Dakar

We tried Dakar, a new Senegalese restaurant in Central Falls last Friday before going to see The SantaLand Diaries at the Gamm Theater. There aren't a lot of dining choices near the Gamm, so Dakar is a nice addition to the area. We had the place to ourselves once the couple that was dining when we arrived left, which is never a good sign for a restaurant on Friday night (or any other night), but the food and the service was good. Our waiter (who was also the host, bus boy, and possibly, the chef) greeted us by asking if we had ever been the Senegal. It was nice that he didn't assume we had never visited his home country (though we haven't), even though it's a place that most Americans have never even heard of.

As for the food, I really liked the ginger juice. It was very strong, but I love ginger and ginger-based drinks especially. I also enjoyed the Naem appetizer that we tried. They are Senegalese-style egg rolls and according to our waiter, they were brought back to Senegal by soldiers who fought for their colonial power (France) in Vietnam. Regardless of how you feel about colonialism, we can all agree that is has given us some great fusion cuisine. I had the Lamb Yassa for dinner. The lamb was a bit on the dry side, but the dish still had a lot of flavor.

I haven't eaten much African cuisine, but my meal at Dakar was one of my favorites. Hopefully the next time we eat there, we won't be the only patrons.

The Horror

I recently picked up Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I'm not entirely sure why I decided to read it, other than it's one of many notable works of literature that I've never read. I went to the library looking for a work of fiction, but beyond that, I didn't really have anything in mind. I enjoyed the book, but I had a few problems with it. The first was that I picked up the Norton Critical Edition, which clocks in at 420 pages. The story itself is only 70 of those pages. I failed to consult the table of contents before diving into it, so I thought that it was a novel-length story. I tend to read longer stories differently than shorter ones. I don't pay attention as closely at the start of a longer story since I figure that the first 20 or 30 pages are just going to start developing the themes and characters that will be fully fleshed out throughout the course of the book. Once I was 20 or 30 pages into Heart of Darkness, I was almost halfway through the story. I didn't realize how short the story was until I was about 2/3rds of the way through it, at which point, I had no desire to go back to the beginning and read it more closely.

My bigger problem was the extent to which the story has been woven into western culture over the past 100 years. It's hard to approach a work of literature from a fresh perspective after you've already seen it parodied on Seinfeld. While I didn't read much of the source material, criticism, and historical information presented in the other 350 pages of the Norton Critical Edition, that which I did read was in some ways more interesting to me than the story. I'd still say that the story is required reading for any student of the scramble for Africa.

Good Old Smithy

I can't believe I missed this while writing my ode to Economist obituaries a couple days ago. Ian Smith, the former Prime Minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), passed away at the end of November. In case you've never heard of him, he was most famous (or infamous) for declaring independence from the crown in 1965 and turning his nation into a pariah state in an attempt to maintain white minority rule. I knew that Smith was getting up there in years and I was positive that he'd be memorialized in Economist upon his passing. I was correct, and his obituary is a masterpiece. Smith was one of the last remaining vestiges of the old British Empire, and his obituary pays homage to that while still condemning his misrule.

The obituary does not delve into speculation, nor should it, but it is interesting to think about how Zimbabwe would be today had it dismantled its de facto apartheid regime in 1965 as Britain wanted instead of waging a disastrous war in defense of a lost cause. Would it be like today's South Africa but with a one generation head start on democracy and racial and tribal reconciliation? Would it still be the basket case that it is today? The history of governance in post-colonial Africa is bleak enough that it's foolish to assume that Zimbabwe would definitely be in better shape today had Smith been willing to dismantle minority rule, but at the same time, it's hard to imagine how Zimbabwe could be in worse shape than it is today.