Tamale

Our reporter Julia Littmann is an experienced Freiburg cyclist, but the bike paths in Tamale are different.

My bicycle is here! Of all days on the day that my colleague Zakaria Alhassan has to hastily write the dramatic front-page story for the Saturday Daily Graphic and then send it off by fax since the Internet has failed again, of all days on the day that he has to deliver a detailed report on the shortage of physicians in the Northern Region as a big article in the Regional News section and also has to pick up the kids at school, on this of all days he brings "l'image" to me in the office. Black and handsome: MY bicycle.

Tamale’s reputation as a cyclers’ city is just as famous as Freiburg’s, however the bicycle lanes are so hopelessly multifunctional that a tour to town is fraught with far more surprises than, say, the ride from Vauban to the theatre.

First of all, the generous three to four- metre wide bike lane is separated from the street by a little barrier that is easily a foot high. This means there is no escaping when a handful of lean cattle rather unexpectedly come trotting towards you or when all of a sudden an entire school form pours onto the bike path, all decked in tiny purple and white plaid, girls in frocks and boys in shirts. Fact is, just about everything that is not automobile traffic uses this kilometre-long verge of pavement.

Street peddlers clamp their stands with telephone cards, plastic pails and papayas accurately on the edge, all pedestrians – with and without burdens balanced on their heads – use it, children, cats, a few scrawny dogs, lots of chickens with even more chicks and – everywhere and absolutely resolutely – goats. All public spaces actually belong to them above all others – and private spaces as well, if they are not impenetrably fenced in.

Consequently, bicycling – similarly to driving a car on the adjacent car lane – involves nonstop slaloming. Wondrously, it always goes well in the bike lane; the chaos functions flawlessly, although most of the cute bikes have neither lights nor brakes and although all of them somehow manoeuvre in all directions past one another.

Over in the car lane, on the other hand, there is always crashing and crunching; it would seem that all-over-the-place freestyle motion is easier to handle without an engine.

There is a minor handicap on long Bolga Road into town: the dusty road has a very slight ascent, no more than Habsburgerstrasse going into town in Freiburg. However, under the torrid sun, every trip to the centre is like scaling a mountain hors catégorie. “Up” in the city, sopping wet, you get off your bike between hordes of chicks and mounds of melons, smile dripping yet benevolently to all sides and assiduously slip away into the office refrigerator. There, for the rest of the day you can sit shivering under the freezing air conditioning and rejoice when there’s yet another power failure –and again in the evening on the much easier downhill ride home.