Border-(S)hopping

Borders fascinate me. 

The Senegal River is the natural as well as official border between Senegal and Mauritania, and in this panoramic picture between the small city of Matam, Senegal on the right and the village of Tofunde Cive, Mauritania on the left. Along the beach on the Mauritanian side is a row of small shops selling goods such as tea, fabric, personal care products and cell phones. Senegalese shoppers cross the river in pirogues to shop in the boutiques, which exist in Mauritania almost primarily for Senegalese consumption on the other side of the river.

I made the pirogue trip across the river on three occasions. I went the formal route, taking the government-sanctioned pirogue seen above, as opposed to one of the many informal, smaller pirogues that make the 10 minute journey throughout the day. On two of the occasions, I too was going to do a little shopping, to check out the boutiques and to buy some fabric. While the trip across is pretty seamless for the Senegalese, not so for a Toubab like me. I did not have a visa to enter Mauritania*, you see, and there is a border agent that sits in a hut on the beach to check for this documentation. Now, I wasn't really that pressed to go into the shops, and even less interested in paying a couple dollars bribe in order to be allowed to walk 100 feet, so when I was rebuffed on my last trip I just went back across the river.

While I did not get very far onto Mauritanian territory, I was amazed during these brief excursions how different this side of the 250 meter-wide river felt from the other. But then again, despite some strong similarities that exist between Senegal and Mauritania at this little crossing, the two countries are very, very different places. That is part of why borders fascinate me, because despite the often arbitrariness of their creation, their impact is real and can mean everything depending on who you are, what you look like, where you come from, and where you are going.

*I have a fascination with Mauritania too, which emerged after reading Kevin Bales' Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. During my time in Matam I had a few encounters with the continuing practice of slavery that exists in Mauritania today.