Video Mariama Diouf was 38 years old and was four months pregnant when she took the ferry which was sinking on September 26, 2002, taking with it nearly 2,000 passengers.
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This day in September 2002, Mariama Diouf was happy to find her children in Dakar after holidays in Cap Skirring, in southern Senegal. It was the first time that she rose aboard the Joola, the ferry which assured, at night, the Ziguinchor-Dakar connection. “I walked to tell my loved ones how the boat was. I also did shopping,” she says. Sitting in third class, the passenger did not, first, “not understood what was going on” when she saw “the floor carpets slide”.
belonging to the community of “people of the sea”, the Lébou, and fisherman, Mariama Diouf managed to find the way towards the exit by swimming in apnea. Twenty years after this disaster, one of the worst in maritime history, she tells the world Africa how she survived. The child she wore was born a few months later. In Senegal, we know her under the name of “Bébé Jola”.