It's been a really long time since I saw my friend Now, who since selling his small shop in Dakar has moved back to home turf in Casamance. In the end he came up against all sorts of problems in Dakar- mostly spiteful rich neighbours wanting to make life difficult for him- and unable to make even basic ends meet, he moved to Bounkeling, a small town without electricity 200 kilometres north of Ziguinchor.

After spending three months in his home village- 25 kilometres from Bounkeling along a narrow sand track through the forest- vowing not to go back to commerce, he started to see business opportunities unfolding before him. Around his village are hundreds of farmers growing lemons, chillies, baobab fruit and rice, bountiful crops flourishing in the immensely fertile soil. Most of it goes to feed the families that grow it, some of it makes it to the weekly Sunday market in Bounkeling for trade between villages but hardly any of it goes further than that. While Dakar imports rice and onions from Thailand and Holland, Casamance remains largely cut off from trade because people want to eat 'exotic' imported food, not the boring stuff that comes from their own land.

Loading his capital- from the sale of the shop- into children's plastic sandals in Dakar, Now set off to make a small profit on it. He went to villages when he heard there was a Joola circumcision party going on and set up a stall, laying a mattress down at night to sleep and lighting a torch above the stall to keep thieves away. When he made a profit on that, he rented a small shop, a couple of rooms in a big empty house and procured a table in the market.

On Sundays he goes to the weekly market to buy onions, stock cubes, tomato paste and mustard (the mainstays of Senegalese cuisine) in bulk and then on hot afternoons on his porch he spoons everything into neat 25 franc plastic bags, twisting the bags into a knot around his thumb to close them, to sell during the week. His wit and charm means he has outstripped his competitor, a grumpy old man who sits at his table opposite, devoid now of customers. Women and girls flock to his table in the morning, and he greets them in Fula, Wolof, French, Mandinka or English, depending on which side of the Gambia border they have come from, giving them each a special name. The girls giggle as they toss onions into their shopping buckets and the women bring him presents of rice or fish as he enquires after the families back at the house. He's a natural-born salesman but he doesn't much care about the money side of it, it's the people who make him happy.

During the evenings where we lay a mat out on the porch, we talked a lot about our time in Dakar and the last couple of years which were difficult for us both, in different ways. He said when when Julia, Cecilia, Naomi and I one by one went off to other parts of the world, he felt like he was stuck in a bottle. He was working all hours of the day and night but not making enough to eat, which explains the constant illnesses. Also he didn't have anyone to share his different way of thinking with; no one appreciated the small garden we had set up and the neighbours, rich Senegalese and French, felt him a nuisance and did all they could to make him leave. Even though he kept the street clean, sold them packets of Malboro and provided a place to keep out of trouble for for the dozens of Fulas - most of them with failed farms behind them- who trekked in from Casamance and Guinea in the hope of finding work, they didn't like his shop, or his success, and made life impossible for him. In the end, he just wanted to sell the shop and never think about commerce again.

On Wednesday we borrowed a motorbike and went to visit his wife and kids in his father's village. We passed through fields of citrus fruits, wide swathes of forest where only the sound of a bell told us that there were cowheards nearby, and under grand baobab trees with their jewelry-like fruits hanging, silhouetted against the setting sun.

"Look at all this forest," said Now as he navigated the sandy track, making do without second gear which had failed just as soon as we left Bounkeling.

"People could farm here, there is nothing from here to the Gambia border and the forest belongs to no one. But people don't want to do anything with it."

As we brushed the hedges crowding on either side of the track, and I thought from time to time about MFDC rebels who might, or might not, be hiding out in wait for a profitable loot, the smell of lemon, thyme and chamomile thickened the air.

"You should write a story about the rocks," said Now, as the bike shuddered over yet another set of small boulders. "That's why I wanted to bring you here, because I know you will be able to write something about it."

This week I went shopping for underwear. It's the first time I have braved buying knickers in Senegal, but I thought it would be an interesting social experiment. I am still in research to find out where the latest national phrase has come from, 'salagne salagne', a word used by Youssou N'Dour in a song of the same name, so it seemed like a good part of the hunt.

One of the teenagers I hung out with last week said it was the phrase used for a woman 'who knew what to do to keep her man', and another (a man) said it could also be used for men, who should also try to do all they can to keep their woman. It is about wearing the right lingerie, having the appropriate number of bin-bin (waist beads) and burning the right kind of incense in the bedroom. But the phrase has also become a description for anything vaguely sexy, so when a woman wobbles down the street, men watching her disappear can be heard to mutter 'salagne salagne' as she goes and if a pair of sunglasses is adorned with diamante studs, 'salagne salagne' also fits. In a world where glitter = beauty, 'salagne salagne' can be heard at the moment just about everywhere.

At Sandaga market I entered one of the stall selling knickers. I wasn't prepared for a man to be doing the selling but it seems women sell bras, men sell pants.

"Oui Madame?" the stall-holder said as I entered a forest of dangling g-strings. "What do you want?"
"I just want to look," I said shyly as I leafed through a stack of nylon knickers.
"But do you want knickers," he said, holding up a massive pair of grey cotton briefs, "or do you want 'salagne salagne'?" He waved a tiny triangle of diamante-studded string in my face. I backed away.

At the next stall it was the same story. There's salagne salagne and there's something my granny might wear. What if I wanted salagne salagne but in my size? I searched for an hour through the market, men lining up along each side of the narrow alleyways which cut through the wobbly wooden shacks, hissing at anyone coming through and holding up the item of clothing they think might suit. I was offered stretchy nylon tops with incomprehensible slogans across the chest in numerous colours but always the same size: tiny size. Stretchy jeans too, but all for skinny girls. Where, I asked myself, are the clothes for the much-adored larger woman?

At HLM market the next day I found my answer.

"Hips," said the men whose stall I had stopped at. He fingered a pair of shorts, like the super-knickers which are meant to hold you in and make you smaller. But these had been pimped. They had foam padding all around them, and on the hips, extra layers of padding. My friend A., quite slim, asked the man if they were meant for people like her.

"Yes," he said, "for people with no bottom. But also for people like your friend," he said pointing to my hips.
"Even me?" I asked?
"Yes!" he said. "Even big girls like you."

That evening A. and I went to dinner with Omar and his family. We told his wife about our find. She roared with laughter and Omar looked horrified.

"Women trick men," he said, shaking his head. "They pretend they have more than they really do and the man is deceived."

What did Omar think about making your bum bigger to attract a man, we asked.

"It's not natural," he said. Breasts, bum, a woman should just be herself.

"Hello?"
"Bonjour Fatou," says the voice at the other end of the phone.
"Sorry, you've got the wrong number," I say to the man.

I hang up. A second later, the phone rings again. I ignore it. The fourth time it rings, I pick it up.

"Hello?"
"Excuse me, I know I've got the wrong number, but I wonder if you would allow me to get to know you..."
"What does that mean?" I ask, stunned.
"I said," he said. "I want to get to know you."
"No thanks, bye bye."

Though I hear that this- ringing a random number and hoping to get a girl or guy on the other end- is quite a popular, and successful, way of getting a spouse.

Having decided to give up smoking, I find myself tonight unable to sleep. It's not too late to pop out to see Souleymane Faye play his second set but since I'm in my pyjamas I decided I'd sit down instead and try to make headway again with the book I have wanted to write for about the last eight years. Staring at the blank page, unable now to sleep or write, I am reminded by this photo (of Baaba Maal's guitarists) of where this whole thing started.

At the end of 2001 I came to Dakar to write my dissertation about religion and Senegalese pop music and got it into my head that I could interview Baaba Maal, the musician I most admired, not just for his startlingly crystal voice and his moving, spiritually-infused lyrics, but also for his dedication to social and developmental issues. Through a contact in London I got the phone number of his manager in Dakar and when I arrived, terrified and unable to communicate with anyone, I tried giving him a ring. Of course I could interview him, the guy said, tomorrow would be fine.

Such was my naivety then that I thought it was really going to happen. What ensued was a month that touched me so deeply that Senegal became my life but the one thing that didn't happen was my interview with Baaba Maal. Desperate, I set off for Podor when I heard he had gone to his home town, and even slept the night in his brother's guesthouse, sad to find out that he had gone on to Matam, too far for me to go in the few days of my trip that remained. I didn't care all that much, because I had no schedule and no deadline to fulfil and anyway, by then I knew that one day I would meet my musical hero and ask him all the questions I wanted.

Since then I have managed to scrape a living through music journalism and I've had the opportunity to meet Baaba on many occasions. A couple of years ago he asked me why I had never interviewed him, but I said nothing. Last year I was commissioned a piece on him by a magazine but months of ringing various people came to nothing: it seemed it was never meant to be.

I still admire him, more now for his truly honest way of speaking about the things that many in and around Africa are afraid to broach, but I think the days for an interview are well and truly gone. Someone once suggested I write a book entitled 'How I Never Met Baaba Maal' and all the amazing people I met in the meantime. Sitting here at two in the morning, a blank page once again open infront of me, it doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

I have been reading, or re-reading- because it's one of those books that one reads so much about that I can't remember if I ever read it-, Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. Amongst other timeless perceptions and descriptions of attitudes in Africa, I particularly loved this:

(Marlow, having reached the Congo, sets off on foot to meet his steam boat that will eventually take him up the River Congo.)

'Next day I left the station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for a two-hundred-mile tramp. No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths, everywhere; a stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a solitude, nobody, not a hut.

The population had cleared out a long time ago. Well if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would be empty very soon."

My father used to work in the docks at Gravesend so it's a particularly amusing image to me. I also like his descriptions of being under the weather a lot of the time, calling it "the playful paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more serious onslaught which came in due course."

This morning, serious procrastination while oranges fall from the tree outside my window.

Last night I saw the new generation of African music, and it doesn't look too much like any other kind of pop, though with its own special Senegalese twist. Rousing anthems, screaming girls, a young guitarist who can play like any of the greats and a frontman with so much presence on stage that it was hard to take your eyes off him, even for all three hours of the concert.

Carlou D makes primarily spiritual pop music but some of his songs, to those who don't understand the language and cultural references, sound like classic Bon Jovi rock anthems. As he sang a duet with the soul singer of the group Daara J Family, I could, for the first time since I've been here, see the future of Senegalese music and imagine that it won't be too long before this stuff is a regular sound on international radio. What a nice feeling to know that other people might, after all this time, also recognise the value in what you love.

I've had a lot of time in the last couple of weeks to think over my years spent living here. I've met up with Senegalese friends I haven't seen in a couple of years, people I fell out with when I was wrought with exhaustion but couldn't get them to see my point of view or lend any sympathy, people who I felt were critical of me and the way I dealt with things here, and hence I let drop. I can see it from their point of view now- that I didn't need to fight every single little thing- but I'm also not sure if I could have lived it any other way. I like to throw myself headfirst into things and defend my values, sometimes regardless of who I might offend. I can see now that there was an easier way of doing things but I was too deeply mired in my own personal issues to recognise it.

I've been accused of being negative about Senegal and as a guest in this country, I suppose my criticisms should have been kept to myself. I know lots of people who have lived here years and not ever taken a bus or paid a water bill themselves. I know lots of Senegalese who avoid that chore, for the simple fact that the bureaucracy involved is soul-sapping. I suppose I should have tried to avoid it too or at least, not whined on about it afterwards. At the same time, since I've been working as a journalist I don't think I've written one story about war or famine but have tried to present the positive side of west Africa. But as a tourist said to me last night, it's just not easy to do things here, and I suppose to be able to write about all the good things, I had to process the difficult things too.

I expect the people who got sick of me complaining about Senegal have long ago given up reading my blog, in which case I am preaching to the converted. But as someone who feels very Senegalese at times, who has spent a third of her life living here, and who loves the country from its extraordinary hill-top monument down to the red beetles that come out when it's about to rain, I feel I need to assert my point. I've had a couple of tough years here and probably said too much about it, but this is a home for me and I'll try to keep writing good stuff about it as long as there's good stuff to write about. Last night's gig was a perfect microcosm of all the great things about this place.

I have known the waiter at Cafe L. so long now that I can no longer ask his name; it is shameful that I didn't get to know it when it became obvious that I was going to become a regular, more than eight years ago. He is always pleased to see me, and grins a stained-toothed smile when he sees me across the spluttering coffee machine. I haven't had to order my breakfast there for a long while, since he always brings me what I want as soon as I sit down.

On Sunday, I chose a blue formica table and sat down with a book, happy to have an hour to myself. An old Senegalese man in a khaki safari suit, short sleeves, sat down next to me and asked for an espresso and two croissants. The croissants steamed in their wire basket. When I asked for one too, he passed the basket my way, shaking it so that crumbs fell to the floor between our tables.

"Please-please," shake-shake, "it's an offer of the heart," he said.

The croissant was crisp, the inside seductively warm on the fingertips.

My neighbour left and I asked the waiter who he was.

"Ah, this man is a real Dakarois , I've known him since I was a boy. He was born in the house across the road."

We both peered out the window and past the air-conditioning units which spat water down the side of the decaying building.

"I've worked here for 22 years," he went on. "It used to be owned by the father, now it belongs to the daughter. They are my family now."

Looking out the window, I could see the balcony of my old apartment. The shutters were up, someone at home.

"They say, when you come to Senegal, you'll never be able to leave," he said when I told him there was someone else now living in my apartment.

"If you understand our customs, you'll understand why."

It's been ages since I went to Ngor island, and after what turned out to be a hard week's work, I was happy to get back there. The sky was a wonderful kind of patchwork and the light soft; after a week of hard sandy skies, the air felt warm and gentle.

A., a young Senegalese friend, saw me about to swim back across from the island. He asked, with his nervous stutter, if he could come too. He went into a shack on the beach and pulled on a faded pink rash guard, then set off, leading me through the rocks.

A. is a fisherman, and lives in Ngor village, a tightly-packed mound of houses on the edge of the Dakar peninsular. He grew up swimming and fishing with his father and probably never went to school. He can swim the 700 metres across from the island in a matter of minutes, whereas it takes me 20. As I pulled my weary body through the water, A. dove down to the sea bottom to have a look around. Needless to say he doesn't wear goggles.

My tour group arrived today and I took them for a wander to the beach. The town was deserted after the festival yesterday and I was enjoying ferrying them around town without attracting much notice.

At the beach we all took off our shoes to paddle. When we came to leave, D. noticed that his shoes were missing. My god, I thought, this doesn't look good.

A man with dreadlocks approached, talking wildly.

"We don't have thieves here," he shouted, waving his arms, then walked to a prickly bush on the edge of the beach and retrieved D.'s shoes.

"That guy took his shoes and hid them there. It's not right."

I'm not quite sure who stole D.'s shoes but he got them back. D. seemed to find it amusing.

J., a good source of amusing stories (but some of which I can't blog about), told me a story yesterday about her search for a Paris apartment. Many property-owners won't consider her because she doesn't have a permanent job contract and she has a dog.

Last week she spoke to one apartment-owner who asked her about her unusual surname, which she took when she married her Senegalese husband. "She said she'd ring me back," J. said, "but she never did."

Of the many surprising things to happen in the States was the frequency with which we went through time zones. We had been warned of it, but it wasn't as simple as passing a state line and going back an hour: in some states, Native American lands keep to one time zone whilst the rest of the state keeps to another, so we would pass in and out of zones, not ever quite knowing what the time was. Often we found ourselves turning up in a place and finding we had an extra hour before things shut, and sometimes we arrived and were noisily putting up the tent when we found out it was 11pm and everyone was asleep. In the end we ceased to be fazed by it; we were mostly keeping to the time as dictated by the sun, so it didn't really matter what time the clock said.

Driving into Utah, having had an inspiring conversation with a Navajo man about his ranching on the family corral just above the Grand Canyon, I was struck with the feeling, again, that I was putting my energy into the wrong kinds of work and should get on with writing. All of a sudden, the skies darkened and it started to rain, large, heavy drops. Just beneath the red cliffs to the side of the road and stretched above a small white house, a complete rainbow appeared.

It's been 4000 miles since my last post, and H. and I have crossed America. From Nashville to San Francisco, the journey was populated by beautiful people and extraordinary lives. Some of the stories I heard I am getting around to writing down, though at the moment most people's words lie hidden in my notebook.

One of the things that made our trip special was our accompanying guide book, Roadfood, by a couple called Stern. Without it we would have missed out on some of the best food made by the most interesting people. The book is filled with loving overtures to odd barbeque joints, diners, tamale shops and cafes across the country, usually in towns where we would otherwise not have bothered to stop.

One of our big, and perhaps predictable, mistakes was to underestimate the size of everything, from the size of cups to the size of towns to the size of the country. What was an inch on the kitchen table in Clapham turned out to be a day's drive, something we found out on day one and which I carried with me as a mild panic until we were within spitting distance of the Pacific two weeks later. But the journey was often broken by a meal in one of Stern's joints, and something I always looked forward to as the miles ticked flatly by.

In El Paso, western Texas, we stopped at the H and H Carwash Cafe, a large forecourt with a small shop at the back. A man sat in a tall chair, almost like a throne, outside, waiting for customers to pull up for a boot shine. Mexicans and the (American) owner of the joint busied around the Sheriff's patrol car, wiping down the glossy black and white body, and we were shown inside the cafe at the back for a late lunch. The heat was stifling.

At the formica counter we cased the joint. A young security guard sat to one side eating quesadillas, and at one of the tables, two ladies chatted over plates of stew. An old Mexican woman asked us in Spanish what we wanted, and we ordered burritos stuffed with chorizo and omelette and tender beef, stew without the liquid. We enquired about the salsa that Sterns had described in the book with such enthusiasm, and were given a pot of it, green, zesty and dangerous, along with a basket of tortillas that the cook cut and fried, sprinkling with salt and serving with a shy smile as she set it down.

"Mexicans are wonderful people," said Mr H., whose father had opened the carwash in 1958 when he was just 12. "Many people have tried to poach my cook, and have offered her more money than I can. But she refuses to leave, she doesn't care about money, she just wants to be comfortable."

New York's taxi drivers are a wealth of information on the immigrant life in America. A handsome young Pakistani driver asked me if I liked cricket, and we talked about the 20-20 World Cup all the way to the West Village. Another was Senegalese and naturally we broke into Wolof, which made us both happy. It was lovely to hear and say those words out loud.

Yesterday I had one from Liberia. He was young too, and had four children, the youngest being three years old.

"I have sent them to school in Africa so they can learn to be African," he said. "I want them to grow up with a sense of African identity, to speak my language, to know how to interact with people and be a part of a community. I want them to know about discipline."

His mother in law brings them up in Conakry, and they go to a Canadian school there. The American school was going to cost $4000 a year for each child, but the Canadian one is cheaper. When they have finished with school, then they can come to America and do what they like.

"Americans spend their time teaching their dogs to sit, but they can not get their children to listen to them."

For fifteen months, more than a thousand of Paris' illegal immigrants have been squatting wherever they can, staging a mass sit-in on pavements and in buildings around the city. They are demanding one thing: the regularisation of their papers.

Having been evicted by baton-wielding police from their last place near the Republique, they moved to an empty insurance company headquarters in the 18th, a neighbourhood described aptly by a friend as 'Africa headquarters'. It is probably the only place in the world you can find a shop selling music from Guinea Bissau next to a Congolese barber next to a shop selling calabash and kola nut from Mali.

Inside the building, 1300 west Africans sit day-in, day-out while the government tries to evict them. Far from the destitute conditions in which they live, they keep up the appearance of being high-spirited, enjoying card games and the tea-ceremony which passes time so well. There are three meals a day, and everyone is friendly, happy to be together.

But in every dark corner, there is someone sorting papers, trying to get enough evidence together to show they he has been in the country for six or eight years, even if illegally. A bill from a department store from May 2003, a Metro card from July 2001, a receipt for a telephone bought in 2007. If he is lucky, very lucky, he will be able to pass the rigorous tests that illegal immigrants have to go through to become legal.

I asked one man if it was better to live in this squat, knowing he could get arrested, jailed and deported any time he goes out, than living in Mali as a legal citizen. "Yes," he said. "Because at least while I am here there is a chance I will get my papers. Then I can work." And what would he do once he got his papers and a bit of work?

"Go back to Mali."

"I saw you this morning; I said to myself, that girl there is not from around here, she doesn't know where she is going. Do you want to come now and have a glass of bissap at my mother's restaurant? It's very nice, and you can try an African dish."

After a long afternoon at the illegal immigration sit-in in Paris I went for a stoll around the 18th district, Chateau Rouge and along Rue des Poissoniers. I wanted to see migrants living in the outside world, on the Paris streets, perhaps offer myself some sense of hope that those who live underground will one day become part of those who live above ground. But all I saw were swathes of Africans swarming around the Chinese and Arabs earnestly selling fish and herbs and plantain, and groups of armed police wandering amongst them, sticking out as much as I was. The till at the KFC at Chateau Rouge was ten-deep with west Africans, and the tables were littered with chicken bones, and everything was sweaty. It was like being in Lagos- the chaos and shouting. It felt so odd to look up at the attractive French buildings high above the cacophony of the streets and remember that we were in France.

At a wig shop I watched women with skin burned pink by bleaching creams come in and demand this wig and that hair-piece, the one with the purple underneath and the tight-cropped blonde one. I unthinkingly told one woman that the wig she was trying on suited her, though it wasn't true- I was just trying to fit in. The manequins modeling the wigs did not seem very black, even though I was the only white person I saw- except for the police- the entire time I was there.

It's been a long time since I spent any time in Elephant and Castle, a largely migrant area in south-east London, but I have rented a small desk space in an office in a cobbled street full of photographers and artists, and am now back there more often. M. also lives near there, and to celebrate being back in that area we met one evening and went the the Afghan restaurant around the corner for dinner.

M. knows everyone, because she is the kind of person who talks to people and isn't afraid of sticking out. She has been out of England a long time, which might explain it, and I like to think that I feel an affinity with her because of this. At the curry shop, all the men working there greeted her warmly as we both ordered spicy lamb curry, paratha bread and cauliflower and peas. I enjoyed eating with my hands, and helping myself to water from a jug kept in the drinks fridge. The toilet out the back was disgusting, but added to the sense that I was in a foreign land.

Perhaps I will feel more at home -or away from home- when I am living back in that area and am once more a minority.

Sorry sorry-o

A day on the English transport system nearly broke me. Somehow I expected that people who have little in the way of external concerns would be more polite in their bustling from one place to the next. Being trampled on by a woman carrying a baby on her back and a pile of cloth on her head, while she hitches her skirt to clamber across a swampy riverbank and onto a ferry which may or may not sink seems reasonable. Being trampled on by someone in a race to get onto an air-conditioned train with seating for everyone, when there is another in five minutes, does not.

Of course, life here isn't all that easy, even though it appears to be so. Life is hectic, expensive, and everyone is full of inward concerns (Am I happy? Am I fat? Am I earning enough?) that don't always exist in a place where more pressing concerns (Will this ferry sink?) do. Life here is just as hard as life elsewhere, just in a different way.

While I swayed about on the underground wishing I was anywhere else, I listened to Femi Kuti's 'Sorry Sorry' to remind me of people with different concerns. Friends in Lagos told me this week that they hadn't had electricity for days now and that they can't afford to fill the generator because petrol, in this oil-producing wealthy country, is now rationed. The batteries on their Blackberrys are flat as a result. When Femi played this song live at the opening of Big Brother Nigeria, the press damned him the next day in the papers, saying, 'why does he have to wash our dirty laundry in public?' It seems to me that if people like Femi and his father, Fela, weren't risking their careers and lives to wash Nigeria's dirty linen in public, then people would be even worse off.

Look my friends,
Them no like to hear word
They will follow follow, follow their enemies
Like zombie, they'll go march dey go.
They fight for other people
Wey spoil Nigeria so
These politicians and soldiers
They be one and the same
No one different from the other
My people don't want to know.
But with these kind of leaders
Africa no get hope,
Africans will suffer
We go suffer reach our bone

I'm sorry sorry o, I'm sorry for Nigeria,
I'm sorry sorry o, I'm sorry for Africa.
I'm sorry sorry o, I'm sorry for Nigeria,
I'm sorry sorry o, I'm sorry for Africa

Supermarket observations

Against blustering winds and bursts of rain dotted with rays of sunshine, I made my way to the supermarket. Discovering that my cycle panniers fitted neatly onto the side of the trolley, I had time in the queue to look around while others piled on and off their purchases.

The man infront of me wore earphones, though from the flat look on his grey, aged face, it seemed as if he wasn't listening to anything, rather, blocking out any sound from outside. He wore an anorak over his creased linen jacket, and comfortable-looking leather shoes. He did not greet the man at the till, just asked for a bag and waited to load his shopping.

He bought two red apples, a small block of Sainsbury's cheddar, one tomato, and two of slices of ham. The teller passed the tomato to him as if it were a newly-born kitten. The unsmiling man did not say thankyou, and walked away.

Behind me were a young couple who jostled over who would carry the shopping. She unfolded a shopping bag and he said he could fit everything into his rucksack. They bought 40 plastic coat-hangers, kitchen roll and two bottles of fruit squash, the makings of a newly-acquired home. She, wearing a silk blouse and looking at her boyfriend adoringly, had an infectious giggle. After the sadness of the man's tomato, it was quite warming.

Yapping at the Jazz Cafe

Photo from: www.netzpolitik.de


Seun Kuti, son of the great Fela Anikulapo Kuti, is a funny chap. At Monday night's gig at the Jazz Cafe, he spoke about something I wrote about in an earlier post : these blessed MP's expenses.

“Your MPs, man, what’s going on? You people are insulting this man because he stole £400, £1000, £200, £6000. What? What? You got it good man, you got it good. I’m sure the Nigerians are just watching the news laughing, ha ha ha, look at that guy, he stole the amount of money I use to fill the fuel in my car, ha ha ha. Oh, look at that guy, he is arrested because of money I sent my son to travel with for holidays, ha ha ha. You know, if you guys attack your MPs like this, they will just become sneakier, and they will steal more. So just let them take their £400, £600, before it comes to £6 million, £20 million. Just allow them to take their £200, the £100. Just forget about this, they uncool man."

Musical interlude of brass cacophony and the nagging, frenetic afrobeat which Seun's father created. So many saxophones on stage that it was hard to know who was playing what. The whole room was sweating, and the 13 band members on stage, playing their long, repetitive, trance-like beats, basses and melodies, exuded concentration as they drove the song on.

Seun may not have created anything new with his kind of Afrobeat, but he knows how to yap, as they say in Nigeria, do someone down, just as well as his father did:

"Before I continue, I have to tell you the secret behind the credit crunch. You'll be hearing it's the bank, the housing, it's all lies. Listen to the truth; they are all lies, all those stories you hear on CNN. The truth is this: the world's decided to start arresting African rulers who carry their money abroad. So for protest, they all decided to take their money back to Africa and hide it in their house. So now, all the dollars and pounds and euros, they're in their house. They are refusing to spend it or take it abroad because they now arrest them. That is the secret of the credit crunch. Just wait, they will hold a new meeting with IMF in two months' time, they will sort it out, they will bring the money back and everything will be fine. The money is in houses in Nigeria, precisely in Nigeria, point, right there. So just relax, it's coming back, I know the meeting is going on right now."

If you want to hear a recording of the track, you can download a zip file here

An old man with a thick scar zigging across his bald head sat on a bench in the fine rain eating an ice cream.

"How far you going, young lady?" he asked, as I packed my tent and paniers on to my bicycle.

He started to give me his life story. Before and after school- he left school when he was 14- he worked on farm land on what is now a forest belonging to the forestry commission. He was born in Walberswick and lived there all his life. A few years ago his car was hit by an oil tanker and they thought he would die. He survived, but his wife left him and wouldn't let him see his three children. He claims incapacity benefit- because the knock to the head obviously made him a little what the English like to call 'special'- and then his house burnt down. But life, he said cheerfully as I tried to protect my sleeping bag from the drizzle, has never been better because he lives on his own and can do what he likes. He got a new thatch roof on the insurance, too.

It was a magical weekend of sleeping in the sand dunes and waking to the perfectly wide and calm sea. We played cricket with some local boys on their stag weekend, using two burnt sausages as the bails, while the summer solstice sun lit us late into the night. We bundled firewood in the forest, strapped it to the bikes and cycled through the narrow lanes knocking into trees as we went. We ate Sandwich Spread sandwiches on Southwold pier and drank red wine from tooth mugs. We ate chips and drank Adnams in a pub while the rain came down, and had cream tea in a garden full of poppies and lavender. Back at Liverpool Street station, someone had put a piano on the pavement. As the perfect end to the weekend, H. sat down and played.

Late last night, while I was negotiating the London underground filled with eastern Europeans and African shift workers, a +221 call buzzed on my phone.

"Hello?" I said.
"'Allo. C'est qui?" asked the caller, a classic Senegalese way of making a phone call.
"Who are you?" I asked back.
"I'm looking for Rose. Rose Mbaye. She's a Senegalese. Are you a Senegalese?"

His squeaky voice made me think it was a friend playing a trick on me. While people rushed around me, I stood in the ticket office and giggled at this ridiculous conversation, enjoying it for its unique west African flavour. The guy eventually hung up. A complete, random mystery that in the cold light of a London Sunday night, was ultimately cheering.

In the UK, in the wake of swine flu no-story, a number of British MPs were discovered to have been claiming from the UK tax payer things like moat-cleaning expenses and for mortgages that they had already paid off. The Prime Minister claimed rather too much for two toilet seats and someone else claimed a large amount for some light bulbs to be fitted.

The press, who paid for the information from a civil servant leak, are horrified. I am indifferent, because my bench-mark for things like police brutality and government corruption is low. Clive James in 'A Point of View' put it rather well:

"In liberal democratic societies, where the free market is regulated by government, there is a limit to corruption. What we are all being asked to be amazed at right now, is that there is such a thing as human dishonesty, but really we should be amazed by how it is being kept in bounds. In countries where no bounds are set, and corruption remains unchecked, hardly anyone can afford to be honest. The terrible truth is that the full force of corruption is doing its dirty work even among us. We, however, have the luxury of being able to call it crime, not politics. The apparent scam of MP's expenses looks bad but the fact that it looks bad is the very thing that makes it not so bad. The outrage that we are encouraged to feel means that we live in a country where corruption is not the norm. If it were, some members on the front bench would be laughing at us right now, not sweating."

Though I nearly expired from a hang-over yesterday, D. had the very good idea of going to the park with a picnic. It was a blazing hot day, and the park was filled with people playing frisbee and football. I fell asleep to the calming sound of conversation from the Romanians near to us, and was awoken by the sound of young Romans squealing over a volleyball game. The park, once belonging to a Roman aristocrat but now turned over to the city, had some beautiful buildings in it which look over the city down below, very red in the late afternoon sun.

The light in the streets of Trastevere at night is almost infra-red, tight alleyways lit by strong overhead lights. The piazzas are full of cautious English tourists with a finger in a guide book, and Romanians and Sri Lankans selling fluorescent whizzing toys. Everyone else noisily eats ice cream and celebrates being in a city where life is warm even at 10pm.

D.'s street is quiet, just wide enough for a small car to pass and has that strange Trastevere feeling of ancient medieval civilisation and 21st century social grit, graffiti over almost every carefully-laid wall. At the end of the street is a small high-up shrine to the Virgin Mary, where a candle flickers day and night.

Rome, a city where everything looks quite perfect but, on closer look, isn't quite, but is stunning all the same. This old pomegranate sitting in D.'s fruit bowl seemed to have aged beautifully.

Incredibly, after a week of hail and rain, the morning I left Scotland, the skies cleared and the water became still, like a mill pond.

C. and A. are neighbours, living in a remote stone house almost an hour's drive away from us. The house, which was once a school, is hidden high up on the hill and has views sweeping down the slopes and onto the sea, out to the Treshnish Islands beyond. The day we visited, there was little in view from the kitchen doors as rain and fog had obscured much of the heather-covered hills.

Tea seemed more of a formality, served up in a metal teapot alongside a lovely Victoria Sponge. Soon after we had finished out first cup, A. started rootling around in the fridge for tonic, coming back with some large drinks, the ice tinkling in the glasses. We discussed my recent parasite- A. is a parasitologist-, love, the state of the roads and the wind. The wind features heavy on the agenda in Mull, especially in this old school house, stranded alone on the hill with nothing to protect it from the raging gales that blow in from the Atlantic.

On leaving, C. offered us some eggs laid on Saturday by the golden chickens that pecked in and amongst the thick heather of their garden.

"We're selling them in the kiosk now," she said proudly, and led us to a small shed sitting proudly beside the gravel driveway, though not near the single-track main road. Lowering the front shutter and putting right the sign that had fallen to the mud, we stepped inside to find eggs and cards for sale (honey to follow) and I thought, this is what Britain is missing. In Dakar, this would be known as a 'Diallo' shop, referring to the hard-working Fulanis (often named Diallo) who take over small boutiques and run them day and night, selling eggs, single cigarettes, hair-weave and toothpaste. In Bissau, it might be known as the 'Narr', referring to the Arab Mauritanians who seem to make such good shop-keepers, keeping tinned mackerel, peanuts, raw shea butter and soap powder for sale in tiny quantities in their tightly-packed shops. The boutique is the quintessential emblem of west Africa- for its readiness to face any eventuality, any time of the day or night, no planning required.

C. and I played shop-keeper for a while, pretending I was in Abidjan and selling "a-thie-ke chaud" to imaginary passers-by. C. said that the first day she opened shop, she came home to find three cards and six eggs gone and a £5 note in the honesty box.


*****




There was snow on Ben Moore, but we only saw it once or twice, when the cloud lifted just enough to be able to see the white-capped hill across the loch from the house. The week brought gusts of rain, gales and a hail storm, and three sheep camped out on the lawn and ate their way through the luscious grass that had shot up with all the water.

Last night, as we were eating dinner, a car pulled up into the drive, our first visitor in a week. It was M., the farmer from down the road with his dog Taff. He was looking for his sheep, which had just that afternoon moved off elsewhere. I invited him in for a drink; it was a lovely still evening and the wind bristling the loch had dropped so that the hills were reflected in the glassy waters infront of the house.

"Aye," he said, "I'll just find my sheep and then I'll be in."

He went to the cab of his red pick-up, pulled a ten-day old lamb from inside, and handed it to me along with a Sprite bottle filled with milk, and a long red teat.

"He'll be needin' feedin'" he said, and drove off to find his tups.

The lamb dragged on the teat, and drank the bottle of warm milk in just a few minutes. His wool was tight, warm white curls, and I could feel two hard horns just emerging beneath the black wool on his head. As I held him by the stomach, his umbilical cord, now hard and black, stuck like a tangled wire into my hand. His bursting, wriggling energy reminded me pleasantly of home, origins. It's been more than twenty years since I fed a lamb, but it served to remind me of my very happy childhood.

Sitting high up on the stands at Ibar Mar Diop Stadium in Dakar, a Senegalese won the long-jump competition and the Americans won most of the running races. We cracked peanuts, shivered in the shade, and I cheered the British competitors. AB said he could tell who they were because they seemed to always be at the back. The view of the Medina, buzzing with noise and energy, is one I will remember when I am back home.



At my favourite cafe in town, I had one farewell croissant and cafe au lait. For sale on the pavement outside the cafe, which I busily noted in my book as one of those useful pieces of information a writer sometimes has need for, was: phonecards, bathroom scales, an iron, Le Monde, sunglasses, calculator, coffee machine, head scarves, belts, door mats and an ab-stretcher.

In Senegal, when concerts or wrestling matches or any event where thousands of people are gathered in a tight space, come to an end, the place will empty in seconds. Patient people- not naturally disposed to hurrying- who have waited quietly for five hours to see one man throw the other down, or angry 20-somethings who have waited all evening for their rap group to come on stage, will suddenly be gripped by a fury to get out of the stadium, ignoring any encore or post-match activity, and will scatter chairs, climb over people, stampede: anything to be out of the stadium in seconds. Watching it, it's like someone pulls the bath plug and the whole world just drains away.

I've never understood it myself. J. and I were caught in a stampede at the stadium after one wrestling match, having sat all afternoon with the docile crowd who suddenly leapt to their feet and careered down the stands to push through the small exit door. In Ziguinchor, I asked T. what it was all about.

"We call it Se-tan," he said. "When the music is playing, Se-tan stands still and people are safe. But when it stops, he comes back again so people hurry home."

Se-tan. Satan. I get it.

A long morning of re-constructing my previous three months' writing and I felt I needed a long walk on the beach. Here and there, dotted along the wide white sandy stretch were the gnarled stumps of dead trees, twisted with fishing wire, blue and aquamarine ropes, a coat-hanger, someone's lost flip-flop. Some of the stumps were coated with greasy green seaweed that made them look like the hairy backs of deep-sea creatures. A lightbulb lay broken on the sand.

"What do you think of people who get annoyed quickly?" said A., one of the guesthouse's workers who had offered to accompany me on the long walk to the end of the island. As there was no one about, only a lonely fisherman straightening his nets, I had accepted A.'s offer of company, remembering what happened to Martha Gellhorn on a beach in Kenya. I didn't want to be raped in a place that had the illusion of being so cut off from the world that not even crime existed.

I wondered if A. was meaning me. I admit that things piss me off quickly and years of travel in slightly annoying places has done nothing to teach me that I always regret it afterwards; I am still the easiest person to annoy.

"Well," I said, trying to sound as cool as anything. "People are different all over the world. Some people store it up and let it out later, some people show their annoyance as it's happening." Was that a diplomatic response, I wondered hopefully.

"Yes but," went on A, starting to annoy me. "It's bad to get annoyed."

"Maybe," I said, singing to myself and looking out to sea, trying to block out the sound of his voice. "People are different."

"But you," he went on, really wanting a proper answer. "You're not like that. You're Seno-Gauloise now."

That did it. Dreadlocked ganja-smoking idiots in the centre of town accused me of being Seno-Gauloise, the supposedly flattering term that the Senegalese give to anyone who can say one word of Wolof and which means that you have transcended your Frenchness to become almost a Senegalese national. The jibe usually leads to an offer of some wood carving painted with black boot polish, and an accusation of being a racist if you don't give in and buy it. I usually respond by walking infront of a fast-moving taxi, hoping they will follow me and be run down.

I responded breathily to A. that I was neither Senegalese nor French.

"Yes but you're a toubab, and toubab is toubab." All whites are the same.

With no taxi in sight I raised my voice and said, "that pisses me off." We carried on our walk in silence and I wished, ashamed, that the sea would just go on and swallow me up.

There's nothing I loathe more than a wildlife bore. Animals more or less leave me cold, especially birds, but sailing up the Casamance River I was surprised by how lucky I felt to see dolphins, many of them in bouncing, leaping tribes, sailing alongside us.

I had it on good authority that in African cities from Abidjan to Kinshasa, Senegalese girls are famous for going all-out for their men. Clipping toe-nails, massaging, cooking and always being available, are female traits that I thought were common across west Africa, but, I am told, are particular to the Senegalese.

Yesterday I had lunch with A., a Senegalese male friend married to an exceedingly clever and feisty Senegalese woman. I began my sentence, "I hear that Senegalese women..." and he rolled his eyes and said, "yes, are mok-potch".


Mok-potch literally means "silky-thighs". She should be ready to attend to her man's every needs; sooth every ache and pain, cook anything he likes, look fabulous the whole time and of course be ready for whenever he feels like having sex.

I asked if it had anything to do with polygamy- the woman needing to be on her best behaviour to prevent him from looking elsewhere, but A. thinks not. "There are a lot of countries where polygamy is practised but the women are not mok-potch. Girls here are told from the moment they are born that this is what they must do, it's just the way our culture is."

The hot weather is here. The sea is a perfect blue, as is the sky.

Khadim Sarr, or 'Boy Sarr' as he is known amongst us wrestling fans (which I have become), threw Fifty Cent down in a sandy brawl which lasted less than a minute. Though Fifty Cent was the larger and uglier of the two, Boy Sarr was more technical and had him on his back in no time. The stadium erupted, the winning fans lighting fireworks amongst the dangerously packed crowd and spraying shreds of school exercise books like confetti into the wind, the losing crowd in tears, holding their heads in their hands and asking, 'why?'

The press area was full of radio journalists swanning around in fantastically-large and luxurious boubous. "You see these people?" my friend M. asked conspiratorially. "People pay them to say nice things. You don't see me wearing cloth like that, but then, I'm not a journalist."

It is the west African way to think that anyone who is doing well must be getting rich off bribes or government contracts. It is a way of belittling anyone's genuine efforts and successes, to bring them down to the level of his neighbour. In many cases it is true. But in most cases, I suspect, it is that people wear their best boubou to the event to cover up how much money they really have, for in this non-consumer society, money is still king.

Watching the mucky urchins on the beach playing in the sand, F. said that when he was growing up he was jealous of the boys playing in their pants while he had to stay home with his middle-classed parents and pursue middle-classed activities. All he wanted to do was play on the beach.

Yesterday I went to Yarakh, a poor fishing neighbourhood on the outskirts of Dakar to photograph boats. I dislike taking photos in Dakar; the Senegalese love to make a song and a dance about anything, especially taking photos, even if of inanimate objects that have no connection to themselves. But in Yarakh, far enough away from the city to feel like a village, people were jolly and welcoming and were happy to let me photograph their nets and boats. Driving back through ramshackle neighbourhoods where men sat on wobbly benches and chatted in the late afternoon sun, I had the strange and fleeting thought that foreign visitors with no idea what's going on seem to have, that people seemed to be happy and poor.

The sky was almost unnaturally blue today. After a long, draining week, I wasn't looking forward to going out to the suburbs, through the traffic which clogs Dakar's only artery, to talk with some rappers. But when I got there I was rewarded with a huge plate of rice and meat, eaten- just how I like it- from a dish on the floor surrounded by rowdy chatty men, and hard-working, efficient musicians who had done the work I asked them to. Sometimes, things are easier than you think they're going to be, and that feels good.

N. is a young waitress at a restaurant I often go to, either to eat their good food or to hang out at the bar and chat with the staff. I hadn't seen N. in a while, and when she came over to serve me, she chattily enquired after my 'cheri'. When I told her I didn't have one, she nearly dropped the plates, but when I offered that men were sometimes as complicated as women, she said,

"Rose, haven't you seen how thin I've got?"

I looked at her; she was a bit slimmer, it was true.

"I was married in November," she went on in explanation, "and I'm really happy, but men are really capricious, they just worry about their own heads and we have to worry about them too."

Her husband lives in France, but comes every three months or so to see her. Isn't it hard, I asked, him being so far away?

"No," she said emphatically. "Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy with him, but I prefer it like that."

M. asked me to come to the office. We would go together to a wrestling school to see more sparring and bulging masculinity. When I got there, the head of the wrestling school, one of the country's one-time biggest sporting stars, rang to say that they were putting up a tent for the election campaign in the school and there wouldn't be any training to watch today. Could he come to us?

As evening fell, he turned up with a shy 20 stone wrestler in tow. Modou, a hulking fella with cheeks bulging over his small eyes, is going to be one of the country's biggest sporting stars, get an interview with him while you can. I asked him about how he became a wrestler, but he didn't speak any French. He's earning 2000 pounds a match, but only gets to do about three a year. It's a tough business.

When the interview was finished, along with a wrestling demonstration from the old man who grappled at the legs of the younger star and threw him to the marble office floor, M. asked us to wait. The women in the cultural centre next door were taking a cooking class, and would we stay to taste the food, then give it marks out of ten. I was hungry, so I was pleased to assist. The wrestlers, probably always hungry (by the looks of them) agreed as well; we sat down to wait.

I huge girl, larger than the wrestler, came in bearing a shiny piece of fabric and a plastic rose, both of which she lay ceremoniously on the table. Next, the woman teaching the class came in and lay two plates of salad and breaded chicken on the table. Would we give marks for presentation and taste? No problem.

It is useful to know that Senegalese cooking, the non-rice kind, is basically formed of a few ingredients:

Onions, raw or half-cooked
Mustard
Maggi cube
Oil
Cold chips
Fish or chicken

Ten plates of burnt fish, cold chips and raw onion sauce swimming in oil passed beneath my nose. I tried all of them, and hope I was enthusiastic enough with my scoring. After all, it's not the students' fault that Senegalese cuisine is so desperately monotonous and uncreative. The wrestlers smacked their lips and dug in and I gave extra marks for one of the women who tried out using lemon in the salad dressing, an innovation in these parts.

As we ended the meal, and I gasped for fresh air to dilute the nauseous effects of oil in my stomach, M. offered the enormous girl to the wrestler as a wife. "She'll crush me," he said, "no thanks."

C. and I have been doing an article on Senegalese wrestling, which is the national pride and joy, and very beautiful to watch.

"To see two well-formed, well-trained men sparring, that's really something wonderful," said Pape, the wrestler who I followed through his training one day.

One hundred men gather each night on a sandy plot of land, wrap themselves in tight lycra pants and loin cloths, and work on their muscles. After group running and air-punching, they get into pairs and lock themselves together like sparring rams in spring. It is frightening: some of these guys weigh 20 stone (125 kilos) and they think nothing of knocking the other in the face if it means he will go down faster. But at the same time it is tender, they wrap themselves together as if they are cuddling. Afterwards, they sit curled up together on the sand watching the other sparring matches, and laugh.

One of my favourite organisations at the moment is The Author's Licensing and Collecting Society who once a year pay me relatively large sums of cash for having published my work in various magazines. It's a complete mystery to me how it works, since it doesn't include newspaper or inflight magazines, leaving very little else. I always forget about it until each March when an amount of money appears in my bank account and I move around with a spring in my step for a day knowing that I have just received a royalty cheque.

I read on their website today that they have £18 million collected for journals, books, articles and they can't find the writers. All you have to do is sign up and see what you are owed. There's no catch!

In 2006 I took part in the 5.6km swim to Goree Island, the first athletic achievement of my adult life. I didn't know her then but Penelope, who has become a good friend since, took these photos. That's roughly beginning, middle, and happy end. I'm the one in the silver swimming cap, slicing through the water like a bullet...

(I'm also the white one)

Utterly tangled by thoughts and ideas I left my hellish workspace and went to Goree Island. My mind was still in unproductive knots when a man approached me at the ferry terminal to tell me that the next boat wasn't for half an hour. It was Mamadou, the man who had been our most excellent guide last year when I led the Songlines tour, and who I needed to do some work for me this week. It was a stroke of luck, and a great pleasure to see a friendly face, someone I can be myself with and chat about interesting subjects.

Mamadou invited me to his house to drink the Senegalese tea that I dread. It is strong and vile, but it passes the time. His two rooms are in an old colonial house, the kitchen painted dusky blue, the living room a calming green. The sunlight, so strong on this sandy island, poured in through the door as Mamadou boiled and poured the mixture at a hypnotic pace.

Mamadou is a nervous man, shy perhaps, and reserved. He asks few personal questions but is pleasingly relaxed and forgoes the interminable inanities which can dominate polite conversation, and which with some people you never break through. He told me how he had met an African-American in 1994 who had paid for him to learn English at the American Culture Centre in Dakar. He went there twice a week for three years, hence his excellent English, and now he scrapes by working as a guide.

"Some people in this world are very kind," he said and showed me the letter from his friend typed on headed paper, along with a copy of the cheque which had been sent to the centre to pay for his lessons.

I met a friend for lunch yesterday.

"You are a very surprising woman," he said.

I like this friend a lot, but we are not close enough that he really knows the ins and outs of my life. I certainly put on my best face for the brief lunches we sneak on the odd week-day afternoon.

"I wonder where you will be in five years' time," he went on. "I wouldn't be surprised to hear you were married with two children, nor to hear that you were still a bachelor and traveling around Africa. In fact, I'm surprised you always look so well," he said. "If I lived your life, I would cry a lot."

It's funny what we allow our friends and acquaintances to see of ourselves and our lives. What you see is almost never what's underneath.

Sweltering heat, Saturday afternoon. We invite ourselves over to Y's house and while she goes out, we feed and water ourselves from her generous kitchen, and then we swim all afternoon. Late in the afternoon, the sun dips and B. dips her feet into the pool water, while I admire her Josephine Baker plaits.



Two days later, the same group of friends are helping me to celebrate my birthday, champagne and live music and wild Nigerian dancing. A hulk of a man enters the room where we are all partying, wide and tall, with a young, quivering face and teary eyes.

"Eh! What happened to you?" someone asks?

"I lost my wife and son," he replies, and explains that they were driving home from church when a Lebanese man in a four-wheel drive smashed into the side of their car. His wife died instantly, another boy who was also in the car soon after and his son an hour later. His face is so tender that I can hardly bear to look at him.

The rest of the people in the room start to interrogate him, presumably it will help him to vent his pain. "What were her injuries?" "Was she driving fast?" "Where is the Lebanese man?" To their horror, he answers that the police came for the man, but that later he asked for them to let him go.

"It will not bring her back," he says, though the room protests, saying it is not up to him to decide justice.

On my last day in Kano, with an hour to go before the cloth market opened, Abdsallaam took me to the zoo. He had only been once before, years ago when he was 'trying to waste some time'. "Funny," he said, "because that is what we are doing now, wasting the time."

The only other people at the zoo, a desolate dustbowl containing ten different kinds of hyena, a lion with a purple and green lizard sunning itself on its back and a baby giraffe, were a hijab-wearing woman studiously writing down the name of every animal she saw in a notebook, and a group of child-disciples to a religious teacher. The children were bare-footed, wore rags and had scabs on their shaved heads. They stared at me as much as they stared at the animals, peering vacantly into the python's pen, periodically sneaking looks around to see what I was doing.

"Ah-ah!" cried Abdsallaam when we came across a pen of goats. "They even put goats in the zoo. People are very stupid."

As we strolled around the grounds of the zoo, I found myself enjoying the spectacle of going to a Nigerian zoo much more than I did the animals. Abdsallaam, on the other hand, complained wittily throughout; there were too many hyenas, the lions were too thin, and there were too many empty pens. The hippo was too ugly, the warthog looked like it was dead. (Being poorly-sighted, he had to take my word for it that I could see the warthog blinking its long eyelashes from time to time.) Abdsallaam seemed to be having a really terrible time.

I asked, at the end, if he had not enjoyed the zoo.

"Ah," he reflected as we walked past a dog-faced baboon with one of its arms missing ("done on capture"), "I can not say that I have suffered myself."

When we finally came to the market, Abdsallaam went off in search of a green shiny fabric that his daughter needed for her school uniform hijab. While he was searching for the exact colour match, this cloth trader, no more than a teenager, caught my eye.

It came as a complete surprise to me that Lagos, above, is a city with a plan; streets in grids, concentric curves and avenues all fitting together to form a whole. I saw it through the smog from a plane, a ceaseless patchwork of tin roofs and suburban red gables, unbroken beneath the haze. When you're inside Lagos, it's hard to imagine that there's anything at all outside of it, or that anything was thought through before it was laid down. It is stifling, tense, everything crammed in as if the heavy gray skies are the thing keeping everyone inside.



Landing in the north, in Kano above, I felt calmed by seeing flat roofs and square compounds, Arabic Africa, the Africa I know and feel comfortable in, love. The hot, dry air burning my eyes and nose only further reminded me of 'home'.

Leaving the airport, we passed a long queue of men hunched over wheeled barrows, each stacked with black jerry cans. "Kano no water," said my taxi driver. The water is collected by these sweating men, wheeled back to town and sold for 40 naira a can; a backbreaking way of earning a living. Kano is dusty and dry, with an intense heat that cools the minute you step out of the sun. It is desert air that at night becomes chilly, and after the sweltering heat of Lagos, it is delicious.