Monday, 12 September 2005

  • Tourists

     

    I was walking from the bus station back to the Peace Corps transit house in the regional capital and noticed that something was different. Where normally I passed unoticed, now people on both sides of the street were yelling at me, trying to get my attention. The typically lazy street was coursing with a hyperkinetic energy, as if everyone had had ten cups of coffee that morning. I walked quickly trying to make it through the gauntlet of street vendors and keep ahead of whoever was trying to get my attention and whatever it was they wanted. One young guy caught up to me and started speaking quickly in a language I couldn’t understand, as if we were sharing a secret. He desperately tried different languages until he hit on one that registered: “My friend, you want the Ganja?” I said no thanks and hurried on. What in the world had happened to my laid-back, friendly, no hassle Mali?

     

                That was my first introduction to tourist season, the frantic four months of “cold season” between November and March when the Western world descends on this sleepy desert backwater in a cloud of foreign accents, outsized expectations, impossible demands, oversized cameras, fleets of Landcruisers, sex, and money money money. In that feeding frenzy, suddenly every man on the street has some “ancient/traditional/magical/authentic artifact” to sell you, offers you a taxi (though he has no car), and to be your guide to Timbuktu (though he’s never been there himself and still has no car). It is the one time of the year when the hotels are full, prices double, and the average Malian has the chance to score big—to receive a handout from a passing tourist who doesn’t realize the value of their gift in the fourth poorest country in the world (a used pocket knife, water bottle, pocket change), or to rip one off, which really isn’t underhanded in a country where every price is negotiable and based on whatever a particular person is willing to pay. There are all kinds of tourists: ruin-seekers, poverty tourists, cultural tourists, Third World development tourists. Thrill seekers come to climb the “Hand of Fatoma,” a spire of rock that rises out of the desert and is the highest point in West Africa and highest sheer vertical rock face in the world, site of a recent North Face climbing expedition documentary. Another kind of thrill seeker, usually a middle-aged European women, comes to find or maintain an African boyfriend. There are those that come to experience Mali's’vibrant music scene, birthplace of the Blues and the banjo, site of the annual “Festival in the Desert,” when musicians from around the world commune together. Then there are the those who just come for the desert itself, to ride camels and “find themselves” in the mighty Sahara (they usually get lost), and to get their passports stamped in the real-life Timbuktu (there’s not much else to do there).

     

    Most famous of all is “Dogon Country,” a long line of cliffs jutting out of the desert where the traditionally animist Dogon people have made their homes in caves for several hundred years after fleeing slave-raiders and Islamic invaders. Possessing their own unique cosmology and home to 80 dialects—many mutually unintelligible—scattered throughout hard-to-reach and often hidden villages, the Dogon are a fascination to Westerners: imagine trekking through a landscape of Mesa Verde’s, but where the people still live there more or less the way they always have. You can learn a lot about a person by how they react to this strange world. A group of tourists will come back from the same trip together, but one will speak only of the shocking poverty, another will be amazed by the preserved culture, while still another will barely see the living people, so entranced with the ruins and sheer beauty of the landscape. People see what they want to see. To some the Dogon stand as a symbol of an older, more vital and primal way of living left behind by modern living. Others see an example of the failure of modern economics and systems of government to take care of the least fortunate. To some, the Dogon are hopelessly backwards, to others they possess ancient wisdom and magic. Unfathomly culturally rich, unimaginably dirt poor, heathens, holy men, incredibly wise, utterly illiterate, tourists come seeking something specific in the Dogon--and inevitably find exactly what they were looking for. Meanwhile the amused Dogon don’t see what all the big fuss is about.

     

    Tourists have an impulse to possess pieces of this unique culture (myself included, after all I am just a slightly longer-term tourist here)—not the made-for-tourists versions, new and overly decorative, but the “real” ones. Everything must be “real,” that is, as visitors define it. They want the Dogon as they imagine them, not sporting a Nike ballcap, not educated and speaking French, and they’d better not see that empty Coke bottle in the corner. One American complained to me after visiting a village: “They just didn’t act authentic.” In search of “authentic,” tourists buy the cracked clay pots out of the working kitchen, the the broken  carved door locks right off the gates. (They’ve bought all the old doors off all the houses of Timbuktu). I once saw tourists stop by the side of the highway and buy the wooden axe and pounding mortar and pestle out of Malians hands, which they were more than happy to sell them. Then they bought the stool out from under an old woman before they left, the amused locals pocketing the money and laughing as they watched the strange creatures speed away in their Jeep packed with dirty old broken things they had no use for. It would be like unimaginably rich and powerful aliens showing up at your house and wanting to inspect and collet the things in your kitchen: a spatula, the toaster, a fork, and insisting on not the good new ones but the egg-covered spatula with the broken handle, the outmoded toaster, the fork with the twisted prong. As one local guide incredulously asked a Peace Corps volunteer friend of his: “Why in the world do you guys want all this crap?” It was a good question.

     

    I recently hosted my own first visitor, an old high school friend of mine from the states who came to see Mali for two weeks. We played tourists together, her presence and fresh eyes reminding me of everything that I’ve stopped seeing—the heat, the beauty, the openess and hospitality of the local cultures, how terrible the local food is, how lucky I am. I gave her some of the best advice I was given when I first arrived: 1) Always chew side-to-side like a cow to avoid biting down on rocks, 2) Laugh, joke, never take anyone or anything too seriously—Malians like to make fun and expect you to give it right back to them, 3) When in doubt don’t drink that water! 4) People, friendship, small talk, community, reputation, history, custom, there are everything—time, material goods, law, work, deadlines are all secondary. She had a great time and everyone loved her, though they were very concerned that at 24 she didn’t have any kids yet (nine years past her child-bearing prime!), and recommended that she improve her diet by eating lots of meat and coffee to get lots of babies. Knowing that my village would assume she was “my woman” as they did every time any female visitor came by, I lied and told them that, yes, this was actually “my woman.” This turned out to be a big mistake as they went nuts overher arrival. The first morning I had a crowd of 30 village women and children at my gate bursting pass me and climbing the walls to get a first peek of “Amadaga’s woman.” People bestowed gifts and blessings on her, assured me she had great child-bearing hips, began suggesting names for our supposed children, and then proposed holding a traditional Dogon wedding with all the village on Saturday—and that’s right when we made the decision to leave on Friday.

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