Thursday 7 May – Day 45

Thud. As you pass a mango tree one of the bad ones - before the season starts and the fruit is ripe - drops to the ground. One day I’m sure I’ll have one on my head. Not a good place to sit, under a mango tree at this time of year.

Impromptu music starts in the internet café/crêpe bar. There’s a man playing the guitar, singing in a gravelly voice with others joining in. It seems to be the same song over and over again, about Serrekunda and Freetown. Or maybe the song just never ends.

You start a conversation with someone in a shop asking for something, or greet them as you ride past on your bike and maybe they don’t speak Mandinka, but you don’t know that until they tell you Francais, or just don’t reply. They look back blankly, because they speak Fula, Jola, or maybe even Mankine – from another ethnic group with their own language. I chat to the man I buy the bread from for breakfast in the mornings in Mandika, but he is Jola. So we exchange all I know in Jola – Cassumei, cassumeichep. The spelling is only a guess, and my pronunciation of it is probably off too.

Everyone wears some ju-ju on their body, and has some in their house. On the body it tends to be small square leather pouches containing tight wads of folded up paper with Koranic texts scribed on them, all joined together by a length of black string and tied around the waist. Then there are bits of animals, such as horns, that hang above doorways, on the inside. And as I have discovered last week by witnessing (and also putting a bit of elbow grease into) the building of a modest house – just two small 4x4 metre rooms – at the time the foundations are being laid it is standard practice to make a little hole in the dirt for one of these ju-ju wads of Islamic texts sealed in a plastic bag and cover it with cement. For all the four corners of the house. It turns out after chatting with a different local about it later, that just one of the pouches would do, in the middle of the floor for example before the tiles are laid, and in the case of a round house, just one in the middle of the house. The ju-ju is said to ensure protection from bad things, peace for your compound, family, body, etc., depending on what you’ve asked to be written, by the marabout who makes ju-ju.

Why do tasks that you often see happening at the side of road, take so many people to do? I have witnessed one such task today involving four men repairing the clutch on a 4x4. One of the four is a qualified mechanic, another owns the car and is giving a hand, one is one of the mechanic’s ‘boys’ – a loose term which I understand to mean anyone they have regular contact with, have lived with at some point, or lived near, and is usually younger than them who they can use as a gopher, sending them to do errands for them when required – this guy’s task would seem to be to roll the joints. The last man who has just turned up has always been a bit of a character when I’ve seen him before, but is now taking an active part in the proceedings, taking it seriously, brushing off dirt from one of the car parts. The mechanic’s kit half fills an old 1970s suitcase, a family heirloom of the Dutch wife of the owner of the 4x4. It’s now falling apart.

Animals roam about all over the place. In the street, through the village, through any compound that hasn’t been walled off, and that’s most of them as the sand bricks may be cheap but are unsuitable for any walls without a roof on top and cement is less easy for many to come by to build long walls around their large land that is their compound. Chickens, dogs, cows, pigs, goats, cats, guinea fowl, frogs and lizards, - admittedly I haven’t seen a huge number of cats, and the guinea fowl don’t venture in to the village, but the rest - are prolific. The dogs have problems with flies in their ears, many have had their ears docked before the flies eat away at them. Cats are thin and have skin complaints. I wish I had veterinary training and could help them. I’m told the nearest vet is in Ziguinchor, a few hours bush taxi away. I find the flattened form of a now rather dehydrated frog in the path.

I see kids in the street playing, laughing in the sand and it makes me smile. They play with bike wheels and a stick, pushing it along, or a small mango maybe or stone in a bucket, bouncing the stone out and catching it in the bucket again. Or throwing freshly picked cashew nuts (in their shells, before being cooked) into a ring marked in the sand, like boules.

In a taxi to Dianna – this time in a hurry, so pay for a private hire fare, not a shared price, squeezed in with many others – the car is in a similar state of disrepair as all the others I’ve been in to date. Inside the car, from a back seat position you get a good view of all the bits that are either hanging off, sticking out or worn down. There are lots of things hanging in the front from the rear-view mirror – Islamic paraphernalia, a toy rabbit, and a money bag. There are stickers on every window; two of Che Guevara and two eagles holding flags for liberty and peace. This time I had a view of the road moving beneath me, through a 50p coin sized hole beneath my feet. The front windscreen is cracked all over, there are no seat belts at any of the seats, but the radio works. Priorities.

Burping, in the middle of your own sentence causes no surprise. Neither does bringing up phlegm in the street. You don’t hear farting, except in private. But otherwise regardless of gender, or status, all will share their bad air and anything unwanted in their mouths with you. It has taken a while for me to get used to that.

My answer to the not so high probability of not getting a decent hair cut in 3 months was to have braids with extensions woven in to them. But when I got it done in my first week it hurt my scalp so much I couldn’t take more than 5 days of it. Kids here start from a young age with corn rows or braids, toughening up their scalps, but mine was too sensitive for it, getting covered in tiny scabs all over. So I decided to do as the Romans do and cover my hair with a head scarf. Not for the first time, as I got used to it during stays in Iran. But this doesn’t cover you up so much, just around your head, not over your neck and shoulders. Now no one can see the unkempt nature of my hair and I fit in a little better, looking slightly more Islamic. I’m working on getting some nice African outfits too, from a cheap wholesaler in the Gambia next week. And then have a tailor in Abene do his stuff, hopefully for a mates rates price, through a friend, and not at a toobab rate like a tourist.

There’s a Muslim hero, a follower of Saint Touba I think, whose image festoons shop fronts all through the village and has been photocopied and stuck on to the front of the windscreen of a friends 4x4. I’ve also seen lots of men wear his image as heavy necklaces. He’s no longer alive – was alive a long, long time ago apparently. Though I point out that it couldn’t have been that long ago as there’s a photograph of him, and photography hasn’t been around that long. Speaking of which I have seen no signs of Africa going digital. In London it has got increasingly difficult to use film, necessitating my reluctant move to digital. But I think it will be a long time before the change here as people just don’t have the capital to cover the costs of buying new equipment. I wonder what the portrait businesses will do when the photographic chemicals aren’t being produced anymore.

The weather has changed. Not normally a topic of conversation here as there isn’t usually much change from sunny and more sunny. But we can see the rainy season is on its way. It’s been very hot, too hot to get about much and then the next day is the coolest yet with an even cover of cloud. Very mixed. Soon it will be very hot, very wet and full of mosquitoes. This is the time of year when most of the white people start going back to wherever they’re from. A chance to escape the worst of the weather and earn some cash to pay for their stay here.