Into Africa: to Timbuktu and back.(TRAVEL)

FINDING your way around Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, should be easy to do. Wide, ramshackle boulevards radiate from plazas and monuments --this is French Africa, after all--and even the hovel-lined dirt alleys are organized into a relentless grid. Buzzards perch on top of the streetlamps that line the avenues, making you feel, as you drive down the street, like a float in a creepy parade.

The trouble starts at night. The milky layer of wood smoke and dust that during the day creates a bustling charm, at night becomes a vaguely alarming, eye-watering fog. And forget the street lamps. The best they'll do is flicker. So if you're driving around the city in a taxicab, as I was several weeks ago, with an address in your pocket for a place you were told showcases live music and cold beer, be prepared to drive around awhile.

I went to Africa for no real reason, except that a year ago I was offered a spot in a three-week odyssey through the Sahara and North Africa. We started with an ambitious itinerary--one that included Sudan and Libya--but settled, ultimately, after a lot of wrangling with unhelpful foreign diplomats, on a few key spots: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Algeria.

Africa, I'm here to tell you, is huge. Its immensity defies an easy summary, but if you're absolutely dead set on one, try this: The two continents currently in the news, Africa and Asia, have a key difference --Asia is an overpopulated mess quickly becoming powerful and scary, and Africa is an overpopulated mess quickly becoming powerless and scary. Thus, when Chinese president Hu Jintao recently made a cruise through Africa (his third), collecting chits for raw materials, distributing promises of investment and money, a collective shudder went through the Western foreign-policy establishment. If the Chinese--who, let's face it, know how to organize stuff--can organize Africa, can figure out a way to exploit its material riches without becoming embroiled in its chaotic, bloody politics, then we're all in for a very different 21st century from the one we're preparing for.

Of course, the first thing the Chinese will have to do is get the U.N. out. Everywhere I went--from the dusty squalor of Timbuktu, Mali, to the hustling trans-Saharan crossroads of Agadez, Niger--purposeful white U.N. vans darted about. It was hard to tell whether the U.N. vans are there because the place is a mess, or that the place is a mess because there are so many U.N. vans darting about, so many promises and programs and development schemes blowing around like sand. "I think we've finally got it right," an aid worker told me in Agadez, as we were sipping sweet Tuareg tea in a shop. "I think with the right combination of incentives and international aid, with strict oversight from organizations such as ..." But by that time I had drifted away, busily buying some stunning Tuareg jewelry for people back home. I'm not sure which organizations he was going to name, but my guess is that they're already there, and already failing.

"Education is the key," another international-relief-organization worker told me, in the oasis village of Timia, Niger. Education is routinely cited by aid workers and Africa thinkers as a key solution to the continent's problems and outrages. Education and its opposite, cultural respect, are often twinned by those guys, who forget that to teach someone something important--how to build a well, say, or why female circumcision is a stupid idea, or that it's unlikely that your baby is possessed by demons--is to place oneself in a necessarily superior position. You can't really have it both ways.

"Education for women, especially," the relief worker continued, in a low whisper. We were standing in the chilly night, watching an exorcism.