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.

My driver, Abdsallaam, is viciously funny about Nigerians and Nigeria. He does not respect royalty, finds the whole complicated protocol of getting into the Emir's palace laughable, and does not have time for it. Despite this, we decided that we would try to get inside, for no other reason than it's something to do on a scorching hot afternoon in Kano.

After much trailing about, from the Emir's secretary to the Emir's palace and back, we were told to go and inform the Ministry of Tourism of my intentions to visit the palace. On entering the Ministry, we found a youngish man flaked out on a thickly puffed sofa, flies landing on his still face, his face shining in the light which seeped in through moulded curtains. Abdsallaam gently shook his knee, and explained the situation. We were lead to the Head of Marketing, a man in a small room who smiled sweetly and told me that it was lucky I had come to register my intentions to be a tourist in Kano, I could have been in terrible trouble if I had not declared myself.

2,000 Naira facilitated my application, which was photocopied at great length and given back to me to take to the palace.

This morning we went back to the palace. By this time I had lost all interest in seeing the Emir's residence but had paid my money and was going to get the goods. We were sent back and forth, asked to wait, and were finally shown into a courtyard within the outer reaches of the palace. Hundreds of men in giant robes and long turbans of silver, gold and red gathered waiting for ther Emir. When he arrived, in an open-top Mercedes to great fanfare, the men gathered their robes and rushed forward, each a defiant fist held high in the air.

"To tell you the truth," said Abdsallaam, "they are all corrupt. These traditional chiefs are not a business, they produce nothing and are of no use to anyone. They just come here to ask for money. I don't know what they are doing with their lives."

Later on he laughed as we crossed the hectic road between the Palace and the Emir's secretary. "If a man steals a yam from the market place, the people will gather to beat him. If a man steals 5 billion Naira from the treasury, the people will respect him. Later, I will explain why," but, as I write, the answer is as yet unrevealed.

I have sustained three strange injuries this week, but none are as painful to bear as the heat. Passing a flashing thermometer sign on Victoria Island yesterday I saw that it is 35 degrees. I'm not the only one suffering in the heat, F. said this morning that he was amazed we hadn't all beaten ourselves to death, and he is Nigerian. Last night I stayed with a friend who has air-conditioning. I've always been against the stuff- it just makes life harder once you inevitably go out into the heat and is a massive power-guzzler, but I slept for 9 solid hours last night and awoke freezing cold: it was wonderful.

My injuries include 'water yam rash', (the liquid that comes off a raw water yam causes this nasty itchy rash if you get it on your body) and swallowing a piece of glass. The glass, I am told by my doctor friend, will be dissolved by the acid in my stomach.

This week I went to meet a friend-of-a-friend in Ajegunle, 'the largest slum in Nigeria', and probably the whole of Africa. It comprises various neighbourhoods and covers a huge area of the city, and was founded by people coming from the Delta regions of Nigeria, where the oil now causes so much wahala (trouble). The children of Ajegunle are all sympathetic to the Delta struggle, the armed warfare that goes on between the Delta militants and the government and anyone on their side.

"They don't care what colour you are; if you're not black, they'll kidnap you" is the gist of one song by the dramatically-tall twin rappers who go by the name of LongJohn. They were invited by the rebels to go and do a concert in the Delta, a moral-boosting gig in one of the rebels' camps, a village deep in the jungle. They had to take a boat for six hours through the mangroves to get there. LongJohn, like most rappers who emerge from west African ghettos, are god-fearing, respectful and neat.

Ajegunle looked to me very unlike a 'slum'. It was not unlike the worst bits of Dakar- low-rise buildings, open sewers, rattling structures in which millet is ground and peanut-oil sold. I wasn't scared, as many said I should be. No self-respecting Nigerian would go to Ajegunle, and when I came back, my Nigerian friends asked to see photos; they were all surprised to see paved roads.

It does have a bad reputation though. My friend, K. led me to a clearing behind a decrepit building where Alsations were kept in cages and Doberman puppies yapped in a pen. "This is where the robbers plan their jobs", he said, pointing to a neat space beneath a palm tree. Later, as we sat in the street sipping cold Pepsi ("You ever had Pepsi as cold as this in Nigeria? The neighbourhood people bribe the electricity office to bring them light.") K. pointed to a young guy who roared up on a flash motorbike. "This guy uses a skeleton key, a spike filed really really sharp, to break into cars."

He also taught me some hand signals that he would use as we walked through the neighbourhood. "If I point at someone with my left hand, it means they're a scammer. If I point with my right, it means they're a robber. If I wave my arm round and round and round, it means they're all into everything." Pretty much everyone I met though, including my friend who is studying for an MA on conflict resolution in the Delta region, was polite and intelligent. I suppose you have to be intelligent to scam million of pounds out of greedy English people who fall for the 419 scams.

"People feel like white people came and took us people for slaves. Now we're taking their money back, it's only fair. But what I don't get," said K. "is how people can be so stupid as to fall for it!" That is what everyone, scammers and non, think about the 419 trick. The bad light is thrown not on the fraudsters, but on the idiots who fall for it.

The house awoke to a lighter mood this morning; the air was cooler.

In the evening, as engineers tried to fix the enormous satellite dish in the garden from which F. runs his internet business, a sharp wind poured down the drive leading from the street to the house, bringing with it black, swollen clouds. When I went into the street, pandemonium had broken out, with okadas (motorcycle taxis) racing faster than usual and danfo buses screeching the horn and the breaks alternately, racing to race the rain.

At Happy Barbing Salon (Grace Makes the Journey Great), the barber shop on the corner which also sells CDs, Happy's apprentice barber, China, asked that I snap him. No doubt in an act of bravado inspired by the bosses absence, he picked up his mobile phone, took a stance at the shop front as if he was the owner of the place and pretended to take a call; the Big Man.

Back at home, Mama Daniel stood beside me defiantly as I made a curry. "I want to learn," she said. I showed her how to cut onions, fry them in oil and add spices. Tomorrow, she said, she will write it all down. Mama Daniel can not cook; she is heavy handed and 'not known for her lightening speed' at noticing things like ripening plantain. But really she is just bored and never been shown how to do things.

This evening, as I write this, we enjoy silent electricity from the grid, for the first time since I have been here.

It is very hard to express why life is so very hard in Lagos. It is so all-consuming that it's impossible to make comparisons or look at the situation objectively. It is hard to remember what life is like elsewhere, as the body sets its airbag to the Lagos setting and forgets what kind of defense system other places require. I haven't been to the interior of Nigeria, so I don't know what life is like in more rural places; life in the village is often a lot harder than life in the city. But Lagos is a beast, and I can't imagine that life elsewhere can be more difficult.

The state of decay that is found all over the tropics is somehow more obvious in Lagos. There are so many people that a bout of heavy rain can cause the most tremendous chaos. Yesterday I was 12 hours trying to get home from friends, stopping for a short lunch on the way and then having to take shelter at The Shrine to wait for the rain to stop. Lorries burnt out their clutch cables stopping and starting in slow traffic up the hill to Akute, passers-by forced to act as vigilante traffic wardens in order to clear up the mess at crossroads. The generator ran out of fuel; muck and air was sucked up into it. A bolt snapped during being repaired, the metal had completely rusted. Now it is well and truly bust.

People in Lagos go to church in a big way. This morning I was allowed a lie-in, the woman who warms the crowd up before the pastor arrives didn't get screeching over her megaphone until 9.45am. Until 2pm, the entire neighbourhood was filled with the excruciating shouts of people trying to improve their lives through god. What would improve life is some infrastructure; people would be less infuriated and shout less.

After I had given up hopes of being a gymnast and a synchronised swimmer (around age 15), I decided I wanted to be a dancer. Around the time I was trying to get to grips with the moves of a Ghanaian dance troupe, I heard 'He Miss Road' by Fela Kuti, saw a few old clips of him and his terrifically sexy dancers, and decided that if there was such a thing as life after death (and time travel), I wanted to come back in the year 1975 as one of them.

Fate would have it that Fela's daughter, a wonderful dancer, decided to teach me how to dance Afrobeat, the music that Fela invented. Femi, Fela's son, runs a band and is constantly flanked by three dancers on the stage, as well as an alternating crew of dancers who come out into the audience and climb up into a cage, a wooden frame on stilts covered with netting to stop eager hands from wandering inside. When they move, the cage sways and jiggles from side to side. Though the girls are small, they are strong and powerful and it often feels as if a flick of the hips could bring the cage down.



The three girls on the stage are the full-time dancers. During band practise every Tuesday and Thursday they wear t-shirts and tracksuit pants but when they perform, either in Lagos or overseas, they wear fabulously-crafted outfits usually made from strings of beads and the bare minimum of underwear. Great chains of coloured glass beads hang heavy over each shoulder, crossing at the back. The hips are adorned with more strings, and when they move, the beads jangle and clatter against eachother, in a mind-boggling frenzy of colours. From the waist up, the girls sometimes appear to be standing perfectly still, waiting for a bus perhaps. From the waist down, they move their ample hips in dizzying circles, up and down and around and around. If the audience wasn't already in a state of smoke-induced transfixion, then this would do make sure they were.



It is very hard to dance Afrobeat. Clutching onto a railing, flicking my hips this way and that, I am trying my best, and I have been told I am "not a lost cause".

Lagos is so large a city that my trip to see friends near the centre of town on Friday has to involve an overnight stay. I am out in Ogun State- still a part of Lagos but in an entirely different state- staying with a friend in a rambling house that has not seen a clear-out since about the early 80s. Crazy floral carpet, years of dust underneath it, hides funky 1970s orange tiles and when the generator is on, beautiful glass chandeliers glow in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The house is set on a compound almost entirely filled with aloe vera plants.





I've been afraid of dogs ever since I was chased by some Dobermans in Japan. Even when I'm not scared of them, I've got it into my head that I don't like them. I am staying in a house with eight dogs, and there's not a thing I can do about it.

Patch doesn't like me. He thinks I will steal his prize pineapple, and in the morning he nips my toes when I am outside watching the sun come up, hoping that a little morning cool air will take away the heat that has built up inside me over night. Those quiet hours between waking and when the generator comes on at nine, are silent and beautiful.

The evening brings the same quiet, and that golden sun which mellows everything it touches. I have become quiet fond of Jessica, a ridgeback, who is lumbering and large but inoffensive. The bench I was sitting on, crumbling like everything else in the compound, cast a shadow on her soft fur and for a moment I thought she too looked very beautiful.

Today I was supposed to go to Dakar; it was the first day of my new project which, on bad days, is tainted by self-doubt. But, having bought the ticket and decided it was now or never, I was pleased to be getting on my way. This morning I awoke to find 6 inches of snow plastering the garden and street. The French girls next door came knocking at my house to ask me to come and play, and I enjoyed it except for knowing that my plane wasn't going to leave for Senegal.

So, bags packed, I am still in London, and so tired from all the ringing around that I can't think of anything except that this must be a sign that bad stars are surrounding the trip, that my self-doubt is justified.