The imaginary monument

The proper size for a monument of revolution is 6 inches. This occurs to me as I look out from our Dakar lodgings and realize that I can see the Monument to the African Renaissance from a-a-a-all the way across the other side of the peninsula.

This grotesquery is, by irony rather than design, a most accurate tribute to Thabo Mbeki’s catchphrase.
Appropriately to that grand vision of a rebirth of opportunities for multinational profiteering on the African continent, this 49-metre tall, dubious depiction of a man/woman/baby was constructed from three-centimeter thick copper by a North Korean firm, who were paid $27 million dollars ‘in kind’, Wikipedia tells us, in the form of '40 hectares of land'.

The improbably proportioned man at the centre of the hulking trio is built like a certain kind of wrestler, which is just as well because he has a sleek baby perched on one shoulder and a nubile adolescent hanging off his arm as if steadying herself against a gale which causes her decidedly unafrican hair to stream out behind her without stirring the man’s little hat. In the whipping wind she is no doubt regretting her rash decision that morning before the mirror: 'Let me see, what shall I wear to the African Renaissance? Traditional finery? Modernist afro-chic ball gown? Oh I know, let me innovatively drape this silky bedsheet across my bosom'.

At the opening ceremony last year – best held, I would imagine, during the day, so that it would not have to be lighted by smelly, noisy generators during one of Dakar’s regular blackouts –Wade declared that his ‘prestige project’ represented Africa arriving in the 21st century ‘standing tall and more ready than ever to take its destiny into its hands’. Up close its clear that the monument was designed to do, once constructed, exactly nothing - unless you count as a function dwarfing and overawing the average viewer while allowing a few big men like Wade to puff their chests.

The revolutions sweeping North Africa, by contrast, are characterised by the growth in stature of all sorts of people previously bent low, whether by a dictator's heel or their supposed place in society, thus allowing, for example, women to play a pivotal role in many instances of the Tunisian and Egyptian events (like 26 year old Asmaa Mahfouz, who 'explained on Egyptian television that she and three others from the movement went to [Tahir] square and began shouting: "Egyptians, four people set themselves on fire out of humiliation and poverty. Egyptians, four people set fire to themselves because they were afraid of the security agencies, not of the fire. Four people set fire to themselves in order to tell you to awaken... Four people set themselves on fire in order to say to the regime: Wake up. We are fed up." ' (Al Jazeera http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/02/2011217134411934738.html))

So I fell to musing on a monument to honor the people currently testing their collective power in North Africa and I was seized by an involuntary fantasy - a fantasy predicated on the revolts maturing and spreading and deepening on a massive scale - of a grubby Uncle Sam/local dictator cloth doll, masticated and spit out by babies who were momentarily unattended in the increasingly pleasant public squares ringed by fantastic architectures such as breathing buildings; a monument spit out and scuffled and kicked and at last ground away by the passing feet of people busily remaking life in a human image.