Labé

Labé is the second-largest city in Guinea (60,000+ inhabitants), the capital of the Fouta, a veritable metropolis compared to the villages and towns that dot my map. I always arrive from the east, just before dusk, covered in dust. One of the corporals at the checkpoint knows me, and so never lets me pass without first chatting for a bit. On days he isn’t there, just remember: greet people with guns, the bigger the gun, the bigger the greeting.

Just like any other big city, the roads are worse within the municipality than outside it. Heavy truck and motorcycle traffic chokes the narrow bridges, alleys, and everyone’s lungs. Trucks that aren’t going somewhere with a full load of things and extra people on top are parked along the sides of the road, receiving long-neglected and now critical repairs. Dogs and sheep lay in their shade.

Unlike towns en brousse, buildings in Labé have signs, lightbulbs (not illuminated, of course), and customers. Unlike in the village, bottled water, onions, and diesel are cheaper, and taxi rides and plates of rice and sauce are more expensive. There are more choices, more refrigerators, more foreigners (few compared to none), more schoolchildren, and more metalworkers’ shops. You need to watch where you’re going.

The most striking aspect of Labé is the people. Because the Peuls of the Fouta are part of the much larger Fula group, and because it is a commercial and administrative center, there are more different looking people here than anywhere except Conakry.

Light and dark skin, all sorts of facial features in all combinations, all heights, and every possible definition of clothing are well represented. Students wear uniforms: red, blue or green gingham for primary school, khaki for middle school, and white on top with blue or green bottoms for high school. Hair and shoes: anything goes, and does. Wigs are more common than long colorful extensions woven into the braids, and dreadlocks are discouraged. Workers wear dirty jumpsuits, businessmen wear suit jackets or colorful, krinkly boubous, and young men wear impossibly bright and clean button-downs with a heavy coat of perfume. What women do can be inferred from their attire as well: Market ladies wear a simple complet of colorful fabric (or a an old tshirt supporting a forgotten candidate and a wrap skirt, if they sell fish or peanut butter), alarmingly young mothers wear tight dresses and babies, linked by a tight towel, and wealthy women wear expensive looking cheap jeans and glittery tops, or complicated layers of imported Malian fabric. Children wear what’s left: tattered shorts, sports jerseys, and snowsuits.

The combination of massive market, towering (relatively) but crumbling administrative buildings, and just-installed power poles (the future cabling lying on the ground between in tangles or spools) gives Labé the feeling of a real place to live; where things are often changing, but nothing ever really becomes different. The same potholes are there, along with new ones, the same broken trucks are being hammered upon, along with older ones, the same sandals are being sold by a different vendor, four doors down, and the bread is always just beyond fresh.

I like Labé.