Ougadougou Nights

A trip to Africa, 2006

I am currently in Africa, and thought I’d repost something I wrote from a past trip which is still, sadly, timely….

Finding your way around Ougadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, should be easy to do.  Wide, ramshackle boulevards radiate from plazas and monuments – this is French Africa, after all – and even the hovel-lined dirt alleys are organized into a relentless grid.  Buzzards perch on top of the streetlamps that line the avenues, making you feel, as you drive down the street, like a float in a creepy parade. 

The trouble starts at night.  The milky layer of wood smoke and dust that during the day creates a bustling charm, at night becomes a vaguely alarming, eye-watering fog.  And forget the street lamps.  The best they’ll do is flicker.  So if you’re driving around the city in a taxicab, as I was several weeks ago, with an address in your pocket for a place you were told showcases live music and cold beer, be prepared to drive around awhile. 

I went to Africa for no real reason, except that a year ago I was offered a spot in a three-week odyssey through the Sahara and North Africa.  We started with an ambitious itinerary – one that included Sudan and Libya – but settled, ultimately, after a lot of wrangling with unhelpful foreign diplomats, on a few key spots: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Algeria.

Africa, I’m here to tell you, is huge.  Its immensity defies an easy summary, but if you’re absolutely dead set on one, try this:  the two continents currently in the news, Africa and Asia, have a key difference – Asia is an overpopulated mess quickly becoming powerful and scary, and Africa is an overpopulated mess quickly becoming powerless and scary.  Thus, when Chinese president Hu Jintao recently made a cruise through Africa (his third), collecting chits for raw materials, distributing promises of investment and money, a collective shudder went through the western foreign policy establishment.  If the Chinese – who, let’s face it, know how to organize stuff – can organize Africa, can figure out a way to exploit its material riches without becoming embroiled in its chaotic, bloody politics, then we’re all in for a very different 21^st century from the one we’re preparing for.

Of course, the first thing the Chinese will have to do is get the UN out.   Everywhere I went – from the dusty squalor of Timbukto, Mali to the hustling trans-Saharan crossroads of Agadez, Niger – purposeful white UN vans darted about.  It was hard to tell whether the UN vans are there because the place is a mess, or that the place is a mess because there are so many UN vans zipping around, so many promises and programs and development schemes blowing around the place, like sand.  “I think we’ve finally got it right,” an aid worker told me in Agadez, Niger, as we were both sipping sweet Tuareg tea in a shop.  “I think with the right combination of incentives and international aid, with strict oversight from organizations such as….” But by that time I had drifted away, busily buying some stunning Tuareg jewelry for people back home.  I’m not sure which organizations he was going to name, but my guess is that they’re already there, and already failing.

“Education is the key,” another international relief organization worker told me, in the oasis village of Timia, Niger.  Education is routinely cited by aid workers and Africa thinkers as a key solution to its problems and outrages.  Education and its opposite, cultural respect, are often twinned by those guys, who forget that to teach someone something important – how to build a well, say, or why female circumcision is a stupid idea, or that it’s unlikely that your baby is possessed by demons – is to place oneself in a necessarily superior position.  You can’t really have it both ways.

“Education for women, especially,” the aid worker continued, in a low whisper.  We were standing in the chilly night, watching an exorcism.

Correct: an exorcism.  Apparently, a week or so before, a young girl from the village had been possessed by demons, and the village turned out this night to chant, sing, drum, and generally mill around the blindfolded girl who sat in the center a circle of other chanting, singing village girls.  It was a party atmosphere.  A spooky, party atmosphere.

We stood along the edge of the circle, nodding respectfully at the unfolding event.  Even with a full moon, the Saharan sky is spangled with stars, so we could easily make out the stricken girl swaying and weaving to the drums, and as long as you didn’t include the battered Toyota Land Cruiser in your field of vision, it could have been a sight from any time in the past 400 years.  You could just as easily have been a French explorer from the 19^th century,  trudging across the desert towards Lake Chad. 

In this part of Africa, the women do most of the work.  They plant and harvest and toil in the oasis, get the water, do the cooking, raise the children.  The men trade salt, or raid passing camel caravans – or at least they did, until about 1911.  Since then they’ve been lounging around the village, ordering women around.  Education, especially of women, is going to bring with it a lot of social upheaval.  Luckily for the Tuareg men of Niger, at least, education efforts by the various NGOs in the region are spectacularly unsuccessful.

“They come, they build a well, they go,” said my Italian guide sadly, “then six months later, we come back, the well is broken, nobody using it.”  He shrugged.  “I am an optimist,” he said.  “But this…this is too much.”

“But what can we do?” asked one of my traveling companions.  “How can we help Africa?”

“You could just leave it alone,” said our guide.

But leaving Africa alone is something that for the past 400 years, we simply cannot do.  The two most recent, most famous African tourists  – Chinese president Hu Jintao and Madonna – each went home with a culturally meaningful souvenir.  Madonna followed in the footsteps of Victorian missionaries by sweeping up a baby and leaving a religious institution – in her case, not a spare Presbyterian schoolhouse but a Kaballah-themed orphanage.  And Hu Jintao, like some kind of Chinese Cecil Rhodes, brought home some mineral rights.  President Hu probably made the wiser move.  Africa has a way of confounding our better instincts.

None of which occurs to you when you’re driving through the night streets of Ougadougou, looking for cold beer and live music.  When we arrive at the address we’ve been given, we find a small shed with four old men sitting outside by a camp stove.   No music here, we’re told.  For music, we need to go a few streets over. 

Which we do, but by that time it’s pretty late – too late to really settle for recorded music, which is what we find at the next spot.  But manning the DJ booth is a young man in a t-shirt extolling the virtues of Blaise Compare, the president of Burkina Faso.  President Compare gives out t-shirts during election season, and this one, emblazoned with his face and a snappy slogan – “Blaise Compare! Le choix des jeunes” – you see all over.  Undeterred, we march over to the DJ booth and ask the kid where we can hear some live African music.  He looks at us for a second and says, “I know where.  I’ll take you.”  And with that, he abandons his post at the turntables, shuts the music off mid-beat, and hustles us through the crowd of (confused, disappointed) dancers, and leads us again through the streets of Ougadougou. 

We find music.  Great, live, African music, washed down by cold African beer.  There’s dancing, international friendship, laughter, and no education whatsoever.  The next day, when I describe the events to French businessman who lives part of the year in Burkina Faso, he laughs.  “So you were going to one place, then to another, and then to a third place which wasn’t where you wanted to go originally, but you had fun?”  I nodded.  “Then, my friend, you had a perfectly African evening.”