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.
