lecture
6 December 2003
by Filiep Tacq
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The Dakar car rapide – an endangered species
"A frequent image: that of the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended up with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form." Roland Barthes
In the spring of 2002 I went to Dakar to find out more about the decoration on the type of public bus known as the car rapide and about how traditional design skills are being lost by the introduction of the computer. On this occasion I also met the organizers of the Biennial of African contemporary art, Dak’Art 2002.
I had contacted them in preparation for a trip I’d later be making to Dakar with 22 researchers of the Jan van Eyck Academy to attend the opening week of the Biennial, and also because I wanted to see how the catalogue, poster and folder for the Biennial were produced.
Until that year the catalogue had been designed and printed in France. Now the board wanted to have the catalogue designed and printed in Dakar by people from Dakar. But after a while I figured out that African designers are difficult to find in Senegal’s capital. Most of the designers who operate there are French, and have come to Dakar to work and live. The African designers are artists who have just had a basic training in computer-aided design. (As far as I know, design in Senegal was in the hands of the painters who decorated buses and billboards by hand.) Now that computers have been introduced, Senegalese designers have to learn how to use them. In the meantime I’m afraid they’ll lose the skills they had developed by doing everything by hand.
On this trip to Dakar I met the painter Moussa Tine, who invented the typical font you can find on the public buses in Dakar. Moussa started decorating buses at the beginning of the nineteen-seventies. He adapted a new font system and invented new decorations. Thirty years later people are still copying his creations. Now you find the font – with the typical red shadow under each letter – almost everywhere, not only on the type of bus known as the car rapide, but on taxis and billboards as well.
The font (more a font system then a true font) is not so much a font as an idea – always put a red shadow under any letter you use. It functions almost as a logo, but one you can easily adapt to any circumstance. This system has been applied thousands upon thousands of times, without any manual, without any type company behind it. People just copied it over and over again.
One morning in May I went to meet Moussa Tine again at the garage where he had worked for several years decorating hundreds of buses. We had a long conversation, which was recorded on tape.
The car rapide got its name, he told me, because it was much faster then the calèche, the horse-drawn cart in use in the days before Senegal’s independence. Moussa couldn’t say exactly when the first buses were introduced, but it must have been at the beginning of the nineteen-sixties, not long after Independence. This phenomenon – the decorated car rapide – seems to be peculiar to Senegal; I didn’t see it in other countries like Mali and Burkina Faso.
There are something like 2,000 or 2,500 car rapide type buses running in the city of Dakar, maybe more. They belong to private individuals and to companies spread throughout Senegal. Some drivers have had the opportunity to buy a car rapide themselves and some of them have gone on to become big operators owning over a hundred.
All these buses are second-hand Renaults imported mostly from France. Some of them are 30 or even 40 years old. Over the years, four different types of Renault have succeeded one another, with names such as Gallion, Guillette, and Saviem.
When I asked Moussa how long these buses lasted, he explained that in the course of its lifetime a bus is not only frequently repainted but its various parts are gradually replaced. The steel plate of specific parts is renewed or even the whole coachwork. The engine is also replaced several times. At the end there is not so much left of the original bus. Along the road, in public garages of a sort, a whole range of very talented craftsman are constantly working on the repair of the broken parts or the making of new ones. It’s interesting to note that when a bus’s bodywork is renewed, the new coachwork conforms exactly to the design
of the old Renaults; almost every detail is meticulously imitated.
The government has imposed fixed fares on the car rapide, depending on the route and the different zones. When you get on a car rapide you sit down and the ‘apprenti’ – the driver’s assistant – comes to collect your money. If you want to get off you say “sssssst”, and the apprenti bangs on the side of the bus as a sign for the driver to stop. It’s a kind of personal service, stopping where people want to get off, just as it was in Europe some 20 or 30 years ago in the more rural areas. These apprentis often have amazing memories – they remember the faces of everyone who gets on and off at all the different places; they can remember where you got on and where you want to get off and the fare you have to pay for the journey.
All the old Renaults still have their lively paintwork, but in recent years more and more white Mercedes buses have appeared. People seem to be bored with the old-fashioned decoration, and gradually it has started to disappear, especially since the ‘Ndiaga Ndiaye’ – the white bus – was introduced, whose only embellishment consists of the address of the owner (which is required by law). This is partly a question of money, because decorating a bus costs the equivalent of 30 euros. But Mercedes buses are also stronger and more resistant to the heavy road conditions, and where the Renault could take only 25 passengers these new vehicles can carry 30 to 35, which makes a considerable difference in profit to the driver or operator.
The basic colours of the car rapide buses – blue, white and yellow – were laid down by law. This colour combination was reserved for the urban buses (those circulating in Dakar); the intercity operators had a dark blue instead of a white stripe running along the side. This was to differentiate the buses circulating in the city from those running outside Dakar. The intercity buses were not allowed to operate inside the city. One day, however, the owners of the intercity buses decided that this dark blue no longer suited them and they simply replaced the blue stripe by a white one to be equal to the urban buses. Thus it became impossible to tell the two types of bus apart, so they could run wherever they wanted. This shows how resistant particular systems are and how they escape or overrule state regulations.
Now the government has decided that these buses have to go. It will take several years to replace them and it will be an expensive business. So far they’re still only at the level of the idea, as Moussa remarked with a glimpse of irony in his eyes.
These buses are all very old. They will go because their emissions pollute the environment and because they’re unsafe. And because, as Moussa pointed out, “People here don’t have this taste for aesthetics, the taste for colour, decoration and art. People don’t want to pay for it anymore.” Most people also think that the way these old buses look does not reflect Dakar’s ambition to become a modern city and for that reason European-looking buses, without any decoration, are seen as being more suited to the image Dakar wants to present. As Moussa says, “Only artists know what originality is, they know what it is to create something independent from what we see in the West. The authorities don’t see it; what they want is to catch up with Europe as soon as possible. So they will import European look-alike buses.”
The whole story is also a story about imitating rather then creating. Not only in terms of physical appearance but also in the repetition of form.
I asked Moussa what would happen if we were to invent some new decorations for the ‘Ndiaga Ndiaye’ buses. If we painted these new designs onto 5 or 10 buses would people start to imitate them, as they did 30 years ago? He started to laugh... “Maybe it would work, yes, yes probably it would work... You know, here in Senegal the problem is that everybody is always imitating, nobody is creating, this is our problem...”
Now the car rapide buses with the blue, white and yellow colours will disappear from the streets and I am wondering if, without them, the typical font (system) will survive.
Thus we come back to one of the first questions: how can African graphic designers re-connect with their own tradition of hand-painted design, embedded in popular culture, and translate and convert this knowledge to contemporary computer-based design? In the nineteen-eighties Senegalese fashion designers rediscovered the traditional boubou, and Senegalese musicians succeeded in reconnecting with their own tradition in their music by going back in to their traditional rhythms: people like Youssou N’Dour made the original mbalax music immensely popular not only in Africa but also in the West. I am wondering whether Senegal’s graphic designers will be able to achieve the same successful fusion of tradition and technology.
Published in Filiep Tacq (ed.), 2002. Proceeding #1. Dakar 5-19/05/2002. Maastricht, NL: jan van Eyck Academie.
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| Photos and captions |
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1. Moussa Tine, the painter.
2. Le tsjélé was created in 1975, inspired by the famous song of Pape Sech about a bird that flew away. Later on, when football became enormously popular, the stick was replaced by a football.
3. Previously Moussa Tine put the Senegalese flag on the mudflap, but the authorities prohibited this because they saw it as provocative, and you can’t joke with the national symbols, so the Senegalese flag was replaced by the French or American flag.
4. “Alhamdoulilahi” comes from the Koran. If you give someone something and he wants to thank you he says “Alhamdoulilahi” (Dieu merci, thank you God). It’s a way of praising the Lord.
5. Difference between the drawings of Moussa and André a younger painter who used the same iconography but in his own style. It’s amazing to see how even after 20 or 30 years the images haven’t changed, no new elements have been added, only the style changes depending on who the painter is.
6. Ndiaga Ndiaye, the white bus. The name came from the owner who introduced the first white Mercedes bus in Senegal.
7. At the side of the road and at specific places you find the public garages where the buses are repaired, painted, sometimes completely dismantled, and where almost every part can be fabricated.
8. Young children scrape the old paint from the cars with piston rings
9. Taxis are all the same colour, yellow and black. No decoration is allowed, only the number on the side of the car, which is required by law. Each taxi’s number has a slightly different design: they all have the same red shadow that's found on the car rapide but there are subtle differences in colour and pattern. Some of the taxis also have a sentence painted on the back.
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