‘Plastic man’ has a cape and a superhero’s mission: cleaning up Senegal

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Written by northsouth

Category: Africa

Published: 21 January 2022

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DAKAR - Dressed head to toe in plastic, Modou Fall is a familiar sight in Dakar. But however playful his costume, his goal couldn’t be more serious: ridding the capital of the scourge of plastic bags, writes the New York Times.

Modou Fall, who works to educate fellow Senegalese residents about the dangers of plastic trash, making his case at the annual marathon in Dakar, Senegal, in November.

As the marathon runners stretched and took their places on the starting line, one man stood out, dressed, as he was, in plastic from head to toe.

A multicoloured cape made entirely of plastic bags swept the sandy ground. A hat constructed out of plastic sunglasses was perched on his head.

But this man, Modou Fall, was not competing in the annual marathon held in Dakar, Senegal’s capital, each November. He was participating in a different kind of race: one to save the West African country from the scourge of plastic waste that clogged its waterways, marred its white beaches and constantly blew across its streets.

With the marathon drawing large crowds and a major media presence, he could not pass up the chance the race presented to promote his cause.

Waving the Senegalese flag and carrying a loudspeaker from which spilled songs cataloging the damage caused by plastic — “I like my country, I say no to plastic bags” — Mr. Fall swished in and around the runners in his long plastic cloak as the race began.

Those at the race who stopped him to ask for selfies fell into his well-laid and oft-used trap: He seized every opportunity to give them a gentle lecture about environmental issues.

After the last group of runners had left the starting area, Mr. Fall and his team of volunteers began to pick up the empty water bottles and plastic bags they had left behind.

For the foreign racers and tourists the marathon brought to Dakar, this might have been their first encounter with Mr. Fall, but for local residents, he’s a familiar presence known as “Plastic Man.”
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He can often be seen dancing through the streets dressed in a self-designed and ever-evolving costume made entirely of plastic, mostly bags collected from across the city. Pinned to his chest is a sign that reads NO PLASTIC BAGS. It’s a fight he takes very seriously.

His costume is modelled after the “Kankurang” — an imposing traditional figure deeply rooted in Senegalese culture who stalks sacred forests and wears a shroud of woven grasses. The Kankurang is considered a protector against bad spirits, and in charge of teaching communal values.

“I behave like the Kankurang,” Mr. Fall said in a recent interview. “I am an educator, a defender and a protector of the environment.”

While plastic waste poses a severe environmental problem around the globe, recent studies have found Senegal, despite its relatively small size, to be among the top countries polluting the world’s oceans with plastic. This is in part because it struggles to manage its waste, like many poorer countries, and it has a large population living on the coast.

In an effort to reduce its share of pollution, the Senegalese government implemented a ban on some plastic products in 2020, but the country has had a hard time enforcing it. Senegal, with a population of about 17 million, is projected to produce more than 700,000 metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste by 2025 if nothing is done, compared with about 337,000 metric tons in the United States.
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Mr. Fall, 48, has been fighting against plastic waste for most of his adult life. A tall, quietly charismatic former soldier, he first noticed plastic’s damaging effects in 1998 during his military service. He was stationed in rural eastern Senegal, home to many herding communities, where he saw their cows getting sick after consuming the fragments of plastic bags that littered the arid landscape.

The herders would slaughter their valuable animals before they inevitably died. This way, at least, eating their meat would not be haram, or forbidden by Islam.

After his military service, Mr. Fall sold T-shirts and life buoys in Dakar’s busy Sandaga market, where dozens of traders displayed all kind of goods, often packed in plastic. Plastic bags were cheap and plentiful, and shopkeepers would toss them into the street with abandon, unaware of how they could harm the environment.

For months, Mr. Fall tried to get his fellow shopkeepers to recognize the environmental threat posed by using so much plastic, and if they did use it, to dispose of it properly. But nobody listened. The market was a mess.

Fed up, one day he decided to try leading by example. He would clean up the entire market on his own.

“It took me 13 days, but I did it,” he said.

The plastic eventually came back. But he’d succeeded in making some of the stall holders think twice.

And stopping the rising tide of plastic became Mr. Fall’s obsession. “If it continues like this, the lives of future generations are in jeopardy,” he said.

In 2006, Mr. Fall used his life savings, just over $500, to found his association, Senegal Propre, or Clean Senegal.

He planted dozens of trees across the city and held community meetings to persuade people to stop buying throwaway plastic. He organized cleaning and tire recycling campaigns in Dakar’s lively neighborhoods, his waste pickers dodging taxi drivers and street vendors as they went.

With the plastic waste they collected, Clean Senegal made bricks, paving stones and public benches. Old tires became couches that they sold for about $430 apiece — money that went toward more environmental efforts like planting trees at schools.

Other street vendors began to see the point of what he was doing, and joined in.

“I used to throw plastic bags or cups in the street after use because I wasn’t aware of the dangers it could cause,” said Cheikh Seck, 31, who sells sunglasses and watches in Pikine, his home suburb in Dakar. “Plastic waste is a global concern, and I am more than happy to contribute to the fight that Modou started.”

The plastic waste clogging up the ocean waters off Dakar has damaged fishing stocks, further decreasing the incomes of Senegalese fishermen already struggling against their waters being overfished. Plastic can also poison agricultural land.

Mr. Fall’s message seems to be catching on. At November’s marathon, the third one he has cleaned up after, some of the runners now knew his favorite slogan and yelled it to him as they passed: “No to plastic waste!”

Following much of the marathon route, Mr. Fall and his team of 10 young volunteers in green shirts and gloves fanned out for their cleanup operation.

They picked up water bottles outside Dakar’s pioneering Museum of Black Civilizations, which showcases one of Africa’s largest art collections. They collected hundreds of plastic bags on the leafy campus of Cheikh Anta Diop University. They found plastic cups in the thrumming city center, known as Plateau, home to the presidential palace and many embassies.

One of the neighbourhoods they passed through was Medina, built by the French during the colonial period, and where Mr. Fall was born. After his father died when he was 4, Mr. Fall’s mother moved the family to the suburbs. As a single mother, she struggled to make ends meet running a restaurant, and Mr. Fall had to leave school after only six years of primary education to support the family by taking jobs in metalworking and house painting. After his mother died, he joined the army.

By mid-afternoon of the marathon day, Mr. Fall and his team were staggering under the weight of the plastic they had collected. A van drove up and they handed over hundreds of plastic bottles.

The team took a short break for lunch. But not Mr. Fall. He was still focused on his mission. There were five miles to go along the race route, and he set off, his plastic cape floating around him.

South Africa Parliament chamber ‘completely gutted’ by fire

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Written by northsouth

Category: Africa

Published: 03 January 2022

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By GERALD IMRAY

CAPE TOWN, South Africa - Fire crews have continued to work at South Africa’s national Parliament complex in Cape Town on Monday after a major fire blazed through the buildings a day earlier, causing extensive damage.

The main chamber of the National Assembly was “completely gutted,” City of Cape Town safety and security official J.P. Smith said, and parts of the roof had collapsed.

“The entire Parliament complex is severely damaged, waterlogged and smoke damaged,” Smith said.

Firefighters were still working on “hotspots” in the National Assembly building more than 24 hours after the fire started, Cape Town Fire and Rescue Service spokesman Jermaine Carelse said. But the fire crews had been scaled back from around 70 firefighters Sunday to 20 by Monday morning.

Other buildings in the complex were also damaged by the fire that started early Sunday morning and spread from an old Parliament building that now houses offices to the National Assembly building.

With grand columns and stately white and red brick buildings, the Parliament complex has been at the center of South Africa’s history for more than 130 years. Some of the buildings have weathered British colonialism, the apartheid regime and South Africa’s transition to democracy under the presidency of Nelson Mandela.

A man arrested Sunday is being questioned in connection with the fire, police said. He is to appear in court on Tuesday and is expected to face charges of breaking and entering, theft and arson, while he will also be charged under South Africa’s National Key Points Act, a security law controlling access to places of national importance and government buildings.

The man had to be rescued from the fire on Sunday, according to South African media reports. Parliament was closed for the holidays and no injuries were reported.

Patricia de Lille, the Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure, said Sunday that someone had turned off a valve which prevented a fire sprinkler system from functioning.

She said an investigation into the cause of the fire has been taken over by the Hawks, a South African police unit that deals with serious and high-profile crimes.

Tutu: a man of empathy, moral ardor, and some silly jokes

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Written by northsouth

Category: Africa

Published: 28 December 2021

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By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA

PRETORIA - One Christmas Day in the 1980s, Desmond Tutu led a packed church service in Soweto, the Black Johannesburg township and fulcrum of protest against white racist rule in South Africa. An American family — mine — found standing room at the back.

We were among the few white people in the congregation and, as we shook hands with Tutu on the steps upon leaving, he made a joke. Something like: “So, it really is a white Christmas.”

Evoking the Irving Berlin song ’’White Christmas,” famously crooned by Bing Crosby, in tense, dusty Soweto was quintessential Tutu. He couldn’t resist a pun about race in an inflamed country suffering the agonies of apartheid, the system of white minority domination that was extinguished in 1994.

(Actually, every once in a very long while, it has snowed in Johannesburg, but certainly not at Christmas time, which falls in the Southern Hemisphere’s summer).

When Tutu died Sunday at age 90, he was remembered as a Nobel laureate, a spiritual compass, a champion of the anti-apartheid struggle who turned to other global causes after Nelson Mandela, another moral heavyweight, became South Africa’s first Black president. Barack Obama praised Tutu for fighting injustice wherever he saw it.

But the former U.S. president also recalled the activist’s ″impish sense of humor.″ And it is that Desmond Tutu — the funny, kind, gracious man behind the icon — whom I and so many others recall.

To see Tutu up close was to bask in his rollercoaster laughter, to revel as his eyes would widen theatrically, to luxuriate in his pristinely enunciated remarks, and to come away infused with the man’s joy and warmth. If he had a chance to dance, usually in church, he was on his feet — with the help of a cane in later years, as he grew more frail.

He seemed to embody the best of what it is to be human, at a granular level. The small generosities, the willingness to listen, the empathy, lightening the mood with … let’s face it, some pretty silly jokes.

He kept that up through grim times in South Africa, showing anger and frustration too at dehumanizing state policies, the violence of white-controlled security forces and the killing within Black communities as apartheid, a scourge that he described as ’’evil,” played out bitterly.

Not everyone was a fan. His moral ardor ran up against realpolitik. His notion of the ″rainbow nation,″ an idealized vision of racial tolerance, is at odds with the social and economic imbalances of South Africa today.

But he always reached out, always looked for and found the humanity in people. In advance of a small service at St. George’s Cathedral in 2015, participants were asked to send photos of themselves; I watched as Tutu went around the congregation, asking each person to say a little about themselves.

I was a boy on that Christmas Day when Tutu riffed on Bing Crosby, and my father was reporting for The Associated Press in South Africa. In 1989, my parents moved to Stockholm. A few months before they departed, a postcard arrived with Tutu’s scrawl on the back.

’’Go well. Thanks for your splendid service,” he wrote. “Will miss you. Will certainly try to see you in Sweden. God bless you.”

In time, I became a journalist and also worked for the AP in South Africa, sometimes covering Tutu’s post-apartheid commentary on corruption and other challenges, as well as his hospitalizations for the prostate cancer that afflicted him for nearly a quarter century.

I would recall the one time he visited our Johannesburg home for dinner. He didn’t stay long. He was charming, easygoing.

Afterwards, he sent us another postcard. On the front was an elephant; on the back was something that could be taken both as a bread-and-butter note and as an unintended valedictory from a remarkable man who, even at age 90, left the world too soon.

“Just an inadequate note to thank you very much for your kind hospitality,” he wrote. “I enjoyed myself and was sorry to have to leave early. God bless you.”

It was signed, simply, “Desmond.”