I take full responsibility for my part in the demise of the once proud African airline called Air Afrique. It treated me well on a number of occasions, including co-sponsoring travel and accommodation for a documentary series I was making, and I dissed it.
Well, I dissed it because, in spite of all the good intentions and generally good service once you were aboard (although that’s debatable), the getting aboard thing was the major challenge. You can hardly get aboard a scheduled flight if the aircraft is nowhere to be seen, and might not be seen for the next few days, either. Hence you had a homegrown refugee crisis every time you tried to fly from one African city to the other, and no one to tell you what was going on.
The death of Air Afrique (and let’s hope that, as in the case of the ailing pope, a resurrection is still possible) was seized upon like a vampire by South African Airways (SAA), which is steadily opening up a network of routes through the African continent, and making them work like Air Afrique couldn’t.
This is good for the image of SAA. This is good for the image of South Africa, generally regarded as the spirit of hope for the African continent — home of the new-fangled African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Developement (what’s the difference?).
Anyway, it is SAA that will now take you (and generally on time) to a variety of African destinations that were previously beyond the reach of the country’s ordinary and extraordinary citizens. Not so far in the past, let us not forget, SAA was not even allowed to land on airfields beyond the Limpopo (with a few exceptions — countries that were prepared to bite the old South African bullet and take the proverbial South African dollar).
But in general, even countries like Joseph Mobutu’s Congo and Houphouet Boigny’s Côte d’Ivoire, which were prepared to indulge in bilateral diplomatic exchanges with the apartheid regime (constructive engagement, they called it), stopped short at allowing South African airliners to land (officially at least) on their soil.
Hence the creation of the bizarre, stranded, isolated, meaningless infrastructure at Ilha do Sol, in the Cape Verde Islands. South African aircraft, civil and military, were effectively obliged to skirt the whole continent, but needed to refuel and refit somewhere. Ilha do Sol was the place. And so Ilha became the stop where no one got off — and has been until just recently.
The delicate manoeuvring of whoever is in charge of SAA has gradually seen this come to an end. Ilha do Sol is still part of the process, when necessary, but increasingly the hub of SAA’s adventures into the world, especially across the Atlantic Ocean to New York and beyond, is at Dakar, capital of Senegal (and one of my favourite cities, just by the way). Nowadays you don’t spring out into the universe from the eerie silence of Ilha do Sol. You stroll into it, if you so choose, from the vibrant streets and hectic market places of the mbalax capital of the world: Dakar.
There’s a small drawback. You arrive there at about three in the morning (‘cos that’s how the schedules work — New York is the priority).
If you choose to get off and take a day or two in this great world capital you have to run the gauntlet of the small hours, the sleepy-eyed immigration officers who are nevertheless alert to any misdemeanours in your passport and health officials who will stab you with a needle at the drop of a hat if you don’t have your medical certificates in place. (This happened to me. I was too tired to resist. They stabbed me for yellow fever because I couldn’t prove that I was already inoculated. I didn’t know who to bribe, so I got stabbed with a dodgy needle and released into the funky night of Dakar.)
It’s an old relationship. Landing in Dakar again, the smell of incense hitting you almost as you step off the plane. The intoxication of arrival, which you cannot quite identify kicks in all over again.
It is only later, driving into town through the darkened streets (after all, it is about four in the morning, before your luggage has finally emerged from the sluggish carousel) pursued by the same maddening, exotic odour of incense and musk, that it dawns on me that it is not the place, but the people who give off this pungent atmosphere. It is part of a way of life.
African as it is, in its relaxed, African way, this is a city that is pretty much Muslim to the core. Under those traditions, cleanliness is as close as life comes to godliness. The Prophet himself was intoxicated by the flavours of the perfumes women and men made out of nature’s gifts, and which they heightened to impossible scales of enlightenment.
I stand once again on Gorée Island. The city never sleeps. An old friend stops for a beer, talks casual nonsense, and indulges in an exchange of perfumes that he has hanging from a phial round his neck.
It is a cultural tradition. ”The Prophet loved perfumes,” he explains. ”It was his only vice. So we who are true believers make a habit of exchanging perfumes when we meet each other.”
Incense and nonsense. I am back on the ground again, wafting on a wave of sound and smell.