So we had an interesting experience on Sunday, as our trip is starting to wind down (only 15 days remaining as I write this), we thought it would be sillyy of us not to take a trip up the Gambia River, which is one of the main tourist things to do while here, aside from sit on the beach drinking beer.
We signed up with a 1 day trip to leave from the Banjul Seaport (where the ferry departs from), and travel upriver about 20 nautical miles to the village of Juffreh. It was nice to meet other Toubabs while we were on the boat, and struck up some lively conversation with several other people enroute. Being on the boat made me very homesick.... well maybe more appropriately, boat-sick... missing the lazy days spent on top of the boat, laughing, swimming, and relaxing.
We arrived in Juffreh for our tour around a 'traditional African village'. It was kinda heartbreaking, as the village was of normal construction, but the relationship to Njawara or Sanyang, where we have spent considerable time on this trip ends at that point. The village has focused itself on these boat trips for its income, and as a result, is anything but 'traditional' or 'authentic'. As we walked along the road, children were dancing in the street and banging on improvised containers trying to receive some money or candy from the Toubabs passing through. The whole culture of the village was different than what we have had the great luck of witnessing first hand. Everyone who came up to you spoke in English, and wasn't just wondering about who you were and where you were from, but was trying to get you to buy something from them, or give something to them. They even sold in large bags, the candies the kids were begging for. Talk about a supply and demand situation.
All in all it was more eye-opening than enjoyable. The vast majority of the tourists we were travelling with were respectful, however there were the handful who were completely ignorant and in some cases outright offensive to the locals. One man carried an open bottle of beer off the boat with him, into a Muslim village, was walking around without his shirt for nearly the whole time, until I told him he is about to meet the village Alkalo and should, out of respect, clothe himself. They had a replica of a slave boat in the museum we visited. We were asked outright not to climb onboard, that didn't stop them in anyway, and as we were leaving, we noticed a large contingent of children surrounding the two. It occurred to us immediatley that, again although being asked not to give the kids anything, but to place candies, books, pencils, whatever we had into a communal collection to be given out to the children at a later time... this both to ensure fairness, and to discourage children from skipping school everytime a Toubab boat pulls in, that these two people were handing out candies to each of the children. At one point, one of the guides took a handful from the woman and placed them in the collection. As they were at the edge of the village, a persistent girl who had stayed with them to this point was rewarded with a candy. She ran back towards us, and her two friends, showing it off. I'm reasonably certain she would have been beaten up by the other girls over this small candy. Glad we Toubabs are so generous!
It just made me really disappointed at this culture of 'gotta go to Africa, gotta see the poor black kids, gotta make them love me by giving trinkets and candy so I feel better inside. These people have now 'seen' the real African village, and can go back to their 4 and 5 star hotels completely satisfied they made the world a better place by spending 15 minutes with less advantaged people. It made me not want to ever be that 'tourist' again.
After spending about 1.5 hrs in Juffreh, they took us across the water to Fort James Island. This was the staging ground for the West African slave trade. Boats would arrive from England and Europe, unload cargo, load up with slaves, who had been led to Juffreh by captors, and sold by traders, then loaded onto the slave boat to go to the Americas. The island we saw was only about 1/6 of it's original size, it is being lost into the sea by tidal erosion. We were able to walk around the remaining ruins a bit, and get a sense of how cramped and unbelievably crowded the spaces these people were crammed into actually are. It gave me pause to think of some of the atrocities we have committed in our drive to success.
We then returned to the boat for our trip back to Banjul. Along the way we were treated to seeing some dolphins swimming in the river. A few came withing 150 feet of our boat. It was a nice ending to the day.
I think, above all else, what I gained from the trip today was a realization about how narrow minded we can be, and how incomplete our understanding of the world really is.
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