In Bissau we stop briefly at the mission to bid farewell to Dan, Lalas and the other fundamentalists. Dan says he will miss us. He has enjoyed our nightly routine of dinner, card games, a mug of Portuguese red wine (smuggled into the hostel) and discussions about religion. He has been glad, too, of the opportunity to hear about different lives, to talk about things other than the problems of the local people who visit his clinic every day. Now, he tells us, he will return to his old routine - morning prayers, the clinic, Bible reading and then bed. Leaving him to plough his lonely furrow, we head for the transport park and climb into a sept places bound for Senegal.
You can learn a lot about a country by leaving it. Although itself one of the world’s poorest nations, Senegal seems affluent compared with Guinea-Bissau. We see things in Ziguinchor, the old riverfront trading post that is the capital of the Casamance region, that we have not seen in months. We see buildings of two, three, even four storeys. We see market stalls displaying piles of food rather than mere scraps. We see factories, cash machines, newspapers, bookshops. People in boats wear lifejackets. There are tourists, and the incessant hassle from hustlers that accompanies them. Most amazing of all, there is electricity. You press a switch and a light comes on. Fans turn instead of lying dormant. There are streetlights, so you do not need a torch to pick your way between the potholes at night. Food is stored in refrigerators, drinks are iced. Guinea-Bissau, back in the Dark Ages, has none of these things.
Ziguinchor was used for most of its existence as a slave trading port, but these days, surrounded by roadblocks and watched over by low-flying army helicopters, it is an oasis of peace in a turbulent region. The town is frequented by newly-retired recreational sailors from France, who moor their yachts in the slow-flowing river and buzz over its surface in motorised rubber dinghies, visiting other boats or touching down in the town for a morning coffee and croissant or an evening aperitif.
The sailors are accompanied by their African wives or girlfriends. The nineteenth-century explorer Richard Burton, translator of the Kama Sutra and the Arabian Nights, described the women of the Casamance, the Diola, as ‘wild, half-naked pagans,’ but today they are beautifully dressed and graceful, the fairest of them labelled admiringly as “gazelles“. They are understandably popular with aging Frenchmen, with whose affluence young African men cannot compete. As these greying, overweight white men in shorts and bulging T-shirts parade their beautiful young partners down Ziguinchor’s streets, the boys of the town look on impotently.
After a few days living like colonials, our lazy days punctuated by long lunches and sundowners by the river, we board the overnight ferry to Dakar. We arrive in the capital just as the sun is climbing above the tower blocks of downtown, and after elbowing our way through the crowd thronging the dock take a taxi to a three-room hotel in one of the city’s residential districts. The hotel is run by David, a bearded, heavy-drinking chef from Birmingham who claims to be fifty-eight but looks a decade older. When we had first arrived in Dakar at the beginning of our trip, we had stayed in a nearby guesthouse and stumbled across the poolside bar of David’s establishment while seeking respite from the chaotic streets outside. At that time he had been running it in partnership with Gilles, a melancholy Frenchman with a Salvador Dalí moustache whose wife had recently left him because she could no longer tolerate Dakar’s heat, dirt and disorder (she had turned to drink, and managed to escape back to Europe before it consumed her).
The hotel had doubled as a brothel, frequented by rich Senegalese businessmen and their mistresses and by declining Frenchmen saved from solitude by young African gazelles. The three musty rooms, reached via a spiral metal staircase climbing from the back of the restaurant, resemble those of an old Parisian bordello, with high ceilings, four-poster beds and large baths with heavy antique brass taps. Since few Senegalese can afford to spend a night here and tourists prefer to stay in the city centre, Gilles had let the rooms out on an hourly basis to couples, to help balance the books.
The hotel’s restaurant seldom had any customers, so David’s shift in the kitchen finished early and he would spend the rest of the evening drinking. We had spent a few nights sitting with him by the bar before we left the city. Although he speaks French so fluently that he sometimes struggles to find the right word in his mother tongue, he had not met anyone from his homeland since his arrival in Dakar a few months earlier and was delighted to discover we were from Britain. When we told him we were heading to Guinea-Bissau, which has a reputation in Senegal for instability and violence, he had been worried for our safety, and he is relieved to see us on our return.
Gilles is no longer there, he tells us: he has decamped to a downtown bar, leaving David to manage the place by himself. He says he has cleaned it up and that it no longer operates as a brothel, and offers us a discounted room. ‘I’ll be glad of some company,’ he adds by way of explanation - we are the hotel’s only guests. Every night for almost a week, we sit at the bar over Gazelle beers (the gazelle seemingly signifying all that is good in these parts), and David, in his slow Brummie drawl, talks.
Like many expatriates of a certain age, he has a lot to talk about. His wife left him some years ago while he was running a restaurant in Paris. Since then he has been wandering the world. He worked in Qatar and then Saudi Arabia, where he cooked for the royal family. He hated the Saudis - ‘a nasty, rude race’ - but liked the lifestyle and the salary until Al Qaeda began to target Westerners and he was forced to leave. He went to South Africa, where a friend had promised him a job. When he arrived, the friend was nowhere to be seen. He was stranded. His hotel room, where he kept his cash, was burgled. He ended up sleeping in a park, where he was robbed of his few remaining possessions. He hates South Africans now, too.
After a few weeks in Cape Town, he had a lucky break and met a Frenchman who owned a restaurant in Dakar. Impressed by David’s wealth of experience (before Paris and the Gulf he had run a bistrot in central London, and he speaks enthusiastically and knowledgeably about food), the Frenchman paid for him to fly to Senegal and put him up in a small flat above his restaurant. Then, as so often happens here, David was derailed by events beyond his control. An adverse reaction to a yellow fever vaccine crippled his legs and left him barely able to walk. Dakar’s doctors were unable to ascertain what was wrong, but predicted a lengthy recovery period. Eventually his sponsor lost patience, and this latter-day Mungo Park was stranded again. ‘I was very lucky to meet Gilles,’ he says, tired but resilient. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done otherwise – I was running out of options.’
He likes Senegal so far. ‘The women are beautiful,’ he swoons in a drunken slur. ‘I love women. I like hunting for them, but I need my legs to get better first!’ He laughs a big, slow laugh and strokes his bushy grey beard in appreciation of his frankness. He tells us he has big plans for the hotel and restaurant. He is changing the menu, refurbishing the rooms and lowering prices. But he is not a well man. He walks unsteadily, often with the aid of a stick. He wonders if he should go back to Britain for treatment. He is frustrated about his health, unable to adjust to the loss of mobility, the sudden and possibly irreversible lurch towards old age. He rails against his bad luck and takes refuge in drink.
On our first visit to Dakar we had been unimpressed by the city. It had seemed menacing and impersonal, its reputation for crime made real to us when we were threatened with violence by a downtown hustler. But on our second visit we view it differently. The Senegalese capital is a light, airy city by the sea. With its shady avenues, bustling street markets, and bright, dusty outlying districts it is a happy blend of Mediterranean France, sub-Saharan Africa and the coastal cities of Morocco and Algeria. Coming from Guinea-Bissau we are struck by Dakar’s modernity, evident not just in its smart shopping malls and patisseries, its extensive public transport system and its multiracial population but also in the sight of young men and women performing stretching exercises and short sprints on the city’s beaches, as if in preparation for a race or match. This impression of organised leisure, of purpose and planning and self-improvement, is absent in Bissau, whose all-enveloping torpor is interrupted only very occasionally by an impromptu game of street football.
It is easy to be lulled by Dakar’s attractions, to relax and become too confident in one’s ability to thrive in the West African city, but an unnerving episode soon reminds us of the dangers of dropping your guard. One afternoon we are awoken from a siesta by a knock at the door of our room. We ignore it, but when we go downstairs later the receptionist, a young Senegalese, tells us that a man has been in asking for me, claiming to have met me that morning. I have spoken to nobody all day, but the receptionist insists that the visitor, who said he would come back in the evening, had asked for me by name.
I think no more of it, assuming it is either a case of mistaken identity or an effort to extract money, but Ebru is worried, and unbeknown to me spends the next hour puzzling over who the man could be. Finally an answer comes to her. ‘You wrote that article this morning didn’t you?’ she asks, sounding panicked. I clutch my forehead in alarm. Earlier that day I had published on the internet a short update about the drug trade in Guinea-Bissau. Although I had thought it safer to wait until we were in Senegal before writing it, the report contained little that was new, and the readership of the website to which I posted is small, numbering in the tens of thousands. That the article might be read by the traffickers was unlikely, that it would prompt them to hunt me down almost inconceivable. To find me, moreover, they would have had to ask for me by name in every hotel in Dakar, and all within a few hours of the offending report appearing.
I should have had no cause for concern. Back in England I had published several pieces on the same subject, on the internet and in magazines, and the idea that they might put me at risk would have seemed preposterous. Here, however, your mind works differently. Here, the steady bombardment of your mental and physical defences – by the heat, by other people, by the pathogen-tipped arrows hostile nature flings at you - eventually has an effect. You begin to see things that are not there, to overlook the obvious, to seek answers in the realm of what back home in rational Europe you would have seen as the fanciful, the magical, the impossible.
As the minutes pass in the turbulent wake of Ebru’s epiphany, we both grow increasingly certain that the man who had come to the hotel intended to kill me. How else could he know my name? How else could he have found me unless he had the support of the South Americans’ all-seeing organisational machine? I marshal arguments to feed my paranoia. Have the traffickers not already threatened journalists in West Africa? Have they not killed dozens of prying hacks in Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela? It occurs to me that neither their new airdrop tactic nor their staking out of Canhabaque is common knowledge, and that this might be valuable information for those in charge of European Union patrols. Might the traffickers think I was an EU spy? Eliminating me would cost them nothing. The Senegalese police would not protect me, and there would be so little chance of them catching the killer that it would barely be worth paying them off. Acquiring the services of a local hitman, moreover, would cost no more than a few dollars - perhaps the equivalent of a line of cocaine. A shot to the head or a knife to the throat in a hotel room or an unlit street would send a cheap but resonant message to other would-be sleuths.
As evening approaches, our fears coagulate. What is most likely a case of mistaken identity or a pure coincidence has morphed in our minds into a cold blooded murder plot. The man had said he would come back after six, but as dusk falls there is no sign of him. This provides only momentary comfort, before we realise he is more likely to complete his task in the dead of night. We debate whether it would be safer to sleep elsewhere, and decide to consider our options over a beer at the poolside bar. We are the only drinkers. Night has fallen. The humidity and fly-filled darkness feel more cloying than ever. A faint underwater light fills the small swimming pool with a spectral glow. Under the thatched roof of the little bar, open on three sides, we sit and think.
The bargirl serves us beers, oblivious to the tempests raging in our heads. Rather than calming each other, my suggestions feed Ebru’s fears, her suspicions tauten my nerves. We tumble together, locked in a mutually destructive embrace like skydivers fatally entangled in each other’s straps. Then, while pondering our next move, we are suddenly confronted with a new crisis. While we have been immersed in discussion a man has materialised at the bar. He has taken a seat behind the shorter section of the L-shaped counter, facing us. Unlike the hitman we have been imagining, who is huge and powerful, this specimen is thin and wiry. Some of his front teeth are missing. Dressed in a grubby brown calf-length gown, he gives off an air of seediness and, to our fear-tinted eyes, stop-at-nothing desperation.
He orders a beer and takes out a packet of Marlboro. Judging by his appearance, he should be unable to afford either. Where did he get the money? Why is he here, alone, tonight, in a bar whose few customers are almost exclusively European? Is this the man who came for us earlier? Is he here to warn us or to eliminate us? Granted, he looks more like a petty criminal than a murderer, but we decide that a petty criminal – cheap, anonymous and unlikely to be missed if he has to be disposed of - would be the perfect conduit for the South Americans’ plans. Besides, we reason, you do not need brawn to shoot someone at two yards: all you need is courage, coolness, and hunger.
While he sips calmly at his beer, the assassin looks down repeatedly at his mobile phone and taps messages into it. What do the messages say? That he has found us? That he can kill us now if they give the word? Or is he arranging a getaway or final-ising payment? All the thrillers we have ever seen hurtle through our heads like a news ticker on speed. The man glances up at us every few seconds, so frequently he could be painting our portrait, as if to make sure we do not escape. Ebru tells me later that she was convinced at that moment that this was the end, that he would pull out a gun and put a bullet in my head, maybe in both our heads. Maybe in the poor, oblivious bargirl’s head, too.
We decide to leave, flight our only hope. As we walk away from the bar towards the busy street outside, I look back. He is watching us carefully. To throw him off our scent, we turn left out of the gate, cross the road and then turn right, back on ourselves. We walk a couple of hundred yards until we reach the darkest stretch of pavement, and stop to hail a taxi. This time Ebru looks back, and is horrified to see the man emerging from the hotel gate. He glances around and turns left. We have managed to trick him, but it is at this moment that I too am sure they are after my blood. Until now I have been worried, but at the same time hopeful that it is all a delusion. Now I am convinced it is real. Tension and fear tighten my throat. We jump in a taxi and head for the guesthouse where we had stayed on our first visit. Fortunately they have a room.
The guesthouse is a one-storey building in a small compound. The compound is entered through a solid metal door. A passageway between this door and the building leads to a dusty yard, in the corner of which a wretched goat is tied to a tree, being fattened up in preparation for having its throat slit during the great Muslim festival of Tabaski later in the year. Our room lies directly opposite the metal door. A wooden shutter blocks our view. We leave it closed, as added protection (there is no glass). We lock ourselves in, switch off the light and fan, and await our fate. Sweat pours off us in torrents. My hands are shaking. We can barely raise a whisper. If anyone comes for us, we agree, we will either jump out of the window and run or, if they station a man on the gate, hide under the beds and pray to Dan’s God.
We know that if we get through the night we will have only a few hours of daylight to negotiate in the morning before our flight to Sierra Leone. But it is not yet midnight, and the hours of darkness stretch interminably, mercilessly, ahead of us. Every noise we hear rattles our brains. Cars passing outside are taken for convoys of drug barons. When a phone rings it jangles my nerves as if I were one of those old cartoon alarm clocks. Each knock at the metal door has us cowering by the window, trying to peer through the vents in the shutter. We cannot go on. We reach a point where we would prefer to give ourselves up, to run out into the waiting hail of bullets, than continue to endure this dread.
We walk out into the yard like condemned criminals, resigned to our fate, expecting the gunman to walk in through the metal door at any moment. There is only one other guest, a cheery German named Mikhail who is researching a radio programme on what African philosophy can teach the West. We sit with him in the dusty yard and he listens amused to our story. He seems unconvinced that our fears are justified, and even volunteers to accompany us out of the guesthouse to buy cigarettes (we ran out hours ago). We warn him of the dangers inherent in such a mission, but he is undeterred. He points out a black cat in the road and asks joshingly if this alarms me, since black cats are thought unlucky in West Africa (many of them are indeed ill-starred, for their skins are used by witch doctors as protective charms; it is rare to see one alive). His humour relaxes us a little, and we continue chatting with him back in the guesthouse yard, cigarettes safely bought. We hope he will sit with us all night, but are aware that he has work to do, and that soon we will be alone again with our terrors.
When he finally takes his leave, we return to our room. Exhausted, we fall into a fitful sleep, illustrated by dreams of falling. Then, suddenly, after what seems like just a few minutes, we are woken by a loud banging at the metal door. We leap out of bed and take our stations by the window, immediately wide awake and ready. It is three o’clock. The young man who looks after the guesthouse opens the door. We hear talking, not in French but in a guttural, harsh-sounding African language, probably Wolof. Voices are raised. We huddle close together, certain our time has come. I can feel Ebru’s fear mingling with my own, as if she is plugged into me and pumping volts into my veins. We strain to hear or see what is happening, but the talking at the gate has stopped and there is only silence. Have they gagged or killed the caretaker, or bought him off? Has he told them where we are hiding? We hear footsteps moving down the passage, and then, joyously, the sound of a woman’s voice. Relief floods over us, for we know that our assassin was unaccompanied. The intruders are nothing more sinister than guests arriving off the night flight from Paris. We are spared. Perhaps it was all just a paranoid delusion. Perhaps it was West Africa toying with us, keeping us on our toes, pushing us to the edge before drawing back and saving us for another day.
We collapse back into bed, and sleep until dawn. Nothing else happens. We walk back towards David’s hotel, checking over our shoulders from time to time but feeling reprieved. On the opposite side of the main road, by a hospital which sits under a permanent cloud of scavenging black kites, we pause, checking for signs of a break-in. There are two large men in sunglasses on either side of the hotel gate and a jeep with blacked-out windows parked on the pavement nearby. Too weary to panic, we wait nervously for a few minutes - although we think it unlikely that anything will happen in broad daylight on a busy road, our pursuers are ruthless and brutal, so you cannot be too careful. Eventually the jeep drives off. One of the men by the gate boards a bus and is carried out of our lives. A few minutes later the other man walks away. We cross the road and steal back into the hotel, past the empty bar and up to our room. David is still in a drunken sleep, unaware of our absence. The previous day’s visitor has not returned, and the mystery of how he knew my name remains unsolved (I begin to wonder if it was the receptionist who mentioned my name, which the visitor, who may have been a hustler, jumped on as proof that he knew me, but am still left with the question of why he did not come back). We pack our bags quickly, leave a note for David, whom we hope to see again when we come back from Sierra Leone, and take a taxi to the airport.