POT ROUGE (SENEGAL)
POT ROUGE (SENEGAL)
Raising awareness of the talibé plight in Senegal
Curated by S.Downham-Lotto
Photographs by S. Downham-Lotto
A selection of photographs taken in 2021 by Sara during a voluntary-run project with talibé boys in Senegal.
The NGO, Maison de la Gare in Saint-Louis, takes in from the streets dozens of talibé a week. The boys are provided with food, clean water, clothes, supplies for washing, treatment for disease or physical injuries and a bed. They stay for 3 nights, at which point they return either to their Quranic teachers, marabouts, in one of the many city Quranic schools (daaras), or, often more favourably, to the streets.
Pot Rouge (Red Pot) refers to empty red tomato concentrate pots re-purposed by the talibé as begging pots. Apart from the shirts on their backs, the pots are their one prized possession, guarded over as if their lives depended on it. Pedestrians might drop in a handful of uncooked rice, a hunk of bread, or if the boys are lucky, a lump of sugar. Often ignored by their ‘official’ guardians, Quranic teachers, daily survival depends on whether or not any form of nourishment gets dropped into their begging pots.
An article on the journey of the tomato paste pot/can in Burkino Faso, applies to a number of other West African countries, including Senegal:
Where imported goods now constitute the basic ingredients of the daily urban diet, tomato paste seems to epitomize the country’s position at the end of the globalized food chain. With the expansion of this manufactured comestible, the empty tomato paste tin can has gradually replaced previously used calabashes and plastic bowls to become the sole recipient used by child beggars for receiving food donations. As such, it has become the primary graphic symbol for child begging, in particular, and for African underdevelopment in general. ….
Usually framed as an emblem of ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘poverty’, the can becomes a symbol of the transformations of the Burkinabe economy and of the rapid changes of consumption patterns the country is experiencing.
The tomato paste tin can: An African journey (Burkina Faso) 2019 Journal of Material Culture 24(1)
For more on the talibé, see Creative Voice for Senegal’s Talibé in Projects.
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