On this Saturday of May, I want to give myself a moment of sweetness on the edge of a lake. So I take the boat from the Island of Gorée where I live towards Dakar, then a taxi towards the Lac Rose an hour away.
Frightening. Le Lac Rose (pink lake) is no more. No more romantic thoughts.
It's time for reality.
It is no longer pink... because the micro-algae that generate this colour are not present today. Soon they won't be any more... the drought sets in and the lake shrinks.
"When the desert advances, life goes... " France Gall sang to us
(she lived over here for decades).
Here, the salt present in the water at the level of 380gr/litre (the rate is higher than in the Dead Sea) continues to feed most of West Africa. The salt slave traders are women: for years, they have been breaking the salt crust at the bottom of the lake to extract the "white gold" and load it into the boats. Because of the high concentration of salt, many of them carrying a child have had miscarriages.
The pink lake makes sterile.
Today, their mission is no less: they unload the boats in buckets of 25 kg each, under a blinding sun. An empty bucket: a shell placed there as a reminder. We are paid by the bucket here; they can expect to earn less than 2 dollars for their daily work as shown in the last picture.
The precariousness of these Senegalese women oscillates between working themselves to death or ending up losing their jobs when the lake has become deserted. They carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. These are my modern caryatids.
