Warplane blues

In the urban fishing village of Yoff, the roar of warplanes has joined the load chorus of commercial flights taking off from Dakar. Every night and morning they come, sharking in low through the haze, their motors screaming as they speed away over the Atlantic. In their wake the noise reverberates with a deep, ominous rumble. "It's the French, they are doing this because of the elections in Ivory Coast," says an academic friend as we are stuck in yet another Dakar traffic jam. "There's a warship in the port too." Nothwithstanding the Senegalese commitment to closing Dakar's French military base, the former colonial power seems reluctant to loosen its grip on the region.

More things than French realpolitik pivot round restive Ivory Coast. The country's drawn-out conflict did much to trigger the large-scale boat migration of sub-Saharan Africans towards Europe in the last decade. Nationalist calls for ivoirité made hundreds of thousands of West African flee the country they had made their home in the 1990s. Many of these decided to try their luck in Libya, where anti-migrant sentiment pushed them towards Europe. Some 400,000 of those who left the Ivory Coast were from Mali.

I am now heading to Bamako, Mali’s capital and a crucial crossroads between Ivory Coast and Senegal, between the sub-Saharan Sahel and the desert. European bureaucrats, activist Africans expelled from Europe, smuggling networks and budding migrants have all made Mali their hub, if not their home. Besides, the country has of late become a crucial hotspot in the Sahelian struggle between the terrorist movement AQMI and regional and western security forces. Mali, a gentle place with a GDP per capita of less than $700, punches about its weight on many fronts.

The question is how to get there now that the romantically named Niger-Ocean train line coughs and stutters into rusty old age. “Take a direct bus from behind the national stadium,” advises a friend, so I go there to find out more. Past hundreds of water melons stacked high for sale, a fume-choked flyover and a gathering of Peul herders with their goats stands a scattering of rather modern-looking buses. A toothless old man in a turquoise boubou approaches me. “Where are you going?” Bamako, I say. The Dakar-Bamako bus takes 24 hours, he says, call Abderrahman on this number to book a place, and whatever you do don’t talk to any of the other people who approach you here. Still, I walk on. Drivers and mechanics are lazing on mattresses in the baggage compartments. By nightfall their buses will be filled with Senegalese cloth merchants and perhaps a migrant aventurier or two. At a canopy set in the middle of the parking lot, an older man greets me with salaam aleikum. He says the bus takes 36 hours, “I don’t want to give false expectations, it’s 36 hours plus ou moins.” My guess is 40. Anyhow, soon enough the smell of fish, the stickiness of the humid sea and the roar of the French air force will be replaced with the wafts of green tea, the ochre dust and the swirling jeli music of Mali. I can’t wait.

Farewell Senegal

My anthromobile rolls out of Dakar now, direction London, then to new destinations along Africa's migrant routes. Here the summer high season for boat migration is off to an uneventful start - the coastline lies calm and quiet, though in Dakar's seaside neighbourhoods discontent is simmering. The policing front brings some news: the Spanish-Senegalese patrolling agreement has just been renewed for another year, while an Icelandic contingent has joined the Frontex mission off Senegal's coast - after first unloading a boatful of charity supplies.

These months I've bumped along potholed roads with police patrols, hung out with embittered and impatient repatriees who once braved the waves to the Canary Islands, and reminisced about the heady days of border crossings and expulsions with aid workers and migrants alike. It's all still a blur, but a picture is somehow slowly emerging of a phenomenon and mode-of-being that has only emerged in full force in recent years: that of clandestinity. The 'clandestine migrant' hovers like a ghostlike presence beyond the complete grasp of the police forces, journalists, NGOs and academics who make their living off him. One thing, though, stands out clearly in the haze of half-truths and doubts that surrounds the clandestine migration circuit: the security force cooperation that has developed in response to boat departures has made Europe's southernmost maritime borders more tangible and visible than ever. Except, perhaps, for a Swede boarding his 6am plane, Schengen passport in hand, bound for Casablanca and good ol' London.

Dakar Dem Dikk

Sandy streets, handpainted and fume-belching cars rapides, tinny Mande music and crusty baguettes: bienvenue à Dakar, a city whose airport disgorges more French tourists than you could shake an eponymous stick at, half of them seemingly with their sights set on feelgood development projects on lush Senegalese islands. Dakar is an alluring, fast-paced place brimming with leisure migrants and labour migrants, businessfolk and beggars, stoic commuters and frantic street hawkers who seem to flog as little of their stuff as their colleagues on the Canary Islands. One of them, a newspaper vendor working the city's clogged suburban thoroughfares, gets excited when I say what I study. "Eh, l'anthropologie, c'est vraiment intéressant!" He studied English and Arabic at Dakar's Cheikh Anta Diop university, until he ran out of money. Now he flogs smudgy papers at 100 CFA - about 10p - apiece. I say goodbye as I get on my bus, run by Dakar Dem Dikk - "Dakar to and fro" in Wolof and a motto if any for my first few days in this seething, traffic-jammed labyrinth of a city.