Togo to Benin

Something was the matter with me. I sat in my relatively pleasant room with its view towards the sea feeling unenthusiastic. The walk along the beach-front into the city-centre, objectively both rather beautiful and scattered with local colour, had felt merely tedious. The only thing I felt like eating was ice-cream. The only reason to walk to the city-centre was the German-run ice-cream parlour. A small vanilla scoop there cost twice the price of a decent meal in a local café. I felt ill after eating it.

Morosely, I flicked through the traveller’s health appendices of one of my guidebooks, but found nothing helpful. I went out for another walk but returned after a few hundred metres. I couldn’t be bothered with it. I picked up the other guide: “…symptoms include loss of energy and appetite, general malaise, pale-coloured stools, sulphur smelling belching…” I heaved a sigh of relief, and headed for the nearest pharmacy.

My (minimal) understanding of the human immune system is that it is optimised, from birth and before, either to be good at dealing with germs and bacteria or to be good at dealing with parasitic infections, but not both. If you are raised in a clean, modern western city, and made to wash your hands before every meal as child, then you probably don’t major on the parasitic infections side of things. Based on my experiences as a traveller, I seem to be an extreme case.

The recommended treatment was the antibiotic metrodinazole, branded as Flagyl. Thankfully it was stocked in the nearest pharmacy, and this being Africa, no prescription was required in order to purchase it. My guidebook suggested a dosage, and lacking any other information, I followed its advice. With hindsight it is possible that its recommendation to “take three on the first day” may not have meant three at the same time. Be that as it may, no parasite could have survived the resulting conflagration in my guts.

My symptoms matched those of the parasitic infection giardia, most easily contracted from eating undercooked infected food. It was not difficult to understand how this might have happened. I had left Marc with his hangover quite early in the morning, and walked down to the Ouagadougou bush-taxi park. Evidently I was already too late. I should have come at dawn, I was told. Nevertheless, if I was prepared to wait, eventually a minibus would fill up with passengers and head south towards the Togolese border. No taxi ever leaves with an inch of spare passenger space, so these situations are simply a question of patience. Quite how much patience is very hard to determine, as all the passengers know that the vehicle won’t leave without them, and so keep wandering away. As the day wore on towards lunchtime, the most edible-looking food on offer was “brochette”, basically a barbecued goat-meat sandwich. From its taste, it could quite easily have been undercooked, infected, or any other dubious verb-ed. I only swallowed one mouthful, but that was probably enough.

Eventually we set off, apparently in completely the wrong direction. A few of the passengers ventured a small protest, but the driver was unmoved. We turned down some sandy back streets, carefully steering around the goats, and eventually pulled up outside a small house. The driver disappeared inside, and emerged triumphantly bearing his lunchbox, which he had forgotten to pack earlier. Evidently he was wise enough not to try the brochettes and stuck to his wife’s home-cooking.

We headed extremely slowly towards the border. There were villages every few kilometres, and at each one it seemed a passenger needed to get off, which meant also finding his or her luggage on the roof, and lowering it down. As it was unthinkable to travel any distance with a spare space, a new passenger had to be swiftly picked up, with associated reverse process for luggage. We finally arrived around dusk. The border was still open, but by the time passport formalities were completed, including a rather hopeful search of my rucksack, all transport on the Togolese side had ended for the day. I could purchase a ticket for the dawn bus, and did so, but there seemed to be no prospect of accommodation. The only food option was more brochettes, which looked as though they had been there all day and certainly smelt like it. However there was a vacant concrete bench so I slept on it with my rucksack for a pillow. Fortunately there was no possibility of getting cold.

The journey down to the capital Lomé was tiresome but uneventful. One of my guidebooks suggested a hotel which managed both to be cheap and reasonably pleasant and to actually exist when I got there. The city itself was much like other African capitals with two exceptions: the presidential palace was by the attractive beach but the improbably grand “Hotel du 2^nd Fevrier” was not. Apparently it had been named in honour of the nationalisation of the phosphates industry (Togo had had a relative shortage of violent coups to leave it with other significant dates), and towered high over the rest of the city, a glass and concrete white elephant. Nobody seemed to be staying in it.

Getting in the catch: beach at Lomé

Possibly due to feeling ill, I found it a difficult town to like. More pressingly the Nigerian consulate was inexplicably closed. Lacking a visa, a 2000km detour via an unstable Chad beckoned. Feeling somewhat better after my first violent encounter with the Flagyl, I decided to press on to Benin to complete my recovery and visa collection.

I had only once previously been a motorcycle pillion passenger, finding the experience simultaneously thrilling and alarming, and disliking the heavy helmet. In Cotonou motorbike taxi was the preferred means of public transport. Without a helmet, but with my rucksack strapped loosely to my back continually throwing me off balance, it was simply alarming.

The rainy season was approaching, it was stiflingly hot and humid, and I still had a craving for ice-cream. Presumably these cravings are caused by a lack of elements normally present in the diet. On a previous journey across South America, I had started to dream about a bowl of Weetabix, and later on this trip I became desperate for a pint of Guinness. I don’t normally care much for either ice-cream or Weetabix. The Cotonou French patisserie boasted such frigid air-con that it presumably made its surprisingly cheap ice-cream without the need for expensive additional refrigeration.

Next day, donning my “official shirt and tie” (very rumpled after residing at the bottom of my rucksack), I set out extremely early for the Nigerian consulate, aiming to be first in the queue and also, since the official shirt was rather thick, to avoid the midday heat. Arriving well before it opened, I spotted a coffee stand along the street, where the witchlike old-woman who ran it was just brewing up for the day. Water was just coming to the boil in a large cauldron, into which she carefully spooned a prescribed quantity of Nescafe. Two small tins of condensed milk followed, accompanied by careful stirring. She was now ready to dispense, scooping out a cupful and then pouring it flamboyantly from high mug to low mug to cool it down to drinking temperature.

The Nigerian consul complemented me on the official shirt and tie - “many people who come here dress like tramps” – and promised that since I had made the effort to be smart, I could have my visa the same afternoon. I did not yet feel quite recovered enough to face Nigeria, and sought out some entertainment while I waited another day or two. Posters for a “battle of the reggae bands” in the covered stadium looked promising. There were three different ticket prices, so I opted for the middle, the correct decision as the more expensive seats were entirely occupied by the local elite, the men looking very hot in suits, the women in full African-style finery.

The music, mostly cover versions of Bob Marley played very well on indifferent instruments through impressive speakers, was quite good. My neighbour was less impressed, haranguing me during an interval in extremely rapid French featuring the word ‘injustice’ repeatedly. As I understood it, the battle was actually a competition, with a quite decent cash prize for the winners. As my neighbour saw it, it was all a sham, the elite at the front had decided the winners beforehand, and furthermore the ticket prices had been designed to ensure that nobody else could afford to sit where they could influence the judges.

I shot the sheriff but I did not shoot his deputy plus corrupt judges: Nigeria beckoned.

Burkina Faso

My hotel was very close to the western road out of Niamey and a long way from the bush-taxi park, and so I decided to try my luck on the road. I quickly realised this was a schoolboy error – no long-distance shared-taxi was ever going to start out from Niamey anything less than 200% full. I was just contemplating the hot trudge back across the city when a vehicle pulled up and the driver asked where I was headed. The border with Burkina Faso I replied. And then where? Ouagadougou. “No problem, get in, I will take you to Ouaga.”

Marc was the West Africa IT support division of a major hotel chain. The support call-centre was the study in his home, and whenever an issue was not soluble by telephone, he would travel to the hotel, driving or flying as the distance demanded. The back of his car was filled with cardboard boxes containing a rather random selection of bits of PC. If I understood correctly, he had just been to clear a paper-jam in the printer in reception in Niamey Novotel, a round trip of over 1000km, accompanied by his girlfriend: free hotel rooms were a perk of the job.

I asked why he chose to base himself in Burkina Faso of all places. Surely there were more sophisticated options, such as Cote d’Ivoire or Senegal? “I am a native,” he replied. “My father was Brazilian, my mother was French, and I was born and raised in Burkina. Three passports!” He held them up.

“Where was I planning to stay in Ouaga?” This was an interesting question. My guidebook mentioned several pleasant sounding hotels or guest-houses. The only problem was that they all cost at least five times my budget, partly due to the inflated value of the CFA. It also mentioned a couple of unpleasant sounding places, where I was left with the impression that I would be lucky to retain any of my possessions after a night or two’s stay, even if I was not actually expected to pay by the hour. Based on this, I had tentatively planned to avoid Ouagadougou altogether, either by not arriving in the first place or by travelling straight on after I got there. This was too much for my French to explain, so I settled on “don’t know” as a simpler answer. Marc and his girlfriend exchanged some incomprehensible joke which included mention of the viler hotel options and much laughter; I caught the gist. “You can stay a couple of nights in my house.”

We continued at high speed down an empty road. After the border, the countryside slowly became greener. “Proper” African villages began to appear by the roadside, round mud-brick huts with conical straw roofs, full of straying goats. I would like to have stopped to take in the scenery occasionally, especially as we crossed the bridge over the White Volta, but for Marc this was a commuter-journey, to be endured not enjoyed.

His house turned out to be a pleasant whitewashed bungalow down a side street within walking distance of the centre of Ouagadougou. It had a staff: a sad-eyed housekeeper named Jean, whose first two tasks that evening, Marc instructed, were to pour beers and then take my laundry. My harissa-stained garments from the Sahara crossing had defeated previous efforts, and I had planned to give them to an opportune beggar, but bemused by the whole situation I included them in a rather sweaty bundle.

Marc drank two beers to my one, and explained what a wonderful place to live Burkina Faso was. We then drove over to his girlfriend’s (identical looking) bungalow on the far side of town for dinner. Marc drank five beers to my two, while the pair of them explained again what a wonderful place Burkina was. Their explanation was less than clear, and appeared to revolve around drinking in bars and/or shooting animals, mainly in neighbouring countries rather than Burkina itself. Marc then drove back through the unlit streets, and poured himself a huge scotch (I declined). Ouagadougou was a marvellous place to live, he asserted in case I hadn’t already understood, downing another large gulp of whisky.

At breakfast he looked somewhat worse for wear, compounded by an early morning support-call into his helpdesk. My laundry was in much better condition, immaculately presented by Jean with my T-shirts miraculously harissa-free and actually ironed (when had he found time to do all this?). Jean then disappeared briefly and returned with fresh French bread to accompany the excellent coffee.

I headed into “wonderful Ouagadougou” to look around. It is the only capital city I have been in with more goats than people (mental-flash image: Thursday 5pm, boarding the Piccadilly Line Tube at Leicester Square). There were indeed some bars, occupied by the usual aid-agency workers with their four-wheel-drives watched over by badly tipped young boys. There was a French supermarket, less splendidly located than the one in Niamey. There was a small cathedral and a smaller mosque (unlike the surrounding countries, Burkina Faso is not predominantly Islamic). There were dusty streets lined with dustier shops. There was not much else. I found the bush-taxi park in preparation for next morning, and returned to the house.

Not much to photograph: bush-taxi park.

In the living room was a piano, a missed pleasure, and since Marc was still out I played for a bit, watching the geckos scamper across the walls. Jean came to watch, and when my limited repertoire was exhausted, I thanked him for the laundry and asked about his life. He almost smiled, and told me that he lived with his family a short distance away. He was lucky to have this job, the patron was very generous, it paid well, and there were many side benefits: Marc often threw away good stuff.

Marc returned carrying in some boxes of miscellaneous PC spares, swiftly downed a first beer, and was embarking on the second: “What do you think of Ouagadougou?”

Niger - part 2

I have read somewhere that the only lasting global legacies of the colonial British Empire are the sport of soccer and the expression “fuck off”. This was not the case for the French colonial empire in West Africa. It was not yet relevant to look for its legacies because, for most intents and purposes, it was still in existence.

The focal point of central Niamey, the capital of one of the poorest countries in the world, was a large French supermarket, apparently stocking exactly the same range of produce as might be found in Lyon or Bordeaux, although for double the prices. There was a large French Novotel. The French Embassy acted as the representative for many of other countries in the region, as I discovered when I went seeking visas for my intended later destinations. The French Army maintained a base. The customers in the supermarket appeared to be mainly French or Quebecois – it was far too expensive for the locals, who shopped in the open-air petit marché opposite – sweeping up in gleaming white four-wheel-drive Toyotas sporting the logos of major international aid organisations.

The currency, the CFA has a fixed exchange rate with the French franc (and now to the Euro), and backed by the French treasury. Theoretically CFA stands for Communauté Financière Africaine (African Financial Community), but previously the ‘F’ stood for Francaise, and before that the ‘C’ for Colonies. Not much seems to have changed apart from the name. Over a dozen former colonies still use it. Its exchange rate is artificially high, although to howls of outrage from the ruling elites of these technically “ex”-colonies, the exchange rate was abruptly halved from 50 to the franc to 100 to the franc in 1994. There was real substance behind the local jokes: “Question: what is the capital of Cote d’Ivoire? Answer: Abidjan. Question: and what is the capital of Abidjan? Answer: Paris.”

Away from the French imperial centre-ville, Niamey was a very quiet town. In part this was a consequence of the daytime heat. (I have often wondered if the protestant work ethic could have evolved anywhere with a decent climate.) Apart from the 4WD Toyotas, motor traffic was light, consisting of battered taxis and the occasional grunting goods truck. An iron bridge spanned the Niger, already broader than the Thames 1500km from its delta. Their disapproving mouths appearing contemptuous of the trucks, tall camels swayed regally across, bundled high with crops.

River Niger at Niamey

Animal hides were laid out along the river banks, being cleaned in preparation for tanning. Occasionally a small group of men would bestir themselves to soak the hides again in the river and then beat them vigorously, before themselves plunging into the river to cool down again. Further along the banks, small groups of women laundered cloths in a similar manner, beating them clean and setting them out on the ground to dry. It was often quiet enough for their chatter to carry several hundred metres across the river.

I wandered down the main boulevard towards the old Presidential Palace. Although a guard waved me half-heartedly over to the other side of the road and away from the walls, and despite a history of coups and takeovers, there was none of the paranoia evident in other regional capitals – it was simply too hot to attempt anything as strenuous as a presidential assassination.

It was my birthday. I decided I had earned the minor treats of a pizza in the (French-owned) restaurant down by the banks of the Niger washed down by an almost cold beer, and a then bar of chocolate from the supermarket for desert. That night I was violently sick.