Street life

I spend quite a bit of time on the street, at least it feels like it. Last night, for the first time, I actually wondered whether I was ever going to get home. To catch a taxi when it's busy you really need to have your wits about you. They often just swing by the crowd waiting on the pavement and you have to call out where you want to go. Sometimes it also helps to offer a fare that is slightly over the odds, say 1000le (16p), rather than the standard 800le(13p). When it gets dark, the task gets trickier, as the lack of streetlights makes it diffiicult to see which vehicles are taxis and which are just cars crawling along in the traffic.

The good thing is that there is no extra hassle for a white guy, but there is no extra preference either, at least not much. After about 40 minutes on the kerbside last night, a woman who had been standing next to me, called out very insistently in Krio to a passing taxi. As he pulled up, she grabbed my arm and bundled me in, without a word to me. As we drove off, the taxi driver was chuckling when he said "So, how do you like our Freetown, brother?" He then took me right to the end of my road for the standard fare. When things like that happen, the frustration just tends to evaporate.

Despite all the exotic chaos of the streets, when you look at the street signs themselves, the names are more than slightly resonant of their British colonial history. There is, unsurprisingly, given Freetown’s origins as a home for freed slaves, both a street and an area called Wilberforce (if you want to go there, you need to call out "Ba-foss!, Ba-foss!"). There is also a Liverpool Street, Gloucester Street, Victoria Street, Regent Street and an area called Aberdeen ("Abba! Dabba! Dabba!"). You can just imagine the colonial administration meeting to discuss naming the streets: Given the strength of the British desire to limit French colonial influence in West Africa, the naming of Waterloo Street and Wellington Street probably had unanimous support!

However, there is one area of Freetown on the hill above where I live that bucks the colonial naming theme: It is called “Bottom Mango”. I have rather been hoping that, somewhere in Freetown, there is also an area called “Top Banana”. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case.