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Five drummers showered the audience with the perspiration flying from their blurred hands as they struggled to bring enough air through their nostrils, their mouths full of wadded up francs stuffed there by the appreciative audience. The singer had long ago lost himself in the driving beat and the two guitarists were struggling to keep up. The 10-piece band had worked itself into a frenzy and the crowd was loving it, but it was all too much for the nightclub's power system. Just as the band reached the climax, the lights died and the amplified instruments cut out. The drummers, however, didn't miss a beat and neither did the throbbing crowd.

Here in Dakar, the youthful tribes of Senegal have gathered, and they're hunting for a good time. The Senegalese capital is to French West Africa what New York is to North America or Paris is to Western Europe. It's the cultural capital of the region, drawing intellectuals, artists, entrepreneurs and anyone from a small place with a dream to make it big. And like most cultural centres, the city has a soundtrack. New York has Broadway show tunes, Paris has the warbles of Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf. Dakar has mbalax.

Music lovers have long ago discovered the enchantment of mbalax, Senegal's original brand of pop music. A vibrant concoction of Latin and Caribbean influences driven by the rhythms of African drums, mbalax (pronounced em-ba-lach) was made popular in the 1980s by Youssou N'Dour and brought to Western audiences through his collaborations with the likes of Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon.

Others have followed, and mbalax artists such as Baaba Maal, Thione Seck, Cheikh Lo and N'Dour now frequently tour North America.

It's only recently, however, that Western tourists have begun to frequent Senegal. Most toubabs (as foreigners are known here) arrive at the airport, dutifully visit the slave house on Dakar's Gorée Island, then escape the city for the charming colonial town of St. Louis to the north or to the Atlantic coast beaches to the south. The capital itself seems to do its best to push tourists away. It's choked with exhaust and in perpetual gridlock during daylight hours.

But scratch Dakar's grimy urban veneer and you'll strike a cosmopolitan core centred around a rich nightlife driven by the mbalax beat.

In most mbalax bands, at least half the musicians are percussionists, and the common thread among all styles is the interplay between the sabar (a bass drum of goat hide strung across carved mahogany) and the more distinctive tama (a tiny hour-glass shaped drum squeezed under the player's armpit to change its pitch). Known as the talking drum, the tama was originally used to communicate between villages before cellphones, but now gives mbalax its defining sound.

The mbalax beat is unavoidable in Senegal; blaring from the tinny tweeters of a passing bush taxi, the booming bass of a market merchant or through the static of an AM radio strung around the neck of one of the city's ubiquitous porters. While the beat is everywhere, the full energy of the music is felt only by those who see it performed live.

I arrived in Dakar after two months in West Africa, just as I was turning the last pages of Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, by Mungo Park, the Scotsman who in 1798 became the first Westerner to explore the interior of what is now Senegal and return to tell the tales.

And so it was with the gumption of early travellers such as Park that I set out to discover Dakar after dark. Like Park, who relied on slaves, salt merchants, native travellers and other locals to guide him on his journey through uncharted territory, I needed someone to take me deep into Dakar's nightlife. So I sought out Alyoune Wade, better known across Senegal as DJ Prince. After a nap -- Saturday night out here doesn't usually start until early Sunday morning -- I headed out to DJ Prince's home to have dinner with his wife and children.

If you're not fortunate enough to be invited to eat in a Senegalese home, two places across from Dakar's Cheikh Anta Diop University serve up live music and West African dishes with an French flair to a mix of locals and toubabs. Run by a French woman and a Senegalese man, Just4U offers a multilingual library, rooms for rent and a large breezy patio dining room around a small stage. After eating spicy fried rice and fish with his inquisitive wife and shy son, DJ Prince and I started our night at 11 p.m. next door at Central Park, which offers similar food in a more formal dining room and also has nightly live music on their patio stage.

We were there to see Cheikh Lo. His unique brand of mbalax is a departure from the pur et dure (pure and hard) sound that dominates the genre. Some mbalax artists, like Lo, wouldn't be out of place at a jazz festival, while others have more in common with Latin dance bands. Many artists, such as N'Dour, are descendants of griots, West Africa's minstrel class of praise singers who today recite folk tales and impromptu narratives on the streets and in markets for spare change and at important social events such as weddings and naming ceremonies.

Lo isn't a griot, but in a nod to the Senegal's rich musical tradition, Omar Bassoum started the night with a set of traditional tales and tributes to Senegal's past in an haunting style of storytelling song. Sung in Wolof, the meaning was lost on me, but I imagined I was listening to some of the same tales that often lifted Park's spirits during his travels.

Lo's set, however, was far from anything Park had heard. In a flowing white boubou with thick locks coming from under his wool cap down to his waist, he took the stage at midnight with a full band. You have to experience it to understand. Sparse at first, the crowd had grown to standing room only by the third song, and we could have easily spent the night here, surrounded by tourists and locals tapping their toes and bobbing their heads to the music. But DJ Prince and I were headed for more adventurous locales as Saturday night turned into Sunday morning.

Most mbalax artists follow a familiar path to stardom in Senegal. They start out as teenagers, playing neighbourhood parties and weddings. If they gain a little popularity, a nightclub in their hometown or neighbourhood might hire them as the house band, and they'll play every weekend for months or years. If their following continues to grow, they might release a cassette and a music video for local airplay and then move on to become a house band at one of the bigger clubs in Dakar and release CDs for the local market. If they grow even more popular, they might open their own club or play larger concerts halls and begin touring elsewhere in Africa and around the world to support an internationally released album.

DJ Prince, 37, and I followed this path backward, stopping in first at a concert hall before hitting one of Senegal's most popular clubs and ending up in the neighbourhood joint where Prince got his start as a DJ and another promising musician was gaining a following.

Concert-hall events can be hard to find, as they're only advertised in the local language on radio. Asking around in bars or at music vendors at the markets will lead you to some.

Or try the casino by the airport and the downtown headquarters of Senegal's national television station known as the Pyramide Culturelle, which often hosts shows.

That's where we found Omar Pen around midnight, playing to a half-empty hall under bright television lights. It wasn't that Pen isn't popular, DJ Prince explained, but most Senegalese can't afford concert-hall ticket prices and prefer the cheaper cover charges at nightclubs.

Four clubs dominate the Dakar scene, with cover charges between $7.50 to $12, which may include a drink. Décor takes a back seat to the music, and if you're not on the dance floor, there's no other place to be. The only appreciable difference between the four is what's on stage.

N'Dour plays weekends at his own club, Thiossane, when he's not touring abroad, as does Thione Seck at Kili. However, both clubs were closed when I visited Dakar last March, shut down temporarily because of overcrowding, a great concern for authorities in Senegal ever since the overcrowded passenger ferry MS Joola capsized and sank in an Atlantic wind storm off Senegal's coast in September, 2002, killing nearly 1,900 people on a boat built to carry 550. The house band at the other most-popular venues, Yeungouléne and Sun Set Sahel, changes every few months so ask around or drop by the club during the day and look for posters advertising what's on that night.

We stopped in at Sun Set Sahel. While the fashions on the dance floor were dominated by American urban chic, the music on stage is strictly mbalax. Young women in hip-hugging designer jeans and belly-baring T-shirts grooved next to young men who looked like they stepped about of a hip-hop video.

I, on the other hand, hadn't packed club wear for my trip to West Africa, and felt a little square in Tilley pants with the zip-off legs, European hiking boots and a quick-drying Mountain Equipment Co-op shirt. However, unlike Park, who drew ridicule and fascination during his travels in West Africa dressed as a proper English gentleman, my out-of-place attire didn't seem to attract much notice, and neither did the fact that I was the only white face in the club.

Everyone was too absorbed in the beat. It was just after 1 a.m., and Asane Ndiaye was just heating up on stage. All the attention was on the music, but not really on the band. Although the dance floor throbbed in approval, there was no applause between songs. DJ Prince explained that these people were here every weekend and knew every song, treating the band more like a DJ. Ndiaye barely stopped to catch his breath before plowing into another song, and would continue non-stop for three hours without playing a cover tune.

I was just starting to get my hiking boots moving on the dance floor, but Prince said there was one more place he wanted to show me. I suggested Yeungouléne. "More of the same," he said, which would have been fine with me. But these were the haunts of Dakar's hippest crowd, and he wanted to take me to a place where working folks went for a good time. He wanted to show me to where he got his start.

Quick cab rides had shuttled us from venue to venue, but I knew we were heading farther afield when Prince started negotiating our cab fare in increments of 1,000 francs instead of 100. He took me to the suburban Dakar neighbourhood of Guédiawaye and to Le Ravin, the local nightclub. This was Dakar's Harlem, a poor working-class suburb and a seedbed of the city's music scene.

The cover charge here is in the hundreds, not thousands of francs, making it more accessible to ordinary Senegalese, who on average earn about $685 per household a year, according to World Vision. We entered a long corridor of a white-stucco apartment building and emerged on a terrace out back under a thatched awning. Where Sun Set Sahel was stifling, a cooling sea breeze wafted through Le Ravin.

Prince started his career spinning records between sets at Le Ravin after some success Dj-ing street parties, and many of Dakar best-known artists began attracting crowds here.

Newcomer Ives Niang could barely fit on stage in front of five drummers and the rest of his 10-piece band. The crowd was crammed even tighter against the stage. Where the club-goers downtown were dressed strictly for MTV, here flowing African boubous shared the dance floor with tight tops and tighter jeans.

There were, in fact, two shows. One on stage and one on the dance floor, were the moves borrowed as much from traditional dance as from music videos. At times, the two shows merged, with a dancer storming the stage to battle her backside beat-for-beat with a drummer, each trying to outdo the other with the audience coming out the winner. The crowd was not stingy with the applause, offering it up for energetic solos and after each song. The more appreciative stuffed wadded up francs into the drummers' mouths.

It was here that the stage show overpowered the power system, and it was here that I put my notebook down and joined the dance floor until, after countless encores, Niang finally made it off the stage a little after 4 a.m. When you've given up on the evening's pursuits, you can join the other unsuccessful denizens of the night at La Boule, the closest thing to an after-hours club in a country without last call. I arrived around 7 a.m. to join prostitutes who haven't picked up, taxi drivers off shift, crippled beggars counting coins and other bleary-eyed clubbers here to chase down pizza and cigarettes with ice-cold ¾-litre beers served from a freezer chest.

The sun had been up a few hours when I finally called it a night. In the end, I fared a good deal better than Park. He made it out of West Africa alive, but barely, having been diminished by imprisonment, illness, starvation and exertion. I hadn't suffered anything two extra-strength painkillers and 14 hours of sleep couldn't remedy.

Pack your bags

GETTING THERE

Air France has daily flights from Toronto and Montreal with Paris stopovers.

Travellers are required to carry proof of yellow fever and meningitis vaccination.

GETTING AROUND

Gridlock is endemic during the day, but the city centre is compact and there's wonder waiting around every corner, so walk if it's not too far or too late at night. Otherwise, black-and-yellow taxis are everywhere, but ask a local for the typical fare to your destination and then be prepared to bargain with the driver to get that price. Fares double after midnight.

DANGERS AND ANNOYANCES

Violent crimes against foreigners are virtually unheard of, but pick-pocketing and purse-snatchings do happen, so keep your valuables close to you and take taxis at night. Dakar is full of friendly people, but you won't find them among the seemingly congenial young men who approach you on the street. Avoid the area around Place de L'Indépendance where touts and street vendors are the thickest, and give a firm non merci to anyone who offers you anything in which you're not extremely interested.

WHERE TO STAY

La Croix Du Sud: 221 (889) 78 78. The smartest choice for business travellers or tourists. Built in 1951, the art-deco hotel's Senegalese owners enlisted an Italian designer for renovations completed in October of 2003 to make it the closest Dakar has to a boutique hotel, with swish rooms and a well-regarded French restaurant right downtown. Rates range from $103 to $246.

Sofitel Teranga: 221 (823) 10 44. Rates range from about $177 to $640 at this bland, package-tour-infested hotel.

Hotel Savana: 221 (849) 42 42. Located just outside the city centre, visiting celebrities lounge at this resort-like property. Rates range from $175 to $309.

Listings for all Dakar's major hotels, restaurants and attractions can be found on-line at the excellent French-language http://www.au-senegal.com. Be sure to check out the up-to-date event listings in their webzine, Ciclo.

THE MUSIC

Street addresses are rarely used in Dakar, even by taxi drivers, but most cabbies know all the clubs and pubs. If you find one who doesn't seem sure, find another.

Central Park: 221 (639) 53 47 or 221 (645) 92 76.

Just4U: 221 (824) 32 50.

Thiossane: Sicap Rue 10, Zone B; 221 (824) 60 46 or 221 (822) 77 44.

Sun Set Sahel: Centre Commercial Sahm; 221 (821) 21 18.

La Boule: 221 (824) 32 49

Le Ravin: Near Centre Sauvegarde in Guédiawaye; 221 (647) 93 58 or 221 (680) 09 32.

RECOMMENDED READING

Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, by Mungo Park. The 1795-97 account by the first Western explorer to travel to the interior of what is now Senegal and return to tell the tale. It's astonishing how little has changed.