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.
