Bukina Faso

I am in Bukina Faso, a land of improbably named towns. Today finds me in Bobo Dioulasso, an exceedingly laid back place where the locals youths lounge away the day, hiding from the burning sun and waiting for the cool of evening when the fun can start. The Bukinabe may be among the poorest people in the World according to UN poverty index criteria, but that doesn't seem to interfere with their credentials as party people once the music starts.

Just before this I was in the capital city of Ougadougou (or 'Waga', as its known amongst the tongue twisted), comparatively a rather more frenetic place as laid-back cities go. My unremittingly unsuccesful attempts to get things done there rather captured the essence of this friendly country.

Grace and I headed off to visit the National Museum, which turned out not to be where it was supposed to be, and not anywhere else that our aimable, perplexed taxi driver could find either. So, anxious not to risk our disappointment, he dumped us near another unrelated museum instead. Well, we abandoned the attempt to be cultural, which was fortunate, since we later heard that when some of the others finally discovered the site of the museum, by that stage a mission akin to discovering the source of the Nile, it proved to be just that - a site. They're still building it! We went to a restaurant which didn't serve food, several internet cafes without the internet, including one place, seemingly open for business, which didn't have computers. The confusion was also kind to my wallet, since the crafts shop I'd set my sights on visiting didn't exist either, at least not at its advertised address. We were supposed to buy food for cooking at the famous Grande Marche, but that had burned down some time ago, and as far as one could tell nobody was in a hurry to rebuild it. That left the supermarket, only that turned out to be shut for half the afternoon for a siesta. Exhausted we popped into a cafe to have a cafe au lait, of course without the lait, they'd run out.

Given that we achieved precisely nothing at all in Ougadougou, I came away with surprisingly fond memories. Perhaps it is the thought of our gallows humour as we paced streets that were anvils to the beating heat of the sun joking about what was about to go wrong next. I suspect however it might be because of a later discovery that evening. Whatever the distance to be travelled between aspirations and reality in this optimistically minded place, the Burkinabe aren't exaggerating when they claim to know how to party. Give me a great band playing infectious beats on a balmy evening, a shaded courtyard to eat one of the best meals of the entire trip so far, and a girlfriend returned from distant places to enjoy these things with - well, who cares about a little background chaos after all that?

Poverty and Tourism

Poverty is endemic in West Africa, but it doesn't manifest itself quite in the way I had imagined. Instinctively I had an urban image of poverty in my mind, a picture of fetid shanty towns with open sewers and appalling air quality. No doubt such places exist here, in overcrowded cities such as Lagos, but its not the form in which I have encountered it on this trip. In fact West Africa can fool you. There is an impression of abundance here when you visit the lively and colourful markets. Houses are extremely modest but on the whole but do look permanent. Children are very neatly turned out in their school uniforms and it is noticeable how well dressed West African folk tend to be - I regularly find myself in situations where I feel myself to be inapporpriately scruffy in my travelling rags.

When you scratch a bit deeper though the problems emerge. Many people have several jobs and live a long way from their homes. A taxi driver I spoke to hadn't been able to get home to see his wife and kids in three months. Basic facilities such as piped water are not available in many places. The pharmacies may be well stocked but most people can't afford the medicines, hence the terrible plight of Aids sufferers over here. The reason you see so many people lolling around in the shade of their verandahs at all times of the day is because there are problems of massive unemployment throughout the region. The guys I talked to in Lome said that everyone in Togo was a craftsman because that was the only way you could make money. Governments regularly fail to pay wages to government employees, sometimes for months on end, a situation which explains the prevalence of corruption and a culture of bribes in so many of the region's police forces. Some countries do seem to be fairing better than others with Benin and Ghana relatively prosperous compared to Nigeria and Togo, and with Cameroon very much on the slide and in danger of freefall.

All of which can put you in an uncomfortable position as a tourist. White is assumed to mean wealthy and the request for 'cadeau', usually quite politely made, is relentless and at times insistent. Certain more touristy spots including the better known african crafts markets become places where you have to exhibit steely resolve to make it through without shouting at someone. If you go with the flow and adopt a local guide/protector it can be a lot of fun, but alone you are besieged.

However the aspect of being a tourist I've felt most uncomfortable about is the visits to culturally interesting communities. The coasts of Benin and Togo, for example, are unusual in that behind a virtually unbroken coastline of coconut palm fringed sandy beaches, there stretches a vast area of fresh water lagoons inhabited by large fishing communities living in stilt villages. You can take trips out to visit these villages in dug out canoe boats called pirogues which punt lazily across the water, occasionally raising a flimsy sail to take advantage of a warm gust of wind. The boatmen make a good living from the tourist trade. The local communities whose picturesque villages are the focus of all our camera lens may well not do so. The distribution of income isn't entirely clear, but as a sensitive tourist it is easy to feel rather exploitative floating around a place where, however nice the views, the people are obviously scratching out a living in highly insanitory conditions. It's a real African problem, and in a part of Africa where much of the tourist interest is focused around the traditions and cultures of the people, its a problem that you cannot avoid thinking about.

Voodoo Adventures

Much as I enjoyed Nigeria, I'm coming to the conclusion that it's French speaking West Africa I like the best. After Abuja, we crossed over the most insubstantial of frontiers to spent a thoroughly enjoyable week in Benin. Only the change of language evident in the first village we encountered after the Nigerian passport 'hut' told the story that we'd actually arrived in Benin. Later, a short 24 hour dash across tiny Togo, just 56km wide on the coast, brought us to Ghana yesterday. I almost got myself arrested at the Ghanaian frontier by an irate soldier in a mix up over currency exchange, so it was an inauspicious arrival. Still, Grace flies in tonight to join me in Accra, so Ghana may well emerge as my favourite country yet. Anyway, it's the last chance to win out for the anglophone countries, as it's French all the way to Dakar hereafter.

Benin and Togo have a quite distinctive feel, much of that distinctiveness coming from the prevalence within local culture of voodoo, the worship of ancestor gods. It was from this region that voodoo was exported to Haiti, Brazil and other parts of the New World with the slave trade. In Ouidah, in Benin, a sleepy little town with a pretty Portuguese fort, you can follow a four kilometre walk to an undistinguished stretch of sandy beach from where over three million slaves were loaded into European slave ships to be transported across the Atlantic in appallingly inhumane conditions. And Ouidah was just one of scores of such ports of embarkation. Ghana alone has over 30 surviving European forts doted along its coast that were used as trading bases for the lucrative slave trade, some dating to as far back as the fifteenth century. Local beliefs held particular trees, especially the iroko tree, to be sacred. Along the 'Rue des Esclaves' at Ouidah you pass two sacred spots that illustrate the interplay of voodoo and the slave trade. The first is the tree of forgetting. Here the local chiefs responsible for selling the slaves would force the male slaves to circle the tree nine times, the female slaves seven times, in a ritual intended to enact the surrendering of their cultural roots. In this way they would relinquish their African identity and behave submissively towards their new white masters. The second tree a little further along was a tree of the spirit. Here the slaves would choose to circle the tree twice before proceeding to the beach in a ritual which they hoped and believed would enable their souls to return to Africa after they had died in distant captivity.

One of the less acknowledged aspects of the slave trade was the extent to which it relied upon warring African kingdoms to provide a steady flow of human captives for the trade. In Benin, you get a flavour of this local context visiting Abomey, the old capital of the Kings of Dahomey. This expansionist royal house was spectacularly successful in its pursuit of war against rival royal neighbours and came to control a large area of southern Benin before being snuffed out by the military superiority of the French in the 1890s. Two royal palaces survive in Abomey which give a wonderful flavour of the wealth and cultural richness of this kingdom, but also illustrate its cruelty. Human life was held cheap to an extent which surprised even this student of medieval history, and a dynastic commitment to almost perpetual warfare meant the kingdom had a ready supply of captive enemies to make it a big player in the slave trade.

The old kingdoms of Benin were without exception voodoo kingdoms, and indeed the last king of Porto Novo committed ritual suicide in 1976 having lost his honour when the latest in a line of post-independence military dictators decided to outlaw voodoo in the country. That ruling was relaxed more recently, and everywhere you go in the country you spy lumpy, rather odd looking fetishes on the edge of villages that protect their communities from various unwelcome misfortunes. Voodoo temples are orientated towards different deities, each with its select group of the 'initiated' who can enter inside and participate in the more sacred rites. There seems to be little personal choice about becoming initiated, if you are selected by an elder it is not politic to refuse. Still, it's clear that despite its penchant for human skulls and dried dead animals, voodoo here is not understood as a sinister or negative thing in the least. It has a vibrancy in its celebrations made patently evident when some of our group got invited along to an all singing and dancing get-together in Abomey which centred on the exorcising of a demon from a young boy. It's interesting to observe how easily these local beliefs sit alongside Christianity. I was told that quite a high proportion of religiously Christian Beninoise keep up voodoo practices as well as attending church because they believe that it is important to keep old traditions alive.

My final encounter to date with voodoo involved a trip to the fetish market in Lome, the capital of Togo. I rather liked Togo on a brief acquaintance and spent an enjoyable few hours there shopping for an african mask, before chilling out over lunch with a bunch of stall traders who told me all about the country's woes, how the President was a criminal, and how Togo's miraculous qualification for the World Cup was the only decent thing that had happened to the place recently. After such a friendly welcome, the fetish market came as something of a disappointment. Half demolished in a move to 'improve facilities', it now consists of a confusion of trestle tables exposed to the beating sun, which are laden with dried dead animals, bats and snakes being particualrly popular, assorted skins, quite a number of skulls, and various sculpted figurines that have been banged full of pins. I was led into a delapidated tin shed for some voodoo hard sell, with an aggressive trader acting as translater for an ancient and nattily dressed voodoo doctor who sported an expressionless face and pineapple nose beneath his trilby hat. Having identified a good luck charm as the item I wanted to buy, there was some protracted mumbo jumbo to be got through as we both uttered a series of prescribed mantras. The old man then tossed a set of cowrie shells on the sandy floor to determine the price. Unsurprisingly, the pattern revealed that the price was exorbitantly high. A firm refusal to pay such a hefty sum soon brought the price tumbling, and I eventually exited the shack wearing my charm having agreed a much more reasonable rate and no doubt picked up a hex from the decidedly disgruntled trader in the process. It doesn't matter what you believe in, there's always money to be made from religion.