Ted Botha

Like Timbuktu or Ulan Bator, Ouagadougou promised mystery, the prospect of adventure. Getting there by train, through the wild heart of West Africa, promised even more.

Daniel was going back to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, to buy a taxi. He had spent 16 years working as a chauffeur for a Western embassy in the city of Abidjan. But his possessions, which lay scattered around our compartment floor, were minimal: two suitcases, one box, a radio, a black-and-white TV, five shopping bags, a gas container, a paint tin, several pots, six baguettes, two mats, three hand brooms and a miniature bundle of wood.

"Pour les dents," he explained, retrieving one of the giant toothpicks to scrub his snow-white teeth. Daniel's' teeth lay arranged like a broken rake. These, together with the dozen cicatrices that lined his cheeks like slanted dimples, made it appear that he was perpetually on the point of laughing at a side-splitting joke.

"C'est Anyama," Daniel grinned, as we pulled into the first stop outside Abidjan, the former capital of Ivory Coast. The jungle to both sides of the train smouldered. The fires, I had learned, were lit mostly by poor immigrants, who had come down from as far another as Timbuktu to share in the wealth of Ivory Coast. They were burning wood for coal to sell in Abidjan or to clear the ground to plant cocoa. A Dutch scientist working in Tai, a protected forest on the Liberian border to the west, told me the burning was so severe that the last rain forest in Ivory Coast would be gone within the year.

"C'est Agboville," Daniel said, pointing out the next stop, not pronouncing the 'b', so it became Aggoville. At each station, Daniel was met by friends who were loaded down with gifts for him: small mountains of glossy palm-oil nuts that sweated in the humidity, bunches of plantains, bags of bitter kola nuts and, of course, more tooth-sticks.

In between stations, wherever there was a cluster of people waiting to sell something, the train stopped. Scheduled halt or not, the train drivers knew their vehicle was a lifeline. To the people along the track, the train represented their one daily chance to hold a market, sell their goods, make a few centimes. The relationship was mutually beneficial. The locals were also eager to sell as the passengers were eager to buy - coconuts, peppers, avocados, mangoes, berries, iced water or ginger water in plastic bags.

I soon discovered that most of the passengers rode the Abidjan-Ouagadougou train solely for the goods they could purchase along the way -goods they would themselves sell further down the line. Women traders predominated, each of them referred to as a "Mama Benz," so nicknamed either because they were so large - they averaged six feet in height - or from the cars the could afford once they'd struck it rich.

The Mama Benzes traded not only by train but also by taxi and by planed, commuting from one stop to the next, one West African country to the next, their luggage loaded with clothes, shoes, anything in short supply at their destination. If the goods clogging our train were anything to go by, tropical fruit was in short supply up north. There was so much fruit on the train that I christened it The Fruit Salad Express. On the way south several days later, it would be transformed into The Stew Train. Around me were gathered all the ingredients for a gargantuan hotpot.

I shared a compartment with three men, one of whom wore thick glasses, smoked incessantly and insisted on calling me " camarade ", despite the capitalist fervour obviously running through his veins. He bought two dozen bunches of onions at Bafondo, their pungent odour permeating the crushed compartment. At the next stop, he bought three goat carcasses, which he deposited on the luggage rack, more onions and 20 chickens tied by their feet and slung under the benches. At Siby, we picked up five more animal carcasses, which left a slippery trail of blood down the corridor. Finally, at Kouentou, we took on four boxes of tomatoes.

"Vous avez une grande famille" (You have a big family), I suggested to him. He said nothing , but he seemed upset I hadn't realized that this produce wasn't for his family. "C'est la commerce, camarade." It was his work

RAN, the Regie Chemin de Fer Abidjan à Niger, starts off in Abidjan on the Gulf of Guinea and ends its journey 1.300 kilometres later in Ouagadougou. Despite its name, the line never reached its intended destination. Niger, which lies several hundred kilometres further northeast. The acronym, however, has stuck. The two cities connected by RAN couldn't be more different than, say, Paris and Tirana. Affluent Abidjan lies on myriad lagoons in the tropics, while poor dusty Ouagadougou - called Ouaga for short - is being daily encroached on by the Sahara. Abidjan's skyline is dominated by golden office towers and a modern Catholic cathedral, Ouaga's by an old dirt-caked mosque. Abidjan boasts banks and shiny sedans, while Ouaga has to rely on aid organisations and mopeds.

For as long as I can remember I wanted to get to Ouaga. Like Ulan Bator and Timbuktu, it had one of those named s that promised mystery and that inexplicable quality which turns travel into something more. If I could get there by train, I reasoned, the adventure would be complete. When I arrived in ivory Coast, however, I doubted whether I would find any train at all, let alone one that went to Ouaga. West Africa isn't famous for its trains the way East Africa and southern Africa are famous for the Nairobi-Mombasa Express, the Tanzam, the Blue Train.

The train lines constructed by the French, the dominant colonial power of the region, leave a lot to be desired. The French trains in the area run-north-south, never-east-west, and always end at a border. If you look at a map of these haphazard slivers of countries, you'll see that the rain lines in ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo an Benin look not unlike fingers on a hand: outstretched, yet amputated. There are only two that take you across a border, or far enough to call them cross-continental systems: the overnight between Dakar, Senegal, and Bamako in Mali. The other, I discovered on arrival in Abidjan, is RAN.

Our first big stop after Agboville was Dimbokro, which is important for two reasons: it has a larger number of traders than normal; and 40 kilometres to the east of it runs the Great Highway from Abidjan. The great Highway is arguably the best piece of four-laned road in West Africa. If it weren't for all the giant termite hills sprouting in the median and the robed beggars walking 1,600 kilometres down from the Sahara to find work in Ivory Coast, the highway wouldn't look out of place in Europe or America. I caught a taxi brousse (bush taxi) to the highway, which ended just north of Dimbokro - about 200 kilometres from Abidjan - in Yamoussoukro.

Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast's new capital - the ghost capital - was built by President Felix Houphouet-Boigny with lavish attention near his birthplace. Declared the official capital a decade ago, no embassies or major businesses in Abidjan have yet undertaken the move. Yamoussoukro remains a shell in the jungle, waiting for people. Yamoussoukro isn't ugly or badly situated. In fact, it's a pretty town with a cooler climate than the coast. But Ivorians dislike the idea of moving capitals yet again. Yamoussoukro, you see, is the country's fourth capital in 90 years. While Abidjan is where money is made, Yamoussoukro is quite obvious where money was spent. In a nutshell, the ghost city boasts the following: a palace with a crocodile-filled moat, several sci-fi-looking government edifices, a maze of wide, well-tarred boulevards, a five-star hotel that looks not unlike a giant golf tee, one of the nicest golf course sin the world, huge manicured gardens nobody is allowed into, an intentional airport where no planes land - and 10,000 streetlamps. (Curiously, it's only when there are streetlamps in an African city that you realise it is an amenity most seem to go without.)

The latest addition to the city is a basilica. "It rises out of the jungle," my friends in Abidjan told me. And they were right. La Basilique Notre-Dame de la Paix rises extraterrestrially from the top of the palms and fromagers . In the heat haze, it looks as if it is about to take off or has just landed. Around its marbled expanse lie huge stretches of lawn and strips of tar - for parking and, one would expect, for parades. To gain entry, you have to walk a small gauntlet of soldiers, have your bags searched and submit your passport. The soldiers remind you that the church, which has been estimated to have cost about $850 million in this predominantly animist country, is still as controversial as when it was inaugurated over two years ago.

Even though it was a weekend when I visited the church, hardly anyone was around. There were perhaps a dozen cars at the gate, and a group of Nigerians in boubous wandered around with me. We felt small next to the gigantic marble columns and ocean-sized floors. Inside we found 24 huge stained-glass windows - one that incorporated Houphouet-Boigny with the saints - breathlessly long wooden pews and inner columns wide enough to house elevators. While we stood there, dwarfed by this spectacle, I couldn't help thinking of the tiny termites next to the anthills on the Great Highway.

Back on the train, I turned once again to the pages of Le Petit Train de la Brousses (The Little Train in the Bush). Le Petit Train was the book most foreigners relied on as a primer for West Africa. It was so indispensable to foreigners in Francophone Africa, as say, Elspeth Huxley or Isak Dinesen were to novitiates heading for the Anglophone east. The author, Philippe de Baleine, took RAN for only half its route to Ouaga, yet he came across enough characters to uncover some of the colorful fabric (and idiosyncrasies) or the area and to write an entertaining travelogue. He met, among other, a beautiful Nigerian princess, an engineer who built a huge bridge of a nonexistent river, an underpaid barman who sold moonshine so that he could buy two cows for his fiancee's dowry, an old judge who bemoaned the rise of materialism and prostitution, a Jesuit who talked about female circumcision and a fetishist who had studied at the Sorbonne.

At de Baleine's last stop, Ferkessédougou - or Ferkay, as they call it - I disembarked for Tortiya. Like Yamoussoukro, Tortiya can only be reached by road, a very bad road, it turned out. If the new capital lies at the end of the Great Highway, Tortiya lies at the far end of The Tortuously Potholed Track.

At the end of that rack sits the muddy, frontier-type village that had once been home to the country's most famous diamond mine. The men liked to wear cowboy hats, and the children shouted "Too-bah-boo" (white man0 at the sight of infrequent white visitors. Today the mine looks like something dating back to the early 1900s. Everything is hand-driven, man d-driven, women-driven, even child-driven. Families dig for diamonds together. Pieces of equipment belonging to the French company that once used to run the mine lie like so many rusted skeletons against slag heaps of red dearth.

Since 1977, when the mine was closed and the French pulled out, people have been doing by hand what it is no longer profitable to do by machine. They use picks to dig modern-day catacombs, shovel the earth into wheelbarrows, run it down to the water, sieve it and maybe, just maybe, catch a glint in the red earth.

My guide, Columbo, who wore a sombrero, a T-shirt and dark glasses, estimated that in the good years, the mid-1980s, there were 40,000 amateur minters here. But now the diamonds are scarce, and only half the people remain. Most of the minters come from Mali. Tortiya is what you could call the Malian sector of Ivory Coast, a country full of so many immigrants that a third of its ten million inhabitants are said to be foreigners. From as far east as Nigeria, and as far north as Mauritania, they headed for the lucrative coast. May of them reached Abidjan, but thousands never got that far. They stopped in the forests to burn trees and plant cocoa. Or they were waylaid in places like Yamoussoukro and Tortiya. It didn't really matter where they ended up, as long as it was somewhere inside ivory Coast. In a subcontinent more renowned for coups and poverty, they knew this was the one country where their dreams stood a chance of coming true.

A group of French expats up from Abidjan for the weekend were staying at the small Tortiya hotel, situated on the Bandama river and run by a Frenchman called Marius. The hotel is a place Graham Greene might have imagined. The French expat guests include d a woman of about 40. Over a dinner of French wine and buck, she told me she had lived in Ivory Coast for almost half her life. West Africa, she added, wasn't a place for travelling. She had been to the usual tourist haunts - the sticky beaches of Sassandra and Grand Lahou, the depleted rainforest at Man - but when she really wanted to travel in Africa, she went east, to Kenya.

I disagreed with her. West Africa was a different Africa to the east. True, there weren't man y animals, and that was sad. But it was captivating in another way, and Tortiya, I said, was proof of that. the woman's husband told me that if I was thinking of going on to Tortiya mine itself, I should remember that it was a crime-ridden place. Most of the diggers were breaking the law by being there. Each of them had to pay rent of between $7 and $15 a month, but few could afford to pay even one CFA, the local franc. Whenever the police raided the place, practically everyone fled, and the hills and catacombs became a cemetery. Once the official heat had passed, they trickled back like religious believers to a pilgrimage.

When I finally walked through the diamond fields, I could feel the stares of the miners, but they were hardly killer stares. They were the eyes of exhaustion. I greeted a miner, whose name was Traore. Monsieur Traore invited me into his hole, his tabernacle. Bent over his battered spade and sieve, he told me he was very tired. He worked seven days a week, and today was the seventh day. Sunday, however, might just be the day he would find his diamond.

Columbo, who moonlighted in illicit gems, was negotiating with a skinny, anxious man. He took a pill bottle filled with liquid from the miner, emptied it into his hand, leaving two specks of glass in his palm. He popped them into his mouth and tongued them. "Three thousand," he said. His dark glasses hid what he was thinking while the seller clucked in disbelief. All those mountains of red earth for two diamond pimples worth only 3,000CFA.

The seller's alternative lay with the Muslim dealers who sat in a grass shack by the water's edge. They hovered expectantly over little scales that could easily have been a hundred years old. The Muslims acted as middlemen, much like the mama Benzes on RAN. They sold the diamonds to any of the eight or nine Jewish buyers who came to town in their fancy cars once a month of buy gems, which they then sent to Antwerp.

Columbo said four thousand was his final bid. The seller was a man from the country. He knew digging, not haggling. He nodded his head. There wasn't excitement in his face and his eyes were vacant. His dream had just come true.

Like Columbo, the soldiers at Niangoloko border post could afford to hide their expressions behind dark glasses. I'd been told they did this to intimidate you. The soldiers were also a reminder that we had entered Burkina, a country ruled by a revolutionary council, a country full of military uniforms. The soldiers made the passengers of RAN empty their possessions on the side of the track - all the avos, plantains and kola nuts they had bought and carefully guarded for hundreds of kilometres. The soldiers were particularly fascinated with Daniel's TV, which, like the fruit on board, was soon coated with a later of Sahelian dust.

The lush vegetation had dissipated into scrub, small trees and long palms sprouting clownlike crops of leaves on top. Lone baobabs were scarred from people knifing them for medicinal cures. Villagers wore long clothes and jacket against the heat, while the harmattan, the end-of-year atmospheric change, hunt in the air like a dry mist. At each stop, men alighted, laid their small carpets on the earth and knelt towards Mecca.

Everything about the place was desperately poor. Children rushed the train and gathered the bones passengers had cast away, then chewed greedily on them. Goats pecking at the dust scattered in our path. At one point there was a crash and, immediately afterwards, a rattle of what sounded like stone down the coaches. The train had hit something. As the people around me looked at one another, there rose a collective cry of recognition: "Un mouton!" (A sheep!) To me, the death of the sheep meant one less animal to crowd the compartment.

In the blood-stained corridor, I met Koudougou Zeida and his friend, two old men who got on at Tousiana to spend the day in Bobo-Dioulasso. Both were full of wizened smiles and mischief. A Malian chanteur called Sali Sidibe listened to his Walkman while tapping his foot on the kola nut-coated floor. Zongo, the conductor, was full of philosophies he'd picked up from years aboard RAN. When I tried to take photograph, he grabbed the camera. I thought he would give me the tired old excuse of a train being a military installation.

"No," he said. "If you take pictures, then you won't buy postcards and Burkina will lose money."

It wasn't the real reason photos on RAN were forbidden - trains, for some reason, are considered militarily sensitive - and why I was thwarted every time I pointed my camera near the train. But I couldn't help admire Zongo's reasoning and his obvious love of his country.

RAN reach Bobo-Dioulasso by nightfall. There was still enough light to see that the town was an oasis in the desert of Burkina. There were trees under which rumbled a flotilla of mopeds and bicycles churning up red dust. The town was full of socialist slogans, especially in the marketplace and around the bicycle racks, which were called "Parking du Peuple." Crudely painted billboards said things like Savoir = Liberté, Let us Hold Hands Into the Future, Let us Fight Analphebetism and Let us Build Toilets.

Daniel gathered up his dust-coated TV and his toothsticks, was met by a crowd and left me with a decidedly empty compartment reeking of plantains. Ahead of me lay the last stretch to Ouaga, the mystery I'd been waiting for so long to see, and after that The Stew Train home.