This summer I spend three weeks doing political science research in Dakar, where I don’t know a soul and not a soul knows me. When someone asks, I confess, Yes, this is my first time in Senegal. (I visited Mexico, once, when I was eleven years old.)

I pass hours in the courtyard of my hotel, which has everything I need and could be possibly entertained by in Africa. A wireless internet connection, which they call wi-fi in French, so that it rhymes with leafy or beefy. A bar and a barman, who meets me with a beer at my preferred beer-drinking and wi-fi surfing table, near the hanging vines but not so near that a mosquito could lurk in the greenery and launch a surprise attack on my upper neck. I am terrified of contracting dengue fever, yellow fever, or malaria.

The barman is convinced I neither speak nor understand a word of French, no matter how many times I talk in French to him.

Bonsoir, I say.

Would you like some food tonight?

Oui, le menu, s’il-te-plait.

The fish is good tonight. The chicken is also good.

Je prends le poisson.

You like beer, don’t you, mon ami. And then he laughs in a very Francophone way, which I do not pretend to understand.

But the barman and do I have an understanding, on a superficial level that is the equal of some friendships I know. He jokes at me in poor English, and I rigole back at him in le mauvais français. The Spaniards who descend on the courtyard for several cloudy days in my second week become the subject of both of our jabs: they speak neither French nor English nor anything in-between, and they smoke all day and drink Coca Light, and they tip badly, the barman tells me. Here as everywhere otherness is measured in degrees, even at the extreme margins of the scale, and my otherness is not as other as theirs. There is an old Frenchman, too, whose voice is like a whisper at full-shout, an unpleasant croaked-out thing. He sits for a week on the same barstool front of a little color television that plays French variety shows and basketball at night. When he shouts at the television or the barman I can picture his voice-box in my head: it is gnarled and poisoned and hanging by the slenderest thread to his esophagus. One day the Frenchman is gone, and I ask the barman if he has seen our friend, if he is alive or dead. The barman smiles a wicked smile, perches himself on a barstool, and peers down at me, arms wheeling theatrically.

“I am dead,” he says, rasping and gasping. “Too many cigarettes, too many women, get me a beer.” Then he breaks out in giggles. “A big beer, I said, and cook me an omelet.” The Spaniards look on, smiling and baffled. I clutch at my neck and waggle my tongue out of my mouth like I’m choking. “Je suis mort,” I say. “Au secours. Police. Hôpital. Pompiers. Omelette.” I lay my head on the table. “Je suis mort.” We are both laughing now, he comes over and slaps me hard on the back, I pretend to choke and die again, and we laugh some more. Five minutes later, the barman brings me a fresh beer. “Nothing in Africa you get for free,” he tells me. “Except this time.”

— Nick Hoy and the Editors of Leland