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



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

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

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

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

Se-tan. Satan. I get it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(I'm also the white one)

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

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

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

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

I met a friend for lunch yesterday.

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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.

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.