Fantastic invasion

Andrew Brown

Banjul, Senegambia

The queue of quietly melting tourists does not move forwards for minutes at a time. One man is gill wearing a black leather overcoat from Stockholm, 6000 kilometres north and 105 degrees colder. He nudges me, and points with suppressed excitement to the bullet-hole in the glass- walled office behind the Gambian passport clerk. We must have come to the real Africa at last. A burly Senegalese officer padded from this office when my landing card was passed through to him and greeted me. 'Are you a journalist? Then I hope that you haven't come here to write something about this country.'

Through the glass walls of the departure lounge we could see black teenagers hust- ling last week's Swedes like tropical fish darting among a shoal of cod. They seemed suddenly far too close. I shrugged and smil- ed, and was allowed to sidle past the passport desk. Later, it seemed obvious that the officer, like the bullet-hole, was only acting his part. That is the reception one expects in an African country, and this is a place where the tourists can have anything they want (and from which jour- nalists are expelled from time to time). But what the tourists want is not the Gambia that works — that's far too complicated but a sort of Bongoville-on-Sea: dirt, flies, and poverty as a backdrop for a cast of little weeping piccaninnies whose lives would be empty but for the interest we take in them and the money that we pay to watch them.

And this is what they get, too, though they can always retreat from it to their hotels. The walls of the hotel compound are raw brown concrete topped with broken glass. Within them, everything is Swedish: even the sun-hats sold there are flown in from Stockholm. The lizards seem ready to turn back into European sparrows at any moment. Outside the compound walls Bongoville pressed round us like a cloud of flies, noisy and inescapable but yielding freely to every movement. The pimps, touts, beggars, and male prostitutes who line the road to the town of Bakau address every European whom they see in fluent Swedish first, then in English. The ruthless; disciplined and unattractively corrupted traders are black, the feckless and corrup- ting savages white. The traders sell the tourists anything but solitude; this can only be found in the national library, which is the saddest place in the whole country, for it is the home of a god that has almost fail- ed. Ambitious Gambian parents now pull their children out of school, and tell them to work the tourists instead, since this is the more promising career.

It takes some days before they will even allow a tourist to climb into a taxi by himself: one night I met a Swedish farmer at the gates of the compound. We had shared a taxi from the airport, and on the strength of this acquaintance Birger greeted me as an old friend: 'I had a Gambian bint last night. It was really nice, because the curfew caught us, and 1 had to spend the night there ... she wasn't much in bed, though,' he added as we walked towards the duty-free bottle in his room. The friend- ly night, the whisky, and the prospect of another 'bint' later in the evening combined to fill him with morose and undirected melancholy. He told me of his failed mar- riage, and of his unhappy passion for the girl who taught him English in evening classes: 'I feel so funny here [clutching his heart with one hand] every time she talks to me. I don't know where to put my hands. I don't dare make a pass at her, because she might laugh at me if I did. She's only 23, and I am 40.' This was his third visit to the Gambia. He had a friend in the President's office who was trying to encourage him to move down here for good, but he had the sense to see that this would destroy him very quickly. He knew that if he were not expected to work, he would not be able to work at all.

When we left for a night-club, we had not walked ten feet from the compound towards the waiting taxis before two young pimps fell into step beside us. They were dressed in Swedish working-class party clothes. Their sunglasses glinted in the light from the street-lamp as they greeted Birger as an old friend. He didn't recognise them, and he certainly wanted nothing to do with them. But by the time we had climbed into the taxi, they were there too, asking tender- ly after our names and professions, and directing the driver to 'the Swedish disco, full of nice Gambian girls' before we had a chance to speak. As we walked up a dirt path at our destination, in the grounds of another hotel, Birger paused and urinated in a flower-bed. After a brief hesitation, the Gambians followed his example.

We refused to pay their entrance fees, as they confidently demanded that we should, but they had somehow reached the bar and ordered drinks all round (we paid) while we were still examining the room. The Swedish disco was dark, spacious, comfortable and quite deserted but for two unhappy white couples, three waiting ponces, and a Gam- bian girl who slipped away from the bar as we arrived. Vast speakers swept the dance floor clean with Abba's music. Birger grew increasingly morose. He told me that he was going to hit one of the pimps soon, and then disappeared, followed, of course, by his 'friend'. I told the other 'friend' for the fifth time in 20 minutes that I didn't want a girl, so he put his hand on my thigh. Birger was sitting in the dark with the girl from the bar. I made my inaudible excuses and left, though not without being asked for money by the pawing pimp.

f course, you can't really blame them,' kJ said the girl from Thomson's, 'I mean, look at them and look at us. We'd do the same in their place, wouldn't we?' She was discussing the attempted coup last sum- mer, which she regarded as a Gambian revolt against white affluence — which it wasn't at all. But her words should be carv- ed above the entrances of all the tourist hotels. The tourists and their shepherds are at all times excruciatingly conscious of their colour. They see the Gambia through a mist of complacent pity, with just a tinge of fear to darken the view. They damn all Gam- bians by refusing to blame any of them for anything, and then they believe that this is tolerance. So it was natural enough for a tourist guide (who was not there at the time) to believe that the rebels had sacked the hotel in which we stayed. They hadn't. The attempted coup remains a mysterious af- fair, but the one thing certain about it was that it was a purely Gambian quarrel, and not a very bloody one. Most of the killings occurred when the rebels started handing out guns to the mob. This led to a spree of drunken looting and murder, but popular resentment was directed against the Gam- bian upper classes, and not against the foreigners.

The President has built himself an enor- mous house just down the road from the corrugated iron town of Bakau. The Presi- dent's family were held hostage in this monstrous building, which is exactly the sort of thing that a newly-rich German millionaire would have built to announce that he had arrived. But the house next door, which is owned by a British engineer who was out of the country at the time, was left quite alone and unlooted in the fighting. The government claims that Libya and, ultimately, Russia were behind the coup attempt. This may well be true, but it is in an important sense irrelevant. This re- mains a civilised country, not one to which power politics travel well.

Everything seems as the prurient traveller would expect: the curfew enforced by an army of occupation; the opposition exiled or in jail; the roads emptying for the presiden- tial motorcade. But all these things are modified in practice, either by in- competence, corruption or that lively popular sense of the ridiculous which distinguishes civilised countries. Curfew runs from one to six, and is rigorously en- forced for a while every night, to the astonishment and subsequent discomfort of six or a dozen tourists every week. But in the small hours no one seems to care about it very much. I was driven back to my hotel at three in the morning past the President's villa and the depot where the Senegalese are quartered. The driver had a Senegalese laissez passer, so the ride was quite legal, but he had no occasion to prove this on a ride of six or seven miles that passed by the prime targets for any revolution.

The Senegalese army is everywhere to be seen in daylight; and its occupation is very unpopular. But the troops themselves are not. At night, you will find them in all the cheap bars (the Gambian police seem to prefer marijuana), where they sit quietly nursing their beers, etiolated, lithe and black as shadows cast by moonlight. Of course, their presence here is a serious mat- ter. They are all that can prevent another coup (though not the rumours of one). The fighting last summer frightened away four fifths of the expected tourists from England, and the confederation with Senegal has put an end to smuggling, which

'That damned indoor plant has escaped again.'

used to be more important to the economY than tourism.. Peanuts are doing well, but they make money only for the government, so the tourists must somehow be lured back. The government's dislike of jour- nalists can only be explained by the assump- tion that increasing repression will be necessary to keep the country sufficiently calm to attract the package trade. Bongoville sells, so they will build a Bongoville in this otherwise delightful country.

His excellency Sir Dawda Jawara, the President whom the Senegalese have reinstalled, grows more and more un- popular. When first elected, he could travel alone around the country. Nowadays security men surround him even when he plays a round of golf, and when he drives out to the course all other traffic must Po in to the side of the road and wait while the motorcade goes by. It sounds impressively tyrannical, but the motorcade consists only of four dusty cars and three weaving motor cyclists. This lack of ostentation cannot he because he can't afford to travel in more style: the first aid loan that the country received after the coup attempt paid for a fleet of air-conditioned Mercedes limousines.

This sort of thing horrifies the Scandiaa- vians if they get to hear of it. If only they were as venal, coarse and disgusting as the English tourists, they would do less harM But most of them have come here to sYm. pathise and to understand for 14 days, II° to behave like pigs inside the hotel 00" pound. Even the middle-aged women wh° come down here winter after winter: because no one will sleep with them a' home, want romance as much as they want jig-a-jig. But romance in the tropics is 3 seller's market. The working Gambian. despise despise the ponces, and the ponces in their turn despise their customers, who despise themselves. The younger tourists, who have come here for drugs rather than for sex, want another sort of romance. They OP rupt because they cannot be corrupted. Everything they say is vague, indefinite, elastic. The Gambia they have come to understand recedes from them through the clouds of ganja smoke which rise frog' these meetings. Gambian marijuana j5 cheap, strong and very popular, but the Europeans have brought with them the idea that only Jamaicans and those who pretend to be Jamaicans can really understand the drug. One of the guests at the hotel was a Galp: bian Rastafari who had returned to h'' roots after five years as a student in Swede° in order to apply for a Swedish work per- mit, which can only be obtained from oat- side the country. I saw him on the beach one morning collecting the address of one of the tourists: the black man stood with his head bowed in front of the white, who rested his pad of paper on the Rasta shoulders while he wrote. One must sup' pose that he was delighted that such a genuine African would want him as a friend'