The area between Gaoual and Touba (see last post) is hilly, beautiful, sparsely populated, and about as economically marginalized as anywhere I’ve seen in Guinea. Pulaar villages of 50-100 people where time stands still. No schools, no shops, no infrastructure. Just some fences enclosing a dozen or so mud huts with straw roofs. Cows wander around looking stunned in the heat.

But keep riding, out of the hills to the Jakhanké town at the foot of the mountain, to Touba, and you’d think you stepped into a different reality. As you approach from the south, you’ll see three story buildings on the horizon. A category error. A few kilometers ago you were amongst mud huts and rickety bamboo fences. Now you are confronted with a landscape of mansions with tiled facades and rooftop balconies. It must be a mirage. You haven’t seen anything but huts for miles.

At the creek on the edge of town teenagers dressed in European football joggers wash cars and listen to French rap. Mercedes, Renault, Peugeot, and Mitsubishi. They have iPhones and nice shoes and pepper their French with the latest Parisian slang. Enter town and you’ll find the streets are paved, and people walk around in spotless, starched new clothing, drinking tea in leisure. There is meat with every meal. It’s a village of mansions. Une ville-village.

What is this place?

Touba was founded in 1815 as a sanctuary of the Jakhanké people, who originated as a caste of pacifist Islamic clerical elites in the Ghana empire. Since this time, it has been a sacred city, and a spiritual/cultural homeland for the Jakhanké people.

In the 70s and 80s, a small but growing number of Jakhankés emigrated to Europe and began to accrue wealth. It was incumbent upon these early émigrés to use their resources to ensure that Touba would flourish—that it would realize its promise as a great city. The result today, as the international community of Jakhankés has grown, is a city that is awash in remittance money. Touba is deeply interlinked with communities in cities across Europe and elsewhere. Many of the men split their time almost evenly between Europe and Guinea, with a wife and a house in each.

Because a single French salary can support a household of 10-15 people here, many— perhaps most— residents don’t have to work, other than managing construction projects and dealing with the logistics of sending money internationally.

But it’s not quite paradise, especially for women, who, despite living in homes with tiled balconies, are still subject to much of the same drudgery as anywhere in W. Africa. Pumps break and water must still be hauled from wells. Clothes are still washed by hand in the creek. Gas is used only rarely and most food is still cooked over wood flame in suffocating kitchen huts. And trash is still chucked into the gutters or onto the road, to be burned at some future date.

Yet there is something undeniably electric about Touba. It feels like there is some kind of ceremony or event every single day— a wedding, baptism, funeral, or religious celebration, perhaps a relative arriving from Paris. All I can say for sure is that I’ve never been anywhere else like it.

The people of Touba (and Jakhankés everywhere) seem to walk the line between modernity and tradition with ease. They are tied by the strength of diaspora networks into the global economy, (see previous post) yet maintain the traditions and piety of their culture and history.

Touba is home to hundreds of talibé, or Koranic students, who are mostly sent by their families from other Jaxanké villages to live under the tutelage of an esteemed imam. They will often stay for their entire adolescence, learning to recite the Koran and how to farm.