A few weeks after we moved into our new home, Amadou rang our doorbell and asked if we needed a housekeeper. Thin but muscular, his eyes shaded by heavy, long lashed lids, Amadou sported a short goatee and flashed a wide and open smile. He had just lost his job with our neighbors for using the dead space between the windowless backside of their house and the compound’s concrete wall to urinate, since he had been banned from using any of the four bathrooms inside the house, not even the one designated for visitors. Amadou urgently needed a new employment in order to pay his next rent, he explained, passing me his credentials and I could tell how nervous he was. To escape the awkwardness of the situation, I briefly read through the first page and had to chuckle at our neighbor’s condescending language. Crumpling the sheet back into the envelope I told Amadou he could start whenever he wanted. There was no way out, we were now living the life of the privileged, so why not go all the way and hire a housekeeper.
Amadou had fled to Guinea from Freetown, when in January of 1999, the RUF plunged the city into a blood soaked chaos of unimaginable violence. Literally in the last minute, he made a run for the harbor, carrying a bag of clothes and his small tv set, that he hugged with both arms as he cowered down inside a crowded, wooden pirogue, powered by a small outboard engine. Luckily–unlike many others who attempted this trip along the rough Atlantic coast–he survived the journey and managed to carve out a new life for himself. By now he had become fluent in Guinea’s four most important languages: French, Fula, Mandingue and Soussou, living a relatively comfortable life in a small round-house just a few minutes down the road from us. When I gave Amadou a lift back home, I could see one of his better off neighbors clumsily hobbling and wobbling down the uneven, rocky road in the backseat of his 250.000,- € Maybach ultra-luxury car, his driver’s head erratically bouncing from side to side like a malfunctioning windshield wiper due to the limousine’s firm suspension.
I often sat in our parlor, reading a book and from time to time took a break to watch Amadou pray. He had picked his favorite spot with soft, indirect daylight next to the window that opened up to the large mango tree out front and his focus was much too strong to be concerned about my company. I appreciated how comfortable he was, to share these times of worship with me and litte by little, I observed, how a sense of peace, balance and serenity could be absorbed in small doses just by being around.
After his escape from the civil war, Amadou had developed close ties to the local branch of his wider Fulani family and after just a few years, he already knew a whole lot more about Guinea’s different cultures, history and current political situation than I could have learned otherwise. There wasn't much housekeeping to do in our sparsely furnished 2 person household and when I asked him, if he wanted to help me try and track down some records, Amadou reacted with excitement. Our first hunting ground was Marché Madina, a huge, in part open air market sprawling vastly beyond its designated area, spilling over deserted lots and along dilapidated railroad tracks. Madina counts to West Africa’s biggest markets and it took a while, to find its last two remaining record dealers. By now their business had concentrated on CDs and Music Cassettes, which were still in demand for their use in car stereos, since they never skipped, no matter how bad the road, and they even had a few boxes of vinyl left.
Many of the goods sold at Madina came from neighboring Mali and Senegal and this also rang true for records. Besides local releases on Guinea’s own Syliphone label, I managed to score my first albums by Star Band de Dakar, Rail Band de Bamako, Le Super Djata Band Du Mali and by Les Ambassadeurs. At the second stall I pulled Fela's „Everything Scatter“, Shuffering and Shmiling“ and „Upside Down“ from a falling apart cardboard box. They were heavily used, but still played ok and I can still remember, how exciting it was, to hold an original Fela album in my hands. In hindsight, the by biggest find however, was a copy of Le Bida de la Capitale self titled album on Mali's Kunkan label. The opening track Kenuna fuses ancient Mandingue music with Jazz and Funk to create something new that is still firmly rooted in tradition. According to the cover’s back side, the song was based on an ancient chant from the river Niger, explaining how the tune’s funky backbeat mimics the movement of the fishermen’s paddles splashing through the moving waters.
Back then, I mostly cared about club friendly Afrobeat and being an English speaking country, neighboring Sierra Leone seemed like the obvious choice for a first digging trip abroad. Freetown was less than a day away and since Amadou hadn’t seen his family since his escape more than 6 yers earlier, he immediately agreed to come along. This was years before the Conakry Freetown highway would finally be completed, back then most of the road was still a tricky dirt track. Amadou cautioned that the rains would make the journey near impossible and that we should stay put until late in October, when the monsoon would slowly come to an end, so I continued trawling Conakry’s markets and patiently waited for the weather to clear up.
Marché Niger, Conakry's downtown market, located just a short walk from the German embassy and the liveliest spot of the inner city, soon became my go to digging spot. Like most Guinean market halls, the main building was painted in a bright sunflower yellow, covered with red Maggi logos in various sizes. To most Germans of my generation Nestlé’s popular seasoning is about as iconic as Campbell’s Soup to most US-Americans and the sight always made me remember the ubiquitous Maggi bottle on my grandmother’s kitchen counter. Anytime she would serve a soup, the bottle would be placed in the centre of the table and starting with grandpa, everybody would generously squirt some concentrated sodium into their steaming bowls. Sometimes I wondered what artisanal seasoning the stuff had once replaced but no Guinean or German I asked could remember a time before Nestlé took over.
Unemployment among young adults generally is very high all across West Africa and the situation in Guinea was particularly grim. Jobs were few and far between and the wages so low that many of those lucky enough to have found work, often still had a hard time getting by. Markets were the places where money was changing hands and for some transactions, services might be needed, even if it was only a two minute job loading freshly bought goods into a truck, assisting somebody to park their car, showing them to the stalls that sold what they came for, even the smallest deeds would in their sum provide some Guinea Francs to buy a few groceries or a 2nd hand shirt. Most of all, the market was full of movement, a perfect antidote to the sense of stagnation and lack of perspective that seemed to suffocate the inner city youth. That’s why they were there, day in day out, standing in the shadows, alert, waiting for an opportunity, however small it might be; Conakry's market hustlers.
As a foreigner I had „opportunity“ written all over me in capital letters and immediately found myself in the company of a group of young men asking what they could do to help. I had handed out printed sheets with record covers on my first visits here and now dropped by at least once a week. Usually some records were already waiting for me, but sometimes my new friends had come across a collection which the owner wouldn’t just let go for a few Guinean Francs and I would be asked to come along to strike a deal. This was my preferred scenario, as it meant I would get to look through the entire collection myself, strike a deal with the owner and later pay my agents a separate finders fee. Most of all, I enjoyed the buzz and unpredictable nature of these communal vinyl hunts. Usually there was an ever growing string of helpers who each had their own connection to a stash of records that sometimes never really existed, but was expected to at some point manifest itself somehow. Someone might have talked to somebody else, who had heard from a third person, that an old man across town owned a bunch of records. I loved the energy and the uncertainty of where the chase would lead us. Sometimes a trail would grow cold but then somebody would make a phone call and come up with a new mark, everything was better than standing still.
One day I was led through the gates of the old warehouse behind the main market hall, from where we proceeded through a shadowy and confusing labyrinth of large, worn out shelves filled with bales of cloth, wooden planks, sheets of corrugated tin, bags of nails, buckets of paint, masks and fetishes, sacks of rice, canisters of vegetable oil, boxes of Maggi stock cubes, tomato purée tins, plastic dishes, rubber sandals, used clothes and all sorts of tools. At the end of the building we were faced by a wall of large, wooden lockers, where a friendly old man in a sky blue boubou and a white, knitted prayer hat was waiting for me. We shook hands and he opened one of the lockers, revealing stacks and stacks of records, all of them on Editions Syliphone. The label’s output spans from the mid 1960s to the early 1980 and can only be described as sublime. I happily stacked up copies of Sombory De Fria „Minerai Musical“, Le Simandou De Beyla „La Confiance“, Le Nimba De N'Zérékoré "Gön Bia Bia“, Syli Authentic „Dans L’Arène" and a thick bundle of the „Musique Sans Paroles“ compilation; a selection of instrumentals by various artists and a perfect gateway to Guinean music.
My entourage looked on as I went through one locker after the other and piled up records that mostly looked unplayed, although many of the covers had at least some minor water damage. The lockers were bone dry even though we were still in rainy season, so I asked the owner what had happened. His son had salvaged the records out of the flooded basement of an old government building, he explained with a proud smile. This sounded incredibly intriguing, so I immediately asked, if it would be possible to see the place. The man used his cellphone and just around half an hour later his son Mohamed arrived, who immediately declared, he would not take any of my friends along. After paying everybody and stashing the records into the car, we took off to the Palais des Nations, a huge, dome shaped monument, built in 1978 by Sékou Touré to serve as his official, presidential residence. During a coup attempt in 1996 against his successor, current president Lansana Conté, the building was hit by RPG fire and the burned out shell was seemingly left abandoned. The concrete facade was blackened with soot and mold and, as my guide explained, the basement flooded with whatever continued to trickle out of broken pipes, while the upper floor gave home to a large population of vultures. I wondered why the fenced off ruin was guarded by a handful of bored looking military police, but my new friend had no answer to the question.
As I would later learn, Lansana Conté, Guinea’s president since 1984 occasionally still resided here and loved to receive foreign dignitaries in the gloomy setting. The wide and open courtyard, that had an imposing effect on his visitors, who had to sit down on rickety plastic chairs while Conté was enthroned in a large, worn out leather armchair. Overlooking the slowly decaying building, he reigned supreme, more powerful than time itself. His palace might have fallen but he was still here, god-like, destined to outlast anything and anybody. Sometimes his Marabouts performed animal sacrifices in there and finished just in time, for his visitors to catch a small glimpse of the ceremonies.
Once Mohamed had paid his way past the guards, climbed down into the dark concrete caverns and waded through the water to excavate as much as he could manage to carry upstairs in a day. The water had been about waist deep and murky, the shelves swarming with rats, mice and bugs and the air thick with mosquitos. He said the place still held an enormous quantity of records, but after his first visit, he had fallen sick for a couple of weeks and said he had no desire to ever go back in there again.
*1 Since we were already there, we walked over to Boulbinet’s fishing harbour and seafood market. The inner harbor was covered with a thick carpet of garbage and a surprisingly large pig was sifting through the refuse that had piled up on shore. A few buckets filled with small, sad looking fish were unloaded from a wooden pirogue, dozens of other fishing boats had been pulled onto the bank, many in a state of disrepair. Once inside the cool shade of the market hall we were immediately surrounded by a swarm of hawkers wielding various types of frozen fish. I asked for fresh caught shellfish and I noticed a kid run to a freezer far off, pull out a fist full of shrimp and then use a hose to rinse the freezer burn off of them. He rushed over and held the glistening, dripping and steaming catch up in my face. It was the saddest fish market I had ever seen. We turned around on our heels and took a taxi back to Marché Niger.
Our impression was wrong, there is a huge amount of fishing going on just off the coast of Guinea and the West African coast is blessed with large areas where waters from the deep sea, rich in plankton and krill reach the ocean surface. These are feeding grounds for all sorts of larger fish and various predators. Tuna, sharks, wale sharks, dolphins, seals, sea turtles and many species more, all get caught by the huge nets of these trawlers and killed indiscriminately. The EU alone has hundreds of fishing vessels in these waters and heavily subsidizes this ecological armageddon. One quarter of all fish caught by the European fishing industry is robbed off the coast of these developing countries, destroying any possibilities for small scale, artisanal fishing and literally stealing the protein off the plates of the poor. On any day of the year, hundreds of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, European, Australian and Russian fishing vessels trawl their huge nets up and down the West African coast from Ghana all the way up to Mauritania. Factory ships that catch and freeze anything in their path. China alone operates more than 2.000 of these naval vacuum cleaners world wide and around 400 of them are busy plundering the West African coast at any given moment. This area is the Wild West for the most destructive form of industrial fishing and a hugely important source of protein for the entire planet. The activities of these fleets are poorly monitored at best and restrictions are rarely enforced. Whenever any of these giant vessels are found where they are not supposed to be, they pay a fine or much more commonly an even lesser bribe and move on. The money to be paid is minuscule compared to the scale of this business. Each one of these ships can hold several hundred tons of fish, so called super trawlers can even catch and freeze up to 4.000 tons before they have to interrupt their raid and sail back home to unload.
The Russians operate monstrous, fishmeal producing factory trawlers that suck the ocean clean of all bio-mass which is then cooked down, dried and ground up on-board. On a global scale, about one third of all ocean catch is processed into fishmeal and about 20 kilos of wild catch are needed to produce 1 kilo of farmed fish filet, raised in „sustainable“ aqua farming. The fishermen of Conakry have long been unable to make a living with their work. Some now use their pirogues to ferry their compatriots up North towards Europe. Others sail out and meet with the trawlers to buy frozen seafood from the crew, so they can keep Boulbinet’s freezers stocked while the prime pieces are sold to the chefs of Conakry’s expensive hotel restaurants where wealthy expats and local elites pay big for mushy, defrosted lobster and cardboard dry tuna steak.
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