I'm kind of stumped. I've never been shy in my use of superlatives on this trip, and I've certainly been in place after place that deserved every one of them. It leaves me with a bit of a challenge, albeit a jolly one: how exactly to get my head or my keyboard around the amazingness of the last month?
Perhaps it's best to start with the basics. If I try real hard, perhaps I can summarize the month's agenda in a paragraph. Here goes.
I arrived in Bamako a few days before Lauren, who landed on the 30th of December minus only her backpack (which would appear a couple days later). We partied it up in Bamako for the New Years weekend, then piled our tuckered-out selves onto a bus and a pickup truck to make the amazing town of Djenne for it's famous Monday market. From Djenne it was off to Mopti for a night, after which we piled into a crowded 4WD for the long drive up to Timbuktu, arriving the night before the start of the amazing Festival au Desert. After 3 days sitting in the dunes until 4 AM, we spent a little while exploring Timbuktu and camel-tripping out into the desert for a night at a Tuareg camp. We then hopped on a pinasse (small motorized riverboat) with 6 other tourists for the 3-day gorgeous journey back to Mopti along the Niger river, camping along the banks for the nights. After catching our breath in Mopti, it was out to the Dogon Country to hike for a couple days and nights through ancient animist villages along an incredible cliffside. From there it was back to Mopti once more, then off to finish the trip with a couple lazy days by the riverside in Segou. On the 22nd, we busted it back to Bamako, did our last minute running around, and Lauren was away to gay Paris and then home. I spent another couple nights there, then took off back down the road to Mopti (again!) and from there onward to do some amazing hiking around the mesas of Hombori, and then to Gao in Mali's far far east, where I start to write this post before leaving for Niger. Whew.
Okay, so that was a long paragraph. It also left no space for the joys of 2 AM patisserie runs in Bamako, of dance floors packed with people from 4 to 50, for curling up on a mattress under the stars on the outskirts of Timbuktu, for wrapping up in sweaters and scarves and sipping hot coffee on our pinasse as the sun rose over the Niger. My paragraph was also severely lacking in the endless parade of insanely cute children, honestly friendly adults, and women never ruffled from their regal dignity by long uncomfortable trips. Then there's the amazing mud architecture, seemingly drenched 24/7 in glorious golden sunlight. There's the music. Oh, the music. Where the labels "traditional" and "modern" stop making sense and people smile, no, grin while they play. Where master bandleaders and famous stars are content to sit in the background and set up a jam, to play in a little garden bar for no cover, or to travel 1000kms to play 2 songs to a spellbound crowd.
Then there's the sound of Dogon villages waking at dawn underneath the towering cliffs. There are all the incredibly strange noises donkeys seem to enjoy making at all hours. There are the games of "child or goat" played when we hear screeching coming over the neighbourhood (and let me tell you, it's often not an easy guess). There's the buzz of ancient engines somehow still dragging buses and trucks and pinasses vastly overladen with people.
Mali was even better than I expected. And I expected a lot. It was dreams of coming there that started off the idea of West Africa in my head years ago. Some places, Djenne especially, I had wanted to see since before I had a clear idea of where they were. I'd also had my expectations tampered a bit along the road by tourists who grumped about the level of hassle and headaches that the tourist industry brings to the place. When I got there, and found myself rarely troubled by a hint of hustle, it seemed even more miraculous.
Miraculous. Like standing at the airport in the cool Malian December night waiting for your love to step off a plane. Like busting past security to find her awaiting her lost bag at baggage claim. Like being able to converse in something other than ten-minute snippets where a day's full of beauty tries to squeeze down the phone line. Eight months was hard. But how better to end it?
The perfection started early. By leaps and bounds, Bamako is the best party town in West Africa. Dakar devotees may argue, but Bamako is smaller, friendlier, and a lot more sensibly laid out for nights on the town without piles of money spent on taxis. Our hotel helped, being outside of the centre but smack dab in the middle of the entertainment district. We had a glorious garden to drink wine in and a pool to jump around in and the comfiest room I've had the whole trip long. Within a short scurry afoot or by clanking cheap minibus were found nightclubs and music venues aplenty. We had a good day of exploring the town (Bamako is surprisingly walkable if you know which routes to take), bought some sweet duds to replace Lauren's still MIA fashionables, and hit the town for New Years, with an amazing dinner of fancified Malian food, then huge beers (and at 4 bucks for a litre mug, cheap ones) were the only price we paid to ring in the New Year with Toumani Diabate, master of the kora, and his band - L'Orchestre Symmetrique.
Effing amazing. The crowd was a mix, from tourists to Malian functionaries and their families to local cool cats. Everyone smiling and dancing in the warm night air. You wouldn't think a band centred around what is basically an upright harp could rock, but they did. I was blissing out. The following nights we took in the Bamako club scene (posh!) and caught a stadium show by the Ivorian master of super-political reggae, Tiken Jah Fakoly (whose music has followed me all over the continent). Glorious. Not a lot of sleep, that weekend. We were both a bit worse for wear, and Lauren rather ill of tummy, when we piled onto a Sunday morning bus out of Bamako.
We went Sunday so to catch the Monday market in Djenne, and with some luck with connections (waiting 20 minutes as opposed to 2 hours for a pickup to fill from the bus turnoff), we were there Sunday evening. The market itself was glorious, people from all over the region plopped down in front of Djenne's main mosque. It got pretty frenetic, but we could and did just duck into the dusty backstreets full of amazingly ornate mud houses whenever we felt overwhelmed. The whole city has a wonderful feel of being someplace completely detached from anywhere where people live and work in steel and glass.
From Djenne it was off to Mopti, the crossroads river port that is at the centre of Mali's tourist industry. I had been warned to expect hassle, but we found little - just a very pleasant city with lots of riverside sitting, a fun harbour, an old quarter, and a super comfy budget hotel with a glorious pool. Not bad. Mopti is the jumping off point for the road to Timbuktu, and after dallying with the idea of hiring a tourist 4x4 for the trip, we decided to skimp a bit on cash and comfort, and all piled into an old land rover (17 of us, counting driver, roof riders, and 13 in the back!) for the surprisingly easy (if ass-numbing drive). Arriving at the river ferry the night before the festival, we found a line of cars that would have to wait until morning to get across, so we abandoned our ride, grabbed our bags, and walked onto the ferry. An hour and a free ride later we were eating a delicious dinner under the stars in the sand yard of our guesthouse, run by a lovely Cape Bretoner lady and her Tuareg chief husband.
The guesthouse, happily, was only a short walk across the dunes to the area where the festival was held, so we could save cash and have a room to stagger back to each night. Stagger we did - 3 nights in a row ended around 4 AM, with the temperatures around 4 degrees! Oh, was it worth it, though... An incredible festival of incredible music. Lots of bands from Mali's north, many of the country's international stars, West African stars, and guests all piled on the stage in a big pile of joyous musicking. It was disorganized, sometimes disjointed, always awesome. We wiggled our toes into the sand still warm from the sun of the day, or cuddled around fires built in braziers around the grounds, buying snacks and tea and beers from wandering vendors and dancing when the spirit took us. Gorgeous.
We took some time over those days to explore Timbuktu itself, which is a charming place. Many travellers romanticise what they will find there, and are disappointed by its lack of grandeur, but we were simply impressed by the nice people, the lovely old buildings, and the sands drifting down the backstreets. It does feel quite far from anywhere, though I feel bad for all those who used to risk life and limb to reach it.
The festival over, we piled into a pinasse (motorized riverboat) for the 3 day trip back along the Niger to Mopti. It was perfect. After some really busy days, we had nothing to do but sit, and eat, and read, and watch the life of the river go by. We camped on the riverside each night and ate under the stars, leaving before dawn in the mornings. Lauren managed to take a tumble into the river (albeit in the shallows - she was washing my shoes, heh), her luggage got a good soaking, and we were both mighty chilly at times, but I should think that the amazing serenity was well worth it.
After charging batteries in Mopti, it was off for the final "big thing", a 3 day trek in the Pays Dogon, a region centred on the Bandiagara escarpment that is legendary for undisturbed animist culture and amazing scenery. Legends well-deserved. Even I who had been hearing how amazing it was from other travellers for months was bowled over by the loveliness. We were fed to bursting, walked to exhaustion, and beered to cheerfulness each day before snoozing under the stars as soon as it got dark. We took a guide, a young Dogon named Kara, who managed to keep us from committing any horrible cultural faux pas, and dictated who rated enough in the priority structure to warrant a gift of kola nuts, the traditional gesture of respect (and stimulants with a good kick - I was pretty jazzed after chewing one). The villages were amazing - one of the last relics of a past long gone. They themselves were often the second or third villages there, the cliffs being previously inhabited by the Tellem, who built houses in caves hundreds of feet up. The Dogon believed they could fly and use black magic to get themselves and their supplies up there each day.
After a return once more to Mopti, we finished our trip in Segou, an old town with a pile of colonial architecture, a lovely riverside, good music, and no organized activities whatsoever, which was a very nice way to wind down. It was from there that we embarked on the last day to get Lauren to the airport for her night flight, and so it was that after 3 and a half weeks of amazingness, I was back to soloing it.
The next couple days were mighty hard, let me tell you. I gradually found my travel groove again, setting out along the long road to Niger. One last stop in Mopti (mostly to sit by the pool, I won't lie) and then it was off to Hombori on a night bus through the moonlit cliffs. Arriving at 3 am, I grabbed a short night's sleep and then set out with a couple German hippies-on-bicycles for an amazing hike around the cliffs. We hitched our way 10 kms from town and then hiked up and around the Main de Fatima, a series of towers that lure rock climbers from all around the world. We took the low path, being sandalled and all.
From Hombori, it was a short ride to Gao, the old capital of the Songhai empire, city far from everywhere, lovely riverside stop, and sad, sad place due to the death of the tourist industry brought about by the extension of travel warnings to the whole region. I was the only tourist in town, sad since the town itself is quite safe - though I wouldn't go rolling through the bush north of there in a 4WD full of tourists right now. That wasn't on my agenda anyway, so I just enjoyed the incredible Songhai food (lots of cinnamon and sausages), a few cold beers and river sunsets, and a trip to climb a giant glowing pink sand dune with the reputation of being somewhat of a convention centre for sorcerors. Lovely. It was from there that I caught my bus down the (lovely) road through what is, in theory, bandit country to the Niger border and on to Niamey, the capital. It's there that I'm sitting as I write this, amongst friendly people, treelined streets, and even more riverside prettiness. My mom will arrive tomorrow for 3 weeks of adventures, including a safari in West Africa's best wildlife reserve and a trip to the deserts around Agadez. I can't wait.
Peace
Josh
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
Let's talk about race, maybe
"I like white skin. I see white skin and know that the person is organized. If we were white, this country wouldn't have such problems"
This pronouncement from a fellow sitting beside me at a fish lady's stand in Mopti, Mali, is perhaps a bit unusually blunt. The argument, though, is by no means an uncommon one. All through West Africa, time after time after time, a traveller is confronted by people arguing for their own inferiority. I try my best to argue the other side - that the problems in Mali, or anywhere, trace their causes to history, geography, corruption and colonialism (just for starters), not to anything inherently related to colour. I don't think I often get through to people.
It may seem a bit strange that after an amazing month seeing amazing things with an amazing woman in Mali, talking about race is the thing that I feel most compelled to revive this blog with. I think, perhaps, that does have to do with the Malian experience. Unlike the rest of West Africa, Mali is a big tourist destination for everyone from backpackers to senior citizen tour groups. With the tourists comes an attitude toward foreigners that is often disturbingly servile. I don't necessarily believe that having a Malian scurrying to bring a foreigner coffee necessarily marks a more problematic power relationship than a Sierra Leonean hustling to bring a report full of development jargon. Racism and inferiority often lurk beneath both of them, but the tourist-oriented version is just a little bit more obvious, the whiff of colonial times just a little bit stronger.
Skin colour, and the differences in it, lay down the boundaries of how a Western traveller meets West Africa. It often is a bit startling to hear how callously the terms "blacks" and "whites" are thrown around, mostly by locals whose perception of race is often far more binary than that of foreigners used to having compatriots from different backgrounds. Still, for how often skin colour enters into the conversation, or hides behind it, it can be tricky to figure out just how often you, or the local people you are talking to, are talking about race.
Skin colour, here, is shorthand for so much. To be white doesn't just signify a different background. It means a different culture. It means being impossibly rich. It means being connected to those who dominate the planet, not those who are dominated. None of this is entirely false in the Canadian context, either, but a black Canadian and white one have a great deal more common ground between them than a Canadian and a Malian might do. Not as much common ground as they should, of course. The West is nothing even close to postracial in handing out opportunities to its citizens. But when we talk about race in Canada, we can try to talk about it from the stated assumption (however weakly held it may be by individuals) that all things being equal, people are equal. That the colour of people's skin doesn't really attach to anything qualitative, either individually or as a group. That's a difficult position to maintain in Africa, where skin colour signifies membership in a group with different behavioural norms, different worldviews, different lives.
So, on the face of it, much of the shockingly brash talk about race is actually a conversation about culture. That can still be fraught, of course, but most of us are generally more comfortable accepting that people think or act differently based on cultural norms than the colour of their skin. Fair enough - and I do think that this diffuses some of the conversations that I've had. There exist plenty of explanations for why Western culture is, for example, perhaps more entreprenerial, or why government corruption in Africa is such a problem. When people say "White people are better at x," they usually mean that "x works better in Europe and North America," which is certainly quite often true. That, at least, is the charitable interpretation. I certainly realize that many Africans believe otherwise, a legacy of a dysfunctional and incredibly Eurocentric education system, and a long history of seeming dependance on the West. Perhaps it's time to make the point a whole lot louder that the so-called "donor nations" are actually net recipients of African wealth, not the other way around.
But I digress. The question remains - when, if ever, am I talking or thinking of race? As a traveller I think this is especially pertinent. Like all travellers, I enjoy the odd wild generalization about the people and places that I'm visiting. I think most of us do this. To pick a hackneyed example, backpacking around Europe one regularly finds oneself at tables full of travellers debating the characteristics of this or that nationality - nice Canadians, rude Frenchmen, et cetera. I don't think most of us have too much of a problem with these kinds of discussion, as long as the odd proviso is made that there are many exceptions to all these stereotypes.
The same lines of thought, though, are a good bit trickier in the African context. At one level, this flows from the complexity of personal identity here. When I gripe about people being perpetually late and then yelling at me to hurry (which happens all the time, by the way), am I griping about Bambara people specifically? All Malians? Africans in general? In this case, I think the gripe is fairly applicable all over West Africa - but that generalization provides a slippery slope to the sort of thinking that you catch snippets of every day: "Africans do things this way." When something goes wrong, it's always "TIA - this is Africa." Whenever I hear a group of tourists referring to "some Africans did such-and-such," I cringe, and yet I catch my own assumptions marching merrily away down generalization street all the time. I think it's unavoidable - but that doesn't make it right.
"Fair enough," you might say, "but 'Africa' is still a geographical concept, not a racial one." This is, on the face of it, quite true. There are plenty of shades of skin in any African country. The lighter ones are generally immigrants, yes, but often only in the loosest sense - the Lebanese, for example, have been here for hundreds of years. But let's be honest. When travellers or expats talk about "Africans," they don't include anyone with lighter skin.
This fuzzy euphemism-ing is a dangerous game. Too often, it is backed up by pointing out a string of examples of how people are acting in the way you're complaining about (or complimenting). These examples are usually valid enough - there are plenty of annoying or inspiring things that everyone around you seems to do. The problem comes with the slip from framing things as "In Africa (or better, "in Mali") women do the majority of the work" to "African men are lazy." I've heard both. I've said both. But I fear the second one has all too much in common with the odiously paternalistic racism that one sometimes runs into from unreformed South Africans. The kind that sighs sadly and regrets the various things - you know, promiscuity, laziness, corruption - that "Africans" cannot escape from. As always, I don't think there's a hard and fast line as to what is harmful and what isn't, and I don't believe in policing thought. The word "racist" suffers sometimes from being too strong a condemnation. I do and think and say racist things all the time, especially as a white traveller in West Africa, and I'd rather take as a jumping-off point for discussion rather than condemnation.
Returning from the realm of thought to reality for a bit, it really is simple skin colour that usually defines how I'm treated, at least until I get to know whomever I'm interacting with. Sometimes, people try and take advantage of you. I'm certainly charged the white price for goods most days, especially in touristy places where people see plenty of well off foreigners. From time to time, people befriend you on false pretenses, as is the case anywhere. Far more dominant, though, is the deference I recieve. I am continuously given special treatment - people get up and give me their chairs, boot people out of choice seats on vehicles for me, bend their heads and fetch me what I need. I don't particularly like it. Indeed, it often bothers me. I won't pretend here, though, to be a better person than I am. I regularly use my white-people-powers (as I've come to call them) to make my life a bit easier. Perhaps I take that legroom-ey seat on the long ride. Perhaps I just waltz past that security check. There are a million examples of things like this. To be fair, I would often have to argue 'till I was blue in the face to avoid being priviledged in this way. I also run into a fair share of situations where not using my white priveleges gets me booted not to an equal place on the pecking order with locals, but to the very bottom of it. Sometimes, though, I just use my position without a second thought - and it is that that every traveller needs to keep a close eye on.
Many guidebooks have sections for women travellers, with tips and advice for them in whichever country the book covers. To my utter fascination, the Bradt guides for African countries also offer tips for black travellers, whose experience is a completely different one from mine (and much more likely to involve problems with local authorities). Sadly, though, black travellers are very rare - indeed, aside from Japanese tour groups, it isn't common to see anything but lily-white skin on the African backpacking trail. I have met a few travellers of Chinese or Japanese extraction, who often tell me stories of the fairly crude racist comments levelled at them by local people. So, when I talk about race, I can only really talk about the black/white dynamic, and indeed I think I can only really even talk about the black/white male dynamic, the experiences of foreign women here being so different. It certainly gives you quite a a bit to stew on.
Peace
This pronouncement from a fellow sitting beside me at a fish lady's stand in Mopti, Mali, is perhaps a bit unusually blunt. The argument, though, is by no means an uncommon one. All through West Africa, time after time after time, a traveller is confronted by people arguing for their own inferiority. I try my best to argue the other side - that the problems in Mali, or anywhere, trace their causes to history, geography, corruption and colonialism (just for starters), not to anything inherently related to colour. I don't think I often get through to people.
It may seem a bit strange that after an amazing month seeing amazing things with an amazing woman in Mali, talking about race is the thing that I feel most compelled to revive this blog with. I think, perhaps, that does have to do with the Malian experience. Unlike the rest of West Africa, Mali is a big tourist destination for everyone from backpackers to senior citizen tour groups. With the tourists comes an attitude toward foreigners that is often disturbingly servile. I don't necessarily believe that having a Malian scurrying to bring a foreigner coffee necessarily marks a more problematic power relationship than a Sierra Leonean hustling to bring a report full of development jargon. Racism and inferiority often lurk beneath both of them, but the tourist-oriented version is just a little bit more obvious, the whiff of colonial times just a little bit stronger.
Skin colour, and the differences in it, lay down the boundaries of how a Western traveller meets West Africa. It often is a bit startling to hear how callously the terms "blacks" and "whites" are thrown around, mostly by locals whose perception of race is often far more binary than that of foreigners used to having compatriots from different backgrounds. Still, for how often skin colour enters into the conversation, or hides behind it, it can be tricky to figure out just how often you, or the local people you are talking to, are talking about race.
Skin colour, here, is shorthand for so much. To be white doesn't just signify a different background. It means a different culture. It means being impossibly rich. It means being connected to those who dominate the planet, not those who are dominated. None of this is entirely false in the Canadian context, either, but a black Canadian and white one have a great deal more common ground between them than a Canadian and a Malian might do. Not as much common ground as they should, of course. The West is nothing even close to postracial in handing out opportunities to its citizens. But when we talk about race in Canada, we can try to talk about it from the stated assumption (however weakly held it may be by individuals) that all things being equal, people are equal. That the colour of people's skin doesn't really attach to anything qualitative, either individually or as a group. That's a difficult position to maintain in Africa, where skin colour signifies membership in a group with different behavioural norms, different worldviews, different lives.
So, on the face of it, much of the shockingly brash talk about race is actually a conversation about culture. That can still be fraught, of course, but most of us are generally more comfortable accepting that people think or act differently based on cultural norms than the colour of their skin. Fair enough - and I do think that this diffuses some of the conversations that I've had. There exist plenty of explanations for why Western culture is, for example, perhaps more entreprenerial, or why government corruption in Africa is such a problem. When people say "White people are better at x," they usually mean that "x works better in Europe and North America," which is certainly quite often true. That, at least, is the charitable interpretation. I certainly realize that many Africans believe otherwise, a legacy of a dysfunctional and incredibly Eurocentric education system, and a long history of seeming dependance on the West. Perhaps it's time to make the point a whole lot louder that the so-called "donor nations" are actually net recipients of African wealth, not the other way around.
But I digress. The question remains - when, if ever, am I talking or thinking of race? As a traveller I think this is especially pertinent. Like all travellers, I enjoy the odd wild generalization about the people and places that I'm visiting. I think most of us do this. To pick a hackneyed example, backpacking around Europe one regularly finds oneself at tables full of travellers debating the characteristics of this or that nationality - nice Canadians, rude Frenchmen, et cetera. I don't think most of us have too much of a problem with these kinds of discussion, as long as the odd proviso is made that there are many exceptions to all these stereotypes.
The same lines of thought, though, are a good bit trickier in the African context. At one level, this flows from the complexity of personal identity here. When I gripe about people being perpetually late and then yelling at me to hurry (which happens all the time, by the way), am I griping about Bambara people specifically? All Malians? Africans in general? In this case, I think the gripe is fairly applicable all over West Africa - but that generalization provides a slippery slope to the sort of thinking that you catch snippets of every day: "Africans do things this way." When something goes wrong, it's always "TIA - this is Africa." Whenever I hear a group of tourists referring to "some Africans did such-and-such," I cringe, and yet I catch my own assumptions marching merrily away down generalization street all the time. I think it's unavoidable - but that doesn't make it right.
"Fair enough," you might say, "but 'Africa' is still a geographical concept, not a racial one." This is, on the face of it, quite true. There are plenty of shades of skin in any African country. The lighter ones are generally immigrants, yes, but often only in the loosest sense - the Lebanese, for example, have been here for hundreds of years. But let's be honest. When travellers or expats talk about "Africans," they don't include anyone with lighter skin.
This fuzzy euphemism-ing is a dangerous game. Too often, it is backed up by pointing out a string of examples of how people are acting in the way you're complaining about (or complimenting). These examples are usually valid enough - there are plenty of annoying or inspiring things that everyone around you seems to do. The problem comes with the slip from framing things as "In Africa (or better, "in Mali") women do the majority of the work" to "African men are lazy." I've heard both. I've said both. But I fear the second one has all too much in common with the odiously paternalistic racism that one sometimes runs into from unreformed South Africans. The kind that sighs sadly and regrets the various things - you know, promiscuity, laziness, corruption - that "Africans" cannot escape from. As always, I don't think there's a hard and fast line as to what is harmful and what isn't, and I don't believe in policing thought. The word "racist" suffers sometimes from being too strong a condemnation. I do and think and say racist things all the time, especially as a white traveller in West Africa, and I'd rather take as a jumping-off point for discussion rather than condemnation.
Returning from the realm of thought to reality for a bit, it really is simple skin colour that usually defines how I'm treated, at least until I get to know whomever I'm interacting with. Sometimes, people try and take advantage of you. I'm certainly charged the white price for goods most days, especially in touristy places where people see plenty of well off foreigners. From time to time, people befriend you on false pretenses, as is the case anywhere. Far more dominant, though, is the deference I recieve. I am continuously given special treatment - people get up and give me their chairs, boot people out of choice seats on vehicles for me, bend their heads and fetch me what I need. I don't particularly like it. Indeed, it often bothers me. I won't pretend here, though, to be a better person than I am. I regularly use my white-people-powers (as I've come to call them) to make my life a bit easier. Perhaps I take that legroom-ey seat on the long ride. Perhaps I just waltz past that security check. There are a million examples of things like this. To be fair, I would often have to argue 'till I was blue in the face to avoid being priviledged in this way. I also run into a fair share of situations where not using my white priveleges gets me booted not to an equal place on the pecking order with locals, but to the very bottom of it. Sometimes, though, I just use my position without a second thought - and it is that that every traveller needs to keep a close eye on.
Many guidebooks have sections for women travellers, with tips and advice for them in whichever country the book covers. To my utter fascination, the Bradt guides for African countries also offer tips for black travellers, whose experience is a completely different one from mine (and much more likely to involve problems with local authorities). Sadly, though, black travellers are very rare - indeed, aside from Japanese tour groups, it isn't common to see anything but lily-white skin on the African backpacking trail. I have met a few travellers of Chinese or Japanese extraction, who often tell me stories of the fairly crude racist comments levelled at them by local people. So, when I talk about race, I can only really talk about the black/white dynamic, and indeed I think I can only really even talk about the black/white male dynamic, the experiences of foreign women here being so different. It certainly gives you quite a a bit to stew on.
Peace
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Yuletidin'
Spending Christmas in Burkina Faso, amongst the bottom 5 countries on earth by almost any measure of human welfare, just begs for a cliche-laden blog post about the obscenity of our Christmas materialism. I thought about writing that. I certainly often find Christmas obscene. The funny thing is, though, that now is not the time at which I find the contrast most jarring.
It's actually really easy to explain Christmas's excesses to Burkinabes, most of whom can sympathize with blowing an unsustainable amount of money on a holiday or festival or marriage or whatnot. It's common enough in West Africa, as I think it probably is all over the world. Indeed, the significance of these big fetes is probably quite a bit bigger, even in material terms. I wouldn't be surprised if what a Burkinabe family spends putting on a feast for their friends isn't a bigger fraction of their income than even the most rapacious Christmas shopping. Big events certainly are "bigger" in lives that are otherwise so harshly delimited by the shit end of the climactic stick that keeps life in the Sahel so marginal.
To me, the real shock is not the burst of christmas consumption, but rather the continual outflow of money that characterizes our life at home. Here I live, and live rather well, on around 30 bucks a day. That's more than most Burkinabe earn in a month. Splashing out on a bottle of wine at Christmastime is nothing special - but I can buy a bottle of wine every day. Festivals for me aren't tinged by the barely-suppressed desparation of living on the edge of family catastrophe. Unless you're indigenous, not even the poorest Canadians have a lived experience anywhere near as tenuous. Without that sense of risk, perhaps, it's a little bit harder to really pour your emotions into a moment like Christmas.
Indeed, I got just that arguement last night from the neighbourhood salad lady in the back suburb of Bobo-Dioulasso where I was staying. Her sons, like many other young Burkinabe, had left to work in Cote D'Ivoire and come back changed, with money but also with a sudden attachment to having stuff that she was finding rather difficult to integrate. I still think it's a little trite to complain about the erosion of community by prosperity, when "prosperity" means a little cushion that staves off desparation, but clearly it is a real process.
Still, most families have a long way to go before they risk the soulessness that can happen at Christmas time in the West. Even amongst Christians here, present-giving isn't such a big thing. When people splash out on Christmas, they splash out on food for their friends and family, on music, on beer. I can sympathize with that.
Although Christmas' core as a Christian festival is well enough known - most Muslims are pretty down with Jesus, and have some awareness that the day marks his birth - it doesn't really seem to matter much. Everything will be closed, but just as with the ghost-towns that West African cities become on a Sunday, it's mostly a hangover from many years of colonial rule.
That's not to say that Christmas itself is viewed purely as some foreign imposition. There simply aren't enough foreigners here to account for the mass of Christmas decorations and bric-a-brac being hawked on street corners (though, really only in the bigger cities). As with much of the rest of the world, Christmas seems to have become something of a catch-all holiday for those who have the resources to observe it.
So here I am in Burkina Faso, a foreigner with not a hint of Christianity in him who nevertheless has always enjoyed the season. I think I take as much pleasure in ritual, sometimes, as a religious person does, and Christmas is nothing if not ritualistic. My family also spends a remarkably small amount of time together, especially considering how close many of us (at least on my father's side) live to one another, so Christmas is perhaps a little bit more special for it. In any case, I like Christmas. I like the smell of a live tree, decorated as tackily as possible. I like the piles of food that lurk around every corner. I like curling up on a Christmas morning, well-slept and as far as I possibly can get from needing to do anything. I like the snow, when it's there. I like the feeling of connection to a string of recognizably similar days stretching back as far as I can remember.
With all this memory, Christmas abroad can be a bit dislocating. I've done it once before, in India. There, oddly, I was staying in an old Portuguese church on the coast, probably the closest thing to a religious christmas I'll ever have. I even ate fish! This time, Christmas eve will pass with a big dinner out in the garden of my little inn, with music and wine and wine-augmented French chatter. Tomorrow, Christmas day will find me curled up under a mango tree with a book, a pile of chocolates and treats, and not a care in the world. As far as this finds me from a white Christmas with the people I love, I still think it'll be pleasant.
I unashamedly sought the company of other foreigners for the holiday, but I'm happy how I found it - at a place run by a Canadian-Burkinabe couple, deeply integrated into the local community, with their kids and the neighbourhood ones running about, climbing on me and making mischief with the musical instruments. It should be a Christmas dinner with allusions enough to set me to being pleasantly maudlin about home - and I do miss home at this time of year - without being just a table full of homesick white people. This, I think, is good.
And so we will sit, and eat, and drink, and in a couple days return to life as rich travellers in a poor place, travellers who have to go through all this fuss for a couple days of the same communal life that people here enjoy simply for lack of any other option. We can afford to go it alone, to travel alone, to live alone, to only see our family on holidays. However most Burkinabe might like to have that sort of freedom, most never will. Those who earn 30 bucks a month will often give 25 to support their extended families, and in turn depend on those families for everything.
So many of our own Christmas pleasures in the West come from tapping briefly into that communal joy with the safety net of our own potential independance right below us. We give because we can. Others give because they must.
Merry Christmas
Josh
It's actually really easy to explain Christmas's excesses to Burkinabes, most of whom can sympathize with blowing an unsustainable amount of money on a holiday or festival or marriage or whatnot. It's common enough in West Africa, as I think it probably is all over the world. Indeed, the significance of these big fetes is probably quite a bit bigger, even in material terms. I wouldn't be surprised if what a Burkinabe family spends putting on a feast for their friends isn't a bigger fraction of their income than even the most rapacious Christmas shopping. Big events certainly are "bigger" in lives that are otherwise so harshly delimited by the shit end of the climactic stick that keeps life in the Sahel so marginal.
To me, the real shock is not the burst of christmas consumption, but rather the continual outflow of money that characterizes our life at home. Here I live, and live rather well, on around 30 bucks a day. That's more than most Burkinabe earn in a month. Splashing out on a bottle of wine at Christmastime is nothing special - but I can buy a bottle of wine every day. Festivals for me aren't tinged by the barely-suppressed desparation of living on the edge of family catastrophe. Unless you're indigenous, not even the poorest Canadians have a lived experience anywhere near as tenuous. Without that sense of risk, perhaps, it's a little bit harder to really pour your emotions into a moment like Christmas.
Indeed, I got just that arguement last night from the neighbourhood salad lady in the back suburb of Bobo-Dioulasso where I was staying. Her sons, like many other young Burkinabe, had left to work in Cote D'Ivoire and come back changed, with money but also with a sudden attachment to having stuff that she was finding rather difficult to integrate. I still think it's a little trite to complain about the erosion of community by prosperity, when "prosperity" means a little cushion that staves off desparation, but clearly it is a real process.
Still, most families have a long way to go before they risk the soulessness that can happen at Christmas time in the West. Even amongst Christians here, present-giving isn't such a big thing. When people splash out on Christmas, they splash out on food for their friends and family, on music, on beer. I can sympathize with that.
Although Christmas' core as a Christian festival is well enough known - most Muslims are pretty down with Jesus, and have some awareness that the day marks his birth - it doesn't really seem to matter much. Everything will be closed, but just as with the ghost-towns that West African cities become on a Sunday, it's mostly a hangover from many years of colonial rule.
That's not to say that Christmas itself is viewed purely as some foreign imposition. There simply aren't enough foreigners here to account for the mass of Christmas decorations and bric-a-brac being hawked on street corners (though, really only in the bigger cities). As with much of the rest of the world, Christmas seems to have become something of a catch-all holiday for those who have the resources to observe it.
So here I am in Burkina Faso, a foreigner with not a hint of Christianity in him who nevertheless has always enjoyed the season. I think I take as much pleasure in ritual, sometimes, as a religious person does, and Christmas is nothing if not ritualistic. My family also spends a remarkably small amount of time together, especially considering how close many of us (at least on my father's side) live to one another, so Christmas is perhaps a little bit more special for it. In any case, I like Christmas. I like the smell of a live tree, decorated as tackily as possible. I like the piles of food that lurk around every corner. I like curling up on a Christmas morning, well-slept and as far as I possibly can get from needing to do anything. I like the snow, when it's there. I like the feeling of connection to a string of recognizably similar days stretching back as far as I can remember.
With all this memory, Christmas abroad can be a bit dislocating. I've done it once before, in India. There, oddly, I was staying in an old Portuguese church on the coast, probably the closest thing to a religious christmas I'll ever have. I even ate fish! This time, Christmas eve will pass with a big dinner out in the garden of my little inn, with music and wine and wine-augmented French chatter. Tomorrow, Christmas day will find me curled up under a mango tree with a book, a pile of chocolates and treats, and not a care in the world. As far as this finds me from a white Christmas with the people I love, I still think it'll be pleasant.
I unashamedly sought the company of other foreigners for the holiday, but I'm happy how I found it - at a place run by a Canadian-Burkinabe couple, deeply integrated into the local community, with their kids and the neighbourhood ones running about, climbing on me and making mischief with the musical instruments. It should be a Christmas dinner with allusions enough to set me to being pleasantly maudlin about home - and I do miss home at this time of year - without being just a table full of homesick white people. This, I think, is good.
And so we will sit, and eat, and drink, and in a couple days return to life as rich travellers in a poor place, travellers who have to go through all this fuss for a couple days of the same communal life that people here enjoy simply for lack of any other option. We can afford to go it alone, to travel alone, to live alone, to only see our family on holidays. However most Burkinabe might like to have that sort of freedom, most never will. Those who earn 30 bucks a month will often give 25 to support their extended families, and in turn depend on those families for everything.
So many of our own Christmas pleasures in the West come from tapping briefly into that communal joy with the safety net of our own potential independance right below us. We give because we can. Others give because they must.
Merry Christmas
Josh
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Whoodoo? Youdoo?
Benin is a country with an intellectual bent, full of little cafes where middle-aged men with glasses are to be found sitting with newspapers, arguing over politics, waving their newspapers about, and pounding back cups of coffee. I myself made a second home at Cafe Eureka, a mere shack on the street corner in Ouidah that proclaimed itself to be "the Cafe of arts and culture". The interior was covered in mathematical proofs scrawled over the rough-cut boards, and I found it a congenial place indeed for a bit of a ponder - though what the proofs were proving escaped me.
All this intellectual infrastructure in Benin is a good thing, because the place leaves you with a heck of a lot to ponder. Especially along the coast, the culture is an absolutely fascinating hybrid. It starts with the Portuguese colonization of South America and the beginnings of the empire of Brazil, whose work was done mostly by West African slaves shipped out from the Benin coast. Early on, several powerful Brazilian families settled in Benin and established control of the trade. They were fruitful, and by taking dozens of local wives, had hundreds of children that helped create a distinctive Afro-Brazilian culture all along the coast as far as Lagos. All through Benin you see Brazilian architecture, meet people named Da Silva and the like, and generall bump into this peculiar hybrid, of one colonial creation colonizing and merging with its own historical antecedant, to create all kinds of complexity, complexity furthered by the split within the Afro-brazilian community, a large portion of which ended up Muslim. Such was the path that led to a beautiful pastel-coloured mosque in Porto Novo, built as an exact imitation of the Catholic Cathedral of Salvador de Bahia in Brazil.
The most famous aspect of this cultural hybrid is the religion that went with it: voodoo, or much more properly, vodun. It's the major part of Beninoise identity for tourists, who come equipped with morbid hollywood stereotypes that are, indeed, not entirely untrue. There really are voodoo dolls, creepy fetishes made from monkey heads, and a general dread of curses and enemies, along with a great deal of death-centric ritual. This is all window-dressing, though, for a truly vibrant animist faith that has a pretty consistent set of rituals from Brazil to Haiti to Benin. To travel Benin is to be immersed in Vodun culture, and the slavery that spawned it.
I wasn't much up for the schlocky side, like paying the local priest to cast bones for your fortune, but that wasn't much of a problem. Most of the time, vodun is just something that's there. In Ouidah, my first stop, a little orderly town full of cafes and museums, you find a sacred forest full of voodoo shriness, and more of them lining the road to the old point of no return, where slaves were loaded into the ships and taken away. You see rich beninoise stop their Mercedes' to offer a quick prayer to one, then drive away in a cloud of dust.
Benin is generally a tidy country. It's very visibly richer than Togo, and has such things - real sidewalks, public squares! - to make it seem positivel sophisticated. A few days in Porto Novo, the capital, pounds that impression right in, with tons of elegant old buildings and more Afro Brazilian history. As nice as it was, the highlight of my couple weeks came at the next stop, in Abomey, the old capital of the Dahomey kings.
There, I dived right back into the vodun, staying at a run-down hole of a hotel run by a fellow who knew everything about the community and the local religious calendar (he was the next president of one of the secret societies). I had the luck to show up in town in time to catch 3 nights of ceremony and dancing, at all of which I was the sole foreigner, which was pretty intense indeed. The first night, the risen dead chased us through the dusty backstreets and beat us with swords until we yeilded coins. The second night, a secret society of women danced together to thank the local river god, and the third night, there was a dance to invite a good rainy season that involved frantic drumming, much spastic dancing and flipping about, and eventually, the killing of 2 goats which were then flung about the dance ground wildly - the dance ground being a patch of dust 5 feet from my room window, so no sleep for me! Well worth it, though - I've rarely felt as honestly admitted into local culture as I did then.
When not dancing, I chased down the ghosts of kingdoms past - Abomey is full of palaces with their selection of creepiness - thrones mounted on human skulls, reliefs of the king beating someone to death with a severed limb. These were not pleasant people, back in the day. They did, however, produce an empire that resisted the French for a long time. It was a rare pleasure to be in an African place which had a historical identity almost entirely rooted in its precolonial past, however bloody that past may have objectively seemed.
It was also an even rarer pleasure, in a complete aside, to be in an African country where cheese - delicious, soft, fried cheese - was a big menu item at street stalls. I nearly died of joy, for days! It was largely in pursuit of cheese, and the Burkina Faso border, that I found my way north, but on the way I found Dassa Zoume, a crazy town buried in epic rock formations, and the town of Natitingou, where the Tata Somba houses (same general idea as the Tamberma valley in Togo) made another appearance. I spent many evenings at my favourite bar in the region, La Breche, which was a restored Tata Somba house where you could put your feet up and look over the Atakora mountains. Joyousness!
And so ended my Benin experience - vodun dancing, snake eating (tastes like chicken!), cafe-sitting, and all. For a place I had few expectations of, it worked out to be a real highlight of this trip.
Peace
All this intellectual infrastructure in Benin is a good thing, because the place leaves you with a heck of a lot to ponder. Especially along the coast, the culture is an absolutely fascinating hybrid. It starts with the Portuguese colonization of South America and the beginnings of the empire of Brazil, whose work was done mostly by West African slaves shipped out from the Benin coast. Early on, several powerful Brazilian families settled in Benin and established control of the trade. They were fruitful, and by taking dozens of local wives, had hundreds of children that helped create a distinctive Afro-Brazilian culture all along the coast as far as Lagos. All through Benin you see Brazilian architecture, meet people named Da Silva and the like, and generall bump into this peculiar hybrid, of one colonial creation colonizing and merging with its own historical antecedant, to create all kinds of complexity, complexity furthered by the split within the Afro-brazilian community, a large portion of which ended up Muslim. Such was the path that led to a beautiful pastel-coloured mosque in Porto Novo, built as an exact imitation of the Catholic Cathedral of Salvador de Bahia in Brazil.
The most famous aspect of this cultural hybrid is the religion that went with it: voodoo, or much more properly, vodun. It's the major part of Beninoise identity for tourists, who come equipped with morbid hollywood stereotypes that are, indeed, not entirely untrue. There really are voodoo dolls, creepy fetishes made from monkey heads, and a general dread of curses and enemies, along with a great deal of death-centric ritual. This is all window-dressing, though, for a truly vibrant animist faith that has a pretty consistent set of rituals from Brazil to Haiti to Benin. To travel Benin is to be immersed in Vodun culture, and the slavery that spawned it.
I wasn't much up for the schlocky side, like paying the local priest to cast bones for your fortune, but that wasn't much of a problem. Most of the time, vodun is just something that's there. In Ouidah, my first stop, a little orderly town full of cafes and museums, you find a sacred forest full of voodoo shriness, and more of them lining the road to the old point of no return, where slaves were loaded into the ships and taken away. You see rich beninoise stop their Mercedes' to offer a quick prayer to one, then drive away in a cloud of dust.
Benin is generally a tidy country. It's very visibly richer than Togo, and has such things - real sidewalks, public squares! - to make it seem positivel sophisticated. A few days in Porto Novo, the capital, pounds that impression right in, with tons of elegant old buildings and more Afro Brazilian history. As nice as it was, the highlight of my couple weeks came at the next stop, in Abomey, the old capital of the Dahomey kings.
There, I dived right back into the vodun, staying at a run-down hole of a hotel run by a fellow who knew everything about the community and the local religious calendar (he was the next president of one of the secret societies). I had the luck to show up in town in time to catch 3 nights of ceremony and dancing, at all of which I was the sole foreigner, which was pretty intense indeed. The first night, the risen dead chased us through the dusty backstreets and beat us with swords until we yeilded coins. The second night, a secret society of women danced together to thank the local river god, and the third night, there was a dance to invite a good rainy season that involved frantic drumming, much spastic dancing and flipping about, and eventually, the killing of 2 goats which were then flung about the dance ground wildly - the dance ground being a patch of dust 5 feet from my room window, so no sleep for me! Well worth it, though - I've rarely felt as honestly admitted into local culture as I did then.
When not dancing, I chased down the ghosts of kingdoms past - Abomey is full of palaces with their selection of creepiness - thrones mounted on human skulls, reliefs of the king beating someone to death with a severed limb. These were not pleasant people, back in the day. They did, however, produce an empire that resisted the French for a long time. It was a rare pleasure to be in an African place which had a historical identity almost entirely rooted in its precolonial past, however bloody that past may have objectively seemed.
It was also an even rarer pleasure, in a complete aside, to be in an African country where cheese - delicious, soft, fried cheese - was a big menu item at street stalls. I nearly died of joy, for days! It was largely in pursuit of cheese, and the Burkina Faso border, that I found my way north, but on the way I found Dassa Zoume, a crazy town buried in epic rock formations, and the town of Natitingou, where the Tata Somba houses (same general idea as the Tamberma valley in Togo) made another appearance. I spent many evenings at my favourite bar in the region, La Breche, which was a restored Tata Somba house where you could put your feet up and look over the Atakora mountains. Joyousness!
And so ended my Benin experience - vodun dancing, snake eating (tastes like chicken!), cafe-sitting, and all. For a place I had few expectations of, it worked out to be a real highlight of this trip.
Peace
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Togo-riffic
The joys of Togo start with the border crossing. Having used my talent for tracking down obscure crossing points, I hopped from Ghana to Togo in the extreme north of both countries, not far from the Burkinabé border. The Togolese border post? A rather jolly little man sitting under a tree. He had the requisite stamps, though, and with zero muss, I was through.
After a night in the pleasant town of Daopong where I discovered that: a) There are mangoes in Togo, with not a sight of them in Ghana, and b) that Togolese beer is incredibly good, I puttered off my way through some gorgeous savannah and mountains down to the the Tamberma Valley.
What a place. For once on this trip I felt like I had stepped into National Geographic. The Tamberma build amazing fortified castle-houses out of mud, using no tools. Unlike most groups, they live amongst their fields, so most of the "villages" are more a collection of farms. Although there is one actual town, with electricity and all the rest, I jumped at the chance to spend a couple nights staying in the compound of the chief of one of the small villages. I paid for the privelege - the chief hosts tourists from time to time, and charged me 4 bucks a night to sleep on his roof. Well worth it, to sleep on top of one of the amazing homes, watching everything glow in the sunset, the stars come out, and the sun come up. In all respects it was a fairly traditional place - lots of topless women pounding millet in the yard, goats running everywhere, all surrounded by gorgeous mountains, maize fields, and enormous baobab trees. It would be wise not to overstate the case though! Although the chief spent the day sitting on a bench in traditional robes gabbing with the villagers, he (like every Togolese person over 15) had a mobile phone with him constantly. His son went to school in town, had a motorbike, and toured me around the other villages. Magic and a half.
From there it was off to Atakpame, the edge of coffee country, where cobbled streets and gorgeous views were found. That, though, was just a quick stop on the way to coffee country itself, the green hills around Kpalime. They bore a lot of similarity to the hills in the east of Ghana, unsurprising given that they are the same hills. Atop them, I could pretty much see the Ghanaian towns that I had been hanging out in. This particular border makes even less sense than most, dating to WWI when the British and the French invaded the then-German colony of Togoland and divided it between them. The French part became Togo, while the British part got tacked onto Ghana, which irks locals to this day, with the territory of the Ewe divided neatly in half.
Although Kpalime was good fun, the real joy was spending a couple days a few hundred metres up in the village of Klouto. The forests there are extremely dense with butterflies; and you can wander off on guided butterfly safaris. I spent a couple days there hiking to discover not only the butterflies, but also all sorts of medicinal plants and the various ways of making natural paints and dyes that get used for fabric paintings all over the region. Really neat. As a solo traveller, experiences with guides are often a mixed bag, but this one was phenomenal.
Equally good was relaxing in the garden of the little place I was staying, drinking endless cups of fresh-brewed coffee that had been grown and dried within a kilometre of me. Mmm! I'm well used to Nescafe by now, but I couldn't help sighing pretty loudly when I tasted the first cup. Even better - it was free!
Fully caffeinated, I spent a couple days lounging in Lome, which has to be the most pleasantly chilled out of all the big cities I've been to so far. Very French - lots of tree-lined avenues and bougainvilleas everywhere, a nice beach and tons of good food. My hotel there was one of those weird pieces of the expat bubble, a little piece of southern France exported wholesale, right down to the greyhaired French guys with mustaches propping up the bar.
The next week was spent doing what I do best - taking it slow! With things to see that I could have done in a day or two, I decided to meander my way for 7. First a few nights on the beach outside Lome, which was my last chance for seaside-ing until April, then off into a sailed pirogue across Lac Togo to Togoville, on to the intense Friday market in the small town of Vogan, and finishing in Aneho, the intensely sleepy old capital.
In a bobble that Douglas Adams would love, on the way to Vogan - or Vogon - I managed to lose my towel! Thankfully no interstellar bypasses or bad poetry came my way over the next few days until I staged a daring rescue mission that took me back to the beach for one last night. Towel recovered, Togo completed.
You don't see too many tourists in Togo, which in many ways is a mighty puzzle. I guess it lacks the Voodoo calling cards of Benin and the English appeal of Ghana; perhaps people are also still scared of a reputation for political instability that is years out of date. It's still a repressive government, and the place is still a bit disconnected from the outside world, but I'm well glad I made it.
Peace
After a night in the pleasant town of Daopong where I discovered that: a) There are mangoes in Togo, with not a sight of them in Ghana, and b) that Togolese beer is incredibly good, I puttered off my way through some gorgeous savannah and mountains down to the the Tamberma Valley.
What a place. For once on this trip I felt like I had stepped into National Geographic. The Tamberma build amazing fortified castle-houses out of mud, using no tools. Unlike most groups, they live amongst their fields, so most of the "villages" are more a collection of farms. Although there is one actual town, with electricity and all the rest, I jumped at the chance to spend a couple nights staying in the compound of the chief of one of the small villages. I paid for the privelege - the chief hosts tourists from time to time, and charged me 4 bucks a night to sleep on his roof. Well worth it, to sleep on top of one of the amazing homes, watching everything glow in the sunset, the stars come out, and the sun come up. In all respects it was a fairly traditional place - lots of topless women pounding millet in the yard, goats running everywhere, all surrounded by gorgeous mountains, maize fields, and enormous baobab trees. It would be wise not to overstate the case though! Although the chief spent the day sitting on a bench in traditional robes gabbing with the villagers, he (like every Togolese person over 15) had a mobile phone with him constantly. His son went to school in town, had a motorbike, and toured me around the other villages. Magic and a half.
From there it was off to Atakpame, the edge of coffee country, where cobbled streets and gorgeous views were found. That, though, was just a quick stop on the way to coffee country itself, the green hills around Kpalime. They bore a lot of similarity to the hills in the east of Ghana, unsurprising given that they are the same hills. Atop them, I could pretty much see the Ghanaian towns that I had been hanging out in. This particular border makes even less sense than most, dating to WWI when the British and the French invaded the then-German colony of Togoland and divided it between them. The French part became Togo, while the British part got tacked onto Ghana, which irks locals to this day, with the territory of the Ewe divided neatly in half.
Although Kpalime was good fun, the real joy was spending a couple days a few hundred metres up in the village of Klouto. The forests there are extremely dense with butterflies; and you can wander off on guided butterfly safaris. I spent a couple days there hiking to discover not only the butterflies, but also all sorts of medicinal plants and the various ways of making natural paints and dyes that get used for fabric paintings all over the region. Really neat. As a solo traveller, experiences with guides are often a mixed bag, but this one was phenomenal.
Equally good was relaxing in the garden of the little place I was staying, drinking endless cups of fresh-brewed coffee that had been grown and dried within a kilometre of me. Mmm! I'm well used to Nescafe by now, but I couldn't help sighing pretty loudly when I tasted the first cup. Even better - it was free!
Fully caffeinated, I spent a couple days lounging in Lome, which has to be the most pleasantly chilled out of all the big cities I've been to so far. Very French - lots of tree-lined avenues and bougainvilleas everywhere, a nice beach and tons of good food. My hotel there was one of those weird pieces of the expat bubble, a little piece of southern France exported wholesale, right down to the greyhaired French guys with mustaches propping up the bar.
The next week was spent doing what I do best - taking it slow! With things to see that I could have done in a day or two, I decided to meander my way for 7. First a few nights on the beach outside Lome, which was my last chance for seaside-ing until April, then off into a sailed pirogue across Lac Togo to Togoville, on to the intense Friday market in the small town of Vogan, and finishing in Aneho, the intensely sleepy old capital.
In a bobble that Douglas Adams would love, on the way to Vogan - or Vogon - I managed to lose my towel! Thankfully no interstellar bypasses or bad poetry came my way over the next few days until I staged a daring rescue mission that took me back to the beach for one last night. Towel recovered, Togo completed.
You don't see too many tourists in Togo, which in many ways is a mighty puzzle. I guess it lacks the Voodoo calling cards of Benin and the English appeal of Ghana; perhaps people are also still scared of a reputation for political instability that is years out of date. It's still a repressive government, and the place is still a bit disconnected from the outside world, but I'm well glad I made it.
Peace
Sunday, November 29, 2009
West Africa's better half
I'm a museum junkie by any standard. Plenty of dusty, tiny, rarely-visited little places have been unlocked for me along this trip. About 85 percent of the time, their exhibits are fairly lame. I justify those visits on historiographical grounds - it's always interesting to see how a place or a people present themselves.
Every so often, though, you happen on a gem. In a big old Brazilian house in Ouidah, Benin, you find one. The downstairs rooms are filled with an excellent exhibition on Women in Africa (done in association with the Museé de la civilisation in Quebec city, as it happened). As is often the case for me, the museum visit was made worthwhile by a single item.
A Beninese sculptor had made a big sundial-esque platform, a circle divided into hours. On that platform were about a dozen finely made bronze statuettes depicting the different jobs a rural woman here takes on each day. The statuettes started just before 4 AM and petered out around 10. If a woman here gets in 6 hours of sleep, she's pretty lucky indeed. I know this. Indeed, I think I know a fair bit, by now, about women's issues in the developing world. For some reason, though, I found this mildly tacky piece of art pretty affecting.
It's hard to overstate how much work African women do. It's a pretty universal experience, especially in smaller villages, to find all the women pounding millet (I wouldn't want to armwrestle any lady over the age of 12 here!) while simultaneously tending several children, cleaning and maintaining the house, and doing pretty much everything else that needs to be done. Not only do women do more than 90% of the domestic work, but they also do more than 50% of the farm labour, often bent double in the fields hoeing by hand with a baby strapped on their back. On top of this, it's women who sell the produce at market. What are the men doing all this time? Quite often getting drunk and listening to the radio. This is much less a charicature than you might think - although of course men do put in work on the farm. Men also take a majority of paid labour, but with that so hard to come by, there's a lot of room to sit around while the women do all the work. Not for nothing have plenty of studies confirmed that a dollar of aid money is twice or thrice as effective if put in the hands of a woman.
The real danger of charicature here is not, though, the depiction of men as lazybones, but of women as some sort of meek domestic slave. The real picture is far more complex than that. Locals often make the point to me that women have a great deal of power over the home and community where most people spend most of their time. There really is a great deal of reverence accorded to women, to their mysterious knowledge and their role as mothers. There are also plenty of women who've escaped and made it as salaried workers, or quite often as rich traders. All across West Africa you come across the "Mama Benz", matriarch of the market, named for their favourite make of car. Many of these women are very rich. All these examples come up regularly, but I think there's a real danger of whitewashing the truth.
No amount of cultural specificity or "local values" can erase the fact that life for most African women is far harder than it need be. Neither can any amount of familiarity with the culture keep this from making me angry on a daily basis. Aside from superhuman workloads, women (rural and urban alike) have to face a society that's incredibly permissive of men and restrictive of them. They may face genital mutilation, and they often face a culture that regards the beating of one's wife as part and parcel of marriage. When I talk about women with local men, the power dynamic is a curious one. Men know they're on top, to be sure, but there's a real undercurrent of fear - fear of these people who can somehow juggle so much in a day while the poor fellow can't keep his bar tab straight.
I shouldn't be too facetious about West African men. I do, reasonably often, meet men with progressive views, or at least people who acknowledge that improving the place of women is vital for society. Too often, though, you chat with a "progressive" man for 5 minutes and wear right through the progressiveness. There are lots of allies here, but not nearly enough.
My position here, as a white, male, feminist visitor is pretty awkward at times. I don't think I necessarily have the right (or the power) to change how men here relate to the women in their lives, but I try to argue the case whenever it comes up over beer. I'm forever explaining, for example, exactly why I think it wouldn't be nice to my partner at home if I took a wife here. This results in many giggles. Every so often, though, I find an argument that gets through. I sometimes find myself telling local guys that learning to cook or clean will get them big points with the ladies... not the tack I'd like to take, but hey.
Above all, what I'd love would be to have more chances to discuss the issues honestly with women. But that's damn hard. Women are much less likely to speak French, are much less often found out in social situations, and are much more likely to get yelled at for wasting their time talking. It really is the language barrier that's the biggest problem, as my life on the road is full of interactions with the women in the markets and food stalls. Indeed, I think "getting sassed by market ladies" ranks up there as one of my big daily activities. Sass yes, serious conversation on social issues, not so much.
I actually find the absence of female conversation in my life pretty exhausting . At home I'd say the majority of my friends are women; I've always found women easier to connect with than men - or at least than "men" in the sports-talkin' emotion-ignorin' sense. In any case, to go from my Canadian millieu to a world where men and women often lead lives unrecognizable to each other is a stress. If I were to avoid conversation with jackass men, I'd have a lot of lonely evenings on my hands.
This is why I often envy the female backpackers I meet - although on the West African trail there are few women travelling solo. A solo woman has the advantage of being able to use her Western-ness to gain access to traditionally male social spaces, while also being able to connect as a woman, with women. Alas, the language barrier is still a big problem here, but women generally have a better chance of bridging the gap on a day-to-day basis than I do.
What viewpoints you might get from those women, of course, is a different matter. When I was in Ghana, hanging around the university crowd, they had an event to discuss on-campus sexual harassment. Some 75% of female students listed "wearing provocative clothing" as a proximate cause - and these are the most educated and priveledged girls in the country. I certainly get laughed at as much by women as by men whenever I talk up equality, and often get the most stringent arguments against it from women. That being said, it's rare for me to have these conversations with women alone; I suspect many of them would have a different answer about how they feel about, say, polygamy (which remains common) if their brother/husband/neighbour weren't there to report on it.
Every so often, though, you happen on a gem. In a big old Brazilian house in Ouidah, Benin, you find one. The downstairs rooms are filled with an excellent exhibition on Women in Africa (done in association with the Museé de la civilisation in Quebec city, as it happened). As is often the case for me, the museum visit was made worthwhile by a single item.
A Beninese sculptor had made a big sundial-esque platform, a circle divided into hours. On that platform were about a dozen finely made bronze statuettes depicting the different jobs a rural woman here takes on each day. The statuettes started just before 4 AM and petered out around 10. If a woman here gets in 6 hours of sleep, she's pretty lucky indeed. I know this. Indeed, I think I know a fair bit, by now, about women's issues in the developing world. For some reason, though, I found this mildly tacky piece of art pretty affecting.
It's hard to overstate how much work African women do. It's a pretty universal experience, especially in smaller villages, to find all the women pounding millet (I wouldn't want to armwrestle any lady over the age of 12 here!) while simultaneously tending several children, cleaning and maintaining the house, and doing pretty much everything else that needs to be done. Not only do women do more than 90% of the domestic work, but they also do more than 50% of the farm labour, often bent double in the fields hoeing by hand with a baby strapped on their back. On top of this, it's women who sell the produce at market. What are the men doing all this time? Quite often getting drunk and listening to the radio. This is much less a charicature than you might think - although of course men do put in work on the farm. Men also take a majority of paid labour, but with that so hard to come by, there's a lot of room to sit around while the women do all the work. Not for nothing have plenty of studies confirmed that a dollar of aid money is twice or thrice as effective if put in the hands of a woman.
The real danger of charicature here is not, though, the depiction of men as lazybones, but of women as some sort of meek domestic slave. The real picture is far more complex than that. Locals often make the point to me that women have a great deal of power over the home and community where most people spend most of their time. There really is a great deal of reverence accorded to women, to their mysterious knowledge and their role as mothers. There are also plenty of women who've escaped and made it as salaried workers, or quite often as rich traders. All across West Africa you come across the "Mama Benz", matriarch of the market, named for their favourite make of car. Many of these women are very rich. All these examples come up regularly, but I think there's a real danger of whitewashing the truth.
No amount of cultural specificity or "local values" can erase the fact that life for most African women is far harder than it need be. Neither can any amount of familiarity with the culture keep this from making me angry on a daily basis. Aside from superhuman workloads, women (rural and urban alike) have to face a society that's incredibly permissive of men and restrictive of them. They may face genital mutilation, and they often face a culture that regards the beating of one's wife as part and parcel of marriage. When I talk about women with local men, the power dynamic is a curious one. Men know they're on top, to be sure, but there's a real undercurrent of fear - fear of these people who can somehow juggle so much in a day while the poor fellow can't keep his bar tab straight.
I shouldn't be too facetious about West African men. I do, reasonably often, meet men with progressive views, or at least people who acknowledge that improving the place of women is vital for society. Too often, though, you chat with a "progressive" man for 5 minutes and wear right through the progressiveness. There are lots of allies here, but not nearly enough.
My position here, as a white, male, feminist visitor is pretty awkward at times. I don't think I necessarily have the right (or the power) to change how men here relate to the women in their lives, but I try to argue the case whenever it comes up over beer. I'm forever explaining, for example, exactly why I think it wouldn't be nice to my partner at home if I took a wife here. This results in many giggles. Every so often, though, I find an argument that gets through. I sometimes find myself telling local guys that learning to cook or clean will get them big points with the ladies... not the tack I'd like to take, but hey.
Above all, what I'd love would be to have more chances to discuss the issues honestly with women. But that's damn hard. Women are much less likely to speak French, are much less often found out in social situations, and are much more likely to get yelled at for wasting their time talking. It really is the language barrier that's the biggest problem, as my life on the road is full of interactions with the women in the markets and food stalls. Indeed, I think "getting sassed by market ladies" ranks up there as one of my big daily activities. Sass yes, serious conversation on social issues, not so much.
I actually find the absence of female conversation in my life pretty exhausting . At home I'd say the majority of my friends are women; I've always found women easier to connect with than men - or at least than "men" in the sports-talkin' emotion-ignorin' sense. In any case, to go from my Canadian millieu to a world where men and women often lead lives unrecognizable to each other is a stress. If I were to avoid conversation with jackass men, I'd have a lot of lonely evenings on my hands.
This is why I often envy the female backpackers I meet - although on the West African trail there are few women travelling solo. A solo woman has the advantage of being able to use her Western-ness to gain access to traditionally male social spaces, while also being able to connect as a woman, with women. Alas, the language barrier is still a big problem here, but women generally have a better chance of bridging the gap on a day-to-day basis than I do.
What viewpoints you might get from those women, of course, is a different matter. When I was in Ghana, hanging around the university crowd, they had an event to discuss on-campus sexual harassment. Some 75% of female students listed "wearing provocative clothing" as a proximate cause - and these are the most educated and priveledged girls in the country. I certainly get laughed at as much by women as by men whenever I talk up equality, and often get the most stringent arguments against it from women. That being said, it's rare for me to have these conversations with women alone; I suspect many of them would have a different answer about how they feel about, say, polygamy (which remains common) if their brother/husband/neighbour weren't there to report on it.
I feel the need to hedge a bit more here. There are many, many women who do at some level escape from all these strictures. I don't want anyone reading this to think that there's some parade of women going by with their heads bowed - it's nothing like that. Quite the opposite, actually - women in West Africa are usually a stronger and more exuberant presence than men. That they are so with such greater obstacles in front of them speaks volumes. I also don't think there's a lot of point in talking broadly about "solutions" here. The role of women's issues in the "development" discourse, and indeed the role of "development" in the feminist discourse are both discussions that I don't nearly have enought of a grasp of to comment on. For me, it's more a question of my experience as a traveller - and there, it's often a strain.
Peace
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Mmmmmmm!
I seriously don't know how I got this far into the blog without posting more about food. I've certainly been meaning to do it... but, well, perhaps I've been too busy eating. To be sure, each new place brings even more new yummy things to my attention, so perhaps I've just been hesitant to write as the story unfolds. In any case, this huge part of my travelling life goes unexplored no longer.
So, food. I love food. I love food even more when missing some of the other creature comforts (having more than 3 shirts, functioning toilets, or temperatures under 35). To a budget traveller food is a lifeline served up in shacks by the roadside.
And shacks they are. A standout feature of the West African eating scene is the vast gap in price between street food and restaurant fare. The same dish might cost you 50 cents on the street and 4 dollars in a restaurant. Suffice it to say, on a shoestring, I rarely end up at places with menus.
Which I don't mind. West African cuisine (and it is possible to speak in broad strokes about the region here) lends itself to streetside service. All around the region, the basic recipe for most meals is sauce + starch = yummy. The starches tend to vary from country to country, with lots of rice in Senegal and Guinea, for example, and much more fufu (a glop of goo made of pounded flour from various grains) along the Gulf of Guinea. You also get To, smaller glops of maize-based pate, and from time to time, couscous. Like most white people here, my preference runs to rice - but unlike many other foreigners, I haven't developed any particular loathing of fufu and its relatives, either.
In any case, you take this starch and over it pour a sauce, often with meat bits or fish bits in it. Sauces are made of many things; my personal favourite is Peanut/Groundnut/Sauce Arachide, especially its Senegalese variant that comes thick, brown, and peanut-y. No points to Ghana for making groundnut soup that just tastes like pepe (the basic hot spice used here). Other sauces are based on green stuff - either cassava leaves, okra, or (my favourite) spinach. Generally there are chunks of something meat-ish in the sauce as well. By far the most common, even far from the sea, is fish. Often it's random little river fishies; they are the cheapest protein here by some measure. Next most common is goat, which pops up in stew or as brochettes by the streetside. Chicken and beef are rare and pricey; pork barely registers (though in more Christian areas, you do find it from time to time)
There are, of course, tons of regional specialties. Senegal goes in for Thibou Djienne, a super yummy fish and veggie mix with the rice steamed in the sauce... mmm! Ghana gets huge points for Red Red, a delicious bean stew served over plantains. I'm in Benin now, where mashed yams emerge as a starch; utter yum.
I'm a vegetarian at home. Not a strict one - ideology being just as silly in your diet as anywhere else - but I rarely eat meat. In many ways though, my diet at home prepared me pretty well for west Africa. "Rice and stuff" is a pretty big staple for any vegetarian, so when I chow down here, I kind of feel at home.
But it's not the big meals that make West Africa great, so much as the little things. You're never far from food in a town, where a continual parade of street vendors go by with buckets of deliciousness on their heads, or grill them by the roadside. Indeed, with rice and sauce generally more of a breakfast and lunch thing here, the roadside barbeque is my usual dinner stop. Tonight, as often, it was a pile of fresh-grilled goat liberally doused in spice and chopped onions, with some fried plantain and a mango for desrt. MMMMMMM. But the snacks go beyond the joys of meat on a stick.
Yam chips, oh yes. Peanuts in every form. Deep fried doughnuts. Roast plantain. Sweets. Dried fishes. Sandwiches of all kinds. Ice cream bars. Fresh yogurt. It goes on and on and on. Togo and Benin even have plenty of roadside salad shacks for that veggie craving.
Just as good as the snacks are the drinks. Often tied up in little plastic bags you find fresh ginger beer (clears the sinuses!) , juice from the baobab tree, iced tea and lemonade (big up to Togo for this one), sweet yogurt drinks, and the love of my liquid life, bissap - sweet hibiscus flower tea, iced down. Many of these are sold frozen from coolers, and letting them melt in your hand is a lifesaver on a scorching day. The best part? Essentially all these things come in good portions for 10 to 50 cents
A whole separate point has to be made about deep fried plantains, which may be the most perfect snack ever created. Roasted plantains get dry; deep-fried they are soft and sweet with just the right amount of salty crunch. You usually get them hot, and with a cold beer they're truly mind-blowingly delicious.
Beer is almost a whole other topic. Each country has at least one unique brew. Most of them are sort of middling lagers that do the job on a hot day, but there are a number of standouts. You can get a mean bottle of stout in Ghana, and the Togolese Pilsner is exceptionally good. They're also usually rather cheap: the standard price for a 630 ml bottle (points to Liberia for 720 ml monsters at the same price) is about a dollar. This goes up in more Muslim places, but not by that much.
And then there's fruit. It's seasonal of course, but my life is full of many kinds of delicious mango, sweet soft papaya, meaninglessly cheap and delicious bananas, occaisional watermelons, oranges and mandarins, tiny sweet pineapples and so forth. I'm a fruit fiend, and it's rare to find a day where I don't down at least 4 or 5 bananas and a couple of mangoes.
My consumption of all of these things is made much easier by my freakish iron stomach. I've been in Africa almost 7 months now. I eat unwashed fruit, drink tap and well water, eat streetside salads and stuff that's been sitting in the sun all day. Not a peep. The only thing that's gotten my tummy really gurgling is a few hubristic attempts at downing whole watermelons in 2 sittings. I don't know much about the vagaries of immunology, and I don't care. I'd be perfectly willing to be sick from time to time as the price of being utterly carefree about food. The lack of sickness is just a bonus. That being said, in general the risks of food, and especially street food, are greatly overstated. I'd be much more worried about restaurants that get 5 customers a day rather than vendors who get 50 - the vendor food is far more likely to be fresh. I know plenty of digestively normal foreigners who would widely endorse this view.
The final thing that matters, oddly enough, in any discussion of West African food is language. Put simply, food in Francophone countries is generally much better. So is the experience of eating it. In Francophone West Africa there are little cafes everywhere where you can have a snack or a coffee and watch the street go by. In Anglophone countries, no dice. They are further burdened by horrid bread. Where in Francophone countries you find tasty crusty baguettes everywhere, in English ones you are stuck with the British bequest of spongey, tasteless loaves that resemble nothing if not wonderbread. Blechh. Any traveler eats a lot of bread, especially when you go away from towns and pack food, so this is a real problem. In any Francophone place you can step out of your hotel and easily find someone whipping up tasty omelettes on bread with a bit of mayo and some cafe au lait or tea (nescafe, usually - let's not be too optimistic here). In Anglophone places (Gambia excepted) you are SOL, as you are with finding a streetside cafeteria in which to be served.
Well, as I knew would happen, I can't write another word without getting a snack!
Peace
Josh
So, food. I love food. I love food even more when missing some of the other creature comforts (having more than 3 shirts, functioning toilets, or temperatures under 35). To a budget traveller food is a lifeline served up in shacks by the roadside.
And shacks they are. A standout feature of the West African eating scene is the vast gap in price between street food and restaurant fare. The same dish might cost you 50 cents on the street and 4 dollars in a restaurant. Suffice it to say, on a shoestring, I rarely end up at places with menus.
Which I don't mind. West African cuisine (and it is possible to speak in broad strokes about the region here) lends itself to streetside service. All around the region, the basic recipe for most meals is sauce + starch = yummy. The starches tend to vary from country to country, with lots of rice in Senegal and Guinea, for example, and much more fufu (a glop of goo made of pounded flour from various grains) along the Gulf of Guinea. You also get To, smaller glops of maize-based pate, and from time to time, couscous. Like most white people here, my preference runs to rice - but unlike many other foreigners, I haven't developed any particular loathing of fufu and its relatives, either.
In any case, you take this starch and over it pour a sauce, often with meat bits or fish bits in it. Sauces are made of many things; my personal favourite is Peanut/Groundnut/Sauce Arachide, especially its Senegalese variant that comes thick, brown, and peanut-y. No points to Ghana for making groundnut soup that just tastes like pepe (the basic hot spice used here). Other sauces are based on green stuff - either cassava leaves, okra, or (my favourite) spinach. Generally there are chunks of something meat-ish in the sauce as well. By far the most common, even far from the sea, is fish. Often it's random little river fishies; they are the cheapest protein here by some measure. Next most common is goat, which pops up in stew or as brochettes by the streetside. Chicken and beef are rare and pricey; pork barely registers (though in more Christian areas, you do find it from time to time)
There are, of course, tons of regional specialties. Senegal goes in for Thibou Djienne, a super yummy fish and veggie mix with the rice steamed in the sauce... mmm! Ghana gets huge points for Red Red, a delicious bean stew served over plantains. I'm in Benin now, where mashed yams emerge as a starch; utter yum.
I'm a vegetarian at home. Not a strict one - ideology being just as silly in your diet as anywhere else - but I rarely eat meat. In many ways though, my diet at home prepared me pretty well for west Africa. "Rice and stuff" is a pretty big staple for any vegetarian, so when I chow down here, I kind of feel at home.
But it's not the big meals that make West Africa great, so much as the little things. You're never far from food in a town, where a continual parade of street vendors go by with buckets of deliciousness on their heads, or grill them by the roadside. Indeed, with rice and sauce generally more of a breakfast and lunch thing here, the roadside barbeque is my usual dinner stop. Tonight, as often, it was a pile of fresh-grilled goat liberally doused in spice and chopped onions, with some fried plantain and a mango for desrt. MMMMMMM. But the snacks go beyond the joys of meat on a stick.
Yam chips, oh yes. Peanuts in every form. Deep fried doughnuts. Roast plantain. Sweets. Dried fishes. Sandwiches of all kinds. Ice cream bars. Fresh yogurt. It goes on and on and on. Togo and Benin even have plenty of roadside salad shacks for that veggie craving.
Just as good as the snacks are the drinks. Often tied up in little plastic bags you find fresh ginger beer (clears the sinuses!) , juice from the baobab tree, iced tea and lemonade (big up to Togo for this one), sweet yogurt drinks, and the love of my liquid life, bissap - sweet hibiscus flower tea, iced down. Many of these are sold frozen from coolers, and letting them melt in your hand is a lifesaver on a scorching day. The best part? Essentially all these things come in good portions for 10 to 50 cents
A whole separate point has to be made about deep fried plantains, which may be the most perfect snack ever created. Roasted plantains get dry; deep-fried they are soft and sweet with just the right amount of salty crunch. You usually get them hot, and with a cold beer they're truly mind-blowingly delicious.
Beer is almost a whole other topic. Each country has at least one unique brew. Most of them are sort of middling lagers that do the job on a hot day, but there are a number of standouts. You can get a mean bottle of stout in Ghana, and the Togolese Pilsner is exceptionally good. They're also usually rather cheap: the standard price for a 630 ml bottle (points to Liberia for 720 ml monsters at the same price) is about a dollar. This goes up in more Muslim places, but not by that much.
And then there's fruit. It's seasonal of course, but my life is full of many kinds of delicious mango, sweet soft papaya, meaninglessly cheap and delicious bananas, occaisional watermelons, oranges and mandarins, tiny sweet pineapples and so forth. I'm a fruit fiend, and it's rare to find a day where I don't down at least 4 or 5 bananas and a couple of mangoes.
My consumption of all of these things is made much easier by my freakish iron stomach. I've been in Africa almost 7 months now. I eat unwashed fruit, drink tap and well water, eat streetside salads and stuff that's been sitting in the sun all day. Not a peep. The only thing that's gotten my tummy really gurgling is a few hubristic attempts at downing whole watermelons in 2 sittings. I don't know much about the vagaries of immunology, and I don't care. I'd be perfectly willing to be sick from time to time as the price of being utterly carefree about food. The lack of sickness is just a bonus. That being said, in general the risks of food, and especially street food, are greatly overstated. I'd be much more worried about restaurants that get 5 customers a day rather than vendors who get 50 - the vendor food is far more likely to be fresh. I know plenty of digestively normal foreigners who would widely endorse this view.
The final thing that matters, oddly enough, in any discussion of West African food is language. Put simply, food in Francophone countries is generally much better. So is the experience of eating it. In Francophone West Africa there are little cafes everywhere where you can have a snack or a coffee and watch the street go by. In Anglophone countries, no dice. They are further burdened by horrid bread. Where in Francophone countries you find tasty crusty baguettes everywhere, in English ones you are stuck with the British bequest of spongey, tasteless loaves that resemble nothing if not wonderbread. Blechh. Any traveler eats a lot of bread, especially when you go away from towns and pack food, so this is a real problem. In any Francophone place you can step out of your hotel and easily find someone whipping up tasty omelettes on bread with a bit of mayo and some cafe au lait or tea (nescafe, usually - let's not be too optimistic here). In Anglophone places (Gambia excepted) you are SOL, as you are with finding a streetside cafeteria in which to be served.
Well, as I knew would happen, I can't write another word without getting a snack!
Peace
Josh
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