The festival commemorates the new year and is the type of thing which takes up a whole weekend but different towns/tribes have their own big day. Ours was Friday, the next town overs was Saturday. I was expecting something very traditional - dancers in crazy ensembles, beating drums, tons of gold clad tribal chiefs and maybe an animal sacrifice or two. What I found did not disappoint, all of the above minus the animal sacrifice but with a healthy dose of commercialism. Two story tall banners for various local beers, and every tent was sponsored by the mobile phone company MTN in our village, the next one over by Zain.
In the middle of largely impoverished West Africa - a land without constant electricity, running water or paved roads - an epic battle of capitalism is taking place between the mobile phone companies. MTN, Vodafone and Zain are putting their colors on every building they possibly can. You will find numerous walls, store fronts and entire houses brightly painted red for Vodafone or yellow for MTN with thier respective logos plastered across the center. Zain was slacking in Ghana, but their purple and teal was dominant in Burkina Faso. In this village, a very Victorian house standing next to the main road was painted entirely yellow as if it had been dunked in a giant vat of yellow paint. Clement informed me that it was an historic building and the oldest in the town. When I commented that MTN must have paid them a lot of money to submerge the house in yellow he was surprised, saying that he had never thought of it like that cause most people would want to have their houses painted so well. He may very well be right. Clement is a first year business student and one of the smartest people I met there.
The day-time activities consist of everyone gathering to pay their respects to the elderly chief who is seated on a platform in the town square and so gaudily adorned with gold that he can hardly move. In order to get him situated on the throne the other elders circle around him and obscure his movements with their robes, then a man must discretely hold his hand up as the other chiefs and elders come to shake it. The chiefs from the surrounding area enter the square with appropriate fan fare, seated upon what I can best describe as an ornate canoe with an umbrella/sun shade, that is held in the air by a handful of young men. Most of the chiefs carry at least one firearm, usually a shotgun and announce their presence by firing into the air while dancing in their seats to the beat of the drummers in tow. My favorite had a gold plated gun in one hand, a silver one in the other and waved them around like batons.
At night the youth come out, dressed fashionably in Ed Hardy, argyle, Air Force Ones and flat brimmed baseball caps straight out of a trendy American rap video. The streets are filled by a pressing swarm of dark bodies in the night, occasionally, momentarily lit up from below by headlights that streak through the melee of legs as a vehicle parts it's way through the throng on the otherwise unlit streets of the festival at night. The bars along the way sport massive arrays of speakers blasting music so loud that talking is impossible, they do so during the day as well while a handful of people sit around staring at their beers and each other. The scene on the streets at night was probably one of the most surreal experiences of my travels. The mass of black faces in the pitch black streets being lit up by the occasional car that was forced to inch its way through gave me the impression of a completely different world, while at the same time the style of dress was eerily familiar thanks to the prevalence of Americian pop culture. The music too had a familiar ring. Louder and harsher but infused with beats just a few notes shy of our rap songs and lyrics that translate roughly to the same themes - love, sex and power.
While in Ghana, I never felt uncomfortable within a situation, rather I rarely knew what to think. I also never quite knew what to do but I knew that whatever I did would be watched with fascination simply because I was a foreigner - if i acted with perfect tact it would be just as, if not more shocking than if I acted the typical American fool. Staring was to be expected, calls of 'Burni' (translation: white person) would follow everywhere as would requests for money and from the girls, marriage. For a culture known for it's hospitality, I found it incredibly isolating, alienating and mocking. One can say what they want about the shortcomings of America's approach to race but overall we are an incredibly accepting culture. A person of any color can walk down the street of a big city and be treated with an equal amount of respect or disrespect as anyone else. In the month I spent walking down the same road nearly everyday, never once did anyone ask me name or say anything to me but, "HEY BRUNI!" And occasionally, "How are YOU?!" To which I would respond in the local language, "I am good," (I don't know how to write it out) but all I really wanted to say back was, as they say, unrepeatable in polite conversation.
Despite English being the official language, I was largely unable to communicate with those around me. Their English totally different in verbiage and sentence construction, plus being thickly accented made it nearly indecipherable. I still get messages on FaceBook and the CouchSurfing network that I find almost unreadable. All the words are English but they make only vague sense. To make the situation worse no one will listen if you try to correct them. The common come back to me was, "Well we speak British English." I tried to say that it wasn't the case, I'd spent the previous several months in the company of Brits and they didn't speak like that at all, but it was to no avail. Without Clement, who was used to my way of talking and at the festival his friends for whom he could translate, I would have been completely alone in nearly every way yet surrounded by dozens of familiar things.
It would be that constant feeling of alienation that would lead me out of Africa in the weeks that followed. Even before the festival I had set in motion a plan to travel through West Africa, to Senegal and from their catch a cheap flight to Madrid. My scheme began on the first day of classes when a man came to the school selling maps and I made the mistake of buying a world map, hanging it up in my room and then after hours of staring at it, realizing that Europe really wasn't that far away. Next came the realization that after my stints in Sri Lanka and India, I knew people all over Western Europe and thus I was determined to get out of Africa.
...and a few weeks later I was back in the midst of civilization, although the route had to be changed due to horrific bus trips, terrorists in Mali ("Yea they killed a French guy up north last month, but he was old," is what I was told in Burkina Faso.) and visa issues. So I ended up booking a last minuet flight out of Ouagadougou whose airport resembles a large garage and even though I was flying the same airline all the way to Madrid with a stop in Casablanca it was impossible to check my bags all the way through because the computers don't link.
Undeveloped Country |udi'velupt 'kuntre|
noun (pl. -tries)
1 a nation in which the simplest tasks become difficult: the lack of running water in the undeveloped country made showering a memorable experience
