Gabu

I had not planned to go to Gabu. I had planned to go to Bafatá, which is the other large interior town, but the car I was sharing broke down on the road east of Bambadinca with a mechanical complaint that the driver diagnosed by sound and that turned out to be correct, and the replacement vehicle that appeared an hour later was heading to Gabu, and by that point the logic of Guinea-Bissau travel had long since replaced my own planning as the operative system. I rode the three hours northeast in the back of a pickup and arrived at sunset into a town that smelled of dust and cooking fires and the particular sweetness of cattle held in a nearby pen.

Gabu is a Fula town in a way that coastal Bissau is not a Fula town — which is to say that the culture, the religion, the sound, and the food are all inflected by a Muslim trading community that has been here since the days of the Gabu Empire, which controlled this territory from the thirteenth century until the nineteenth. The minarets of several mosques punctuate the skyline. The streets are wider than the capital’s, more orderly in a way that suggests a different relationship with civic space. The men in the market wear robes of pale blue or white and the women wear headscarves and the rhythm of the day is organized around the five prayer calls in a way that gives the hours a structure Bissau entirely lacks.

The cattle market held on Monday mornings is the reason most travelers who make it this far have come. I arrived on a Sunday evening specifically to be there at dawn when the trading begins, and nothing in my experience of West African markets quite prepared me for the scale and the noise of it — hundreds of zebu cattle with the distinctive humped backs and wide curved horns of the breed, men moving between them assessing and arguing and occasionally pressing hands together to seal something, the dust that hung over the entire ground at knee-height from all that movement, the smell of animal that was not unpleasant but was total. I stood at the edge for a while before understanding that nobody was watching me and that I could move through the market at whatever pace I wanted, and I spent two hours doing exactly that.

I ate breakfast at a stall run by a man who made a kind of millet porridge cooked with a small amount of sour milk and sweetened with whatever the local analog of sugar was — I never established exactly what — served in a metal bowl with a spoon and a cup of sweet Nescafé that was the most welcome coffee I have ever drunk at seven in the morning in a dusty market while zebu cattle moved around me. The porridge was thick and slightly fermented and tasted of something very old and very correct for this landscape.

The landscape around Gabu is the landscape of the Sahel’s southern edge — dry season bush, flat and pale, the trees thorn-studded and sparse, the laterite soil the colour of old rust. After the coastal world of mangroves and islands, it felt like a different country, which in some meaningful ways it is. The people here have more in common culturally with Fula communities in neighboring Guinea-Conakry and Senegal than with the Bijagó or Balanta people of the coast. The cuisine reflects this: less palm oil, more millet and sorghum, the groundnuts that appear everywhere in West Africa present here too but cooked differently, roasted and pounded rather than stewed.

The guesthouse where I stayed had one ceiling fan, which worked, and one shower, which delivered cold water with intermittent enthusiasm. This was enough. In the evening I sat in the courtyard and listened to the town decompress from the day — the last prayer call, the sound of cooking fires, the cattle settling in their pens, a radio somewhere playing what I eventually identified as a Fula praise-singer whose voice moved between registers with a facility I found genuinely beautiful.

When to go: November through March is the dry season and the only practical time to travel the roads east of Bafatá. The Monday cattle market runs year-round but is most active during the dry months when herders bring cattle in from a wider range. The road from Bissau takes six to seven hours; there are bush taxis most mornings from the Bandim transport yard.