As marathoners stretched and took their places at the starting line, one man stood out: head-to-toe plastic clad, with a multicolored cape of plastic bags sweeping the dirt floor, and atop his head a hat made of sunglasses. plastic sun.
On that November day, Modou Fall was not competing in the Senegalese capital’s annual marathon. His race was different: to save this West African country from the scourge of plastic waste that clogs rivers and lakes, stains white beaches and is constantly swept through the streets. With the race drawing huge crowds and considerable media presence, Fall couldn’t pass up the opportunity to promote his cause.
Waving the Senegalese flag and carrying a loudspeaker blasting songs describing the damage caused by plastics — “I love my country, I say no to plastic bags” — Fall snaked through the runners in his long cape as the race began. . Anyone who stopped to ask for a selfie fell into his deft and habitual trap: he takes every opportunity to give a gentle lecture on environmental issues.
As the last group of runners started, Fall and his team of volunteers began to collect the empty water bottles and bags that the marathon runners had left behind.
For tourists and foreign competitors who came to Dakar for the race, this may have been their first contact with Fall. But for the people of Dakar he is a familiar presence. The “plastic man” is often seen dancing in the streets wearing the costume he created and constantly evolving, made entirely of plastic, mainly bags collected in the city. On the chest, a sign saying “no to plastic bags”, in bold letters. It’s a fight he takes very seriously.
Her costume is inspired by the “Kankurang”, an imposing figure deeply rooted in Senegalese culture who roams in sacred forests and wears a shroud of braided grasses. The entity is seen as someone who protects people against evil spirits and is responsible for teaching community values. “I behave like Kankurang,” says Fall. “I am an educator, defender and protector of the environment.”
Although plastic waste is a serious environmental problem worldwide, recent studies point out that Senegal, despite being relatively small, is one of the biggest polluters of the world’s oceans with the material. This is in part because, like many poorer countries, Senegal struggles to deal with waste — in addition to having a large population on the coast.
In 2020, in an effort to reduce pollution, the Senegalese government banned the use of some plastic products, but there are difficulties in implementing the veto. If nothing is done, by 2025 the country, with 17 million inhabitants, should produce more than 700 thousand metric tons of incorrectly treated plastic waste. Meanwhile, in the United States the figure will be 337 thousand metric tons.
Modou Fall is 48 years old and has been fighting plastic waste for most of his adult life. A tall, charismatic and modest ex-soldier, he noticed the harmful effects of the material in 1998. He was doing military service in rural eastern Senegal, inhabited by many herding communities, when he saw cows getting sick after consuming fragments of plastic bags. scattered across the arid landscape.
After his military service, Fall went on to sell T-shirts and buoys at Dakar’s bustling Sandaga open-air market, where dozens of vendors displayed all kinds of merchandise, often wrapped in plastic. The bags were plentiful and cheap, and the vendors threw them on the street carelessly.
He spent months trying to make other vendors aware of the environmental danger and convince them that if they had to use plastic bags, they would at least get rid of them properly. But nobody listened to him; the fair was a filth.
Fed up with what he saw, one day he decided to try to lead by example and set out to clean the entire fair by himself. “It took me 13 days, but I did it”, he says. The bags eventually reappeared, but Fall had managed to make some of the vendors think twice. Halting the rising tide of garbage, then, became his obsession. “If it continues like this, the lives of future generations will be at risk.”
In 2006 Fall used all of his savings, just over US$500, to found his association, Senegal Propre (Clean Senegal). He planted dozens of trees in the city, organized tire cleaning and recycling campaigns, held community meetings to persuade people to stop buying single-use plastic items.
Your message seems to be being heard. In the marathon, the third in which he performed, some runners already knew his watchwords and shouted as they passed him: “No to plastic waste!”.
Following much of the marathon route, Fall and his team of ten young volunteers spread out to handle the operation. They collected little bottles in front of the Museum of Black Civilizations, which exhibits one of the largest art collections in Africa; hundreds of plastic bags on the leafy campus of Cheick Anta Diop University; disposable cups in Dakar’s bustling center, home to the presidential palace and several embassies.
One of the neighborhoods they passed through was Medina, built by the French in colonial times. It’s where Fall was born. With the death of his father, when he was 4 years old, his mother took the family to live in the periphery. A widow, she struggled to pay the bills by running a restaurant. To help support his family, he was forced to drop out of school after just six years of primary schooling. He worked as a metallurgist and wall painter. After the death of his mother, he joined the army.
By midafternoon on the day of the marathon, Fall and his team were hunched over the weight of the plastic they had collected. A van arrived and they delivered hundreds of plastic bottles. The team took a brief break for lunch, but he didn’t stop: there were still five miles of the race track, and he continued on, the plastic cape fluttering around him.
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