Béa goes to the polls: Nigeria photolog

Gradually getting ready for a posting to Nairobi, Béa looked summery and fit when she took time out to cycle over and join me for a very agreeable lunch.
This talented fellow Africanist shares a taste for the sun. So the clear sky over a market scene must have been a particularly welcome sight for her after Lagos, where she joined the crew to cover the Nigerian elections last April (2003; AFP and photojournalism entry).
This snap could be of many such places in Africa, but Béatrice was by then in Libreville, capital of Gabon (Lonely Planet guide), where everybody might be richer if chunks of the country's oil wealth hadn't been turned into real estate owned in Paris by some of its élite.

Filling me in on her travels, my colleague had only nice things to say about the team in Lagos, where bureau chief Dave has laid asserted his solid northern English roots by installing a bar -- "rather like that," she said, pointing to the one in 'the canteen' -- in his home!
Heaven knows, it sounds as if refreshment is direly needed after a long day's work in the office, which looks out over the lagoon. What this picture of the view doesn't show is the sheer heat, all the time and often humid.
While in Lagos, Béa saw the sun but once, after a memorably scary storm. The skies were blue for all of an hour and that was it. Some people, Dave, have remarkable constitutions!
Your visitor survived admirably ... until Libreville. I won't embarrass Béa by describing how she decorated walls and floor of an apartment there with something unstoppable once Africa pulled a sometimes unavoidable stunt. It was apparently regrettably "public" enough as it was!

.She produced her pictures for me, and you, the day one of west Africa's most troublesome former warlords, Charles Taylor, looked set to leave a ravaged Liberia for exile in Nigeria. (Being a tough bastard, Taylor's still in Monrovia today, his men fighting rebels for bridges, says AFP). Her own travels took her right up to Kano, in the distant Muslim north.
First though, here's Ade, one of AFP's Lagos journalists, at work. Remember, when he came to Paris, I went and missed the day he shed his suit for the full princely regalia, to the admiration of all on the English and Africa desks. Though not "the works", this looks comfortable.
(I imagine you're up to the eyeballs in the ramifications of the Taylor story right now, but when you get a chance, guys, please pass on my regards all round!)

One picture of a different view from the office showed a well-tarred road in excellent shape, but this was the exception to the rule across Bea's Nigeria.
While the country produces plenty of petroleum products, domestic distribution problems remain such that a long journey will mean stops like this one to fill up the tank on the black market.
Stall after stall of the jerrycans are run by competing traders and it doesn't do to pull up halfway between a pair of them.

Nigeria's second city, Kano (tourism pages), now the biggest industrial town in the Muslim majority north, was so dry and dusty that some of Béa's pictures were studies in plant life where she found it, rejoicing that one place she stayed was like a tiny oasis.
This isn't it, but the picture shows the kind of colours you can expect to be surprised by on the streets of Kano and other cities like it on the southern edges of the Sahel.

All these shots were taken with a cheap throw-away camera, since Béa was reluctant to travel with her own, only to feel the twinges of regret afterwards. So one of the first things she said was how "awful" they were.
Not so. Thanks for a taste of the trip!