No sooner do you step out into the darkness from the Air France 737 than West Africa smothers you in her treacherous embrace. With one hand she plies you with the sweet, earthy smells of the tropics and anaesthetises you under a wave of damp heat; with the other she dismantles your defences, chipping away at the control you thought you had over your life, stripping you of your layers of protection, and leaving you naked, vulnerable, powerless to stave off her arsenal of threats.
At first, the losses of control are minor. In the airport, the unofficial porter who makes off with your bags can probably be trusted to take them to a waiting taxi, but as you are swallowed up by the dimly-lit throng outside the terminal and lose sight of both porter and luggage, you are hit by a moment of doubt as it occurs to you that the bags’ contents would be worth much more to their bearer than the meagre tip you will give him. In the taxi your control is limited by the decrepit state of the ancient vehicle, the absence of seat belts or headlights, and the carefree driving of the alarmingly young driver. In your hotel you chance the food, praying it has not been touched by unclean hands, washed in contaminated water, or left for too long in the pounding sun. And in the town the following morning, when you allow a “guide” to show you to the transport park, you hope your payment for his services will be acceptable; proffering a few hundred francs, however, you are rebuffed and then threatened, more serious trouble averted only when you raise your voice, cry ‘thief,’ and discover with relief that your aggressor is unwilling to run the risk of vigilante justice at the hands of an angry mob.
As you move around the country the dangers mount up, your grip on your life loosens. The long journey south in the battered seven-seater Peugeot estate car that is the region’s only form of public transport, along a rutted dirt road littered with overturned trucks: one stray cow or unnoticed boulder, perhaps obscured by dust thrown up by a passing jeep, and that could be you. Nearing the border a different threat looms. A low-lying rebellion has simmered here for years, occasionally boiling over into horrific violence. Not long before our passage, a Red Cross worker had been kidnapped and then executed by rebel soldiers; not long after, a nine-year-old girl would be shot dead in a bungled attack on a village. Commercial transport makes a three-hundred-mile detour to avoid the area. This is expensive and slow, but the money and time saved by taking the direct route are judged not to be worth the risk.
Fewer than fifty miles away, across a different frontier, more trouble lurks. A World Food Programme representative is here in Senegal’s south-eastern corner, staking out the territory in case civil war breaks out in neighbouring Guinea and a flood of refugees pours in. A military junta seized power there a year ago and is equipping itself for a fight. Weapons are being stockpiled, South African mercenaries recruited to train the new president’s supporters in the arts of war. Earlier in the year the junta had put down a protest in a stadium by killing dozens of unarmed civilians. Weeks after we passed by, the president himself would be shot in the head at point blank range by an aide. He would survive, miraculously, only to be spirited overseas for treatment, his brief hold on power consigned to history.
On reaching the border you breathe a sigh of relief. You cling to the delusion that it is you that is responsible for your fate, that it is your own resourcefulness that has got you through the first tests. In reality, of course, it is Africa that has allowed you to survive. It is she that controls your destiny, and if she so decides, although you are loath to admit it to yourself so early in your journey, this capricious continent can take it all away from you on a whim.
In the end, to retain your sanity, you must surrender. Your panic must soften into resignation. You must loosen the reins and, faced with no other choice, accept a higher degree of risk. This, after all, is how West Africans cope. The daily dangers they face in their lives are more threatening than any that confront the wealthy Western traveller. Fatalism, the resigned acceptance of whatever the gods throw at them, is their only rational response.
We break our journey at the small frontier outpost of Kolda. One of the hottest towns in Africa, it is a mosquito-infested froth of sweat, noise, industry and filth. Everywhere you turn there is a bicycle repair shop, a mechanic, a tyre seller or a wholesale store, all servicing the thin stream of cross-border traffic. The air judders with the roar of generators, the clink of metal on metal, and the rumble of idling engines. A central square clogged with mopeds and trucks hosts a single fuel pump. Along one side of the square winds a sluggish river, oozing litter and grime. Bloated pigs trawl its banks for scraps. Only in the evenings does the stench of traffic fumes recede, elbowed gently aside by the dank smell of raw sewage.
But although unlovely, Kolda is a friendly place, its inhabitants surprised and pleased to see foreign visitors. In the late afternoon, as the heat is beginning to relent and the first squadron of brilliant white egrets flies by in V-formation to roost, an old Muslim rice-seller in a sky-blue robe and white skullcap beckons us over to sit with him in front of the dark cavern of his shop. Tall and thin, with a hooked nose and slightly sunken cheeks, his crooked teeth are blackened and the skin on his flipflopped feet chapped. His dark eyes are warm and welcoming, and he seems pleased to be able to fulfil his dual duty, as an African and a Muslim, of showing hospitality to strangers. He motions us to sit beside him on his wooden bench, and from a passing vendor orders three plastic cups of café touba, a strong, peppery black coffee that is reputed to have medicinal properties and to improve the eyesight. When I offer to pay, he laughs me off paternally. To our right, sitting on low stools, two young men wash their feet with water from a kettle in preparation for the afternoon prayer. Another man, already washed, kneels on a green straw mat on the dusty ground next to them. Facing Mecca, he prostrates himself in submission to Allah, oblivious to the motorbikes churning past a few feet east of his bald scalp.
The rice-seller’s French is limited, my Diola nonexistent, but we manage to establish that before he grew too old he had been a truck driver, and had travelled to Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Mauritania, Mali and Niger. He can tell me the distance to the Guinea-Bissau border, the most effective means of reaching it (another seven-seater), and the state of the roads on the other side (a comfortable journey sounds unlikely). He still owns a truck but his son now drives it, leaving him to concentrate on his new business of selling rice imported from Vietnam and Thailand. (Senegal‘s farmers once produced enough rice to meet the nation’s needs, but the combined effects of French colonial encouragement to grow cash crops for export rather than staples for domestic consumption, post-colonial underinvestment in roads and irrigation, and the disruptive effect on agriculture of the rebel uprising mean that South East Asian rice is now both cheaper and more abundant than the West African variety.)
Later that evening we are reminded that our growing sense that life is slipping from our control is as nothing to how West Africans must feel. We have dinner in the spartan, strip-lit restaurant of our hotel. The room is vast – someone clearly once had grand plans for it - with long wooden tables laid out as if a large group is expected, perhaps a school party or wedding guests. We, however, are the only diners. In the corner of the room a television is switched on, but the screen is so fuzzy it is impossible to watch. A clock is stopped on the wall behind the bar. Outside the window behind us, a blizzard of bats screeches past in the darkness.
We are served by Ibrahima, a stocky, light-skinned young waiter with a shy, polite manner. He brings us fried chicken and chips – the only item on the menu. As we battle with the stringy bird he hovers by our table, smiling shyly but expectantly at us, evidently hoping for a chat. His eyes are narrow and watery. His broad, pale face bespeaks both openness and vulnerability; it is the sort of face to which bad things happen. He speaks good French, and when we reciprocate his smile he grasps the opportunity to unburden himself of his troubles.
His parents were groundnut farmers. Funds were tight, but they scraped enough of a living to send their son to school until suddenly, when Ibrahima was in his mid-teens, they both died in quick succession of undiagnosed illnesses. They left no money, so he had to give up his education. ‘Kolda is poor and there was no work here,’ he says, ‘so I left for the coast. There were no jobs there either – people employ their family or their neighbours, not strangers. That’s how things work here: there aren’t enough jobs to go around.’ He speaks quietly, barely opening his mouth, no trace of resentment in his voice.
In the coastal town he tried his hand at buying and selling fish in the market, which gave him just enough to live on. Then, after a few months, he had a lucky break. A local businessman, impressed by his linguistic abilities (he speaks six of Senegal’s forty languages as well as French and a little English), gave him a job in a seaside hotel frequented by wealthy Senegalese and a trickle of French tourists. Aware of how fortunate he had been – ‘if you don’t have connections here you need fate to help you,’ he says – Ibrahima worked hard. He learned the trade and took groups of tourists to Guinea-Bissau and Guinea. ‘I had got back on my feet,’ he says. ‘It was going well. I married a girl from Thiès, a city near Dakar, and we had a son.’
Success in this part of the world, however, is as difficult to hold onto as it is to achieve; at any moment, often through no fault of your own, the rug can be pulled from under your feet. The seaside hotel, bereft of guests, closed. Ibrahima’s boss was reluctant to let him go and promised to try to find him another job. He waited around for a while, but with a wife and child to keep soon ran out of money. He was out of work again, back among the struggling masses, a precious opportunity gone.
He rocks slowly on his heels as he comes to the most difficult part of his tale. His broad hands tense, the skin tautening over his knuckles as they grip the back of the chair next to me. His sad eyes narrow to a squint. ‘Kolda is my home so I thought I might be able to find work here,’ he says. ‘I told my wife I was coming back and asked her to join me. But I had lost my job and had no money, so she didn’t respect me any more. Her mother and father didn’t want her to be with someone who was out of work, so they tried to dissuade her from coming with me.’ His wife heeded her parents’ advice and went back to Thiès to live with them, taking the child with her. Now divorced and still lacking the means to earn his in-laws’ respect, Ibrahima is allowed to see his young son only twice a year.
He has worked in the hotel restaurant for a few years now, putting in a long shift from six-thirty in the morning until ten at night. He lives alone. After work he goes home and sits for a while, reflecting; he tries to forget about the hotel, the empty restaurant, the second-rate job he has no enthusiasm for. Then, in the middle of the night, he goes out on his bicycle. ‘Je suis athlète,’ he says with a flicker of pride, explaining his fit, muscular frame. Sport provides an escape, a way of forgetting the past, something to look forward to. Every night he cycles fifteen miles in the dark through the forest. He has no helmet and his bicycle no light (and there are no streetlights), but there is little traffic at that time, donkeys and sheep presenting more of a hazard. When it is really dark he uses the torch on his mobile phone to light his way. I ask if he could find another wife now that he is back in work. ‘First of all I want to get myself organised and settled,’ he replies, his wounds still unhealed. ‘I’m quite sensitive. I don’t want to go through that again.’
The next morning, after a short but bumpy ride in another decrepit Peugeot, we reach the border. We are the first to cross that day. The Senegalese border post is a dusty yard with a well in the middle. When we arrive, the customs official, a tall, authoritative man in a white, knee-length tunic, is standing chatting to a woman who is drawing the morning’s water in a bucket. Once they have finished their discussion, the man leads us into the dark, bare, brick-built office that abuts the yard. He takes out a tatty A5 notebook and with a biro and a ruler carefully draws up three columns on a fresh page. He writes in our names, passport numbers and nationalities, and after stamping our passports and wishing us ‘bon voyage’ directs us down a track across two hundred yards of scrubby no man’s land to Guinea-Bissau.
The day is overcast, dulling the lush green of the dense surrounding forest. It is the beginning of the dry season and the rains’ fecund legacy is still evident in the range and depth of greens on display. The border is unmarked; there is no fence or watchtower, no line of waiting guards; the forests of Senegal merge seamlessly with those of her southern neighbour. All is quiet and still, the only sound the occasional cackle or caw from high up in the trees. Rounding a bend in the track, we come upon the Guinea-Bissau customs post. Under a straw shelter held up by wooden poles, two khaki-clad border guards are draped sleepily over brown plastic chairs. I am apprehensive – border police across West Africa are notorious for extracting bribes - but their laid back smiles put me at ease. I open my rucksack for their inspection, but instead of rummaging through it one of the guards, a cheery young man with bulging eyes and round cheeks, asks me in Portuguese if I have any bombs. ‘No,’ I reply, surprised. ‘Any guns or drugs?’ ‘No.’ Relieved, I offer the men a cigarette as a thank you for our painless passage. They decline and wave us on with a grin. Inevitably there is another Peugeot waiting beyond them. We climb into the back, happy, uplifting West African pop music blasting from a huge speaker in the boot, and hurtle through the jungle down the cratered road to Bafatá.