©2016 Djibril N’Doye

In farming life, disparity from one family to another is often a short term situation. Every farmer depends on the rain season. Like in any society, stratification by class is not natural in society. It is created by humans. A good harvest feeds a family until the next harvest and sometimes longer than that.
With one rainy season yearly starting every July, rain is life to farmers. Natural disasters like flooding, drought, locust, or sickness can cause a lack of a good harvest for granaries. With a communal spirit in a communal community, farmers who have a good and abundant harvest gather behind closed doors and decide to fill the granaries of those less fortunate.
Another year, the same situation may happen to the ones who are helping this year, and the ones who received the help will decide to fill the granaries of those who are not fortunate. It is human nature to feel up or down and also hard to be up all the time.
Here in the drawing called “Disparity”, the ones who have and the ones who don’t have are hard to find because there are no faces visible. While helping each other, what another can see is the beauty of togetherness, the beauty of the communal bond. How one feels or looks is part of his/her private life, and life goes on . . .
In today’s life in my community and many others around the world, “modernism”, elitism, politics, religious sectarian rivalry, and technology are pushing society to modernize, and the landscape I grew up seeing is being taken over by the industry hiring farmers, while traditional farming with organic crops is disappearing, the communal living is also being lost and individualism is taking its place.
From my own first hand observation, 8 out 10 people in my hometown have a cell phone most of the time hanging on their side from a belt of the young men for a ‘visual aesthetic’ but not everyone has been able to pay for minutes to place a call, they wait to be called. Cellular phones are like ants in Africa.
The ecosystem is suffering from erosion and industrial pollution like nature is at the mercy of “political modernism”. It is unpleasant for me to see degradation in a very rich and historic indigenous village like my hometown which is now a town of 75,000 people demographically.
My hometown is Bargny, one of the oldest and the most historic indigenous places, and I call it home. If Bargny is changing, every place will also be changing or already has.