds and controlling insects.

Still, the African bushmeat trade here in Paris likely represents just a tiny fraction of all of the wild animals killed for meat in Central and West Africa every year. And not all conservationists see the European smuggling as a major concern.

Veterinarian Phillipe Chardonnet, head of the International Foundation for Fauna Management, points out that millions of Africans rely on bushmeat for protein. Chardonnet says most of the animals hunted—species like porcupines and cane rats—are plentiful and can sustain hunting pressure. Often, he says, farmers, government authorities and development agencies consider them pests.

Chardonnet’s organization, which promotes wildlife conservation and sustainable hunting, does supports some anti-bushmeat initiatives, especially for apes and other protected species. But he says for them to work, the efforts must be associated with positive measures that involve local communities.

“You have to have people on your side,” Chradonnet says. “You must understand their livelihood, their culture, and their taste for wild meat.”

Chardonnet acknowledges that the smuggling of some of this wild meat in France does carry health concerns. But he says the relative quantities are too small to make it a serious issue.

And it seems likely that the illegal African bushmeat trade won’t end any time soon. Health inspectors say it’s so well-hidden that they rarely find any on their searches. Meanwhile French customs don’t even mention the issue in their most recent annual report, and declined interview requests. Bushmeat smuggling has little economic impact, so it’s just not a priority.

Meanwhile Roger, the Congolese aficionado, says bushmeat is far too important to his culture to leave it behind.

He says he trusts hunters back home to use their ancestral knowledge to manage their forest animals sustainably. And as long as he can find it, he’ll continue to buy bushmeat here in France.

• Bushmeat market in Ecuador rainforest
• More about Dr, Marcus Rowcliffe
• International Foundation for the Conservation of Wildlife
• The Wildlife trade monitoring network
• The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species

• Multimedia: See a slideshow of Jori Lewis’ photos from Senegal
• Senegal street children
• Africa at the G8

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Many environmentalists these days are proponents of the local food movement. They argue buying produce that’s grown nearby is good for the community, good for the planet, and good for your health. Some farmers in the West African nation of Senegal are trying to make that case, but they’ve found it’s not so easy to get people to change their buying habits. Jori Lewis has the story.

JORI LEWIS:  In the north of Senegal as you near the border with Mauritania, the land becomes progressively more arid and brown, all sand dunes and scrubby brush, and you realize that you are close to the edge of the Sahara. But in the valley of the Senegal River they are growing what seems an unlikely crop: rice. Moustapha Fall comes from a family that’s been farming rice here for decades.

FRENCH SPEAKING

MOUSTAPHA FALL: It’s good quality rice that we can sell and that can feed the country.

LEWIS: Fall smokes non-stop while we drive to his fields in his pickup truck, past rows of green crops surrounded by water canals and dusty lanes. Farm workers take shelter under the shade of a spindly tree. Moustapha Fall says there are lots of challenges to farming here. There’s the price of fuel to run the irrigation pumps. There are the aggressive grain-eating birds. And there are periodic droughts. But he contends that the biggest threat to his livelihood as a rice farmer has nothing to do with the environment.

FRENCH SPEAKING

FALL: The biggest problem is actually selling the rice. Most of it just sits at the mill. You see over there, the mill? There’s a lot of rice stashed away there. It hasn’t been sold.

LEWIS: It’s not that people in Senegal dislike rice. On the contrary, most people here eat rice every day. The problem is that local rice farmers have to compete with imports. In Senegal’s capital, Dakar, I slide through a small doorway into the Tilene Market’s main food hall. Vendors man tables crowded with bags of rice from all over the world, places like Vietnam, the Philippines and India. There’s even rice from the US that comes packed in bags with the USAID logo. That rice is probably part of a US program that allows countries to sell food aid to raise money for development projects.

FRENCH SPEAKING

LEWIS: I ask a vendor if he sells local rice from Senegal.

FRENCH SPEAKING

LEWIS: No, he says. There’s not much at the market. He points me toward someone at another stall who points me toward someone else who points me toward someone else. I can’t find anyone with the local rice. Rice seller Ramadan Ba says that with all the varieties of imported rice to choose from, merchants here just don’t bother to stock Senegalese rice.

FRENCH SPEAKING

RAMADAN BA: The customers don’t ask for local rice. It’s rare. Even if I brought a sack of local rice here, it might sit for months.

LEWIS: He says you have to soak local rice before cooking it so people think its more work to prepare. The quality is uneven. And it tastes different. Not at all like the popular broken jasmine rice from Thailand. The President of Senegal, though, wants to wean his country off imported rice. Relying on imports leaves the country vulnerable to shortages and price spikes, like the ones that happened in 2008 when imported rice was difficult to get. Those shortages sparked riots in Dakar as they did all over the developing world. So the government is now working to boost rice production in Senegal. But Sakura Diop, who works for a group that advocates for Senegalese rice farmers, says, getting locals to buy Senegalese rice will require raising public awareness.

FRENCH SPEAKING

SAKURA DIOP: People who are in Dakar and other major cities just don’t know that we produce rice in the valley. We have said many times that we need to introduce people to it and advertise the local rice that we produce here.

LEWIS: He hopes that this exposure will make a difference. And in Dakar, if you look hard, people are starting to consider local rice as an alternative. At the Tilene market I met housewife Sainabou Diop, who likes to buy the local rice for her thieboudienne, Senegal’s national dish of fish and rice.

FRENCH SPEAKING

SAINABOU DIOP: I really like local rice. It’s a rice that has a certain flavor. It’s good. It’s a little difficult to prepare, but it’s good anyway.

LEWIS: She thinks local rice is fresher and healthier than the imported stuff. And, she says, she tells that to anyone who asks. For The World, I’m Jori Lewis, Dakar.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

The plane was carrying President Gnassingbe Eyadema when it crashed in 1974. Eyadema was the only survivor. He continued to rule this nation until his death in 2005.

His son is now president. And he’s trying to lure American tourists. We’ll follow some visitors who had a special interest in touring this African nation…

In fact, its government recently placed an ad in the New York Times. The ad said the country is open for tourists. That country — and today’s Geo Answer — is Togo.

View Larger Map

And now let’s go to Togo…along with the family of producer Anna Boiko-Weyrach.

Listen:

Download MP3

• The Blacksmith Institute
• Jori Lewis on Senegal’s struggling fishery industry (Aug 2009)

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World.  Over the past few years, charitable efforts that focus on children’s health have grown.  Philanthropists are donating billions of dollars to the cause, providing medicines and vaccines to protect the world’s poorest kids form infectious diseases like malaria and polio.  But there are other threats to the health of children that don’t receive as much attention.  Reporter Jori Lewis brings us the story of one such threat.  It caused widespread poisoning of children in West Africa, in a poor town outside Dakar, Senegal.

JORI LEWIS: A woman named Seynabou Barry lives in a house by the railroad tracks in a neighborhood called Ngagne Diaw.  One day a couple of years ago her toddler son, Mamadou, got sick.

TRANSLATOR (FOR SEYNABOU BARRY, SPEAKING IN WOLOF): It just happened suddenly.  He started to throw up and we took him to the hospital.

LEWIS: When he got there, he started to have seizures.  And then he died.  She said the doctors didn’t know why.  But other children in the neighborhood, all infants and toddlers, they were dying, too.  Five dead children became ten, and then became fifteen.  They were dying almost every week.  And so people started to wonder if something was going on in the neighborhood in Ngagne Diaw.  Local doctors looked into it.  Amadou Diouf is with the Senegalese Health Ministry.

INTERPRETER (FOR AMADOU DIOUF): They investigated and they ruled out malaria.  They ruled out epilepsy.

LEWIS: They also ruled out cholera and meningitis.  And finally they went to the site, to Ngagne Diaw.  And they found the answer.  It was lead.  There was lead everywhere.  Lead in slag piles; in peoples’ homes; in the sand that blew through town.  And it was in the children.  Many had blood lead levels that indicated severe lead poisoning.  The lead mostly came from one source:  car batteries.  For years a group of local women had been pulling apart old batteries to sell the lead inside.  Kine Dior started doing it 20 years ago, when a man showed her how.

TRANSLATOR (FOR KINE DIOR, SPEAKING IN WOLOF): He showed the women who didn’t have jobs, how to do this work.  He told us to go look around for some batteries, crack them open to get at the lead inside, and he said he would share the profit with us.

LEWIS: The women melted down the metal inside the batteries and recovered the lead.  They poured the waste metal out into the sand.  Dior says it was worth the effort.

TRANSLATOR (FOR KINE DIOR, SPEAKING IN WOLOF): I spent 25,000 francs on batteries and got back 50,000 francs for the lead.

LEWIS: Dior is an expansive, middle-aged woman whose concrete home is crowded with heavy furniture and flowery drapes.  She says the business allowed her to provide for her family, and do it well.  Dior has several children.  She won’t tell me how many because she says it’s bad luck.  But none of her children have ever had any problems, she says.  None of them have died.  An environmental group called the Blacksmith Institute cleans up toxic sites like this all over the world.  Meredith Block is the director.

MEREDITH BLOCK: The tragedy of this community is really representative of a larger issue that we’re seeing in almost every developing country as the price of lead has gone up as we’re seeing more cars on the road and more people in urban environments.

LEWIS: Block says this kind of simple car battery recycling is dangerous enough.  But the people of Ngagne Diaw started doing something even more risky in 2007.  That’s when the market price of lead climbed so high that the waste lead they had dumped into the sand was now valuable.  There was money in that dirt.  So they dug it up and started to sift lead from the sand.  People stockpiled sacks of lead in their courtyards and in holes under their homes.

TRANSLATER INTERPRETER (FOR MBAYE DIOP): During this time, we noticed that there was a rush on lead.

LEWIS: Mbaye Diop works with a local environmental group.

TRANSLATER INTERPRETER (FOR MBAYE DIOP): Everyone was working on this.  There were women, teenagers and children.  The women did the sifting, and it was the men who put it in bags.

LEWIS: The result, according to Senegalese health authorities, was a total of at least 18 dead children, and lots of sick ones who will never be the same.  High blood lead levels can lead to severe neurological and developmental difficulties in children.  Mbaye Diop introduces me to a boy, a three-year-old, who Diop told me had lots of problems.

[CHILD YELLING]

LEWIS: When the boy looked at me, his eyes rolled back in his head and he moans.

[CHILD WHINING]

LEWIS: Mbaye Diop tells me the boy has seizures and he can’t talk – he doesn’t know how.  This boy and others have received treatment for lead poisoning; and many were, at least for some time, recuperating at a center outside of town.  But eventually they had to come back home, back to Ngagne Diaw.  And that means that they continue to be re-exposed, though at lower levels than before.  Senegal’s Ministry of the Environment is cleaning up Ngagne Diaw.  Clean-up coordinator Assane Diop says they removed the most contaminated material for the neighborhood, but there is still a lot of work to do.

ASSANE DIOP: Now we need to decontaminate all the site.

LEWIS: I wander with him over to a large field that was one of the areas where the women used to work.  The field is full of stagnating pools of water, plastic bottles and bags, and a few wandering sheep.  I ask him about this particular site.

DIOP: This site have not been cleaned, so far.

LEWIS: Oh.  But this site has not –

DIOP: We plan to clean it up.

LEWIS: Not been cleaned at all?

DIOP: No.  No.  No.

LEWIS: He says his team will tackle it in the next phase of the cleanup, which he hopes will begin in the next few months.  They’ll also scrub down most of the homes in the area, going from house to house.  Money, he says, has been the barrier.  The Environment Ministry relied heavily on technical help from the environmental group, the Blacksmith Institute.  Again, its director, Meredith Block.

BLOCK: It’s very difficult to find funding for this kind of work.  There is no international agency that the government of Senegal could run to and say, “Do you have $200,000 for us so that we can, you know, help this community?”  There’s no fund for toxics like this.

LEWIS: For now, she says, the main focus is to stop contamination like this from happening again.  Many of the women who recycled batteries in Ngagne Diaw have sworn off working with lead.  They’ve started to sell fish or clothes or house wares.  The Ministry of the Environment even hired some of them to clean contaminated homes.  And the government has been trying to find some sort of factory or business for them.  But it hasn’t started yet.  Kine Dior, the woman who had been gathering lead for twenty years, says she’s not happy about giving up the business.

TRANSLATOR (FOR KINE DIOR, SPEAKING IN WOLOF): Right now, they stopped us from collecting the lead.  It’s the only thing we know how to do, and now they tell us to stop?!”

LEWIS: Well, she says, they’ll stop – for now.  But if they don’t find anything else, they’ll go back to it.  For The World, I’m Jori Lewis, Dakar, Senegal.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

What’s on your iPod?

• Best Global Music 2009
• Best Global Music 2008
• Best Global Music 2007

Marco Werman’s Top 10 List

Artist: Tony Allen
Album: “Secret Agent”
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Artist: Franco & le TPOK Jazz
Album: “Francophonic Vol. 2″
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Artist: Marcio Local
Album: “Don Day Don Dree Don Don: Adventures in Samba Soul”
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Artist: Hypnotic Brass Ensemble
Album: “Hypnotic Brass Ensemble”
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(Featured in the piece)

Artist: Ocote Soul Sounds and Adrian Quesada
Album: “Coconut Rock”
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Artist: Oumou Sangare
Album: “Seya”
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Artist: Staff Benda Bilili
Album: “Très Très Fort”
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Artist: The Very Best
Album: “Warm Heart of Africa”
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Artist: Allen Toussaint
Album: “The Bright Mississippi”
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Artist: Various
Album: “Marvellous Boy: Calypso from West Africa”
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Previous picks:

Best Global Music 2008
Best Global Music 2007

Tom Schnabel’s Top 10 List

Artist: Buika
Album: El Ultimo Trago
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Artist: Jon Balke & Amina Alaoui
Album: Siwan
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Artist: Tito Rodriguez
Album: El Involvidable
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Artist: Anouar Brahem
Album: The Astounding Eyes of Rita
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Artist: Rosalia de Souza
Album: D’improvviso
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Artist: Various
Album: Panama! 3: Calypso Panameno, Guajira Jazz and Cumbia Tipica on Theisthmus 1960-1975
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Artist: Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba
Album: I Speak Fula
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Artist: Sara Tavares
Album: Xinti
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Artist: Systema Solar
Album: Systema Solar
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Artist: Various Artists
Album: The Sound of Wonder: The First Wave of Plugged-in Pop at the Pakistani Picture House
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>>> Purchase these CDs and support The World

Columbia is about to re-issue everything Miles Davis recorded for them. 70 CDs in total. But I want to talk about the music of an old band that few people in the west have ever heard of: “Orchestre Poly Rhythmo de Cotonou.”

Cotonou is the capital of the West African nation of Benin. In the 70s, Orchestre Polyrythmo was a household name in Benin. The group recorded dozens of songs and toured all over Africa. But they hadn’t recorded anything in decades.

Then in 2003, a German-Tunisian producer named Samy Ben-Redjeb heard some of the band’s tunes. He fell in love with this song: “Malin Kpon O.”

And he wanted to hear more of the band’s music. Ben Rejeb re-mastered a selection of their songs. This version of “Malin Kpon O ” is from his re-mastered CD. Today there are only 4 surviving members of the original band Orchestre Polyrythmo.

But they added new members and they’ve kept on playing. That’s how Radio France reporter Elodie Maillot heard them live in Cotonou. She liked their sound so much, she decided to help them tour Europe for the first time. But she knew it wouldn’t be easy.

Crazy or not, she went ahead with the plan. She even managed to get the band some badly needed horns, and guitars. This fall, the band did in fact tour Europe, their first foray outside of Africa.

The original members are all in their sixties now, but singer Vincent Ahehehinnou, says that hasn’t slowed them down.

“Just because we’re over sixty doesn’t mean we’re going to stand still on stage,” he says. “We will be grooving for the audience until we draw our last breath. You can count on us.”

B & B Restaurant Corp. in Manhattan

Guineans living in New York City do have reminders of their home in West Africa. There are restaurants like the B & B in midtown Manhattan, which serves Guinean dishes and employs a number of Guineans. But given the violence that has gripped their homeland in recent weeks, many Guineans in New York are looking home anxiously, and awaiting news from their friends and family. Some Guineans in New York are even organizing opposition to the country’s military rulers. The World’s Alex Gallafent takes the pulse of Guineans in New York.

• Massacre in Guinea (Oct. 8, 2009)
• Timeline: Guinea
• Country profile: Guinea

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.  In the West African country of Guinea, a national strike today left streets and workplaces deserted.  People were protesting an incident two weeks ago in which soldiers opened fire on a crowd in a soccer stadium.  Human rights groups say more than 150 people were killed.  Fifty thousand people had gathered in the stadium, in the capital Conakry, to protest the country’s military regime.  For Guineans living here in the United States, the situation back home is confusing and frightening.    The World’s Alex Gallafent reports from New York.

ALEX GALLAFENT: Mamadou Sidy Barry is a Guinean in New York, and here’s here on his own.

MAMDOU SIDY BARRY: All my family members are over there in Guinea, my wife, my daughter, and my father, brothers, everybody.  So I am here by myself and I’m here for political asylum

GALLAFENT: I caught up with Barry at the West African restaurant he runs in midtown Manhattan. It’s a small place, and Barry’s staff is getting for the lunch rush.  But back in Guinea, Barry was a political activist, working for an opposition party.  He says he was arrested during a local election in 2005 and jailed for three weeks.  On his release, he fled to neighboring Mali.  He didn’t feel safe there either.

BARRY: So from there I decided to come to the United States of America.

GALLAFENT: He hasn’t seen his family in years.  And since the violence of two weeks ago, Mamadou Sidy Barry has found it hard to reach them.  He says communication lines into Guinea have been disrupted, and he’s worried about his daughter in particular.

BARRY: My daughter is three years, so she’s a very small girl, and she’s really living on the panic, on the trauma, you know.  A little girl of three years, hearing every time sounds of guns, you know.  All over the night, they are in the streets of Conakry, blowing up guns, you know.  It’s crazy.

GALLAFENT: What does it feel like to be here while your family is there?

BARRY:  It is very, very, very hard, very difficult.  When they tell you some people lost their beloved ones, they never see their bodies, they never seem them in jail, they never see them in hospital, so it means that these people have been pulled away, or they have been buried, but who knows where and how?  What happened to the other person can happen to your own too, so it is really a very hard time for us.

GALLAFENT: Many of the workers in Barry’s restaurant are from Guinea themselves.

BARRY: Ismael!

GALLAFENT: Barry calls one of them from out of the kitchen, where a grill is piled high with chunks of meat.

ISMAEL:  [speaking Guinean Creole]

GALLAFENT: He says, “My wife and three children are in Guinea.  It’s safe here in New York, but if my family isn’t safe, I can’t be at peace.”  Finally, Mamadou Sidy Barry introduces me to a young woman named Mariama.  She comes out from the kitchen in an apron smeared with cooking juices and tells her story.

MARIAMA:  [speaking Guinean Creole]

GALLAFENT: Barry translates.

MARIAMA:  [speaking Guinean Creole]

BARRY: Really I’m very worried, because what is going on back home in my country is terrible.  They are raping women, killing them, taking off their clothes in the street in public and rape them in front of everybody, kill children.  My family is over there.  My husband, my children, my mother, my brothers and even they killed one of my brothers and I am terrified about what is going on.

GALLAFENT: The reports they’re hearing suggest that the violence didn’t spread beyond the events of two weeks ago, but that doesn’t ease the minds of these Guineans in the United States.  The Guinean community here is tiny, but Mamadou Sidy Barry says they plan to organize a series of rallies in Washington to protest what happened back home.  For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent in New York.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark and this is The World. The global stocks of fish are declining. Scientists say that overfishing will destroy most populations of saltwater fish within 40 years – that’s if current trends continue. And so marine ecologists and fisheries managers are trying to make sure that current trends do not continue. This pattern of overfishing and then putting restrictions on fishing has played out all over the world. Reporter Jori Lewis has an example. She visited the West African nation of Senegal which has depended on the riches of the sea for decades.

JORI LEWIS: It always seems simple enough. Take your boat out into the water, drop a couple of hooks or a net or a bow, and wait. Et voila. Food for days. Food for a nation. And for many people a real living too.

[SOUND CLIP OF WATER AND DRUMS]

The beach in the Senegalese resort town of Nianing is full of drummers and dancers on this cool afternoon. Mansour Thiaow stands to the fray and gestures to the boats in front of him and the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

MANSOUR THIAOW: All is from the sea.

LEWIS: Everything Thiaow has he says is thanks to the fish – The fish that he and his brothers catch with their six small boats.

THIAOW: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

TRANSLATOR: Before there wasn’t any electricity at our house. For us it was candles. Now there is electricity. There wasn’t water. Now there is a tap at the house. There is a telephone. There are plenty of little things.

LEWIS: The Thiaow brothers haul in squid for local hotels, mollusks for the Asian market, and any fish that swims for the local daily thieboudienne habit. Thieboudienne is Senegal’s national dish. A meal of fish, broken rice, and vegetables. And the Thiaows have lots of company. Fishing and related businesses employ more than 15% of Senegal’s workers. And fish products are the country’s primary export. That’s because in the 1970s Senegal saw the ocean as its road to economic development. It made sense. Senegal had fish. Europe wanted fish. It would be trade not aid. So the government subsidized the expansion of the industry and thousands of locals entered the trade – men whose fathers had been miners and bureaucrats. Farmers driven off their land by years of drought.

[SOUND CLIP OF PEOPLE TALKING IN BACKGROUND]

Children play on the beaches of the small city Foundiougne in Senegal’s Sine-Saloum Delta. The Delta’s estuary system is home to hundreds of fish species and some of the region’s biggest shrimp. It’s also home to Moustapha Diakhate, the president of the local shrimp fisherman’s association. Long ago he was seduced by the lure of the fishery.

MOUSTAPHA DIAKHATE: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

TRANSLATOR: I came here, I look at the sea, and other people doing the fishing and I left with them. I tried for two days and I understood more and more. It will be 30 years now.

LEWIS: Diakhate says it was just that easy. Find a boat to share, buy a net, and go. Too easy perhaps.

DIAKHATE: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

TRANSLATOR: There are a lot of fishermen and each person does what he wants. There are norms that you should respect. Norm of net size and capture. But there are people who don’t respect anything.

LEWIS: And it’s not just fishermen who are concerned.

ABOUBACAR SIDIBE: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

TRANSLATOR: Today we are definitely in a situation where the available resources can’t satisfy everyone.

LEWIS: Aboubacar Sidibe is a marine biologist in Dakar and a scientific advisor to seven West African governments.

SIDIBE: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

TRANSLATOR: Some ordinary person will say, “no but there are fish there.” And it’s true that you can find some beautiful fish but that doesn’t mean that the stocks are doing well. On the contrary I know what I’m talking about because I’ve done the evaluation. I know that the numbers shows the abundance of fish is declining.

LEWIS: After years of encouraging fishing Senegal’s government is finally taking some steps to curtail it. It suspended agreements with the European Union that allowed EU boats to fish in Senegal’s waters and it’s taking steps to regulate its own legions of small fishermen.

[SOUND CLIP OF WAVES AND CHILDREN PLAYING]

In Ngor village, just outside of Dakar, the waves of the Atlantic crash on a beach crowded with hotels, fine restaurants, fishing boats, and children playing soccer on the sand. The side of each boat is painted with its name in the red, yellow, and green Senegalese flag. Each of the boats is also being fitted with a computer chip containing its registrations records. Ultimately the government hopes to use the chips to track the country’s thousands of registered small fishing boats by GPS. Masserigne Mbow is a technician working on the project.

MASSERIGNE MBOW: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

TRANSLATOR: If you want to manage the sea’s riches you have to know how many boats are in the sea fishing. We have to count them.

LEWIS: Of course the chip won’t help track Senegal’s illegal and unregistered fishing boats. Not to mention the industrial trawlers and foreign ships that work far off shore. But it’s a start. The government is also supporting the local councils to help small fisherman monitor themselves. In Nianing, where the brothers Thiaow fish, the local council has instituted a periodic ban on catching certain species. Mansour Thiaow says he hopes that the ban will give the fish a chance to reproduce.

THIAOW: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

TRANSLATOR: Now when it reproduces there will be plenty of fish. The species are going to flourish.

LEWIS: But fishery officials, conservation organizations, and academics all say that the best thing for the fisher would be to get rid of some of Senegal’s fishermen – maybe most of them. And some outside groups are trying to help the country take this next step. Vaque Ndiaye works with the World Wildlife Fund an USAID program that supports sustainable fishing in the Sine Saloum Delta. He says they want to crack down on the guys who are only in it for a quick buck.

VAQUE NDIAYE: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

TRANSLATOR: We’re thinking about how to establish access rights and how to do it so that professional fishermen can access the fishery because the traditional fishermen know the sea and will fight to preserve the resource.

LEWIS: But every former fishermen just swells Senegal’s soaring unemployment rate – it’s nearly 50%. And with so few jobs those out-of-work fishermen add to the problem of illegal migration to Europe. For years Senegalese migrants have been embarking on the long and dangerous ocean journey to Spain’s Canary Islands. Some of them make it but many others don’t and instead become victims of the waters they once plied. And in small coastal towns like Foundiougne, all sand and salt and people taking refuge from the unremitting sun, that leaves people like the shrimper Moustapha Diakhate without a lot of options.

DIAKHATE: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

TRANSLATOR: Here in Foundiougne imagine if you didn’t fish. Look at this city. Everyone’s sitting around drinking tea. There is nothing, nothing to do. There is just the sea. Imagine 30 years of work without stopping. And the sea’s tired. And us we are tired too.

LEWIS: For The World I’m Jori Lewis, Foundiougne, Senegal.

CLARK: You can see Jori’s photos from Senegal on our website, The World dot org. While you’re there check out this week’s science podcast. It’s all about animals. Crocodiles in Cambodia, jaguars in Panama, and harp seals in Canada. Just go to The World dot org slash science.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. Hilary Clinton is in the Democratic Republic of Congo today. The secretary of state urged Congolese students to speak out against corruption and conflict. Tomorrow she’s expected to raise issues of sexual violence as she speaks with President Joseph Kabila. Later this week Secretary Clinton will visit another African country that has suffered an epidemic of sexual assaults often by government soldiers. That country is Liberia. As Anna Sussman reports the US State Department is trying to reform Liberia’s army by re-training and re-arming.

ANNA SUSSMAN: On a patch of dry land south of Monrovia young Liberian soldiers crawl on their stomachs through the brush firing machine guns and tossing smoke bombs. Above them several broad-shouldered Americans shout orders. This is the re-training of the Armed Forces of Liberia – the AFL. The old AFL had a reputation for corruption and lawlessness. Solider Edwin Barclay says the training is finally making the army something he can be proud of.

EDWIN BARCLAY: the difference is that this new Armed Forces of Liberia got a new thing. We are seeing a new army. First of all, we got human right violations is not in this new army and this new army full of discipline.

SUSSMAN: Were there human rights violations in the old army?

BARCLAY: I can say yes. I see violence against women. Violence against children. The differences are determined by the kind of training that we’re having now.

SUSSMAN: That training includes lessons in gender sensitivity and human rights law. But the Liberian army’s long history of carrying out abuses against its own people has left many worried about re-tooling and re-arming the force especially since the US helped fund the old criminal army decades ago. Emira Wood is a Liberian native and co-director of Foreign Policy and Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.

EMIRA WOOD: What happened in the 1980s was that US tax-payer dollars paid to build this machinery that then killed 250,000 Liberians during these 26 years of war. And we cannot repeat that cycle.

LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD: This is a different day. It’s a different era. I think it’s impossible to compare what happened in the 1980s with what has happened now.

SUSSMAN: That’s the US Ambassador to Liberia, Linda Thomas-Greenfield.

THOMAS-GREENFIELD: We’re conscious of how security aid is viewed and we don’t want our aid to go to people who would abuse their populations. Did that happen in the past? It probably did. But now we’re monitoring it very, very closely to ensure that that does not happen in Liberia.

SUSSMAN: The American in charge of that monitoring here is Colonel Al Rumphrie. He’s chief of the US Office of Security Cooperation in Liberia. He says if everything goes right the Liberian project could serve as a model for future re-training projects across Africa. But that’s a big if. Rumphrie’s concerned about the Liberian’s government’s limited ability to pay and feed its rebuilt army.

AL RUMPHRIE: We’re worried about what’s going to happen once we turn everything over to the Liberians. Because we don’t think they’re at that level right now to accept responsibility for an armed forces. If they cannot feed the people in the long run, they cannot pay their soldiers in the long run, we just trained a military force to take over government.

SUSSMAN: That worries Liberian officials as well. And they have another concern. Much of the actual training work has been farmed out to American private contractors such as DynCorp. Liberia’s Minister of Defense Brownie Samuki says that’s a potential problem.

BROWNIE SAMUKI: Let me put it this way. We support the participation of active duty military personnel from the US in helping us to re-train our military because these individuals will come to carry out a mission whereas the contractor comes to carry the contract terms. So everything he sees is a dollar sign.

SUSSMAN: Still Samuki is hopeful the peacekeeping experiment will succeed and so is AFL soldier Edwin Barclay.

[SOUND CLIP OF SOLDIERS CHANTING]

Back at the training ground Barclay says he believes the army’s troubles are in the past with the help of what he calls Liberia’s big brother.

BARCLAY: For now realistically speaking to you we will not experience just war from outside but we’ll always have internal problem. That’s why I say it’s really up to our big brother – the US.

SUSSMAN: The US has invested some $200 million in re-training and re-arming Liberia’s military. But come January the trainers will leave and the men and women of the Armed Forces of Liberia will be on their own to maintain the country’s fragile peace. For The World I’m Anna Sussman, Monrovia, Liberia.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Lonji

For our Global Hit today, we go to the West African archipelago of Cape Verde.

Since the country’s independence from Portugal just 34 years ago, the geographically isolated country has raced to catch up with the world beyond its shores.

As its first generation to grow up in the post-independence era is now coming into its own, their music is enjoying a new golden age.

Madeleine Bair reports on one young guitarist whose sound traces the path from Cape Verde’s traditions to its globalized present day.

CD information

• Album: Lonji
• Artist: Tcheka
• Audio CD (May 27, 2008)
• Original Release Date: January 2008
• Label: Four Quarters Ent
• ASIN: B0016GLZUQ