GG Ndiaye

Ibrahima Ndiaye layers coloured sand into glass bottles, building river scenes and portraits grain by grain, in a trade where one careless shake erases a month and where he is the acknowledged master of the old river town. He trains two apprentices, prays at the mosque his grandfather prayed at, and walks the water at dusk. He will not play his countrymen. Everybody at home who plays learned it from him, or from somebody he taught, and a match against a pupil is a lesson wearing a contest's clothes, so he declines those once, politely, and does not revisit it. Against everybody else he is slow, exact and very hard to move.