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President Macky Sall took advantage of his new book, "Senegal at Heart," to give a moving tribute to his First Lady wife, Marième Faye Sall. A tribute to love and language. The initiative is unprecedented on the continent where politicians are rather reserved on their love life. In this autobiographical book of 167 pages, the Head of State explains the important role played by his wife throughout his life. Extracts!
"I (…) have the chance to have with me an admirable wife, devoted and endowed with an extremely acute sense of realities and situations. She jostles me, she likes to make fun of me, but she is my biggest support. With humor and joie de vivre, she keeps me up. For Mareme, family takes precedence over everything. It is a decision of Mareme that I like to recall, as it seems to me the most moving and eloquent testimony of the purity of her feelings and the meaning she has of her role as wife and mother.
Our first child was born while she was a student. One day, in order to go to class, she had entrusted our son to the wife of our friend, the late Ousmane Masseck Ndiaye. It is also the name of this lady that we gave to our daughter. Installed at our friends' place, our little boy kept crying. The lady, worried, and not knowing what to do, ends up calling me. I was in my office: she explains that he refuses to eat and take the bottle. Very worried, I go home. Indeed, he kept crying, I took him with me and we went to the college where my wife was studying. We broke into the classroom. I explain what is happening. She took the baby and gave him the breast: he calmed down immediately. I told him, "We're going home." This was his last class: "Now I'm going to take care of my son," she said. Her merit is all the greater because she had chosen to put an end to a training at the end of which she would have become an engineer, like her husband, and would have practiced a profession in which she would surely have shone.
Mareme has always been politically involved with me. We were married in 1993. For seven years, I was a young executive with lots of burdens but, with friends and comrades, we spent beautiful evenings receiving each other. Mareme has always played the conciliators: psychologist, she knows how to round off the angles, spare the sensibilities and contribute to the resolution of a number of problems. It harmonizes, because to me, time is lacking. Without it, I could not accomplish my mission at the level where I placed it. Mareme has infectious laughter and humor. Personally, I would be a little more austere. I like to jostle my serer cousins, for example using what we call the "pleasant kinship". Between certain surnames, in the big families to which we all belong, there are old stories, buried conflicts, we can get out of doors. We heckle and it restores balance, for the better and for laughter. I am severe, perhaps, but I hope to be fair, to live moments of joy despite the pressure of emergencies and burdens.
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