Dakar is going through sudden gentrification. Over the last year or so, shiny night spots and flash restaurants have been sprouting up along the souless road to the airport, and I was recently refused entry into one of them because I was wearing flip-flops. I am not the kind of clientelle these places are hoping to attract.

Closer to home, in the centre of town, the government has started a massive cleaning-up-the-streets programme which means that the lepers who live on one corner of my road, and the wheelchair-bound women who live on the other side, have suddenly disappeared. Fruit sellers, the Burkinabe furniture makers, the peanut women, the boys selling phone top-up cards- they have almost all gone. The streets are empty, clean, and on odd corners lie piles of wood where make-shift shops have been dismantled and turned into firewood.

It has been remarkably quick. Armed soldiers came down and literally swept the lepers from their homes the night before last, and in the morning, there was nothing to be seen of them.

This afternoon I went looking for fruit. I could not find any. I couldn't bear to go to the corner where I buy my vegetables for fear that the lady, who calls herself my Senegalese mother and always sends me away with a squash for free, had been swept away too. On my way back home, I saw the furniture weaver tucked away on the corner of the road where he used to have his business. I asked him about it.

"Well, they didn't move us on but they were moving everyone else so we decided to hide in that derelict building," he pointed to a block of half- flats, "until it all passed."

We both remembered that this kind of attempt to get street traders off the streets had happened some years ago and after a couple of weeks, it all went back to normal, all was forgotten.

Turning the corner, I saw one of the handless lepers, an old man in a wooly bobble-hat, leaning up against a wall. Infront of him were two kids, about 7 years old, begging for food. The leper was dividing up a small piece of stale baguette and putting pieces into the kids's begging bowls.