HLM

If you are looking for fabric in Dakar, it is here and nowhere else. The HLM market, spread over several blocks along avenue Bourguiba, is the textile market of French-speaking West Africa: bolts of rich bazin stacked to the ceiling, wax prints from Holland and Abidjan, lace, linings, buttons, thread, and tailors working out of two-square-metre booths who take your measurements standing between two customers.

The district is called HLM because it was built in the 1960s as subsidised housing — low blocks around shared courtyards, for civil servants. The buildings are still there, one or two storeys taller, with shops on the ground floor. Next door, Colobane sells the second-hand clothing all Dakar calls feugue-jaye, and Grand Dakar carries on from there.

You can read the season in the noise of the machines. Three weeks before Korité or Tabaski the HLM market stops closing: tailors sew through the night, delivery boys weave through with sacks bigger than they are, the price of bazin doubles, and families come back three times for a single fitting. The rest of the year it is an ordinary market — that is, dense, loud, and far cheaper than the Plateau boutiques.

Sleeping here means sleeping in the Dakar that works: no sea view, no terrace, noise from six in the morning, but a thousand-franc thiéboudieune on the corner, transport everywhere, and the very concrete feeling of being in the city rather than beside it.

A tailor's advice, since that is why you came: allow three days for something simple, a week before a feast, and bring a photo of the model — that is how everyone does it. The price is agreed beforehand and you pay half on ordering. Bazin sells by the metre or as a five-metre "complet", the dyer is always two shops from the tailor, and if your Wolof is shaky, bring someone from the neighbourhood: it is not a question of trust, it is a question of speed.