Dalaba

Dalaba owes its existence to its height. The French, who imposed a protectorate over the Futa Jallon imamate at the end of the nineteenth century, looked for places on the plateau where administrators and their families could escape the heat and the fevers of the coast, and the ridge at about 1,275 metres above the Kokoulo valley suited them. The botanist Auguste Chevalier, sent to find a site with a sub-temperate climate, chose Dalaba and laid out a botanical garden there in 1906 to test African and foreign species at altitude; pine and eucalyptus were planted on the slopes, and the arboretum that bore his name is now the Barry Gassimou garden. The hill station itself followed in the 1930s, its climatic station inaugurated in 1936, with rest houses for officials sent up from Conakry and some thirty villas for Europeans from Dakar.

The best-known survival of that period is the villa on the slope above the town, built as a rest house for senior officials and long shown to visitors as the governor's residence. Beside it stands the case à palabres, a round meeting hut with a tiled roof and carved wooden panels, built in 1935 for meetings between the governor and the canton chiefs of the Fouta Djallon — a colonial building using a local form.

Independence in 1958 ended the traffic of holidaying officials, and the relationship between Sékou Touré's government and the Fula elite of the highlands was a difficult one. Dalaba became an ordinary Guinean prefecture town, its plantations and villas slowly weathering. What remains is a small place with an unusual inheritance: a planted landscape and a handful of buildings that belong to a European idea of a hill resort, set in a wholly Fula countryside.

Dalaba is a Pular-speaking town in the heartland of Guinea's Fula people, and the values of the Fouta Djallon set the tone. Islam is central: Koranic schooling, the mosque and the religious calendar order the week and the year, and the scholarly tradition of the old imamate, in which Pular was written in Arabic script, is remembered with pride. Manners follow pulaaku, the Fula code of dignity, patience and self-restraint, and quietness in public is a virtue rather than a coldness.

Greetings are the substance of an encounter, not a preliminary to it: enquiries after the household, the cattle and the harvest run on at length before anything else is raised. Hospitality is expected of hosts and honoured by guests, and a visitor arriving at a compound will be offered milk, food or tea poured in rounds. Elders and religious teachers are deferred to, and decisions in the villages around the town are still discussed collectively, the practice the old meeting hut was named for.

Cattle remain a mark of standing even for families who now live by gardening or trade, and the round house with a thatched roof inside a hedged compound is still the pattern of village building on the plateau. Crafts include dyed cloth, basketry and leatherwork. The great gatherings of the year are Tabaski and the end of Ramadan, when emigrants working in Conakry, Senegal, Europe and North America come back to the highlands.

Dalaba is a small town — a prefecture centre of about 40,000 people in the urban commune at the 2025 census, in a rural prefecture where far more live in the villages than in the town itself. It sits on the Conakry–Labé road, which supplies it and takes its produce away, and much of the working day turns on that road and on the market beside it.

The economy is agricultural. The cool plateau grows crops that will not thrive in lowland Guinea: potatoes above all, along with vegetables, maize, fonio on the poorer hillsides, and oranges, avocados and bananas from the hedged gardens. Cattle are kept in most villages, and milk, fresh and soured, is part of both diet and trade. Traders move produce down to Mamou and Conakry, and money sent home by relatives abroad supports many households, as it does across the Fouta Djallon.

The day begins early with prayers and with work in the gardens before the sun is high, and slows in the afternoon heat. Electricity and water supply are intermittent, health care is limited, and young people leave for Conakry or abroad for want of work — the long-standing pattern of the highlands. Local concerns include the erosion of the plateau soils, deforestation, and the drying of springs in a region whose rivers supply much of West Africa.

Dalaba eats the food of the Fouta Djallon. Fonio, the tiny highland grain that grows where little else will, is steamed like couscous and served with a groundnut sauce or a sauce of cassava or sweet-potato leaves, or eaten as a porridge with milk. Rice is the other staple, plain with a sauce over it, and tô, a stiff paste eaten with okra or groundnut sauce, appears on some tables.

Milk matters here more than anywhere else in Guinea. Kossam, fresh or soured milk, is drunk on its own, poured over fonio or rice, and made into butter in the villages. Meat is not an everyday food: chicken or a little beef goes into a sauce, and sheep are killed for Tabaski.

The plateau's gardens give the town a range of produce unusual in the country. Potatoes are the local speciality — Guinean highland potatoes are traded as far as Conakry — and oranges, mangoes, avocados and bananas fill the market in season. Bread from the town bakeries, bean and wheat fritters, and grilled maize are the quick foods at the roadside.

Drinks are non-alcoholic almost everywhere: sweet strong tea poured from a height in small glasses and taken in rounds, ginger juice, and bissap made from hibiscus. Alcohol is rarely sold in a region as observant as this one.