A day of consuming. This morning I bought a phone card from a cheerful fellow who this evening remembered me. "Ah," he said. "My first client of the day," flapping his phone cards.

This evening I tried to buy some shoes. A friend A. told me on the phone where I could get some from his friend, and when I went down stairs to this guy's shop, A. rang him up and told him to make me a good deal. The guy, about 18, was instantly friendly to me, telling me the exact, non-inflated, price of the shoes which were stacked up like half-fallen dominoes on wooden shelves. But he didn't have any my size. I tried, in vain, to coax him into selling me something, asking him if he had something, anything, in my size, but he looked forlorn as he said no, nothing. He did, however, send me to his friend down the road who had exactly what I was looking for.

Down the road, a similar shack on the pavement had red shoes in my size. We chatted, bantered a little, and I decided to buy them. He asked 3 times the price, and I told him to cut the crap. He reduced the price a little and I walked away. You win some, you lose some. Neither my Wolof chatter nor my minutes of sitting about chatting would convince him to give me a fair price.

On my way home, I went into a shop to get change for a 100 franc coin. Since yesterday I have owed the paper shop around the corner 25 francs, and no one in Dakar seems to have the brassy coins anymore, perhaps because they are now worth so very little. The Mauritanian who sold me a sachet of water did not have the right coins, but a young guy who came in the shop after me had one, and offered it to me as a cadeau. I took it, reluctantly, realising as I walked away that in trying to pay back one debt I had created another.

"Excuse me, miss!" the guy called out as I walked down the street. "I really want to know your name. You are so nice!"

Eventually I gave him my name, paid back my debt to the paper shop owner, and retreated inside as quickly as I could.

I'm off back to London tonight and feeling strangely ambivalent about it. The down-side of being in a place where there is time and space to breath and be is that too much thinking goes on. Perhaps it is better to charge ahead through life and not think about anything much.

Yesterday P and I sat looking at some kids playing in the dramatically turquoise shore waters, kids covered in sand, plunging again and again into the shallow surf.

"Most Africans never get over their happy childhood," said P, who is probably right. What a great way to grow up.

I think P. will blog about Christmas decorations, for who could come to Dakar at this time and not be impressed by the extraordinary glitzy decorations which deck out every patisserie and street vendor's neck? Today I saw Santas swaying from left to right as they played the saxophone; yesterday my taxi door was opened by a Santa with a whited-out face.



Usually the Senegalese hate to have their picture taken, unless they know and trust you. This guy, with a fake pot-belly, was happy to be snapped; he was rightly proud of his costume.

Yesterday I was called by the mother of one of my little girls from Ziguinchor.

"I annoyed K. yesterday," said the mother, laughing. "And she told me, 'tonight I will kill you in your bed'. I told her, well, then you will lose your mother. And she said, 'No I won't, I have another mother. Rose will take care of me.'"

I am far away but I am not forgotten.

"Danke danke moi japal goor si n'iaye," said my shy friend El Hadj as we enjoyed the warm Sunday afternoon sun and smoothed little piles of sand with our hands. This Wolof phrase is used in almost every situation, and translates as 'slowly slowly catch a money in the forest.' "It doesn't interest me to know someone today and then tomorrow not even greet them when I see them. If you want to get to know a girl, you have to go slowly slowly, so that you can become her friend first."

El Hadj and I were talking about Senegal and the Senegalese. "I love seeing foreigners come to my country," he said. "If people come here to visit it means that we are at peace." But, he went on, he hates it when Senegalese act like idiots when they see a foreigner. "You see some guys, they call out to a girl, 'hey, la belle' and they think they will be able to catch her like that. No," he said, "first you must become her friend."

El Hadj went on to tell me, in hushed tones, that some white women come to Dakar and they get with one of these guys just for a week. That's why, he said, they keep chasing white women. They think that they are all easy.

'A dirty little bar' is what I call this place but it does actually have a name: 'R n B bar' flashes in green fluorescent piping near the doorway- some stiff saloon doors and a grimy brown curtain which sweeps over your face as you try to get inside. Once inside, there is nothing much to light the place, but a blue fluorescent string of lights over the back wall showed the elements of a drum kit lying in pieces on the floor, and a few empty chairs.

A musician approached us, in a red cap.

"Hello, have you come to see the soiree?" he asked. "It is going to start right now!"

P and I both looked incredulously at the pieces of drum kit and the empty chairs where the band would eventually sit.

"Right now. In half an hour."

I am lucky to have great blogger staying with me, whose blog about last night's dinner conversation eminently cheered me. The Dakar air is gritty today, a sand storm blowing somewhere far off, and even more gritty human relationships that I can not quite understand leave me feeling puzzled.

This afternoon at the small sports stadium in the medina, we watched pair after pair of muscular men punching and grappling at eachother in an attempt to throw the other onto his back during a traditional wrestling match. Behind us, the supporters of Gouygui and to our left, the young men and women supporting Building, aptly built as his name. For hours, the two combatants had been parading around the stadium, flanked by diamante-studded youths eager to get their share of the fame and massive fortune that falls to successful wrestlers in Senegal.

Gougui, dressed in a shell-studded loin-cloth, seemed the favourite to win, or at least the most popular. Building had less supporters and less of an entourage, but was eminently tall and quite handsome, except for his broken front teeth. The two stomped around, covered in talismans, herb-filled waters blessed by the most powerful marabouts in the land poured endlessly over their big bald heads and backs.

Finally they stepped into the sandy ring and started to batter eachother. Gougui's supporters, orange bandanas on their heads, were wild and festive, while Building's supporters, perhaps nervous that their hero couldn't pull it off, were less confident. Red beret policemen with ancient rifles knelt beside the ring to stop a pitch invasion, though when the invasion did finally happen, they could do nothing but stand back and watch impotently.

After a couple of minutes of cat-fisting, Building had Gougui on his back. The cry that went up from the loser's fanbase was one of terrific disappointment, and soon the girls had started to cry. The men just stood with their hands on their heads, a look of cold emptiness on each face. Their loss was palpable.

A trip to the supermarket to buy some of the fresh local milk that I so crave here.

"Hello Madam," says a young pretty girl dressed in the blue and white colours of the milk company. "Do you know about our product?
"Yes," I say, ever-impressed by this company who now seem to be doing customer satisfaction polls at the milk fridge.
"Oh," I go on, reaching my hand to the empty shelf. "Where's the milk?"
"Oh," she says, smiling unsympathetically. "There isn't any left."

Omar was shyly taking my bust measurement ("You have changed a bit since you went to England. I must re-do you") when he suddenly fell into fits of giggles and started scrabbling through his notebook to show me something.

Usually as discreet as your local doctor, he pulled up a page with some measurements on it, the usual stuff, until I saw that the measurements were not usual.

Longeur: 167
Poitrine: 147
Centure: 148

"The height is normal," he said, "but look at the rest. She is the biggest woman I have ever seen."

Omar, who still closes his eyes when he has to stretch a tape-measure around me, went on to tell me that when he wrapped the tape measure around this lady, he had to press himself against her or else his hands could not meet to take the dimension. He was terrified that she would think he was doing something inappropriate.

*****

An early morning fight in the local computer/telephone/printing/internet shop.

Customer: "I don't have the right money. Can I come back later with 1,000 francs?"
Boss: "Ah! I can't leave the till without the right money in it. Pay it now or leave your printing here and come back with the money and collect it."
"But I will bring the money, I promise."
"I can't leave the till with the wrong money inside it"
"Why don't you trust me?"
"It's not a question of trust. It's a question of accounting."
"Stop with this attitude. I will come back with the money."
"Attitude? Attitude? Get out of my shop, now!"

The boss, a fat, heaving man, comes around to the front of the desk, shoves the skinny man with the printing in his hand to the door, then pushes him out onto the pavement. The customer looks shocked, embarrassed and angry.

"Never darken my door again," says the boss, whose workers tidy him up and send him back to finish serving me.

On day one of leading my tour of Dakar, we were taken up into the lighthouse near where I used to live. I have always loved that place, it's the most westerly lighthouse on mainland Africa and feels completely forgotten, just an old building on a hill which despite its isolation and seeming neglect, is still functioning and essential to Dakar life.

The man working in the lighthouse, a young guy, took us all up into the tower, guided by some very well-polished brass banisters. One by one we climbed into the revolving cylinder of mirrors which reflects light from the tiniest little bulb dozens of kilometres out into the sea and across the city. Then he showed us a huge bulb, supposedly the first one used there, at the end of the 19th century, though I wonder if that's true because the glass would have had to be hand-blown. In any case, how would it have lasted 150 years of Senegalese man-handling?

Taking us out on to the terrace, our guide showed us a whole load of antennae. Some are for embassies, some for the national TV station, he said. And some, he went on, I can not tell you who they are for, because it is a secret.

It's that time of year again, the streets are literally lined with sheep, and headscarved-men sleeping in between, reposing in the soiled sand, watchmen over their numerous 4-legged wealth.

J and I went sheep shopping. Sunday night, a cool sea breeze, what more peaceful activity than walking out with a friend and perusing the wares on offer? The first place we stopped at, the watchman got up and kicked his sheep sharply in the ribs, pulling on its tail, hoping to make it stand and show us how big he was, how much meat on him.



I asked for the sheep's name. He reeled off the names of all three of his prize muttons, then told me that for £500 he could be mine. We walked on, tip-toeing through the sand to the next gathering of sheep and men, and were offered something slightly more affordable, at £300.

At the last place we stopped, a group of guys sat around an oil-drum fire and warmed themselves. We chatted to the man nearest the sheep; he asked if we had husbands.

"I am looking for a white wife," he told us hopefully.

"I am looking for a white sheep," I replied.

"Look," said another who had come over to see what all the chat was about. "Are you here to buy a sheep or just to talk?"

I said that talking and buying sheep went hand in hand.

"Yes," he conceded, "talking is an important part of life."

Omar is learning English.

"Can I offer you something to drink?" he said proudly. I don't know what other convoluted English phrases his teacher is teaching him, but he is managing the basics of verbs extraordinarily quickly, considering he probably has his lessons whilst bent over his sewing machine.

This week I went to have dinner with his wife and their three children. The youngest is six months old, and very plump. He looks like Omar, and giggles non-stop, lying on my chest as I lay on the family bed and giggling into my face.

I told Omar he had put on weight.

"Really, it's because you have gone. I do not stay up all night working anymore. Really, yes, it got a bit too much."

Belgium is a funny little place, divided between Dutch speakers in the north and French speakers in the south, with Brussels, a French-speaking capital marooned in the middle. Tribalism is alive and well in Europe, with three linguistic groups fighting for resources and recognition in one tiny land.

"We may do fifteen concerts in Belgium," said my Belgian friend and producer of some of Africa's greatest acts, "and twelve will be in the north. The northerners are completely curious about African music but at the same time, 35 percent of northerners belong to the Far Right and are completely racist."

The Gangbe Brass Band blew me away with their wicked Voudun, Afro-beat, jazz, marching band sounds and Beninois softness and humour.

*****



P and I spent a happy evening in Abidjan in the summer at a Kofi Olomide concert; we only went to see what kind of sunglasses he would wear on stage. Walking through the Belgian drizzle, I was delighted to come across a station bridge plastered with posters bearing his arrogant image. I thought of P and happy African days. Somehow, my African days all seem happy, I can't remember now, if I ever knew at all, why I left.

Out the back of The Shrine, where we were looked after, entertained, fed and watered, for our days in Lagos, the women got to work cooking food for us and the hundreds of people traipsing in and out during Felabration. One minute, it looked like this, just a few pots of chilis and packets of oil hanging around, innocuous-looking dried items sitting in bowls.



By evening, the place was alive with the smells of fried plantain, yam mash and crispy fish. One large lady scooped servings onto plates, while musicians and stage crew passed along asking for more of this and that. Under a canopy we ate, tired, looking forward to the show.

I never got used to cooking whilst standing up, the pot on the ground, stoking the fire or fiddling with the gas ring as I went. But I guess you get used to it eventually.

One of the happiest days I spent in Lagos this time around was, as mentioned below, a trip to Abeokuta, a smallish town under the great red rocks surrounding the town.



It is also the centre of cloth-production for a kind of batik which is only found there, and across the rocks above the town are great swathes of cloth drying in the sun. After the apparent soullessness of Lagos, this town with life and colour brought welcome warmth, as well as a chance for me to have a break from organising.

We were honoured with a tour of Fela's parents' house, which started with an incredibly lively and enthusiastic talk by the guardian of the house. Under a canopy rented for the occasion we drank cups of earthy-tasting palm wine from plastic buckets, though we all drank as much as we could bear and tipped the rest into the grass which was growing up around the house. We were then treated to a choral demonstration, which left us all speechless, such was the earnestness with which this tour was being carried out.



Next we were taken on a hasty visit of the school that Fela's parents founded, the church where they are buried, and some other churches that also went by in a blur. Tunde drove the bus from place to place and we and armed Ibrahim were shepherded in and out of the bus at great speed. We had said we were in a hurry, typical white people, so we were taken at our word. "Hasten yourselves," shouted Balinger as we tardily looked around the church yard under the wide-eyed expression of the church caretaker. "You musn't be tardy."

I just received my photos back from the printers and amongst some pictures of our day out last month in Abeokuta, the birthplace of Fela, I found this one.



Ibrahim was my MoPol, or Mobile Police, who I hired for a vast sum of money from the Anti-Robbery Squad, a place where my fixer Kole told me people arrested for robbery are taken, tortured, and rarely re-released. Ibrahim carried two pistols or an AK47 whenever he was with us, and mostly he drank Star Beer at the same time, though didn't get as drunk as the other MoPol, who was drunk all the time and complained to me as much as he could, in a language I could not understand, demanding money.

I disliked Baba, the second MoPol, so much that I could barely go near him, and sent Kole to deal with him whenever something was needed to be dealt with. The two bus drivers, who did not go home for a week while they drove us around, sat under the tree in the hotel car park and giggled as Baba teased me, demanding money, whining and whinnying in his squeaky voice, brandishing his pistols ill-concealed on his hips. The bus drivers did not like him either.

The day we went to Abeokuta I actually enjoyed myself because there were only a handful of us, the musicians left in the hotel to rehearse. When we stopped the bus in the intense afternoon heat to wait for Balinger, our guide for the afternoon, we climbed out of the bus and I took the opportunity to try on Ibrahim's bullet-proof hat. He posed for a photo, and though he looks serious, he was light-hearted on that day.

The evening that Kole and I went to pick up the police, the day my musicians arrived from London, we waited outside the police station as night fell. Policemen armed to the hilt were streaming out of the gates and climbing into vehicles or onto motorbikes.

"You see this?" said Kole, "You know where they are going? To raid people."

I had assumed, in the way that instinctively happens when you grow up with a police force who are mostly there to protect you, that they were all going out on jobs like ours, hired thugs to warn off bandits on the road, and trouble from other police. But infact they were out to create havoc on the roads themselves, these were the very police I was hiring Ibrahim and Baba to protect us from.

Fela Kuti was a man of epic personality with a following in Africa as powerful as that of Bob Marley in other parts of the world. His image would have been easy to capitalise on, he's an icon to millions of downtrodden Africans living in poverty or under dictatorships, a man who embodied artistic genius with a fearless temperament, and who lived to care for the community in which he lived. His resting place is the front yard of his old home and commune, the Kalakuta republic. From the roof top, his shrine is beautiful and geometrically perfect.



"There can be no other Fela," said old Jimoh, my taxi driver who proudly remembers once driving the Kuti children around Lagos in his taxi. "Any other man is a counterfeit," he said, before telling me how it was possible in the Fela days to go to his Shrine nightclub and be fed a decent meal. Anyone was welcome, everyone would be taken care of.



Last Wednesday would have been Fela's 70th birthday. The Kuti's and our outfit bought two cows and they were slaughtered on the forecourt of the Shrine, where later on massive crowds would be dancing and smoking the night away. At night, I stayed high up on the balcony and watched with amazement the shows that unfolded to celebrate his birthday. During a rendition of Anarchy, a Fela song, the crowds picked up tables, chairs and glass bottles and smashed them or threw them wherever they could. After that they went back to watching the show with relative calm.

On hip-hop night, the Shrine was forced to close its gates after eight thousand people had come inside. The shows during Felabration are all free, and a lot of people get to eat for free too, something that his children have humbly insisted upon now that they run their own version if their father's legendary club.



Eight thousand young, mostly male, people high or drunk in an enclosed space could run to trouble. At three am, the Kuti daughter and her head of security are wandering around with a clipboard making sure that everything is running as it should. The security guards carry sticks, not guns, and in person are the gentlest, kindest men, despite their massive physical size. No one much misbehaves, everyone knows this is the Kuti home, not just a nightclub, and order must be respected. That is what Fela would have commanded, and that is what his children now expect too.

The man sitting next to me on the plane, a Nigerian now living in America making a living selling second-hand heavy digging machinery, said that flying into Lagos is his favourite moment of the trip back. The moment that he gets on the ground and knows he is back again, home, where things happen in the way that feels natural to him. When I get out of the British capsule and into the immigration hall, everything feels starkly unnatural, and I usually feel scared. What if someone robs me, cons me or points a gun at me? What if I lose all the money I am carrying? So many things could go wrong. It’s not until I am outside and away from the airport that I start to relax. Things go wrong all the time, but when not juxtaposed against the clinical safety of a British airplane, it doesn’t feel so bad. When armed robbers were pillaging cars further up the express way, we reversed and took another route. There was no panic.

At the roundabout on Allen Avenue, we are stopped by three policemen shining a torch into our car. Apart from the money I am carrying about my person, the man who has come to pick me up is carrying half a million naira in a plastic bag, for a ticket that he wanted to buy at the airport but didn’t manage to, since first class was booked up. The three men- the driver, my friend and the security guard brought along to prevent such happenings- all climb out of the car, and I am told to relax lady, be at ease.

“You must respect us,” barks one of the policemen, loosely wielding an AK47, at the three men.
“We respect you already,” says my friend, who clearly doesn’t.
“Are you a policeman?” demands the same policeman, turning the security guard around to shine his torch on his shirt, which has ‘security’ written in black letter across the tatty fabric.
“I am security,” grunts Tyson, the 7-foot tall guard, unsmiling.

Before long, the policemen take my friend’s telephone number, and when we are back in the car, a few moments later, his phone rings. It is the police. They want to check his number. The next time they come to the Shrine, they would like to be given special treatment.

I left my flip-flops in Lagos when I was last here and they are now long gone. I thought I could get some in a go-slow but so far I haven't seen any.

Yesterday morning I went to the hole in the crumbled wall across from my guesthouse, and awoke a man sprawled on a woven mat across the floor.

"Do you have slippers?" I asked, as he scuttled around to the window to serve me.

"What size?" he slurred, pulling out two pairs of swirly purple plastic shoes. One pair were the size of a small hovercraft, the other fit for a medium-sized child. Neither fitted me.

"This is ten" he said holding up the small shoes. "And this is eleven," flapping the large pair. "You must be ten and half."

When I left Senegal in July I never thought I would be back to Africa so soon, but as someone who showed me around the late Fela Kuti's house today told me, "your dream has come true". Some time around August, when I met a journalist planning to go to Lagos for Felabration, the annual festival celebrating Fela's birthday, I hoped I would be able to find a way to go myself. And there you go, sometimes dreams just come right at you and you have to grab them while you can.

When I landed in Lagos last night, I was filled with that familiar feeling of euphoria at being in a place so hot and disordered whilst at the same time knowing that anything could go wrong. Racing, and then crawling, down the highway at night, a route I told myself I would never take for fear of bandits who rob anything that moves slowly enough, I had that rush of adrenaline as the hot dusty air ripped through my tangled hair and a bus completely filled with green oranges and topped with men crawled alongside. Back in Africa, just a couple of months after leaving, and feeling so incredibly at home, but not really knowing or understanding why.



This afternoon I was treated to a tour of The New Africa Shrine, the legendary musical home of Femi Kuti, son of Fela. Afterwards, Fela's daughter took us to where her father is buried, in the scrappy front yard of the Kalakuta Republic, where posters of her late father still stick to the white wall of the house and her brother Seun's more recent posters are stuck all over the front gate. She looked sad, she said she had not been there in six years. There seemed to be bad feelings surrounding the visit, but I still felt honoured to be there, in the place which I had heard so much about and never really thought I would ever get to visit. When we left, a crazed skinny man whose jeans seemed barely to cling to his waist, spotted Fela's daughter and chanting, "Mama, Mama" ran alongside the car, his clenched right fist in the air, until she wound down the window and met his fist with hers, the undying sign of her father's incredible strength.

"I think that if Africa has something to sell, it’s not petrol but the joy of life, the joy of living with nothing. I know that we had that, I don’t know if we still have it because today, in Africa, people complain a lot. Before, everyone wanted a mobile phone, now everyone wants three.

Africa is not just bam-bam-bam-bam and acrobatics. No, it’s also violins, people who walk peacefully, people who have something inside their hearts. It’s bam-bam-bam-bam inside, spirituality, people who have a special view of the world, people of emotion, poets who do not know they are poets. Africa isn’t just a history but something new as well, something which is moving towards the future."

I had a pleasurable encounter with Wasis Diop this summer, who told me this as he talked about his ethereal new album. What a poet, intellectual and visionary. I especially like his song and clip Automobile Mobile, which uses shots of 1960s Dakar from his film-maker brother's film to show a Dakar that still exists in small, barely-detectable elements.

Steve, who commented on my last blog, reminded me that I did not explain the removal of my previous posts from London. I have not found England easy to return to; the first weeks in which I revelled in the ease with which things can be done soon gave way to despair that life is colourless and provincial. Gone is the drama of a trip to the shops and gone the afternoons swimming in open warm seas and the heavy heat that allows, or insists on, long naps. Life in London is stressful, busy, rushed, but flat.

My last posts were becoming moans. I did not want to write a blog that bemoaned my easy life, and so I decided to delete the last posts. But things are becoming a bit easier, I suppose, and I am going to Lagos in a couple of weeks for some work, so I imagine I will start posting again soon enough.

In any case, it seems that from all the comments I have had from people who have left west Africa and now read my blog, it has got inside them like it has got inside me. I can't explain it, and don't need to, just that I will be happy to go back.

I have recently gone back to a camera using real film, which means that the last months' images are only just surfacing. In no particular order, or perhaps chronologically, they follow.



These are the young fishermen Pauline and I met at Assinie in Ivory Coast. We were ambling on a long relaxing walk; they were out catching their food for the day.



Walking back along the beach at sunset, trying to remind myself that being able to walk on the beach almost every day is a luxury I have chosen to give up, for something better, if yet unknown.



She might not like me posting this picture- we have a 'no bikinis' policy on our blogs but not as yet a 'no boubous' one. But it was such a happy day and P looks radiant in her boubou, which she did not buy, yet could still. We walked through Treicheville, a run-down quarter of central Abidjan, and met a tailor in his shop who showed me into his house behind to use the toilet, lending me his flip-flops so as not to get my feet wet. The tailor and his boys watched television as P tried on the outfit. I can't remember what we had done that day, it may have been on our way back from an odd hotel where P had saved a frog from the hotel swimming pool, causing every male in the joint to approach us in the hope of igniting a friendship. It is the second time that P has saved a frog from a pool in the time I have known her, which is not all that long.



Philip, the Beninois corner shop worker, has been documented before. P and I went to see a dress-maker in the hope of finding someone who could make shirts for a mining company whose CEO we know. We went through Philip's shop and up into a tower block that felt like something one might find in the outskirts of Paris. Abidjan is impressive like that- from the outside a truly big city feel, deeply degenerated. I was taken with this stack of eggs.



I thought that this could make the foundation for a wax print cloth pattern. On our way to Abomey in Benin, we stopped at a village that seemed set up only for the purpose of selling pineapples. We had raging hangovers and the car was all over the place, dangerously overtaking long slow trucks on their way to Niger. We stopped at this village in order to stock up on the cheap, sweet fruits, and a lady cut them up into a plastic bag. Later on, as the juice began to spill across the car, I was charged with throwing the juice out of the window, bag and all. I still find it hard to chuck plastic into the bush. Armand, our small handsome driver, could not understand my reluctance to do so.



Mangoes. Seeing the sticky juice crystalising on the skin still makes me feel nauseous, as I have eaten too many in the last years. I wonder if I will ever love them again.



At a market on Lagos Island, I met Nike (pronounced Ni-kay, right) and her twin sister. Nike was half-heartedly persuading me to buy a piece of Akosombo cloth from Ghana, a fantastic black and white fabric with diagonal patterns slanted across it. She liked the outfit I was wearing- a boubou from Benin-, and asked if she could 'snap' me, holding up her mobile phone and taking my picture to show her tailor later. I snapped her in return, although her sister was reluctant, and then I sat down to draw her outfit, which Omar later copied to dramatic effect. At this market I met many girls who I could sit and chat to. Half way through the sale, Nike became distracted from our sale when a trader came in and she counted out hundreds of naira notes in great bundles to give to him. Nike was no small-time cloth saleswoman.



Back in Dakar, I was fascinated by Yaya's face, and one sunny day asked if I could take his photo. He was Julia's guard at her flat, and so nice with everyone, especially Julia's wayward dog Diek. He sat outside the door every day, with very little to entertain him, but he was always smiling and pleasant, even when the landlady, a mean-sounding woman, screamed his name through the intercom.

At the weekend I tramped off to another festival. It was all the things that were in the England of my home-sick memories- rain, stoic picnics, checkered rugs, ale, polite queuing, friends, music, and marshmallow teacakes.



To my absolute delight, one of my favourite musicians was playing, a singer from Kent called Chris Wood , who's timing, humour and gentle mannerisms shine out from even the simplest of songs. To a tent of sodden onlookers, he unassumingly transfixed us all.

'Heaven and hell, and the life ever after
Are such a beguiling idea.
But our spell on this earth
Is much richer, Jehova,
Richer than we'll ever know.
When it comes time to leave it behind,
We'll just close our eyes and let go.
If we've done our best,
We'll be ready for a rest
We'll just close our eyes and let go.'

This from his atheist spiritual, Come Down Jehova. When my grandparents died, I was haunted by the fact that I had never explored where the dead went to. Consequently, and in search of some kind of solace, I went to a church, a mosque, and a marabout, but nothing much touched me. It's a nice idea, put to me in a damp marquee in Cambridge, that when we go, we just go, and that what we have to look forward to is a long, well-deserved rest.

*****



A prom, where these smooth discs on the ceiling made me feel incredibly soothed.

*****

London is taking some time to get used to. My stresses are not the same kind of stresses I dealt with in west Africa, yet I am still geared up physically and emotionally to do only one thing a day, for it will take all day, expect that things will somehow not work out but then suddenly work out in a way I could not have imagined, and to harden myself against all irritations.

What I am finding is that life- the logistic of life- is easy. Food is everywhere and everything is available, roads are good, public transport is quick and comfortable, traffic is quiet, people are restrained, money comes quickly and efficiently out of a hole in the wall, pavements are made for walking on, medical care is available to anyone, cycling is a joy as sand does not billow onto the roads. I wonder how long it will take for me to start complaining about the things I used to- buses cutting up cyclists, crowded tubes, rude people? I have already started thinking I should be thinner- that only took two weeks.

But the stresses in London are there, if different, and I miss the colourful disorder of Africa. I had a sudden overwhelming desire to hear the call of the mosque yesterday, that reassuring sound that sends men to the gutter to wash their feet and ears. I miss Omar and my afternoons at the cutting table, I miss the balcony doors overlooking the cathedral.

What I miss most, which is the very reason I am glad to be away from it for I know it will make me stronger in the end, is the complete chaos and struggle, the entertainment and the exoticism which distracts me from me. In London, I am faced with the bare bones of myself, and there's no getting away from it.

Cycling to Peckham this evening, I noticed that little has changed since I lived nearby. 'Your Time Clock Shop', antiques and new time pieces, is still open, and the large billboards advertising miracle healing and faith ministries still litter brick walls and train bridge underpasses. Paul's Olive Shop in Camberwell, where the one-eyed Greek-Cypriot owner who used to bring me kilos of Cypriot apricots every summer to make jam, sells olives and stuffed breads, is still there, smoking his brown-tipped fags from a chair outside, his large wife beavering away behind the till. The shop selling Persian foods and artifacts is still there, a sign in the window saying,

'You smile
I smile, they smile, we all smile
Please smile more.'

In Peckham, Nigerian suya grilled meat shops line the high street, and a crowd of Africans had gathered around in the road where a number 35 had run someone down. A stoned man on the other side of the road watched as another bus coming in the opposite direction ran his bike down, which he had left inexplicably in the road. The Peckham Pulse has been re-named but is still an incongruous modern-design swimming pool, and the Member's Club which is no doubt a brothel on Camberwell Church Street is still up and running, a neon light flashing outside. My old street is smarter, window boxes proliferate, and posh blocks of flats have shot up, nearly outnumbering the not-so-posh estates and crack houses on the other side of the road. The Zest of India Indian take-away is still running at Loughborough Junction, and they gave me a discount for being a customer from the very beginning, when they were a restaurant in Camberwell.

While I was waiting for my take-away, I sat flicking through my photos from my last weeks in Senegal. A beautiful little girl came in with her mother, and while she, her enormously fat mother, ordered food and took no notice of her daughter, the girl came to look at my photos. She loved the snaps of the pineapples in Benin, and the market women in Lagos. She told me about her Nigerian neighbour who wears wax print cloth, but said she didn't like living where she lives because they have mice.

When I showed her pictures of wall paintings in Senegal warning people not to take pirogues across the ocean to Spain, the girl told me that when she was on holiday in Spain, she was on the beach when a big boat came along and there were lots of African people inside, many of them dead. The mother turned and said, yes, all these Africans washed up on the beach, but the police took them away. She said she had lived in the Canary Islands many years ago and Africans, dead and alive, turning up on beaches was always a problem.

It's always disappointing when the writer of a blog you really like moves. People who become enlivened when describing the mundanities of getting on the bus in Equatorial Guinea become positively bored by the experience when returning to Surrey. I am on my way to London and unless the police have started directing traffic with Kalashnikovs, I imagine I will have little to say about it. Much about west Africa irritates me, but the worse fate of all is to be rendered apathetic by a place.

In other news, I have spent a lovely final week in Senegal, including a night on a house on stilts above a clear lagoon where the turning of the tide at midnight sounded beneath me like an incoming tidal wave. Croaking birds kept me awake beyond that, but the moon was full enough to read by. In the morning, four bedraggled young fisherman approached us on the beach.

"We are looking for our friend. Our boat turned over last night and he has disappeared. If you find him, please ring this number."

I wrote the number in the sand with my finger.

"Those men are pig-headed," said one of the men at the guesthouse to whom I reported the incident, lest they should find a dead body washed up on the shore. "They don't listen to the weather report and then they go out in their fishing boats at night."

On returning to land and our car, we saw another boat rocking slightly on its side in the lagoon. A coloured wooden canoe, a long prow, like a child's toy boat.

"This boat came up from Casamance full of illegal immigrants trying to get to Spain," said our boat driver as we sped past. "The boat ran into difficulties and came in here. The police jumped on it and arrested 25 people. The rest ran away."

The price for getting to Spain on a canoe has gone down. It used to cost almost £1000, but in 2006 went down to £450. Now it is possible to buy a passage for £350. It must be the only thing in Senegal which has gone down in price. A loaf of bread has gone up by a third since I last bought one.

*****

An over-heard snippet of conversation from the news room, recounted to me by a friend.

Journalist on the desk rings on-the-ground reporter over reports that 27 people have died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a leaking generator in a church in Nigeria.

"Look, the police say they found a generator leaking carbon monoxide. They were not killed by evil spirits."

Omar and his tailors are making a right fuss of me, since they know I am leaving. Omar became tearful today when I started photographing the tailors, knowing I was making souvenir photos. The Nescafe guy brought me strong sweet coffee without me asking, and did not ask me for money.

"I heard that if in Europe your women have two or three children and then they stop," said one talkative skinny boy as he folded white shirts on the rickety cutting table. "You have it easy there!" he laughed, trying to imagine how cheap it would be to only have to feed two mouths. "You Europeans have made the right decision," he concluded, seriously.

Omar, on the other hand, had something pressing to tell me.

"Last week I had a phone call," he said, as he busied himself on the hem of his latest creation. "It was a Guinean living in Liberia. He said that he had seen the magazine on the airplane..."

One of my less inspiring money-makers is writing city guides for airline magazines. Each month at the end of the page I try to include a friend who I know makes good hand-made products. One month it was Omar, noting where to buy the cloth and how to find him, including his phone number.

"He rang me and he spoke to me in French. Then he asked if I was a Peul and we started to speak in Peul. Then he asked me if I was from Guinea, and I said, 'diarama'. He told me that he had seen my name and number in the magazine, and knew I was a Guinean. He said he wanted to ring to tell me that he was proud to see a Guinean succeeding and having his name printed."

Omar was moved, and I was a bit too.

"Then I had another call," he went on. "A Senegalese journalist living in the Gambia. He was coming to Dakar to write an article about tailors, and a friend of his in London had seen my name in the magazine and had passed it on to him. He said he was coming to Dakar to see me and Oumou Sy."

Oumou Sy is one of Africa's most famous clothing designers.

"This week he rang me again. He said he was at Sandaga market and where could he find me. I went to pick him up right away."

"Where is better, Nigeria or Senegal?" is the question an airport taxi man will always ask when he drives you away from the infernal mess that is Dakar airport. "I hear Nigeria is hot," meaning hard-going, "they don't have peace like we do here."

I was surprised at how hot Dakar was when I got back here. Perhaps I have become too used to air-conditioning, but I slept the first night bathed in sweat on top of the sheet, wishing it were morning. I sit here now in much the same way, wishing it were November.

I am interviewing rappers for an article I'm doing about the electricity problems, or 'lite' as they call it, in Lagos.

"NEPA office got no lite how them wan take dash me?" (Even NEPA, the National Electric Power Authority, has no electricity in its office, so how are they going to supply me with any?) raps Terry tha Rap Man, a young rapper who I met in the mall this afternoon.

Terry tha Rap Man is easy to get to know: his first name is easy to decipher (Terry) and I have no cause to call him by his surname (Mr Tha Rap Man). Harder is Modenine, or Mode, as I forced myself to call him yesterday. Even worse is Six Foot + who I am meeting tomorrow. Do I call him Six? "Nice to meet you Six"? Or does he go by Joseph, Fred or Adesinya? How does one ask without sounding a pratt?

The meeting I am really dreading is with a hard-sounding woman, who shows up on my iPod as Weird MC.

I was an hour today in the go-slow, the traffic jams which have inspired many a Lagos musician to pen a tune or two. Trying to pull out onto a main road, we came across a pick-up truck full of military in full battle-gear. Jet black dark glasses, helmets with visors and padded neck guards, flak jackets with pouches stuffed full, presumably, with ammunition, and bayonets, the blades glinting in the afternoon light. Finding themselves stuck in the jam, two of the guys leapt out of the truck and started screaming for cars to move this way and that, jabbing their bayonets near car windows, while the pick-up lurched violently forwards until it was out of the jam, and then was away. The traffic very quickly soaked up the space they had made.

A friend, and someone who knows these things, tells me that the police on Falamo Bridge do not have bullets in their Kalashnikovs. At least, they didn’t when he was running the Nigerian budget. They were never given money to buy any, because of their tendency for shooting at people.

This morning I have tried to make bread, but the only flour I could get, although happily locally produced, is ground for making a smelly sloppy porridge. My bread is therefore smelly, with the consistency of hard porridge.

Saturday evening, seven o’clock. The row of squat shops along Falomo road in Ikoyi are lit up, mini-generators coughing their ghastly fumes out from the puddle-filled forecourt of each one. An old woman sells apples from a tray on the ground, there is a beggar, a couple of shops selling plastic plumbing pipes, some girls dressed in tight tops with mis-spelled random English phrases across bulging breasts, and the loud and comforting noise of excited chatter, generators, men calling out to other men, merchants and busy-bodies asking what we would like. It is a typical west African scene, and completely reassuring to me, who has heard nothing but bad things about Lagos City.

On Friday I ventured to the National Museum. I found a taxi, another reassuringly west African moment, the taxi barely held together with panels of thin rusted metal, and he fought his way all the way up Awolowo Road, competing with hundreds of ocadas, stinking motorcycle taxis, to get through impossibly small spaces. At the museum, the lights were out, I was told. There is a generator, but we can not put it on just for one person. Perhaps come back Tuesday when there might be some school children, we can put it on then. Sorry.

A man crept out of the shadows, wearing a daftly shiny black boubou and offered to show me around the dark exhibition. I said I would come back another day, but he insisted, said it would be his pleasure. I said I had to leave, as he cornered me against a display case of heavy metal beads and a wooden fertility statue. I resorted to sucking my teeth, as my only defence against the overbearing west African male, and was able to escape into the drizzle.

Back on Awolowo Road, trying to find a cash dispenser that worked, bright sun had broken out above the clouds, and wet steam rose off the pavements and shop parking slots. I tried to get from one side of the small road to the other, and remembering the Saigon Shuffle, learnt nearly a decade ago, set out across one lane only to be pushed back by a crack team of ocada drivers. Heavy-duty Land Cruisers racing in the other direction, I was defeated, wanted to hold me head in my hands, wanting to hate Lagos. I naively thought I had seen it all in west Africa, there was nothing left to shock me. Perhaps that’s why I like it here, it’s not west Africa, it’s a whole other world.



Today there is grid power and we can open the windows and let in some fresh air. This morning I was woken up by the sound of a bird singing, a shocking noise in this place where the generator normally grinds outside the bedroom window from morning through till morning, seven days a week. There is a breeze, and palms are rattling their leaves. Last night I went to the cinema, thinking how nice to be in a place where there is a bit of cash, where there are cinemas, where other people can afford my luxury items too. When the film came to an end, the Nigerians were up and out of their seats before the credits rolled. It reminded me we were in west Africa, reassuringly familiar, where no one waits until the end or demands encores.

Coming back over the bridge after the film, a police checkpoint herded the small amount of traffic into one lane. A rickety car beside us, dwarfed by our colossal size, wanted to take his chance to beat us through the check point. Neither of us stopped, and he ground his already-smashed wing mirror along the side of our car. The policeman, in alarming black fatigues, stepped out infront of us, his AK47 in one hand and a torch in another. His oily face glistened in our headlights, as he shouted at the other driver, a guttural rumble of a voice which did not sound like words, but another kind of language. The second driver, seeing he was in trouble, slammed his car into reverse and sped backwards, down the hump of the bridge, his dim lights receding. The policeman grabbed his Kalashnikov, held it in the air, and slammed the handle forwards and back ready to shoot. Another policeman, watching this scene lazily from a chair nearby, told him to drop it, and the tension passed.

“You see dat?”, the wild-eyed policeman barked through the open crack in our window, “he’s animal”.

Benin is the home of voudou. Voudou is the belief in the power of animist spirits, used by a practitioner to achieve certain results: success, happiness, health. When slaves were taken from west Africa to the Americas, voudou was also transported, which is how it finds itself in Haiti, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. But Benin is its original home.

When I saw the state of the roads in Benin, which wouldn’t be so bad if used for their original purpose- the transport of a thin flow of traffic, rather than the transportation of goods by decrepit trucks to all the landlocked countries of the Sahel- we decided to see the fetisheur who deals in contra-accidents. Chugging a trois through the vast green landscape on a motorbike, Marc, our serious-looking guide, took us to a voudou priest who was particularly strong in this department. There were no displays of voudou tourist nonsense that we had feared we might be dealt, just a small room in a concrete compound in the forest full of old wooden statues covered in wax, cigarette ash and old cow blood. Here the fetish for making women pregnant, Marc pointed out, and here the fetish for erectile problems. Consult this fetish, he explained, mix up an ointment of shea butter and then massage the penis, indicating proudly to his crotch. “Within 43 days,” he assured us, “the man will fall upon an erection.”

Our expensive contra-accident talismans in hand, the three of us set off once again through the bush to another voudou priest’s house. This is the Love Doctor, Marc explained, and he is available to give consultations on any matters of the heart that we might want to discuss. I was initially, and latterly, sceptical. We were taken into a compound where from over the mud wall, the eerie humming of children- or fetishes- rose to meet us. Through a gate, guided by a series of toothless crones, eight children dressed in hessian wraps, their black bodies smeared in some kind of vegetable oil, were guided towards us. They did not once look at us, the bewildered and suspicious tourists, but kept their bodies doubled over, clutching their arms around themselves, until they were kneeling on the ground infront of us.

Would we like them to dance for us?, asked a mean-looking man in a fake Puma shell suit, clutching three mobile phones in one hand. No, I asserted, it’s not necessary. The oily children were led away, and the Love Doctor took us back to his consultation room.

On the porch of a mud and concrete hut, strange objects, strings, shells, and free 2007 wall calendars hanging on every hook and wall space, we were asked to sit down and compose our questions. I would like to say here that our visit was purely for research purposes, journalists on the prowl, but by this time I was convinced that our man was for real, that there was nothing so cynical as voudou for tourists in this village. The way he had gently taken my hand in greeting, but held it for longer than was necessary as he also greeted P as if he was already trying to read me, made me feel completely at ease in his presence. The fact that he was wearing a faded Dutch wax pyjama suit, adorned with the 80s-style motif of lips and lipstick, only warmed me to him further. That he didn’t ask us for money was more concrete proof that he was in fact applying a legitimate trade. I asked him my question, muttered onto two seeds pressed close to my lips, and he got down to work.

Pulling out from an old bag some dirty-looking rope tied with shells and some kind of seeds or nuts, he gathered this in his cupped hands and rubbed chalk into the mix. He spat into his hands for good measure, and started whispering. He laid the ropes and shells on the ground, threw the seeds onto them, and took note of the way everything had fallen. He did this a number of times, muttering, whispering, adding chalk, until he seemed to have finished. “Yes,” he proclaimed, looking satisfied. “You have already met your husband, and you will stay with him morning and night until the end of your life.”

“But,” he warned, talking through our translator. “You must find work or live no more than a few kilometres from a body of water, the sea, or a river. And it is very important that you learn how to forgive. You are someone who gets annoyed or angry very quickly, and your husband is too. You must be the one to forgive quickly.”

Assuring me that everything was already taken care of in the marriage department, he said that just to make sure, he could make a sea sacrifice for me at a later date, if I liked. This would involve a baby goat, some peanut oil and a bunch of bananas. He marked down my divination patterns so that when I phoned him with the order, he could get to work taking the goat and the bananas down to the sea.

In Dakar, we have the 'taxi-blow dry', where one washes ones hair and then gets in a taxi and has her hair styled for her by the warm woosh of sub-Saharan air through the open taxi window. It is cheap and effective: many times I have commented on a friend's new hair-do only to hear that it was the results of a 'taxi blow-dry'.

In Cotonou today, I experienced the 'zemidjan nail-dry'. Deciding to fight off two-day old achey-body syndrome with a visit to the beauty salon, I emerged two agonising hours later with newly-varnished toe and finger nails, wondering how I was going to get to my hotel through the sandy street without smudging them.

A smiling motorcycle taxi (or zemidjan) chugged slowly along beside me as I walked along what passes in these parts as a pavement, and asked me where I was going. He had such a sweet smile that even though I was only going 200 metres or so, I agreed to get on the back, asking him if the ride was free.

"Of course," he said, laughing, and whisked me away through the hot afternoon air. My toe and finger nails were dry by the time I reached my hotel.

I have developed a love of places where street signs point to neighbouring countries. In Ziguinchor there is a roundabout with a sign pointing to three destinations: Town Centre, Bus Station, Guinea Bissau. In Cotonou, capital of narrow little Benin, there is a sign on one side of town pointing to Togo, and on the other side of town, to Nigeria.

Narrow and insignificant it may be, but Benin is a country of fantastically dressed citizens. It’s not just the poor and the proud who wear locally-printed textiles, but absolutely everyone, in a range of colours and patterns which rivals even Senegal, where to wear the batik-style wax print cloth is a matter of national pride. The men, many of whom are dramatically short, wear trouser suits in matching yellows and greens and over the top purples, and the women, climbing onto motorcycle taxis and carrying giant dishes of pineapples on their heads, wear finely embroidered tops, stylish tapered trousers in matching cloth, or just a simple boubou caught with a tie around the waist. Even the children are well-dressed.

“Madam, madam,” says a bright little boy wearing a yellow and green outfit, tapping P on her leg and looking up expectantly. “Someone is calling you.”

“Who is calling me?”

“My papa.”

This is dating Benin-style.

Today's taxi driver was as cheerful and as pleasant as they have all been, despite the oppressive heat and dismal greyness of the day.

"I started work at 7 this morning," he chirped, "and I have already done 85 km. When you have a family to feed you have no choice."

We careered along the highway and across the bridge in the morning traffic, and I told him that in Senegal, taxis have meters but do not use them, so that either I overpay, and am pissed off before I even start the journey, or that I pay the right price, and he is pissed off that I am not paying more. Either way, the journey is usually unpleasant because of the Dakar taxi man's insistence on bargaining for a price.

"There are a gang of Senegalese taxi men at the airport in Abidjan," said my man. "They stay there all day, and wait for a client who isn't from here. Then he makes up for the fact that he hasn't had a fare all day and stings her for it all at once. Once," he said, getting into the swing of it, "I was outside a hotel when a taxi appeared with a Chinese girl inside. He had told her it would cost 15,000cfa to the hotel from the airport, when really it should have cost 5,000 at the most, but that at the bridge she would have to have her bags searched by the police, and she had agreed to pay the cost of the bribe. Well, when they were stopped at a checkpoint, as he knew they would be, the Senegalese had paid the man off but when he got to the hotel, he said he had paid him 10,000 francs. When the girl refused to pay, the man took her bag. So I told the man I would take him to the police station."

My taxi driver went on with other stories about the Senegalese taxi mafia, concluding that it was all "pas bon".

I have heard a lot about Abidjan's legendary military roadblocks, and even scooted through and around a couple of them myself. "If I haven't made eye contact with them, I don't stop," says Pauline, as I regret making eye contact with a whistling soldier on the way back from the beach, and bow my head hoping I haven't done any damage.

On Friday night, well Saturday morning really, we were coming home from the Ritz Discotheque when we came across a roadblock on the otherwise-deserted bridge. The taxi driver, a man who had assured us that we were in safe hands because we were with an 'old chauffeur', fell silent and switched off his engine, watching with worrying disinterest as five armed military men in green fatigues demanded to see our papers.

"Where is your vaccination certificate?" asked one of me through the window, knowing full well I hadn't taken it out dancing with me.

"You must get out of the car," said another, opening the door, "we want to check the car."

I did not know what to do and I was afraid. We sat tight, did not look at them. But they were all looking at us.

"Are you refusing to get out of the car?" he asked, and I tried to push the worst from my mind. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash silver car approaching, slowing down as it approached us. As Pauline and I climbed cautiously out of the taxi, staying as far away from the soldiers as was possible, one of them went over to the car which had slowed to a halt beside our taxi. I saw two men in the front seat. They started a discussion with the soldiers.

After some moments, we were told we were free to leave, but that we must "thank monsieur"- indicating to the silver car.

"Have a nice holiday in the Ivory Coast," said one of the soldiers to me as he handed back my ID card. "We like to please all visitors to this country."

I am going to the beach for the weekend.

The sky yesterday was something special. Not a cloud in sight, glittering sunlight, not too hot, the city felt like a sleepy beach town while people cruised around in their cars, everyone feeling cheerful.

My taxi driver was as happy as can be. "Good morning, Madam," he called out as I climbed into his red cab. "How is the health? he cooed. "If you have good health, you have everything," he said brightly.

Racing along the lagoon-side, he became distracted from the road as he tried to catch something on the passenger seat next to him. He let go of the steering wheel while he tried to get a hold of whatever it was on the seat. Cracking a broad grin, he held up his find for me to see.

"A golden hair," he said, laughing and showing me one of my own hairs, come loose in the breeze of the open window. "I presume one of yours?"

Laying it in the compartment next to the gear stick he said,

"I will put it in an album," and chuckled, bright with the freshness of the day.

"But what name will I write next to it?" he asked, and laughed as I said he could put whatever name he liked.

We bantered too and fro, he told me about all the great things Cote d'Ivoire had on offer, wild animals, every fruit and vegetable you could imagine, and lovely beaches. He told me about his days as a room cleaner in a hotel in town, how he made friends with a Polish girl whose hair used to drop out a lot. He asked me if it was normal. I expect it's quite interesting to someone surrounded by African girls whose hair, presumably, doesn't fall out that much, or get long enough to be noticed when it does. He was really pleasant to talk to, and did not leer at me in the rearview mirror or say anything inappropriate. I gave him a good tip.

Over lunch, I told Pauline about my nice encounter with a friendly taxi man.

"He might have been trying to voodoo you," she said. "All he needs is one of your hairs, and your name."

I landed in Abidjan and was met by a terrific rain storm that went on all night and flooded the roads to knee-height. It's good to be back though, in a city where the Ivorian French accent is rounded and singing, and people seem more reserved, or perhaps more wary of white foreigners, and I can pretty much go about my business without being noticed all the time.

Last night's rain brought with it another colossal mess, the traffic, which did not move for more than two hours along the city's main artery. I was lucky enough to have the kind of taxi driver one doesn't find much in Dakar anymore, the kind who will do everything possible to get to the destination more quickly than if we sat it out. Careering off the highway and onto blocked smaller roads, mine smiled and waved and cajoled his way through the traffic and into a car-wreck yard, whose muddy thoroughfare had been blocked by young mechanics with a tyre.

"Give us 100 francs," shouted the boys, which we did, and they lifted up the tyre barrier to let us pass. This is what my friend and fellow Africa blogger Pauline calls, West Africa Wins Always. As we churned up the mud to pass out the other side, the tyre was slammed back down and the car behind us forced to stop, and hand over money.

I have been trying to get into Nigeria. At the embassy I realised I didn't have the right papers, and was about to despair when a large, fleshy black woman with an incredibly deep southern American accent, waddled up to the application window and forced her way into the face of the bony, acid-faced secretary on the other side. She declared that she was an American citizen, although was most likely of Liberian origin.

"I am the minister of my church and I don't need no letter from nobody," she said, her voice unavoidably loud, the whole bedraggled room of Nigerians turning to stare at this fascinating creature.

"She don't know what the hell she talking about," the lady, dressed entirely in pink, bellowed as she walked away from the window and went to sit down on one of the plastic chairs. "I don't need no invitation letter to go nowhere."

"No! She is sitting there," she barked, almost screamed at a young Nigerian who came in and wanted to take the empty chair next to her. Her mignon, an embarrassed-looking Ivorian girl, smiled apologetically at the man, and did not take the seat allocated to her. Instead she started making frantic calls to the ambassador, who did not answer his phone, at the request of the minister who sat, false pink and gold nails fanned elegantly across her lap, calling out orders.

"You get the ambassador on the phone and you tell him what I be going through down here. I shouldn't have to put up with this. They ask me to come and preach in Lagos and that what I'm trying to do."

As the furor died down, and the invitation was sent for by two further mignons, I leaned in to hear a conversation between a Nigerian woman who had come in, and the minister. The Nigerian was telling the minister, who was not listening but instead umming whilst looking at her telephone, how she was out in the villages feeding children and giving them clothes and everything, but needed more money to keep her operations going.

"There's a lot of money out there," the pink lady said conspiratorially, leaning in towards the Nigerian. "The Chinese, the Lebanese, the EU," at which point she swept her podgy hand towards me, "they give billions of dollars. But they gonna take it for you cause they think you're stupid. By the time it gets to you, it's just a cup of soup. None of the food gets to the villages, none of the trucks get to the villages," the lady had become breathless, "it's just for these people"- once more sweeping her hand towards me- "to ride around Africa saying what good things they're doing. So until you get accurate records, that's going to keep on happening. Accurate records."

"Accurate...records," the listener repeated slowly, savouring these words of advice as if they were the answer to so many of life's difficult questions. "Accurate records."

The minister, whose briefcase flipped open spilling hundreds of pink church leaflets proclaiming her ministry was the way to finding everlasting joy in the lord, was talking about her trip to preach at a church in Lagos.

"That's why they got security and everything. Cause Lagos is a crazy place. But I trust the Lord is with me, I trust he is there."

Someone told me how a friend had described living in west Africa as living with eternal decay. The decay of buildings, the decay of infrastructure, the decay of governments and democracy and people. I thought this, at the time, unnecessarily gloomy, but I think today I agree with it. This morning the skies were filled with clouds as I tried to find a sunny spot to hang out my washing. It finally rained, but the oppressive tension in the air didn't lift.

At the Air Ivoire office, on my second visit- the first being fruitless since the office was on a lunch break- the clerk sold the man infront of me a ticket on the flight which I had been told had been cancelled due to a plane break-down in Paris.

"Oh, they sent another plane on Saturday," the clerk cheerfully told me. "And check in opens in ten minutes, you'd better hurry."

But someone had told me, from this very office, yesterday that there was no other plane to replace the broken one, that I would have to wait for a seat on a plane with another company.

"Well, they sent another plane on Saturday," he told me again, and I wanted to cry.

Managing to convince him that I could not get home, pack and to the airport in the next hour, he agreed to transfer me to the even more unreliable Air Senegal flight tomorrow. The guard, the one who looked vaguely sympathetic when I arrived at the office in the lunch break, looked baffled as I fled the office in tears. Some days the total decay of everything- communication, planes, order and organisation- knocks me for six.

Hospitals for the rich. The roof terrace cafe has the best view in Dakar. Down below, wheelbarrows hold bountiful fruits, mangoes and bananas, whilst women in glorious embroidered outfits trail the hallways. A few roads away, the general hospital keeps patients on the ground amongst the roaches.

A lazy afternoon on the beach, hazy skies and endless breaking waves, a sea of wash.

The thousands of black figures scattered across the wide sands playing football, wrestling, doing acrobatics, gathered into one dark mass as a fight broke out amidst them.

By the time I got there, picking my way through stranded mauve jellyfish, a group of gangly kids torturing a large one with a piece of driftwood, the fight had broken up and I was amongst thousands upon thousands of teenagers and younger children, mostly boys, spending their Sunday afternoon in activity.

Some paired themselves off into couples, grappling at eachother, pawing the others' raised hands as they went into a bodylock which would result in one of the boys being thrown on his back. Others sat and watched, some played football, pitch upon pitch lined up along the shore, shoes, tires, blocks of wood, lumps of concrete forming the goalposts. The odd group of teenage girls in childish bikinis, breasts and curves spilling out unaware.

Absolutely everyone was covered in sand, some faces with only the eyes clear behind a mask of fine white sand, most in their underpants, all caked in the stuff. Everywhere I went, with my camera around my neck, the bolder boys hissed and asked for me to photo-them, the girls looked away shyly. One group of children sat tranquil in a group on the sand, an oil painting of sun-faded red shorts and pants and white sandy bodies, the black skin barely visible beneath. But once I had aimed my lens, they leapt into a pose, grins and thumbs up, and the moment was lost.

Near them, some older teenagers were doing somersaults. I lined up behind them and crouched down, a crowd of a hundred or so people gathered beside me. The acrobats made dramatic twists and leaps in the air, kicking up the sand, as they effortlessly leapt off eachothers' cupped hands and flailed elegantly in the air. Some kids tried and failed to leap, the younger ones giggled.

So many black bodies, all around me, suffocating except for everyone was so happy.

To ease my imminent integration into European social ways, I went to a McDonalds in the airport and my observations and thoughts were as follows:

*I am happy to see French people eating here. They have their BigMacs with beer.
*This is the busiest place in the airport
*In the ten years since I was in a McDonalds, nothing has improved taste-wise, and the carrots in little packets do not look appetising either
*Depressed

I spent a large percentage of the last two days in clothes shops, trying to buy clothes that will ultimately make me look like every other girl in Europe, but desperate not to have to go to my job interview in old jeans and flip-flops. In Zara, I could not make sense of the sizes and everything, from the teeny tiny numbers to the really big numbers that were hidden in a corner, seemed to be the same size and I eventually gave up. I did find one nice item though, a jacket with minuscule arms, so I got into the changing room and took a photo to show Omar. I also bought a nightie, which I will wear as a boubou.

It was good to get somewhere near home. Lisbon was aflame with jacaranda trees, and fallen purple blossom lined the city’s cobbled streets. My friend Marta, one of my Bissau sisters, got us tickets to a puppet show on the first night, in which the principle actors were two tea kettles and a piece of spaghetti. Last night we went to a beautiful Congolese dance performance, with a choral version of Jimi Hendrix’s Vodou Child and the intricate, danced-out memories of a man from Kisangani. One night we went to a Togolese dance class, and Marta and I pretended we were back in some dirty nightclub on Bissau’s outskirts and danced shaking Angolan koudouru during the break. We walked and looked at architecture, ate fantastic small cheeses, and drank café in old hole-in-the-wall shops and watched the trams go by.

Today we cooked a cockerel from Marta’s grandmother’s farm which even cut into three, was a monster. Quince jelly reminded me of my granny, and the time I took all their quinces from the tree and annoyed my grandfather, who rang me up to tell me so. Pastels de nata, possibly one of the finest creations on the cake creation scale, at midnight, described on a postcard as ‘little custard queens’.

When I came to say my goodbyes, I looked around my little house and thought, I will be really pleased not to sleep here again. I will be happy not to wake up caked in dust, happy not to have to search high and low for a pot to boil water in that does not have a hole in its bottom.

But when Papa called me into his room to say goodbye, it was very different. He clasped my left hand, the hand that Mandinkas say goodbye with because it's the hand of the heart, and said,

"Please tell your father that my health is fine, that we are all fine, and that I hope his health is fine. Please tell him that you have been a good daughter to us, and that you are a part of us, that we will miss you. Please tell him that."

I turned away and sobbed.

One of the things that has surprised me most on this trip to Ziguinchor is how desperately dull life is. The days drag by unmarked by the usual routines of work, so that any day could be Saturday, or Wednesday. Mealtimes are the only thing that bring any sense of time into the day, although dinner is now a kind of spawn-like porridge that is nothing if not monotonous. At night I can not sleep; I simply haven’t done enough during the day.

It was very different for me when I lived and worked here, and I was constantly busy, interviewing peanut traders, writing articles, going on trips to visit remote villages. When I look around the place now, when I have none of that going on, I can’t understand how this was ever my life. It seems so foreign.

A couple of days of not working- and I even have books and writing to keep me company- and my will to do anything has been sapped. I can’t think of anything to set my alarm for in the morning, and the afternoon is too hot to do anything but sleep. The evening is just a long downhill run to dinner time, and beyond that to the moment when sleep might just catch me. It’s no wonder that nothing ever happens here; nothing comes of nothing.

It rained in the night, just a small bit, but the first rains of the season. It feels like a real blessing that I was here to hear it. I awoke in the night and could hear it drumming on the roof, and quickly went back to sleep feeling that all was OK.

Early this morning, a giant mango fell from the tree and plummeted onto my corrugated metal roof, rolling and then thudding to the ground. I didn't have a hope of claiming it; there was a scramble as the children dived in, scrabbling in the dirt to get their small fingers around the hard green fruit.