Biker babes of Burkina Faso

Motorbikes, Muslims, fashion and the modern woman in Burkina Faso.

 

When your brain does a Google image search on the terms Muslim women, African women or African Muslim women, what comes to mind?  I won’t be so presumptuous to think that my regular readers are the kind of people to jump immediately to the stereotypes of poverty and oppression, or at the very least to move on from them after a moment’s reflection – after all there are many forces at work conditioning our minds to certain  ideas no matter how well-travelled or woke we may be. I will go so far as saying that whatever came to mind, the reality is probably rather more varied than you first imagined.  I doubt if your mental movie was more microscopic in width than the Google images search for Muslim women however, which would have you believe that almost the entire world’s population of Muslim women were swathed in black from head to foot – outside of Iran and parts of the Gulf this rarely bares any resemblance to reality. A search for African Muslim women does a lot better, with a lot less black and more of the bright colours that African women of all kinds are partial to but still, well enveloped in modest robes and covered hair. A search for African women actually throws up a fairly enlightened selection: modern, traditional, rich and poor, fashionable and the casually dressed.

Maybe you did think of a black burqa. Well, I won’t deny you can’t see that in West Africa but I bet you didn’t imagine her on a motorbike.

OK, that was more of a flimsy excuse to use a five string alliteration in b, but it was a too good an opportunity to miss. The burqa is very much an imported concept to West Africa and black is probably the last colour that most women would consider when out clothes shopping.  Billions of dollars of Saudi investment over the last fifty years to promote their narrow brand of Islam has had little effect on Muslim women’s wear in West Africa: I’ve never seen more than three or four burqas in one day in any of the West African cities in Muslim majority countries.

Keeping women locked up at home may be considered acceptable in some Muslim cultures but not in West Africa. The culture may well be patriarchal in many respects but women  don’t need a guardian and women only areas or are prevented from working in the name of the religion. Some Saudi clerics are still upset about women driving cars but they’d be apoplectic with rage if they saw not just women on motorbikes but with men as subordinate passengers.

 

Hair coverings of all kinds are worn throughout the continent regardless of religion and the absence of one is by no means a reliable indicator of a non-Muslim in West Africa. Even some of the evidently Islamic styles do little to obscure the hair, such as these below.

The one piece of head-gear you are least likely to see is however the crash helmet. Although Ouagadougou squeals with the sound of thousands of cheap Chinese motorbikes you’ll be lucky to see more than one or two helmet clad bikers,  in fact you’re more likely to see a forlorn and unloved road safety sign urging everyone to wear a helmet.

 

Ladies here, like most places, don’t just chuck on the first thing on they find in the cupboard when they get out of bed in the morning, a bit of thought is required, like colour coordinating your outfit with your preferred mode of transport. Whether it’s a majority blue theme above or red shoes below.

With Chinese bikes typically being only a third the cost of the eminently more reliable, well-known Japanese brands, it has transformed personal transport across Africa,  making it accessible to many more people. For those who can’t afford to buy one they can be rented or are shared between friends and family. It’s not just for the young by any means, there’s no shortage of more mature ladies hitting the asphalt in style.

For the modern, busy mum the motorbike is the practical solution for transporting the kids to school or getting your products you the market.

If there’s one thing that being brought up carrying stuff on your head does, it’s instill perfect posture.  You’ll never see a round-shouldered biker babe slouched over the handlebars in Burkina Faso, or just about anywhere on the continent, unless they’ve lived an overly comfortable existence free from fetching and carrying.

Whatever words come to people’s minds in their mental Google search for African women and African Muslim women, let this modest post be a plea to tag your search with words like: stylish, independent and cool or anything similarly positive.

There’s no doubt that women in Africa have a host of difficult issues to face but we are not going to help by boxing them into categories like victim or oppressed, particularly when so many are proving that their lives are not defined by such ideas. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from travel, it’s that wherever you go we share much more with people than what keeps us apart, no matter how different the circumstances may appear. I’m sure there are better ways of making the point than these silly words about fashion and motorbikes but if it helps in some small way to convey the notion that women in strange and distant places are not really so different from ourselves then I will at least have achieved something. Of course you may feel I’ve totally misjudged the whole subject so feel free to tell me. I’ll leave you with this little gang of women out on the town, off to celebrate Eid with the rest of Ouagadougou.