Enough of this… In Mogadishu for how many days – running around in circles, militias in tow – adding to the quantity of armed men surrounding us every time we crossed an arbitrary barrier. Indeed, each time we had to cross into another warlord’s territory, another militia truck would have to be added to our convoy for a few hundred more that day. Expensive? Hell yes. Of course, nothing but the worst in southern Somalia. Nothing but the worst, for all intents and purposes, has all it’s been ever since my last visit there over four years ago.

Sure, it all came to a head sometime in the past two years. People started paying attention again, after all this time, all the while Somalia has been going on near a generation without a functioning government. That means kids growing up without any knowledge of law and order, any idea of what a head of state is, a parliament or some equivalent, or even what the notion of nationhood even means. This is indeed all foreign to us bloated rich western folk that, on this planet in the infancy of the twenty-first century, people can still live off the grid, off the map, with a currency that technically shouldn’t exist, in a country that technically doesn’t exist. I got in and out, officially, by paying my translator ten bucks to handwrite my entry and exit dates inside my passport. All this in the age of the internet, the ever-traceable individual, the see-through body scanner, the Al-Qaeda database (trademark) that can make any man with flammable underwear stop and think twice about taking a flight out of Heathrow to Detroit.

Ah, if it was only that simple. Once in awhile, people head out to Mogadishu, and back in the early throes of oh-six, I was doing the same. The second time, actually – one more than most, almost more than all of the world.

Mogadishu, that time, was a different experience, one that I’d written about extensively some years ago. Few cared then, and few more care now, thanks to a few token white sailors getting stuck on the wrong end of a rusty machine gun. Nonetheless I refuse to repeat that story: what I’m going to tell is the story of an aborted trip south from Mogadishu to Kisimayo, some five hundred klicks southwest, some kind of random mad-max road trip that was never intended to succeed.

Why haven’t I told it sooner? Well, I tried. Selling stuff on the country is a task somewhere between difficult and impossible, and magazines tend to only buy stuff about dumb blondes who happen to appear on American television. Thusly and therefore, no one really cared that I was heading south to Kisimayo.

Back then, in the old days, Mog was a “safer” place – warlords had divided the city into about eight, maintaining a sort of equilibrium amongst themselves, ensuring a basic level of law and order. But back then, things were not going extremely well for these eight folks, as the Islamic Courts (also known as Al-Shabab, sort of, kind of) were jockeying for their own piece of Club Mog and already controlled about half of it. Three months after our departure, they got the other half, and Mog would never be the same. But before this fundamental change in the anarchistic equilibrium of the city, we were planning a road trip south.

Indeed, a road trip with a truck full of Somalis with heavy machine guns, ourselves decked out in abandoned bulletproof vests that the Pakistani contingent of the UN had cast off around 1993, as well as a bundle of satellite phones, laptops, satellite internet, backpacks full of stinking clothes, and of course our guide and driver. We had spent the whole afternoon two days before negotiating a price.

A few grand, the hotelier demanded from us. We said sorry, we’re just poor students, not much in the way of cash, and even if we had extra cash to spare it wouldn’t do you much good as there wasn’t a single working bank machine in your whole damned country – or the three countries that currently make up the geographic boundaries of your whole theoretical damned country. It’s getting confusing already. They had an offer, however – a few friends of theirs (clan members, to be precise) had agreed that for a smaller fee they would meet up with us around the halfway point between Mogadishu and Kisimayo, and ferry us south from there.

Kisimayo, back in these ancient days four years ago, was not yet overrun by Al-Shabab but was naturally no vacation spot either – it too had been divided up between warlords, though they were far less used to receiving international visitors than the community representatives in Mog. (Think that, instead of a handful of visitors each year, you get zero). This was only one of our initial problems with the place – the mystery was, of course, did they manage the same sort of semi-organized law enforcement like the Mog types had created, ad-hoc, over the past fifteen years? Did anyone even know this was going on in Mogadishu? Obviously, no one else had bothered to ask, as I discovered one charming afternoon arguing with some fool from Ottawa who couldn’t believe someone could be calling him from a satellite phone from an airstrip west of Mogadishu asking if he knew anything about chartering aircraft out of Nairobi; but, as I said, that’s another story.

But as for Kisimayo – it was a mystery. Me and my associate had been bouncing around Nairobi for a week before our arrival in Club Mog, asking about chartering aircraft into southern Somalia, and finally found the leading “domestic” airport in Kenya and the office of a charming Somali gentlemen who gave us a price, and then delivered a deep heartfelt sigh. “You guys are young,” he said with sadness, “and perhaps you should think again about your visit to Kisimayo, considering all that is going on there.”

Oh. Did I mention that back in the early days of Oh-six, Kisimayo was the initial flash point for all this piracy-on-the-seas stuff, the jumping-off point for the Islamic rebels? The first place they really managed to gain ground against the warlords, in their mission to consolidate the southern third of the country into some sort of authoritative Islamic state? Well, it must have slipped my mind; as we did, in fact, politely decline the chartered aircraft to Kisimayo and decided to wait out the weekend for a scheduled flight into Club Mog.

Then it all happened – the militia truck appeared out front of the Sahafi Hotel on another scorching day. Over the past week we had spoken to numerous parliamentarians who wandered amongst the walls of the Sahafi Hotel like ghosts, mysterious figures from murderous army generals to intellectuals whom had spent most of their previous years in Toronto and Minnesota. Indeed, we loaded up the SUV with our craploads of gear, various sugary sweets for the journey, and watched our guide down plenty of camel milk. The call to prayer woke me up early, I pushed off the heavy velvet blankets from my hotel room’s bed, looked down from the chain-link screens that covered the balcony, and, in any event, realized it was time to go.

Kisimayo, here I come. No one had managed a road trip through Southern Somalia for, oh, probably fifteen years. Maybe they did back in ninety-three, no one will really know and few will ever really care. Strapped into the vehicle the gates then opened, and we stopped on the outside as the gates closed; from the alleys our two trucks filled with machine-gun men appeared. On our way, it would seem.

It was an innocuous journey for the first couple of hours. Past Merca, our guide kept holding his head. We played with the satellite phone, I took pictures of camels. Looked at the dust trailing us, looked at the militia’s truck trailing dust in the front. No, you don’t get to see the coast as the “highway” is, naturally, a dozen kilometres in. That is, if you can call it a highway – it had been broken into a maze of potholes, and more often than otherwise we drove along the side of the highway than on it.

Low trees, various herds of camels and cows, dotted the landscape. A clear blue sky, random Somali sounds (and of course Bob Marley) blared from the radio. We stopped briefly to fix some tires, the machine-gun men fanned out around us, but soon we were back in the vehicle. Some hours later, again, we stopped. Our guide had chatted with the hotelier back at the Sahafi via a cellular phone. Time for a stretch, at least.

Yet, this was not simply a stretching of the legs. This was another experience, that of the militia commander huddling his troops together behind the vehicle, screaming on the phone, expounding his reasons for something or other, demanding a resolution. Our guide, staring into space while holding his belly, seemed uninterested. Minutes later he turned to us.

“We had planned to hand you to another militia group one hundred kilometres south, but they misunderstood our intention. They are thinking we are coming to fight, not to meet them, so they are expecting to fight us. So we leave the question to you – do you want to go meet them, and fight them? Or, we can go back to Mogadishu,” he said, staring off into space, looking a little ill.

Ahh. It would seem as though that our intensive planning, and road tripping in southern Somalia on the cheap, may have been all for naught. There was something of a communication error here – they had told us that the two clans were friends; they had explained clearly that we were to be handed off between the two militias, without incident. Now we were, apparently, hiring a few local mercenaries to spark a war between clans in southern Somalia. The final showdown between Mogadishu and Kisimayo. Talk about kicking it up a notch.

Par for the course, perhaps. I told them in no uncertain terms that we weren’t going down there to face anyone, to fight anyone, but in fact were simply students on a research project here on the Somali coast, for a second time. When we arrived back at the Sahafi wearing level-three vests and unloading tonnes of laptops and satellite equipment, you could just see the locals drinking tea and muttering to themselves, “students my ass”.

It was not until our arrival back at the hotel, as well, that we had learned that our little road trip was novel enough that a local journalist had found fit to announce it to the entire city on local radio the day before – indubitably with a little bit of circulation to their friends down in Kisimayo as well. The media may have hammed it up, made it out to be more exciting and interesting than it was intended to be, and rumours persisted upon our departure of it appearing in Mogadishu’s daily newspaper as well. Some young white guys road tripping in southern Somalia, Mogadishu to Kisimayo? What are the odds?

But hey, we got our money back. The hotelier blamed our poor guide on wimping out due to “drinking too much camel milk”, which is a line I’ll have to try someday when I don’t want to do something. It’s one thing to say no, but in places like this, the Somalis were still eager to help us at less than half the price – and they failed. Perhaps it’s a lesson for all, and I hate to say that for those east coast Africa overlanders, your time has yet to come. One thing’s for sure, however, you should definitely bring some spare tires. And maybe a few bulletproof vests for good measure.

Luanda’s domestic terminal is a crowded, dim, smoky place that definitely has not been affected by the obsession with banning cigarettes that has swept across the globe. Amongst local Angolans hauling piles of luggage were crowds of men from the Philippines and China, packed closely together, dutifully handing their passports over to their handlers when the time for check-in came. Other folks with American accents ran the gauntlet into the waiting room, which was a little less humid, sporting one working air conditioner and some truly squalid bathrooms.

Par for the course, really, in central Africa. Luanda, in spite of Angola’s nascent boom from oil and diamonds now that the war has ended, still sports a grimy little airport packed to the gills with those who would see the country’s industrial revolution arrive in full. I was heading north out of Luanda, to follow the oil workers to their mecca on the African west coast, a tiny dot of a place that few can even find on a map – Cabinda. It’s something of an exclave, wedged between both Congos, and for many, a great unknown as to what would await them there.

Cabinda has trailed far behind in the peacemaking that the rest of Angola has been enjoying for around five years. FLEC, the Cabindan separatists, only really reached a peace deal in 2006 or so, and that was conditional on a whole lot of that oil money staying within the province’s boundaries. This is no small deal – Cabinda’s been called the Kuwait of Africa, and glance at any map of the proven oilfields off Angola’s coast and you’ll see that without Cabinda, the country doesn’t have much oil at all. Angola joined OPEC in 2007 and has recently been exporting slightly more crude than Libya. The promise was, the Angolan government said, that the Cabindan locals would see their standard of living increase from all this wealth, and their life expectancy would be drastically improved thanks to a noticeable lack of bullets flying everywhere.

This may seem to be the case when one arrives at the newly refurbished Cabinda airport – a small but gleaming complex with a beautifully paved runway and glossy luggage belt, full time sweepers and window washers, plasma televisions hung from the rafters with the only channel available interrupting idle chatter. The claptrap of a domestic aircraft I arrived on seemed out of place, and at first glance the new airport could make Cabinda seem almost first world – until one sees the crowds of police officers, razor-wire, and oddly useless passport checks every few meters. And then, nearly an hour for our luggage to arrive from the aircraft and into the arrivals area. A shiny building is only a small part of what makes a country stable.

Cabinda the province has its main economic centre in Cabinda the city, and driving around the sleepy town one will see more effects of the recent peace deal – newly built parks popping up everywhere, with more gleaming fences, statues, and clean streets – at least in the town centre. Indeed, my driver would tell me, all of this has occurred in the blink of an eye, over the course of only a year. Construction is rampant, as the government attempts not only to meet its end of a peace deal but also to prettify the city for an anticipated influx of even more foreigners.

And yet, on the street level, we’re few and far between. The vast majority of the oil employees coming to Cabinda work at a vast complex just north of the capital city, in a town called Malongo – a venerable fortress of its own. Walled off by razor-wire, with unmarked minefields behind it, human rights groups have been in a tizzy for decades over this overprotected enclave within the exclave. Those seeking to escape the conflict on the outside would scale the fence, only to have their legs blown off on the other side. Things are quieter these days, the minefields are marked, but the oil company in question still refuses to let their staff drive the two dozen kilometres to the complex – they all take helicopters. While waiting for my luggage, one would arrive and leave almost every five minutes.

FLEC, or the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, had been battling both Angola and Chevron-Texaco’s interests here for a number of decades. Along a sideline to the protracted and well-publicized civil war of mainland Angola between the MPLA and UNITA, FLEC engaged in a nasty guerrilla war for longer than anyone could remember. Their leaders stipulate that the original agreement signed with Portugal was for independence, in 1885. When independence for Angola arrived in 1975, they said, Cabinda should have become a separate nation. But instead they became another province, and were swiftly invaded by the MPLA. FLEC has been fighting against this ever since, and even though the most recent peace treaty was denounced by some within the group, the province is nonetheless reasonably peaceful these days….. and the government, with its relentless construction initiatives, is trying to prove that it’s worth their while to stay that way.

Cabinda’s city itself is gaining affluence, and the highway north to Pointe Noire is a beautiful and well marked stretch of asphalt. We headed to Cacongo, Cabinda’s second city, which has not seen nearly as much development. Sandy beaches, ancient colonial buildings, the water just over there, it could be a prime vacation spot for some. However, head northeast from Cacongo into the inland of Cabinda and one reaches the homeland of FLEC and its real base of support – as well as more Angolan soldiers.

Buco Zau is a small town carved out from the jungle on a few hilltops, and the residents certainly were not alone in the wilderness with all those uniforms about. I, the hapless white guy, was getting too many stares from the resident army and police – however I was really here to check out the forest reserve in the environs that goes by the name of Maiombe.

One unfortunate fact of so many decades of conflict is the endless placement of minefields across the borders in central Africa. Maiombe is said to have animals, from primates to elephants, yet no one in their right mind would go see them without an idea of where these minefields lay. Or, for that matter, whether any animals still remain. Locals would tell me that the animals do indeed remain, but like so many animals exposed to years of conflict, will find the areas of country where the fewest people are. I went away empty handed, though I poked around further north near the Congo-Brazzaville border for a few more hours. It is in fact open these days – but only to foot traffic. This area is also an excellent place to hide out if you’re a guerrilla group aiming to conduct research initiatives for asymmetrical warfare – in June 2008 there was an attack near the commune of Massabi, near the Congo border. Army leaders quickly issued press releases expounding their efficient success of eliminating the threat.

The invasion and reconstruction, though, is just the tip of the iceberg. Coming up soon are more hotels, and plenty of visits from small-scale VIPS, like Angolan ministers and various people in pressed suits from large organizations like the World Health Organization and the World Bank. In many ways it’s a very Angolan approach to solving the problem of Cabinda: if you throw enough money at the problem, it will go away. Indeed, promoting the idea of being a rich Angolan, rather than a poor Cabindan, is top of everyone’s to-do list in the province these days.

“Oh, I cannot take you to Darra,” the Afghan fellow insisted. He ran a clothing shop in our hotel during the evenings, and specialized in shepherding around random tourists during the daytime; though, at this juncture, tourists were few in Peshawar.

Darra had been labeled off-limits for the tourist crowd for some time, though a few intrepid backpacking types had managed to find themselves there through strokes of random luck – and the Pakistani police would single them out at one of the checkpoints on either end of the town, arrest them, extort a pile of cash from them, then call their hotel and demand they send a driver to pick them up. It’s a town most indicative of the wild frontier attitude in the Northwest Frontier Province, a real smuggler’s bazaar for the twenty-first century rather than simply the fake one just west of Peshawar that only sells Chinese made appliances at duty-free prices.

So, we decided to head elsewhere and see if another hotel/tour company could assist us in our mission to visit the famed and secret town of Darra. We were bent on a private driver, though guidebooks stated it was not entirely necessary: one simply needed to find a public bus heading south and say they were going onward to the town of Kohat, then get off at Darra. However this plan was not foolproof, as the tribal police inside of Darra did not take kindly to those who arrived without first paying them off.

We found an eager group of gentlemen at another hotel in the old town, call the Rose, where the hotelier spoke English fast and furiously – chastising our countries’ governments, going on about Canada and England and Iraq, we sat and drank the sweetened green tea of the region while waiting for their fixer to arrive. He was a younger fellow, in his mid-twenties, attending university during the day normally and running off on occasion to assist stupid tourists in their mission to visit the sealed smuggling town of Darra. This was his home town, he said, and his tribe of origin – what the Afghan lacked was local connections that one who has grown up in Darra can offer. The price was not cheap for the region, at sixty US dollars – but he insisted it could not be negotiated, as the police needed to be paid off, both in the government regions and the tribal regions. Soon enough, away we went – and I was implored to take off my bright green western looking coat and look a little more….. local.

Darra is only twenty kilometers south of Peshawar, but the distance does not do justice to the complicated politics of the Northwest Frontier Province: made up of twenty-four tribal areas, crossing the internal border is like crossing a real border. Police have their checkpoints set up, and if they see tourists in a private car, you’re bound to get stopped. “Just tell them you were heading to Kohat, and never stopped at Darra,” he said. We nodded. I checked that I had a spare memory card for my camera, in case I needed to hand one over for confiscation – the blank one would go, naturally.

Rolling farmlands lined a well-paved road south of Peshawar, and soon we left the policed confines of the city limits and our guide/driver began putting his foot to the floor. The space in between the Peshawar canton and the tribal region five kilometres south was mostly lawless, a place unprotected by either tribal or state officials. Banditry was rife, he said, as the muddled administrative issues of who should follow up on a robbery in the area paralyzed most departments while emboldening criminals. It was rally racing all over again, though soon enough we passed through another checkpoint – the beginning of the Darra Adam Khel tribal region in Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan.

We had arrived in Darra, though our guide was hesitant to take us deeper into town. And aside from hash and guns and other exciting products for purchase, what made Darra such an attractive place? Well, it dates back to a hundred years ago – tribesmen in the area have a special proven talent for being shown the schematics for a firearm, and duplicating it exactly within five days. Their skills are widely renowned, and the quality of their weapons – at least for firing a few hundred rounds – is astounding. We were here to witness some of the last handmade, blacksmithed, guns on the planet.

I had expected some rustic black-powder weapons, but walking into the blacksmith’s shop proved that they were not interested in anything so ancient. No, they were busy replicating a Heckler & Koch nine millimeter pistol, complete with rifled barrel, full metal frame, beautifully manufactured wood grips and even a laser sighting device under the barrel! The quality was immaculate, and the smiths worked away at these things with just the most basic of tools – an electric buffer, a vice, and several tinker’s hammers. They were also busy replicating an MP5 submachine gun, with plastic frame and all. They offered to let us fire it – “just point it into the hills over there,” they said, and it fired immaculately.

I tried to press them on who, in fact, was buying such large numbers of submachine guns and pistols in this region. Who are their buyers? Who needs so many MP5s? They said that it was the local tribesmen, who supported the blacksmiths and their trade. Suspected Taliban insurgents? Not likely, they said – the range of these weapons is short, and Taliban need long range weapons to be effective against NATO Forces. Or do they?

Our guide showed us another workshop where the beloved AK-47 was being replicated, as well as a Beretta semi-automatic shotgun. The original Italian model would run you around five thousand US dollars, but here, they were selling this model for only three hundred and fifty. As well, there are more troubling weapons to be had in Darra – including pen guns, cell phone guns, knife guns – all of the reasons why it takes so long to get through airport screening these days. Rumour has it that when tourists visit Darra, the Pakistani police revel in catching them – they inevitably come back with a pen gun or two, a few ounces of hash, and are way up shit creek if they get caught with these things. Foreigners need permits to have firearms within Peshawar, though the laws are different in the tribal areas. They will let you buy one, no doubt, knowing that when the police confiscate it they will simply return it in the same condition as it was bought.

With our fun completed in Darra, and losing a bit of hearing firing off their guns, we headed back north – but first I swapped out my camera’s memory card with a blank one, remembered the story that we were in Kohat, and breezed past the police checkpoints. While Darra may be something of a taboo tourist spot that gets all the media attention, the insidious fact remains about Darra Adam Khel and the Northwest Frontier Province: all of Afghanistan’s major offensives originate near the border area with Pakistan. Are tribesmen simply buying these things for storage in their home? Who is buying so many automatic weapons?

The connection between Northwest Frontier Province and Afghanistan’s continuing insurgency with the Taliban is more than coincidental, and Darra, at the least, hints at a few answers for this.

Author – Sean Rorison

In January 2006, Sean Rorison travelled to Mogadishu, the war-torn, hellhole capital of Somalia, to see how the region is faring and what the future holds in store.

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I first traveled to Mogadishu, Somalia, in 2002. Back then it was all quite a new experience to me – having ten armed guards surrounding you at any given time outside of your hotel compound, garish amounts of weaponry on every street corner, a blazing sun and countless bombed-out buildings. It was a realm of active conflict the like of which I had never seen before and have not seen since. Nothing on this planet comes close to Mogadishu – in terms of volatility, level of civilian firepower, and total lack of resolution. Southern Somalia still ranks at the very top – beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, beyond Chechnya. Pity, then, that we’ve all forgotten about it.

Three and a half years later I returned and learned more about the town. The shock of seeing how the city worked had worn off, my eyes had adjusted so to speak, and I could focus my attention more on the details of how life goes on… And it does: The city is divided into numerous areas controlled by warlords, and those warlords in turn protect their own populace and even seek to mitigate crime and chaos in their own little areas. Private ownership of weapons is high, but no higher than any other city where guns are legal. Militias roam the streets, and just like any other place that experiences gang warfare, people should expect to be hunted down if they start stirring things up.

Whilst other parts of Somalia have begun to sort themselves out – Somaliland in the north, and Puntland in the northeast, both sport their own democratically elected governments – southern Somalia still rules strictly by clan and guns, and the larger of either that you have behind you, the better off you’ll be. Across the arid shrublands of the south the entire region is divided amongst Somali clans, and then divided further between local leaders. Each leader needs their own protection to maintain influence over their respective territories. Mad Max indeed, but these people are far less unreasonable than one may think – they are interested in maintaining business ties and improving the lives of their own people as much as any other community leader. Indeed, no one inside their area of protection would call them a “warlord” per se, but instead would refer to them as the “Local Businessman” or “Community Representative” – a leader of sorts, no doubt leading by force of arms, but rarely if ever seen as something to be feared by the normal person. Unfortunately, no foreigner can be seen as ‘normal’ inside Mogadishu.

White people, or anyone not Somali for that matter, are exceedingly rare inside the city. Only one other fellow who departed with us on the flight to Mogadishu from Nairobi even stopped there – the others, four aid workers, continued north to the safer environs of Hargeisa, in Somaliland. The guy that disembarked at Mogadishu only appeared inside the city briefly to interview a parliamentarian at the same hotel I was staying at. The cost of arriving, and doing business, in the city, is astronomical: Ten men with machine guns guard you at every moment once you are outside of your compound, tailing your truck while your guide and driver navigate Mogadishu’s various routes to and from the hotel. Always changing routes, talking on mobile phones to confirm if one route is open or closed, or if daily fighting has shifted territories, once again necessitating a diversion to avoid checkpoints.

Conversely, going from one warlord’s territory to another requires phoning ahead with them so their militiamen can accompany your vehicles through their territory (requiring a fee of course), then doing the same thing again once you move into another territory. Handed off time after time between militias; paying each one as you go; observing tell-tale lines of debris on shattered roads as indications of where one territory ends and another begins; all of this is daily life in Mogadishu, and it is expensive, extortionate even, which may give an insight into why so few people even bother reporting on the Somali situation at all.

…And also why so few aid groups, charity organizations, and even the UN prefer to establish their missions in Somalia to somewhere else – mainly Nairobi. Out in the Gigiri district of Nairobi’s suburbs with the towering building that is the new American Embassy, past the lavish mansion with heated pool that is the Canadian Embassy, is a small town unto itself called UNOSOM (UN Operations Somalia). Over a dozen various agencies have taken over the shady terraces and walled mansions of this upscale neighbourhood; hung their signs out front, and continually wax poetic of how things ebb and flow in the Somali region. Random field reports arrive from the outer limits of Somali territory, or from Jowhar, the new capital of Somalia’s parliament that refuses to enter Mogadishu – because they believe it is too dangerous.

Too dangerous for some, but not for all. A rift in the recently appointed parliament meant that half of them were staying at our same hotel, several dozen of them, debating on where to move next – or what to do at all. Their philosophy was that if this newly arranged government did not establish itself in Mogadishu, then it was another hopeless cause already. Being in the capital would be critical to proving that they could exert control over the wider southern region and should be seen as its most important first mission. About two weeks following our departure, we heard they’d left for the countryside – to Baidoa, not Jowhar. So now this new government has split into two and has no presence whatsoever in the capital city.

This is a step backward from September of 2002, when a small government had at least established control of central Mogadishu. The TNG as it was called, Transitional National Government, was assembling various innocuous infrastructural changes such as license plates, traffic police, and had begun to draw up forms for various civilian institutions such as police stations. But once the TNG dissolved this went with it, and Mogadishu slipped back into its familiar anarchy. The new government was supposed to come in and fill this vacuum with a stronger parliamentary system, but that didn’t happen and, instead, the warlords quickly moved in and divided up the empty territory between themselves and shut the new government out entirely.

Which is not to say the warlords do not believe that a government should come into Mogadishu and establish control. One that we spoke to was even a minister in the new government, called the TFG – Transitional Federal Government. However, there is continuous disagreement on the makeup of the parliament and even after things have been decided, it only takes a few minor squabbles to bring the house of cards down again. For all the talk we heard of Somalis tiring from a lack of government and willingness to allow the new parliament to come in, their actions speak otherwise.

Islamic Courts, one of the largest institutions relied upon by people for some establishment of order, have been receiving funding from outside sources and have also been fighting with other warlords as of late. To those uninitiated in the world of Somali affairs this might look like the road to something akin to the Taliban in southern Somalia, but I wouldn’t count on it – Somalia’s problems stem from their fervent individualism and devotion to clan above all. And conversely, it is these things that ensure the conflict has not deteriorated even further down the spiral into absolute disarray. For all that doesn’t work in Mogadishu, there are vast ad-hoc networks that regulate business, crime, shipping, and even traffic. The more time you spend in the city, the deeper the whole mess gets – but the more order you see amid the chaos.

-Sean Rorison, April 2006

Photographer: Sean Rorison

Get in touch with Sean if you want to be added to his email group to keep updated on his regular wanderings through some pretty interesting places.

Contact: sarchives@lycos.com

Website: http://www.seanrorison.com/travel

The spell of Liberation, a narcotic with which the world over dreams of acquiescing their souls, was cast upon Blaine today.

In our convoy we crossed the border under heavy protection and witnessed the Birth of a Society, a City, a Nation; these proud men and women have thrown off the yoke of oppressive imperialistic dictatorships and now see for themselves the glories that the dream of democracy can provide.

There must be special mention for the Women of Blaine. Now that the Women of Blaine are free, they are able to talk amongst one another, buy meat and cheese without fear for worry of retribution. They shall not fear random canings or rape, or be confined to their homes.

They may even wield a weapon if they so choose, the weapons of Glory that can be found all across America, God’s most Blessed country, this great Country.

Its town of Blaine is free.

In my flak jacket and helmet I braved my shaking bones and soiled pants to witness its suddenly Liberated streets. Soldiers across the world, this is what you fight for. This is the gift of Freedom, and a bountiful gift it is indeed.

“I will eat you alive.”

The young Japanese tourist stared at me helplessly as the customs guard grinned and said something that I didn’t understand. I would have helped him had I understood at all what in the hell he was saying, but I didn’t. In Dakar, tourists are separated and fleeced in an ever so friendly way. This is not like other African megalopolises I have visited, indeed there is a civility to the fleecing, but a fleecing is a fleecing whether you’re smiling or crying after it.

Out into the glaring crowds. A few police to keep the order, and a throng of black men in brown striped shirts surrounded me and started in; the game had begun. I was expecting this, said no thank you, I’m fine, please go away. Which they did, for awhile. Yet one guy stuck around, hung around me while I stood behind a cordon in a line of Senegalese waiting to change money. It was there that he pulled out a very official looking card that stated he worked for the airport as an information guide, which I assumed was a good thing. Hangers-on usually don’t have fake IDs, and I usually trust my instinct these days. He must work for the airport then – that means I should be able to trust him, marginally.

Of course, I had never been to Senegal. After my money changing he was still there, waiting. Of course, this should have been in a sign, but when dealing with scammers you rarely get the time to really ponder all of the signals; you need to act, and act quickly. I hesitated for a moment and then followed him out into the night, where he found me a taxi. Good, I thought. Things took a turn for the worse when he hopped in the back.

I knew that wasn’t right – that told me immediately he was a scammer of some sort, and I opened the door in the moving taxi and motioned to get out – in most countries that I’ve done this, it’s enough of a drastic action that the taxi driver will slow down and things will be renegotiated. Yet here, the scammer kept yelling at the taxi driver to keep moving; this wasn’t a robbery, I knew that much, but I wasn’t particularly interested in handing this guy any money.

Conversation ensued. I told him I didn’t need him to go to my hotel with me, and didn’t need him at all. He agreed he’d just leave a few kilometers away from the airport. Indeed, he did, but not after a raging argument with me about money, and how much of it he should get.

These guys are aggressive. Far more aggressive than the last rip-off artists I had to deal with, in Armenia, two months ago. He demanded 3000 CFA(about 5 Euros) for his time, which I flatly refused, and began arguing politely back. As a Canadian, my mild-manneredness is both a blessing and a curse. It helps me diffuse a lot of otherwise intense situations by responding with a very quiet voice, and that often leaves people looking for a reason to pound me into the ground very confused as to what to do – he’s harmless, why touch him? Yet this guy knew he was in the wrong, and he knew the louder he yelled and the more he cut me off when I tried to say something, the faster I would just try to get rid of him with money. On the other hand, I’m rarely blunt enough to get rid of people quickly, and try to work my way out of these situations with as little bad blood as possible between me and the opposition.

I tried arguing; but a tactic I would discover more and more in Senegal was being cut off when I tried to explain things, reason the price out, discuss why things shouldn’t be the way they demanded. They would just simply cut me off and repeat their last statement: “I helped you, you give me 2000 CFA!”

“but you—”

“I helped you, you give me 2000 CFA!”

“you didn’t—”

“You give me 2000 CFA!”

And then I try another approach, which is what he wants, and the disjointed argument continues -

“I’ll give you 1000 CFAs.”

“1500! I helped you!”

“no, 1000.”

“1500! I helped you!”

“Fine. 1500.”

I had been duped by his fake ID. After all of my travelling, I can still get scammed. Really, I don’t think any amount of travelling is ever enough to protect oneself against all scammers – you can create flat out policies of never dealing with the locals, but that is stupid since you’re probably travelling to get to know the locals in the first place. Yet, I’ve met travellers like that – aggressive, belligerent, mean, all of these things can bite you in the ass later on. I’m not a super-cheap traveller, I don’t mind reimbursing people who help me. But slimy scammers get on my nerves.

I finally got to my hotel and the squalid room was a ridiculous € 24; Dakar is, in fact, one of Africa’s most expensive cities. No budget accommodation, no value for money whatsoever. I had only arrived here since a visa for Mauritania seemed like a real hassle to get back in Canada and thought a day or two in Dakar wouldn’t be too bad an idea, I’d see one of the continent’s major cities and it has good flight connections back to Europe, much easier to get in and out from here than Nouakchott which is only served by Air France three times a week, when the airport isn’t closed as a result of the coup attempt. I entertained the idea of heading out to see Dakar’s legendary nightlife that night, but my fatigue got the best of me and I just plain passed out before I could figure out where to go.

Sunday morning; I’ve been travelling without a watch for about 4 months now and have found the experience interesting. I don’t know what time it is, just that it’s light out and something must be open. I was wrong – Dakar is absolutely empty on a Sunday, all day – from the travel agencies, to restaurants, to supermarkets, to the banks; this is especially strange for a country that is 80% Muslim, yet the Catholic minority exercises enough power that shops must honour this requirement to be closed not only on Friday but also on Sunday. Productivity is not one of Senegal’s strong points. So out I went, wandering around.

A few people chatted to me, interchangeably in English and French; I was wandering around aimlessly, looking for anything that was open, anything worth seeing; the Place de L’independence is hopelessly dull, the president’s mansion has one sole guard in front of it in ceremonial costume, and the streets are empty. In most cases, when in a city with scammers lurking, I’ll duck into a shop or restaurant to lose them. But this was not possible in Dakar on a Sunday – there was just nothing open. There was nowhere to be but out on the street, in plain view, with the scammers on the prowl.

I had been ready for this – indeed, the tactics used in Dakar would have to be good for me to be fooled. And guess what – they were good.

“Ah, you know me – I’m from your hotel,” the man stated, smiling softly; he didn’t look familiar, but hey, last night was a blur from my jet-lagged self and it may have very well been possible. He said he was heading home from work, and we walked together talking about Senegal, Canada, and he took me to some tourist sites, around in a circle as I had meant to walk anyway; so, there was little reason to part ways. Had he tried to tug me in a direction different from that which I was going, again, I wouldn’t have gone. But ah, he is an adept at these sorts of things; mild manneredness simply did not cut it when dealing with individuals like this.

Again we walked, and headed toward the largest market in town. It was slightly bustling, but not very; we walked amongst empty stalls, he greeted one large fellow whom shook both our hands. It all seemed to stem from large African friendliness. Indeed, these men seemed harmless, the entire place a harmless third world atmosphere. I asked him if he wanted money; I was up front that his help was not necessary, and I would not be reimbursing him for showing me around. “Ah, all I want from you is a postcard,” he said, smiling. Throughout our encounter he would highlight that fact, and that relieved me. A verbal tranquilizer, and I only realize it now. Few beggars, few touts; he walked with me, and eventually, predictably, led me to a fabrics shop.

Inside it was quite impressive, and I pretended to be interested, just to be nice. They said they were funded by UNESCO and some other projects to keep these people employed. Another fellow led me around, showing me all manner of crap with typical West African patterns, puffy backpack bags and small hand pockets, shirts, and traditional clothing. Anything that sort of caught my interest, they set aside. Then we went across the street and began to negotiate a price.

This shit wasn’t cheap. Unlike other African textiles I had bought over the years, these prices were high. I didn’t have much cash on me to begin with, after all, I was intending to do an afternoon of street wandering. He wanted something like 50,000 CFAs for the whole lot of stuff that I did not even want; I notched my assertiveness up a notch and told them I only wanted the small pocket bag; he wanted 15,000 CFAs for it, which I told him was ridiculous. I eventually got him down to 5000 CFAs, about € 8.3, and ended it at that. The shop owner stormed away, clearly disappointed. I smiled; these people take me for yet another typical tourist, which I am not.

But in other ways, I am. The fellow whom I met on the street continued his wandering with me, and invited me into a bare African bar. Another fellow from the clothing shop had joined us on our street walk, me flanked by these two touts. Yet their demeanour was not as such; they were trustworthy, calm, and not persistent. A huge difference from the tout I had to deal with back at the airport, these seemed much more the type of Africans who are just friendly and curious about foreigners in their town than the ones out to fleece me. So I played along.

Sitting down at the bar, some fellow approached us, and he handed me a small wad of paper; I felt a lump in it. He smiled and said “here is my gift to you! I have had my first child, after five years of marriage. It is customary in Islam for a man to give a gift to the first stranger he sees, based on his profession.”

My first thought was that he had handed me a small wad of drugs and was colluding with the police to get me arrested; he picked the wad of paper back up, opened it, and staring back at me was a glistening lump of solid gold.

Of course, my first thought after that was that it must be fake; yet I consider myself reasonably knowledgeable as to what real gold looks like, as opposed to fake gold, painted gold, brass, yellow metal, and so on. This looked real. I also considered where we were, in Africa, and it is far more likely to be real gold simply since Africa’s resources are based more on pure original metals than fake ones.

We chatted for awhile about Senegal and Canada, exchanged addresses. The other two showed me some traditional Senegalese toasting methods, and it all seemed like a very typical meeting between tourist and African lower class urbanites. He said that tomorrow he would be having a celebration that would go on all day for the new baby, with hundreds of people to come wish the new child well, and he would name the child then. He then invited me to the ceremony – perhaps, knowing full well, that if I’m a tourist and want to experience the culture, what else would I say? I could show up for a small period of time, I offered.

Being goaded by the other two men, who told me this was a very special gift, I began to become quite convinced. The object looked real, the man who handed it to me seemed real. The two other men, one of which worked at the shop and I automatically assumed wasn’t a scammer, looked real. It was all very convincing; so when the man who handed me the gift got up to visit the washroom, and the original man I had met on the street began to tell me that I should give him some sort of financial recompense to help with the celebration tomorrow to celebrate the birth of his child, I felt obliged to help. Help being the operative word; not a gift, not a scam, not buying anything; I was helping this man with his celebration, since knowing that families here are poor but must perform their traditions as required, regardless of the cost. All of this made sense to me, and most importantly, did not at all seem like a scam.

He told me that I should give the other man about 30 or 50 thousand CFAs to help him buy food, like a bag of rice, to help out with the celebration. The other man came back; this was where I could find out for sure if these people were scamming me. Indeed, the other man came back and looked at me expectantly; perhaps this should have been enough, and it is all and well for me to sit and write this now, looking back on it; yet then, his look seemed expectant of someone mild mannered like myself. The first man, who told me that I should compensate him, said to him, “so I believe this man has a gift for you.”

I told them that sorry, I was out of money. After all, I had bought that little pouch for 5000 CFAs and being too smart to wander around with too much money on me, was now officially broke. All three of them looked quite shocked, and also quite sad. I read the mood, and they definitely seemed disappointed.

The operative word here is disappointed. Had they seemed angry, aggressive, confused, or concerned that the situation was out of their control, I would have known right away. Before Senegal, my experience with scammers was always that they will become aggressive or frustrated if the situation seems to be unfolding out of their control. Yet they seemed real; so I offered up the next possible step, that I would go back to my hotel and get some money for them. They liked that idea. We hopped in a cab together, I told him the name of my hotel(ah, retrospect…. I should have had the first man I encountered name the hotel…. Hindsight is always 20/20 as they say), and we drove there. “We are waiting,” the original man said.

Being quite convinced of the situation now, I handed over 20,000 CFAs, about € 34; lower than what he had suggested, but too bad for them; I knew the price of money and that was a sizeable donation already. Also, if the wad of gold he had given me was real, that was still a great deal for an ounce of real gold. Of course, they never actually -said- it was gold, or anything, other than jewelry. In that they are right; I have yet to do any testing of the metal. And at this point, what difference does it make? I’ll put it in my travel treasure box; there’s a story behind it, that should be enough.

I handed over the 45000 CFA notes and immediately saw him tuck one aside for himself, and hand the rest to the other guy. I didn’t seem to mind that he was taking a cut for himself, after all he had spent the morning with me showing me around.

And, that was that. I agreed to meet them all at 10am the following day for the celebration, as they called it, and went back into my hotel room. But not before being hit up by a young fellow from Guinea, who showed me his passport, his pictures of his drums, and told me he just wanted to visit and chat at his shop just around the way. That seemed odd, since I told him I wasn’t going to buy anything anyway. I suppose he assumed that I might change my mind if I would just go there, but for me, I wasn’t having it. I thanked him but told him I had work to do in my hotel room.

I felt good about the situation; I thought, also, that I was out too early and the travel agencies might open up later in the day. They didn’t. But on my second foray out of the hotel, a larger man started walking with me, chatting. He seemed friendly, more real; he seemed concerned, interested, spoke reasonably good French but often I had trouble understanding him because of his accent.

Indeed, as an aside, the French accents in Africa are hard for someone not fluent with the language. He asked me once, “TeeVee Espagne?” to which I responded no, I didn’t watch TV while in Spain. He repeated: “TeeVee Espagne?” and I looked at him, confused. Finally, in his broken English, he said “You – live – Espagne?”

Ahhhh – he was asking “Tu habites Espagne?”, though, it didn’t sound like that at all. Also, the Mauritanian consular officer asked me twice, “KanTee ParTee?”, and I just stared at him. Finally he said “WHEN – you leave?” Ohhhh — “Quand tu partis?” Sheesh. I would have never figured that out.

Anyways, this guy seemed real. He also said he knew a lot about Mauritania, and I told him that I might be going there; after I sorted out some info about plane tickets to Sierra Leone and Liberia. We sat in a taxi, and he pulled out of his pouch some letters and pictures from other tourists. He was a guide.

We spent the better part of the afternoon sitting around, him and his friend who spoke very good English, chatting about guiding and whether or not I needed one. His English speaking friend was definitely smarter than him, and more calm; my schedule wasn’t set, but their prices seemed reasonable. 20,000CFAs for two people, including his own food, accommodation, and transport, and it seemed agreeable. I agreed to meet him tomorrow and chat about the thing a bit more. Also that afternoon both of them told me that I was indeed the victim of a scam about the celebration, and it would be best not to go through with it as certainly they were just setting me up to extract more money. I had my suspicions, and actually hesitated of telling these two guys about the thing, as I was expecting them in fact to tell me that I had been duped. Perhaps I just wanted to stay comfortable in my bliss that Africans actually wanted to be kind to me here. Silly me.

I was not very keen on a guide, but if the price was right I knew he could draw me in closer to African culture than otherwise. As a white man, you are always on the outside looking in on these situations; with him, it would be easier to hang out in typical places and get the African experience. It would be less an anthropological trip and more of an interaction with the real local culture.

The following morning I left early to find out if the travel agencies were open; they weren’t, and had they been I would have never seen the guy again. As I left the hotel the man who I had met on the street first the day before, followed me and told me that he was there to make sure that I would be at the celebration, to which I smiled cynically and said “you bet I will be,” and told him I had other things to do first, so I was off the hook. He was trying to walk with me, but I went determinedly in a different direction and he, trying not to look too obvious, let me go.

So back around to the hotel I went, and there he was, waiting; my guide, that is. I was suggesting to him that perhaps he could go with me to the celebration, he was a big guy so perhaps a little violence could ensue and I could get my money back. He suggested against it, despite my best efforts.

As for him, if the price had not been reasonable I would not have gone through with it. I was also trying to scare him, make him hesitate, as those sorts of things bring these scammers out of their usual zone of control and into my own zone where I see them for who they really are, and not the effrontery, the mask that they bear for the foreigners they aim to deceive. He sat beside me in the travel agency as I inquired about prices to Freetown and Monrovia; I had thought that people in West African countries would be well aware of the situation in Liberia, but he proved me wrong. He was blissfully unaware of the problems, merely suggesting something under his breath about “la guerre, la combate”, but otherwise he was still interested in pursuing a journey with me. So off we went to the Mauritanian consulate so I could secure a visa.

The consular officer was bumbling around somewhere far from his desk so the guide helped me find him. I filled out an application, handed him some photos, and he spoke to me in broken French. Then on a calculator he punched in the amount I needed to pay for the visa: 33,500 CFAs. That seemed pretty damned high, since my 5 year old guidebook put the price at only 4000, but I suppose it’s possible. At any rate, how can I argue with him? Can you bargain with consular officers? If I was being ripped off, is there any way for me to know?

The visa would be ready at 2pm. So, we went back to the guide’s house. He seemed happy with the situation, but I still had some reservations. First, 20,000 CFAs seemed quite high for the region, even for two people. Second, I had told them I would be journeying for 10 days when in fact I was only going to be there for 7 days. So when he asked me again if all was well, I told him yes, 105,000 CFAs was fine for a week. He got angry – 150,000 was what he wanted, and that was that. I told him that seven days at 15,000 CFAs was 105,000, and not 150,000. He told me to wait, as his English speaking friend would be getting back soon.

When he did, we spent two hours renegotiating the price. At one point, almost relieved, I had them finally accepting that my budget could not include a guide. And I could leave on amicable terms with these two. Yet somehow he figured in that it would be enough; I told him I did not want someone else dictating my eating habits, and I would pay my own way for food. So 7 days at 12,000 CFAs, I said. “Is that enough for two people, and enough for him to save money each day?” I asked.

“Yes, that is enough,” he said calmly. Ah, good. On top of that he would get 15,000 CFAs as a financial gift as well. I would give him 50,000 CFAs now, and 50,000 later, in Nouakchott. It sounded good to me, and we agreed.

Certainly both of these people were concerned about the scamming that went on in Dakar. They tried their best to present themselves as genuine businessmen, as knowing how the western business mind works. You present a product, offer a price, and that is open for negotiation. Once the deal is agreed, you can’t change the price. If something comes up along the way, then it is the merchant’s problem to fix and not the customer’s.

The guide was, indeed, helpful. Everything he did I could have done myself, but it was fun to hang out with him, and he knew his stuff reasonably well. He enriched my journey, and although unnecessary, his help was welcome. Not once after our agreeing on the price did we have a dispute, and I treated him to several beers and cokes over the course of 5 days. Even upon our arrival in Nouakchott, after I handed him the other 50,000 CFAs, did he not ditch me, as I was half expecting. He was usually concerned for my well being, although this diminished upon our rearrival in Senegal.

In retrospect – again – perhaps he was a little out of his element in Mauritania. He said he knew the place, and he had many Senegalese friends who worked in Nouakchott and we hung out with them, but he was well within his stomping grounds in Senegal. Touts couldn’t even get near me in Mauritania or Senegal, but upon our rearrival in the Senegalese border town of Rosso his attitude had changed. This was day 5.

Touts were indeed hassling me, and he was more interested in his cigarettes. We went to the same tea house as we did on our first time here, and he had given me 10,000 CFAs as I needed 1000 to pay the police to stamp my passport(now….. was that a bribe? It seemed odd to me, at least); he disappeared for a few minutes to change the 20 US dollars I had given him in return for the CFAs. He came back with a 10,000 CFA note and a somber look.

Earlier, in Nouakchott, we had agreed that since he wanted to buy a rug there that I would give him 25,000 CFAs in Saint Louis when we got there and he would reimburse me when we returned to Dakar. So he had bought the rug, and now he was showing me the 10,000 CFA note and telling me that it was all that was left of the 100,000 CFAs that I had given him.

Not only did he want the 25,000 we had agreed upon, he also wanted 40,000 more for food and for “mes petites jeunes, ma famille” back home in Dakar, so they could eat. I acted shocked at all of this – first of all, we had agreed on 100,000, basing that on hours of negotiation and constant questioning of whether it was enough. And not only was it supposed to be enough for 7 days, but it should have left him with 15,000 at the end for himself. Yet now here he was, telling me that he had blown it all, and he wanted more.

I tried several tactics to get to the bottom of his motives. He had been generally good to me, but now he was back at square one in the trust department with me. I asked him where it all went – the hotel in Nouakchott was more expensive than he had anticipated, he told me, and he needed to spend more on that. I found that odd as we had slept on squalid mattresses in a communal room for Senegalese shift workers – how could that possibly cost more than he anticipated?

Just as with the tout, when I offered an alternative, he would cut me off and repeat what he said last. “Quarante mille CFA!” he persisted. So after those, I had to pause. He tacked on the fact that I should think of his hungry kids – so I paused and thought. To diffuse these situations, as always, I slowed the conversation down. To speed them up adds emotion, gets him worked up, and since he was a bigger and louder person than me only the reverse could work. So I took long pauses between when he said something and I did – I acted shocked that this had happened. However, I did not get angry.

Getting angry did cross my mind. I’ve learned to apply and remove emotion as necessary, to get through these situations. However, I have been angry in Africa before and it has never provided a positive outcome. A waitress came over with some Senegalese tea, which I had been drinking incessantly for a week, and I refused it.

I told him that the 10,000 CFAs was all I had as well; there was nothing left. We had already been through this in Nouakchott, since I told him the same thing there when he asked if I could forward him some money in Saint Louis since he would not have enough if he bought that rug in Mauritania. I told him I would, but he would also have to reimburse me for the 5 dollars’ service fee that the card company charges.

So again, he told me I would have to use my card to get all this money. To him, and often to many Africans, there is no time but the Present; the past is gone, the future does not yet exist. All he knows is that I can walk into that little room, put in my plastic card, punch in a secret code and voila! Instant money! Shower him and his family with unfathomable gifts! Never mind that I will have to pay it later, or that it would mess up my finances for this year’s later trips, to him this did not matter. My welfare did not matter; or at least, not as much as his own. After all, I can always get more money, but what about him?

There was no way he was getting an extra 40,000 out of me; even if he had in fact blown all of the money, and his body language and facial expression did seem real, that simply showed me that he was ultimately an incompetent guide and I should have nothing to do with him from now on anyway.

Yet I need to consider this as well – if I stormed out of this empty restaurant, perhaps he had set something up. He greeted many people when we first passed through here, and it was quite possible he had set up some sort of trap that I would get robbed with force if I refused to provide the extra cash.

So, considering that, I asked him what time it was. 4:30pm. I asked him if it was possible to get back to Dakar by the evening. “Oui, mais ou est-ce que tu dormir?” he asked. Where would I sleep, he wanted to know – nowhere, I told him, I’d take a flight out.

With my tickets, there is no such thing as a change penalty. Africans(and most people in general) think that plane tickets are rigid things that cost a chunk of money to be changed. Not in my world – I use this to my advantage, since I can skip town at a moment’s notice if I feel like it. Or to get myself out of spending another 24 euros on a shitty hotel room.

“Allons a Dakar,” I told him. He began to sip his tea, and get ready. I just picked up my bag and walked briskly out of the tea house, never looking back. Okay, I looked back once, about 75 metres later, and saw him slowly heading toward me. Another young fellow asked me where I wanted to go, and I said Dakar – he pointed to the Peugeot by the gas station. I hopped in – there wasn’t room for him. The car full, I was worried about letting my bag sit in the back, but a girl smiled and said that it’s okay. I paid the 5500 CFAs to get back to Dakar.

The kid sitting beside me on the long taxi ride asked where I would be going in Dakar; I said the airport. He nudged me when it was time to go, I found a taxi driver and a reasonable price to the airport. The kid hopped in the back.

“Tu vas ou?” I asked him, inquisitively.

Only a few blocks along your way, he said. That sort of gift I can handle – after all, he helped me find the closest place for the shared taxi to stop so I could get to the airport, and in return he wanted to get dropped off about 2 kilometres away. A modest gift like that for a modest bit of help I can handle.

But so often in Africa the people there want everything from the white man – it’s never a dollar or two, it’s a hundred dollars or two. It’s never a small favour, it’s references and a plane ticket to Europe. It’s always the world, and they always seem to get angry when you don’t give them the world. I am always ready to help out these people with modest requests, but rarely are the requests modest – and I am just left with them being angry at me since I don’t meet their ridiculous demands.

However, I left Senegal reasonably unscathed. The four flights back to Europe that evening were populated by hundreds of people with their Senegalese guides helping them check in and fill out their paperwork, Europeans sporting those African backpacks and clothes, one guy who bought two dozen wikker pots and needed each of them wrapped individually. Twenty-something tourists carrying around Senegalese musical instruments and wearing full length West African clothes; the whole check-in area was awash with people who were far happier than I, and had spent far more money than I.

Dakar is not a bad city; but I can recommend many other African cities which have better food, cheaper and nicer accommodation, and friendlier people. Being the only country in West Africa that a Canadian can get into without a visa, it was an obvious first entry point for me. But in the future, the hassles of being there far outweigh the hassles of me getting a visa back home.

So long, Dakar – I won’t be back. But there are plenty more from where I came from.