The Road to Ouagadougou
by DAYNA EVANS
The whole city of Ouagadougou smells like burning trash and gasoline, which gives me unholy headaches, causing every night of the seven nights I am there to feel long and restless. Burkina Faso is not South Africa. It is not Morocco, nor is it Ghana or Côte d’Ivoire, despite their relative proximity. It is not touristed by Americans, and there is no beach, no mountains, no fields, no anything that you can find to place yourself in front of to pose and photograph. The view out my window is not comforting, either. A stretch of tin-roofed shacks — with debris covering everything — visibly sigh and bend under the heavy weight that follows you everywhere in the slums where they rest. I am distressed by this strain, but the people barely seem to notice it. This is the Burkina they know.
Eighty-four children pause at my inelegant use of the word écrivaine, then I take it back clumsily and say, "Non, je suis une journaliste," to which they respond with nods and murmurs of understanding. They are happier with my profession as a journalist than as a writer; in their eyes, this means I will return to America with a chronicle of my time in Burkina Faso and publicly recite it through a megaphone, igniting international attention for the little country that no one’s heard of.
From the very second I walk through the dilapidated gate of Lycée Ouindinsongde, the questioning begins. Every student wants to ask the American about America, and when I respond, they are eerily quiet; their attentiveness so determined that it’s painful. The questions vary and are presented in such amalgamations of French and English that I sometimes forget which language is native. They ask me things like,
"How old is your brother?"
"What is wrestling?"
"How do you find the food of Burkina Faso?"
"Is there racism in America?"
"Are you married?"
I tell them that my brother is twenty-five and that the food is delicious. I draw a picture of two men wrestling on the chalkboard — it looks disastrously sexual, so I erase it and explain it’s a sport where men play-fight with the goal of domination. I laugh at the four classes I’ve been in today — ranging in age from 7 to 21 — when one brave boy will stand up and proudly ask me about my marital status. When I say no, I am not married, I am a fool to appear incredulous, for several of the young women in my classes are — one or two of them with children. The shades of difference paint themselves darker.
It was curiosity. Not the version of curiosity where one thinks of how novel something is and they’d like to immerse themselves in the blissful bemusement. My curiosity was sorrowful and disbelieving, a desire to see the facts with my own eyes. The facts being Burkina Faso’s literacy rate (the lowest in the world), it’s GDP (ranking one above Madagascar and one hundred twenty-six behind the US), and its utter invisibility. No one had heard of it — an entire country undereducated, underpaid, and neglected to fend for itself.
Traveling in the third world requires a higher level of self-awareness, just enough to understand that danger is not an impossibility. But traveling alone to Burkina Faso as a white American female with no point of reference for the country’s security was preposterously naive and I blanch at the thought of my ignorant courage now. Why was I willing to compromise my own safety for a week-long trip to a trash-ridden dustbowl?
It is a Tuesday night in the city and the owner of the nightclub that I am in has just turned up the music to a cheerful boom with the intention of getting people excited to dance. There is a lone dancer slowly twisting her hips on the round pedestal in the center of the floor. She seems satisfied enough to not need a partner. The music is a confused mix of salsa and Afrobeat but the patrons are content, nodding their heads and talking quietly. It is early yet; the real dancing won’t start till later.
At my table, I am stuck in the middle of an argument. Alima sits to my left, her boyfriend, Aly, to my right, and they are disputing over a text message that was sent to Alima’s phone, then immediately deleted before Aly could see it. Aly tries to bring me into the conversation, goading me to take his side. He does so in French, and I pretend that I cannot understand.
"Ce n’est pas juste, tu es d’accord?" I nod but am looking at Alima, attempting to express my allegiance to her with a weak smile. Aly presses me and my look turns blank, as if to say I can’t understand you. It feels uncannily like situations I've seen before, heard before, in comfortable environments, bars, and apartments. But at this moment, I’m the outsider sitting with a young couple in a foreign city, very far away from Brooklyn.
My French, though considered fairly fluent anywhere else, is elementary here, where everyone I speak with moves through the language with a staccato rhythm, enunciating syllables that Parisian French has forgotten. Despite the difficulty I am having with communication, I feign comfort — I smile at perceived compliments, laugh at anything resembling a joke. The obvious is hard to ignore, though. I am the only white person in the bar; my companions, both Muslim, are drinking Coke with no alcohol (as am I, to be polite); and my senses are being attacked by unsavory smells and caustic sounds. It’s my first time in Africa and though the conversation is familiar, I could be on another planet, another vastly different world.
The argument ends when a large plate of chicken arrives at our table, and I am asked several times why I won’t eat with them.
"Je suis végétarienne," I say, apologetically. "C’est difficile de manger en Afrique." They laugh and nod. Yes, it is difficult for you here. They continue to eat, bent over the table, and now I am thinking, Yes, it is difficult for me here.
I'm not trying to display how worn my passport can get; it’s not a trip of egoism or pride. What I had naively thought before arriving was that the facts I had poured over and gawked at would somehow be inaccurate and that I’d find American NGO and EU imprints everywhere; I thought I’d see progress. Instead I am immersed in an even more depressing reality: the streets are lined with unnamed foreign banks where I occasionally see white men in tailored suits hover around, making shifty phone calls. This was not progress, it was pillaging — Europeans use the country’s lack of resources and strength as a home base for financial corruption; whatever they want to do is simply easier to get away with when it occurs in the last possible place anyone would think to look. The rest of Ouagadougou is destitute, the roads unpaved and overrun by barefoot street children playing in and around piles of rubbish while the French contribute yet another ATM. Irony can’t even encompass the idea of a city with no money but an abundance of ATMs.
When my school has its two-hour break, a necessity instituted by the 110-degree heat, I am asked by my companion Nasse, if I’d like to see some schools in the suburbs of Ouagadougou. I respond that I’d love to and he directs me toward his motorbike.
"Both of us will ride on this?" I ask, feeling that it is not quite sufficient for two fully-grown adults. It is essentially a bicycle with a motor.
Nasse laughs and says it’s the only way. His English is phenomenal and makes me feel less like a stranger when I am in class with him. He was the first person I reached out to when I planned my trip, and his fervor to have a real, live American girl come to his classes to teach was wonderful. He truly believed in the impact an American would have on his students. He wanted them to see that it is possible to achieve.
"D’accord, d’accord," I submit. He gets on and shifts his body close to the handlebars, then I follow. It is innocent and awkward because I do not know where to put my hands. Nasse instructs me to wrap them around his torso and I do, clinging tightly to the fabric of his navy rayon shirt. I am initially reluctant, as the shirt is soaked through with his sweat, and his body is so thin that there is little to hold on to. But as we get on the main road heading toward the suburbs, I instinctively squeeze tighter, valuing my life in spite of a moment’s embarrassment.
The ride is long and anything but smooth. The farther we go, the greater my disbelief. The landscape changes drastically — there are no more paths, no people, no scooters, and no buildings at all. There is only an expanse of camel-colored dust that is spotted with brick huts the size of Western bathrooms. Then the shouts begin.
"Nasara! Nasara!" They come from all sides of us. I start to notice in the white brightness of the sun that there are children chasing after our bike. No shoes, few clothes, and wide, awed grins.
"Nasara! Nasara! Nasara!"
"Nasse, what are they saying?" I yell into his ear.
He takes his eyes off of the path ahead of us and yells back, "White girl! They are screaming white girl!" He laughs boldly when he registers the horror in my face. "It is no insult. These children have never seen a white person before. They are shocked, they are surprised!"
"Never?" I yell. There are at least ten children running around us, blinking with uncertainty when a curve causes us to slow to a near halt. One little girl extends her hand forward.
"Never!" He laughs again, as if this is the most normal thing in the world.
A third world country needing Western "help" is rarely what it should be; the veil is so thin that it is transparent: "help" is commonly used as the negotiator for resources in return. A proverbially uneven and fucked-up version of "You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours."
Burkina Faso — what little I saw of it — was indeed barren and arid; a constant swirl of dust and a narrow smattering of trees all indicate low agricultural yield. Having been in Morocco only days before, the two seem light-years apart. Casablanca overflows with opulence and grandeur; even the streetlights flash with a clear white intensity. It is a city of men — men in cafés, men in markets, men at prayer. There is an imposing quality to Morocco that is scarce in Burkina Faso. The capital city is unlit at night; everything is illuminated by car headlights and bonfires, and people gather in clusters on the sides of the main road, casually drinking and talking. The feeling is warm and the people seem content.
While I attempt to hail a taxi on Ouagadougou’s busiest street, an elderly man asks me how my day is going.
"C’est bien, merci. Très chaud," I say, fanning myself with a hand — the universal sign for overheating."Vous êtes très belle. Je veux être vos ami." This type of conversation is typical and funny — by the time I leave, I have made more friends than I can count based on my looks alone. I carry with me a steno pad for note-taking and observations; it fills itself instead with e-mail address and phone numbers. One man passes me a crumpled piece of paper on the street that merely reads, "Je t’aime."
The conversation turns when I notice three distinct lines etched into either side of his face, right below his cheekbones. I am afraid to ask, thinking the subject would be taboo, but my curiosity overcomes me and I point toward his face with distinct awkwardness.
Not even a moment later, he explains happily to me in French, "Many men in Burkina Faso are born into tribes. This is the sign of the tribe that I am in. When a boy child is born, an elder will mark him on his face so that he will always know who he is and where he is from. It is not as popular anymore — the tribes are dying out. But there used to be many tribe wars."
In a capital city swarming with cars, smoke, and crowded markets, a man dressed like my grandfather is part of a dying tribe — a tradition so unlike anything I’ve ever known. He insists on giving me his phone number as I step into a taxi. And before I even scribble it down, the taxi driver asks me if I am married.
An older student walks into my classroom and approaches Nasse, who is sitting at a wooden desk behind me. The first level class is singing the Burkinabe national anthem to an audience of one. I am pulled away from the impromptu concert, which I am recording on my highly admired smart phone, as Nasse introduces me to Alima.
"She will show you around the school," he says. "When this class is through, go with her."
We walk out of the room and back behind the school, to what Alima calls "the yard" — a vast plateau of sandy nothingness, where track practice is in full swing. She leads me to a bench and we sit, shaded by the only tree on the campus. While I observe the runners and Alima sends a text, the heat doesn’t feel so oppressive. Alima is petite, thoroughly dark-skinned with thin cornrows in her hair, which at the moment are covered by a pale blue bandanna. She is wearing thick eyeliner and clear lip gloss, and she is stunning, with or without makeup. She wears her school uniform as if it is an afterthought, pairing it with many items of clothing that probably don't fit within the code.
She knows everyone. The school is a small mini-campus but she waves and smiles at every student, and they respond warmly.
"Do you want to come with me to get a snack?" she asks, gesturing toward the entrance to the school. I agree, and we walk through the front gate. She asks me a dozen questions, excusing herself three or four times for her poor English. I assure her that her English is better than my French and we laugh. I ask her about her family.
"My mother is from Ghana. She speaks very good English, it is very good. She is in Ghana now because her father is finished."
By the look on her face, I assume she means that he has died, and so I correct her delicately.
"Her father. . . il est mort?"
"Yes, yes, that is what I mean. How do you say it?"
"He has died, he is dead. I am very sorry to hear that."
"It’s okay, she has been gone for two weeks. I hope that she will return home soon. If she was here, she would make you a big feast. Perhaps she will arrive when you are still here. How long are you staying in my country?"
"Only for one week," I say.
"That is too short." She orders a baguette avec lait and I watch, baffled, as the man at the little stand pours condensed milk from an open can onto a skinny baguette and passes it to Alima.
"Your belly could not handle this," she says, which makes me laugh. She is almost certainly right, as the can is swarming with flies and has been sitting in the devastating heat for the entire morning.
Alima is incredibly bright, family-oriented, and like any teenager in the United States, not entirely sure of what her future holds. She speaks openly to me about her desires but does not commit to any real career path because, as she reassures me many times, she is only seventeen. One thing that she does know is that she wants to go to the United States, if only for a little while. She is proud of Obama and finds the American people to be exceptionally nice and tolerant. I ask her how, having never been there, she could possibly know this.
"Obama is your president. There is no racism in America. And I know you now."
Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Tina Fey's Bossypants.
Photographs by the author.
"Kids on the Run" - Tallest Man On Earth (mp3)
"Troubles Will Be Gone" - Tallest Man On Earth (mp3)
"King of Spain" - Tallest Man On Earth (mp3)
