Love, money and other misunderstandings in Burkina Faso.
This was also published in the Prisma probably the week after the previous article
Bobo-Dioulasso is the economic capital of Burkina Faso. On one of the main streets there are big trees on both sides, painted white around their bases typical of villages in the south of France. I spent most of 2 months there, for a variety of reasons, the rich cultural life at first, but later the women friends I made, and finally from simple inertia in the growing heat.
My evenings began with a dinner at 8 rotating between 4 or 5 cheap bar/restos, while practising techniques for discouraging the people selling CDs, souvenirs, or on occasion ´ petits soeurs´ as they like to describe young women. There doesn´t seem to be a single technique, sometimes being cold and firm worked best, at others it was better to let them talk, feel acknowledged and then say ‘No’. But really it was them who set the agenda, homing in on the lone white man while disregarding known expats or groups of French tourists.
I met Ange (aka Queen Gertrude), an actress who worked nights in a bar where I went after dinner. The bar was not completely free of hustlers and after one such encounter, I asked her what technique she recommended. Her reply was “I simply ignore them as if they don´t exist, and they soon go away”. I suggested she was benefitting from her training as an actress, but she said “no”, it was rather the other way round. She remembered as a young child that her father could sit in a chair reading or writing in the midst of all kinds of noise and confusion without being distracted, and she always wanted to be like him, so she learned from watching. Getting his attention required something Africans have plenty of: patience, but that’s another story.
This was one of a number of occasions on my journey when an innocent question suddenly opened a window on another world. In Europe these kinds of candid revelations are quite uncommon, but they are a charming aspect of travel in the Third World. Not that everyone is transparently honest: far from it. In a course on cultural studies I was informed by one young student that “her ears hurt” when she heard me say ‘third world’, and I should say ‘developing countries’ instead. Only later it occurred to me that development might not be a panacea, and in any case the ex-colonies have been actively under-developed by the 1st and 2nd word countries, so actually calling them 3rd world is quite accurate.
Later one Night.
On Thursdays and Fridays, a Blues band plays in an open-air bar called the Restaurant Ivoire, a simple wooden stage with cheap tables and chairs under a tree for the customers.
The band assembles slowly, chatting, and gradually shifts into playing as some members tune up their instruments, so that by midnight things are generally cooking. This was when K arrived. I saw her clock me twice as she made her way between tables greeting friends and then arrived next to me asking if I´d like to buy her a drink. Perfectly timed as I’d just finished one of their large bottles of beer. I also vaguely noticed an older woman smiling in our direction but forgot about it until later.
After this second bottle I needed a pee, and since the only loo was in the bar across the road, K offered to show me the way. The toilet was a squat-down type in a dark box in the yard, and K waited, holding her mobile phone so that the light showed me where it was safest to stand. A first moment of intimacy and comedy for me, but for her just a bit of necessary practicality.
After another of the large bottles she suggested we leave for her place or mine, which I decided against, as booze and sex don´t go well together for me, and the thought of waking up without my wallet was uppermost in my mind. Standing by her motorbike and pointing out the girls hanging around in the street, I asked her what she really wanted from me. Her reply was straightforward: “I don’t ask for money, just a present, but you’ve already bought me a beer so no problem. And then to explain further: “Je t’amene a l’hotel, je te baise, et je retourne chez moi.”, or: “I´ll take you to your hotel, fuck you and then go home”. Hard to resist, but I managed to stick to my decision, and we just exchanged phone numbers as we said goodnight outside the hotel.
Altogether we saw each other for 3 weeks but after the first week things began to drift. One night at dinner there was a Chinese guy sitting alone and after persuading me to ask him for a cigarette she started a conversation, until it turned out that he was leaving the next day and he excused himself. I suspected she was about to ask for his phone number otherwise.
Our meetings were confined to evenings, since she said she ran a hairdressing salon during the day. So, after dining out we took off on her motor bike to visit friends before going back to her place or my hotel. The trip to hers was a nice way to end the evening, as after the last traffic light we had several kilometres of empty nighttime boulevard to fly along, and it’s a long time since I’ve had a girlfriend with a motorbike .
Her house was one of six around a small, gated courtyard, and inside half the space was taken up by a kitchen/diner while the rest contained 2 bedrooms and a toilet/shower, the water for which was kept in a plastic butt filled weekly from a tanker.
The memory I have of that first week was of a relaxed time with a warm spontaneous young woman, but the first sign of something darker occurred when she missed a dinner date and her phone was turned off. The next day I managed to find her house, but the neighbours hadn’t seen her, and it was not till evening that a friend of hers told me she had been arrested. I didn’t know him, but he stopped beside me as I was walking back to the hotel, and suggested he give me a lift on his moped to her family’s house. I decided it was OK to trust him, since he obviously knew her and I wanted to find out what had happened. Apparently, she and her sister (who doesn’t even smoke tobacco ) had been surprised by police at the house of a drug dealer. Her sister had been kept in jail, and K’s bike and passport impounded until a fine was paid. K had apparently been released on mental health grounds, after she had spent the whole night crying. Whatever the truth of the story, I could see an opportunity shaping up for me to liberate some money in her direction, so I decided to pre-empt the question by asking how she planned to pay the fine. She said she’d try to phone her friends in Europe.
The next morning, we were woken by insistent banging on the metal shutters of her house. K began shouting in Dioula at a guy outside and the argument continued for about 20 minutes, with him coming and going about 4 times until she opened the door. His story was that he had stood guarantor of the fine and the police were now pressuring him, while according to her he was mentally deranged, a drug addict and trying to get money out of her. So, what was really going on was not at all clear, especially when she turned up the next day with a brand-new bike that she said had cost 2,000 euros (about 4 times the real price) while her sister was still in jail.
If the whole drama was concocted to get some money out of me it hadn’t been very well thought out, and from what I knew of K, she was far too indiscreet to carry through such a deception but was very likely to have found herself in such a drug bust situation. A couple of days later I offered to lend her the money to pay her fine, now reduced to about £40, and she promised to pay me back later that week, but I had an odd feeling as I handed it over that I was ending the relationship by giving her money. A day or so later she arrived at my hotel with a young French aid-project worker, giggling about how they and another couple had spent the night at her house - “but no sex : you are my husband, he´s just a friend ” - I declined the suggestion that we all go for lunch and from then on most of the meetings we arranged were cancelled for a series of dramatic reasons such as a friend had fallen off her bike and she had to take her to hospital – this supposedly happened twice.
It seems that K’s ideal was to have an older man to support her economically who would be happy for her to have a younger lover.
So, what did it all add up to? The truth I can only guess at, but I only parted with one cash payment, and I had a week of great fun, and an insight into how people live, and I met the guys in the band. I didn’t feel cheated.
One night I went back to the music bar and met the woman who’d been there the first night, who turned out to be K’s aunt. She took me dancing and gave me a lift home, and casually said that she’d been laughing, watching K moving in on me the first night, but “that’s her work”. There was no hairdressing salon, either, she just used tourists as a meal ticket when she needed to, but I think she gave good value too, all things (and especially the unpredictable life that people live there), considered. I mentioned that I was 62 and K--- only 22 so it wouldn’t have worked. She said, “Well, I’m 42”.