T.T. Fons (Senegal): Goorgoorlou
Lai-momo, Bologna 2008, pp. 32, 21x28 cm, black and white, euro 10.00, in italian.
Goorgoorlou rek! Struggling, scraping along, disentangling…this is the occupation of Goorgoorlou, the Senegalese unemployed created by the pencil of Alphonse Mendy, alias T.T. Fons.
Goorgoorlou is a common man who passes through the sidewalks of Dakar everyday, looking for the famous “D.S.”, the “daily shopping” essential to get something to eat.
Roaming the streets of Dakar, Goorgoorlou meets different persons, who reflect, from time to time, different aspects of African society, with its difficulties and its problems, sometimes local and specific, but other times linked to a wider world, of immigration, of big plans of economic interventions in the developing countries, of international diplomacy. Unfortunately hopes to get rich constantly fall through: being rich is not his destiny… even when he finds out a positive solution is just for one day, just for “today”…
The author
Alphonse Mendy, aka T.T. Fons, was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1957. After his law studies, in 1982 he won a contest as humorist and cartoonist for the Senegalese newspaper Le Politicien, currently closed. In this way he had also the opportunity to make an internship at the French satirical weekly
newspaper Le cafard libéré. It is in that ''irreverent and self-supported'' journal that was born the very popular Goorgoorlou, the representative of a new race of men: the Senegalese subjected to the Structural Readjustment Plan. Since 1991, T.T. Fons has published 8 personal successful albums of Goorgoorlou's adventures, whose success is still growing, and one album about health sensitisation.
Goorgoorlou, his wife Diek, his son Modou and the phrase “Goorgoorlou rek!” have become familiar to the Senegalese big odience,… and they will probably be more and more popular considering that, since October 2001, their adventures have been transformed in a TV series.