Our new home was located in Kipé, a quaint neighborhood south of the small fishing harbor of Kaporo. Kipé had originally started out as one of Conakry’s many suburbs, but the sprawling capital had grown so much in size that it eventually swallowed up its outlying settlements and merged into a vast labyrinth of seemingly endless urban landscapes.
To familiarize ourselves with Manuela’s commute, we switched on our brand-new navigator and drove toward the downtown district of Kaloum, where the embassy was located. We first entered Ratoma with its expanse of market stalls. Astonished, we rolled past an abundance of tropical fruit, vegetables, freshly butchered meat, and all sorts of artisanal groceries from wild honey and peanut butter to oven-fresh baguettes and the blood-red, ever present palm oil.
Next came the neighborhoods of Taouyah, Cité Résid, Hafiya, Dixinn, Donka—and then the surprisingly posh Quartier Camayenne with its expensive hotels, villas and international restaurants. The streets were full of life, the roadsides dotted with food stalls, cigarette vendors, tiny booths selling cellphone credit and all sorts of other micro-businesses.
It was hot and humid as hell. The stink from open sewers competed with the exhaust fumes of cars, vans and container trucks. Then we passed some food stands and caught the scent of roasted chicken, charcoal-grilled fish and sweet plantains—aged until the peel was black, thin and moldy and their flesh sweet and soft. Slow cooked over charcoal and caramelized to gooey perfection, they were a delicious treat and paired perfectly with the salty Atlantic breeze as we crossed the narrow, man-made traverse into Kaloum.
Before it was first claimed by the British and then handed over to the French—who preferred to house their colonial administration at some distance to the mainland—this had once been the peaceful fishing island of Tombo. Old mango trees and coconut palms provided shade on the road side, while majestic fire trees dropped their plump orange flowers onto the patchy blacktop, filling some of the many potholes. Street vendors sold oven-fresh baguettes through the windows of passing cars, still warm and wrapped in a shred of cement sack.
Mounds of coconuts were piled high along a stretch of sidewalk, manned by machete-wielding youths ready to chop one open and then run alongside the car so that a transaction could be completed without stopping traffic. We took another turn, passing the national bank, several government buildings, and the vast French embassy—all carefully guarded by armed security personnel in crisply starched uniforms. The high humidity and torrential monsoon rains encouraged mold and moss to grow on the few remaining colonial façades—weathered symbols of a bygone era, left to crumble in the shadows of high-rise office buildings and a handful of hotels.
Looking towards the fishing harbor of Boulbinet, Conakry’s skyline was dominated by two dilapidated high-rise buildings. Erected in the late 1960s, the Soviet-style architecture of the once-prestigious twin towers still bear witness to Guinea’s first president, Sékou Touré’s brief flirtation with communism.
The romance didn’t last and mostly served to have some roubles rolling into the leaky state coffers. The maintenance of the towers was soon neglected, tenants left and squatters moved in. Today, the buildings seemed abandoned during the daytime, but gave home to large colonies of fruit bats that swarmed out at dusk, while small to mid-sized trees sprouted on the roof tops and trash-filled balconies.
The city looked a bit run-down and rough around the edges, reflecting the desperate living conditions of most Guineans—but it also felt vibrant and culturally alive, with a big heart and a complex character. We immediately fell in love with our 1970s style bungalow and its beautiful, expansive garden, shaded by avocado, mango, banana, and papaya trees. Our immediate neighborhood was diverse and friendly, but most houses had been built in clusters, enclosed by high walls and blade wire.
Our compound consisted of six modestly sized homes, arranged in a terrace formation that offered some much-appreciated privacy. Our co-residents included some of Manu's colleague, an older Belgian businessman with his wife and a French military adviser. I cringed at first, but he turned out to be friendly—if somewhat private. Little did we know how much we would come to appreciate his presence in the not too distant future. Next to his house lay a white-tiled communal swimming pool. Nobody else seemed to use it, but we spent many weekend afternoons soaking in the generously chlorinated water, sipping mango daiquiris made from fruit harvested from our own tree and the Cuban rum we had packed into our moving container in almost troubling quantities.
Our neighbors across the rocky, narrow dirt road also in a walled-in compound, but theirs featured two long rows of un-plastered, single story brick houses with rusty tin roofs a bare courtyard of fine, dark-red gravel. For celebrations, a small stage would be set up for a band. We regularly enjoyed their performances from our terrace. It felt as if a new musical world opened up right in front of us. Volume was clearly valued above fidelity, and the distortion of the overdriven amplifier, connected to a rattling pair of large, beat-up speakers, added a psychedelic texture to the traditional kora- and djembe-based music.
To our south, an overgrown, empty lot was occasionally visited by a small, solitary cow who waded through the thorny vines, searching for a bushel of dry grass to wrap her tongue around and hundred meters down stood an absurdly large villa that belonged to the owner of a local cement company and likely had more square meters than all six of our compound’s bungalows combined. The garage for their luxury cars alone had the size of a single-family home, while the front of the building featured a manicured garden with a large, elevated swimming pool. Across the street from the imposing palace, surrounded by overgrown, abandoned lots, a moldy concrete bunker housed a tiny police station, manned by two or three sleepy officers.
Guinea’s climate hit me like a blow delivered by the moist, hot hand of God. The air was humid and thick, and wherever the breeze from the Atlantic couldn’t reach, it felt like walking through warm jelly. I embraced the heat and the constant light-headedness that came with it like a natural high and allowed it to slow me down to a comfortably sluggish pace that I nicknamed the Conakry Crawl.
Slave traders began raiding the Guinean coast as far back as 500 years ago, when American demand surged. Trade posts were established and by the late 1800s, the French had run their parasitic arteries throughout the vast interior of the region, ushering in an era of industrialized bloodletting. Back then, the malaria-infested area around Conakry was feared as the “White Man’s Graveyard,” or the “Fever Coast” among the French invaders, many of whom proved too weak to withstand the onslaught of infectious tropical diseases.
Even today, malaria prophylaxis remains one of the more pressing concerns for any long-term visitor to Guinea, as the parasite can easily and quickly kill those who haven’t developed immunity from childhood. Carelessness can come at a high price—a visiting friend who was initially amused by how I doused myself in mosquito repellent two or three times a day eventually came down with malaria and had to be airlifted to one of Conakry’s better hospitals, reserved for the rich and foreign.
Other diseases endemic to Guinea include typhoid, cholera, yellow fever, hepatitis A, B and C, and schistosomiasis—to name only the most common killers. During the monsoon season, the groundwater can rise to street level, open sewers are flushed by the flooding, and low-lying areas can be submerged for weeks in water the color of café au lait. Conakry’s water supply is also frequently cut off for days at a time, and as soon as the pressure drops in the antiquated pipes, raw sewage seeps in through countless gaps and cracks.
We had received more vaccination shots from the Ministry’s medical unit than I could keep track of, and we had the means to drink only bottled water—but the vast majority of Guinea’s population couldn’t afford a basic doctor’s visit and were forced to rely on unfiltered tap water laced with a virtually endless list of potentially deadly pathogens.
Conakry ranks as the wettest capital city on the planet. The rainy season usually lasts from June to October, while it doesn’t rain at all for the entire rest of the year—with the sole exception of a mild and isolated tropical storm that rolls in from the Atlantic during early to mid-May, right before mango season begins. The phenomenon is known as the “Mango Rain,” as the showers wash the layers of red dust off the ripening fruit.
Day after day, the soft red rock and gravel of Conakry’s many dirt roads were ground into fine powder by countless wheels, kicked up by the airstreams of passing vehicles, and dispersed by the ocean breeze. The red haze was omnipresent across town, and even more of it floated out of the bauxite trains’ open containers as they hauled the spoils of Guinea’s vast—and exclusively foreign-owned— mining industry past our compound towards Conakry’s harbor, from where they would be shipped off to wealthier lands.
The rains changed everything. They washed away half a year’s worth of dust, and the reddish hue gave way to countless shades of green as Guinea’s plains, valleys, and mountains burst into lush tropical vegetation. The awakening reached all the way into the heart of Conakry. The city boasts an enormous number of mango trees, which now provided a feast for the entire city as kids threw short sticks into the branches to knock the fruit to the ground.
Many mangos also fell on their own, denting the hoods of passing cars or offering snacks for the legions of famished gutter dogs. After sundown, the shrieks of feasting fruit bats could be heard through the thick foliage, and countless roadside stands sagged under the weight of gigantic heaps of plump, sweet, shiny, nutritious, delicious mangos—it felt like an awakening paradise.
The rains rarely lasted the entire day, but when they came, they were unimaginably powerful. From late August onward, as their frequency and duration increased, creeks turned into raging streams, and many stretches of road remained flooded for weeks at a time as the monsoon steadily grew more intense. Driving became tricky—deeper potholes and missing manhole covers had to be memorized before they were fully submerged in the opaque, brown water and turned into axle-breaking traps.
The rains seemed like a blessing and an adventure at first, but we soon witnessed how the water flooded entire settlements, uprooting lives and bringing disease and destruction. Flash floods raged through houses, violently washing away people’s meager livelihoods and leaving behind nothing but thick, toxic gunk. Everyone remained calm, however; the destruction and disease were accepted as just another God-given factor in the cycle of life—an unavoidable annual occurrence that everyone simply had to endure.
The owner of our compound employed government soldiers as guards, outfitted in shabby army fatigues, large, bright-yellow plastic sandals, worn-out AK-47s, and shotguns. At first, we found it irritating to have armed guards standing outside our front door—but then something happened. About 300 meters down our dirt road stood a small orphanage that looked like a miniature fortified castle, surrounded by four-meter-high walls with a sentry house beside its entrance. We wondered what the fort-like structure and armed wardens were for, and joked that the place looked more like a prison than a home for children.
One night, masked intruders shot one of the guards on duty dead and convinced the remaining security detail to open the gate. They were inside the building for mere minutes before speeding off again in a brand-new SUV. An official report claimed that nothing had been taken, but this sounded highly implausible. There were persistent rumors that a gang of child traffickers was on the prowl for the most vulnerable—and many feared the raid would not remain an isolated incident.
About four weeks later, on a sunny weekday afternoon, a schoolgirl was grabbed right off the main road between Kipé and Ratoma. She was dragged into a car by two young men, and the driver sped off—but several onlookers gave chase on foot. The crowd was still running behind the vehicle when it suddenly got stuck in traffic. The girl was rescued, and while the female driver managed to flee and blend into the crowd, the two male perpetrators were dragged out of the vehicle and badly beaten by a steadily growing number of people.
The mob eventually tired of the kicking and punching and proceeded to drag the barely alive men uphill to the small police station below our house. The cops jailed one of them, but his accomplice had been beaten so ferociously that the officers didn’t want to take responsibility for his appalling condition. Not that police brutality was usually punished or even prosecuted in Guinea—but these were somebody’s foot soldiers, and the officers didn’t want to be blamed for the young man’s probable expiration.
The mob took the perpetrator back under its wing, dragging him further uphill to hang his body from the locust tree just around the corner from the orphanage. Once the deed was done, they quickly dispersed. Minutes later, only the hanging man remained, when our neighbor’s children were brought home from school. They passed the tree at a stretch of road where their chauffeur was forced to slow to a crawl due to a cluster of sharp-edged rocks the rains had washed out of the eroding, deep-red soil.
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