--------- Forwarded message
>
> NEW YORK AND TOUBA, SENEGAL
>
> IT MAY have taken the murder in
> February of Amadou Diallo, a Guinean, by the New York
> police to open New Yorkers' eyes to the West Africans in
> their midst. But there are plenty of them, and perhaps
> none
> more obvious than the ones who work along the main
> tourist
> drags, surreptitiously flashing briefcases glittering
> with fake
> Rolex watches and Ray Ban sunglasses. These street
> traders are part of a Sufi brotherhood, the Mouride,
> founded
> by Cheikh Amadou Bamba in Senegal at the turn of the
> century. They operate round the world, from Paris to
> Tokyo,
> but their headquarters-in-exile is New York.
>
> "It has special significance for us Mourides," says Modou
> Sarr, a shopkeeper. Mr Sarr arrived at the age of 17,
> speaking no English; the police arrested him on the first
> day
> for peddling without a licence. But this, he says, is
> simply one
> of the trials and tribulations the Mourides expect on
> their
> journey towards God. Now, at 33, Mr Sarr is an American
> citizen and owns a high-rent tourist shop on 42nd Street
> at Times Square, on one of the corners where he used to
> dodge
> the police. "They would confiscated [sic] my goods and
> arrested me but I managed to save my pennies and keep my
> faith. I knew that Amadou Bamba prevailed, so so could
> I,''
> he says.
>
> Uptown in Harlem, many Mourides have opened legitimate
> restaurants and shops. By so doing, they are changing the
> face of a depressed area. According to Randy Daniels, the
> deputy commissioner for economic development in New
> York state, "African fabric shops, travel agents and
> telephone call-centres are internationalising the
> economy."
> Immigrants from other countries in West Africa are also
> settling in Harlem and across the Harlem river in the
Bronx
> (where Diallo was shot). But 116th Street and Malcolm X
> Boulevard, around the mosque named after the radical
> black
> leader, has become known as "Little Senegal", with more
> than 80% of businesses now owned by Senegalese. A
> Mouride religious centre is under construction. The city
> of
> Manhattan has proclaimed an official holiday in Harlem
> for
> Amadou Bamba, as has Cincinnati, another favourite
> destination for the Senegalese.
>
> Many American blacks are converting to the Mouride faith.
> One of them, Alpha Elias Abdul Latif, once a member of
> Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, praises "the
> uncompromising stance of Amadou Bamba against the European
> dominatio
> n of Africa and the world." Other
> blacks
> see parallels with their own heroes, particularly Booker
> T.
> Washington, who admonished blacks to pull themselves up
> by their bootstraps. Bamba did not do so much for his own
> people, apparently consigning them to a life of poverty
> as
> peanut-providers for the French colonial rulers in
> Senegal.
> But he has a clear advantage over Booker T: he supposedly
> performed miracles, including walking on the water after
> the
> French had put him on a ship to send him into exile.
>
> Astonished by this, the French authorities granted Bamba
> semi-autonomy over the "holy city" of Touba and the land
> around it.
> Today, Touba is squalid and overcrowded, with
> little water or sanitation. Yet it has a giant mosque and
> a
> library with 10,000 books, including Bamba's original
> writings; and, for blacks in Harlem, it carries the same
> romantic allure as kibbutzes once did for American Jews.
> Abdul Latif calls it "the ideal Islamic experience." A
> popular
> Mouride bumper sticker reads "Fly Air Touba", although
> this
> is a purely spiritual journey: Touba not only has no
> airline, but
> also no airport.
>
> What is real is the Mourides' international trade
> network.
> According to Cheikh Seye, the executive secretary of the
> Mouride Isl
> amic Community of America, about $100m is
> transferred from New York to Senegal every three months
> through informal banking arrangements. "We're a
> self-supporting community," he says from an office at the
> back of an international telephone centre on 116th
> Street.
> "When people first arrive, we find a place for them to
> stay in
> New York and we help them look for business."
>
> The problem, as Modou Sarr found, is that the start-ups
> are
> mostly peddlers who are unlicensed and illegal, and the
> city
> keeps a tight rein on the number of street-vending
> licences it
> issues. The lucky few get them through a city-organised
> lottery syst
> em; the rest are always on the run from a
> special
> police task force that cruises midtown streets in
> unmarked
> cars. Police admit (unofficially) that, of the roughly
> 1,300
> arrests they make each year, 90% are Senegalese. "We
> arrest the same guys over and over again," says one
> officer.
> One Italian-American policeman claimed that when he was
> on holiday in Rome, he saw a Senegalese peddler he knew
> from New York: "When he saw me, he ran."
>
> The Mouride community helps peddlers when they lose their
> goods. Often they are back selling on the streets the
> same
> day. But the police and city officials have cited that
fact
> as
> evidence of an organised crime network, and since 1992
> the
> task force has been arresting peddlers on more serious
> criminal charges. "Before, they'd just spend a day or two
> in
> jail and do some community service time," says the task
> force's new chief, Robert D'Onofrio. "Now we often
> charge them with selling counterfeit goods, which means
> they can do up to a year in prison." It also leaves them
> with
> a criminal record that can jeopardise their immigration
> status.
> But Seydina Senghor, executive director of Afrika
> Business
> Community and an advocate for the Mourides in New York,
> complains that the police make a habit of beating and
> harrassing bla
> ck immigrants whether they have licences or
> not.
>
> Few Mourides have made formal complaints, however. "We
> knew it wasn't going to be easy before we came," said
> Amadou Thiam, who hawks T -shirts with fake logos. "But
> this is business."
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