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Four years after Franco's death in 1979, homosexuality ceased to be a crime in Spain; the first municipal elections would be held and Naranjito was presented as the official mascot of the 1982 World Cup. But before this sporting event, in 1980, Pedro Almodóvar premiered his first film, Felipe González presented a motion of censure against Adolfo Suárez and began the Madrid scene. At the same time, the Senegalese Spanish professor Mohamed Insa Séne (Saint Louis, 1952), was a direct witness of the drug, the uncovering and the beginning of the Transition. Together with six other students, he attended a scholarship at the Complutense de Madrid after graduating, between September 1979 and June 1980, which would join him forever to Spain. "We had been warned to be careful, because it was wrong to hug and hold hands in public, but when we arrived it was the opposite; people kissed, like a kind of rebellion against a system that had crushed them for many years. It was a wonderful time, "he recalls in a perfect and delicate Castilian in front of a single coffee and some peanuts at the Siki hotel in Saint Louis (Senegal).
The graduate in Hispanic philology has been a translator of Spanish diplomats and politicians, such as Anasagasti, of journalists such as Mercedes Milá and Javier Bauluz, and accompanied Queen Letizia on her visit to Senegal with the Spanish Cooperation Agency (Aecid). And he assures that his work as an interpreter was always for "a succession of accidents", although he already has his official degree as a sworn translator. “I made a reputation for myself and I was interested in practicing, more than money, because that's how I kept in touch with Spanish natives, which was my work tool as a teacher,” he explains.
His true vocation has been that of teaching, a profession he has exercised for 32 years as a Spanish teacher at a Saint Louis institute. Although he retired at 60 - the official age in Senegal -, he does not conceive of his life without working, and from his home in the neighborhood of Sor, he travels to Dakar where he teaches Spanish at a trade school two weeks each month. "Since I retired I have been unemployed for three weeks and it seemed like the whole world had fallen on my head, I think I even got sick," he says amused.
I remember participating in a demonstration in the streets of Madrid where we shouted 'the son of the worker to the university', because people had trouble paying their tuition fees
Séne was born and raised in Guet Ndar, a popular fishing district in the former capital of French West Africa, where all its inhabitants greet him every time he walks through its sandy streets. Son of a woman selling fish, his parents separated after his birth, but he remembers his childhood as a happy stage, "without much trouble." "At 12 years old my brother started working and took care of my mother and my sister," he recalls. Although he acknowledges that his family had no economic problems, he is aware that he was able to study thanks to the free education in Senegal. "When we arrived in Spain we realized that the university was very expensive. I remember participating in a demonstration through the streets of Madrid, in the district of Argüelles, where we shouted 'the son of the worker to the university', because people had problems to pay your tuition. "
When he speaks of himself, he does so in the plural and with modesty, as if he were exercising the collective voice of an entire generation, although he fled from generalizing. A voice that also represents that of his other six adventure companions in Madrid, with whom he lived on a single floor, what they could pay with a scholarship of 18,000 pesetas of those then [108 euros], near Tetuán, from where they went down to the verbenas and the Imperial disco ...
There is a kind of invisible barrier. When before we unleashed curiosity, now it's as if they don't see us
Lavapiés, today the quintessential multicultural neighborhood of the capital, was a territory banned by the drug of the eighties and explains that they approached there only "on Sundays to the Trail". “When we went to the market, people told us that we talked like books, and it's true. I don't forget the stir that caused the day I used the expression 'it's necessary', ”he recalls. The professor remembers that his first contact with the language was television, specifically the theater program of the Spanish Television Studio One. “Our best classes were in the streets, talking with people. That is not learned in college. ”
Despite the good stage in Spain, the seven students had no plans to stay, the dream was waiting for them at home. “We knew that on the way back we could be teachers. In our passports on all pages you could read: 'Work not enabled here', so that we would not be tempted to stay. I had a friend who had looked for me a job in a private academy, but staying was synonymous with being clandestine, ”she explains.
So it took Séne 25 years to set foot in Madrid again. He did so in 2006, in the midst of the cayucos crisis, when up to 31,678 immigrants from Mauritania and Senegal arrived in the Canary Islands. “In those who left Saint Louis there were no dead, because they were captained by people who knew the sea. When the mafias seized the situation many, without knowing how to take a boat, they threw themselves into the sea and there many people died ”, he answers quietly when asked at the time that marked a before and after the emigration to Europe from Africa On that visit to Madrid, he says he was watched "like milk on fire" until returning to Senegal. “Why would I stay in Spain? It was the first months of Frontex, and I think we all wanted to leave Senegal for them. ”
Although he knows that his opinion is not very popular, he believes that young people in Senegal who are looking for a better future in Europe do so for the wrong reasons. "They do not flee from war, nor from hunger, but they believe that by going there it is much easier to get rich," he argues and recalls those first years of exodus in which many people bought emigrants in Spain, France and Italy, as a palliative measure. To help them make a living. “Those first emigrants returned and built houses and the boys have believed that there [Europe] is easier to earn money,” he contextualizes.
He defines himself as a man of the left and admits that Senegal must assume and solve its problems in the area of Health, Transportation and Education, in a country with a rich political class, "with pharaonic wages" when compared to those of teachers and workers, and that does not think about the people, but about the seats. And with a deep knowledge of the Spanish political news, Séne has found differences in that Spanish society that he lived, who woke up from 40 years of dictatorship, and the current one. "The people He is very afraid of brown people, as they called us then, "he says more with a tone of pain than resentment." What saddens me the most is that the first reaction when I approach to ask about a street is to always be scary, " he laments, "There is a kind of invisible barrier. When we first unleashed curiosity, it is now as if they did not see us," he continues.
In 2008 he returned to Spain with one of his daughters, and since then he repeats it every two years, to walk through the streets of Madrid, but also to visit the Valley of the Fallen or the tomb of the woman of Machado in Soria. He has transmitted his love for the Castilian to his five grandchildren and his four children, among which there are two graduates in Law, another in Commerce and a Spanish teacher but who has now decided to be a singer, “to rebel against the father who imposes on him ”, According to its version. However, that love that he transmitted to them by the tongue has led his daughter to become a celebrity after having versioned Despacito in Wolof.
40 years have passed since Séne's adventure in Spain and in October 2019 Franco was exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen. In December, a coalition government agreement was reached between Pedro Sánchez (PSOE) and Pablo Iglesias (PSOE); In January 2020 Pedro Almodóvar was again nominated for the Oscars and in February four decades of the first concert of the Madrid movement are fulfilled. "Despite the difficulties, political and social, there is a substratum that remains, the extraordinaryness of Spain has not disappeared, there is a very human background."
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