Wolof and the Web

  • Revenge
    Juliana Friend | January 22nd, 2011
      “How much you gonna pay me?” snapped an A's cap-wearing street vendor. “Fey la uma, dé! I’m not paying, man!” I retorted in the hip-cocked Dakaroise pose of outrage I’d been perfecting all week. When a tubaab acts à la Sénégalaise, it’s...
  • Women in Sagatta, Senegal learn to read and write in their mother tongue
    bind wolof ci internet bi: am na solo?
    Juliana Friend | January 19th, 2011
    Waxale, Waxale, Waxale. It seems like that’s all I’ve been doing this past week. Talking, talking, talking. But I'm not solely to blame. While my linguist contacts argue that Dakarois have forgotten how to speak properly, I beg to differ that the...
  • Einstein in Wolof
    Juliana Friend | January 18th, 2011
      Usmaan Faty Ndongo selects a dusty tome from the top shelf of his bookcase.  “Look!” He beckons, flipping to a dog-eared page. “Mooy ben…,” I try to puzzle out the Wolof words before Usmaan declares, “It’s Einstein’s theory of relativity...
  • Modesty and Marriage
    Juliana Friend | January 11th, 2011
    Dakar’s unfamiliarity isn’t so unfamiliar anymore. Dodging  horse-drawn carts, Mercedes, and street hawkers to reach the cell phone vendor barely spiked my adrenaline. And I didn’t flinch when a pre-teen kid snickered at my broken Wolof. What...
  • On the Air
    Juliana Friend | August 3rd, 2010
    I had never spoken on the radio before, let alone in French. But there I was, sitting in an air conditioned cell plastered with posters of Senegalese rappers, waiting to discuss my research on Senegalese national radio. Needless to say I was a...
  • Reflections on digital fieldwork
    Juliana Friend | July 15th, 2010
    I never would have thought I’d register for an online dating chatroom. But there I was, sweating like a pig in a tiny cyber café, entering my age, my ‘interests’ and a Senegalese pseudonym into ‘123 Love.’ It all started with a real live chat with...
  • Blogging at last
    Juliana Friend | June 24th, 2010
    A professor once told me that the best anthropology begins in bars. Indeed, I arrived in Dakar, Senegal with a timeline, a list of contacts, a research plan. But it was a chance encounter with a web developer in the nightclub ‘Just 4 You’ that...