Fifi Go-Goes.

That table is breathing.

Heaving. Undulating. A coagulate mound on the ever-so-gradual move.

Slow - but definite.

I take a few steps closer, fascinated by the trick my eyes appear to be playing in the muggy afternoon light. It’s half past siesta in Angré market place, Abidjan, the occasional whiff of rotting, sunburnt refuse competes with the scent of smoking eel and frying plantain bananas. I’m pretty sure I just stepped on the discarded femur of a late primate, the bush meat bone picked clean of flesh, and marrow, too. There’s at once a buzzing sense of urgency punctuated by a languid sleepiness, and this table seems to be at the epicentre. As I get closer it clicks. Escargot!

A roiling mass of African snails sits before me, piled high on a gunk-stained hessian sack. Each cone, bronze with a dull zebra striping and the occasional flash of red is size-ably larger than a man’s fist. I’m at once repulsed and enraptured, and before long I've given each a name and an elaborate back-story. An elderly woman casually herds the haphazard pyramid of muddy shells into shape. Periodically she picks up a gleeful escapee and plonks him unceremoniously atop the pile.

“Bonjour Maman,” I greet the woman. She is clad in a brightly patterned pagne wrap with matching headscarf and obligatory free political party T-shirt. The leering mug of the President grins down from her shirt at the oozing pile before them both and waves at his sea of adoring invertebrate fans. I lean in for a closer look, wrinkling my nose. “C’est l’escargot?”

She nods, giggles at my intrigued expression and pokes one of her slimy charges in the eye. I look on as she holds them aloft one by one, jams a long metal baton deep into the shell, skewers a slimy kebab and twists it free of shelter. Silent shrieks ring out across the warm, thick air and ricochet off the woven plastic prayer mats, for sale, (Bon prix madam!), the candied peanuts roasting on charred hotplates, and the luminous dark skin of a bare baby’s bottom. Maman slops the naked snails tenderly into a blue plastic bag, chattering loudly about my bizarre facial expressions.

A crowd is beginning to gather, chuckling at la Blanche’s contorted visage. It’s clear from the raucous laughter of the ladies that I’ve turned a spectacular shade of verde. Probably time to go. “Bon appetite!” one of the women calls after me. I steal a glance back at them. They are doubled over with mirth, Maman leaning heavily on the still gasping table.