Through this somber picture I hope to evoke the feelings that ran through me as I set up its creation. Those feelings of guilt for using another human being, one who must beg to maintain their existence, for my own selfish aims of completing an assignment for a course. Those feelings of shame for walking past them every day, only stopping now because I need their assistance. Those feelings of self-hate for giving only when it was convenient for me, even knowing all the while that I acted to relieve the moral burden my mind brought to bear upon me, not for them. Never for them.

In Sow Fall’s The Beggars Strike, my actions are found in abundance, with citizens giving regularly to the battu-bearers on their commutes and later seeking them out in their “slum” resettlement area so as to gain help from Allah, as the beggar Sarr points out. However, my feelings are seldom seen. Take Mour Ndiaye, who uses his marabout Serigne, his wife Loli, and failingly the battu-bearers in his attempt to rise through the echelons of power, but who discards them as soon as has no use for them, exchanging Serigne for Kifi, replacing Loli with Sine, and hounding the beggars out of the streets. He goes so far as to say to his driver that “we only despise [the battu-bearers] when we don’t need them,” but this is no emotional enlightenment or burst of self-awareness, simply a fact he had yet to realize and incorporate into his own selfish plans. Mour Ndiaye is man’s ambition for himself alone. I am Mour Ndiaye.

Somewhere inside each of us lies a Mour Ndiaye. But I believe alongside him lies a Keba Dabo. A man tortured by his past, having seen his mother repeatedly pay for her dignity with the escalation of her and her family’s poverty and suffering, refusing to beg whilst boiling twigs so that her children might believe they had food. A man consumed by an internal rage, identified as being directed towards the battu-bearers for having sacrificed their dignity for their own well-being when he and his family starved. But most of all a man mired in his own confusion. A man whose true anger derives from the uncle who shamed him and left his mother with nothing, the boss who asks him to undo his actions against his beliefs, the society who cared nothing for him or his family. Keba Dabo is man’s fury at himself. I am Keba Dabo.

Who are you?