In pictures: Year One in West Africa

You can do a lot in a year. Get a Masters in Sacred Music, calculate Pi to the ten trillionth decimal (which is 5), or father a love child.

I arrived in Dakar exactly one year ago today and did none of those things.

But it’s been a riot nonetheless, once or twice too literally (though much less so admittedly than back home, there being less Foot Lockers to burn…).

Golden beaches adjacent to rows of factories, wrestling matches and open-air concerts of Angelique Kidjo and Wyclef Jean have provided the light relief to trying to get my head around a new home, strange language and confront new challenges such as the crises in Cote d’Ivoire and Liberia.

I’m lucky to have seen so much of this region too,  visiting two countries building themselves out of conflict (Sierra Leone and Liberia), one sadly plunging itself back in (Cote d’Ivoire) before pulling itself back out, another recovering from a devastating food crisis  (Niger) while reinstating its democracy, and one whose democracy and economy (Ghana) is the success story the region.

One day I’ll go to Chad. Maybe. One day I’ll go to Oldham too.

But it’s Senegal I always come home to, even though one year on it still remains a bit of a mystery to me. With elections coming it’s a country at a crossroads, while myself I’ve barely yet worked out what road goes where.

Anyway, rather than bore you with some profoundly shallow analysis of Senegalese life, here are some pictures of my year gone by…