Tragedy has struck at the door of our country with the accident in Kaffrine which cost the lives of thirty-nine people and injured a hundred (the toll is provisional). The Head of State has declared a three-day national mourning period, and since Sunday, reactions have been pouring in at home and abroad to show support for the Senegalese people. For the moment, the reactions within the political class -with the exception of some dull spirits chanting the permanent vulgar agitation- are marked by decency, measure, and responsibility. All the political, religious, and customary components of society are united around the imperative of national unity in such circumstances. It is up to the authorities to live up to this consensus by taking the necessary measures to avoid as many disasters of this nature as possible in the future.
President Sall had the right words for this painful circumstance. The holding of the Interministerial Council on Road Safety and Public Transport on Monday 9, the day after the tragedy, is a relevant initiative. It is necessary, at the end of this drama, to take strong actions to reform the transport sector which is a snapshot of all the dysfunctions in our country. It is a nest of corruption, indiscipline, unconsciousness, and violation of all the rules of community life. This tragedy in Kaffrine can be the trigger for a change in transport and road safety. In view of the various reactions noted, everyone agrees on the need to put order in the sector, which is plagued by various problems.
It is not yet time to point out with precision the enormous challenges in the field of road safety and transportation, because we are in mourning and a time of recollection is necessary. This time of mourning is to be used for introspection on our customs and practices, our challenges, and our indelicacy with the common good and the sacredness of human life. We have stopped reflecting on what makes us a nation united in its diversity. And in his recent speech, President Sall invited us to do so: « We have the individual and collective responsibility to overcome our differences in order to cultivate our living together and preserve it from the perils that make the misfortune of peoples. » We must dare to take a lucid and sincere look at what we have become after decades of national construction.
Our country is hanging on by a thread due to various fractures that are causing moral and spiritual decadence. I was touched by this sentence of Joe Biden, speaking about the United States, a great country shaken in its democratic values by the hurricane Trump. Biden said to Americans, « We must heal the soul of the Nation. » No country is spared the fury of those who promote chaos and civil war and who, in their sinister enterprise, deny no point of entry. In a few weeks, when the strong emotion has passed, they will come to distil their hatred of the Nation and their refrain of division and politician politics. Senegal is in mourning. And this time of austere silence and distance from the mundane must also be a time for prayer. All the more so since we are a Nation with secular institutions but whose soul is strongly imbued with the faith in a unique God, master of the hundred worlds and the souls that inhabit them.
I believe in prayer as an intimate act with a universal purpose, as a mark of devotion and an act of contrition, as an instance of recollection and an admission of the smallness of man and his inability to access the mysteries that surround the immensity of the worlds. Senegal holds on because men and women pray there from dawn to the depths of the night to a God who is attentive to the multiple quests of humans, whether they are Muslims, Christians, or Jews.
I told a Muslim scholar friend about my recent visit to Popenguine, my emotion in the Basilica of Our Lady of Deliverance and in the mystical grotto of the Marian shrine, and my fascination in front of the Black Virgin blessed by Saint John Paul II. We talked about the dialogue of religions, the Senegalese example in this matter and the importance of reading the texts as an act of faith so that knowledge is always the compass of practice. I spoke to him about Mgr Jean-Louis Tauran, who was Cardinal protodiac and died as Camerlingue of the Church of Rome, a man of faith and a great scholar because he was a great reader. Archbishop Tauran was above all the president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, a great connoisseur of Islam and the Muslim world, for whom I had a deep esteem. Our discussion ended on the fragility of human life and its unpredictability, and on the true meaning of faith as an act of rebellion in the face of passing passions.And I thought of this sentence by the Catholic writer Georges Bernanos in ‘Les grands cimetières sous la lune’ (Plon, 1938): »Prayer is, in short, the only revolt that stands. »
By Hamidou ANNE / hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn
