I’m Sorry Officer, We Don’t Pay Bribes

This is a picture of the cop - the guy in the blue with our paper in his left hand.

So we are driving through Senegal and they have informal police checkpoints everywhere, and up to this time we have managed to avoid them, but at this one the cop guy stands right in the middle of the road and flags us over to stop, and since he has a gun and there’s two of them, we oblige, and he asks for our registration papers and he doesn’t speak English and I smile and give him what I am confident is the proper paperwork and he immediately points out that a important document has expired and shakes his head and walks off with this important document,

and we are sitting there and wondering what happens next and he keeps flagging down other cars and trucks and we sit there and wait and he keeps looking at us and we wait and he finally says this paper is expired and I say I realize that and is it a problem? and he tells us to pull over to the other side of the street, and we keep waiting and one of the cops speaks English and I explain that we are borrowing the vehicle and he asks a whole bunch of questions like where are you going and where are you from, when are you leaving, and I find another piece of paper that has not expired and he says that is not good enough and I realize this is kind of a game and he wants money and I don’t want to pay a bribe even it’s not very much and I show him another piece of paper and I point out that it says “Mission Baptiste du Senegal” and he looks at the other cop like “these guys are not gonna pay us a bribe”, but the other guy is playing hardball and finally blurts out “give us 6,000 yen ( I call all foreign currency Yen, but that’s another story) and I ask why and he rolls his eyes and walks away and we keep waiting and we call our friend who loaned us the car and she says that actually, because the paper is expired, he could confiscate the car and I think, maybe this is not such a game after all,

and she says she will come down and speak with the officer and I tell him that, and he doesn’t look happy and we think “wait til she gets here, she’s gonna set this dude straight” and so we keep waiting and it’s already been half an hour and the cops keep looking at us (I think they were hoping we’d cough up the money or leave or something, but he still has the document) and finally he gets the paper from the other guy and calls me over and says “listen, this is expired and it’s bad and we could do bad things but I’m gonna let you go this time, and you better get this fixed” and I smile and I say no problem sir and thank you for pointing this out and we’ll get out of your hair now, and we drive off, calling our friend to tell her we have been released under a hail of gun fire but that would be a slight exaggeration.