Diaobé

A crossroads town in Upper Casamance, sixty kilometres from the Guinea-Bissau border, where four language communities live side by side and one of West Africa's great weekly markets takes over the streets every Wednesday.

Diaobé-Kabendou is one of the three communes of the Vélingara department, in the Kolda region — the part of Senegal known as Upper Casamance. It sits about sixty kilometres from the border with Guinea-Bissau, and that position explains almost everything about it. Every Wednesday, Diaobé stops being a town of its own and becomes a regional crossroads. Traders arrive from Gambia, from Guinea-Conakry, from Guinea-Bissau, from Mali and from Burkina Faso. The market has grown large enough to overshadow Kounkané, the administrative seat of the arrondissement it belongs to. You can hear that history in the streets. Diaobé speaks Pulaar and Mandinka — known here as Socé. To those are added a large Fula community from the Fouta Djallon highlands of Guinea-Conakry, and Diola families. Four ways of naming the same things, in the same town. The rest of the week, Diaobé is a village again: sand tracks that turn to mud in the rainy season, breeze-block houses with sheet-metal roofs, and one enormous tree whose roots serve as a bench, a meeting point and a shelter from the sun.