Tomorrow my sister is getting married. She is my sister in the African sense, and in that we all need someone who is slightly more than a friend when stuck in far away places.

This afternoon I told MH, my smiling bonne, that my sister was getting married.

"Yala moila-la," she replied gravely, and muttered some incantations about dieu being grand and 'it'll come, inshallah'.

I pressed her to tell me what she meant.

"Well, your sister is getting married and you, you are not married. So I am asking god to bring you a husband too."

All the Senegalese people around me who care about me, and that does not included almost every taxi driver I meet, seem disproportionately concerned that Julia is getting married and I remain a spinster. MH looked horrified when I, perhaps unfairly, for it was only to make a point that this line of conversation is futile, retorted that God was useless in this sense. She has gone silently back to shelling broad beans.

Ouds lined up in a shop like bottoms.

Strolling down Rabat's palm-tree lined main boulevard this morning, I caught myself looking up at the window and balcony of a cheap hotel I stayed in a few, three, years ago. I was considerably poorer then, and definitely insecure, unsure, and paralysed by the feeling that I wasn't quite good enough, as a journalist and as a person. I spent a lot of energy then trying to impress other people, a futile exercise.

I felt like kicking myself this morning for having tried so hard to be something I wasn't quite, yet.

In through the sliding door of the minibus climb four heavy-built Afghans. They take their place on the shuttle bus to the airport next to three Mauritanians, all men.

"I am from Mauritanie," says one of the men to the Afghan behind him, his French burbling with a guttural Arabic accent. "You know Mauritanie?"

"Is African country," says the Afghan, turning away. The minibus pulls round the roundabout outside the city's airport. Flowering plants border a coloured pebble rock-garden, the logo of the Islamic Summit blue and green against a white pebble background.

"Is an Arab country," the Mauritanian says sharply.

The Afghan turns back to him, and says,

"Is an Arab African country." He smiles without friendliness, while the Mauritanian grasps his hand, and laughs.

In Mauritania, a Mauritanian friend told me, not even the Governor of the Central Bank, who is black, would be able to marry the poorest house maid if she was a white Moor. In the Arab world, Mauritanians fight not to be grouped with their black neighbours; no one there wants to be mistaken as African.

On the roundabout, a homeless man, one of Dakar's fantastically-dressed crazy men who wear scraps of cloth and have masses of matted dreadlocks, is intercepted by three gendarmes as he tries to cross the pebbled garden. In this uncharacteristically-sterile environment, created in the flash of Arab funds, his wild staring eyes and bare bony legs look like real life. The rest is just a mirage.

The Islamic conference has finished and the Arabs have gone home. Open-backed trucks crawl along the curb picking up the pretty plants that for a week lined the roadsides; the stage set is coming down.



On the president's billboard welcoming the Arab leaders to Dakar, someone has scribbled a message. "We are hungry".

Another night at the palace. I never fail to be impressed by it, the body guards and black 4x4s, the dramatically-lit trees and the piles and piles of candied fruit and canapes. I have grown rather attached to the special guards who wear red uniforms and carry sharp swords, although tonight came too close to one, only to be reminded by a very polite gendarme that I was not to press myself too close. I was reaching through the throng of journalists to hear the Sudanese president speak, but was distracted by the red hats.



The Sudan-Chad peace deal was signed on the steps,the photographers smashing glass candles sticks under foot in an effort to get close, and some music piped up. 'I know that voice,' I thought, the unusually-high for a man notes wafting through the crowd. And there was Ismael Lo on a podium singing weepily. By the time I got to him, the camera crews were already on him. What a lovely evening, a peace deal, a cocktail or two, and some music.

I knew nothing about millet, not even what it looked like, until I spent a day on assignment interviewing millet farmers. There was nothing to look at; the harvest is over, and the fields are covered only in straw. Try as we did, we could not find anything much to photograph, although the old farmers I met were full of tales of their hardships. One, predictably, asked me if I could bring him a water pump the next time.

The striking thing about the villages we went to was that they all had areas, covered over in corrugated metal, with long concrete benches. This is the man's meeting area, where the elders gather to discuss, enjoy the shade and quiet of their special zone, play chess. I am used to seeing old wooden versions in Malian villages, but here they were about the only modern construction in the otherwise tired village. Even the market happened on the ground; noisy women selling their dried fish and cockles on rice sacks laid out on the shelly street, in the full glare of the sun.

One area of activity was the millet-grinding shed in the centre of the village. A young guy stood all day long waiting for girls to bring their calabashes of millet, when he would tip them into the machine and give them their powder out the other end. The machine looked almost human to me, like a Giacometti sculpture, and as dusty as we all felt after an hour in that shed.



Visiting the onion gardens made me realise how hard it all is. The millet doesn't grow anymore because there's not enough rain. The sons have all fled to the cities. The fathers are left to work onion gardens instead, hoping they can make a couple of hundred dollars to keep them going until the next millet harvest, which may or not yield. One farmer we met watered his entire garden, violent patches of green in the scrubby landscape, with a bucket whose bottom flapped open.

The most exciting thing to have happened to Dakar since the birth of Youssou N'Dour some fifty years ago is the building of a tunnel, THE tunnel, which goes all the way underground and up the other side of a road which was never really that busy. The tunnel bypasses some ugly bits of the city so that visitors can get from the airport to the town without having to see any poor people. It emerges onto a junction which is now incredibly busy and extremely dangerous.

This morning I went on my moped to the travel agency, which sits right on the slip road beside the tunnel, near the exit. I took the tunnel, thinking I would be able to turn off the road but found that I was on a super-highway all the way to the roundabout, 1 kilometer away from the exit. So around I went, and back to the tunnel. I stopped and asked a policeman, guarding the entrance to the sliproad, how I was meant to get to the agency, there, 20 metres away.

"Go through the tunnel."
"But I've just come through the tunnel," I protested.
"Go back through the tunnel," he said, clutching an automatic rifle to his shoulder.

Deciding not to argue, I went off through the tunnel again, where a huge line of traffic had backed up because a taxi had broken down at the exit, and eventually emerged out the other side. But I could not get off that road either and ended up back in town, where I had started.

Deja-vu. The same thing happened to Julia and I in a taxi on Saturday night.

I eventually arrived at the travel agency, third-time-through-the-tunnel lucky.

"They are telling me I am having to shut the office," complained V, my ever-efficient and helpful Indian travel agent.
"It does not make any sense. The people are coming to the airport," he was talking about the delegates to the Islamic summit, "not to the office. But they are telling me to close."

On the way home I got caught in a sandstorm- the construction in the city has left vast expanses of land treeless and covered in sand- and arrived home feeling like a piece of sandpaper.

Whilst waiting for Omar, I greeted my friend, the Nescafe boy, whose cafe on wheels stays outside the atelier all day long, every day. He does a roaring trade with the tailors and clients.

"Salaam aleikum." Smiles.
"Aleikum salaam,"
"Please sell me a cafe au lait."

The boy, with buck teeth and a Nescafe bib on over his t-shirt, takes a small plastic cup and shovels in:

One tea spoon of sugar
One tea spoon of Nescafe
One teaspoon of powdered milk.

The tea spoon has been flattened and bent into a new shape, more like a tube, so that the coffee etc pours more directly into the cup. These spoons are also used for shoveling washing powder from 20 kilo sacks into small 25 franc sachets.

He holds the cup up to the hot water flask and pushes down on the lid; the water pours forth. Taking another plastic cup, a bigger one and not disposable, he pours the mixture from the smaller cup into the bigger one. Then he pours it back again, more carefully, into the smaller one. The milk starts to lose its lumps, the mixture takes on a creamy brown colour, and ten or twelve swaps later, I have a frothy cafe au lait.

"How much?"
"75 francs." He clears up the decks, puts the lids back on the Nescafe tins, and puts his spoon back in its place.
"There you go."
"Good. Thanks. Have a nice weekend."

Another exchange.

I am in traffic, on a scooter, and a taxi blocks my way between him and the back of a bus.

"Hello," I call, through the window. The boys smile, the driver hangs his cigarette out the window and gives me a daring grin.
"Um, you have blocked my way. Please could you let me pass?"
Teeth-sucking from within. Comments.
"Yeah, uhu, you can pass. You will pass up above!"
The boys all laugh. I have received my first ever death threat. I wait for the bus to move on and politely go on my way.

Anyone who knows Dakar will be familiar with this.



And this.



These same people will not be familiar with this.



The city has gone crazy. The Islamic Conference is coming and the President is convinced that Senegal's international reputation is at stake. And so it has spent millions of dollars on making the place pretty, planting hundreds of palm trees, building bridges and tunnels, some of them useful, most of them just big. Stadiums are ripped down, and pavement-hawkers like these will, I am sure, in the next few days just disappear.



The city is changing by the hour. At 4pm, someone might call to warn me off one road into town as it has been shut to build a roundabout. At 7pm, I will be driving on that same roundabout. Pavements are laid on sand in an afternoon, buildings are quite literally going up overnight. Bridges are built with no barriers or lights. It is power gone mad, foreign aid and investment wasted in the most disgusting way possible.

As my taxi man, Sow, said as we drove by a new mural which will no doubt have fallen off in 3 weeks:

"I can't afford to take my children to the hospital but at least we have pretty murals."

I can't understand why they didn't start building the roads a year ago. You literally can't build Rome in a day, but Senegal is trying very hard to do so. In a year these buildings and bridges will be falling down and Dakar will be back where it started, except it will be a hell of a lot uglier.

Today I went down to the big shiny office which is taking care of the Islamic summit, due to take place in Dakar in one week. So far, only five Islamic heads of states are confirmed to attend. The Senegalese government has started closing petrol stations which lie on the airport road where the Arab presidents will travel; journalists surmise that threats have been made against the presidential cavalcades.

I have to have a police check for my press accreditation. All ten fingerprints must be taken, tomorrow morning. But I am out of town tomorrow morning, and I went down to the office, for the second time today, with a heavy heart.

I explained the situation, that I am all alone in the office and I can not come tomorrow to be fingerprinted. Is there any way around the problem?

"No."

I talk a bit longer, and the lady I am talking at turns away from me and makes a phone call, which has nothing to do with my situation. A junior-looking man pretends to pay me attention in her place, and he just shrugs and says there is nothing that can be done. If I am not in the office at 8 tomorrow morning, then I will not be able to cover the summit.

In walks a man I recognise. He is fat and smiling. I remember him from a press conference, more than a year ago. He had tried his best to chat to me, in that charming but slightly conniving Senegalese way which suggests it is much more than chatting. Luckily I didn't suck my teeth at him, a bad Senegalese habit I have picked up.

"I will sort everything out, don't worry," he said, smiling through a sandwich. "I'll take care of it."

With that, I handed him my phone number, office and mobile.