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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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New Paths towards Adulthood? The Baye Fall of Gueule TapÉe in Dakar
| Panel |
30. Islamic education and activism in sub-Saharan Africa
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| Paper ID | 489 |
| Author(s) |
Bjarnesen, Jesper
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| Paper |
View paper (PDF)
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| Abstract | In the residential neighbourhood of Gueule Tapée in Dakar a group of young men are particularly visible in the afternoons; particularly audible in the darkness of the night, and particularly active in social events in the neighbourhood. These young men present themselves proudly as Baye Fall; in their own terms a sub-grouping of the Mouride brotherhood – but self-ascribed by numerous and quite different groups of young men throughout Senegal.
The young Baye Fall in Gueule Tapée spend most afternoons together in front of an old house in a quiet street. They spend many Sundays on the beach, grilling fish and they preferably spend the Muslim celebrations, such as Tabaski and the Gamou, in the presence of their marabout, General Moudou Kara Mbacké, a young and controversial religious leader and founder of the political party Partie de la Verité de Dieu (PVD). The general, his followers will tell you with a smile, is known as ‘the marabout of bandits’, referring to his strategy of recruiting followers among the unemployed and often discouraged youth of Dakar.
The paper is based on a five-month ethnographic fieldwork in Dakar, in the first half of 2006, and presents the stories of a group of young men who seem to have found a way out of what they now relate as moral transgression and despair in a religious leader who addressed their particular predicaments as young, uneducated youths.
In Gueule Tapée, the older generation shake their heads and snap their tongue at these self-righteous hoodlums who speak of Islamic purity and elegance while flicking the ashes of a joint in the gutter. What are we to make of these young men and their interpretations of Mouride religious praxis? Evoking an emerging literature on the anthropology of African youth, I discuss the Baye Fall identity and its promises and contradictions for these young men, many of whom are approaching thirty years of age and struggling to find a path towards adulthood in a socio-economic context where the expected paths through (secular or religious) education or through the steady income of wage employment are blocked to the majority. The inability to work strikes the Baye Fall particularly hard; a movement whose founding ethos was ‘work for pray’, advocating an African Islam in which work assumed the central pillar of faith.
Although representing a rebellious youth identity that draws upon global icons as Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur and Chè Guevara as well as the authority of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, the Baye Fall in Gueule Tapée are also embraced as important actors in the community through their performances of Mouride chants at important ceremonies such as funerals, weddings, and commemorations for the older and more traditionally minded Mourides in the neighbourhood. These events serve as legitimising manifestations for the Baye Fall and provide them with an accepted position in the community despite their controversial interpretation of a Muslim religious identity.
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