I WANDER the streets of Dakar, gobsmacked, plain, hardly believing I am there at all. Around me a fugal elaboration of prints and patterns, turns the street like a kaleidoscope - lime seersucker, plain, yellow, a dress of huge orange spiders weaving their webs into the black creases of a blue batik ground. The women in Senegal are, according to my guide-book, the best dressed in Africa, I have no reason to disbelieve this, nor the more dubious European claim that the Wolof people, who live here, are the most beautiful. It is two days before I can stop looking long enough to blink.
White girl stumbles around Africa - first stop is the Island of Goret, a little nub of rock in Dakar harbour that looks like a piece of Tuscany dropped in the sea. Only when you get close do you see the trees are not poplars but palms, and in the small harbour the shallow water shows its sweet and alarming blue. Compared to the rush and ramshackle of Dakar, the smell of history on the Ile de Goret seems very familiar very benign - winding streets, houses of terracotta pink, with colonnades and faded green shutters - it's the kind of place you could pick up tips for the colour of your kitchen tiles.
Six million people died here, without leaving so much as a bloodstain. Forty million men, women and children passed through its slave houses to ships anchored in the bay, leaving the air clean and mute. The slave house that's now a museum isn't even much of a museum, as these things go. It has a central courtyard, with two sets of stairs curving down from the first floor colonnade like a pair of arms, and through their hands runs a short dark passage ending in a door to the sea. By the cells on either side of this passage are paper signs saying "men", "women", incapacitated", "children" and "reluctants". Framed by the final door is the beautiful sight of the sea. It looks like the door to heaven. Then you look at the saddle stone in the floor and you see that it is worn at the lip.
I can't understand Dakar: the bits marked as "main business area" look just the same as the docks but I am a naive traveller, not used to reading cities and afraid to look left or right. Dakar has a reputation for hustlers, as our companion Mahmoud is at pains to point out - this is why he will not leave us alone. The city is one, big, shifting shop, which is to say that wherever you are, the shop is. If you are shy about money (which is, after all, embarrassing stuff) then in Dakar you will be mortified. You have it; the people around you don't. Once you have figured that much out, things get a bit more straightforward.
The frenzy of selling climaxes in the market-place, with us looking for a bush taxi to take us south. We finally get places in the next car going to Casamance and drive out like rock-stars, a mob of people pushing their hands through the window, waving small goods in the interior space of the car.
Casamance is the southern region of Senegal, cut off from the north by Gambia, and by, we soon discover, a swiftly deteriorating road, all nine hours of it - potholes are a good indication of how a government views distant regions, especially those with separatist guerillas. (Cavan eat your heart out!)
NINE hours. None of our fellow passengers drinks water. I drink two litres and still nearly pass out. We pass through mile after aching mile of bush and baobab trees, cross the Gambia river on a lumbering ferry, the groan of its engine thumping out into the huge, flat, shimmering, silence.
The swamps of Casamance arc beautiful, wooded islands, rice paddies - for mile after mile, the roots of the mangroves probe their reflections in the water, a flat and impenetrable mirror. It looks deserted, few cars, no houses; then dusk falls and the road fills with streams of people, called into being by the glowing light. They are making their way back from the fields to the villages, whose straw huts arc camouflaged by the trees., They carry anything and everything on their heads - why, at home, do we use so many plastic bags?
In a shed in Oussoye, where he sells books, stationery and a couple of second-hand Barbie dolls, the owner talks us through the political situation with the despairing sophistication of an SDLP man explaining the siege of Derry. There are roadblocks; soldiers, who you don't bribe; policemen, who you do bribe and a gang of men cutting the brush on the verges who get the equivalent of five pence and a big smile to remove the trunk of a tree that has fallen across the road.
This is a country place; the people are friendly. It is a shame, perhaps, that £20 a night will buy you seclusion and colonial-style privilege, £40 a white paradise on the beaches of Cap Skiring. In the main town of Ziguinchor the bars are jumping after midnight, with live music and dancing to make you feel 16 again - at least one bit of you - while back at the hotel, French-speaking whites drink in the heat. And drink.
Cicadas are the muzak of Africa, thrumming in the darkness, mixing with the laughter and chat. Everyone shakes hands with everyone else, a web of handshaking weaves around us. No-one, however, shakes hands with the two prostitutes sitting at a side table, except the Minister for Agriculture, who has dropped in for a quick glass of lemonade and a flurry of handshaking. I thought they were rich women, too rich to be bothered (which just goes to show, how peculiar and inverted the Irish are in their snobberies), sitting like queens in wraps and head scarves, smiling at the white men - big, charming, playful smiles.
We will fly back to Dakar and from there to Paris, to Dublin, where people live interior lives and carry their goods in plastic bags, where the shops open and shut and the sales assistants don't run after you down the street. After a week in Senegal I am just finding out, how to speak about this place, just beginning to read the map. I just want to leave, and think, and pack, and come back.