"I’d just finished my second helping of the ‘grande
casserole’ a typical Rwandese dish made of chicken,
plantains and other vegetables when someone cried out,
“cinq minutes! ca reste cinq minutes!” – Only five
minutes – there are five minutes left ‘til midnight!”
As if on cue, all us who’d been sitting in the living
room eating and chatting jumped to our feet and made
our way to the main foyer of the house. There was a
wall-unit stero system and several big colorful
balloons hanging from the ceiling light fixture.
We stood, everyone smiling, excited. Someone turned
on the radio and fiddled with the dial to get a
station. Then the radio voice boomed, “ Quatre, trois,
deux” -four, three – I never heard the “un” for the
noise in the room erupted. People were hugging and
kissing each other and saying “meilleurs voeux” –
Best wishes! “bon annee!” –Happy New year! Outside I
could hear fireworks popping. I rushed outside and saw
the black night of the sky light up like a Fourth of
July display – fireworks were bursting colorfully in
the air.
On New Year’s Eve, I spent the evening at the home
of a Rwandese couple, refugees living here in Dakar.
There are about 100 of them living here now. There
used to be more in the years just after the 1994
genocide there but many of them have migrated on to
other countries. My office assistant, Esperance, who I
call, “Essy”, is from Rwanda. Her friends invited me,
an American living and working Dakar, Senegal, West
Africa, to this end of the millennium, New Year’s Eve
house party.
Across this sprawling city that is a daily visual
clash of modernity, traditional African ways with a
heavy Muslim overtone, and typical developing world
ills like poverty, similar scenes were being played
out. Most of the people I knew opted to stay home or
in the company of friends. Most had television sets
tuned to watch the rest of the world ring in the New
Year. Others listened on radio.
Few people seemed really concerned about the problems
of the Y2K Bug or “le bug” as everyone in this
officially French speaking country called it. For one
thing, the joke was that “what, no water, no
electricity—we experience that often? What’s the
problem?” But some people were worried. There wasn’t
a rush on the banks but I heard several stories of
people taking out large amounts of money – they wanted
to be “liquide” – just in case. Officials had been
assuring the public that the country, mainly one
speaks o the city, was ready to make the leap into the
new era.
About hour after midnight a local radio station
reported the first problem “avec le bug” – cell
phones, which have become almost so popular recently,
didn’t work for the first few minutes after the clock
struck midnight due to some computer glitch. But, it
was reported, the problem was quickly fixed.
In
the heart of the city’s downtown, at La Place de
L’Independence, the city construction crews just made
the deadline to finish erecting the sound stage and
setting up the equipment for the free music concert
that was planned for the evening. A number of
Senegal’s top musicians were scheduled to play – Couba
Gawlo Seck, Thione Seck and Alioune Mbaye Nder.
New Year’s Eve this year fell right smack in
the middle of Ramadaan. This didn’t deter people from
coming out last night. No one, it seems wanted to miss
marking the end of the year, the coming of a new
century.
The plaza typically draws a big crowd on New Year’s
Eve becoming somewhat like State Street in Chicago or
Times Square in New York but this year’s organized
entertainment and the reinforced presence of the city
police force was something special. The brightly
colored lights strung across the plaza made it look
like the entrance to a Big Top carnival."
