Hann Bay, Senegal: from coastal idyll to industrial dumping ground – in pictures
Amongst the general insanity gripping the globe, one of the more devastating picture essays recently published by the Guardian, is the one entitled above, with the further information below:
Dakar’s nine-mile-long Hann Bay used to be known as one of West Africa’s most beautiful, lined with traditional fishing villages, villas and tourist attractions. But for the last 20 years it has been at the centre of the city’s industrialisation, with 80% of the city’s industry nearby. Today it is one of Dakar’s most polluted areas, with canals spilling raw sewage and chemicals on to the beach and into the sea.
The degradation of the natural environment at its most visual extreme is hard to fathom from a distance, e.g. from Auckland, New Zealand/Aotearoa where the urban environment is by comparison pristine. I suppose a trip to the local landfill would be equally disturbing, seeing mountains of waste bulldozed into a designated valley, but to see this scenario transported to a beach promenade in Auckland would be unthinkable. It is not that I’ve not seen with my own eyes random rubbish dumps – often of considerable proportions – in otherwise relatively clean and green environments, like on various Pacific islands, or alongside nature walks in Malaysia or Oman. I am equally aware of the saying (about Germany) ‘you are so clean, but your gases can’t be seen’ that points to the much wider issue of industrial pollution that is managed to be largely ‘unseen’ in the suburban gardens, where lawns are kept tidy and roses bloom – ignoring the much more sinister implication of the saying. So, what about Dakar and Hann Bay, having never been there? Why do these pictures alarm me so? Is it the people in the pictures who simply traverse the unspeakable landscape or else scavenge for recyclables? The latter being the poor of the poorest, they have no choice. Do the people have a choice who own and run the nearby polluting factories? One would think so, except to say that they would argue that their profit margins would shrink to next to nothing if they had to install expensive anti-pollution measures, thus robbing Dakar and Senegal of its already precarious economic base. Who is to argue with such devastating logic? Combined with corruption in high places, the government no doubt turns a blind eye on what must be an unbearable environmental disaster. Who knows, maybe the stuff churned out by the factories there turns up in Auckland bargain bins? Are we all to blame? Is there a solution? As a Marxist group of activists in New Zealand, Shane Walsh et al., wrote a pamphlet (2018) entitled ‘Everything’s fucked but the point is to go beyond that’ we might agree and call for a global revolution of sorts, for anything less is pointless, e.g. the rubbish on the beach of Hann Bay is the result of a cheap battery in a hardware store in Auckland. Hauled to the people’s court of the global environment I plead not guilty and blame the people of Hann Bay: how can you do this, allow this to happen? I tend my garden to keep New Zealand green, why can’t you guys do the same for Hann Bay? Sure, I have enough leisure time to read the Guardian on-line and after being shocked by this pictorial essay – and even write a blog about it – I can turn to the ‘gallery’ just below the last pic that shows a dead cow amongst the rubbish on the beach, and choose between pictorial content about ‘Putting pandas on a plane’, ‘Grubby and extreme – Mulletfest 2023’, ‘Snuggle up: 10 of the best cosy fashion pieces’, etc. Is this mishmash of content a sign of the times? The Dickensian best of the times and the worst of the times? As my intellectual despair will neither reach the rich nor the poor, all I can do is wondering why the saying ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ gained such currency, surrendering to insert the word ‘not’ when failing to see the utopia that is ‘the point beyond’.
