In New Senegal, No Holds Barred

Migration Changes Face of Ancient Sport

DAKAR, Senegal -- In his dark, concrete room in a congested Dakar neighborhood, Lamine Mane, a professional wrestler, and several friends huddled over a bundle of faded photographs.

The frayed stack of old pictures showed some of the traditional wrestlers who generations ago performed on the soft green grass in villages across West Africa. On those family-filled evenings, peasant children would drop their mundane chores to watch their fathers achieve glory in a five-minute match.

There were no headlocks. No hitting. No biting. At the end of the match, a team of wise elders announced the winner. Women sang praises to the loser to heal his disappointment, then everyone feasted on succulent goat and rice.

In the village where Mane grew up, 500 miles south of Dakar, only single men were allowed to wrestle, as a ritual of courtship. Girls with neatly braided hair sashayed around the ring, flirting with potential suitors. The wrestlers were believed to have mystic powers, and they served as the community's private military.

But today, any man who trains and finds a manager can wrestle. Competitors punch and bite, and some end up in the hospital. They want to win cash and contracts for fast-food endorsements, not roasted goat. No one sings to the loser. Romance happens at dance clubs, not at the ring.

Mane, 26, a buff man shaped like an inverted pyramid, wrestles in Medina Stadium, a concrete dome in a residential area of Dakar, with other athletes who have borrowed names from American celebrities such as 50 Cent and Mike Tyson. Mane goes by the nickname L.A.

"The way the ancestors wrestled, well, that was pure fun," Mane said as he prepared for a Saturday match. "But today, it's my obligation to win, win and bring home the cash. Forty people are depending on me for rent. God willing, I won't fail them. They need my earnings for life in the city."

His relatives, like so many people in Africa, are economic migrants who have abandoned rural areas and streamed into teeming neighborhoods in the continent's fast-growing cities. By next year, more Africans will live in urban centers than ever before, researchers say, as farmers abandon their land because of droughts and as ambitious and frustrated young people look for new opportunities.

The movement of people from rural areas to cities is changing elements of culture from birth to burial rites, dating to divorce, and even one of West Africa's oldest traditions and most popular sports.

"In the village, the wrestlers were representing the community. Now we've left the soil, found the city, and it's all about the individual," said Abdoul Wahid Kane, a professor of sports sociology at the National Higher Institute for Popular Education and Sport at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. "The changes in wrestling represent the changes in African society. Yet sometimes I wonder: How modern, how individualistic, do we really want to become?"

A Life With Meaning

Every day, new arrivals from the countryside move into Mane's neighborhood, a lively working-class area called Fass. Rickety yellow taxis and horse-drawn carts rattle past storefront mosques, barbers taking a rusty razor to a beard and teenagers hawking cellphone minutes.

Girls make their way through standstill traffic to sell cashews, mops, scales, Korans and Jesus alarm clocks. Pedestrians ask for jobs from familiar faces in passing cars on the road, a habit carried over from village life that contributes to the harrowing traffic jams.