Word: dakar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...incapable of separating my dislike of world music from my dislike of the dinner parties at which it's played. But Egypt, winner in the Best Contemporary World Music category, is not the usual easy-listening exotica shrink-wrapped for the appetizer course. The melodies traipse from Cairo to Dakar; the lyrics are in Wolof; the liner notes offer translation and explain that the songs are about Sufi scholars, most of whom seem to practice a West African strain of Islamic Calvinism. Lest you fear learning something, N'Dour's voice sweeps and swells with a passion that makes listening...
Royal knows how to play tough. Born in Dakar, Senegal, the daughter of a French army officer, she grew up as the fourth of eight children in a large house in Lorraine. Her father's regime was a strict one (the family intoned Gregorian chants on Sundays). Royal attended a Catholic boarding school and the University of Nancy before attaining the classical educational polish of the French political élite: a degree from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and another from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), where her class included the current Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin...
...marketing executive from Bordeaux who just joined the Socialist Party, says she is drawn to the way Royal "doesn't pontificate, but touches sensitivities. And she doesn't epitomize careerism, like other candidates." Well: yes and no. In truth, Royal's career has always been politics. Born in Dakar, Senegal, the daughter of a French army officer, she grew up as the fourth of eight children in a large house in Lorraine, not far from that of her paternal grandfather, an army general. Her father's regime was a strict one (the family had to sing Gregorian chants on Sundays...
...among the richest in Africa to utter penury. Meanwhile, Mobutu and his cronies looted the treasury of billions of dollars. In addition to his many secret bank accounts, Mobutu owns nine villas in Belgium, an estate on the French Riviera and an apartment in Paris; property in Johannesburg, Dakar, Abidjan and Morocco; a coffee plantation in Brazil; and, in the cellars of his estate in Portugal, 14,000 bottles of past-its-prime wine from 1930, the year of his birth. The dictator, who is suffering from prostate cancer, will thus not be inconvenienced by the Swiss seizure...
...allowing people to cross with the flash of a local identity card. In particular, Senegalese truck drivers and traders have long cut through Gambia to get to the south of their own country, because the ferry route lops more than 500 km off the trip from the capital of Dakar. The shortcut was abruptly closed in mid-August after Gambia doubled ferry charges. "The Gambians just woke up one day and increased the price of crossing," says Kebba Fall, a money changer in the Senegalese border town of Keur Ayib. "It's too expensive. We cannot take it." When Senegalese...