Word: dakar
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Senegal's capital was unusually subdued for a Saturday night in late February. In Dakar's popular Sicap Baobab district, the normally packed Toucan restaurant was empty and quiet, save for the voice of local pop star Cheikh Lô coming from speakers above the bar. In 1996 Lô hit international fame with Né La Thiass (Gone in a Flash), which warned about sudden changes of destiny. With Senegal emerging from a tumultuous election, the most keenly contested in its history, that lyric is timely again, echoing sentiment about the country's tippy democratic traditions and life under...
...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...