Selling Men

By Benjamin Temchine

“By the unofficial reckoning of some police officials, 90 percent of arrested street merchants are Mouride.” David Hecht, Invisible Governance

There are on the streets of New York men practice the holy art of dealing in counterfeit watches. These men have brothers who do the same thing in cities around the world. Every continent except Antarctica has them, and the moment some frozen scientist yearns for a fake Rolex, I have no doubt that one of them will book a flight
These men are Africans, more precisely Senegalese; specifically they are followers of a Sufi Muslim brotherhood from the barrens of inner Senegal. “We are Mouridulahi, the soldiers of god. We are Talibees of Serigne Touba.” said one peddler who requested anonymity.
I lived with these men for two and a half years. I now see them in New York, bundled against the cold, running from the cops, working twelve-hour days pushing the cheapest knock-offs to the chumps from out of town. Street peddlers are not new to New York. Mourides are not the first people to come to New York seeking prosperity for themselves and their families. But how many street peddlers consider themselves soldiers of Allah?
Mouridism is a way of life for them. Serigne Touba, the title of the founder of the Mourides Cheikh Amadou Bamba, they love him. They love him like they love god, like they love Mohammed, and Serigne Touba, like Booker T. Washington, says, love yourself through hard work and prosper. Serigne Touba says, “Work and make work your prayer”. He says, “Pray like you will die tomorrow, and work like you will live forever.”
Most of these men on the streets in front of Saks 5^th Avenue and Tiffany’s came from villages on the edge of the Sahara desert 4,000 miles away. There was no concrete around them; there was no glass. They lived in huts made of grass or of mud and manure. Their parents were farmers like their parents and their parents. Their huts were built without foundations, rough on the desert sand. They had no electricity, no running water. .
The legend about Serigne Touba is, that he took the Koran out the hand of one of his most devoted followers, Cheikh Ibra Fall, and gave him, instead, a plow. “Head out to the peanut fields (called Daraa Khoudoss: school of the servants of god) and we will build a mosque to the glory of god and the glory of our work.” The mosque they building is now the largest in sub-Saharan Africa. The minaret is 250 feet tall and the mosque itself is larger than a soccer field.
It all would have stayed that way but the rains stopped about thirty years ago, and the desert began to grow at the same time the population began to increase. That is when I came to Senegal. The young were being sucked out of villages, but instead of being blown to the wind, seeds on barren soil, they were planted throughout the world, though their roots remained in those peanut fields.
The Mourides are reshaping themselves and they start in the Koranic schools, called daara. Family is the fundamental organizational structure, the atom, of the Mourides. The daara, though, is the laboratory where the life of the Mouride is shaped and defined. Islam, and in particular Mouridism, is not just a religion to be practiced on Sunday. It is all encompassing, and the daara is the root. It is an act of conjuring: by combining many who have nothing, you will create an organization with enough to share.
While the students are from the farms, the daara are in the towns. Kids as young as five are sent by their parents to the cities to study the Koran at the feet of Imams and Marabouts to become Talibees, or students of the Koran. According to Serigne Fall, a Mouride businessman from Diourbel, “the father will give the child to the marabout saying, “ Teach him the Koran or give him back to me dead.” This is not an invitation to kill the child, although the discipline is stern. It is a simple statement of possible outcomes. The child will either learn, or he will die. So the children will learn the Koran, and the life stories of Serigne Touba and Mohammed. They learn to read and write Arabic and to count. They learn how to make a life in a world whose life giving power is being blown away by the wind.
The numbers of Talibees quickly overwhelms the ability of the marabout to provide for the students and most of the students do not have the ability to provide for themselves. To get food, the Talibees will spread out through their adopted town and beg for food, not for themselves but for Allah. “Ngir Yallah” they say. And the Mourides, remembering when they were Talibees, feed them.
This period of begging is fundamental in the creation of the young Mouride entrepreneur. There are two lessons learned, according to Abdou Sarr, owner of a store in Diourbel, Senegal. The first is that “I survive on my own without family, who are far away, and secondly that the charity of other Mourides will carry me through when nothing else is there.” In multiple interviews with Mourides, it was these lessons, more than any sura from the Koran, which were cited as the most valuable. There is a famous local saying: “People are man’s medicine”.
After the daara, the Talibees can return home and farm, if there is any hope in dragging the plow through the fine dry sand. Most will look for work. The most common route, according to Bacc Dieng of Diourbel is to integrate yourself into a daariya. The daariya is an organization of followers of one of the Mourides’ many religious leaders. The daariya are one of the few sources of capital available in West Africa, and it is because of the daariya money that the street peddlers, or bana-bana, pace the streets in Dakar and New York.
You can sell in Touba, the home of the marabouts themselves. You can do it with the help of the daariya in other parts of the country. If you do well, you help the next group, and get larger aid from the daariya. Part of all of the millions of dollars being created monthly around the world by this commerce, comes back to build the mosque. The current Grand Kalifa of the brotherhood is covering the mosque, inside and out, with tons and tons of Italian marble.
Serigne Touba says work, you have no fields, and you have no craft, so grab something, get out there and sell. It does not matter what; the daariya provides the goods its members will sell. It could be counterfeit watches, flip-flops, knit hats, t-shirts. You have done this before. You wandered the streets for food, Ngir Yallah, for god, then and you grew and learned. Now you do it again. They daariya will provide a roof and maybe, if you are lucky enough to get a visa, a plane ticket. .
It is a closed circuit, upward. The places a bana-bana goes are the only things that change. Sandaga Market in Dakar or at the corner of 54^th street and 5^th Avenue, the relationship between the peddler and the daariya is the same. Leave the village for school, learn the Koran, and return home, full of life and part of the community. Hopefully, with prayer and hard work, you build a house in the city where Serigne Touba walked. It is, for some, an African Horatio Alger story. But the details of the life of a wandering salesman are not filled in by these broad strokes.
There are bana-banas who never move up and out. The streets will keep you alive, Ngir Yallah, but the desert that is drying up the fields has dried up wallets as well. Sometimes the road back to the village is not open anymore.
In the past, an old man belonged in his village. There are still places like that and men like that. Men who did not have to fly to the United States. Most old men I met did not move very far in their lives. Most sit on wide woven mats underneath the trees, watching their grandchildren, and great grandchildren play with the chickens in the sand. I met a man who was 80 years old, a village chief. He remembered meeting Mouride warriors who returned from the battles with French colonial invaders. He lived 45 miles from Kaolack, the third largest city in Senegal, and while man was going to the moon, he never made it the 45 miles to see the biggest covered market in West Africa. He never saw a television. He had never seen even a picture of a factory. Although he had seen a car, I wonder how he thought it was made. He was a small man in a knit hat and dirty multi-pleated pants.
He is spending his final years unsurprised. There is a place for him, even though surrounded by boys in Mike Tyson shirts so eager to get money, to listen to rap music and drive a car in New York, to get away from the trees, the sand and the children everywhere.
In other parts of the country, old men in dirty robes wander the streets of the cities along with the young ones in their counterfeit jeans. An old bana-bana in Dakar with three ski hats in his hands sits waiting at a chaotic intersection, cars honking, people yelling and young men in Tupac shirts and fake Tommy Hilfiger jeans spread around him. They always seem lost, disconcerted by all the screaming hell that tornadoes around them. It is all so new, this new life.
The most jarring sight, however, are the people who carry only one thing to sell; a single gray office telephone or a beaded taxi driver seat cover. When the bana-bana has a selection, there is always the hope that one of those things may be needed soon. But a man with only one thing, has no choice of hopes. One man endlessly circling with a single pair of wrinkled khaki pants, looking for the man with the right sized hips, the man who will need khaki pants and has money for them, the man who will help him eat and build the mosque, Ngir Yallah. They never stop circling the city.
Sometimes the bana-banas, especially the boys boldly walking through the streets impress me with their war for god. Maybe they are a step ahead of it. The salesmen of one product in particular inspire awe. Out of narrow, long trays that look like toolboxes covered with a wire screen, they sell small brown finches captured out in the bush and brought into the city. They sell the finches so the buyer can make a wish and release the bird into freedom.