An attention-seeking saxophonist

There’s something magnificent about the extent of the job creation here. To go swimming, I interact with no fewer than eight people – from the guard standing next to the ticket seller to the second attendant at the lockers – before I’m allowed in the water. Buying a drink in any bar requires getting a ticket from one person before claiming the drink from another, as if the country’s governed by some archaic regulations prohibiting the direct sale of alcohol. And the other day I took a call from the office secretary, who connected me to the secretary in another office, who then in turn connected me to the person who wanted to talk to me. But that one just made me feel important.


I’m lucky enough to be at Just 4 U with Tendayi on Saturday night, when a band are playing a series of flawless covers of Orchestra Baobab classics. So flawless in fact, that I wonder if they might actually be Senegal’s most successful band themselves (the review that got me into them: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,786661,00.html) Their showmanship is encapsulated in the attention-seeking saxophonist, who spends the night making eye contact with different members of the audience, then chuckling to them as if sharing a private joke. My own interaction with him passes the bounds of the familiar when Tendayi finally persuades me to dance. Gyrating awkwardly among a crowd of graceful Dakarois, my self-consciousness reaches new heights when I realise that the saxophonist is good-naturedly parodying my every move. At least Tendayi doesn’t get away unmocked: after her fourth toilet trip, the performer makes a joke to her from the stage about the weakness of her bladder.


Hinesh tells me he’s surprised that I’m not hanging out more with the other people in the office, going to dinner with them, swilling Guinness in the Irish pub etc. He’s right, it’s not what I expected: particularly given the general lack of things to do here, I’d have thought spending time with other people from the office would be the main social activity. I wonder what it is people do in the evenings. Perhaps there are social circles that I’m not in on (I assumed this was the case for a while, on the grounds that I wasn’t here long enough to get really integrated), but I don’t hear people making plans or talking about great nights out. Still, now Amir’s moved into the flat, at least there’s someone to talk to in the evenings – and he’s started talking about having a flat party, so maybe my work social life is picking up.


I suddenly hit a point on the line between anger and despair when I’m putting two boxloads of books away into the Resource Centre: a library in the office, with walls lined with books, journals and magazines about development, emergency response, conflict resolution and so on. Each book had no doubt been written by an expert on the subject, who’d devoted months or years to crystallising their knowledge into this transmittable form. As far as I know, no-one has used the Resource Centre since I’ve been in the office, and as I understand it, no-one used it for some time before then either. If development practitioners aren’t reading these specialist materials, who is? How much difference does the publication of each one make to the people the authors are trying to help? Of course research is crucial to making development work, but the vast weight of the paperwork is surely excessive. I leave feeling like these clever people are wasting their talents writing books that few people are reading. It seems another case of the failure of the development world to take a step back and consider every bit of work in the context of their overall objective.


Turns out that the reason the band last weekend were able to do such flawless Orchestra Baobab covers was that they really were the Mercury Award-winning band themselves. In an open-aired bar, with a crowd of no more than 70 people, my excitement’s doubled at the prospect of going to see them again in the same place tonight. Writing this with a mug of earl grey (with milk, sorry George) in one hand and a piece of cake in the other, I reckon birthdays in Dakar aren’t so bad.

The night turns out to be as fun as I’d hoped, especially thanks to Tendayi’s friend, Malik, who works behind the bar in Just 4 U. A Thierry Henry look-alike, he discovers our fascination with the Orchestra Baobab saxophonist, Issa, and sends the musician to our table in the middle of the set, along with a birthday bottle of wine. We talk – well, Isa talks, incessantly, and I do my best to understand one word in ten – while he drinks our wine and periodically interrupts himself to join in with his band from our table. Isa tells us that he’s been with Orchestra Baobab for 30 years, and that although he did leave for a while, the rest of the band was nothing without him, and begged him to come back. Tendayi and I conclude that he’s just as crazy as we’d guessed last weekend, but we’re both happy to have made such an unexpected new friend.