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.
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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