Crime and Punishment Guinea-Bissau style

Bissau is a curious place, not only because it’s the capital city of a very small country which has utterly no historical justification for existing, but also because it appears to be stuck in a time warp. With the country having been at war for the majority of its independence and recovering from military coups for the rest of the time, there has been precious little time or money to knock down the old Portuguese colonial buildings and build something else. As a result, the visitor can wander into Bissau as onto the Marie Celeste and find the place exactly as it used to be. Much like the Marie Celeste, the centre of Bissau is also largely devoid of people. It is among the most charming towns anywhere in Africa and great to wander around. The Portuguese heritage gives the city a flavour of its own and it’s quite different from Senegal – the music is slower, the pace of life more languid, the food drizzled with piri piri sauce. Other features are unmistakeably West African – Bandim market is a hive of activity, the taxi drivers are sharks and the city is one big explosion of colour.

"Che Guevara Roundabout"

How polite

With Bissau less than 4 hours bush taxi ride away from Ziguinchor we took advantage several times for weekends. The centre is compact and can be walked across in about 20 minutes so assuming that the visitor does this in all possible directions at an African pace, that’s a bit over half a day for the entire old town. This leaves plenty of time for a cachupa (a stew which contains everything you have lying around in the fridge) and throw a couple of very pleasant caipirinha bars into the mix (500cfa a pop) and you have a disastrous recipe for rotten mornings wandering around the crumbling ruins.

Not quite sure exactly what this building is but it's very lovely

 

 I'm very sure this was the "Caipirinha K-Bar", and that was also very lovely

One such ruin is the old military fort down by the port and we wandered around this on New Year’s Eve with my parents. My dad, seeing a particularly interesting pillar-box lookout post, whipped out his camera and snapped away before being pounced on by a Ray-Ban wearing military man who appeared very unimpressed with the impromptu photography session. He confiscated the brand new camera and gave it to a fatter military man with bigger Ray-Bans and the assembled soldiers then spent quite a while going through the picture while looking over at us very disapprovingly. Fat guy came back twirling the camera around one figure and while I pinned my mother down to avoid her throttling the guy for disrespecting her property, Ross apologised profusely in Portuguese on behalf of everyone involved and the camera was eventually returned with a stern warning not to take pictures of this building.

The National Workers Union has probably seen better days. And the work has probably not been done on the roads.

It turns out that the place, which would probably have been converted into a museum in any other country, was a military base and contained the office of the chief of staff. With several attempted coups having taken place in recent months, it was probably not a great time to be taking pictures there. We decided to go back to what we did best, scouted out a nice courtyard bar and rang in the new years with caipirinhas, taking pictures only of each other.

Happy new year !

Happier for some than for others... Caipirinha's revenge strikes again !