Unruffled rhythms in Ouagadougou

Published Jun 25, 2013

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Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso - At a farewell party for a French couple one night in Ouagadougou, the impeccably named capital of Burkina Faso, I asked some friends about the situation in the north.

They laughed nervously. Hadn’t I heard? The government had evacuated all the expats some months before – had supposedly rounded them up in the dead of night, after rumours spread of an alleged plot targeting foreigners.

Since neighbouring Mali began to unravel, everything in Burkina Faso had changed. You couldn’t travel more than 60 miles north of Ouagadougou without written permission and an army escort, they told me. Hadn’t I heard?

No, I hadn’t.

What I had done, in fact, was to arrive in this little West African nation with breathless plans to travel across the Sahel in the country’s north.

The long, parched belt of semi-desert on the southern cusp of the Sahara is Burkina Faso’s most evocative region. I imagined crowded bush taxis and colourful Tuareg markets and desert campsites with my tent pitched beneath the stars. But now the north was off-limits.

I let the news sink in, washing it down with an oversize bottle of Brakina beer, in typical Burkinabe style. Smoke from a nearby grill pirouetted into the night sky. Wherever there’s a maquis, or sidewalk bar, in Ouagadougou (pronounced WAH-ga-DOO-goo), there’s a crafty entrepreneur near at hand, selling brochettes or grilled fish to hungry drinkers. It’s one of the simple pleasures of life in this ramshackle city.

There were worse places to be, I figured. After all, I’d been here before.

“You can’t be bourgeois in Ouaga,” said a young Frenchwoman. “Except here.”

We were having cocktails at Villa Kaya, an upmarket tapas bar that had, since opening some months before, been adopted as the nightspot du jour for Ouaga’s energetic expat community. The tables were set in a sandy courtyard shaded by towering neem trees. The walls were painted blood red and hung with West African objets d’art. Everything looked stylish, sexy – chouette, cool. It was decidedly unlike anything either of us – my companion, a long-time resident, had recently repatriated to Paris – had seen in Ouagadougou before.

I first visited Burkina Faso in 2011 for Fespaco, the country’s biennial film festival, which has improbably reigned for nearly half a century as the continent’s premier showcase for African film.

Dust-swept Ouagadougou seemed like the unlikeliest of capitals for the African film world; it seemed an unlikely place, too, for a holiday.

Like the country around it – a poor, parched, landlocked nation of 17 million – there was little on the surface to appeal to the casual tourist.

Even the French, arriving in Burkina Faso more than a century ago, seemed ill disposed towards the colony they christened Upper Volta. For years it was little more than a source of cheap labour for the profitable cocoa plantations in neighbouring Ivory Coast.

The festival passed, and yet I found myself sticking around, oddly seduced by the city. The Burkinabe were warm and genial. Even after some years of travelling in Africa, I was surprised by the good humour with which they took the day’s challenges in stride.

Everyone was thoughtful, helpful, curious. The name Burkina Faso means “land of the upright men,” and that seemed to me in keeping with the character of the people I met.

The pace of life, too, was easy – a consequence, perhaps, of the oppressive heat. In the afternoon, men gathered in the shade of the city’s ubiquitous neem trees, chatting, laughing or kneeling on mats to perform their daily prayers. The city’s preferred modes of transport, the bicycle and the motorbike, felt like a natural fit for the lazy rhythms of the Sahel.

Yet now, two years later, change seemed to be blowing across the city like the fierce harmattan wind that sweeps down from the Sahara each year. Wildcat exploration companies were pouring into Ouagadougou, flush with foreign currencies, on the heels of the discoveries of new gold deposits around the country; friends told me rents in fashionable parts of the city had doubled in the past year. Crime, too, was on the rise, a troubling trend for a place long considered one of Africa’s safest capital cities.

What was going on? When I last lived in Ouagadougou, the country appeared to have reached a tipping point. A series of increasingly bellicose student demonstrations had spread to trade unions and merchants – and eventually to the military. Panicky expats fled the country. A curfew was imposed. Sitting with my housemates in our darkened compound, we listened to the popping of distant gunfire as disgruntled soldiers took up a nightly campaign of drunken looting across the city.

One night there was a shoot-out at the presidential palace: President Blaise Compaoré, surrounded by his elite presidential guard, was spirited from the capital to the safety of his village.

For a few weeks, Western analysts wondered breathlessly whether Burkina Faso might, on the heels of the Arab uprising, provide the spark to ignite an “African Spring”. But the protests petered out. Wily Compaoré had lived to fight another day.

Sitting at Villa Kaya two years later, pondering the downward slide since my last visit, I asked my friend what was happening in the city we both knew and loved. She had her theories. Some said it was Ivorians from Abidjan, allies of the deposed Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo, who feared retribution and no longer felt safe in their country.

Others thought it was drug traffickers from Liberia or Sierra Leone. Still others said it was remnants of the Burkinabe military, since hundreds of soldiers had been left jobless when the government, in the wake of the 2011 protests, disbanded several regiments.

Each theory seemed entirely plausible.

Muammar Gaddafi himself, in his final days, was rumoured to be looking for sanctuary under the protective wing of his good friend Compaoré. As the Libyan government tottered, there were reports of a fantastic convoy crossing the desert, like the great trans-Saharan caravans of old – hundreds of vehicles, laden with guns and riches, kicking up dust on their way to Ouagadougou.

“La vie est simple,” a Burkinabé man once said to me when I asked, with a certain feigned naiveté, how life is in Burkina Faso. A few days later, the phrase was repeated verbatim by a Frenchwoman I’d met two years ago, when I asked, over a strong cocktail, why she’d never left. “La vie est simple,” she said.

Life is simple. In fact, I would often say it myself when trying to explain to friends back home the odd charms of a dusty, brown-tinged city where temperatures this time of year regularly top 46ºC.

It is perhaps the reason everyone looks at the troubling signs – the rising crime, the neighbouring unrest – and takes them in stride. Life in Ouagadougou has a metronomic quality; it’s full of evening drinks at the crowded maquis, Saturdays at the pool, Sundays paying visits to family and friends.

One afternoon I called on my friend Davy, a young actor I’d met during the last film festival. He took me to eat at a sidewalk cafe.

We talked about his maquis, which he had opened a year before. Business was tight. One of his employees had taken off with his savings – more than 40 000 francs, which he had pieced together through months of work.

Though life in Ouagadougou has a simple charm, it’s still a grind for most of the 1.5 million Burkinabe who call it home.

I asked after Davy’s brother, Joel, a wiry, mischievous thirty-something who washed cars in a nearby lot. Joel had a poet’s soul; he kept a wooden tablet by his bedside, on which he scribbled verses from the Bible for daily inspiration. Recently, Davy said, he had written the words: “Un homme qui a faim n’est pas libre.” (A hungry man isn’t free). “Il est philosophe,” said Davy, laughing.

Walking home from lunch one afternoon, I was approached by a young man called Martins. Tall, handsome, his arms rippled with muscles, he told me he was a soccer player from Nigeria.

I asked how he had ended up in Ouagadougou, of all places.

As it turns out, Martins had been lured by a Dutchman, a scout who’d offered to find him a spot on a team in Ivory Coast. The Dutchman had vanished with his recruitment money in Abidjan, and a few weeks later, he was on a bus that deposited him in Ouagadougou. For six months he’d trained with a local squad, but now the coach was refusing to play him in the first team, which meant he wouldn’t get paid. The season was about to start, and he now found himself without a squad.

Couldn’t he go back to Nigeria?

“My mother, she sweat just to give me small money,” he said. “If I go back, I’ll look like a foolish boy.”

When I arrived in Ouagadougou in February, full of avowals to improve my threadbare French, I bought a children’s book from one of the itinerant hawkers who ply the city’s streets: La Belle Histoire de Leuk-le-Lièvre (The Beautiful Story of Leuk the Rabbit), by Senegal’s former poet-president, Léopold Senghor.

It tells the story of a young rabbit who ventures forth into the wider world, where all manner of mishaps and misadventures befall him on the path to age and wisdom. I couldn’t help feeling an empathetic bond with that rabbit, and with my young friend Martins – each of us lost in the world, in our own ways.

If all went well, according to my logic, I could commit myself to my studies, acquiring my own sort of wisdom along the way. With any luck, I’d soon be speaking French like an 8-year-old Senegalese boy.

The book was slow going. Learning a language is like discovering a new country: its singularness, its nuances, its odd rules and whims. You’re always arriving at new frontiers.

Armed with my French-English dictionary I slowly charted the uncertain terrain around me. Slowly I could feel that expansiveness that comes with discovering a new language or place: approaching its spirit, its rites and mysteries, like a sacred temple. After a month I knew that there was no going back – I could never return home like a foolish boy.

A few weeks later, I saw Martins again, his rangy legs loping down the street. His spirits were high: he had made friends with another footballer, from Togo, who had told him about coming trials in that neighbouring country.

Martins had scratched together money for a bus ticket; he was leaving Ouagadougou the next day. We exchanged contacts. West Africa is a small enough neighbourhood, and I knew that I might find myself in Togo a few months down the line. I promised to look him up in Lome. It would be, I thought, a beautiful story.

“A trial isn’t the end of a man’s life, it’s the beginning,” said Martins, sounding wise beyond his years. “This is my beginning.” – The Washington Post.

l Vourlias is living in Nigeria and working on his first book.

 

If You Go...

WHERE TO STAY

• Residence Napam-Beogo

Off Avenue Kadiogo

residencenapambeogo.weebly.com

Basic rooms from $18 (about R160).

• Hotel Pavillon Vert

Ave. de la Liberté

hotel-pavillonvert.com

A backpacker’s favourite that's popular for its lively bar and restaurant. Rooms from $16.

• Yiri Suma

Rue Maurice Yaméogo

yirisuma.com

Five spacious rooms appointed with West African artwork. Rooms from $35.

 

WHERE TO EAT

• Villa Kaya

Off Avenue Babanguida

Cocktails and tapas in an attractive outdoor space have made this newcomer an expat favourite. Plates from $3.

• La Cave du Petit Paris

Off Ave. Kadiogo

This hidden gem is the best of Ouaga’s ‘caves du vin’, serving meat dishes alongside a selection of French wines. Meals from $14.

• Le Verdoyant

Avenue Dimdolobsom

Expat haunt famous for its wood-oven pizzas, pastas and atmospheric garden. Meals from about $14.

 

WHAT TO DO

• Institut Francais

Avenue de la Nation

institutfrancais-burkinafaso.com

French cultural centre is the hub of the city’s buzzing cultural scene, with a packed programme of art, film, music and theatre. Check website for a list of forthcoming events.

 

l Jardin de l’Amitié

Place des Nations Unies

It might be a tourist trap buzzing with mosquitoes and touts, but the lush and lively jardin is a good bet for live music every weekend.

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