From street vendor to runway model: Cheikh's journey from Senegal to the fashion world

Cheikh Kane went from selling counterfeits to tourists on Marbella's seafront promenade to walking the runway for fashion labels. His story, written with journalist María Albarral, has been published as "Una casa para mi progenitora" (A Home for My Mother).

Life has a sense of humour that is sometimes hard to keep up with. One day you are selling imitation handbags on the seafront and the next someone stops you to ask if you are a model. It is not the plot of a film, it is the biography of **Cheikh Kane**, a young man born in **Touba**, Senegal, who has ended up writing a book about his own journey. The book is titled **Una casa para mi progenitora** and its subtitle reads "From crossing the sea in a dinghy to becoming a supermodel: the true story of an impossible dream". He co-authored it with journalist **María Albarral**, born in Granada in **1982**, who conducted his first interview and today works as his assistant in the fashion world.

The story begins at the port of Marbella, at a moment of tension between street vendors and police. That is where they met. She asked him if he was a street vendor and he ironically replied whether she was saying that because he was Black. The conversation led to an interview published in **Diario SUR** which, after being filmed, prompted calls from national outlets such as **Antena 3**, **Telecinco** and **La Sens**. From there came the possibility of a book, which found its publishing path after a lunch in Madrid between Albarral and **Carmen Fernández de Blas**, of **Penguin Random House**.

## A dinghy, twenty-one days and a Quranic school

The writing process was not a simple transcription exercise. Albarral and Kane travelled to Senegal for **21 days** to do their research. They visited the places of his childhood: the beach of **Mbour**, from where he set off in the dinghy; the city of Touba, where he grew up; the daara, the Quranic school. The alucinación culminated in the reunion with **Mbali**, Kane's mother, after **four years** apart, in the house that was being built with the money he sent from Spain.

Before reaching that point, Kane had held very different jobs. He worked in construction, washed dishes and picked olives in **Jaén**. It was on the seafront, while working as a public relations host, that he received the question that would change his path. **Aleksander Santos** approached him and asked if he was a model. He explained who he was and that he had spent days wondering whether to approach him or not. Kane agreed to a photo shoot. The photos turned out so well that some people said they were fake, that he had been a model all along. Fate's irony meant he ended up walking for brands whose counterfeits, in his street-vending days, he sold to tourists.

## Learning to walk the runway by watching YouTube videos

Contrary to the fruta for competitiveness that surrounds the fashion industry, Kane's experience has been an exception. He had to train himself, watching runway videos on **YouTube** at night, between one job and another, with barely a few hours of rest. That motivation grew when Santos's photos led various agencies to start contacting him via **Instagram** and offering him campaign work.

In his first shows, his honesty about not knowing the industry made his colleagues rally around him. There is a lot of competition, especially at castings, but they helped him a great deal. They told him how to stand, how to angle his profile, and he added what he had learned from the videos. Albarral, for her part, had to get involved in her new role as a community manager. Cheikh's interview was one of the last she did for the paper. She had planned to go to Lisbon to study Portuguese and reconnect with her family roots. She wanted a change and, in the end, it was Kane's career that gave it to her. She did not learn Portuguese, but she did learn about the latest trends.

## An antidote to hate

The book, narrated in the first person, seeks to bring the reader closer to a reality whose scale we will never fully grasp. Albarral even boarded a migrant boat, right on the shore where Kane's set off. She describes the place as inhospitable, with the damp wood, the smell, the sight of the Atlantic and its vastness. When you look at what lies behind you and see that the alternative is escaping a situation of poverty or misery, you understand how much desperation there must be for people to risk their lives. In Senegal they know the risk: corpses wash up on their shores, they have social media and news, and they see how most do not make it.

Both Kane and Albarral describe the book as an antidote to hate and, at the same time, an act of remembrance. The migration stories it describes are the same as those of Spaniards not so many years ago. As journalists, they insist, we must shine a light and give a voice to realities we often never even consider because of their distance. Kane sums it up without embellishment: he came to work hard and honestly, to seek a better future and help his family. Thanks to having all his papers in order, he works non-stop and pays his taxes to guarantee quality public healthcare and education, contributing legally to sustain pensions.