Pointe-Noire

I came to Pointe-Noire on the train from Brazzaville — the CFCO line, an eight-hour journey through forest and savanna that is, by any reasonable standard, one of Central Africa’s great train rides. The train creaks and sways and stops at villages where vendors push arms through the open windows with skewers of grilled meat, bottles of peanuts, single cigarettes, entire clusters of bananas. By the time the forest began to thin out and the air started carrying salt, I’d eaten well and slept badly and was entirely ready for the ocean.

Pointe-Noire presents itself as two cities occupying the same streets. One is an oil city: French energy executives in white SUVs, expat compounds with generators humming behind security gates, restaurants serving steak frites at prices that require a moment of quiet calculation. The other city is entirely Congolese: the fish market at dawn where the pirogues come in with their catch and the bartering is conducted at high volume; the neighborhoods of La Côte Sauvage where teenagers play football on the beach as the waves come in; the dépôts de boisson along the Avenue Charles de Gaulle where the cold Ngok beer arrives with a plate of groundnut crackers without being asked for.

I spent most of my time at the fish market and on the beach. The market operates in the blue-grey light before sunrise — it’s the hour when the night’s fishing is sorted, weighed, and distributed. The smell is intense, briny, alive. Women in wax-print cloth carry tubs of fish on their heads toward the covered stalls. Men with ice-chippers work through styrofoam boxes. The barracuda lie in long silver rows on trestle tables. Everything is moving at the same moment and nothing seems chaotic because everyone knows their part. I drank terrible coffee from a thermos someone sold me for fifty francs and watched the light change from gray to orange over the Atlantic.

The beaches themselves — La Côte Sauvage especially — are wide, wave-battered, and entirely unmarketized. There are no sunloungers or cocktail menus. There are fishing boats drawn up on the sand, children playing, women selling fried fish wrapped in newspaper, and the Atlantic Ocean, which doesn’t moderate itself for anyone. The surf is strong. The water is warm. On Sunday afternoons the beach fills with families and the sound of portable speakers playing Congolese ndombolo. I swam anyway, among all the craziness, and it was excellent.

The city also has a proper colonial-era railway station — the Gare de Pointe-Noire — a building of delusional grandeur for its location, with high ceilings and iron columns and a clock that no longer works but is still consulted by habit. The café attached to it serves real espresso, which surprised me. The train to Brazzaville departs from a platform out the back. Standing there waiting for the departure, with the Atlantic visible between the buildings and the forest beginning its slow encroachment from the other direction, Pointe-Noire felt like a city that had ended up somewhere no one quite planned and had done the best possible thing with it.

When to go: July and August are the coolest months on the Atlantic coast — around twenty degrees, overcast, with less humidity than the interior. This is paradoxically the best time despite the cloud cover. Avoid January through March when the heat and humidity are at their peak.