May 29, 2005 

Investigation

White mischief

They go to 'find themselves', to seek love, to indulge their desires. They 
jettison their homes — and husbands. But do these European women really find 
happiness in the Gambia? 

David James Smith reports   
    
Carol had called her husband earlier that week, at their home 2,780 miles 
away, out of sight and out of mind in a small town near Bournemouth. It was the 
first time she had ever been away on her own, and she had called to tell him 
she had found herself at last, that she now knew the person she was always meant 
to be (and, as it happened, rather liked her, this new person she'd belatedly 
met for the first time). Her husband said, what on earth are you on about? 
That response spoke volumes — it told Carol all she needed to know.

Her true self was not the only person Carol had met in the Gambia. The other 
one was a man young enough to be her son with whom she was engaged in a 
passionate sexual relationship. Carol was a white woman of 51; Lamin was a black man 
of 30. It was not just about sex, she said. It was about the affection and 
attention he showed her.

With English men, she said, after the initial honeymoon period, it was "iron 
this shirt" and "where's my clean trousers?" That had been her life since she 
married and became a parent 35 years ago: caring for someone else. Coming 
here, she discovered she was important, after all.

All this began last year, when Carol and her husband came to the Gambia, on 
the coast of west Africa, for a holiday. As many tourists do, Carol visited a 
local school and decided to support it financially. She and her husband 
returned around Easter to visit the school. Carol met Lamin at a nightclub, they 
danced together and, on her return to England, started writing to each other. For 
this third trip, Carol left her husband behind. He knew nothing about Lamin. 
She had not spoken to anyone in her family about it. She thought she might end 
up living in the Gambia, though certainly not with her husband and not 
necessarily with Lamin, who was young and might want to be a father one day. But she 
knew her family had noticed the differences in her: the aura of wellbeing, 
self-assurance and sexual confidence that she carried. She sensed her mother's 
disapproval, as if she knew something, but even her mother had said: "You have 
to grab your happiness while you can."

Carol had not had sex with anyone else during her marriage, though she'd had 
her chances. But when she first saw Lamin she thought, God, there's something 
about that man that rows my boat. And, she said, he's been rowing it ever 
since.

When we met, Carol and Lamin were at the Ali Baba bar and restaurant, a 
renowned Gambian melting pot near the Senegambia hotel where many mixed-race 
couples gather. It was the perfect spot to watch two worlds collide.

Sometimes over half the 30 tables would be occupied by black and white 
couples, from just met to married with children. You could see tourists living 
outside of themselves, behaving as they never would at home: smoking furiously, 
nearly all of them, as if immune and immortal; and sampling the forbidden fruits 
of black Africa.

Each story was distinctive. So far as I could see, the only common ground was 
the collision of dreams, the desire to escape poverty, both material and 
emotional. Sex was exchanged for money sometimes, for sure. And some of those 
couples looked sad and desperate. But mostly — as with Carol and Lamin and others 
I met — it was more complicated, shaded with romance and not nearly so cynical 
or sleazy.

Carol's tanned, faintly leathery arm was draped around Lamin. He wore a 
bright African shirt and kept his dreadlocks tucked beneath a floppy white sunhat. 
He was a good-looking man — beautiful in Carol's eyes. In England, she said, 
people like her didn't stand a chance with people like him. But in the Gambia 
there was no ageism.
 
You have to keep your head on your shoulders, she said — you could have a 
different man every day if you wanted to. Perhaps Lamin was listening to us, but 
he was not joining in. He was a man of few words, she said. He would tell her 
how lovely she was, with her sexy legs and eyes. He said he loved her and she 
felt something like love for him, especially when he spoke in that profound 
way of his about Africa and his family.

Unlike the majority of young men, known as "bumsters", who haunted the 
beaches and loitered outside the hotels in search of an income, Lamin was employed 
and self-sufficient. He was not apparently looking to get married or get a visa 
for England, which was often the endgame in these liaisons. Still, despite 
her modest lifestyle back home, Carol knew she must seem wealthy. 

In the Gambia the currency is constantly undermined by inflation, and a 
typical weekly wage, for someone lucky enough to be employed in a hotel, is about 
500 dalasies — around £10.

A bag of rice to feed a family for a week costs half that. Extended families, 
as many as eight or nine people who live together in a compound, typically 
manage on around £20 a month. The most recent figures place two-thirds of the 
country's 1.4m people below the poverty line.

It is a predominantly young population, with substantial unemployment and no 
state welfare. Crime, drugs and HIV are not significant, and tourists are 
rarely the victims of assault or robbery. Still, the lure and relative glamour of 
wealthy white tourists are obvious. The Gambia has been a package-tour 
destination for over 25 years and currently receives about 80,000 visitors a year, 
mostly from Europe and more than half from the UK. Tourism is important — even 
though it provides less than 10% of the country's income; the hotels and tour 
companies employ around 10,000 Gambians. At peak season, during the British 
winter, the main tour operator, the Gambia Experience, flies in about 800 
visitors a week. There are no figures for the number of lone women on the planes — 
and, anyway, many single travellers are arriving on business for charities and 
other non-governmental organisations. But you notice the women on the beaches, 
solitary figures beneath bamboo shades, surrounded by eager young men selling 
almost anything, including sometimes themselves.

Many bumsters and regular tourist-industry workers don't just want to make 
money: they want to make friends, establish a relationship that might lead to an 
invitation to Europe, or even marriage. Bumsters are very determined, with 
practised techniques for wooing tourists. They know what buttons to push, and 
many of them are fit and physically attractive — in stark contrast to the 
reddened, sweaty, paunchy western men.

Isha Jallow arrived in the Gambia in February as Sharon from Nottingham. 
Sharon, 38, had always loathed being Sharon. It was such a common name. She had 
wanted to go to India but it was too expensive, and her sister suggested the 
Gambia. Sharon travelled with her sister and her own teenage daughter, who lived 
with her dad, Sharon's ex-boyfriend, in London. It was not a quest for 
romance, Sharon insisted, but a chance to spend quality time with her daughter.

On their first night at the Banna Beach hotel, Alhagie Jallow, 29, known to 
his friends as Tupac,  started talking to them at the bar. Sharon thought he 
was gorgeous. They went on a date at the end of the first week and spent most of 
the second week together. They were kindred spirits, said Sharon; they saw 
the world the same way.

Back home, Sharon immediately started planning a return trip. She began 
buying phone cards for conversations with Tupac. They talked of marriage. Sharon's 
dad said he looked forward to meeting Tupac, but her mum thought Tupac was 
using her to get a visa. But Sharon knew better. She went back in April, 
converted to Islam, and married him. Like most of the Gambian people, Tupac was a 
Muslim. Sharon was asked to perform a ritual cleansing and then to choose a name. 
Goodbye, Sharon; hello, Isha. She was happy, and determined to get Tupac a 
settlement visa for the UK. As a child, Tupac had told his mother he was going to 
marry a white "lady" one day. Some of his brothers lived in Europe and had 
married European women.

We met during Isha's third visit to the Gambia, which was just a week, the 
third week Isha and Tupac had spent together since they met in February. Isha 
had done all she could to help Tupac's visa application and she hoped he might 
return with her. She'd found a full-time job in Nottingham. She kept all the 
phonecards she had used and the letters they had exchanged, knowing the British 
High Commission would want evidence of what they referred to as a "subsisting" 
(existing, to you and me) relationship.

I went with Isha and Tupac when they visited the High Commission and arranged 
my own interview with the deputy high commissioner, Ron Rimmer, who said they 
processed about 50 visa applications and conducted about 20 interviews for 
applicants a day. He didn't know how many involved mixed-race marriages — they 
did not keep those kinds of records. They did not want to pry or be intrusive 
and, especially, did not want to make moral judgments about people's lives, but 
they did need to be sure the relationship was genuine. Evidence of contact — 
phonecards, letters, air tickets — was important, together with proof that the 
applicant was self-supporting or could be supported.

At the visa section down the road, where Isha and Tupac were waiting, we met 
other couples. Samantha and Jack, who were both young. They were married and 
living in Yorkshire, Jack having long since been granted his visa. Their 
friends arrived, a harried-looking young white woman with buckteeth and a tall, 
elegant black man with dreadlocks. They were to be married that week but there was 
a problem and they didn't look happy and did not want to talk in any detail.

Later, at Ali Baba, I met Louise and her beautiful son, Jay Dawda, who was 
five months old and had not seen his dad for three months. Louise's parents had 
come out to the Gambia on holiday and loved it so much, they decided to move 
there. Louise, 23, had gone with them and met and married a Gambian man. They 
returned to England when Louise became pregnant, planning to return when the 
baby was born. But Louise's husband became withdrawn, and when Jay was seven 
weeks old he disappeared. He was somewhere in England, as far as Louise knew, and 
she was back in the Gambia. Louise felt used by him for the visa. But she 
said that she could see how the men felt used too, by those older women who went 
out there to the Gambia because they couldn't get a fella back home.

Certainly, there could be ill feeling on both sides, the moral compass 
flicking one way and then the other. You had to remember Gambia's history as a 
British colony and, way back, as a trading outpost for slavery and a port of 
departure for the slave ships. Sex between black and white people came laden with 
colonial history and the imbalance of power that implied.

One white woman I met, who had married a black man in the UK, spoke about the 
sexual prowess of black men. Perhaps this was true, or perhaps she was buying 
into old imperial myths about African men being animalistic, only fit for 
enslaving and breeding. Perhaps, too, if you had been engaged in a bloodless, 
long-term relationship, any newness would seem thrilling.

Alhagie Sanneh, a bumster turned hotel worker, sees everyone in the tourist 
industry as a bumster, officially employed or not. They all want something from 
the tourists, he says, and he is no exception. He is in his mid-thirties, 
getting old by the standards of the Gambian tourist industry and running out of 
time in his ambition to find a rich white woman to whisk him off to Europe. He 
spoke of his disappointment at being used and "wasted" by European women, 
especially the older ones, whom he described in almost vampiric terms, saying how 
you could see their old, white, sagging skin become taut and fresh as they 
sucked the youth from their boyfriends.

The Gambian men know how to play the white women who are looking for sex, he 
said. You could see them in action, even in front of the women's husbands, 
touching their hands and arousing their interest. Last winter, he said, there was 
a horrible scene outside Ali Baba, with a man from Manchester crying and 
distraught in the street as he looked for his wife, who had disappeared with one 
of the bumsters.

Five ladies, Alhagie said in his broken English, he had experienced from the 
tourists with the love. He always knew when they were interested, and he would 
invest his time, drinking, dancing, smoking and having sex with them. There 
was the Belgian woman who'd said she was going to leave her husband and come 
back to the Gambia for him. His German "girlfriend" left him for another 
bumster. Like the others, she was much older than Alhagie, perhaps 50. Some refused 
to tell him their age. Only the Swedish woman had been older even than 
Alhagie's own mother. She had been generous with her payments of dalasies to him, but 
still it had not gone any further.

You did not ask the women for money or negotiate a fee, you accepted what 
they offered. Sometimes they just gave you gifts, like Caroline, his English 
"girlfriend", who gave him a watch. Alhagie hoped she might be the one to take him 
to Babylon, as he called Europe. They had kept in contact by phone after her 
holiday and she had said she was coming back and would set up home with 
Alhagie, but she stopped calling. Throughout most of this time, he had been in a 
relationship with a Gambian woman, with whom he now had two children. She knew 
all about his affairs with the tourists, he said, but what could she say? These 
white women were his best prospect of a better life.

Property was crime, Alhagie kept repeating, meaning that the drive to be rich 
could make you do things you'd regret. While working in a restaurant he had 
once been propositioned by a German man, who asked Alhagie to go to his hotel 
with him for sex. Alhagie's boss intervened. Alhagie has always been troubled 
by the thought that he would have gone with the man — "man on man", he called 
it — if his boss hadn't stepped in. Of course, Alhagie acknowledged, there were 
many tourists who wanted innocent friendships with the bumsters, and there 
were many bumsters who simply wanted the company of the tourists.

The Gambian authorities have tried to curb bumstering, which can result in 
harassment for tourists. The police — sometimes the army — will conduct sweeps 
of the tourist areas from time to time, and drive the young men away, 
sometimes with a beating and a few hours in the cells. They have also created a 
uniformed band of official tourist guides (OTGs), who are stationed near the hotels 
and are supposed to make simple, polite approaches to tourists. It is not as 
lucrative being an OTG, but it has status and is more dignified.

Lamin Sanneh, another former bumster, was now a guide based near the 
Senegambia hotel. He liked to remember the English family who'd welcomed his company 
and taken him into their hotel (a rare honour for a bumster) and let him use 
the hotel pool. That relationship was not complicated by sex. He has since had a 
couple of sexual relationships, one with an English woman of his age, and 
another with a German woman 10 years his senior. Only once was Lamin asked by a 
tourist to find an underage girl for sex. He reported the man to the police. He 
knew of other bumsters who had faced similar requests. He guessed not all 
were rejected.

There have been concerns in the Gambia about the vulnerability of children to 
sexual predators, both Gambian and tourists. While there was said to be a 
culture of Gambian "sugar daddies" using young girls for prostitution, there were 
also some reported cases of European tourists befriending Gambian families 
and then assaulting their children. Unicef has produced a substantial report 
citing instances of abuse of children, and various measures are being taken to 
try and stop the problem from getting worse.

There is a Child Protection Alliance involving various organisations from the 
tourist industry, the police and welfare groups. There is a Task Force for 
the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Tourism, and a 
Responsible Tourism Partnership. A new Tourism Offences Act has also been passed, with 
long jail sentences for child sex abuse. The law is intended to target Gambian 
offenders too — the existing law was so old that fines were stated in English 
shillings and amounted to a few dalasies for serious offences.

The acting director general of the Gambia Tourism Authority, Kaliba Senghore, 
told me that the children selling mangoes, melons and peanuts from trays on 
their heads on the beaches around the hotels were vulnerable to an inflated 
offer of money for more than just a slice of mango. So now they would be kept 
away from the tourist areas unless they could produce identity cards showing they 
were 18 or over.

Kaliba noted the many changes in Gambian society, and the rising number of 
interracial and cross-generational marriages. In the past, he said, a Gambian 
man might have been ashamed to walk down the street holding the hand of a white 
woman, but now it was the norm, and marrying a westerner was celebrated. 
Everyone I spoke to thought such weddings were on the increase. But I found no 
couples whose marriage had lasted more than two years. Perhaps they were living in 
the suburbs of Belgium, or Tunbridge Wells. Or perhaps they did not exist, 
and all the relationships faded, like holiday romances. They were certainly 
burdened by blatant differences of age, race and way of life. On the other hand, 
many relationships thrive on difference.

Buba Camara told me he had seen Emmy in his dreams long before he met her. 
Their love was a miracle, he said. Buba had a romantic vision and an eloquent 
turn of phrase. And the body of an athlete. No wonder Emmy had, as she put it, 
felt a 1,000-volt shock when she saw him for the first time in her hotel. In 
his dreams, Buba said, he'd see a white woman with the same pointed nose, the 
same eyes. He'd wake and go looking for her all over town, wondering who she 
was.

Two years ago, Emmy came from her home in Amsterdam for a holiday. She had 
been married for 29 years but was about to get divorced. She met Buba, a hotel 
employee, after a few days at the hotel. She remembered her own childhood 
dream: that she would marry a dark man in Africa. She was in her sixties, but Buba, 
in his late twenties, didn't see an old woman. He saw the woman of his 
dreams. After two return visits and a hastily arranged divorce, Emmy crated her 
possessions and moved to the Gambia last December; she and Buba promptly got 
married. They set up home in a residential area near the beach. Buba was troubled 
that European women could be bossy; Emmy got cross when Buba ate with his hands 
and refused to be "civilised" and use cutlery. His friends started turning up 
at meal times, but Buba would tell his "lovely darling" he couldn't send them 
away.

Buba's father died when he was a child, and his mother, who was illiterate, 
had struggled to raise eight children. Buba had known suicidal despair as a 
child, going to school without shoes and sometimes begging food from friends. Of 
course his life had changed immeasurably since meeting Emmy, but he had 
married her from his heart, he said, and he did not see the differences between 
them, he only saw the similarities. He was sad that they would not have children 
together, but perhaps they would adopt. He realised Emmy would likely die long 
before him, and he hoped to meet her again in heaven. Emmy said that they 
understood each other physically. That was all she was saying about that aspect of 
their relationship. Except she observed that many of these other couples 
found each other through sex, and she did not believe that was the basis for a 
lasting relationship.

She was pleased with Buba. African men seemed older, wiser, more spiritual. 
His love for her, she said, was a gift from Allah. Perhaps one day she would 
become a Muslim. That would make me really happy, said Buba. But not if I have 
to cover my head, said Emmy. That's not necessary in the Gambia, said Buba.   


    
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