Background: we have a hotel/bar/restaurant in Bamako. We were evicted 6 months ago.

A few weeks ago I was standing in the courtyard of a villa. There was an adolescent baobab tree a few meters away from an empty swimming pool. I started having a vision. The baobab at the center of a wraparound bar, a paillote next to the pool. Then I went up to the roof. River view. Alright. This could work.

I asked Bocoum, a fixer from one of real estate agencies I was working with, about the rental agreement, price, etc. He didn’t have any info, but he had the phone number of the landlord. What’s the landlord’s name? Bathily. Bathily? The same Bathily that already refused us at two other properties? No, Bocoum said, I think this is a different Bathily.

The phone number was different. In fact, it was a French number. When I called him, Bathily said he was going to tear down the house and build a new one. He wasn’t interested in renting it to someone at this time. I explained that we would be interested in rehabilitating the existing house in an arrangement that would be favorable to him. We would share the cost and he would pay his part through deductions in the rent rather than pulling money out of his pocket.

He seemed to be open to this idea. But then he asked me what I wanted to do in the house. I told him we have a business. Ah bon? What kind of business? A restaurant and — he cut me off before I could mention anything else. I didn’t even need to say the word bar. He wasn’t going to have a business serving alcohol on his property. As the conversation continued it became clear that it was in fact the same Bathily from the other properties. He was just spending a few weeks in France.

And so it went with almost every house I visited. Religiously conservative moneyed landowners with multiple properties, all of them very much clued in on the current housing economy in Bamako. If you are renting property, you want a diplomatic mission (or UN agency or international NGO) that is going to pay your asking price, and possibly several years of rent in advance. That’s the best case scenario. A restaurant and bar – a business that is both notoriously prone to failure and widely associated with loose morals – is not going to be your first choice.

In 2010-11, a 3-bedroom villa in Badalabougou with a swimming pool and a garden could be had for 300,000 CFA/month. It is triple that now, if not more. Landlords are willing to let their house sit vacant for months if it means that they can rent to someone (or an organization) with deep pockets. The UN economy has not only caused a price explosion, it has also allowed landlords to be more selective in their choice of tenant.

Of course, the irony in all of this is that we have been completely dependent on the UN/NGO/Embassy economy since everything went south in Mali. Back when I was a client of the Sleeping Camel, I remember arriving from Senegal during the month of May. It was peak hot season – normally a quiet time for tourism in the Sahel – and the hotel was full. You couldn’t walk to the bar without tripping over a tent. That was in 2011. Seven years later, we had the lowest number of travelers during the normally busy December-February season since the hotel opened.

United Nations, NGO and embassy personnel are the reason we still exist. They are the reason we have expanded the business and hired more staff. But the UN economy has also put us in a corner. Prices have skyrocketed and even when we are willing to pay up, landlords prefer to wait for the golden goose.

And it gets worse. Abdoul Aziz Mangane, the Malian business tycoon who bought the property out from under us, owns the land that was rented by the UN for their civilian headquarters in Bamako. The word is that the UN paid Mangane in advance for three years of rent at an exorbitant monthly rate, enough to buy several Sleeping Camel-sized plots of land. The same UN that has kept our doors open has also led to our demise.

Ok, that’s a bit dramatic. Our demise won’t be happening just yet. After months of searching, we found a place with an accommodating landlord. The rent is double that of our current location, but double is far more manageable than some of the other houses we visited. It’s actually the former home of friends of ours. Plenty of joyful memories already occupy the space. It’s thin on rooms and there is a lot of work to do, but the property lends itself to the kind of relaxed ambience we have become known for, and it is only 400 meters from our current location. And there is a pool.

So here’s to new beginnings and all that shit…