England is under water and I am going camping next weekend, in England. I know I should be worrying about finding my wet-weather jacket but at this moment, I can't imagine what water falling from the sky is like.

There has been no rain in Dakar for nine months. When that rain did come, it wasn't much more than a trickle, what we call 'whisse' in Senegal , as opposed to 'taow', the big, thundering rain. Cotton farmers are suffering in the south, which means entire families go without a crop, the sale of which should, in a good year, sustain them throughout the 12-month period.

A friend told me that the reason it doesn't rain in Dakar anymore is because God has decided that it's not important for us to have water. There are no famers here anymore, he says, so why do we need rain?

I'm living the most priviledged of lives; I have a generator and a water pump, so I hardly ever have to go without water or electricity. I have very little to complain about. But I miss the rain, I miss water, I miss the smell of wet earth as the rain putters on the pavement and causes everyone to run for cover. I miss sitting on the balcony and watching the wild weather outside, rolling up my jeans to be able to cross the road, watching my flip-flop get caught in a whirl of flood-water as it gets taken to some unknown destination. I miss the wonderful release of a storm, the cool relaxing breeze in the clean, light skies that give you a moment to breath before the vast heat of the next build-up starts.



We have been waiting for a month for the rains now, and I have all but shut up shop. By 11am I am exhausted by the heat, until 8pm when I can start work again. If I eat at lunch time, I must sleep for two hours afterwards. When I was in Abidjan, which had been through the waiting period and was in the cool of the full rainy season, my friend said one afternoon, 'things are so much easier when it's not so hot' and she's right. The heat builds up and builds up so that you almost don't notice it happening. Just, one day you can no longer function. It takes a while to work out what's wrong with you and then you realise: nothing. It's just all part of waiting for the rains.

The Moulin Rouge

Leon is the parrot who lives in our building. He speaks French, he makes dog noises, he does the Moulin Rouge.



The Moulin Rouge is where he climbs up on to the top bars of the cage, holds on with his claws (paws?), throws his head back and swings his red tail feathers round and round in a circle. Just like a red windmill.



This afternoon, Papi (in the white hat), whose sole responsibility it is to look after the parrot, invited some kids in to play with Leon.



It's not the same as being able to go down the street and hang out with Now, but it is some sort of community. A parrot, a man who claims to be a hundred years old, and me.

"Ca c'est pas l'Afrique"

I was walking along the street. I was going to the bank. A man, in his thirties, dressed in a smart black shirt, was standing by a car and jangling a set of keys, as if he was going to get in and drive off.

"Bonsoir Madam," he said, and with one look I knew I didn't know him.

Before I could reply, because I almost always greet the strangers who greet me, he said, angrily, "So you don't recognise me huh?" and I walked on without replying.

Sometimes, it is true, you meet someone once, you chat briefly, you forget them, then you see them again somewhere totaly unconnected and they remember your name and what day you spoke, but you have no recollection of them. It is embaressing, but it happens.

I knew I didn't know this person, although he looked vaguely like my plumber, but he also didn't look like the kind of guy who hangs around in the market pulling this trick on every toubab who comes along, in the hope of getting an extortionate sale out of them. He was smart and he had a car. It was confusing.

I went to the bank. I returned, and as I was crossing the road, the same man came up from behind me, as if he'd been following me, and said, angrily,

"When you see someone you know, you greet them. It's like that in Africa."

Oh, right. That old chesnut. Look at the rude tourist who doesn't know how to behave with humanity and respect. She wasn't brought up properly. In Europe they're all rude anyway, no one talks to anyone else, and then they come here and they do the same to Africans. C'est pas comme ca en Afrique.

If it's one thing that drives me mad, it's being told how to behave properly by con-artists.

He tried to walk beside me, I tried to let him walk ahead, he tried one more time, I took refuge with a nice boy who was selling fake perfume, the guy went on. I watched him, as he watched me, take out a piece of carboard box and set it on the wall of the cathedral. He would sit and wait for his next target. Still wearing his best shirt, and jangling his car keys.

Living in a big city

Omar the tailor has been working overtime. At the moment Dakar is emptying itself of foreign workers; the UN lot have finished their contracts, the French are taking off for August. Omar knows that this is probably the busiest time of year and he doesn’t want to turn any work down so he’s working 7 days a week, 12 hours a day.



This is also the time of year when 8-hour power cuts aren’t unusual. The other day I went down to the atelier to find out how the patchwork trousers were getting along and he was sitting at the back, silence around as machines lay dormant, fanning himself with a wicker hand fan.

I eventually took him to my flat, left him a key while I went out to a meeting, and let him work on my machine.



The trousers are finished, and are beautiful, and it’s not just me who thinks it.

Thursday night was the debut sortie of the trousers. I set out from my flat, through the cooling dusky streets, and walked down the main boulevard that leads to the presidential palace.

As I crossed the road, I saw one of Dakar’s crazy folk sitting in the road wearing only a ripped and dirty cloth around his waist. He had dreadlocks yet half of them had fallen out. He was dirty, grinning like a mad man, and holding his arm out towards me. Having just passed the group of wheelchair women who congregate on this road and wait for the lights to turn red so they can ask for money from the drivers who have nowhere to turn, I assumed he was holding his hand out for money too.

When I got closer, and smiled at him in place of giving him coins, I realised that the reason he was holding his hand out was not to collect coins, but to tell me, with a big thumbs-up and a crazy grin, that he liked my trousers.

*****

This morning, having been out till 5 listening to music, I wandered out of my flat in the midday sun to go and see how Omar was getting along with my tunic. It was hot, bright, and I hadn’t eaten.

Crossing the roundabout at the end of my road, a taxi crossed my path and stopped. The driver stuck his hand out to stop me.

I hate Dakar taxi drivers, I thought. You try and cross the road and if they don’t try to run you over, they stop in your path to try and get a fare out of you. I wasn’t in the mood.

Then I heard my name called. It was Sow, my taxi-man.

“Where are you going in this sun?” he called out, shaking my hand and laughing as another taxi sped by and nearly knocked me flying.

“I’m going to the tailor,” I replied in Wolof. Although Sow has worked in Dakar his whole like, he doesn’t speak a single word of French.

“Get in, I’ll take you,” he said, and we sped through the quiet Saturday streets, round the back of the bus station where the women and children have made a tentative home on its perimeters, their bright clothes hanging out to dry on the railings, to Omar’s shop. He dropped me off and drove away.

*****

I watched Omar piece together my tunic. We talked about setting up a proper atelier where he could work on his own. We talked about the patchwork trousers, how Cheikh Lo, musician and famous wearer of all things patchwork, had made me dance last night with him at his concert, delighted that I have at last joined the patchwork family. I drank some coffee from the toothy boy who pushes a Nescafe barrow around mixing up coffee and powdered milk into something almost delicious. I wandered around and talked to the other tailors.





I watched silly dancing on the TV with the rest of the guys as they took a break from their backbreaking work.



My friend Now sent me a message. ‘Madam, how is the morning, did you have a good repose?’.

Dakar takes and takes and takes. It so very rarely gives so much all at once.

Rays Bans

My friend Aziz told me today that the reason I lost my sunglasses over the side of the boat on Sunday was because I hadn't made any sacrifices to the sea. He said it was backpay for all the times I have been in the sea but not scattered any rice or sugar. Now I am at zero and must take a little bag of sugar with me every time I go from now on to make sure this doesn't happen again in another 6 years.

My mum told me the reason I lost my glasses over the side of the boat on Sunday is because I didn't attach them to a little cord around my neck.

I thought I had malaria so I went to the clinic to have a malaria test. It came back negative, so that's not the reason that I am tired the whole time and can only work till midday.

But while I was worrying that some horrid disease was incubating in my blood stream, I missed the signing of a contract between a big agricultural co-op and the government. It's not like I even knew about it: imagine that the man who deals with the press at the ministry would do something so helpful as to telephone me when big things like this are happening. That would make life too easy.

So yesterday morning, seeing that the rest of the news-wire world had covered the event, I rang around a few people to try to get information on the what and how of this deal. I read it three times in different newspapers, but being a thorough kind of journalist I needed to get the info from the horse's mouth. So in the heat of the midday sun, I went off the the ministry to speak to the person whose job it is to speak to the press about this information.

Arriving at the gate, I was met by a gruff guard.

"Who are you?" he growled.

"I am Rose Skelton," I said.

"What do you want?" he asked, and I told him I had a meeting with Mr So-and-So.

"Which country do you come from?" he barked, frowning from under his blue peaked cap.

What the hell difference does that make, I wanted to ask him.

"Ang-a-la-terre," I said in my Senegalese French.

"Oh, OK," he said, still not smiling, and let me through the gate.

I went up tp the guy's office. He wasn't there. A young man came to help me knock on the door, as if two people knocking would bring him back. I rang him on his phone.

"I'm coming!" he said, and then appeared a second later wearing a whilte boubou from the floor above. I was sweating at this point, wondering why government buildings always have a lot of expensive air-conditioning units but at the same time always leave the outside doors open.

I went into this gentleman's office. It was the typical scene, stacks of old newspapers, empty mineral water bottles balancing on top of the stacks, dog-eared and yellowing printed documents everywhere, a telephone somewhere on the desk, just the curled wire visible, an old computer, not switched on, and some cardboard files from which he started to hunt around for the document I needed.

I passed him my business card; he didn't give me on in return. "They've just run out," he lied.

I told him what I needed. Figures, and lots of them.

I knew at once from the far-away look in his eye he wouldn't give them to me, either because he didn't know them or he wasn't authorised. We had not written letters and had them stamped and legalised, so I was surprised that he had even agreed to see me.

He started to talk, to fend me off, to stop me from asking questions, to draw out the meeting so that I would go away and leave him alone.

"First the minister thanked the head of state, Maitre Abdoulaye Wade..." said my friend, telling me the gory details of the signing ceremony.

I let him ramble on, until he came to a pause, and I asked him how much the signing was for. At this point I had nothing I could publish.

"Well..." he said, uncertain.

"I saw in the newspaper that it was eighty million dollars," I said, hoping to help him out.

He jumped at the chance to throw me off completely.

"Ah ha! So you saw it in the papers. ALL the press was there yesterday so you can take it from them." He was speaking quickly now, knowing he had found the thing with which I could not argue.

I reminded him that not all the press was there. I was absent. I also reminded him that it was his job to tell me about these things. But looking around the room, realising he did not even know where his telephone was, I knew it was too much to ask that he do something like that.

"But I can't copy other people's work," I protested.

"Maybe we should call the director of the cabinet," was his next line. With which he started searching for the phone. On finding it minutes later and dialling all sorts of numbers, he eventually got through to the person who would be authorised to get authorisation to speak to me.

My man picked up my business card and mumbled into the phone that he had 'someone' (a journalist, I would have said) here who wanted information. What company is she from? Let me see...

"Rose....e-skelton...west.....Africa....corre-."

I stopped him. That was my title, not my company. I pointed to the name of my company written clearly beside my name. He gave a sharp jab with the phone as if I was intruding on his private space. I realised I had been rude, but then, well, this my chance to get the information I needed to get paid that day and he was ballsing it up left, right and centre.

I heard the man on the other end of the phone ask him to pass the receiver to me. I gave encouraging looks to show that I would behave well if he gave me the phone. My man resisted; the other man persisted. Finally, reluctantly, he gave me the phone.

"Which company are you from and where is it based?" asked the man on the other end of the phone directly and clearly.

I told him and he said,

"Fine. I will see what I can do. Give me your number and I will call you back."

Done. I handed the phone back. I knew he would never call me, but I liked this line of tact, it was better than the one that wasted everyone's time.

I went home without the information. I will never have it. I will never be invited to the next thing, unless I happen to hear it from another journalist. And I will probably never get used to working in this country.

Four go on an adventure

Some of you may remember how, back when I was 5, I wanted to be a traffic warden. Later on, when I discovered swimming, I decided that my career of choice was synchronized swimming. Here is what happened this weekend.

Mona, Naomi, Julia and I went, in dubious weather conditions, to an island off the coast of Dakar for a relaxing picnic. Mona and Julia, graceful ladies that they are, were having fun practising their synchronized swimming moves while Naomi and I watched from the shore.



I never like to be left out of anything so here I am asking if I can come and play too.



See how graceful we all are? Except, oh, I seem to be the only one holding my nose, as if I'm the only one who expects to go entirely under the water.



My body didn't stay up like the others





And then I laughed so much under the water that I nearly drowned.



Come on, let's do it again.



They agree, and I get to show them that I can be dainty too.



Now it's time for the picnic. Oh. it's just a little breeze.



What the girls didn't know when we set off on this trip is that after I decided as a kid that synchronized swimming wasn't for me, I took up geology instead. Imagine my great delight, and theirs, when I discovered that the island we were on was formed of hexagonal-shaped basaltic columns formed when lava bubbled up and flowed into the sea.



Here is Julia getting into the spirit of the geology lesson and being really interested in all I have to say.






But we did have such a lovely day. Unfortunately, in my excitement to show off my new haircut I whipped my cap off on the boat and my Ray Bans flew into the sea. Goodbye lovely glasses.

Dakar raps

It's been a while since I went to a concert, could be all of two weeks, and I was a little apprehensive about agreeing to go to a hip-hop gig when I was feeling a little emotionally delicate. But I went, reminding myself that most of my reason for being in Dakar is to be able to go out and see real people making good music.

Didier Awadi is one of Senegal's most famous rappers. He was part of the group Positive Black Soul which became internationally acclaimed in the early 90s after touring with MC Solaar and Baaba Maal, and now he's going it alone. I always maintain that while I'm interested in the kind if rap people are listening to, and the stuff rappers are talking about, I don't really like listening to it as a genre of music. But then I hear albums like African Underground: The Depths of Dakar and go to gigs where rappers deliver such nicely-timed, funny and melodic lyrics and the whole audience is going wild because the beat's good, the musicians are having fun and there's a really good energy about the combined belief in whatever this person is saying, and I think, why do I always say I don't like listening to rap music?

Didier's thing is fighting illegal immigration, fighting African governments, commemorating the death of Lumumba and Thomas Sankara, disliking the French, and making really good-sounding tunes. The audience in the open-air auditorium was one-third white to two thirds-African and I noticed there was a little discomfort, or perhaps just not knowing what to do, when 300 Africans have leapt to their feet, fists jammed in the air, shouting "George Bush is a criminal" and (to my horror, because it was funny to laugh at this till it was turned to my own lame government), "Tony Blair is a criminal". The French-bashing caused a few gasps, but I kept thinking, if I described this to anyone, this scene of sitting amongst loads of black Africans while they scream the horrors of what white people have done to them, they'd fear for my safety. In fact, I found it quite warming, because where else could that happen and then afterwards everyone's milling around and chatting without a thought of race or colour in their heads, but Senegal?



One of the best parts of the evening, apart from the 40-member church choir, the Congolese singer who made amazing melodies with small clay bottles, and the kora player who managed to make the whole classical Mandinka music thing work with the Swiss-led hardcore guitars and drums, was Xuman, pictured above, who came on and did five minutes of pure and beautiful rap, in Wolof, but in a way that even I could understand.



He managed to slate the current Senegalese government in nicely-rhyming metaphors and be witty at the same time, dropping a line in at just the right time and place so that the whole crowd went wild. It was pure genius.

Once again, music reminds me why life is good, and why life in Dakar can be so fantastic. Thanks.

West African Admin

I spent the first two days of this week trying to do three things:

get my passport back from the British Embassy
get a visa to Sierra Leone
get a flight to Sierra Leone

The visa I can understand would be difficult. Countries make it hard to get visas and the fact that I, as a British passport holder (ha!), can get into pretty much any country I like without any trouble whereas a person with a name like Ibrahim won't be given so much as the passport application form, makes me feel that I should suffer for a visa at some point.

The Sierra Leone high commission in London politely informed me I would need an invitation letter from the Sierra Leoneon government. Knowing full well that it would be virtually impossible to get a) a phone line through to Sierra Leone and b) to talk to someone who would have the authority to invite me to their country and c) get them to send me a letter, I asked the man how I did that. He informed me, less politely, that he had given me all the information he was obliged to give me and it wasn't his job to make it happen for me. In other words, 'we don't want you in our country, thankyou very much'.

Next I try to find out what's happened to my passport. I had given it in at the British Embassy, along with £200, to apply for a second passport. The idea was that they LOOKED at it, but didn't sent it away anywhere to have its corner cut off (because it still has pages left in it), and gave it right back.

They said they would need to keep it and would call me when I could come and get it. They didn't call. The British Embassy in Dakar, like the Sierra Leone government, does not want you to be able to reach them. They make it virtually impossible to telephone, and when you do get through you are told, "Didn't we tell you we would call you when you can have it back?" as if there is something wrong with you for feeling a little nervous that you have to take a plane in 2 weeks, have to get a visa for somewhere else, have no ID in a country where you are asked for it even to get your letters from the post box, and someone is holding your passport for a reason which is never explained to you. So far I have: no visa, and no passport.

Next I tried to find a flight to Sierra Leone, arriving on a Wednesday. I rang two different travel agents, and they both gave me the same advice: travel on a Friday. The two airlines which fly from Dakar to Freetown leave on a Friday. I explained that since the elections were on a Saturday, I couldn't possibly fly on a Friday and could they, since they have computers infront of them which tell them about all the flights all over the world, find me a way of getting there, perhaps via another country, via Europe if I have to, on a Wednesday. The answer from both of them: travel on a Friday.

So I lied. I told them I wanted to go to Gambia on a Tuesday. I told them I would also relish the idea of staying in Banjul for the night and then taking the SN Brussels flight to Freetown the next day. "Ah!" said one of the agents, "you could go via gambia". "You have to go via Brussels" said the other.

So now I have: no visa, no passport, but I will get to spend two nights (one each way) in the Gambia. What more could I want?

Home Truths

This week I was sent two fantastic albums. One, by a Cameroonian bass player called Etienne Mbappe and the other by a group from the UK called Lau, a folk group of epic proportions that anyone with an interest in cool rocky guitary-violiny stuff (I am not a person who knows anything about this so-called folk stuff) should invest in. It's just really interesting to listen to, isn't boring and samey, the guy has a gorgeous husky voice, and it sounds like home.

Other than that, a morning with Omar the tailor making another iPod cover and bringing the third person into the Senegalese Patchwork Co-operative, the guy who's going to fit together the 165 pieces for the wedding present. Omar was tired, having not slept much, and I was making him work hard, presse to get to my breakfast meeting. I sat, sweating in his sweat shop, fanning myself and giving orders, and thought, what nicer way is there to spend a saturday morning now that Home Truths is off the air?

128 bits of fabric, 37 to go

I've got a new patchwork project on the go. I am in the process of cutting up 165 pieces of fabric. Here are 128 of them.



My friend Now came to visit this week and helped me work out how many pieces I needed for this wedding present for friends. He measured out the whole thing then counted the pieces I had already cut. This is all part of my Senegalese patchwork co-operative which I am running, which involves Omar finding me the fabric, me designing and cutting, Now counting and measuring and then one of Omar's guys in the sweatshop sewing the whole thing together. I worked out that this way I have more time for striped iPod covers and purses if I leave the boring jobs to someone else. This is the first step towards Omar and I going into the patchwork business together.

This is what I brought home from Abidjan. The first two have tiny gold dots painted on them, and are designed and made in Abidjan, so says my Ivorian cloth source.







It's incredibly hot here and I have taken to having a 4 hour break in the middle of the day in which I eat and sleep and sometimes go for a swim. The hard bit is coming back to work afterwards, especially when the rest of the country stops work at Friday lunch time and never comes back to work. If I went to the mosque like everyone else, I wouldn't feel so guilty about taking the afternoon off.

Fixing my shoes

Airplanes in west Africa are like buses, a friend once said to me. They can't help stopping when they pass a place with people. Flying back from Abidjan, making my way northwards, we passed over endless green and rivers, battling through thick heavy rain cloud.

"This is Sierra Leone," said my neighbour, glancing out of the window. "We must be arriving in Conakry soon." He said it as if he were on the bus and we had just passed through East Croydon.

Arriving in Conakry, a whole lot of people got off and another lot got on. Through the window I saw a motorised luggage truck ramming a suitcase and destroying its front end. The man in charge of luggage shouted to the driver to reverse, which he did, but no amount of thumping the case would get it back in shape. I was glad it wasn't mine.

Finally getting to Dakar, I realised that I would have to face the mean taxi men at the airport. From the plane I called Sow, my faithful taxi man, and told him I was at the airport.

"I missed you," he said, and added he'd be there in a flash.

When I finally got out of the airport, I saw Sow coming towards me in a smart new shirt, waving. He had had a haircut too, and looked younger. After he had put my stuff in the boot, he climbed into the taxi, but not into the driver's seat: there was already someone driving the car.

I asked him why he wasn't driving his own taxi.

"It's my day off today. My friend's using the car instead."

He had left his home to come to the airport to make sure that I found the car alright. We dropped him off home again before we went to my place. Sow is a rare gem.

**************

Dakar. The first thing I did, of course, was to visit Omar the tailor. I had brought him some fabric from Abidjan and I wanted him to get to work on my trousers. On the way to Omar's, I passed a young guy fixing shoes. My high heels broke at the Queen's Birthday Party and I wasn't sure if it was the kind of thing one of the 'shoe doctors' who fix shoes by the side of the road could fix. I was sure I would have to take my favourite shoes to the man who actually makes shoes, so he could replace my heel tip.

Abdou the shoe doctor was about 17 and didn't speak any French. I showed him the shoes and one of his customers, a young girl, translated for me from Wolof. He would replace the shoe tips for such-and-such a price. I whistled through my teeth and loked unsure.

"OK, donne" he said, agreeing to my price.

I realised, it being evening, that I would have to leave my favourite shoes with him overnight, and suddenly felt unsure. Having size 9 feet, high heels are not something that for me are easy to find. But Abdou said he would do it in half an hour. Somehow I thought that was unlikely.

On my way back from Omar, I saw that the little street where Abdou had set up his table was empty. The man with the pousse-pousse cart of fruit had gone home and the peanut sellers had disappeared too. I had visions of Abdou hawking my size 9s around Dakar, up and down traffic jams on the corniche calling out "bon chaussures, grand chaussures" as he thrust them in people's faces through car windows.

But there he was, waiting for me, my shiny fixed shoes sitting on a little stool where his table been earlier.

"Donne cadeau" said his friend who wandered over to watch me hand over the money.

I told his friend that I had just given my tailor a ream of beautiful Ivorian fabric. If Abdou became my regular shoe fixer, then I would give him a cadeau too.

A night out in Abidjan

Today I got over an enormous hurdle which has been looming on my horizon for about three years. I wrote the first, and only (so far), paragraph of a short story which I have been wanting to write for some time. For a long time after I started making my living from writing articles, I still thought of myself as a writer, not a journalist: journalism was just what I did to make money. Slowly, I have forgotten about that and just enjoy what I do.

Recently, my perceived 'inability' to write has been haunting me, my fear that if I do start to write, it won't be any good, or that it will be too hard to do, or even worse, that I won't do it at all. The fear stops it from happening, and so for a year or so now I have been putting it off, telling myself that I am too tired to write at the weekends when all I do all week is write. This week away in Abidjan, I thought as I sat on the plane feeling free from all weight of Dakar and of my job, I will write, I will have all week to write. Of course, all I really wanted to do was to read, but this morning, Sunday, I sat down and I started to write. Even if no one ever reads it, I hope I will finish it. Just to let myself know that I can still do it.

********

On Friday night, we went out to a bar in one of the districts of Abidjan. It had rained heavily, and it was still before midnight so things were quiet. There had also been an attack on the Prime Minister's plane in the morning, and three people had died. Many people were staying at home.

Abidjan is much more developed than Dakar in its basic infrastructure. Shanty towns still nestle in the green crook of hillsides between large, middle-classed neighbourhoods, and the slum-road that leads of kilometres out of the city towards the countryside is much the same as Dakar- mosques, little roadside stalls, bars, girls in boubous walking together along the congested road. But in Abidjan there are shopping malls with escalators, there are street lights, and there are pavements. There are even curbs, that you can not drive up, and that people don't.

But the bars still have one thing in common: pretty girls in tiny outfits vying for the attentions, however short term, of the white man.

The 'Taxi Brousse' was a lot more colourful and well-kept than the average Senegalese hooker bar, with an impressive glitter ball rotating on the ceiling spinning out not just white but red lights too. The bar, rectangular, had bar stools all around it and we three took our seats on one side and ordered our drinks. A stunningly beautiful woman in a small red miniskirt and matching top sporting a pair of intellectual-style glasses (which I am certain were not to help her see) smiled charmingly as she served us. Other girls, all dressed in similar red outfits, dittied up and down seeing to the clients. More pretty young girls sat on the other side of the bar, some getting up to dance on the empty dancefloor and inspect themselves closely in the wall mirrors as they flicked their hips to Ivorian pop music, others chattering on the elbows of the white men who began at midnight to drift in to their, no doubt, favourite joint.

The lone man, probably French military, sitting across from us on the other side of the bar, was not lone for long. A young girls in a stretchy black and white shirt, siddled up, clinked glasses with him gleefully, then within minutes was lolling her head on his shoulder with a puppy-dog vacant look on her face, which was almost charming. For once, I thought, I am not the target. Not an Ivorian man in sight.

We moved onto another bar, slightly more run-down but even more entertaining. This place had an 'orchestre', a group of young guys and an older guitarist (who was forced to play standing on the dance floor because the stage was too small to accommodate him) who played every kind of cover song you can think of: Stuck on You, a Richard Bona hit and as much Reggae, Antilles and Ivorian pop you can desire. The lead singer was wonderful, so full of energy for every single song, even though they play there four nights a week, every week, to the same clientele- hookers and the odd ageing white man.

During the band's break, there was some commotion as three young guys shuffled onto the dancefloor, took the mics and started to body pop and dance an outrageously athletic and expressive dance routine. They each wore large diamante studs in their ears, wore chains around their wrists and necks, and one had a tough hip-hop twirl of plaits which wound around his head like a pretty African village girl. The hookers went wild, jigging up to thrust money down the boys' shirts, taking the opportunity to dance a little dance on their way back to their sits. A photograph projected onto the wall beside the dancefloor showed a white girl with an 80s perm, naked from the waist up. I felt like I had stumbled into someone else's life, and felt bad for finding it thoroughly amusing.

City comparisons

After another afternoon of sweaty, backbreaking dancing, I was taken out for dinner at an Ivorian 'Maquis', a semi open-air restaurant in a ramshackle little street in the local neighbourhood. To one side, some rough wooden tables covered in plastic Guiness table cloths and to the other side, some grills and a table covered in skewers of beef and large fresh fish.

We chose our food, which came with friend plantain, had some beer, and listened to the upbeat Ivorian pop music spilling out of a bar behind us. The waitress was pleasant and polite, the food was fantastically fresh, good tasting and not expensive, and I now find myself looking at Dakar as if she were the ugly sister who can't quite get stuff right. And disliking, immensely, myself for it.

Dancing in Abidjan

Arriving in Abidjan by plane, you can't help but notice the vast expanse of water stretching across the city. Stepping outside of the air conditioned airport, it feels like the water is just as much in the air as it is in the lagoons and rivers of the city's landscape. Dakar is hot, but it's a heat with no respite because the rains haven't yet come so the heat never breaks. Everything is dry, yellow, sunburnt, uninspiring. This is the Africa I had got used to, especially as the African country I know best after Senegal is Mauritania, even more dry, more yellow, more sparse in its signs of life.

Abidjan, on the other hand, is like the Africa of novels, it's the tropical rains, the deep green grasses, the puddles by the side of the road, thick flowering bushes, gardens bursting with life, rains dripping through the leaves of every tree. The air is hot, but so wet that it's almost cooling, and there is no direct, burning sun. Cloud obscures everything, which in these parts, is good.

Last night my friend and I went to the shops and drove by the artists' village where Dobet Gnahore grew up. We got caught in the car on a crossroads where the traffic wasn't moving, and no one could escape from the gridlock. It was dark, much darker than I am used, and women sold sweetcorn on the pavements beside us. One by one, people got out of their cars, or clients got out of the red taxis which dot the city's traffic jams, and started to direct cars around eachother. A young boy approached a robust white four wheel drive with the black letters 'UN' stamped on its doors, with a six foot long radio arial bending across its roof, as he begged for money through the jam. An older boy stood infront of our car and slowly moved us through the traffic until we were out the other side and driving up to the commune. We gave him 100 francs, and he moved onto the next client in need of his freelance traffic wardening skills.

This afternoon I went to the village to take my first dance class. My teacher is called Rita, a young Ivorian dancer who showed me into a cupboard to get changed and then swept the water from the crumbling open-air auditorium floor. We started with the dance of central Cote d'Ivoire, performed with the chest almost parallel to the ground, bottom out, and led by the neck which juts forwards and back as the chest, back and arms follow. The founder of the village, called Were Were (pronounced Weray Weray), came to watch how we were getting along, her dreadlocks falling the her stout waist, her carved wooden walking stick in her hand. When she tried to help me coordinate my head and hands I saw a reflection of myself, so white, in the terrific glassiness of her eyes, and I realised that she looks at me as if she can see right through me. She has a smile, a constant glow in her face, which is both comforting and perturbing at the same time, as if this mother figure could cut you down with just a single glance.

We danced for two hours, the drummer sometimes stopping to answer his mobile phone, and I sweated as much liquid as I could get inside me. In the breaks I practised some Senegalese dance moves, feeling good to be in an enviroment where people experiment and pracise, rather than the Senegalese sabar parties where the girls are so intimidating that anyone short of a professional would be mad to try and join in. My body is aching, I am still hot from the exertion, but feeling good.

Patchwork Elbow

Anyone who's been to my house recently will have been quizzed on the new patchwork cloth, and what to do with it.



I've given myself patchwork elbow sewing the little squares together after a long day's work at my desk next door, but it is at last finished and now I don't know what to do with it. Originally it was going to be a pair of trousers, for a boyfriend who, happily, showed his true colours before I got onto row 2, so now it has developed in to two metres of pinks, greens, blues and the odd piece of orange scattered throughout, and it's going to be for me.



I wanted to make it into a pair of trousers for myself, but then I moved onto the idea of a dress, then someone suggested I use it to make another bedspread, a chaise longue, cushions, a ball gown, a tunic, and now I am back to the trousers. But at this rate it's not going to be anything because it's still sitting on the back of a chair being shown to anyone who comes to visit, and Omar the tailor is still waiting for me to come down and give him instructions on what to do with it.

It's been a busy few weeks, and it's suddenly got very hot. I've been spending my saturdays at Now's new shop, where his niece cooks lunch and we drink Nescafe and I amuse his clients by getting up from the broken plastic chair I sit on outside the shop to sell them one cigarette or a teaspoon of pepper. I guess they've never seen a white person spoon washing powder (bought in bulk) into little plastic bags then tied in elaborate knots and hung on a metal wire to be displayed on the back wall before. I've also been working hard, having the annual contemplation of moving to another country, but mostly just trying to do my job well, make new friends and amuse myself with music and going to the tailor to find new scraps of fabric.

I recently wrote an article about an Ivorian singer called Dobet Gnahore, who gave probably the best performance I have seen in a year at the French Cultural Centre in Dakar. She's an absolute fireball of a woman, a singer, dancer, actor, drummer, who's intimidating in her talent on stage but just the nicest sweetest and most modest woman in person. She grew up in an artists' commune in Abidjan, where she learnt every art under the sun, and as I was researching this village, it reminded me of how when I came to Africa I was going to dance, that I said to myself, even if I never find any work, at least I will be able to do what I love most: to dance. Luckily I found a lot of work, but I never did much dancing. So, I am off to Abidjan today to stay with my friend and spend the week taking dance classes in Dobet Gnahore's village.

Next post from Cote d'Ivoire, then.

While I was in South Africa I received an excited email from my friend Idi in Dakar.

"We have some big news," he told me, but didn't tell me any more.

The next day I received an email from Now.

"Madam, I have something exciting to tell you," he said. I couldn't resist, so I called him up to ask what the news was.

"The tree has some flowers!" he said. And here they are. The frangipani tree which we planted to long ago in Mamelle, long before I moved, has at last produced some beautiful, sweet-smelling flowers.



I thought that was all the news I was going to get. But when I went to visit, Now told me his other piece of news. He's opened a new shop, in the depths of Ouakham, a neighbourhod not far from the original shop in Mamelle. It's a small place, a hole-in-the-wall kind of joint, but, he tells me, it's working really well. Single cloves of garlic and little sachets of black pepper are the big sellers, as people in this neighbourhood (euphamistically known as a 'quartier populair') don't tend to stock up on things like other people do. Why buy a whole head of garlic when you can just buy what you need?



So as Idi and Awa run one shop, Now's friend Samba runs the other. And Now runs between the two all day long.



While I was taking photos, a guy selling shoes came along and asked me to photograph him. Then he told me I couldn't take the photo to France and make money from it, which just about ruined my plans.



So nice to be back with my friends. I always forget when I'm away, how much my Mamelle crew mean to me. Then when I come off the plane at 2 in the morning and see Now standing there fighting off the taxi touts and the money changers, I know that as much as I miss 'home' (I don't even know where that is anymore), I like Dakar too.

Actually, when Now came to pick me up from the airport last week, I decided, for the first time, to change some money while I was there. I had some Euros, and no CFA, so I asked the guy if I could change 40 Euros. Sure, he said, just give me 25,000 francs. I did. Then he said I had to give him one Euro commission. When I said that I didn't have to at all, he let me go. Then came running back and told Now that he wanted to un-do the transaction. Apparently, having failed to find a way to trick, lie, cheat or beg some money out of me, he decided he would be much better off changing money with some other toubab.

Saying goodbye to an old friend

For much of my childhood and most of my adult life, there's been an old friend in it. I'm not a dog person but I grew up with Pippa, and she was, for a dog, amusing and friendly. She died early this year and the powers that be waited until I was back in England before we scattered her (small) remains somewhere peaceful.



This was her favourite beach.

While we were in the neighbourhood, we took a visit to a place where we used to go as kids, Dungeoness. Such a gloomy name and with a dis-used nuclear power station hovering over the pebbly beach, almost a gloomy place. But not quite. We had fish and chips in the Railway Cafe, which is, thankfully, just as it used to be (except with the addition of plastic flowers on the plastic table cloths), and we ventured, in true British form, to the beach for just long enough to know that it was way too cold too hang around.

We went somewhere really nice for the weekend

I and the team went somewhere really super nice for the weekend, within drivable distance of Dakar, a clean, perfectly sandy beach with good swimming water, a lovely house right on the beach, great weather, no nuisance...and I'm not going to tell you where it was. But do enjoy the photos (views from the house).

Music link

To hear some music recorded at the wonderful Malouma's house, click here

She has a new album out on Marabi, which is really worth getting.