The Vichy cannons used as backdrop for the climax of The Guns of Navarone on the slave island off Dakar. Picture: Sankarshan Thakur

In a silken half hour’s zigzag from one end of the mid-Atlantic corniche to the other, Dakar traverses a thousand years, lugging a past it will not forget, leaping at a future still out of grasp.

At one end of the sealine to the Senegalese capital lies a beached whale called Goree Island, staging post of two centuries of slave trade that fed the prosperity of the Americas. Goree is now a memorial to a past nobody wants repeated. It is also home to Bohemian artists and the site where the climax to The Guns of Navarone was shot — a revolving cannon installed by the Vichy regime is still mounted at Goree’s peak which overlooks the ocean.

At Dakar’s other tip looms the Renaissance statue, a lofty monument to Africa with a lofty price-tag that many believe sits heavy on Africa’s unrelieved burdens — $14 billion, a good billion or so on top of Senegal’s GDP. Mounted atop a hill-head, the Renaissance monument is a majestic piece of metallurgy. It was crafted by the North Koreans, who, by dint of regular labouring at Kim Il Sung likenesses, are the only ones left with the expertise of turning blocks of ore into larger-than-life man.

But none of it has convinced — or pleased — all Senegalese about the cash President Abdoulaye Wade has flung permanently into Dakar’s azure sky. Madiambal Diagne, editor of Le Quotidien, speaks for many countrymen when he says: “This is an act of megalomania, nothing else, a monument by Wade unto himself. All it says is ‘this is where I once walked’. It does nothing for Senegalese, even less for Africa.”

Wade, well into a decade in power, remains impervious to criticism and is planning ornate embellishments as frill to his disputed legacy, but the reasons why the Renaissance monument is a mote in most Senegalese eyes are not far to seek.

Third world nations tend to have two signature sides to them — the affluent and the afflicted. For all the new-world suitors that have arrived at the continent’s doors, seduced afresh by the scent of rich earth, Africa remains a classic, and familiar, disparity tale. Other than steamy tropical heat, what strings together Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria — the three West African nations we recently visited, as one of three Indian media delegations in preparation for next week’s second India-Africa Forum Summit in Addis Ababa — is faltering democracies spawning in-the-face inequity.

Should you keep to posh Dakar, a manicured knob nosed into the Atlantic as if trying to sniff the Americas, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in a French department — trendy street bars, grand townsquare facades, haute couture leaping at you from the billboards, swish cars and swisher motorbikes. But that’s a tiny clot of opulence that you will come upon as certainly in other African metros like Accra and Lagos; the rest is a bleeding insufficiency. Dakar’s municipal limits haven’t been exhausted when the roads fall away, housing becomes stunted and rudimentary, life forms begin to struggle in heated dust.

This is a scorched lower lip of the Saharan desert — a vast baobab bush — and subsistence must be scratched out from its parched heart. Even so there is evidence of formidable fortitude and endurance everywhere the gaze travels.

There isn’t a woman whose walk isn’t music, saddled though she may be with her vending wares and infants tied at the waist. There isn’t a patch of bare earth that boys haven’t colonised with exuberant football. You see them at play on baked sand and you know why the Drogbas and the Adebayors, the Etos and the Essiens take world by storm. Tested on sand, their feet turn electric on European grass.

But that’s no consolation for deprivations back home. Ghana takes over Accra sooner than it would like publicised: its humongous slums are like scab on its colonial grandeur, the peripheries of the capital proof that erosion marches inexorably in the absence of repair work. Ghana has heaps of old gold and wells of new-found oil off its shores, but it hasn’t found the mechanisms yet of a more democratic delivery of rewards to its citizenry. “Our great crisis of leadership,” former President John Kofour calls it. “This great African crisis of leadership that we as Africa, as a continent, must overcome in order to make the most of the immense resources we possess.”

Nigeria floats in a new buoyancy courtesy its most peaceful and most participatory election last month which returned Goodluck Johnson to office. But Goodluck is only the nervous eve of a turn of fortune, not the firm promise of it. “We are still a divided nation,” confesses a senior minister in government, “between Christian and Muslim, between the poor north and the relatively prosperous south, we have a long way to go.”

Lagos, the Nigerian Mumbai, is a milling army of faces driven by desperation, knocking at the car window for purchase, any purchase, a city so notorious for street-corner crime, it forever teases ease.

At a dinner hosted by expat Indians, a lady spoke eloquently for Lagos and Nigeria and vehemently against its reputation for being the most lawless neck of the African woods.

Having finished, she got off the mike and launched right away into what a horror daily living in Lagos could be — “I’ve been robbed in front of my home in daylight, that happens all the time, and if I didn’t have jewellery on me to give away, they’d have killed me, they usually do. But I live in Nigeria, I can’t openly badmouth it.”

Africa’s most populous nation and India’s largest trading partner on the continent is riven with contradictions. It sits on Africa’s biggest oil reserves, but imports nearly all the fuel it requires because it does not possess a refinery.

And oil it desperately needs for Nigeria produces next to no electricity — a mere 4,000MW when the base requirement is more than 30,000MW. All of Lagos’s night-time glitter is diesel-fed, as are all the nation’s homes and hearths. The sprawling Indian chancery on Victoria Island — a desolate enterprise run by five lonely souls — would shut down if it didn’t possess its own diesel pump facility which chugs all day from the backyard. “No generator,” said one of the staff, “no life, that’s Nigeria, to each his own.” What are we doing here?

Of late, a fair bit as we play catch-up with China even as we loudly protest there is any such intention to renewed Indian enterprise. A dead, but rich, phosphate factory in Senegal — their largest industrial operation by the name of Industries Chimique du Senegal (ICS) — revived by a public-private affair led by IFFCO on paper but actually driven by smart opportunity seekers from Chennai.

An expanding network of truck and auto manufacturers. An aggressive telecom expedition that is fast becoming the chief challenger to the African monopolist MTN in many parts. It is already No. 2 in Nigeria on the back of a price war that has brought telephony rates down several multiples and intensified mobile density. A rash of IT firms that have made quick gains on industry’s reputation for job generation.

“This isn’t Europe or Southeast Asia, this is a tough place,” says one of the newly arrived entrepreneurs, “but if you are willing to rough it out for a bit, the areas to be explored as immense and the prospect of profits huge. “In some senses Africa is ready for another round of exploitation and this time both parties stand to gain.”

No repeats of the past horrors of Goree Island, but it isn’t as if Africa is anywhere close to the future it aspires.