I was lucky enough to have Pauline with me in Dakar a couple of weeks ago, who took this photo of the street outside Omar's tailor's shop. It is taken at my favourite time of day in Dakar, just turned dark, when I have spent the late afternoon watching Omar sew or talking about new designs. Three is something very cool and soothing about the light; she captures it beautifully.

Of the many fabulous evenings I spent leading the Songlines Music Travel trip to Dakar, this soiree senegalaise
was one of the more entertaining. I had told Moussa, our fatherly driver, in Wolof (so the others couldn't understand) that I would lose my job if we didn't find music that evening. We were in St Louis and the town was dead. Moussa had been telling me to take people home, we must be tired, we shouldn't stay out alone. I was tired of his mothering on a trip that was meant to see us out till all hours. When I told him I would lose my job, he stepped his foot on the accelerator. Hands to the wheel, nose pressed against the windscreen, we bumped the two miles down a deserted road through the fish market, ending up at the Papayer Nightclub.

Before I could stop him, Moussa had leapt down from the driving seat and charged, wooly hat and all, into the glitzy nightclub. By the time I arrived, he had gathered the doormen and bar staff and told them he was leaving us in their hands, that we were their responsibility. They were not to let us walk the 100 metres to the hotel alone; we were to take a taxi.

Up for grabs that night at the dancefloor competition was a ram.

"Hello? Hello? Yes, Madam?" came the response over a crackly phone line to Lagos. I had telephoned my friend C., a retired army captain, who promised to meet me at the airport if I ever went back to Lagos and warmly extended 'compliments of the season'. It reminded me to look through my notebooks from my last visit to Lagos, where I had scribbled some phrases as C. entertained me with stories of his life in the Nigerian army.

'Operation Nightwatch,' I have written. 'For fear of the unknown.'
'In the trenches there is no bed, no air-conditioning. You have water, you sip and put back, sip and put back,' (here I remember him knees bent, half-crouched, motioning taking his hip flask of water from his belt and putting is back as quickly as possible for 'fear of unknown').
'Magistrate has no eyes in back of head.'

Reading these garbled notes, I was reminded of an incident at the airport. C. was taking me through the security scanner to the area where the baggage carousels whirred under the weight of Nigerian suitcases. I was not meant to be in there, but he managed to wangle it for me. I had not seen him go off to the scanner, and was left leaning exhausted on the Bureau de Change counter.

"This woman is with me," he told the security agent, pointing with a thumb to the empty space behind him. "Please let her through."

We laughed about that for days.

C's response to everything is, "Because I am an army officer." He fought in the Nigerian civil war (of 1967), and although now retired, maintains Operation Nightwatch in his alert stance and reluctance to sleep. Once I left him dozing on a sofa and went off to the airport, only to find him already there, waiting for me ("You are late!"). He comes across as serious, sharp, his pressed shirts rigid with starch, the buckle of his belt gleaming. His eyes have hollowed in their years, and seem shadowed. But he knows how to laugh better than anyone else, and would do anything for anyone he deemed worthy, never accepting a penny in return.

A day of consuming. This morning I bought a phone card from a cheerful fellow who this evening remembered me. "Ah," he said. "My first client of the day," flapping his phone cards.

This evening I tried to buy some shoes. A friend A. told me on the phone where I could get some from his friend, and when I went down stairs to this guy's shop, A. rang him up and told him to make me a good deal. The guy, about 18, was instantly friendly to me, telling me the exact, non-inflated, price of the shoes which were stacked up like half-fallen dominoes on wooden shelves. But he didn't have any my size. I tried, in vain, to coax him into selling me something, asking him if he had something, anything, in my size, but he looked forlorn as he said no, nothing. He did, however, send me to his friend down the road who had exactly what I was looking for.

Down the road, a similar shack on the pavement had red shoes in my size. We chatted, bantered a little, and I decided to buy them. He asked 3 times the price, and I told him to cut the crap. He reduced the price a little and I walked away. You win some, you lose some. Neither my Wolof chatter nor my minutes of sitting about chatting would convince him to give me a fair price.

On my way home, I went into a shop to get change for a 100 franc coin. Since yesterday I have owed the paper shop around the corner 25 francs, and no one in Dakar seems to have the brassy coins anymore, perhaps because they are now worth so very little. The Mauritanian who sold me a sachet of water did not have the right coins, but a young guy who came in the shop after me had one, and offered it to me as a cadeau. I took it, reluctantly, realising as I walked away that in trying to pay back one debt I had created another.

"Excuse me, miss!" the guy called out as I walked down the street. "I really want to know your name. You are so nice!"

Eventually I gave him my name, paid back my debt to the paper shop owner, and retreated inside as quickly as I could.

I'm off back to London tonight and feeling strangely ambivalent about it. The down-side of being in a place where there is time and space to breath and be is that too much thinking goes on. Perhaps it is better to charge ahead through life and not think about anything much.

Yesterday P and I sat looking at some kids playing in the dramatically turquoise shore waters, kids covered in sand, plunging again and again into the shallow surf.

"Most Africans never get over their happy childhood," said P, who is probably right. What a great way to grow up.

I think P. will blog about Christmas decorations, for who could come to Dakar at this time and not be impressed by the extraordinary glitzy decorations which deck out every patisserie and street vendor's neck? Today I saw Santas swaying from left to right as they played the saxophone; yesterday my taxi door was opened by a Santa with a whited-out face.



Usually the Senegalese hate to have their picture taken, unless they know and trust you. This guy, with a fake pot-belly, was happy to be snapped; he was rightly proud of his costume.

Yesterday I was called by the mother of one of my little girls from Ziguinchor.

"I annoyed K. yesterday," said the mother, laughing. "And she told me, 'tonight I will kill you in your bed'. I told her, well, then you will lose your mother. And she said, 'No I won't, I have another mother. Rose will take care of me.'"

I am far away but I am not forgotten.

"Danke danke moi japal goor si n'iaye," said my shy friend El Hadj as we enjoyed the warm Sunday afternoon sun and smoothed little piles of sand with our hands. This Wolof phrase is used in almost every situation, and translates as 'slowly slowly catch a money in the forest.' "It doesn't interest me to know someone today and then tomorrow not even greet them when I see them. If you want to get to know a girl, you have to go slowly slowly, so that you can become her friend first."

El Hadj and I were talking about Senegal and the Senegalese. "I love seeing foreigners come to my country," he said. "If people come here to visit it means that we are at peace." But, he went on, he hates it when Senegalese act like idiots when they see a foreigner. "You see some guys, they call out to a girl, 'hey, la belle' and they think they will be able to catch her like that. No," he said, "first you must become her friend."

El Hadj went on to tell me, in hushed tones, that some white women come to Dakar and they get with one of these guys just for a week. That's why, he said, they keep chasing white women. They think that they are all easy.

'A dirty little bar' is what I call this place but it does actually have a name: 'R n B bar' flashes in green fluorescent piping near the doorway- some stiff saloon doors and a grimy brown curtain which sweeps over your face as you try to get inside. Once inside, there is nothing much to light the place, but a blue fluorescent string of lights over the back wall showed the elements of a drum kit lying in pieces on the floor, and a few empty chairs.

A musician approached us, in a red cap.

"Hello, have you come to see the soiree?" he asked. "It is going to start right now!"

P and I both looked incredulously at the pieces of drum kit and the empty chairs where the band would eventually sit.

"Right now. In half an hour."

I am lucky to have great blogger staying with me, whose blog about last night's dinner conversation eminently cheered me. The Dakar air is gritty today, a sand storm blowing somewhere far off, and even more gritty human relationships that I can not quite understand leave me feeling puzzled.

This afternoon at the small sports stadium in the medina, we watched pair after pair of muscular men punching and grappling at eachother in an attempt to throw the other onto his back during a traditional wrestling match. Behind us, the supporters of Gouygui and to our left, the young men and women supporting Building, aptly built as his name. For hours, the two combatants had been parading around the stadium, flanked by diamante-studded youths eager to get their share of the fame and massive fortune that falls to successful wrestlers in Senegal.

Gougui, dressed in a shell-studded loin-cloth, seemed the favourite to win, or at least the most popular. Building had less supporters and less of an entourage, but was eminently tall and quite handsome, except for his broken front teeth. The two stomped around, covered in talismans, herb-filled waters blessed by the most powerful marabouts in the land poured endlessly over their big bald heads and backs.

Finally they stepped into the sandy ring and started to batter eachother. Gougui's supporters, orange bandanas on their heads, were wild and festive, while Building's supporters, perhaps nervous that their hero couldn't pull it off, were less confident. Red beret policemen with ancient rifles knelt beside the ring to stop a pitch invasion, though when the invasion did finally happen, they could do nothing but stand back and watch impotently.

After a couple of minutes of cat-fisting, Building had Gougui on his back. The cry that went up from the loser's fanbase was one of terrific disappointment, and soon the girls had started to cry. The men just stood with their hands on their heads, a look of cold emptiness on each face. Their loss was palpable.

A trip to the supermarket to buy some of the fresh local milk that I so crave here.

"Hello Madam," says a young pretty girl dressed in the blue and white colours of the milk company. "Do you know about our product?
"Yes," I say, ever-impressed by this company who now seem to be doing customer satisfaction polls at the milk fridge.
"Oh," I go on, reaching my hand to the empty shelf. "Where's the milk?"
"Oh," she says, smiling unsympathetically. "There isn't any left."

Omar was shyly taking my bust measurement ("You have changed a bit since you went to England. I must re-do you") when he suddenly fell into fits of giggles and started scrabbling through his notebook to show me something.

Usually as discreet as your local doctor, he pulled up a page with some measurements on it, the usual stuff, until I saw that the measurements were not usual.

Longeur: 167
Poitrine: 147
Centure: 148

"The height is normal," he said, "but look at the rest. She is the biggest woman I have ever seen."

Omar, who still closes his eyes when he has to stretch a tape-measure around me, went on to tell me that when he wrapped the tape measure around this lady, he had to press himself against her or else his hands could not meet to take the dimension. He was terrified that she would think he was doing something inappropriate.

*****

An early morning fight in the local computer/telephone/printing/internet shop.

Customer: "I don't have the right money. Can I come back later with 1,000 francs?"
Boss: "Ah! I can't leave the till without the right money in it. Pay it now or leave your printing here and come back with the money and collect it."
"But I will bring the money, I promise."
"I can't leave the till with the wrong money inside it"
"Why don't you trust me?"
"It's not a question of trust. It's a question of accounting."
"Stop with this attitude. I will come back with the money."
"Attitude? Attitude? Get out of my shop, now!"

The boss, a fat, heaving man, comes around to the front of the desk, shoves the skinny man with the printing in his hand to the door, then pushes him out onto the pavement. The customer looks shocked, embarrassed and angry.

"Never darken my door again," says the boss, whose workers tidy him up and send him back to finish serving me.

On day one of leading my tour of Dakar, we were taken up into the lighthouse near where I used to live. I have always loved that place, it's the most westerly lighthouse on mainland Africa and feels completely forgotten, just an old building on a hill which despite its isolation and seeming neglect, is still functioning and essential to Dakar life.

The man working in the lighthouse, a young guy, took us all up into the tower, guided by some very well-polished brass banisters. One by one we climbed into the revolving cylinder of mirrors which reflects light from the tiniest little bulb dozens of kilometres out into the sea and across the city. Then he showed us a huge bulb, supposedly the first one used there, at the end of the 19th century, though I wonder if that's true because the glass would have had to be hand-blown. In any case, how would it have lasted 150 years of Senegalese man-handling?

Taking us out on to the terrace, our guide showed us a whole load of antennae. Some are for embassies, some for the national TV station, he said. And some, he went on, I can not tell you who they are for, because it is a secret.

It's that time of year again, the streets are literally lined with sheep, and headscarved-men sleeping in between, reposing in the soiled sand, watchmen over their numerous 4-legged wealth.

J and I went sheep shopping. Sunday night, a cool sea breeze, what more peaceful activity than walking out with a friend and perusing the wares on offer? The first place we stopped at, the watchman got up and kicked his sheep sharply in the ribs, pulling on its tail, hoping to make it stand and show us how big he was, how much meat on him.



I asked for the sheep's name. He reeled off the names of all three of his prize muttons, then told me that for £500 he could be mine. We walked on, tip-toeing through the sand to the next gathering of sheep and men, and were offered something slightly more affordable, at £300.

At the last place we stopped, a group of guys sat around an oil-drum fire and warmed themselves. We chatted to the man nearest the sheep; he asked if we had husbands.

"I am looking for a white wife," he told us hopefully.

"I am looking for a white sheep," I replied.

"Look," said another who had come over to see what all the chat was about. "Are you here to buy a sheep or just to talk?"

I said that talking and buying sheep went hand in hand.

"Yes," he conceded, "talking is an important part of life."

Omar is learning English.

"Can I offer you something to drink?" he said proudly. I don't know what other convoluted English phrases his teacher is teaching him, but he is managing the basics of verbs extraordinarily quickly, considering he probably has his lessons whilst bent over his sewing machine.

This week I went to have dinner with his wife and their three children. The youngest is six months old, and very plump. He looks like Omar, and giggles non-stop, lying on my chest as I lay on the family bed and giggling into my face.

I told Omar he had put on weight.

"Really, it's because you have gone. I do not stay up all night working anymore. Really, yes, it got a bit too much."

Belgium is a funny little place, divided between Dutch speakers in the north and French speakers in the south, with Brussels, a French-speaking capital marooned in the middle. Tribalism is alive and well in Europe, with three linguistic groups fighting for resources and recognition in one tiny land.

"We may do fifteen concerts in Belgium," said my Belgian friend and producer of some of Africa's greatest acts, "and twelve will be in the north. The northerners are completely curious about African music but at the same time, 35 percent of northerners belong to the Far Right and are completely racist."

The Gangbe Brass Band blew me away with their wicked Voudun, Afro-beat, jazz, marching band sounds and Beninois softness and humour.

*****



P and I spent a happy evening in Abidjan in the summer at a Kofi Olomide concert; we only went to see what kind of sunglasses he would wear on stage. Walking through the Belgian drizzle, I was delighted to come across a station bridge plastered with posters bearing his arrogant image. I thought of P and happy African days. Somehow, my African days all seem happy, I can't remember now, if I ever knew at all, why I left.

Out the back of The Shrine, where we were looked after, entertained, fed and watered, for our days in Lagos, the women got to work cooking food for us and the hundreds of people traipsing in and out during Felabration. One minute, it looked like this, just a few pots of chilis and packets of oil hanging around, innocuous-looking dried items sitting in bowls.



By evening, the place was alive with the smells of fried plantain, yam mash and crispy fish. One large lady scooped servings onto plates, while musicians and stage crew passed along asking for more of this and that. Under a canopy we ate, tired, looking forward to the show.

I never got used to cooking whilst standing up, the pot on the ground, stoking the fire or fiddling with the gas ring as I went. But I guess you get used to it eventually.

One of the happiest days I spent in Lagos this time around was, as mentioned below, a trip to Abeokuta, a smallish town under the great red rocks surrounding the town.



It is also the centre of cloth-production for a kind of batik which is only found there, and across the rocks above the town are great swathes of cloth drying in the sun. After the apparent soullessness of Lagos, this town with life and colour brought welcome warmth, as well as a chance for me to have a break from organising.

We were honoured with a tour of Fela's parents' house, which started with an incredibly lively and enthusiastic talk by the guardian of the house. Under a canopy rented for the occasion we drank cups of earthy-tasting palm wine from plastic buckets, though we all drank as much as we could bear and tipped the rest into the grass which was growing up around the house. We were then treated to a choral demonstration, which left us all speechless, such was the earnestness with which this tour was being carried out.



Next we were taken on a hasty visit of the school that Fela's parents founded, the church where they are buried, and some other churches that also went by in a blur. Tunde drove the bus from place to place and we and armed Ibrahim were shepherded in and out of the bus at great speed. We had said we were in a hurry, typical white people, so we were taken at our word. "Hasten yourselves," shouted Balinger as we tardily looked around the church yard under the wide-eyed expression of the church caretaker. "You musn't be tardy."

I just received my photos back from the printers and amongst some pictures of our day out last month in Abeokuta, the birthplace of Fela, I found this one.



Ibrahim was my MoPol, or Mobile Police, who I hired for a vast sum of money from the Anti-Robbery Squad, a place where my fixer Kole told me people arrested for robbery are taken, tortured, and rarely re-released. Ibrahim carried two pistols or an AK47 whenever he was with us, and mostly he drank Star Beer at the same time, though didn't get as drunk as the other MoPol, who was drunk all the time and complained to me as much as he could, in a language I could not understand, demanding money.

I disliked Baba, the second MoPol, so much that I could barely go near him, and sent Kole to deal with him whenever something was needed to be dealt with. The two bus drivers, who did not go home for a week while they drove us around, sat under the tree in the hotel car park and giggled as Baba teased me, demanding money, whining and whinnying in his squeaky voice, brandishing his pistols ill-concealed on his hips. The bus drivers did not like him either.

The day we went to Abeokuta I actually enjoyed myself because there were only a handful of us, the musicians left in the hotel to rehearse. When we stopped the bus in the intense afternoon heat to wait for Balinger, our guide for the afternoon, we climbed out of the bus and I took the opportunity to try on Ibrahim's bullet-proof hat. He posed for a photo, and though he looks serious, he was light-hearted on that day.

The evening that Kole and I went to pick up the police, the day my musicians arrived from London, we waited outside the police station as night fell. Policemen armed to the hilt were streaming out of the gates and climbing into vehicles or onto motorbikes.

"You see this?" said Kole, "You know where they are going? To raid people."

I had assumed, in the way that instinctively happens when you grow up with a police force who are mostly there to protect you, that they were all going out on jobs like ours, hired thugs to warn off bandits on the road, and trouble from other police. But infact they were out to create havoc on the roads themselves, these were the very police I was hiring Ibrahim and Baba to protect us from.

Fela Kuti was a man of epic personality with a following in Africa as powerful as that of Bob Marley in other parts of the world. His image would have been easy to capitalise on, he's an icon to millions of downtrodden Africans living in poverty or under dictatorships, a man who embodied artistic genius with a fearless temperament, and who lived to care for the community in which he lived. His resting place is the front yard of his old home and commune, the Kalakuta republic. From the roof top, his shrine is beautiful and geometrically perfect.



"There can be no other Fela," said old Jimoh, my taxi driver who proudly remembers once driving the Kuti children around Lagos in his taxi. "Any other man is a counterfeit," he said, before telling me how it was possible in the Fela days to go to his Shrine nightclub and be fed a decent meal. Anyone was welcome, everyone would be taken care of.



Last Wednesday would have been Fela's 70th birthday. The Kuti's and our outfit bought two cows and they were slaughtered on the forecourt of the Shrine, where later on massive crowds would be dancing and smoking the night away. At night, I stayed high up on the balcony and watched with amazement the shows that unfolded to celebrate his birthday. During a rendition of Anarchy, a Fela song, the crowds picked up tables, chairs and glass bottles and smashed them or threw them wherever they could. After that they went back to watching the show with relative calm.

On hip-hop night, the Shrine was forced to close its gates after eight thousand people had come inside. The shows during Felabration are all free, and a lot of people get to eat for free too, something that his children have humbly insisted upon now that they run their own version if their father's legendary club.



Eight thousand young, mostly male, people high or drunk in an enclosed space could run to trouble. At three am, the Kuti daughter and her head of security are wandering around with a clipboard making sure that everything is running as it should. The security guards carry sticks, not guns, and in person are the gentlest, kindest men, despite their massive physical size. No one much misbehaves, everyone knows this is the Kuti home, not just a nightclub, and order must be respected. That is what Fela would have commanded, and that is what his children now expect too.