When we get home, Astou scrubs the chicken with a green Sunlight soap bar, before rinsing it in clean water that’s mixed with bleach. I fall over with laughter when she asks me to pass her the ‘javel’, as she calls it. Everyone laughs when I tell them that we also call bleach javel. She gives the chicken a final rinse in water that’s mixed with vinegar. I pound black peppercorns, dried chilli, garlic, deseeded green pepper and stock cubes before joining Fana and Oumou in turning the onions and carrots into squares that I rub with the spicy paste. Next, I start the fire on two braziers. One is for the yassa and another for the pot of rice. Fana rinses the rice and puts it on the fire. Astou heats two litres of oil and deep fries the chicken. When it’s cooked, she transfers it to a bowl, and cooks the onion and carrot mix in the oil; stirring it constantly and adding a touch of mustard paste a minute or two before she removes it from the fire.
Now that we have a fridge, lunch is washed down with bissap, which I make by rinsing dried hibiscus flowers until there’s no dust on them before soaking the leaves in boiling water for a few hours. When the liquid cools, I strain it and add a kilo or more of sugar and half a bottle of vanilla essence; refrigerate until it’s ice cold, serve and revel in the compliments. To make nyamaku, we usually buy a kilo of fresh ginger and one bundle of mint and take them to the appliances market that’s a five-minute walk from our market in Djicoroni Para, where one of the merchants charges a small fee to people who don’t have blenders in their own kitchens to use the one he keeps for this purpose. We add water to the ginger and mint, strain it, add lots of sugar and vanilla essence and refrigerate before serving. Astou starts selling juices; we stop making bissap and nyamaku for our housemates’ enjoyment. They have to pay like everyone else.
VIII
LOSING MYSELF
April 2009
WHEN I ANNOUNCE MY plans to start travelling, the question I’m asked more than others is, ‘What are you going to eat?’
‘On the up side,’ a friend says, ‘You’ll be on a diet you can never abandon.’ I do lose weight, but not from the enduring stereotype of Africa as the land of starvation. The region is obsessed with eating. There’s food round the clock. I fill out on shawarmas in Senegal, gorge on fresh baguettes slathered in margarine in Mali, live on a diet of fried chicken and chips in Burkina Faso and promise to be careful in Ghana: Fat chance, not with the jollof and fried rice.
I also discover the only bean dish I like. Waakye is made with rice and black-eyed beans, and served with spaghetti, a piece of fried fish and tomato stew that has more oil than tomatoes. It comes with a dollop of a hot dark-brown condiment called shito. I eat like it’s an ancestral instruction. In Abidjan, I stuff myself with fish, rice, grilled meat and stewed pork trotters; snacking on alloko and eating a breakfast of attiéké and fried fish. It’s served with a mixture of raw chopped onions, tomatoes and habanero peppers. The plate is rounded off with a splash of oil. By the time I move to Djicoroni Para, you don’t see me approaching, you hear the loud shuffle of my thunder thighs.
It’s Sunday afternoon at number 227, and as always my right hand is the last in our communal dish. Abbas changes the music from Alpha Blondy’s ‘Jah Victory’ to Tracy Chapman’s ‘She’s Got Her Ticket’.
Miriam and I get up to dance, Samba takes a picture. I have four chins and my stomach looks like it’s on its way to my knees. I have to lose weight. Adama the drummer introduces me to a traditional dancing teacher called Ibrahim. The boy’s body is all muscle and no fat. ‘Wait until I’m done with you,’ he says at our first lesson.
Ibra turns the rooftop, previously my favourite place in Bamako for the cool, starry nights filled with Bob Marley, Morgan Heritage and Tikken Jah Facoly, into a painful experience. I fall and scrape my knees and bum. My chest is in flames. My joints feel like they’re going to break into two from the squatting. I want to tell him off for not taking things easy as promised, but I can only huff out my words. Yet, my body has never felt this good.
We dance like this for five weeks; with me throwing tantrums that only make him push me harder. Now, in addition to the heat that traps me at home during the day, my body is too sore to go out at night. My torture becomes another display of social living. The kids on our street stop playing to watch me dance; cheering when I get my moves right, encouraging me to get up and try again when I fall. At first, the men at our house complain about being banned from the roof. A week later, they help me work out on weekends. Abbas and Mohammed from Conakry teach me boxing, King runs on the spot with me and Moussa tries to get me into jogging. The twins from the family that lives one floor below us, Awa and Bajuku, come over to play music, insisting that I get up and dance.
Walking down the street to get a sotrama to town, a teenage girl I’ve never seen before comes up to me to say she knows I’m trying to lose weight. She’s a runner but offers to power walk with me. Oumou encourages me to keep going when I don’t feel like dancing.
‘Doni, doni,’ she says. ‘Little by little, that’s how a bird builds its nest.’
Astou digs through her suitcases to find French editions of Elle and Marie Claire for dieting tips I never use. They keep me going until I feel confident enough in my commitment to travel to Conakry to continue learning traditional dances.
IX
AISHA
July 2009
‘BORDER POST’ IS NOT just a sign. It’s also an announcement of impending combat. Out of all the battles raging on this war-torn continent, there’s nothing quite like the stand-off between travellers and border control officials, or uniforms, as I call them. Provoke a uniform with so much as a hello and bombs will drop – invalid passport, expired visa, missing yellow fever vaccination and a litany of problems that only exist in the uniforms’ heads. It’s as if they’re competing to be the Idi Amins of border posts. Like all such encounters, this one is brutal, as I discover in Kouremale, Mali, on my way to Conakry. Everyone inside the one-room office puts franc notes in their passports when handing them over. I stand my ground when the uniform says my visa has expired. ‘You have to pay 5000 francs.’ He waves me away while I presumably look for the money in my bag. His next victim is a woman who is also in my taxi to Conakry.
Her one-page travel document is accompanied by a 1000 franc note. She pulls me outside, where she ‘go beg’ me to ‘jus pei de man’. The thing is, I just don’t feel like it. I’ve already paid too damn much to be here. Or, as I rattle off to my ‘sistoh’, ‘In the fifteen years that I have been on my period, I have only ever used Lil-Lets; it’s the most intimate relationship of my life, and my constant in a life that changes every few minutes. I now use OB, as if a period is a spelling bee. I haven’t had privacy in a year and spent the last four months living in a house with ten men. I don’t have a sex life and clean up ‘number two’ with water, soap and my left hand, and here’s a further payment for you – I love it for being cleaner than the toilet-paper way I’ve known all my life. I have paid with my money, my comfort, my everything. Hell, I don’t even look like the Lerato I’ve known all my life – excuse me if I’m not in the mood to bribe.’
The way my ‘sistoh’ looks at me storming back to the office, it’s as if she knows a bigger fool is yet to be born. It doesn’t matter. My visa is valid. The uniform persists. We go around in circles until it turns out that he’s right. Technically. I sleep when others leave the bus to get their passports stamped at the border between Mali and Ivory Coast. I don’t have a date of entry.
‘You have to go back to Bamako,’ he says.
‘Other people are renewing their visas here. Why do I have to go back?’ I fume.
‘Because,’ he smiles, ‘I say so.’
‘My sistoh why you de no listen?’ the woman in the taxi to Conakry says when I offload my bags.
All the cars I approach are full, and it’s too late in the day for a taxi. The uniform walks over to carry my bags to where he’s sitting with three colleagues, brewing mint tea. We spend hours under the full moon and st
ar-lit sky listening to Toumani Diabaté and Ballake Sissoko’s New Ancient Strings.
He asks a trucker to give me a lift back to Bamako. My lost temper costs me 37 050 francs: 15 000 for a visa, 2 000 in passport pictures, 350 in taxi fares between Djicoroni Para and the immigration office in Hamdallaye, and another 20 000 on a ticket to Conakry – I really need to be locked away when I’m premenstrual.
I keep my mouth shut at the Bankan crossing in Guinea four days later when a uniform asks me to put money in my passport. My hand digs willingly into my bag at an immigration checkpoint a few kilometres later. This office has bamboo walls, a scratched table, pens with chewed lids, and a dog-eared notebook into which the two uniforms write our names and passport numbers. We hold travel papers in one hand and money in the other. The uniform demands 5000 francs to buy airtime to call me, to make sure I arrive safely in Conakry. The long, winding road to Conakry starts out on a smooth, tarred road before hitting the most potholed stretch in this infinitely potholed continent. At the second and third road blocks, only our driver, another Mohammed, steps out of the car. He pays with a smile that turns into a snarl the moment he’s back in the taxi. ‘Bandits,’ he hisses.
Guinea is too beautiful for the six road blocks we go through to ruin the experience for me. The landscape looks something like a rain forest, with houses and people surrounded by a chain of hills and valleys and mountains that stretch on and on, some shrouded by mist, poking into grey skies that look like they’re a squeeze away from pouring with rain. I know the fourth roadblock is trouble when two uniforms shine their flash lights into the taxi. Mohammed’s bribe is just a start. They want us all to pay. The uniforms interrogate me with the usual questions about why I’m in Guinea. One uniform declares my visa invalid, and my passport expired. I have time and legitimate papers; I’m fighting this one out until I win. After an impasse is reached between me and the uniforms, they order Mohammed to follow them to the police station. My passport is checked as if I’m a suspected terrorist before a new problem emerges. My medical card is invalid. It’s over four thousand rand spent on multiple vaccinations because, to quote Lonely Planet travel guide quoting the World Health Organization, I dare not travel around Africa without immunisation from diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, hepatitis B and a host of other diseases.
We wait until morning for the station commander. He starts by angling for a bribe, but after a fed-up guy in the taxi tells him that I’m a journalist, he relents and apologises for wasting my time. The town is wide awake when we leave the police station. I get to see the dense, green plateaus that make up the Fouta Djalon region. Mohammed stops to pick up a parcel of sacks bulging with raw plantain still attached to the stalks, to give to someone in Conakry. We are in a valley, misty with dense grey clouds tumbling over a mud house surrounded by tall bright-green maize plants.
Our next road block is in Coyan, a village so beautiful it has a brand of mineral water named after it. A group of young boys bathe in a stream flowing from a small waterfall. Mobile kitchens sell fat cakes, boiled eggs and bread.
We follow Mohammed and the uniform who’s collecting our passports. I smile my way out of parting with more francs. An aggressive man wearing a luminous lime car-guard’s top runs up to the taxi when it crawls through traffic at the last roadblock in Conakry. ‘L’argent’ he thunders, hands reach into the window to start collecting money while the car moves. Into my purse my hand goes again to get 5000 francs. I get off the taxi with my education in crossing African borders complete: You have to know when to shut up and pay.
My final destination is the island village of Soro. I get into the wrong boat and end up in Kassa. I sit at the pier while it empties out, waiting for a man who will inevitably show up to play my hero. Matthew sees me sitting here while surveying the pier from the barracks. He’s in the army and wants to search my bags to make sure that I’m not breaking any laws. He carries my bags up a stony footpath to the barracks. He goes through them with another male officer and a female one. The Diallos are married and spend most of their nights at her place at the barracks.
He offers me his place. It’s one of three rooms that the owner of the property, Monsieur Sylla, rents out to male soldiers. Monsieur Sylla is a sour old man who regards me with suspicion when I go into their house to greet and introduce myself.
‘One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roof, or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.’ Saib-e-Tabrizi’s ode to Kabul could be said of Mali as well. I found this Tuareg man at the Festival of the Desert in the Sahara; this sunset turned my three-day trek to Timbuktu into a magical moment. Sitting on the banks of Niger River in Segou is the highlight of attending the Festival of the Niger.
An artist turning sand into an object of beauty at Gorée Island in Senegal.
The first time being in Dakar felt authentic was when I attended a wedding with the female staff from Via Via guesthouse. The bride is decked out in gold.
Waiting for the infamously unpunctual train from Dakar to Bamako at Gare de Hann.
Bamako has been described as twice broken and thrice mended. It makes a shocking first impression, but the Malian capital city is one of the most soulful places I’ve been to.
The ancient trading city of Djenné, Mali was once the centre of Muslim scholarship in the region. Its mud buildings and rich history have turned it into a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Grand Mosque is the largest mud building in the world, and the town’s people plaster it with mud every year after the rain.
Monday is the main market day in Djenné.
A photo taken on a day tour of Djenné. This Fulani woman, with rings in her septum and ears, is an unlikely style icon; while these are trends that come and go, to the Fulani women, this is the time-old standard of beauty.
We didn’t spend more than an hour at Labadi Beach on a media trip to Accra in 2006 but it was enough to convince me to quit my life in Johannesburg to start living my dream of travelling around Africa.
If it moves, it qualifies to be used as public transport, never mind how old it is.
This is Africa, where frustrations like constant roadblocks are always outweighed by wonderful surprises, like the brief moment on my way to Conakry when we drive past this house in the Fouta Djalon region.
Thieboudienne is the national dish of Senegal.
Sunrise in Kokrobite.
Ghana is the first country in Africa to be liberated from colonialism in 1957. Its first president, the great Kwame Nkrumah, is held in high regard, so the celebrations held to celebrate his centenary in 2009 were an occasion to end all others.
Barack Obama’s election as America’s first black president sent Africa into a frenzy of public declarations of admiration that were previously reserved for Nelson Mandela. This café in Lomé is one of many places named after Obama.
A funeral parade in Abomey, Benin.
Abomey was the capital of the kingdom of Dahomey. Their royal courts, at least what’s left of them, are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Photography is not allowed beyond this court where I imagine my heroes, the fearsome female army of King Ghezo, used to stomp.
The fetish section of Dantokpa market in Cotonou sells animal remains and other ingredients used in magic potions.
Every Thursday at dawn, a parking lot in Koforidua in Ghana turns into a bead market that has been held since 1928. It brings together traders and shoppers from around West Africa, but some wares are too valuable to sell. These brass bracelets are family heirlooms that have been passed down from generation to generation since the days of the Ashanti and Ghana empires.
Snails are a staple food on the Ivorian menu.
Matthew is at my door first thing in the morning to walk me to Soro. There are no boats between the two villages, no electricity except for four hours at night when a kiosk fires up a generator, and the villagers pay to charge their cellphones at the multi-adaptor. We walk through narrow spaces between houses to the wild side of the island whe
re the branches of palm trees sway in the wind. Litter sticks to the vegetation. The clouds are dark grey and the ground wet from the rain. The rainy season is six months of incessant downpours. We go back to the only main street, walking along the shore, past houses with paint that’s been washed out by water and time, jumping over the small furrows between some houses.
The ocean is grey and still. We get to a stretch of about six-hundred metres, bordered by mud houses, then walk past two big brown rocks on either side and keep walking until we get to Soro. The first houses in the village are on steep ground that slopes into verdant gardens; people work on the plants with machetes. A drummer called John walks us to his friend Mohammed’s house. He’s the best dancer in the village and agrees to work with me for 500 000 Guinea francs a week. ‘Another thing,’ he adds, ‘I don’t do private classes – you’ll dance with the troupe. We dance at 10am and 3pm except on Sundays when we run to Kassa.’ I refuse to run. ‘Bien. I’ll organise a few people to dance with you on Sundays, 9am.’
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