Today we’re going to have our first guest posting.

Ben Curtis: AP Photo Editor for West Africa, good friend and one-time roommate. He’s traveled all around Africa from the palms of Zanzibar to the mortars of Liberia. Good guy, funny accent.

See, the kids here are into their own modern pop. They laugh at the old school much like kids back in the States laugh at their dads for listening to Steely Dan. So without further ado, here’s Ben with a pop-filled contemporary night-club hit straight from the depths of small-town Sierra Leone…

In the lexicon of entertainment hotspots throughout the world, the remote diamond-mining town of Koidu in eastern Sierra Leone, near the Guinean border, is unlikely to feature all that highly.

But it was there in June that I found myself for a few days with a colleague and in the course of our work there, ended up at one of the hottest nightclubs I have ever been to. Hot in every way.

The place was small and dark with no air-conditioning, no ventilation, no windows, and was packed with about a hundred Sierra Leoneans flailing about on the packed dancefloor as their condensed sweat ran down the walls of the sauna-like room. Within five minutes in that heat and humidity every item of clothing we were wearing, including our shoes, was drenched in sweat.

But we stayed. As oppressive as the heat was, the place rocked. The dancefloor was pounding with a mixture of young guys and girls out to lift themselves up from the desperation of the town, diamond dealers, traders, and a few shady-looking white “businessmen” types standing in the corner looking very out of place indeed. The common bond between all was the desire to dance ourselves stupid.

During my stay in Sierra Leone, all the nightclubs and radio stations were playing this song, and when the DJ put it on, the whole place was completely jumping. Sadly I never found out the name of it, or who it was by, but when I got back to Freetown I managed to find a copy on a homemade, unmarked CD in the streetmarket. I decided to call it “Tell me if you want me to go” based on the chorus.

If you want a feel of the area, I have a photo gallery called “Sierra Leone Diamonds” on my website - www.bpcurtis.com

-Ben

Tell Me If You Want Me To Go