Another taste of slum life in Burkina Faso It’s all very well luxuriating in 5 star hotels but you aint gonna learn much about a country or its people sipping fine wines and chomping on Lobster flown in from some distant sea. Sometimes you’ve just got to get down and dirty. So, I was only too happy to go back to the muddy shacks of Jongo, on the outskirts of Ouagadougou, the shabby capital of Burkina Faso, to see my…
Booze or medicine It’s a common dilemma for the poor, hard-drinking man: spend your limited funds on medicine or get drunk to disguise the symptoms? However, in West Africa they have found a unique solution – make booze into medicine. In the Ivory Coast it all starts with the basic ingredient of palm wine or Banji as its known. Sap from certain varieties of palm is tapped off every day from the living trees to be delivered to the thirsty, although…
A bit of everyday life in the suburbs of Abidjan, Ivory Coast There’s a wonderful lack of urgency on the sandy streets of Gonzague, this ramshackle development stretched out along the pedestrian unfriendly, coastal route to Grand Bassam. Why hurry anywhere, when you can dawdle in the sun and sea breeze, chat to neighbours or a shopkeeper, making a trip to the shop last twice as long as any westerner would? A goodbye to a parting guest might become a…
“Lazy Africans”, would be an unsurprising comment from the comfort of the back seat of an air-conditioned, tourist’s 4×4 but it’s one you will hear from Africans themselves, which would indicate that it’s something that should not be dismissed quite so lightly. There can hardly be a country in the world entirely free of bone idle gits, all too happy to blag a free meal at someone else’s expense but is Africa a special case? The answer must undoubtedly go…
I arrived promptly at 9am as the Sierra Leone embassy in Conakry opened to watch the Consul in charge of visa affairs leave in a car. “Never mind, he’ll be back by 11am, come back then”, the gate security inform me. Thanks to the local climate, which combines the less pleasant aspects of a furnace and a sauna I lose a few kilos in body moisture killing two hours in the particularly unremarkable portion of town in which the embassy…
There are few pleasures in life more sublime than being able to make small children burst into tears or flee in abject terror at your mere presence. Such are the joys of travelling in areas of West Africa away from the tourist trail and you don’t have to go very far to do that given the limited number of people who make the effort to come here. These kinds of reactions are usually an indication that the children have never…
If you are unfamiliar with the American expression S.N.A.F.U. an explanation is required before I proceed: it stands for Situation Normal All Fucked Up. Whilst scanning an online map of Liberia in preparation for the trip I was delighted to find a place so named, hence the goal of reaching this forgotten corner of the country became my prime reason for going there, sad, puerile individual that I am. Whilst many would assume the title was an unsurprising indictment of…
The photo above of an advertising hoarding for a popular skin cream is, in some respects unremarkable: yet another product to beautify the skin. But this is West Africa and even a generous interpretation would we hard pressed to describe the model as even mixed race. If this was some lone, anomalous advert it would not be worth more than a brief mention but it is typical of marketing for beauty products in the region. Of the dozens of ads I have seen,…
Liberia’s coastal town of Buchanan is home to a lively Ghanaian fishing community known as Fanti Town, named after the region and its people in southern Ghana. Sharing Christianity and the English language makes them a compatible mix with the locals. It should be pointed out that although these immigrants generally understand Liberian Krio (as in creole form of language) English, to us it may as well originate from Planet Zogblax 3 in the Acturian Nebula. What may seem reasonably logical when read in a…
I’d hesitate to recommend a decent, well publicized war as a development policy but ten years of aid after the country’s horrors have seen improvements due to foreign agencies which would never have occurred otherwise. Few indications of the war remain, only the occasional abandoned ruin, some graced with the pockmarks of bullets and shrapnel, forlornly waiting for their former owner to return, in the slim hope they may still be alive. If there is one thing aid agencies love…
