Sénégal — The Trip I Paid for One Paycheque at a Time

Dakar, Sénégal | 40 years ago

I was 19 years old, working a retail job, when I decided I wanted to do something different.

Not just take a holiday. I wanted to go somewhere that felt completely outside the world I knew.

I chose Senegal

 

The trip was arranged through Jet Tours, which at the time was associated with Air France. I certainly didn’t have enough money to simply walk into a travel agency and pay for a trip to West Africa. So every time I got paid, I went to the Air France office and put some more money toward it.

The staff there got to know me. They knew what I was trying to do, and they wanted to see this 19-year-old kid actually make it to Africa.

They helped me.

Forty years later, I still remember that kindness. They didn’t have to take an interest in whether I made that journey or not, but they did. I will always be grateful to them.

And eventually, I got on that plane.

The journey itself felt like an adventure. I flew from Toronto to New York’s JFK Airport, and from there boarded an Air Afrique flight to Dakar. For a 19-year-old setting off for Africa for the first time, even changing planes in New York and seeing Air Afrique on the aircraft made the whole thing suddenly feel very real.

I was actually going to Africa.

My First Africa

Sénégal was my first experience of Africa, and Dakar immediately fascinated me.

During that week, I saw very different sides of the country — impressive, affluent neighbourhoods as well as ordinary working-class communities where people were simply going about their everyday lives.

That mattered to me.

Africa was so often presented to us through a narrow collection of images. Being there allowed me, even at 19, to begin seeing something far more complicated and human: a real country, with wealth and poverty, beauty and hardship, history and modern life existing alongside one another.

And through it all, I remember people being welcoming.

Gorée Island

There was one place I knew I had to visit: Gorée Island and the Maison des Esclaves — the House of Slaves.

Standing there was different from reading about slavery in a book.

The building itself is striking — the faded pink walls, the sweeping staircases and the small rooms below. But knowing what the site represented made the experience profoundly unsettling.

I was a young Black man from the Caribbean, standing at a place associated with the history of the Atlantic slave trade.

At 19, I probably didn’t have the words to fully articulate what that meant to me.

I think I understand it differently now.

The historical interpretation of Gorée and the precise role of the Maison des Esclaves in the slave trade has been debated and reassessed by historians over the years. But that doesn’t diminish what the island represents today: a place of remembrance, a connection to an enormous human tragedy, and a place where millions of descendants of the African diaspora can confront a history that shaped our world.

I am very glad I went.

 

Forty Years Later

Looking at these photographs today is almost surreal.

There I am — 19 years old, walking around Dakar and Gorée with my bag over my shoulder, having no idea where life would eventually take me.

I couldn’t have known how many countries I would visit afterwards. I couldn’t have known that four decades later I would be looking at these photographs and telling the story again.

But perhaps this was where something started.

I learned that you didn’t have to be wealthy to see the world. Sometimes you saved a little from every paycheque. Sometimes strangers encouraged you. Sometimes you simply chose a place that seemed impossibly far away and figured out how to get there.

Sénégal was one week of my life.

Forty years later, I still remember it.

Sometimes the trips we take when we’re young stay with us the longest.