Redskins and Bumsters of the Smilin' Coast

Although tiny, The Gambia remains a giant in world tourism. But some enemies of The Gambia say it is only gigolos or young male prostitutes that keep sex-starved European women returning each year. Thank God the authorities here in The Gambia know the real truth and can reject these evil insinuations from our envious neighbours. Our youths are not lazy bumsters as some people cruly label them. They are merely citizens from our smiling coast, who take tourists on fine walks along our beaches.

Banjul, The Gambia

If ever there were a country that should not exist, it would have to be The Gambia. Surrounded north, south and east by Senegal, the country really only owes its existence to the Senegal River, which it wraps itself around, and to the fact that The Gambia was once a British colony. Senegal, by contrast, was a French colony. Thus, even though culturally and ethnically there was not that much difference between the two colonial areas, they form two countries rather than one. You would think they would be good neighbors, but they are anything but. When I was there twice in 1994, Senegal had cut off all links with its tiny neighbour, accusing it of providing support to the separatist movement in Casamance, in the south of the country. Another sorepoint was The Gambia’s status as an entrepot economy, whereby imported goods were getting into Senegal illegally, avoid taxes and custom duties.

The late Elspeth Huxley wrote about The Gambia in Four Guineas, her book from the fifties. At that time the capital was Bathurst, and it was a real backwater. Now it is called Banjul, and it is still a backwater. Because of its geographic configuration, Banjul can not realy grow beyond a certain size; for this reason, it’s nighttime population is only around thirty thousand. During the day, however, its population swells to several times that. For Banjul is the administrative, legislative and economic capital of this microstate straddling the Senegal River for a length of 300 miles. Most of these people live in a city noone outside the region has ever heard of: Serrakunda, a sprawling city of 300,000 or so across the river.

The Gambia also has about 80 kilometres of ocean coast from north to south. This makes it a very popular tourist destination. Europeans flock to it as a cheap sunspot, with miles of beaches. It is also said they come here for sex; middle-aged women in particular are alleged to come here to find a bog black stud. You see these couples walking arm in arm along the beach, the fiftyish woman with her big belly hanging out, and her twenty-year old lover. The fact that this kind of flagrant promiscuity can still take place in an age of AIDS defies belief. One hears that Africans simply refuse to believe that AIDS is a problem; they see it instead as another western myth being foisted upon them. As for the Europeans, who knows what goes through their heads!
I visited the country twice in the space of three months. Within a week of my second trip there was a military coup. The government of Sir Dada Jawara was overthrown by a bunch of Young Turks, including an incredibly juvenile looking twenty-eight year old soldier who promptly pronounceh himself President. The junta gave two official reasons for their putsch: corruption and moral decay. They took issue with the fact that Jawara and his cronies were siphoning off a large percentage of the national wealth for themselves. They also decried the lude behavior of foreign women, who paraded topless along the beaches, luring young Gabians into sex. They promised a crackdown on both fronts.

As for the corruption charge, the new military government had a certain amount of public support for their allegations. In a country where the number one export was peanuts, people asked themselves where the money came from for all those fancy Mercedes government ministers were driving around in. They also wondered who paid for all the luxury villas that were going up near the beach. Even the World Bank had produced an internal report, the so-called “black report”, detailing corruption in high places. It was thinking of cutting off all aid to the country before the coup, but was reluctant to take such a drastic step because The Gambia was considered a model for other countries in terms of structural adjustment, the policy whereby a country reforms its public policies, reduces government deficits, and liberalises trade and investment in return for international loans at preferential rates.

Ironically, only after the coup did The World Bank, along with all the other donors and lenders, cut off aid to The Gambia. The hypocrisy was incredible. Here was a situation in which corruption was tolerated for years under a more-or-less-democratic political system. But when a new government comes in to clean things up, all aid is suspended.

The Gambia was another pathetic African example of the yawning gap between what might have been and what was. In 1982, Sir Dada pronounced the very lofty Banjul Declaration, a commitment to sustainable development if ever there was one. The pledge has been quoted around the world as a brilliant enunciation of ecologically sound principles. In practice, however, the country’s record on the environment is a joke. In Banjul itself, rotting garbage lies uncollected in the streets. Children play by open sewers. Telltale signs of oil stain the country’s beaches. But the worst example of environmental mismanagement is the coastal tourism industry.

Started in the nineteen-fifties and sixties by Scandinavians, tourism has seen several different waves of development. One area is developed, and then when that fails because of coastal erosion, sewage or overcrowding, then another area of the coast is developed. Planning is haphazard at best. A sizeable stretch of the coast is reserved for tourism development, and yet houses are built in this zone, projects that are underfinanced leave half-finished buildings spoiling the beaches, unsightly bars litter the coast, and everywhere beachbums harass tourists. Each stage represents not so much as an expansion of the sector as a recognition of failure. The prevailing attitude seems to be: “Right, we’ve messed up this place now, so let’s move on top the next”. This is part of the African disease: nobody takes the long-term view. Instead of nurturing something, fixing what is broken and generally improving things, a resource is sucked dry, plundered, taken for all it is worth. International aid perpetuates this cycle of mismanagement, underwriting overly-ambitious development schemes that can only hurt existing investments financially. Corruption rears its ugly head: land is leased to Ministers who sell it to shady developers.

The Gambia was pinning its hopes on the tourism industry as a means of developing the economy. There is no doubt that it is an important sector of the economy, contributing a large part of the country’s foreign exchange, and providing numerous jobs as well. But if you look below the surface, it is questionable whether The Gambia receives any net benefit from the annual influx of foreigners. There are several reasons for this, and it must be said that Gambia is not unique in this regard. First, most of the goods required to run the sector have to be imported from abroad: everything from food and dishes to lawn mowers and swimming pool equipment. All of this eats up precious foreign exchange. Then there is the managerial staff, many of whom have to be recruited from developed countries. Locals tend to hold menial, low-wage jobs in the hotel industry, making beds, washing dishes, cutting the grass, etc. It is not uncommon for a four-star hotel to charge $150 US per night for a room, but pay a gardener or chambermaid $50 per month. Granted, some employees can make good money on tips, but westerners on business or on package tours tend to be very stingy. The prevailing logic seems to be that one should not pay a local too much or it will somehow spoil him or her. I have stayed in some hotels in Africa where my expense account covered $50 per day in meals; I find this positively obsene, when the person serving me could probably live on this sum for a month. The problem is, in many places on the continent, there is not much choice: there is very little good, cheap food or accommodation. More on this later.

Two hotels I stayed at in Banjul illustrate the pitfalls of tourism as a way out of poverty and into prosperity. The first is the Senegambia, and the other is the Kariba. The Senegambia, optimistically named after the union of Senegal and The Gambia which failed in all but name within years of being established. It was built in the early eighties, and was the first large, three or four star hotel in the country. It was purposely built further away from the previous wave of smaller, generally more run down hotels which had been built closer to downtown Banjul in the previous two decades. The Senegambia was, when I stayed there at least, a lovely hotel. The rooms were rather modest, but the grounds were very nice, with lots of royal palm trees providing ample shade, lots of other cover affording nesting areas for all manner of tropical birds. At the break of dawn there would be a cacophony of bird song; I used to get up to listen to them, even to record them. There was also a lovely swimming pool, and decent cuisine. The motif was Spanish.

Europeans came here by the planeload, especially during the winter months. They could get room and full board for one week, including airfare, for around US $800. For this ‘modest’ amount they could dip their feet into Africa, getting a bit of adventure, but mainly getting a lot of sun and a good tan. Typically they would take one or two excursions lasting perhaps a day or two. They might take a ‘cruise’ down the Gambia River to see Jiuffre, the site of Alex Haley’s ancestors in Roots; or they might go overland on a mini-safari in a four-wheel drive vehicle to see some African wildlife. Locally, they would probably go into Banjul for a day of sightseeing, where they might buy some local cloth, wood carvings or other tourist items. Otherwise, all they would really do would be to lounge around the pool, engaging in what the French aptly call “bronzage idiot”. On my morning constitution through the hotel grounds I would see them out there as early as 7 AM, reserving their chaise longes before heading in to the breakfast table, where they would feast themselves on waffles and sausages and croissants and coffee. It was all very nice, but I found out from talking with the hotel manager that his staff were being paid next to nothing. African labour is expendable: if someone does not like the pay or the conditions of work, he or she is quickly replaced by someone else, until that person in turn grumbles and quits. For everyone working there, there might be five or six people willing to come in as a replacement.

The Kariba hotel was even worse. This, to me, represented all that was wrong with African priorities. The place set itself up as a lavish, five-star hotel, Hawaii-style. It had been set up with Danish aid-money, and was supposed to be a hotel training school. Things did not turn out that way. Somehow it went bankrupt shortly after opening, and was picked up by a German firm, who had managed to turn it into a profit-making venture by catering to business travellers and World Bank types on bog expense accounts. The setting was, admittedly, magnificent, with lots of sea views, and large, well-furnished rooms. The view from the dining room terrace was captivating. Hotel management also prided itself on its environmental practices. Unfortunately, the hotel made very little ecological sense to begin with. For example, to provide those unobstructed sea views, the designers had cut down hundreds of beautiful, shade-giving plam trees. This turned the grounds into an oven by about 11 AM. The palms were replaced by grass and tropical plants; but because these received no shade, they required vast amounts of water in order to survive. So, although there was a shortage of groundwater, sprinklers were normally kept on all day long, which of course is not only wasteful, but burns the grass.

The lack of shade trees also meant that all the rooms had to be air-conditioned virtually all day long, resulting in a tremendous waste of energy. All this so that visiting westerners could be protected from the African elements! The whole thing was disgusting. Why, then, did I stay in a place like this? The short answer is, because my colleagues were there, and we had to all be together. But it is also true that I was on an expense account, and it is much easier to get the job done when you can live in this kind of setting, not having to worry about getting food, or getting sick from the food, having a regular supply of electricity so that you can plug your computer in, and being able to take a hot shower or go for a swim. It is also nice to be able to get CNN on the television. The idea is that when you are being paid $10,000 per month as a Consultant, you want to be in an environment that is as pleasant as possible, so that you can get the job done without any hassles. It sounds horribly the way I describe it, as if this is some sort of rationalisation for a high-flying, jet-setting lifestyle. I cannot in all honesty deny that it is; all I will add is that these are the percs one gets for staying in these otherwise accursed places, and without them I probbly would probably not have gone. But people back home who think I must be making tremendous sacrifices when I go to Africa are for the most part mistaken, for in some ways I live better than I do back home.

One impediment to the development of the tourism sector is the unwillingness of the government to put any money back into it. The government gets substantial revenues from the industry. There is, for instance, a head tax on each foreign visitor. This tax is imposed as you leave the country. I suppose the logic behind this practice is to avoid creating a bad first impression. Instead, one is left with a very bad impression; it is like having your pocket picked at the airport. The airport itself creates a bad impression: it is dark and dingy, and passengers have to wait interminably for luggage which arrives on one of those old railway baggage carts towed by an old farm tractor. A new airport is in the process of being built, again with foreign money.

Africa is not alays as it appears to be. A case in point is all those unfinished houses I see wherever I go. Cinder block structures are all over the place. To the uninitiated Western eye this always looks like a case of poor planning and lack of foresight. By our way of thinking, someone has started a house with insufficient funds to complete the project. This may be the case for hotels, which need a lot of capital. But for houses, what I found when I looked into it was that there is no real mortgage market in places like The Gambia. We in the developed world take it for granted that if we want to build a house, then a bank or a building society will give us the money up front, in return for our paying them back over a certain number of years. But in large parts of Africa, no such facility exists. Perhaps there is insufficient capital available, the risk is too great, or the builder has no collateral. Either way, a housebuilder has to come up with his own money. How he does it is that he finances the project out of his own savings. If he had to amass the entire amount required before he started, this might take a decade or more. What he does instead is build a little bit at a time. The first year he will lay the foundation, the second year put up some walls, the next year the roof, and the final year the windows. So those structures that look abandoned all around the West african countryside may actually be “works in progress”.

Whenever I visit Africa, I caanot help but notice how little people actually have. They seem to survive on virtually nothing. Just next to the Presidential Palace in Banjul is shanty town smelling of rotting fish and garbage. The squalor is abominable, with dirt floors, no walls, and only a tin roof protecting the inhabitants from the elements. And yet in the middle of the day I would hear music blaring from a radio, and people dancing, laughing and generally having a good time. I can never quite figure out why they don’t get out and clean up all the rubbish that surrounds them, but somehow they seem oblivious to the flies and the stench. There seems to be a tremendous sense of resignation and fatalism in the African psyche.

At the same time am impressed with how industrious people are. Most people get by with next to nothing. In order to survive they have to be very ingenious. Somehow most of them manage to find a way.

"South" to Alaska

Anchorage and Prudhoe Bay, November, 1984

Alaska may be big and empty, but Anchorage is big and crowded. At least it was when I visited it, in September of 1984. This came as quite a shock. I really did not know what to expect. The flight from Seattle is long and beautiful on a clear day, with glimpses from afar of the snow-capped mountains that line the British Columbia coast and then the Alaskan Panhandle. Looking at a map, the enormity of the fiftieth state (check) is awesome. As the plane makes its approach to Anchorage airport, fabulous Cook Inlet and the Kenai Peninsula, with many islands jutting out of the sea here and there, makes a spectacular first impression.

The airport itself provides the first clue that if this is indeed the Arctic, it is also the south brought north. The main terminal is big and chock full of planes, not just because Anchorage is the gateway to Alaska, but also because Anchorage is on the Great Circle Route: airlines stop here for refuelling and change of crew on their way to and from Asia. Ten years after my first visit, for instance, a flight I was on from Toronto to Hong Kong made a stop in Anchorage, at precisely the halfway point in our eighteen hour journey. The second thing one noticed about Alaska on the ground was the omnipresence of military aircraft. At the height of the Cold War, Alaska was armed to the teeth against the Soviet Union, which lay a short distance across the Aleutian Islands. The state also served as a key listening post as to Russian military activity.

Alaska conjures up images of many things, not the least of which is Kodiak bears, salmon runs and huskies. But what really drives Alaska these days is oil; and that is what brought me there. Oil is what really built Anchorage. Not only did oil bring jobs and people, but it also meant that the native land claim was settled along with it. This settlement provided large amounts of money to native peoples in Alaska, including the Inupiat of the North Slope ( check). Oil is of course a mixed blessing for Alaska, as the notorious 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound amply demonstrated.

When I was there in the mid-eighties, Anchorage looked like an average North American city of a few hundred thousand people. In fact, it reminded me a lot of a mini-Calgary, with its neat, grid layout of downtown streets, its functionality, and its lack of warmth: nice to look at, but rather unappealing otherwise. The mountains in the background do, however, provide a magnificent backdrop, especially when set against the broad expanse of Cook Inlet to the west.

One day was all that was needed to visit the oil installations of Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope, some 500 miles ( check ) and a three hour jet flight away. Flying over Denali ( aka Mt. McKinley (sp) and the Richardson Mountains, one suddenly realises what an incredible engineering feat it was to have built the TAPS, or Trans Alaska Pipeline, all the way from the North Slope terminal at Prudhoe Bay to the southern Alaskan port of Valdez, made famous by a drunken ARCO tanker captain who led his ship onto the rocks one fateful April day in 1989, causing tremendous damage to the environment, not to mention EXXON’s pocketbook.

Prudhoe Bay is a company town belonging to ARCO ( Atlantic Richfield Company ) and BP, the two main Alaskan North Slope producers. Their installations are impressive for their size, and for how they manage to make one feel that one is nowhere near the Arctic. In fact, when one is inside these facilities, one might as well be in Libya or the Persian Gulf, for all the local flavour. People come here to work, they do their job, and they go south on leave, to be replaced by someone else. They are part of the global oil culture.

Prudhoe Bay owes its existence to the OPEC crisis of 1974, when the US government decided it did not want to hold itself hostage to Arab oil interests any longer. The EXXON Valdez spill could hae been averted had the authorities accepted one of the original plans, which was to transport the oil overland through northern Canada and down into the southern forty-eight. However, the security implications of this transportation route were deemed to be too risky at the time, and so the TAPS was built to take the oil to Valdez and from there to Washington state and California by supertanker ( as if this transportation system did not in itself pose large enough threats to American security!). The plan to push ahead with Alaskan oil development also led to the settlement of native land claims in Alaska: the whole process is eloquently described in Thomas Berger’s Village Journey. Moreover, the extremely dangerous nature of supertanker transport is brilliantly and chillingly exposed in Eric Nalder’sTankers Full of Trouble.

Alaskan oil will not last forever. Vast amounts are thought to exist in the ANWR near the Yukon border; if developed these and other, offshore reserves could prolong the lifespan of TAPS. But sooner or later the state and the US at large is going to have to find a replacement. Even now, Alaskan oil only accounts for approximately ten percent of American consumption, and, ironically, the United States is today far more dependent on foreign oil than it was when the lights went out back in 1974. Of course, the global geopolitical situation has changed dramatically in the past two decades.