girls, they have a choice to wear western clothes. i have also as a right to wear this. minielle: in a way the reason behind it for every muslim, uh, will be modesty. whether you come from a rich background or a poor background, people should not judge you on the way you dress. she doesn t want you to be, like, oh my gosh. i love her hair. oh, her earrings! oh! the watch! no, you see us as something threatening but we are just here in peace. anthony: what about women s roles here, traditionally? in many of the african countries that i ve been to often you will see the man walking up front and behind the wife and the children, you know, carry, carrying the, the bucket of water or, you know, laden down doing the work. fama: i mean, here, in dakar, you re not gonna see it. [ laughter ] anthony: you say that with
of asbury, and, most famously, his frequent collaborator peter gabriel. youssou: [singing] youssou: [singing] anthony: people started to talk about you when you age 12 when you started to perform, uh, professionally. youssou: yeah. anthony: but did you come from a musical tradition? youssou: my mom, she s a griot. griot are the storytellers and they are also singers, rappers, and everything. and i, i grow with my grandma, she was a big singer. she give me a lot of things. and from there going to the school for two years, then left
the mosques fill to capacity, people spill onto the sidewalks and streets, they pray where they can. in senegal the majority of the people are sufi muslims, practicing a mystic form of islam which is often considered more tolerant. fama: senegal is very different from other countries. we are very tolerant. we also have, in senegalese family, christian married to muslim, muslim married to christian. so, you don t really know exactly who s christian and you don t really know who is muslim. anthony: it is a comfortable assumption that islam is oppressive to women that it allows no room for personal expression, that it forces women to hide themselves. these ladies, however, make that argument more complicated. fama diouf is a photographer.
anthony: attitude about many things are decidedly different here. where many post-colonial cultures are ambivalent or conflicted about their bloodlines picking black or white to identity with here, people are proud of who they are and where they came from. all of it. anthony: i m curious why the post-colonial experience in senegal is so different than the post-colonial experience almost everywhere else. man: i think that the pre-colonial and the colonial experience in senegal is different, also. not only the post-colonial experience, because in saint-louis we had lots of influences, i think. anthony: arab, portugese, uh . man: so, because, yes, the portuguese and the english first they were here and after that, the morocco, from the morocco. marie-caroline: my feeling was this that because we are at the crossing of various roads, eh, independently from the colonization prior, makes the senegalese people very
position of presidential but we can have, uh, also a woman in the head of, uh, senegal. if we don t try, we will never know. anthony: sometimes we get lucky. we get to do things on this show because just because it s a show, that are, frankly, awesome. like this, a small restaurant in dakar. the delicious smells of senegalese cooking coming from the kitchen. a band.