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."