If you are tailor, and you are tired, there are many opportunities to lie down and have a snooze. This tailor, in Dakar, snoozes in a cupboard full of piles of cotton. And why not?

If there was one Senegalese artist who I wish could have his music heard, and understood, by the masses, it's Souleyman Faye. But he probably won't ever find anyone to take him and his quirky band on, because of various stories about the harebrained activities he got up to on tour when he was with the group Xalam, which have become Dakar legends. But he is one of the city's finest, someone I could spend hours listening to and never- almost never- get bored.

As luck would have it, the one time he did let me down was when I had two friends visiting from England. Both in the music business, I took them to see him on their first Saturday night here. He played a set which wouldn't have sounded out of place in the foyer of some anodyne French-run hotel somewhere in west Africa. It was heavy on the keyboards, light on the poetic charm that Souleyman usually wields, with such force.

Last night, he had a new guitarist with him, who threw a whole new dimension on the set. Wavering between jazz and Afro-beat, I wasn't quite sure where it was going, until Souley turned up in a pork-pie hat and an acrylic beige waistcoat and leapt about on the small stage, an unlit pipe in his mouth.

He had a saxophonist with him, an old man in a wooly jumper, who wandered on mid way through the first set. He blew us all away. The bass guitarist, one of the tallest and quietest people I have ever seen, who plays with his eyes shut, his moustache curling aroung his clenched lips, was given his chance to break free. Thumbing his guitar with unusual ferocity, it had the effect that fear sometimes has on me: turning my stomach to liquid. There was some electricity in that room that took me out of Dakar and the shabby bar where I spend most of my Saturday nights, and into something much more hair-raising.

At Ziguinchor airport, I got into a conversation with a German tourist.

"It seems to me," she said, sucking on a Marlboro Light, "that without women this country could close."

Behind us, a colourful group of Joola women clapped wooden sticks and danced by the side of the road. Some young boys beside them sang and hammered out a rhythm on a calabash floating in a bucket of water. They were waiting for some locally important man to arrive, and when he did he sped past the women in his 4x4, not pausing to even look at them. The group had been there, singing, for two hours, but they didn't seem to mind at all, and just picked up their boubou tails and clambered back into the bus in which they arrived.

After the gymnastics of passing through countless customs and immigration controls, I returned from Bissau to Ziguinchor, happy to be back on home turf. I got a taxi to the house, and on the narrow road leading there, we met a tanker, winding its way down the potholed gravelly road.

As it pulled up beside our car, which had stopped to let the groaning lorry pass, the driver looked down from his cab and shouted at the driver. Then he drove off.

The taxi driver, in a mustard yellow boubou and white skull cap, laughed and turned to me in disbelief.

"He said I must stop doing what I am doing." He turned back to the steering wheel and laughed to himself.

"But I wasn't doing anything. He said that I should have waited back there on the road to let him pass. He says he has no breaks."

He laughed even harder.

"It is one thing to have a car with no breaks. But it is another to have a big tanker like that without them."

It has been five years since I first heard the haunting, pained music of Zé Manel, a Bissau Guinéan now exiled in the States for his politically-critical music against the then-President, now re-elected for another term. When I got back to England, I tried to get in contact with him, to get an interview. He seemed totally unreachable, no one knew where he was, and I eventually gave up.

In the wonderful way that these things happen, last night I met him. Some friends and I had gone to a small bar in the crumbling old quarter of Bissau, a bar which had rattan furniture downstairs, and a cyber-café upstairs filled with computer terminals. As we were sitting there wondering how we were going to get away from the terrible racket of the girl singing at the front of the bar, my friend noticed that Zé Manel sitting in the corner. Praying he would sing, we stayed until the end, through countless rounds of cover songs by women with far greater voices than she, but he eventually left without a song.

On his way out, though, he passed by us. My friend, a Guinean, tapped me on the shoulder and when I turned around, Zé was there with his hand out. He said he would be happy to see me at his studio this weekend for an interview.

**

When you’re standing on the dance floor of a Guinean nightclub, dancing to the latest in Ivorian coupe decalé or American dirty south, it’s hard to remember that you are in one of Africa’s most defunct countries. Sitting outside the club, eating egg sandwiches made by a mama, or a tia, as they call the motherly women here, it’s hard to imagine you were just inside a nightclub. The table lit by a candle, eggs fried in a pan over a coal brazier, the turbaned women pulling cold beers from a bucket, it’s the perfect way to see in a Saturday morning.

Unlike Ziguinchor, Bissau has changed a lot since I was last here during the 2005 elections. The town has smart new restaurants, and some not so smart, and the roads are filled with 4x4s and whites. Dinner anywhere will be taken between two tables of people you know; it has become an NGO playground.

But it is carnival, and Guineans know how to celebrate it with full energy.



Riding on top a carnival float, the city streets below churned with bodies. Kids and adults fought eachother for the balloons and pens being thrown from the trucks, and the police- violent, Angolan-trained men- ran alongside the truck beating people with sticks and the buckles of belts. Even the girls being trampled under a stampede of feet seemed to see it as a game. At one point, someone threw a plastic water bottle and it rolled under the truck. There was a screeching as a group of children dived under the massive wheels to get it and the truck was forced to stop. The band stopped playing, but the bottle was retrieved and the truck moved on.



My favourite band from Senegal is here, Pierre and his brothers. They let us ride on top the carnival float as we danced through the dusty streets of Bissau. They are still as good as they ever were, and I still dream of making it happen with them. Pierre has a new line in his repertoire when calling out people's names in song: "the journalists are here". I, of course, am chuffed.