Tangana Tango
“Bleary eyed and peckish, we wander down the first street of this boom town. Kedougou, flooded with rural migrant workers brought by the gold mining in the hills, offers plenty of cheap breakfast options. Three sided stalls made of cotton sheets are erected temporarily and stand alongside more permanent wooden slatted huts, each selling sandwiches of beans and omelettes. Their interiors are bare bones, just a table with a couple benches or perhaps a rickety chair or two.
The routine at each is fairly uniform. You sit at one of the benches where some regulars eye you with vague curiosity before returning to their bowl of beans and potatoes. The proprietor sits behind a table, piled high with eggs, spices, tapa lapa and various twisted and worn cooking implements. She smiles and the creases all over her face fold into each other. She motions for you to sit as she quickly assembles her ingredients. You watch her cut the onions with speed and dexterity, dicing them completely in 20 seconds without putting them down once. She cracks the eggs and beats in the dirt colored Adja spices that she sprinkles in from each small recycled container of chocolate spread. When she reaches for the homemade mayonnaise that has likely been sitting in the stall for a few hours, you interject ‘tutti rekk’ attempting to control the ratio of mayo to filling.
You can choose your own ingredients: nebe, beans slowly simmered in tomato sauce and spices, often leftover from last night’s dinner: potatoes cut chunky and cooked til golden: the omelette itself, usually more fried than sauteed in the generous helping of oil heated on the furno’s glowing coals. She roughly flips the rapidly cooking eggs with with one hand as she reaches for the thick short loaves of doughy tapa lapa. A deft slice and the whole loaf is ready to absorb the excess oil leftover from her ministrations. The slightly crispy and salty eggs go in first followed by spoonfuls of beans packed alongside. She rips a piece of butcher paper or foreign language newspaper off the crackling pile and wraps the middle to alleviate the oily fingers, which the average toubab cannot avoid. ‘Am’ she says ‘take this.’ The question of beverage soon follows and you will inevitably consume a significant amount of spicy sweet Cafe Touba or kinkeleba tea. The first bite is to be savored, then you quickly chow down on the rest in order to make it back to the campement for morning check in.
The woman (Awa, Fatou, Ramata) continues the dance of the tangana (the name of these stalls, literally ‘it is hot’) as you munch the sandwich. You sip the thick coffee while her hands dart around the table. She can converse freely, accustomed to these motions from years of experience. She has seen the success of the gold mining rise and fall, the somber men who visit her benches coming and going with their fluctuations. She sees the new arrivals to her hometown, from the Malian migrants to the foreign companies to the Nigerian prostitutes, and continues frying and pouring. There’s peace in the routine, a beautiful choreography of clicking and stirring and greeting all at once. And then you pay your 400 CFA (maybe 300 if you have the same last name as she does) and draw aside the Spongebob sheets, back onto the dusty red laterite roads of Kedougou.”
Claire
West Africa Semester Student
