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.