Radio Tip: Taxi, Sister!
The Taxi Sisters on the job (Photo: rbb/Mona Winter)
11 June 2010
Oumy, Moussou and the Others – a radio play from Dakar by Mona Winter
Dakar, a city of nearly three million people, situated at the western tip of Africa. Construction girders, tin huts, travelling hawkers: all over, hundreds of thousands of people attempt to survive, to keep their heads above water. The taxis are also all over; honking and stinking, they populate the streets like swarms of hornets. Among them, the Taxi Sisters, in their brightly coloured African robes and tidy vehicles, appear like their queens. It is a female cooperative in the transport trade otherwise dominated by Muslim brotherhoods, unique in Dakar and unique in all of Africa.
The Taxi Sisters are experts in transition, moving along the narrow line between tradition and modern. Until recently they were dependents as first, second or third wives and now they are on their way to becoming freelance taxi entrepreneurs. Mona Winter hires them to take her across Dakar. The result is an acoustic drive through the city’s inconsistencies. The radio play by Mona Winter, a co-production by Kulturradio rbb and the Goethe-Institut, can be heard today, 11 June 2010, at 10:04 PM on Kulturradio rbb.
The programme can also be received via online live stream at http://www.kulturradio.de/livestream/index.html.
