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Journal of African trips

Africa, spring 1999 part II

Agelasto
2004-05-21 18:00:16

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off the sound while a riot is shown on TV. That no one shouts
at each other is very British, very un-African French. Vans continue to be stopped up and
down the street, with various mini-mobs trying to trap whichever van it can find. I see no
hope of ever leaving Banjul. That IS a nightmare.

I hit upon the clever idea of backtracking the route of the vans and trying to catch them
before they reach the final stop. Other people have the same idea, and we end up walking
about five streets before we can find a van heading toward the terminus that has empty
seats. After we board, the van fills up and doesn?t even bother going to the terminus. All
in all, this seems to me as very un-British, not the way a post-colonial transportation
system should operate.

I stay in TG for several days and then decide to take a bus (full-sized, not a mini-van)
across the length of the country, to the town of Basse which is the stepping off point for
Guinea, the next country I want to visit. Everyone I ask tells me that busses depart
frequently and that I should just show up at the station. So I wake up at 6:00 a.m. The
widow and I are staying at a family-run guesthouse a kilometer or so off the beach; she
will be heading back to Dakar, up through Morocco, and then to France for a grandchild?s
baptism. Promising to keep in touch (in Dakar I had opened up an email account for her
on hotmail.com, but she is computer illiterate, and in this electronic age I no longer write
letters), I depart and walk through various business and residential neighborhoods in the
dark (the moon had set almost before it had risen the previous night) and finally arrive at
the bus station, and am told I have just missed a bus. It was a ?local? and not worth
taking, I am told. The next bus will show up ?sometime after? 9 a.m. but tickets are not
for sale in advance (also ...