Naming Names

I watched a brilliant documentary last night called Je Chanterai pour Toi about the Malian musician Boubacar Traoré. It made me think a lot about Africa. When I first started traveling, I was incredibly curious to go to Timbuktu, which was a city that just seemed the epitome of far far away. When I was young, there was still a train running from Dakar to Bamako (today there are only parts that are still in use, apparently). Then at some point, some tourists were killed in Mali and it became a place where I just didn’t want to go because I’d stick out like a big, fat, white target.

Timbuktu today is under siege, or a blockade. I don’t know what they (the Islamic group holding the city hostage) want the residents to do, exactly, but it’s a mess hidden behind all the other messes in the world today.

This all made me think about a teaching assistant from university, who was not from Mali but Senegal. His name was Mar N’Diaye.

At some point at university, I had two required classes in two different disciplines at exactly the same time. One needed my presence, and I could only be absent three times or I’d have to do the class over again. The other had a very kind teaching assistant, Mar, whose office hours fell at a time when I could go see him. I’d get the class notes, go through them on my own, then go see Mar and ask him all the questions I could think of. I knew he liked Coca Cola, so in the beginning I pretended to have accidentally gotten two out Cokes of the machine, or had leftovers from the café where I was working. This wasn’t supposed to be a bribe, but I felt pretty bad about showing up and making him actually work his office hours (when normally nobody shows up for those with a T.A.). It had the added, egotistical perk that he was more energized to deal with me, but he caught on and felt that it was inappropriate, so I stopped. He was a great teacher, and I understood probably more this way than if I’d gone to class and had to work through everything on my own.

I wound up getting very, very lucky with that class. The final exam was an oral, and I drew the exact question that had been used as an example but with different data. As I knew, thanks to Mar, how to work that problem, I wound up getting a perfect grade. This class was averaged out with another that I still had to take, but I could actually have completely failed the next class and still get the credit. It put me in a good spot.

Mar was also a southerner. I’d worked with him before in a previous class, and he was always depressed in winter when it was cold, and got into a better and better mood as summer arrived. I reminded him of that during this second class and he laughed, admitting that it was true.

The particular part of the university where Mar worked was very odd and I’m not really sure what its goal was. It was computer science but attached to the linguistics department. This was before LLMs and AI, and there were people working on programming translation software, but this department also treated computer languages as languages, learning about and comparing their syntax for example. Just to give some perspective about when I was there, Java was about three years old, C++ was the standard and Python was just making inroads. The department worked a lot with Prolog, which for any programmers out there, I mean, check it out because it’s weird. The point of this is that while Mar was learning “computer science”, I sincerely doubt that he was learning anything practical there that would allow him to move on to Silicon Valley and make a mint. He was interested in the intellectual exercise of it all. He was smart, passionate about the weird things we studied there and sticking it out even though he hated the cold winters.

I finished that part of the university, and went on with my life.

Many years later and for different reasons, I contacted his boss, a Luka Nerima, and Luka told me about Mar’s sad end. Mar was in my country on a student visa, and had gotten his doctorate and stayed on for a post doc. Luka told me that Mar arrived at the end of his visa and couldn’t stay. He went back to Senegal. He either was ill before he left or fell ill when he got there….. and he died. Luka said it was not something people died of here, not saying what it was exactly but that Mar was killed by Senegal’s lack of medical care.

So the name Mar N’Diaye is about like “John Smith” in English speaking countries, “Jean Dupont” in French ones, “Max Schneider” in Germany or “Juan Garcia” in Spain. It’s super common. However this Mar was a brilliant, kind young man and his country couldn’t take care of him. I’m naming names to remember him.

This is paralleled by the story of Moulud, a friend of a friend in Morocco, who studied international law but could never get a place in the post grad department in Morocco because most of those spaces were reserved for the (mostly sons) of elite families.

And Boubacar Traoré, who is brilliant, and instead of making music to change the world his entire life, spent a dozen years working construction in France. When I read about him, as famous as he is, there’s almost nothing. It’s not because he isn’t brilliant or appreciated, or discrete and staying away from fame. It’s just that the spotlight of international interest doesn’t fall on Africa. It doesn’t fall on black and brown people that much either.

And Africa has a tendency not to take care of its people. Part of that is corruption, but a lot of it is due to borders which mostly have nothing to do with the people who live there and everything to do with which European country exploited them in the past. I mean, Nigeria has 525 languages. Mali thirteen. Senegal thirty six. No one there, if given the choice, would have drawn their borders where they are today. It’s hard enough to get along in rich countries where everyone speaks the same language, but it’s nearly impossible in poorer places where they don’t even have a way of talking to each other.

So tip a glass to Mar N’Diaye, and I’ll put a link for the documentary: https://youtu.be/DXZCJz5qHMw