Re: Trade Rigged Rules [Gues Post by Yaya Jallow]

Last week I posted on Facebook a link I had seen with animations by oxfam on trade and how it is rigged to work against poor countries. My friend Yaya Jallow, an economics student in Ghana, wrote this essay in response. It is quite insightful and I though it should be presented to a larger audience. Enjoy.


Response to ‘Trade Rigged Rules’: For the average Non Economist

By Yaya Saidou Jallow

Before going on to the arguments for trade, it would be best to start off by defining trade and to ask, what is the purpose of trade? We need to understand these two points in order to fully appreciate the arguments below. The main problem with the Oxfam argument is that the author either does not know or ignores the true purpose of trading and thus ends up making arguments that, though on the surface look valid, looked at more closely will reveals its flaws.

I won’t bother you with the textbook definition of trade; trade is just the exchange of goods (or goods for money) between two parties. Now the question to ask is, why do we trade? Can’t we just produce everything we want? No we can’t, but even if we could, it wouldn’t make sense to do so. This is because there will always be goods which others can produce at a lower cost than we could. Thus it would make sense that we produce goods that we can produce relatively cheaper than others, sell it to them and use the proceeds to buy the goods we do not produce from the others at a cheaper price. An example, assume Gambia and Senegal are the only two countries In the world (unrealistic I know and they’d probably even try to invade us). Also assume that there are only two goods the citizens of these countries need, food and clothing. Gambians and Senegalese could try and produce both goods for themselves or Gambia could produce one of the two and Senegal could produce the other. By specializing and producing only one good, Gambia and Senegal could produce more of the two goods than they could separately.

	Food	Clothing
Gambia	3	6
Senegal	5	5

The table above is a hypothetical illustration of how much Gambia and Senegal can produce from a labor hour. In The Gambia for example one labor hour will produce either 3 units of food and 6 units of clothing. In Senegal one hour of labor will give you 5 units of food and clothing respectively. Notice that in this situation, the total amount of food produced between the two countries is 8 and that for clothing 11. Now if Gambia decided to focus solely on clothing and let Senegal focus on food, then Gambia can produce 12 units of clothing per hour and Senegal can produce 10 units of food. The sum of these will be greater than each country trying to produce everything.

Though the assumption seems simplistic, it is a very good representation of what goes on in the real world. The model shouldn’t be taken too literarily, countries should not depend on only one product but rather produce the good they have a comparative advantage in (I haven’t defined comparative advantage, didn’t want to get too technical). The basic idea holds though. Now that we know why we trade, we have to ask ourselves what the aim of trading is? The aim of trading is simple, get as much as possible from your trading partner and give him as little as possible (I know sounds grim). I think the previous sentence seems a bit too harsh but an example would clarify this point. When you go to the shop to buy let’s say bread, you don’t tell yourself “I’ll give the shopkeeper as much money as possible and get from him as little as possible”. That’s just crazy but this is what people mean when they say that importing is bad and exporting good. Though they do not know, but that’s what their statement implies. Countries produce goods to meet a demand, that is people want a product and suppliers produce it. The aim of production is not to create jobs, job creation is a by=product of production and trade. When you produce a good and export it, you are creating jobs (something the author of the Oxfam argument supports) but then you are denying your citizens from consuming these goods. The aim is to use the money from the trade to buy goods from the other country at a cheaper price than you would have had you produced it at home. Therein lies the gains from trading. Specialization allows a country to get more goods that was previously possible and at a lower price. This is a win for both producers and consumers. Producers will sell more goods and consumers will be able to get these goods at a lower cost.

Now to the whole reason I even bothered writing:

Dumping

The argument here is that the Western countries subsidize their firms (and farmers) and therefore Western firms have an unfair advantage over African firms. This advantage means that they can produce at a lower cost and sell their products in African markets at cheaper prices than African firms. Western firms go as far as even dumping their products in African countries thereby putting many African firms out of business.

This argument makes a number of contentious assumptions:

1. All (or most) poor people in Africa are farmers
2. In Africa, the welfare of producers is more important than the welfare of consumers

It is true that most of Africa’s population is engaged in farming and most of these farmers produce cash crops, which means they can be severely affected by dumping, but anyone who lives in Africa knows that farmers are not the only segment of the population that are poor. People in a number of occupations are or can be termed as poor, dock workers, market women, laborers are just a few occupations in there Gambia where you can find people who can be termed as poor or almost poor. If the idea is to fight poverty, then don’t these people deserve the same consideration? Or is it that farmers are more important in the society due to some yet to be explained reason?

In economics we are taught that one cannot compare the utilities of two people, it must never be done. Actually it’s a cardinal sin for one to do so. For example, taking one dalasi from a rich person and giving it to a poor person and claiming that the improvement in welfare of the poor person is greater that the decrease in welfare of the rich person and thus society is better off is wrong. We cannot tell how much the rich person and the poor person value money and thus cannot compare their welfare gains and losses. The dumping argument assumes (implicitly) that the loss of farmers (and other African firms) is greater than the gain in welfare of consumers or that farmers lose and consumers do not gain. Both of these assumptions are wrong. On the surface, the dumping argument seems to hold merit but upon closer inspection. It fails to hold up. An example on the dumping process will shed more light.

Going back to our example about Gambia and Senegal, if the Senegalese government decides to subsidize their clothing industry in order to boost their exports of clothing whilst still producing food, the net effect of this is that it would be clothing would be cheaper in Senegal than Gambia and thus Senegalese clothing producers would be able to price Gambian cloth producers out of the market. This has effects in both Gambia and Senegal. First in order to subsidize they will have to raise taxes to pay for the subsidies, the best way to do this would be to tax food producers more or tax consumers. Both of these have effects, the first would raise food prices and the latter would decrease the welfare of consumers. In The Gambia, the subsidies would affect producers of clothing negatively but all consumers of clothing positively. Cheaper imports of clothing would put Gambia clothiers out of business but the cheaper clothes for consumers means that they can use the money saved from cheaper clothing to buy more food (and maybe even more clothing). From this it can be seen that producers’ welfare has decreased whilst the welfare of consumers has increased. As mentioned earlier we cannot compare welfare gains and losses of different people, but from the above example it is clear that dumping is not totally bad for a country, as in most things there are gainers and losers.

Market Access

This argument is seriously flawed, in that tariffs are lower now than they were in the 50s, 60s and 70s yet Asian countries like Japan, China, Singapore and South Korea were able to move from exporting agricultural products to exporting consumer electronics and cars (they had a better educated population than African countries). The Asians succeeded in moving up the ladder with the decks also stacked against them. The issue of exporting primary produce permanently goes beyond just having market access. As I’ll explain in more detail on the next point, the reason for the success of the Asian tigers and the failure of other developing countries was due to the policies that these countries set up in their pursuit of development immediately after gaining independence.

Countries like The Gambia have been given increased market access for their products into the US market with lower tariffs than most countries, yet since then little improvement has occurred in Gambia’s groundnut industry. The problems in developing countries with regards trade is more complicated and the reasons for the problem more domestic than Western.

Forced Liberalization

The Oxfam piece argues that farmers (producers in developing countries) are forced to lift tariffs and other forms of trade barriers and liberalize their markets. Their argument is that developing countries are forced to liberalize whilst Western nations do not. This, the piece states will lead to domestic firms in developing countries being overrun by big multinational corporations, and the most vulnerable of these firms are the infant industries in these developing countries. Infant industries are industries that are fairly recently established. These industries usually requirement some form of protection until the firms in that industry can compete internationally. The argument says that these firms will not grow without protection and thus protecting these industries will create jobs now and in the future and improve exports and/ reduce imports.

As most of the arguments in the piece it seems on the surface to be convincing, what the article fails to mention is that developing countries have already tried to protect their industries at a great cost. Let me just digress a bit for it is necessary to go back in order to have a more complete understanding of this point. After independence (round the 1950s) developing countries were faced with the task of trying to develop their respective countries. This was around the time that Development Economics rose to prominence (some would argue over this but it’s beside the point), and development economists had theories as to the most efficient way a developing country could be developed. There were two main schools of thought, the first believed the import substitution and the second export promotion. These two schools can be termed as a nation looking inwards and looking outwards respectively. The first school believed that for developing countries to develop, they needed to protect their domestic infant industries, from international competition. These countries need to create industries that dealt in the production of capital intensive goods (goods whose production requires machinery, a good example would be Sankung Sillah type businesses), shield them from competition until they were matured then lift the shield. One doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist (or a programmer) to see that this method raises a lot of questions, for example who will determine what industries are worth protecting since not all industries will be protected? What will be the determinant of ‘maturity’ of an industry? Shielding industries from competition has consequences, as in the dumping case, protecting industries means that goods will be produced at a higher cost and consumers have to bare that cost. Is it right for a few business men in society, who are neither farmers nor poor, to benefit from protection at the expense of the rest of society? This was tried by countries like India, Brazil, Nigeria and Ghana and needless to say it failed. The problem with this theory was that it failed to take into account the tendency of producers to take advantage of protection by government. In most of the countries above, businessmen, knowing that they were being protected used their surplus profits to lobby for continued protection (both internationally and domestically) instead of innovating and cutting costs. By the 80s, these firms were seriously inefficient, using technologies that were decades old and producing at costs there way above their international competitors. Removal of protections meant that these companies eventually went out of business.

The second theory says that the fastest way to develop is to promote exports. Countries should start by exporting primary products and as time goes on they can use the excess money from trade to move into exporting new products that require more capital intensive methods of production. This was the route taken by the Southeast Asian countries (Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea) China also followed this method. More than fifty years later, history has shown us that the second theory was more accurate.

Back to the Oxfam piece, forcing countries to liberalize can be very destabilizing, this is because countries that are forced to liberalize are in so much trouble. The trouble is brought about mostly by anti market policies and liberalization when it occurs causes a shock that has effects that last for decades. The Gambia had a Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) in the mid eighties the result was a steep decline in output and income for the country. Incomes did not return to their pre SAP level for another 7 years. The reasons why countries have to (or are forced to) liberalize are numerous and complicated and going into them would just end up making this paper too long.

Well to sum things up, protecting domestic industries does not help developing countries, it’s been tried before and it has failed. Arguing that developing countries should be allowed to protect their domestic industries because Western countries are doing the same is equivalent to arguing that one should fall off a cliff because all of one’s friends are doing so. The reason they might be doing so is because they have parachutes.

Labor Rights

There is a book by a well known Economist called Jeffery Sachs called ‘The end of poverty’, his argument against NGOs like Oxfam that lobby for companies like Nike to raise their wage rates in developing countries is perhaps the best I have seen. His argument is that the women working in the sweat shops work there because they have no other better place to work, if they had they would move jobs. Multinational companies open factories in developing countries because labor is cheap (high unemployment and low education levels) and the workers require minimum training to be able to do the work. Most of the sweat shop workers are women and children, the women use the money from their work to pay for their kids’ schooling, health matters and to take care of the family. Working gives these women independence that they would not have had had the multinational not offered them work.

Arguing that multinationals should raise wage rates would reduce the incentive of these firms to operate in these countries by increasing their labor costs. The result would be less employment opportunities for women in developing countries. The aim of these NGOs to help these women leads to these women being losing their live hoods and dropping further down the social ladder.

Another argument related to the point above, deals with working conditions. The women in these sweat shops are mistreated because they are poor. As cruel as it may sound, this occurs everywhere, businesses have been known to take advantage of people, a good example is in Florida where orchards that grow orange take illegal immigrants from Mexico and pay them below minimum wage and deny them any other benefits that the average American worker gets. This is because the orchard owners know that these people have no choice. The problem can only be solved by the governments of the countries where these sweat shops are located, only they can enforce these policies to make workers environments safer. Workers being taken advantage of is not something new, it has always been the case. This has mostly been solved with legislature from the domestic government demanding better treatment of workers, and not by some foreign government passing some law against it.

Regional Trade Agreements

To some extent this point is true, but given that the WTO negotiations are not yet done and that developing countries are taking it upon themselves to devise agreements between themselves that would benefit them, I think I’ll leave this point until the matter has been fully resolved.

Didn’t think this piece would be so long; hope you’ll find it a bit more enlightening. When it comes to trade, issues are a bit blurred and emotions tend to dominate. It’s a pity because countries could gain so much from trade only if people could realize this.

The Invisible Hands of the Gambian Commerce

Opposite the Mosque on Independence Drive, outside the building that houses the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Employment, there sits a cobbler. Watch, as he deftly inserts a long needle trailing its thread into the side of a leather shoe, and then carefully pulls it out the other side. Around him and on the ground are a pile of such shoes, mouths wide open, waiting to be mended. There is also the other cruft of his trade: the leather patches and sole replacements, the long needles which he uses, spools of (predominantly black and white) thread, tins of polish and brushes. He is a permanent fixture here, like the old men who sit on the other side of the road, Men of the Mosque awaiting the muezzin's call to the next prayer. He is very good at what he does - he will fix a gaping sole to make you swear it is fresh from the factory. He sits with a cloth spread over his lap - it is on this that he places his work. And whilst he works, whilst you wait for him to finish, like all the best tradesmen, he is full of stories, to hold your interest, and make the work seem faster.

Down the road, walking towards the Arch (and, beyond it, the Sea) there is a shop, a local bitik. Outside it a Fula woman, her skin fair, who sits frying pancakes for sale. Around her run her children, two small boys recognizable instantly as hers, by the look of their faces: flat at the sides, triangular almost in appearance, tapering towards the top. Her pancakes are popular with passersby, a brief repast between meals, still hot and drenched in oil, a spoonful of hot sauce added to the top before eating. The children are twins, identical, though it is easy to distinguish between them: one is the crueler, always subjecting the other - the submissive, the perpetual victim - to the most painful contortions of limb and body, so he screams in pain. She will intercede, and stop him, but there are the pancakes to watch. She cannot do it all, at once - the children will learn to fend on their own. They run the streets of Banjul wild, giving as good as they get from the local kids. When the bitik-keeper goes inside to eat, or to pray, she watches the bitik for him, looking up every few moments from raking the pancakes through the hissing oil, and behind her to see if anyone has entered the bitik.

This particular bitik-keeper's family has been here since his father was a young man, and came over from Guinea. He brought his wife, and they stayed, and had children. Soon he became as much a part of this area of the City as any resident, coming to know everyone. There are four other bitiks now, within walking distance of his - but he was here first, and there is a generation - the ones who were young men and women of able body when he first opened up shop - who will still only buy from him, only trusting him, though the others have identical wares. They will go to other shops, when he is closed, but there is none of the familiarity they display in his, the gentle unburdening of complaints and grievances - about their grandchildren and their failing bodies - whilst he sees to their needs. He is an old man now, and his children are grown up - it is their turn to run the shop, something they have been groomed for since they were knee-high, calculating change behind the counter whilst their father took a break to pray, or to sleep, so he could keep shop in the night.

Our cobbler ran away from home when he was but a child, barely a teenager. By his telling it was a great adventure. There is a quiet pride in his tale, this his story of redemption that he will tell anyone who will listen, of liberation from his Quranic teachers from whom he fled repeatedly, and his father who whipped him each time and sent him back when he at last got home, breathless and elated. This went on and on until the father tired of it, and calling all the family together washed his hands of him in public, and left him to his own Fate. All the years in the City have removed any illusions he may have had about urban life, and he speaks of his home and his father, if not with sentimentality, at least without accusation, or shame, or any lingering bitterness. He speaks of them merely as one would speak of the weather, or the state of the country, or of other things one cannot change - without rancor, testing at the same time with a free hand the strength of the thread he just inserted, whether it will hold its leather on the rough roads of Banjul. - Futa, he says, is bigger than Gambia, in its entirety. There are parts of it in Senegal, in Mali, even in Bissau. He spreads apart his palms to show the largeness of it with the space thus created, opening his eyes wide to add to the effect. He has a habit of blinking his eyes more often during pauses in his speech, an act which accentuates his long, feminine eyelashes.

In Banjul alone there are hundreds of bitiks, small one-man shops that sell everything from soap to bread. The majority of these are run by Guinean Pulaars. Within my street block alone there are three, all within two minutes of each other. To open a bitik you need first to rent a large room, empty, devoid of furnishings. Down the center of this room you will have a carpenter create a custom wooden partition, which has on one side wooden ledges nailed across it (these will be for holding your stock), and on the other side is smooth and empty, like a wall. The partition is then set up across the center of the room, neatly dividing it in half (and leaving space, of course, for passage between the two halves). One half of the room is your new shop, and the remaining space will be your bedroom, where you and your family will sleep (hence the wall). A wire will be put up between the end of the partition and the wall directly opposite it, and on this wire a curtain will be strung, creating privacy in your bedroom, from the prying eyes of your (future) clientele. Finally, for security, you will need a large metal door, with two bars crossed over the front when it closes, held in place by stiff, unyielding padlocks.

In the bitik opposite my house (the one I would traditionally call "my bitik") the bitik-keeper lives with his wife, and younger brother. He is teaching his brother - who recently arrived from Guinea - the local money, and how to make change in it. Also: how to be polite to customers, and call them "boss", so they keep coming back; how to measure oil, or vinegar, or bleach, into a container; how to wrap amphora, the little hand-rolled cigarette which are so popular with the youth. His brother is a bit slow, and sometimes, when the day is particularly hot, the bitik-keeper yells at him. Eventually he will leave the bitik to him, perhaps opening a new one in another part of the City, perhaps going back to Guinea for a while, to be with his extended family again. His wife is pregnant, and daily he watches her with concern as she lies in the back-room, looking up at the ceiling, or sitting at the door to the bitik, leaning over the gutter now and again to spit (her spit trails lines of sadness, I imagine, being discharged by her body: I have never seen her smile).

If Globalization is a world religion, then the bitik-keepers are the local priests of an arcane sect within it. Bitiks are packed to the ceiling with cartons and cartons of goods, from all over the world: the blue of packets of Freedom menstrual pads, the yellow of Cerelac tins. Peak Milk and Omela, vying for the faithful's purchase. Sardines and canned beef from Brazil, toothpaste from India, slippers from Senegal, shaving razors with advertising copy written in exotic Arabic script on their packets. And the more immediate domestic needs of the stay-at-home women: oil, and vinegar, and rice, and sugar, all measured out by the cup- or tin-ful. The view of him obscured by a fly's eye barricade of metal mesh with large holes in it and a small wooden door set in the middle to admit payment and pass out goods - a simple but effective security system - the bitik-keeper-priest stands behind a counter, waiting for clients. And they come - in the morning to buy fresh bread, and akara and mayonnaise, and teabags and the other foods of breakfast. Soft drinks, at lunch time, and water. Maggi and Mayonnaise, Ketchup and Mustard. There are brands which are staple, and have been around forever, so that the brand name comes to be a synonym for the product type - Freedom, Peak (and, to a lesser extent, Omela), Moon Tigers (in the latter case the brand name far outlasting the product). And there are others which change every few months, to be replaced by new brands purporting to be of better quality and less price (remember Loppy, Jumkin, Davida, Foster Clarke's - all at one point or another the concentrated juice powder of choice for the discerning Gambian household).

Outside the sun is hot [the Gambian sun is never anything else but hot, which makes it seem surprising that there are not more synonyms to describe the hot-ness of the sun, in the local languages. Surprising, that is, until you come to live under it: then you understand: this particular display of heat defies the attempts of language to describe it, not because it is too nuanced, too strange, but because it is what it is, and nothing more. The sun is hot - what more is there to say?]. Just inside the Ministry of Trade is a conveniently located tree, which grows up snuggled against the metal railings, so the shade it projects shields the cobbler from the sun. This is how he can sit here the whole afternoon, and not be driven to conclude his business and hastily flee indoors, like everyone else. He has a small stool, on which he sits. Next to this is a four-person wooden bench, for his clients. - My friend said to me, get this amount of money, let us leave at this time, and go to this place, where we can take a bus. The money I got from my mother's purse, and the time by sleeping outside of my house that night so I would not be missed, and we met at the agreed place early the next morning. The cobbler's hands as he speaks seem to be detached from his narrative, their action automatic and removed from the conversation: testing the leather siding of the shoe, holding the needle poised over it, pressing - just so! - to lead the black thread into the leather, the needle's thin silver head emerging on the other side. - On the bus the driver would not take us because we were too young. Then he would not take us because we did not have enough money. We begged and lied and pleaded with him, until he, impatient to depart, let us board. When people pass he raises a hand to greet them, and asks about their family, and does this and resumes the story so seamlessly it is as if the greetings are part of the telling. He seems to know everyone, asking after their homes and ailments, drawing smiles from the most dour of faces.

The large warehouses, the importer's stores, are near the Port. It is here that the goods come from the Port, when they have arrived from other countries - and it is here that the local shopkeepers come once a week, to order what they need. To stretch our Globalization-as-religion analogy a bit farther, this is their Mecca, or their Rome. Keeping a bitik is a delicate balancing act, keeping in your mind at all times track of stock levels, and what needs to be replenished. What sells, and what does not - what to get more of, because demand outweighs the supply you have in stock, and exactly how much of it to get so as not to end up with an unneeded surplus, slowly deteriorating, until it expires and you have to throw it out. In addition you must possess an almost uncanny ability to gauge the public mood, to predict what will be in demand next, what particular chocolate the kids will buy, and keep buying.

The Pulaar are present in almost every country in Africa, from Senegal to the Sudan. You will find them in Nigeria, Togo, Burkina Faso, Benin and Mali. In each of these countries they are a minority, but one which has learnt the local languages and the ways of the indigenous culture - whilst never losing their own - integrating so well that they become the most successful small traders, all the while with their minds left behind, at home: Guinea. [this phrase - "mind left behind" - borrowed from the Wollof, very useful in describing the condition of not merely remembering the place you were born in, but going beyond this, as if you had left your mind behind when you left, so now even as you wander the Earth your mind is at home, calling out to you to return].

In traditional Pulaar culture, the cow is an animal of great importance. It is a measure of wealth and status, and a source of meat, and milk. Cows were handed down from generation to generation, and also used for dowries. Sometimes, in a car on the Banjul highway, one will pass a Peul herder leading a long line of cows, majestic (or perhaps merely stupid?) animals which will not increase their speed for any man or machine, and for which traffic will have to stop until they have passed.

The bitik keeper plays many roles. There is a drawer, where he keeps his money - he is the cashier and accountant. Behind the drawer, in plain sight, often as not there can be found a catapult or other similar weapon, warning would-be thieves - he is the day watchman. He sleeps in the bitik at night, in the partitioned area in the back with his ears cocked for any sound that will draw him from his sleep and rising reach for the catapult - he is the night-watchman. His family sleep with him in the tiny back room, his wife and the little children. When he goes out, or takes a nap in the afternoon his wife runs the shop in his absence. And when he is old his children will take over from him, or other family members from Guinea will arrive, to pick up where he will leave off. It would be easy to draw parallels between the keeping of cows, and the keeping of bitiks - the steadfastness and labor which must go into each enterprise, the handing down of property from father to son, from brother to brother.

When I was a kid there was a bitik next to my house where I spent my days. The bitik-keeper - whose name was Amadou - was the funniest adult I knew, and he never said a harsh word, or got angry. He wore netted undershirts, his skin showing through the holes in them, a different color everyday. He kept me entertained with a long line of jokes and pranks (including the "fake knife" trick, which involves showing someone a knife, moving the knife behind their back, and then sticking your little finger held straight and rigid into their back so they believe it is the knife. To my young mind this was the epitome of all practical jokes. I terrorized my screaming little sisters with this trick for months before they finally caught on). And in return I was loyal to him: what little pocket money I had I spent at his shop, buying sweets ("kebba damfaa", "minti bu nyuul" and even, in my times of greater bounty - such as during Tobaski - "condem mlik"). My favorite joke was when he pretended to be an old Chinese Kung Fu master, showing me silly karate moves which had me in convulsions. He also made really good omelette sandwiches - everyday at break-time high school students would come to his shop, and he'd be kept busy for an hour frying, slicing, mayonais-ing, ketchup-ing, and cracking them up with his witty insights.

Any other cobbler would have finished fixing the shoe by now, a silent, efficient job to be paid for and forgotten. But not him: his work is tied to his narrative - one cannot come to an end without the other. In this way, in later days, when you look at the shoe as you apply polish to it in the morning it will bring to mind his tale, and a rueful smile. - We traveled for many hours on the bus, he says - the needle the bus, the thread the passengers - and at last we came to a place where the driver told us we could all get off, for food, and to pray. We went into a canteen, my friend and I, and bought one bowl of rice which we shared - even this seemed too great an expense. The needle has emerged now, at the other end of the shoe, and he holds it between finger and thumb, motioning with it as he speaks. His eyes glimmer for a moment, a laugh passing through them, and he smiles. - We did not feel full - far from it - but we knew we had to save our money. We did not know what awaited us in Dakar. After we were done we asked the canteen keeper if he would give us water. But he had run out - all he had were drinks, for sale. He laughs, out loud this time. - Drinks! As if we had money to throw around. So I went in the back of the canteen, and taking up an ablution kettle I put it to my mouth, drinking deeply. - But that is for performing the ablution!, my friend exclaimed. - Is it not good water? Will it not satiate our taste?, I asked him. I held it out, and he took it from me, and drank as I had, until the water ran down his chin. And we both laughed, and went back to the bus.

Not all Peul who come to the country choose to keep bitiks. Becoming a seller of oranges requires less up-front investment: one only needs a wheelbarrow and a pen-knife, and also some small capital to buy the first wheelbarrow-full of the fruit. With a little extra money, you can also get a radio, which keeps you company during the long hours at the side of the road - it is a slow trade, and one which requires patience. A wheelbarrow is like a poor-man's bitik, with the added advantage that you can move around with it, be completely mobile and not tied to one place. An orange costs only a few dalasis - it is probably the least expensive fruit in the Gambia. There are orange wheelbarrows everywhere you go, usually by the sides of roads, manned by old Guineans and young, waiting for thirsty passersby. Sometimes they are all in a row, accepting competition and a decrease in overall sales for companionship.

There are two main schools of orange peeling. The first, the "chip" (imagine an artist chipping away at a wood block) is carried out by holding the golden (or dark green, as it were) orange in one hand, and chipping away at it with a pen-knife with the other, until the white nakedness of the orange's true self is revealed. The chip works away at the sides - afterwards there will be some peel left on the top and bottom of the orange - these must be cut away with the penknife. By the end of it the orange peel is reduced to a collection of short, thin slices. This is the chip method's main difference with the method of the second school of orange peeling: the twirl (a.k.a "the 360", a.k.a. "the snake"). The twirl begins by setting the orange against one edge of a sharp penknife. Then, whilst the penknife is held firmly in position with one hand (one may wrap a handkerchief around one's pen-knife hand, if one's palms have a propensity to sweatiness), the other hand rotates the orange, at the same time moving it up the length of the blade. This movement sheds the skin of the orange, exposing the white and creating a long, unbroken peel. It is a beautiful technique, when done right - it is also one that requires more practice than the chip. (Do not confuse the twirl with the "faux twirl", a third technique which can be carried out by just about anyone, and which is what most people use when they peel an orange: moving the penknife across the surface of the orange, instead of the orange across the blade. The faux twirl can also create unbroken orange peels - these are not, however, works of art, but merely cheap imitations, children at play with paint and canvas in contrast with the work of a true surrealist). The wheelbarrow serves another purpose - gathering the orange peelings. These are sold off to Senegalese, who take them across the border and sell them to exporters, who send them off to Europe and America. Dried orange peels can also be used as kindling for lighting fires.

My bitik-keeper is reading the Quran, sitting on a bench behind the counter, when I go into the bitik. - How is the family?, he asks me, getting up. In recent months we have gotten friendlier, exchanging pleasantries, even the occasional joke (or rather: I have become more receptive to his attempts to exchange pleasantries, not choosing to see so much behind his courteousness a thinly veiled attempt to sell me things I do not need). - All is well, I reply. - Good, he says, and tell your father that my wife has delivered. On Monday. - That is good, I remember to say, what was it? - A boy, he replies, smiling at me. I nod. He looks gaunt, and lacking of sleep, as if it was he who had delivered new life. His time here is almost done. Soon he too will be gone. His brother - the heir apparent - is nowhere in sight. Perhaps he is at the hospital with the new mother. His sister washes clothes in a plastic tub by the side of the gutter, wringing them with both hands, turning the black surface of the gutter white with soap suds.

On the day of the naming ceremony all the bitik-keepers and their wives from the neighborhood come. The mother is dressed in bright colors, and holds the new baby in her arms, wrapped up in soft, white cloth, so that only its pink face is visible, curled into a toothless yawn; the father in a plain purple kaftaan, moving amongst the guests, being of service to them. The ceremony is held in the main house that the bitik is an appendix of, a concession from the landlady, so it would not have to be held out on the street. The new baby is shaved and given a new name - Muhammad - and there is much joy and laughter. A small goat is killed. Everyone converses loudly and freely in Peul, and a modest lunch is cooked and served, with drinks. Afterwards when everyone else is gone, the new mother sits with her in-laws outside the shop, all still dressed up, watching as her husband's sister stirs something cooking in a pot on a charcoal stove set on one of the heavy stone covers of the gutter. The baby is passed around, and everyone exclaims over it, and makes silly-baby-sounds, and funny faces.

- And at last we reached Dakar, the cobbler says, his pace of work increasing - the fixing of the shoe is almost done now. - And there, waiting for us, was the greatest challenge we had faced yet. A man, from my family home in Futa, recognized us as we got off the bus. His eyes widen, his hands are held suspended over the shoe. He stops speaking for a moment, looking up, a simulation of the terror he felt then in his face now. - He grabbed us by the collars, and asked what we were doing so far from home, on our own. I did not know what to say! Finally I blurted out a story about how we were with our father. Your father?, he asked me, Then take me to him. He let go of my collar - and my friend's - and without a word to each other we both ran off as fast as our feet would carry us into the crowd, his angry shouts behind us.

One day I go to the bitik, and the bitik-keeper is not there. It is his sister who sells me the mints I came for, whilst her brother makes another customer an omelette sandwich for dinner. I don't ask them where he and his wife have gone. Perhaps they will be back, in a few days, appearing behind the counter and calling me boss like they had never left. Sitting at the door to the shop is a new Peul I have not seen here before. He wears a Barcelona T-shirt, and a cap turned sideways. Leaning against the bench next to him is a large wooden display case, stacked full of DVDs in plastic jackets, with lurid cover images. "DOLPH vs RAMBO: The Best of the Fight". "LOST Season 3 (ALL COMPLETE)". "BEST OF WESTERN ROMANCE (42-IN-1)". - How much are these for?, I ask him. - Which one do you want? I point at one at random (on the cover, 50 Cent, and a promise to hear the "Best America Music Ever"). - Hundred, he says, in a tone that tells me he will sell it to me for fifty.

Whilst the bitiks are run by older Peuls and their families, the younger ones mostly take to the streets, selling oranges and shirts, cigarrettes and matches and mints, and, lately, DVDs. These days you can buy any movie you want for a D100, barely a month after it is out in cinemas. The quality is bad (what else would you expect, cramming 42 movies unto one DVD), the cover designs lurid and outrageous (and obviously of Asian influence), but do not belittle these pirates: they are the first (and only) front in Hollywood's local battle against the other -woods, especially Nollywood, which has grown exponentially in the last few years, with a Nigerian Movie rental shop in every major town in the country, and whole households staying up all night on Nigerian Movie-thons. Without them the Nigerian movie could very well replace the American movie as the escape fantasy medium of choice, and then what would happen to the myth of the white man as eternally strong and invincible, in a war able to destroy whole countries alone and without any external aid, walking away with only a few minor bruises and a background theme song?

Sometimes, the janitor from the mosque comes across the road and sits on the cobbler's bench. The cobbler makes him attaya, and they drink, and speak. He does this now, crossing the road with his kaftan waving behind him, taken off in the heat and left to hang on a window of the mosque. The mosque has a long and dignified history, stretching back to colonial times - and now it is being expanded, a golden dome added to the top. The janitor is covered in cement, from the work inside. He sits, and looks at the traffic - he has heard the cobbler's story of origin a hundred times. - We spent almost a year in Dakar, and slowly I learnt the trade of the shoe, how to polish, how to repair. Every month I took a little for my food, and my board, and the rest I kept in a tin can. And then at last we decided to go home, to visit. He stops work (which is almost completed, anyway) for a moment, holding the shoe aloft, a grin showing his teeth, large and white. - We bought presents for everyone. You should have seen me, in a new pair of jeans, fresh from the city - everyone had so many questions. And my mother! He stops, and his grin does the rest of the work of describing the home coming, the excitement, the happiness, his eyes contain a memory of tears shed, perhaps on the occasion, perhaps in his first re-telling of it. Even the disinterested janitor turns to smile at him. And what better ending for a story, even if in real life the story went on, and is still going on, sitting out here on the road repairing shoes for strangers and missing his mind where he left it, in Futa? Knowing when to stop, to create an ending - this is the mark of every good storyteller.

Almost eight years later, when I was in high school, I met Amadou again. It was on the street, and we both recognized each other. - How you have grown, he said - he was exactly the same, down to the trademark netted under-shirt he always wore. He asked a few questions - I was in a rush, or unable to speak, to ask him where he was, or what he did now. The conversation went nowhere, was only his smiles and my nods. After a while he shook my hand with a final smile, and walked away. I haven't seen him since.