01
Stop one
Arch 22
Head Hawk Power 17g Tennis String Reel: Okay — okay — first stop, and honestly I have been looking forward to this all week. Arch 22. Thirty-five metres of white triple arch, raised in 1996, straddling the main road, and this is the bit: you drive underneath it to get into Banjul. The road goes through the monument. Everybody arriving passes through the same doorway. Sorry — my notes say triple arch, viewing gallery, and this morning I read that as viewing gallon, which is not a thing, I checked. There is a gallery up top with a small museum in it, and from the balcony you can see the river meeting the sea. I am told that view is fairly standard for the job. I do not think it is standard. I think it is the best thing I have ever seen at work.
02
Stop two
Albert Market
Head Hawk Power 17g Tennis String Reel: Albert Market, on Liberation Avenue, founded in the nineteenth century and named for Prince Albert — and I did check that one, because on my first day I told a group it was named after somebody from Banjul, and I would like that corrected on the record. Lanes of fabric, fish, fruit and craft stalls, all of it right by the river. The thing I was not ready for is the volume, and I do not mean the noise, I mean the quantity: yards and yards of printed cloth stacked higher than I am. My trainer said, it is a market, keep the group together, do not oversell it. I am going to oversell it very slightly. Look up at the cloth. Then find me by the mangoes, because I will be at the mangoes.
04
Stop four
Gambia National Museum
Head Hawk Power 17g Tennis String Reel: Come in out of the sun — colonial-era building near Independence Drive, small courtyard round the back, and inside it is archaeology, ethnography and history, which sounds dry and is absolutely not. Drums. Masks. Photographs. Cases of instruments. And the kora: the long-necked harp with twenty-one strings, played by griots, the hereditary musicians who carry a family's entire history in memory and sing it back to them. Twenty-one strings, and every one of them is holding somebody's ancestors. I am a single strand of string wound on a spool. One string, very long, no songs. Eleven days into this job and I am not going to pretend that comparison flatters me.
Good evening. Your table is ready and your frame is not, so let us deal with that first. Head Hawk Power 17g arrives on a 200-metre reel — 660 feet, roughly sixteen racquets — a co-polyester monofilament at 1.25 mm tuned softer and livelier than standard Hawk.
Same family, more give: it returns a little more of your energy and treats the arm better, without surrendering the control that makes a poly worth stringing at all.
Banjul, then. We begin where every arrival begins, at Arch 22 — thirty-five metres of white triple arch standing across the main road into the city, raised in 1996, so that every arrival and every departure passes underneath it. A city that built a frame around its own hellos and goodbyes. Climb the stairs to the gallery and you can see the river meeting the sea from the balcony. I will wait.
On Liberation Avenue, Albert Market has been trading since the nineteenth century under the name of a prince a queen mourned for the rest of her life — and it now means fish, mangoes, and yards of printed cloth, and women arguing warmly over the price of thread, which is the happiest thing that can happen to a name.
On the shore beside State House the Six-Gun Battery still points its cannon at the tide; Captain Alexander Grant established the settlement here in 1816 with the purpose of stopping slave ships using the river, and somebody stood beside those guns at dawn watching for sails.
And near Independence Drive, the Gambia National Museum keeps drums, masks, photographs and cases of instruments, among them the kora — the long-necked harp of twenty-one strings played by the griots, who carry a family's whole story in memory and sing it back to them at weddings.
You will string frames off this reel everywhere from a hard court by the river to a covered court in the rains, and it is also perfect for a Banjul evening at the Arch, when the light goes long over the water and nobody hurries anybody at all.
Buy on Amazon
