[click on the play button and you should get Sierra Leone's current top of the pops playing while you read... The sound quality is evocative of tinny speakers in a beat-up taxi with its back door held on by a bit of string.]
So, I write this from Sierra Leone: a brief holiday from Mali. I’ve been in Bamako—Mali’s capital city—for the last four weeks asking myself and various Bamakois themselves: what happens when a city of 1.5 million people is growing fast enough to double in size every fifteen years? Memorable days have been trooping round slums on the outside of the city, chatting with people over sugared tea about their choice of residential location and job. I recruited a sparky 22-year-old translator for the Bambaran language, since even my crappy French is better than most people’s here; and last week we also interviewed a gang leader in one of the city’s poorest districts—though it must be said that he was 14-years-old and quite small owing to malnourishment.
[A merry bunch inside of one of Bamako’s minibuses.]
Each day has the feel of a fairly regular routine: I wake at 6am with the sound of crying infants drowning out the muezzin calls, itch my mosquito bites, carry a plastic kettle of water to the toilet, and ‘shower’ with a bucket of cold water. I ease on my old pair of New Balance which are totally coated with red African earth, and emerge out into the daylight. Most of the women from four families sharing the same house are already up and about, cleaning or cooking. Out in the street I face a barrage of exclamations “toubabou!!” from neighbourhood children always delighted to spot a white person, and pop my daily malaria pill with a sachet of yoghurt from one of the small shops.
[Two of the approximately 17 children living in my house.]
Mornings are spent in dusty rooms at one of the myriad government ministries, consulting their documents, or turning up a municipal office to arrange a meeting and getting speedy treatment because I’m ‘un blanc’, or trying to follow through on one of the meetings with an NGO worker or civil servant (which they may have forgotten was on their schedule and left for lunch at 11am already). Lunch is likely to be rice. Probably from one of the market women selling plates of it with sauce from huge buckets containing mixtures of various animal parts. Most of the time I’ve maintained my pescatarianism, but have a couple of times accidentally chosen chicken cunningly disguised as fish.
[One of the chickens I might’ve eaten.]
Afternoons are more of the same, though probably involving a visit to the fluorescent-lit internet café, bumping into my friend Nouhall on the way, who waits every day from 7am to 7pm outside the bank for customers to buy telephone credit or change money with him. As the sun goes down at 6pmish, the burning and dusty streets begin to take on some of the bleakness I enjoy, with detritus of the immense market strewn all over the ground, and many layers of stray plastic bags covering up the road surface of rocks and dirt. Along with most of the rest of Bamako’s population, I join the exodus from the central market area to one of the transport hubs, and dive into a green minibus crammed with stallholders and shoppers heading back out to one of the peripheral neighbourhoods.
[Bleak streets at dusk.]
[Me, having just crossed part of the River Niger with my friend’s death-trap moped, which broke down 8 times that day.]
[Happy days when I was living in a hotel room.]
[The view from that hotel window.]
Then there’s Sierra Leone.... I could write about the warmth of the people and the repose of speaking English of sorts. But the poverty is truly wretched, and the country is filled up with people scrabbling money for food and shelter each day. I travelled from 6am until the most bewitched hour of the night, traversing the palm-treed hills, through towns with burnt-out buildings resurgent only with cassava, bananas or Indian glucose biscuits. A rusted tank. Bullet holes. Ubiquitous NGOs and their incongruous white SUVs. Mobs of children selling Vimto at sweaty roadsides. Sleeping 3 hours of the night in a town with no electricity or water, and starting again at 6.30am on the back of a motorbike bound for the Guinean border. Two hours of dirt tracks in the jungle, and greeted at the frontier by a smiling soldier in a red beret. By 11am I was carried across the calm river by poled canoe, arriving again in Guinea—a country sickly with corruption and oppressed by its battle-hardened military government. The village sells cassava, bananas and Indian glucose biscuits. And some glass bottles of petrol. The police ask for money, whether sitting under a tree or in their fly-infested concrete hut. I pay a soldier to scoot me over more hills to the nearest town, and cram in a northbound taxi with 9 adults, 7 children and two riding on the roof. The soldier wants my phone number so he can get a visa and get out. The road is a succession of potholes and ditches. I can barely concentrate on the dusty copy of Hamlet I cradle in my palm.
[Fast food at the Malian roadside.]
[Excess baggage on the Sierra Leonean border. Contents of the car itself will include 3+4+3 adults (in 3 rows), innumerable babies, and a chicken.]
[Vital signs in Sierra Leone.]
On a lighter note, I saw Toumani Diabaté and Amadou & Mariam on New Year’s Eve. Admittedly I didn’t know they are world famous until my friend Serena told me, but they were definitely two quality acts. More recently I went to Bamako’s Palais de la Culture, and found 2,000-3,000 people crammed into the immense music hall for a concert starting at 9pm and ending at 1.30am. A veritable feast of larger-than-life Malian women were decked out in larger-than-life colourful outfits, singing to a backing band of multiple kora, ngoni, guitar and drum players. Each would come on stage for 20-30 minutes, sing their hearts out, and then give way to the next one. But during all this, an almost constant procession of women from the audience clambers up onto the stage, almost as large but somehow negotiating the rickety stage steps in their tiny high heels, joining the singer on stage for a minute or two to hand her several monthly salaries’ worth of crisp bills. It turns out the songs are actually successions of generous praise heaped on Bamako’s most prestigious families (“Mr. Keita’s grandfather [yaaaahhhahhhhaaah] was a warrior [laaaalaaahhaaah] who killed 800 people”, etc), who then appear on stage to reward the singer with large wads of cash. I reckon I watched at least 3 million CFA get handed over (i.e. about £3,000). My taxi driver on the way home told me it’s not just the prestigious families: it’s actually a way of appearing prestigious when you’re not, accepting praise and throwing cash around: a good way of building the family name. People even take out loans from the bank to spend it like this. Meanwhile their housemaids at home have monthly incomes between 5,000 and 10,000 CFA ($11 to $22).
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