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.

If you are tailor, and you are tired, there are many opportunities to lie down and have a snooze. This tailor, in Dakar, snoozes in a cupboard full of piles of cotton. And why not?

If there was one Senegalese artist who I wish could have his music heard, and understood, by the masses, it's Souleyman Faye. But he probably won't ever find anyone to take him and his quirky band on, because of various stories about the harebrained activities he got up to on tour when he was with the group Xalam, which have become Dakar legends. But he is one of the city's finest, someone I could spend hours listening to and never- almost never- get bored.

As luck would have it, the one time he did let me down was when I had two friends visiting from England. Both in the music business, I took them to see him on their first Saturday night here. He played a set which wouldn't have sounded out of place in the foyer of some anodyne French-run hotel somewhere in west Africa. It was heavy on the keyboards, light on the poetic charm that Souleyman usually wields, with such force.

Last night, he had a new guitarist with him, who threw a whole new dimension on the set. Wavering between jazz and Afro-beat, I wasn't quite sure where it was going, until Souley turned up in a pork-pie hat and an acrylic beige waistcoat and leapt about on the small stage, an unlit pipe in his mouth.

He had a saxophonist with him, an old man in a wooly jumper, who wandered on mid way through the first set. He blew us all away. The bass guitarist, one of the tallest and quietest people I have ever seen, who plays with his eyes shut, his moustache curling aroung his clenched lips, was given his chance to break free. Thumbing his guitar with unusual ferocity, it had the effect that fear sometimes has on me: turning my stomach to liquid. There was some electricity in that room that took me out of Dakar and the shabby bar where I spend most of my Saturday nights, and into something much more hair-raising.

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.

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."

It has been five years since I first heard the haunting, pained music of Zé Manel, a Bissau Guinéan now exiled in the States for his politically-critical music against the then-President, now re-elected for another term. When I got back to England, I tried to get in contact with him, to get an interview. He seemed totally unreachable, no one knew where he was, and I eventually gave up.

In the wonderful way that these things happen, last night I met him. Some friends and I had gone to a small bar in the crumbling old quarter of Bissau, a bar which had rattan furniture downstairs, and a cyber-café upstairs filled with computer terminals. As we were sitting there wondering how we were going to get away from the terrible racket of the girl singing at the front of the bar, my friend noticed that Zé Manel sitting in the corner. Praying he would sing, we stayed until the end, through countless rounds of cover songs by women with far greater voices than she, but he eventually left without a song.

On his way out, though, he passed by us. My friend, a Guinean, tapped me on the shoulder and when I turned around, Zé was there with his hand out. He said he would be happy to see me at his studio this weekend for an interview.

**

When you’re standing on the dance floor of a Guinean nightclub, dancing to the latest in Ivorian coupe decalé or American dirty south, it’s hard to remember that you are in one of Africa’s most defunct countries. Sitting outside the club, eating egg sandwiches made by a mama, or a tia, as they call the motherly women here, it’s hard to imagine you were just inside a nightclub. The table lit by a candle, eggs fried in a pan over a coal brazier, the turbaned women pulling cold beers from a bucket, it’s the perfect way to see in a Saturday morning.

Unlike Ziguinchor, Bissau has changed a lot since I was last here during the 2005 elections. The town has smart new restaurants, and some not so smart, and the roads are filled with 4x4s and whites. Dinner anywhere will be taken between two tables of people you know; it has become an NGO playground.

But it is carnival, and Guineans know how to celebrate it with full energy.



Riding on top a carnival float, the city streets below churned with bodies. Kids and adults fought eachother for the balloons and pens being thrown from the trucks, and the police- violent, Angolan-trained men- ran alongside the truck beating people with sticks and the buckles of belts. Even the girls being trampled under a stampede of feet seemed to see it as a game. At one point, someone threw a plastic water bottle and it rolled under the truck. There was a screeching as a group of children dived under the massive wheels to get it and the truck was forced to stop. The band stopped playing, but the bottle was retrieved and the truck moved on.



My favourite band from Senegal is here, Pierre and his brothers. They let us ride on top the carnival float as we danced through the dusty streets of Bissau. They are still as good as they ever were, and I still dream of making it happen with them. Pierre has a new line in his repertoire when calling out people's names in song: "the journalists are here". I, of course, am chuffed.

A return to Ziguinchor, after a year away. Nothing much has changed. The baggage handlers at the small airport are still the same, the crooked old man still struggling under the weight of vast west African suitcases carrying unidentified cargo and nylon chinese blankets. There have been the usual rounds of marriages and deaths, it seems, including one friend who got married and had a baby, but forgot to tell me, but is not living with his wife, and declined to say more. Likely that the girl's father found out and arranged a wedding quick-smart.

At the house, mama came to greet me with a jug of water on her head, pumping my hand voraciously while looking straight ahead, popping her chin forwards and back to keep the jug balanced. The children were at school, and at midday they came running round the corner and leapt into my lap, chanting, "Rose now-na" (Rose has arrived).



Daba, who a year ago was more prone to rolling around in the dust fighting with the neighbours' children than showing any kind of affection, has started wearing dresses and being very loving. She has turned into a proper little girl, leaning calmly on my knees as we sit outside under the trees, and no longer determined to break everything she touches, instead begging me to play drum-kit on her back, and wriggling around in fits of giggles when I do.

The others are much the same, but bigger, although there is one who has not grown in the three years that I have known her. She has stopped crying at least. There is another little girl in the house now, the daughter of one of the brothers, and she is now the one who spills things all over herself and shrieks instead of speaking. Perhaps all the new recruits go through it; it is quite a daunting place to be, so many self-assured people in one small space.

This afternoon, the band, still going, it seems, went off to Bissau in a bus.



The bus arrived late in the day, and three swarthy-looking boys climbed out of the insides as if appearing through a narrow cave opening. They started hauling speakers and keyboards from inside the house onto the roof, while the children all helped wheel the musicians' suitcases through the dust and bring pieces of the drum kit alternately to the back of the bus, and then back inside the house again.



I thought about going in the bus with them, since i am off to Bissau myself tomorrow, but it's possible I will arrive after them anyway. The bus looked like it might need a bit of TLC along the way.

Snakes, wild dogs, large fish...the Senegalese are afraid of nothing. Until it comes to the humble, harmless gecko which, by Senegalese lore, is the most dangerous of all poisonous beasts.

I have already written about the black lizard which appeared one morning, uninvited, in my bedroom. At 1 this morning, I was brushing my teeth when I heard a crash. I went into the kitchen and saw a small pile of dirt lying just beneath the chimney which runs from my ceiling to, presumably, the roof. And I was just in time to see a large white tail disappear under the fridge; I slammed the door and stood in the hallway wondering what on earth I was going to do.

Eventually I went downstairs in the dark and found Phillippe, our large guard who sleeps across the door at night and looks like the kind of man who couldn't possibly be afraid of anything. I told him the situation, he looked unsure, but not wanting to appear fearful, I suspect, grabbed a wooden broom and said, "come on". We took the lift upstairs and I hid outside while Phillippe crept into the kitchen, broom in hand.

There was silence. Eventually he called me in and said, conspiratorially, "he's hiding under the fridge. I don't want to make him come out. If those things even get anywhere near your skin, it will make you very ill. Better wait till morning and ask Cisse."

Cisse is the day guard. He was the one to fish the last lizard out. He is in the kitchen now, thumping items of furniture around and giving the occasional cry. I wonder if the gecko will come out with Cisse in its hand?

Morocco notes

At Bounia, 25 km off the Midelt road and in the middle of the plain, the weekly souk was in full swing. Some fields on the side of the small town had been given over for the market and in one of the fields nomads, one man to one cow, were gathered for the cattle auction while other men, the buyers, checked out the beasts. The whole place hummed with muttering voices, while snorts of cold air hurrumphed from the nostrils of cows, a pair of them humping to one side.



The main market was divided by its products. Here, spices, next door, tupperware. To one side, handwoven cloaks, to another, olive oil. Fruit and vegetables took over a half of the space. Someone selling dodgy goods, no doubt stolen, had a crowd of onlookers and keen bargainers cloaking him as he palmed off old microwaves and other electricals. We of course were looking for Berber rugs, but no one much had any to sell, so I bought a litre of olive oil from the back of a van, a litre which eventually came to a nasty end in a square in downtown Fes.



At a van selling dried fruit and spices, we were given some tea while we tasted and eventually bought almonds, prunes, dates and bags of red yellow and orange spices.

More Morocco notes

Not even the cold of Fes prepared me for what was to face Jenni and I when we hired a car and drove south. Snow, and plenty of it. In one of the towns along the way, where we fancied we might stay the night, we asked at the town hotel if we could see a room. Only afternoon but already bitterly cold, a scraggy-looking man peeled himself away from his coffee to show us where we might sleep.

The room smelled of decay, and when Jenni pointed at a colonial-period radiator and asked if it worked, he shrugged unconvincingly and said, "yes". We decided that between the road winding through the snowy mountain range between us and the next town, and a night in a cold, damp room above a cafe, we would take the high road. So off we set, me nervously twiddling my hair as I tried not to think of a night by a roadside while wild barbary apes rattled at our windows, teeth bared.

With dusk falling, we emerged across the Middle Atlas mountains to find a dry plain, cactus lining the roadside, the ground yellow dust and the rare buildings we came across made from the same sandy stone. It looked from the inside of the car as if it would be scorching hot outside, but it was, at 1500 metres above sea level, the same bitter freezing air that had followed us across the snowy mountains.



Up ahead, like a film set backdrop totally incongruous to the arid landscape we now found ourselves in, was a line of magnificent peaks that continued to belittle and inspire me throughout our whole stay.

Morocco notes

Safron-yellow, poppy flower-red, indigo-blue. Standing on the roof tops of Fes's ancient Medina, I felt like a visitor to another era. Down below, men dipped cow, sheep and camel skins in vats of dyes, or sprayed the dye over the prostrate skins, just as they did centuries ago.



This was the first day of many in which we were almost run down either by load-carrying donkeys ("ATTENTIO!" their drivers shouted as they ploughed at speed through the narrow alleys), or by bread-carrying children, late home for dinner.

Every morning, I take 600 francs and walk down to the corner to buy my newspapers. If the paper I want has run out, he unpegs one of the papers off the washing line and gives it to me, not yet faded by the hot sun. If I have money left over, I go down a few meters and buy croissants with the change.

It took two months and involved a trip to England, but I finally got some photos back, real ones, from my trip to Ghana. In no particular order, photos of all things cocoa:


Our friend Elias, the village recorder, walking to work in the forest, stool in hand. Early morning.


A cocoa pod, the raw deal.




Members of the cooperative split pods deep in the forest. Elias is the only one with his own stool, the other sit on segments of palm trunk. This is where I ate the most delicious banana of my life.


We walked kilometres into the bush to see a farm belonging to a 90 year old man who was still working his own land. This was one of the houses we saw on the way, and typical of the kind of architecture in these parts. At 6am, the light was magical.


In the village, cocoa beans are laid out to dry. They are turned throughout the day, and covered up with palm leaves by night, for 8 days.




They rustle, dry, under the fingertips.


The cooperative cocoa truck comes to town.


Elias sits at his desk at dusk, a long day of weighing sacks and loading trucks, behind him.





Dinner is prepared on smoky fires, in smoky kitchens. One girl, fifteen, does all the manual house work.

I was most confused to find a packet of star-shaped crisps flavoured with something called 'pigs in blanket' nestled amongst a multi-pack of ready salted Hoola Hoops yesterday. But since the wise people at Hoola Hoop central have started making something they call 'Wholewheat salt and vinegar Hoola Hoops' but which taste like acidic rings of sawdust, nothing surprises me anymore.

"In our country, there are rules, and the rules have to be obeyed. This is how it is in Africa."

Of course I needed reminding. I always forget myself, and think I am in my own country where I can do whatever I like. In my own country I would have got away with refusing to pay what amounts to a bribe, so silly me for thinking I could do the same here. Luckily there were a few people lined up to remind me that I have been bad.

All of this because I went to pick up a christmas present from the post, a box of shoes from my sister with the value $35 written on the customs slip.

The first day, I spent an hour there, chatting with the various men behind their counters, begging in my cutest wolof phrases and fake smiles for the man at ticket desk 4 to go and ask the man in 5 to come to his desk, so I can have my papers stamped. I went through the whole cringe-making ordeal of having to suck up to these people who have something I want (and is mine), only to fall at the final hurdle. When met with the douanier, the man who decides on the import tax fee, I lost my rag.

Punching numbers into a calculator, seemingly randomly as far as I could see (since he looked neither at the customs ticket nor at any kind of papers on his desk), he came up with a number which amounted to $30.

"A little mouse has been in your box," he said creepily, scattering the shreds of wrapping paper which were stuck to the everything. He was trying to make a joke of the fact that time after time, customs men at the post office had ripped open my present, taped it up with 'Senegalese Post' tape, and passed it on to the next person, only to be ripped open again. I said nothing. He repeated it, hoping, I suppose, he would get a smile out of me. I did not feel like smiling.

I told him I didn't see why I had to pay almost 100% tax on my christmas present. He said, his belly hanging over his trousers, that this was the rule. Knowing that it was only the rule for foreigners who are stupid enough to try and extract their own post rather than send their person, I left the office in disgust, and then, tears.

Day 2. I had to go back. How could I explain to my sister that I had left her gift at the post office? I could have got away with it by giving the guy a pair of shoes, but I wasn't sure what size he was. But this time I was armed. I had my friend, a man, and a Senegalese with me. Nothing could stop us now.

I waited outside the post for a while, hidden behind a tree, till my friend arrived. He did, and he went inside to try and sort it out. After 40 minutes he came outside and said that the man knew I was outside, he had seen me, and he wouldn't settle it until I had come inside myself. He knew I had come back with my tail between my legs and he was going to milk it for all it was worth.

I was dragged into the office like a naughty school girl. I was presented to the office of the customs man, another one, and told to sit down. He turned to me, stamping papers as he went, and started to tell me how things were done in Africa. My friend had told me to be nice to him, so I nodded as much as I could bear and muttered the odd, 'you are right'. Inside I thought of the number of ways I could put him through a similar ordeal in London. Perhaps make him wait in the que at the Lavender Hill post office for 45 minutes, only to find that parcels are collected next door, but only on Fridays.

When he had finished he told me that the man I had dealt with yesterday wanted to come in and talk to me. I told my friend that the point of me coming back was to get the shoes and leave. If I had to go through hours of humiliating lecturing infront of a room of people, then I would rather leave the shoes to their fate as permanent prisoners of the Senegalese Post. But my friend told me to stay. The customs man then said that he would do me a special favour. Because my friend had told him how much I love his country, he was going to let me off with just a $10 charge. He said it in a way that told me I should be very grateful.

I spoke for the first time. I said I was happy to pay any money, if he could show me the rule where it said it stated the percentage I should pay.

He pointed to a ridiculous scrap of paper stuck to the grubby wall behind him, handwritten, saying 45% import tax. I pointed out that I had previously been asked to pay 100%. He turned to me and said, as if I was incredibly stupid, that the person who sent the shoes must have been lying when she wrote out the customs form. These shoes were clearly worth a LOT of money.

At this point I just wanted to get out of there. I had had the most humiliating dressing down of my life as a stupid foreigner. I paid the money and made to get my parcel off the desk. Oh no no no. There are other fees to pay. Please go to ticket desk 5.

A hefty 'storage fee' later, plus an admin fee, I was allowed to have my parcel. My friend asked me to thank the man graciously for all he had done for me. Wearing my glasses so that I wouldn't have to go through the further humiliation of him pointing out to any bored person who will listen that the toubab was crying, I told the man how kind he was and walked away.

Crossing the road outside, I seriously considered throwing myself, and my shoes, under an oncoming bus.

Returning to Dakar airport after an 8 hour wait in Casablanca airport, which had been stuffed full with pilgrims returning to Mali from the Hajj, I was exhausted and fractious. It was 4 am by the time we got our suitcases off the slow conveyor belt. I had rung Sow, my friendly taxi man, from Casablanca to tell him I was coming at some point during the night, but wasn't sure when. He said I could go ahead and ring him whenever I landed and he would come and get me.

As we hauled our suitcases onto a trolley and made for the parking lot, a pack of people waiting hungrily at the gates which are now stopping people from approaching the airport, but which in fact makes it a lot worse when you finally are met with the outside world, I rung Sow to ask where he was and if he could come and get me. He sounded sleepy.

"I'm in the car park at the airport," he said. He had been asleep in his car all night, preferring to spend the night there and wait for me to arrive than sleep at home and be late to pick me up.

What a nice welcome home.

Wrapping up presents alone in my hot and dusty apartment has made me feel homesick, especially when listening to the BBC at the same time and hearing tales of snow and advent calendars and carol concerts. I'm going to London tonight, but still, I feel particularly non-festive, even if I have got the obligatory Christmas cold.

All of this has made me feel pretty emotional. Someone who I thought was a good friend to me failed to perform the most basic of friend favours this week, while someone I hardly know rang me when he woke up this morning to see if my cold was any better. A beggar in the street wished me good morning, while people I have known for years have forgotten to ring me to wish me a good trip away. I am confused about my position here, I feel so foreign in a place I regarded as my home. It has thrown me topsy-turvy.

I have had a gas leak in my kitchen since Sunday when I broke the gas head which plugs into the cooker. There are no hardware shops in town, only handbag shops, so I can look nice but I can't fix a gas leak. In desperation, Omar the tailor took me to a place he knew, not allowing me to go alone because it being the day before the big muslim festival of tabaski, the whole world is out in the street buying last minute things, and everyone is desperate for cash. It's not safe for me, he said.

In one shop, the man said he didn't have what we were looking for. Then he turned to me, gave a great big fake smile, and said in wolof, "hello you. How are you?" as if he were talking to a child. I replied hello and Omar pulled me out of the shop.

"Senegalese are not normal to treat a foreigner like that," he said. I was glad he had seen what idiots people can turn into when they see a white person. I have many friends who tell me I am exaggerating when I say people act differently to me than to other Senegalese. No one wants to think that their countrymen are capable of being effected by the colour of someone's skin (I can't use the 'R' word here). But it's a fact I deal with every day. Toubabs are like something you might find in the circus. We are a constant source of amusement. And Omar, I am pleased to see, thinks it uncivilised.

I am happy to say though that some things are sacred. Now is going to get up at 3am to accompany me to the airport.

On Wednesday night, Tiken Jah Fakoly, Africa’s most famous reggae singer, did a concert in Dakar. Like his music or not, he is the most influential musician on the continent today, driving fear into the politicians he denounces in his songs, and stirring up the crowds of dissatisfied youth who, living under often-oppressive political regimes, have little other believable leadership to listen to.

His big hit at the moment in Senegal is a song called ‘Open the borders,’ and asks why ‘they’ should be able to apply for a visa to an African country and travel the very same day when ‘we’, Africans, are unlikely to ever get visas to visit Europe. ‘We only want to travel, and also work,’ Tiken sings in his raspy reggae voice, ‘but we didn't refuse you your visas.’

On Wednesday night we had sat through a handful of hip-hop performances, waiting for Tiken to come on. One of my favourite artists, Xuman, did his piece and finished it off with a quick verbal attack on the government, at which point the organisers cut his microphone and he was ushered off the stage. When Tiken Jah did finally arrive, late and clearly tired, the momentum was a little lost. Still, he pounded out the old classics, including one of my favourites, 'Quitte le pouvoir' (leave the power), in which he changed the words of one chorus to (translation from French), 'if you love Senegal, get out of power'.

The next afternoon, a colleague called me to see if I had heard the news. The Interior Minister had banned Tiken Jah from the country. His criticisms during the concert had not escaped the president's notice and from now on, he would be persona no grata, unable to come back to the country where he is a living legend. Considering riots rocked Dakar just a month ago, with young people making it clear they are no longer going to put up with the unjustified spending of public cash while the average Jo fights to even earn enough to feed themselves, it seemed a brave decision. The days of freedom of speech in Senegal might be well and truly over.

*****

Last night, with a plane to catch at 6am, my visiting friend showed enthusiasm for one last night out in Dakar. I wasn't sure what was on and at midnight, we were still sitting at home contemplating the outing over G and Ts. I couldn't for the life of me think of anywhere new and different to go to, since we have been to at least one concert a night for the last 8 days. It suddenly came to me: an old dark bar I used to go to when I first lived here, when I had a boyfriend who played in a band. Jo and I got our best Saturday-night-in-Dakar outfits on and set off for Keur Adriene in some dark corner of the city.

At the door we were met by a dreadlocked singer, who insisted on telling us he was from Paris, and then showed us to some seats inside the long, dark room. A fish tank had been added to the rear wall since my last visit almost three years ago, and some flashing lights had been strung up along the side wall, presumably with Christmas in mind. But other than that, it was all the same, a few hookers at the bar, rows of low tables and plastic chairs set on a cracked concrete floor, and men drinking cheap beer and looking bored. It felt good to be back.

The band, who had the unfortunate luck of being positioned in a corner of the room infront of a huge screen playing silent Lucky Dube music clips, were warming up with some elevator-music standards. "It's not terrible," said Jo, optimistically. We decided to stay.

The waiter came along, a fat man in a baseball shirt and cap, and asked gruffly what we wanted to drink. Jo said she wanted water. He looked annoyed and said there wasn't any. "What, none at all?" she asked. "No," he said.

"Well, I'll share her drink then," she said. Gin in this country comes in triple measures and one is enough for a small army.

"You have to have your own," he said, really pissed off.

"Even if you don't have what I want? Ok, I'l have a Coke."

The waiter brought our drinks, and when he came back with the change, he screwed the note up in his hand and threw it at me.

"He's not a natural," Jo said.

Next, a young guy came up to me and whispered in my ear, "They don't have that in France!" nodding to the band who had started some quick-fire sabar drum playing.

"Well, quite possibly not, but then I'm not from France," I replied, not hiding the fact that I hate being confused for a French person.

"Do you have an email address?" he asked.

"No."

"All French people have an email address," he said, unwittingly spitting on me, before storming off.

Luckily the singer, whose name I didn't catch even when I went up to him afterwards and tried to find out who they were, was fantastic. As much energy as a young Youssou, two sabar drummers who looked like they had been dragged out of bed by their older brother to play for him but were in fact the best drummers I have seen in a long time, and a tama player in Malcolm X glasses who danced with his little talking drum tucked under his arm and set the entire place on fire. It was arse-shaking silly dancing all round, sexy women with tiny tops billowing up to the tama-player and shaking their buttocks until he could drum no more and men in flat caps losing themselves in this incredibly loud, fast rhythm, blissfully unaware of how silly, to foreign eyes, it could all look. It was one of those moments where I thought, if I had to capture 'Dakar' in one real scene, this would be it, and how lucky I was to be there.

I had a visitor this week. His name is Guillame. He is 2 weeks old, smells like new babies should, and in 3 months, when Mary Helene gets back from her maternity leave, he's going to be sleeping in a bucket in my flat, while his mother works, every Tuesday and Friday. I can't wait.

I wrote a little about the forced removal of the lepers in my street some weeks back, and the 'walking markets', guys who sell stuff informally in the road. Except it's not so informal; it's the mainstay of Senegalese commerce. People are frustrated; there were some violent riots while I was in Ghana, so bad they made it onto the pages of the Guardian.

What is so shocking to everyone about this is that Senegal is, and has always been, the cheri of the west's eyes. While the rest of the region is either mid-conflict, post-conflict or in the hands of drug barons, Senegal remains relatively peaceful and 'democratic'. It suits everyone's agenda for it to remain, and remain looking, that way. So the attacks on uncomfortably vocal activists, journalists and musicians, the student riots, the underhand treatment of the ex-Prime Minister who was fired for calling the President's son to the national Assembly to explain spending on the infrastructure for the 2-day Islamic Conference next year (somewhere in the region of £90 million for useless road projects alone), have been glossed over by all except the frustrated few in the country. Except now those frustrated people are becoming a big beast that, by the look of the riots two weeks ago,is growing in numbers and force. People have started to sit up, notice, and take action.

This week is my 7 year anniversary of my relationship with Senegal. I have been thinking about the changes which have gone on during my time here and I was left feeling really sad. The gap between rich and poor is excessive, and not just that the rich are getting massively richer but the poor are getting massively poorer. I find it hard to find a budget that I can survive on, and I am part of the rich. The cost of living is unlivable, and the President continues to make rash decisions that anger the growing numbers of unemployed, dissatisfied people who are no longer happy to say, 'ca va aller' and reach for the prayer beds. There is a real feeling in the air of violent frustration that is, sooner, rather than later, going to turn nasty.

But I thought I was just being dramatic, so kept my thoughts to myself. After all, can an intuition about a socio-political situation really be right?

This afternoon I met a friend at the supermarket (I must be rich), who is heavily involved in the music industry. We talked about the number of musicians who are starting to get vocal again, which is usually a good barometer for how the rest of the population are feeling. She said that in the next six months, she expects there will be a serious backlash against the government. Later, I was talking to a representative of a UN mission here, who told me that by next spring, a serious violent confrontation will have occurred, and he didn't mean another riot of shop-keepers throwing stones. He was talking about something much more serious. And I feel it too.

It is exciting, in a way, because what is bubbling under the surface will finally come to a head and maybe it will produce better results. Maybe, like happened in Guinea this year, people will be able to show that they have a voice and with it can make positive changes. But it also saddens me. Senegal has, in the words of every newspaper article about the place, been the bastion of peace and democracy in west Africa. But if you ask me, it's a false image that is just waiting to shatter.

I have friends coming this week from England, so I didn't want to write about the wildlife issues I am having at home, incase it put them off. But they are now far too busy to read blogs, as I have sent them off with shopping lists including things like cheddar, and conditioner that doesn't contain parabens, so I can tell all.

Last week I was going into the living room, also my bedroom, to have lunch when I noticed something that looked like a large stick on the floor. On closer inspection, and when the stick ran under my bed, I realised it was in fact a large lizard, and not a gecko, but a big scary black lizard which was sticking its tongue out and everything.

I screamed, shut the door, and ran downstairs to get my guardian, who I usually try not to have much to do with because of the way he stares at me in an inappropriate fashion, but he was the only person I know who's nearby who could help me. I told him the problem, that there was a lizard under my bed, and he started saying annoying things until he realised I was near-hysterical and better come upstairs quick.

On entering the bedroom, and realising that I was going to do nothing much more than stand at the door with it open a couple of centimetres and call instructions, he asked for a broom and proceeded to search under the bed for the offending creature. When he pulled the bed out from the wall, we found the ugly thing lurking in a corner. I screamed and locked myself in the kitchen. There was a lot of banging, then Cisse asked for a floor cloth, and a little while later he appeared holding the lizard in the cloth, white belly in full view, and proceeded to move towards me with the thing, which I estimate to be 20 cm long, until I got actually hysterical and locked myself on the balcony, which was as far away from it and him as I could get.

I have not slept well since. I live on the third floor; how did it get in? Is there a nest? Was it just the baby and is daddy still under there?

The wildlife issue did not stop there. This morning I was making coffee in the kitchen. I noticed that the little speckled eggs which I had seen last week but decided they were nothing dangerous, are still stuck to the kitchen door. They are now much bigger. They are perfectly round, speckled like quails' eggs, and stuck to the door. Anyway, I noticed that they were moving, and when I got down on the floor I saw that they were in fact hatching, and out were crawling little hairy millipede-type creatures, lots of them. They were small, compared to the lizard, so I didn't scream but I did douse them with insecticide and then squash them with the handy fly-swatter that my sister sent me and which has been the most useful thing I have ever had. At least they died at the hands of a Hawaiian flip-flop, a trendy way to go.

Where are these creatures coming from, and why?

Occasionally the telephone company makes a special offer on phone top-up cards, the way most of the population pays for their phone calls. 25,000 cfa (£25) will get you 37,500 cfa, 10,000 cfa will get you 15,000 cfa and so on. I walked along the streets quiet after Friday prayer, and saw a young guy flapping the orange cards in the way of passing pedestrians.

"Do you have 25,000?" I asked him.
"I have 10,000, and 5,000" he said.
"OK, but I want 25,000, so, thanks," I said and tried to walk away.
"But I have 10,000," the guy said, a little agressively. "It's the same thing."
"But it's not the same thing. Sorry."
"Buy 10,000," he almost shouted at me.

I tried the next guy.

"I have 5,000 and 5,000 and 5,000 and 5,000 and 5,000. It's the same thing."

I could not argue with him.

Last missive from Ghana

Sunday

“The airplane will wait for you,” our representative from the cocoa co-op assured us.

“Check-in is now closed, and we have sold your seats,” the representative from the airline assured us, twenty minutes later.

“This sweet give you sperm,” the driver of the car which eventually had to take us all the way to Accra giggled as he handed us some nuts he’d bought from a boy at the traffic lights. The nuts tasted of coconut but left the grit of sawdust in the mouth.

Flying into Abidjan, felled palm trees looked like a game of Spilikin, sadly abandoned.

Ghana

Saturday

Three days in the cocoa forest was hard. We did not even sleep there, yet I came home every evening feeling thankful for hot water, soap, clean clothes, a soft bed and a fan.

The thing that was hardest for me was not having coffee. 5am starts, and 14-hour working days in the heat and humidity of the cocoa forest, and nothing to pick me up after lunch for the afternoon shift, or to get me going in the morning, was really tough. I had a headache every day, whether from dehydration of caffeine withdrawal, I do not know.

I can still eat with my hands, I was happy to discover, and eat things out of politeness that I would never have otherwise ingested. I can still spend 2 minutes in a toilet and hold my breath for the entirety, a useful tool in these parts, and I can hang around on the side of the road in the midday sun while the broken-down car gets fixed without getting agitated or losing faith that we’ll soon be on our way. But I can not go without coffee.

Ghana

Friday

Breakfast this morning was not the oily eggs and thick white bread which we had yesterday, but fresh boiled yam and a sauce made from coal-roasted cherry tomatoes (there’s something you could make a killing off at Borough Market), aubergines and dried fish, all ground together and mixed with violent red palm oil. The meal was eaten, with the hands, at the 21-acre farm of Mr Atta, an 83 year old man with thick white chest hair and all his own teeth. We walked for 2 miles through the dewy forest at day-break to get to this splendid example of exceptional health, both the owner and everything around him, through forests where the cocoa pods dripped from trees, nestling for space on the silvery trunks.

Mr Atta’s 14 year old grandson, Isaac, shares the small mud house with him, and before school cleans the compound and cooks breakfast. There are two other houses in the ‘village’, both mud homes where the farm labourers live. One of them, who spent the morning cutting the husks off coconuts for us to take back to the village, is from the north of Ghana. While we were eating the yams, crouched on stools around the tin bowl, he played the balafon in a dark corner of the cook-house, a young girl sitting near him scraping food from a bowl. The hot coals of fire hissed nearby.

“When I come home from school, when I have done all my jobs, I read my school books,” Isaac, the grandson, told me shyly. “When it gets dark, we have a lantern, so I can keep on reading.”

Isaac carried a basket containing 30 oranges and 10 coconuts on his head, the whole way to school for me.

***

“Can she use the pit?” asked an old man whose house I had been taken to so I could go to the loo.

“Of course I can use the pit,” I said. I am, after all, hardened to the worst kind of African loos. Nothing disgusts me anymore in that department.

‘The Pit’ was terrifying. Wooden planks suspended over a hole six foot long and as many deep. Down below the mass of shit writhed with white maggots. For some reason, I could not stop staring at it, even though I was appalled.

Ghana notes continued

I did not take my digital camera with me to Ghana, because I went with a photographer. Instead, I allowed myself the luxury of taking my granny's 1986 Canon camera, with 2 rolls of Boots film which I had lurking somewhere. Now I realise that my blog will be without colour; the pictures will be posted some time in January, once they're been developed.

*****

Thursday

Whilst sitting, ten of us, around a four foot high pile of golden cocoa pods, I met Mohammed Massahoud, a striking Togoloese man who could speak French. His eyes were delicately and naturally rimmed with a purple smmudge, like make-up. Despite his weathered face and ragged clothes, he was exceptionally handsome.

As he hacked his machete into a pod to bring it into his hands, and then gave it two great whacks, splitting it open and scooping out the seeds and flesh into a basket, we chatted about cocoa farming. Because he and I could speak our own language (‘France-English’, as one of the men in the village called it) I felt like we had something in common. We were able to slip into our own secret world, where things were homely and familiar to me, more so than with the other people who could speak my mother tongue. Maybe it’s because neither of us speak French as our first language, we both take time and understand when the other does not. With English, I hear myself talking as if to a child, berate myself for it, but at the same time know that I must use simple words to be understood.

As the sun got higher in the sky, my ability to sit around this slow-shrinking pile of cocoa pods listening to the delicious thwacking noise of machete-upon-husk dimmed.

“Le soleil va vous tapper,” the Togoloese man said, as if practising his voice scales.

The owner of the farm, a young and incredibly muscular man who said little but did much of the hard labour, ran into the forest and came back minutes later with long slender fronds, 12 foot high. He burrowed their ends into the pile of cocoa and dug others into the ground, building a fortress of shade around me. When he saw that the section of freshly-macheted palm trunk that I was sitting on was damp, he whipped off his dirty string vest, laid a pad of palm leaves down first and then let me have the vest as a cushion. Later on in the morning, he went off into another section of his farm and came back with two bunches of the most wonderful sweet bananas I have ever eaten. This man, it appeared, was rather pleased to have guests on his farm.

The other men helping him on the farm were mostly older, one of them being the recorder, a man with two wives whose job it is to weigh the cocoa and pay the farmers, another being the secretary of the village’s cocoa co-operative. Tomorrow they will go elsewhere to help another farmer, until all the crops are in. On Wednesdays no one goes to the farm. On Tuesday nights, someone will go around the village ringing a bell and announcing what Wednesday’s compulsory communal job will be, and everyone will work on it together.

On the night drive back to the town where we were staying, we passed a small mosque which was lit inside. I saw men in rows kneeling and bowing their heads, and for the second time in the day I felt a kin-ship with something that has nothing to do with my own culture. Senegal has seeped into my life more than I had realised; it has become something comforting to me when I am far away from home.

Ghana notes continued

Wednesday

“There has been a change of plan,” Erika told us this morning as we finished up a breakfast of flabby white toast and red jam.

“The chief of the village where we were going to stay, who also owns the hotel where we were going to sleep, is celebrating his fifth year as chief today. He rang me to say he needs all the rooms in his hotel for the celebration. The only other hotel in the village has an outside toilet. So we can not stay there.”

The prospect of a latrine did not bother me so much. This afternoon, in another latrine in another village, I had to move slowly so as not to disturb the swarms of mosquitoes that lurked on the cool damp walls waiting for the heat to pass, and for a bare bottom to arrive. They were as heavy as flies, and longer, their fine syringes heaving up and down, waiting for a skin feast. I tried to pee harder to be out of there quicker.

Erika, from the cocoa co-operative, took us to another village instead. Through selling Fairtrade cocoa and establishing the Divine Chocolate company, half of which is owned by the co-op and the farmers themselves, they have been paid cash dividends and built a school.

Cecilia, a soft-skinned woman with thick plaits and the sort of friendliness which in Senegal I would just wait to turn into demanding cash, showed us around her village. I told her one of my best friends was called Cecilia. She told me that I reminded her of her sister and promptly gave me her sister’s name, Esswe. On a wooden bench near the co-op weighing scales, Cecilia split open a golden yellow cocoa pod and we shared the fruit inside, a slimy translucent white flesh covering the bitter brown cocoa seed. She could not believe I had never seen cocoa before. Neither could I. What a wonderful, wonderful thing.

Ghana notes

Tuesday

Workmen in tiny Kumasi airport stood on bending planks suspended over high scaffolding frames and sanded the new wooden ceiling. Like parquet flooring, the ceiling shone in herring bone patterns, whereas the floor was tiled in bare ordinary squares. The ceiling at the spotless Precise Lodge was built from the same, proud, wooden slats. I thought about the moulding concrete-and-plaster ceilings of the average hotel in Senegal, and wondered, why.

*****

A two-part article in the daily newspaper expounded on the subject of heartbreak. I left the paper in the seat pocket of the 30-seater plane, and wished I hadn’t.

“Women, I hear,” professed the male journalist, “have more people to talk to about their heartbreak; hair-dressers, taxi drivers, and Aunties.”

It reminds me of the old taxi-driver who gave me a lift in Dakar, a year and a half ago. For some reason, I had told him a secret that had been on my mind for months.

So much more than a taxi service, my friend had said when I told her to whom I had spilled my heart.

*****

Kumasi market is the largest open-air market in west Africa. It is vast, a city of tin roofs with suburbs of yam-sellers within; roads of meat-vendors give way to underwear neighbourhoods; bulk toothpaste streets hustling against the tailors sewing strips of kingly kente cloth.

The yam sellers, all women, were the most gregarious. They pummelled my skin, their ugly bulbous yams sitting by dusty and grey, blobs of pink and green paint to identify their size and price. Piles of dried fish balanced in headstands on tin platters, while their young girl vendors sat behind and called out their worth. A teenage girl with dark blue tattoos on her forehead bustled for a photo, but refused to stay still long enough for me to take it. Again and again, they asked me if Aubrey was my husband or my brother, and when I said, friend, they all laughed and eyed me disbelievingly, like I was telling them a dirty joke.

In one row, a girl sold patchwork cloth, strips of tattered faded fabric in large, thoughtless blocks. She asked me if I wanted to buy it, and I pointed to my own patchwork skirt and told her I could make my own.

“Yes yes, this is fine-fine,” a lady laughed approvingly, crouching on a stool nearby and grabbing at my skirt.

When I told them I lived in Senegal they all laughed again and asked the little girl with the elephantine belly button if she wanted to go home with Auntie Rose to Canada.

Saturday night, and I was on my way to see Omar the Tailor, to pick up my silk sleeping bag for the trip to Ghana. Winding my way through the back of the bus station as darkness fell, I received a phone call from the photographer, Aubrey, in Liberia, who I was to meet on the Slok flight on Sunday morning. Our flight, he said, had been cancelled. The airline said they could get him on a Belleview flight on Tuesday, but apart from that, there was nothing to be done.

Aubrey, once a next-door neighbour from London, and I are meeting delegates from a chocolate company in Ghana on Tuesday. They are taking us out to a remote village to meet cocoa farmers. We have to get to Accra before Tuesday, or we will likely lose the trip. Slok, the Gambia National carrier (this had rung warning bells in my ears), are famously unreliable, cancelling flights five minutes before take-off and forgetting to stop in the cities along the way, leaving passengers for Monrovia stranded in Freetown, with no way of returning.

“These planes,” said Vijay, my young Indian travel agent, “are like buses. They should not be going in the air.”

While Omar finished up my bag, the machines in the atelier rattling away, I called Vijay and asked him if he knew anything about it. He said he would ring Slok and call me back. Five minutes later, as I tried to explain to Omar what The Independent magazine is and why it matters if I don’t leave for Accra on Sunday, Vijay rang me back to say he had rung Slok in Dakar, who knew nothing about the cancellations and were still selling tickets, who had rung Banjul to discover that all planes have been grounded for a month. “The planes,” explained Vijay, “are past their expiration date. Some planes can stay for one hundred and twenty five years, some for one hundred and fifty.”

“And Slok planes,” I asked, intrigued to know how old Vijay thought they were, “how old are they?”

“Maybe two hundred years. Yes. They should not be going in the air.”

“What am I going to do?” I wanted to know.

“I will get you to Accra tomorrow madam, please do not worry. I will call you back.”

Ten minutes later, with Omar sitting beneath the glow of the atelier light in wonder at this back and forth of text messages to Liberia (Aubrey trying to get on a UN flight), the chocolate company in London, and various friends who have all flown Slok and who all have their own techniques as to how to deal with the inevitable cancellations, Vijay rang me back to tell me the good news.

“I get you on a flight to Abidjan and then you will stay in transit to Accra. It is two hundred thousand francs more. And I must issue the ticket tonight or else you will lose it.”

I hadn’t yet heard from the chocolate company to know if I should pay the extra money. “How late can you issue the ticket,” I asked him, “before we lose it?”

“Madam, I do not go to the night club, I am here with my laptop. If you call me at twelve or one o clock in the morning I will issue the ticket. Please do not worry about this.”

Promising to call him back, I sat down with Omar and we decided to make a scarf out of the remaining strip of silk. It was nine o clock before we finished, and Omar walked me home.

“It is easy for you to create things,” Omar said, and I felt pleased. Senegalese do not give compliments that often. “You can see nice things quickly.”

This morning, I went out to get money for the ticket. Outside the cash machine, boys hung around selling Herald Tribunes and top-up phone cards.

“Do you have a card for twenty-five thousand?” I asked a young boy who held a strip of the orange and black cards, flapping them in my face.

“No,” he said, sucking his teeth. “Buy ten thousand.”

I ignored him and crossed the road, but heard a loud hissing, turning into, “oh-ho”, from behind me. The same boy was pushing his friend towards me, his friend holding out a card for 25,000 francs. I bought one, and the two boys slunk back to their post outside the cash machine.

*****

Vijay’s office overlooks the smelliest place in Dakar. One day, when they have finished digging the tunnel that will turn the road into a veritable super highway, of exactly the same size as it was before, it will be well positioned. But for now, the office is constantly covered in dust, the air outside is indigestible because pits of raw sewage lie festering and open, and the men who sit about like spare parts beside the road works, waiting for something exciting to happen, hiss and shout, following you with waving hands if you try to make your way to the office.

“Where are you going?” they demand aggressively, as you climb over random pieces of metal and rocks to get to the front door. “What is your business here?”

It doesn’t occur to them that I may in fact be going to the row of shops overlooking the roadworks, and not about to climb down into the works themselves. They must think toubabs are really stupid. Or perhaps they have nothing better to do.

Now I ignore them and walk on. Let them follow me, if they want.

Vijay is inside the office, his motorbike also parked inside. He has opened up the agency for me, on a Sunday morning.

Quickly, he prints me out my ticket. He asks me if I am with Reuters or Associated Press.

“Neither,” I say, and tell him who I work for.

“So that means when Kenya Airways crashes you have to go to Doula and things like that?”

“Um, not exactly, but that kind of thing, yes,” I say, unsure.

“Okay well have a good journey anyway,” he laughs.

*****

‘First time in Africa!’ exclaims the board in the smoky hotel lobby. ‘Broadband internet in the rooms!’

I telephone the front desk to ask for the password for the internet router.

“Twelve dollars for twenty four hours,” drawls the man on the other end of the phone, the cable of which I have to hold in place for a clear line.

*****

At the airport, my hotel bus hasn’t arrived. I go to the hotel information desk and ask the young man if he can help me.

“Do you have a reservation? Can I see your proof of confirmation please?”

I tell him I have no proof that anyone confirmed my booking, although I’m sure someone did, but could he call the hotel anyway and ask them to come and pick me up.

“I can give you the number of the hotel, but I can not call them for you unless I can see your proof of confirmation,” he says. I can not bear to continue this conversation and take a taxi.

Dakar is going through sudden gentrification. Over the last year or so, shiny night spots and flash restaurants have been sprouting up along the souless road to the airport, and I was recently refused entry into one of them because I was wearing flip-flops. I am not the kind of clientelle these places are hoping to attract.

Closer to home, in the centre of town, the government has started a massive cleaning-up-the-streets programme which means that the lepers who live on one corner of my road, and the wheelchair-bound women who live on the other side, have suddenly disappeared. Fruit sellers, the Burkinabe furniture makers, the peanut women, the boys selling phone top-up cards- they have almost all gone. The streets are empty, clean, and on odd corners lie piles of wood where make-shift shops have been dismantled and turned into firewood.

It has been remarkably quick. Armed soldiers came down and literally swept the lepers from their homes the night before last, and in the morning, there was nothing to be seen of them.

This afternoon I went looking for fruit. I could not find any. I couldn't bear to go to the corner where I buy my vegetables for fear that the lady, who calls herself my Senegalese mother and always sends me away with a squash for free, had been swept away too. On my way back home, I saw the furniture weaver tucked away on the corner of the road where he used to have his business. I asked him about it.

"Well, they didn't move us on but they were moving everyone else so we decided to hide in that derelict building," he pointed to a block of half- flats, "until it all passed."

We both remembered that this kind of attempt to get street traders off the streets had happened some years ago and after a couple of weeks, it all went back to normal, all was forgotten.

Turning the corner, I saw one of the handless lepers, an old man in a wooly bobble-hat, leaning up against a wall. Infront of him were two kids, about 7 years old, begging for food. The leper was dividing up a small piece of stale baguette and putting pieces into the kids's begging bowls.

There is something intrinsically wrong about enjoying tender rolls of smoked salmon, and canapes of avacado and succulent beef on the lawn of an African presidency. It is the second time in a week I have eaten fabulous food at the expense of the Senegalese state. Perhaps what feels wrong is how pleasant it is. Or how gullible the average man on the street seems when I step outside. I know it's nothing in comparison to the extraordinary extravagance of some of Africa's dictators long since gone, but I don't know how to comfortably be a part of it anyway.

The Harmattan, the wind that blows Saharan sand through every crack of the house and covers clothes, skin, hair, fridges and floors with dust, has arrived about two months early. In celebration, or preparation, I have fitted out my flat with house slippers. I searched high and low, and came across these lovely creatures.



Visitors, always welcome (but also encouraged out of habit to remive their shoes), will be provided with a pair of Twin Tower house-slippers on arrival to protect their feet from the dust.

In other news, I have been lusting after a pair of flip-flops, for the street, which are not ugly and do not bear the image of buildings or Osama Bin Laden beards. If anyone wants to send me some, or give me some for Christmas, I will be entirely grateful.

Now I need some advice. I want to make labels to sew into the patchwork things I make with Omar the tailor. What's a good name for us? I had previously thought of The Senegalese Patchwork Co-operative, and today thought of Chapa-chapa which is what they call patchwork in Guinea Bissau. Any ideas, anyone?

This evening I took a taxi from the beach back to my home in town. The driver spoke no French and looked barely old enough to be driving a car. I noticed he beeped his horn rather a lot, but said nothing. I then noticed, to my horror, that he drove like a manic and that his car could barely take the turns he was insiting on speeding around to overtake another car in the face of oncoming traffic. He beeped his horn some more and the driver of the car we were overtaking at the time made an angry hand gesture as we went by. I asked the boy why he used the horn so much.

"Me!" he shouted above the din of his rustbucket slamming over potholes. "Me, no", he went on, pointing at the horn at the same moment that it beeped, all of its own accord. "Connection," he went on.

I got it. The connection was dodgy and the horn was beeping on its own. But why did he have to drive so dangerously? I threatened to get out of the taxi if he didn't slow down, and he eventually did.

When he dropped me at my place and handed me the change, he said politely,

"Thankyou, Mama."

Labah Soseh, a well-known musician from the Gambia who played old-school Cuban salsa, sadly died recently and there were various obituaries in the papers which remembered his rich musical career and life. I nearly saw him perform once, in a small popular bar in Ziguinchor, where I used to live.

It was late on a Saturday night, and I went along to see what was happening at the bar. At one end of the dark room, past crowded tables with their plastic place-mats, instruments were set up but no one playing them. The manager, a smart-looking lady with a fierce voice that she was never afraid to use when one of her hired musicians misbehaved or turned up late, was standing in the corner bellowing. Some men were standing around giggling. I tried to follow the conversations to find out what was going on, and Tapha translated for me.

The musician, by this time in his seventies, had arrived to play his set, and a large audience had turned out to see him play. He insisted that the manager of the bar pay him before he start, which she did, so he took the money and started to sing. Half way through the gig, he apparently took a break and went to his nearby home with one of the bar's many prostitutes, using the money he had been paid for this evening's work. He then returned twenty minutes later and the manager was horrified to see that he had changed out of his smart outfit and shiny shoes and was now wearing a pair of flip-flops on his feet. She fired him on the spot. One has to ask who is the loser in all of this.