When the fare is to be paid, you watch them introduce one slinky hand into the bulging, broadly patterned dress; it travels its routine trip to the shoulder, down the armpit, where it goes to work: first gropes and pokes, then tweaks and twitches, till finally the seizure is hauled from the quarry. Mission accomplished it is withdrawn and resurfaces clasping the 500 cfa (african franc) note that is then handed to the "apprenti" -the boy selling the tickets.
Try to imagine what the money looks like after having travelled innumerable times in these sweaty mamma?s bras, extracted only to be exposed to the almost palpable grid of fumes and dust clogging the air on every major street here. What remains of once stark new notes, only a couple of years old, is a crumpled assemblage of thumb-sized rags whose rectangular unity oftentimes is only maintained by sticky tape; all colours annihilated under a brown veneer, the amount, when lucky, is still although hardly lisible, otherwise only faintly visible; the texture thick, grimey and oily under your fingers.
Then when they sit back, ticket in hand, and we are painfully rumbling on, pothole-slaloming, the thought has crossed my mind more than once I must confess, that we all would be so much more comfortable if we all ate a little bit less in life -especially them I mean.