I’ve already dropped all these hints about how terrible the guide that we hired in Banfora was. And honestly, now that it’s time for me to write about him, I don’t feel like it at all. Now, a month later, I don’t want to recall his arrogance and rudeness, how he treated us like we were idiots and laughed at our suggestions. How he cheated and charged us for things that he just made up. How ignorant he was, and how he got mad at us when we asked him to explain something again. How he didn’t do what we had agreed upon, how he was late, how he drove like a lunatic, and just laughed and said “Pas de probleme!”, as if car accidents couldn’t happen, when I asked him to at least have one hand on the wheel. How he started screaming at Helena when she asked him a question while he was on the phone. And how he had the nerve to start flirting with me in the middle of all this. Revolting. But most of all, how he had been recommended to us by a contact. And the realization that: People are corrupt here. Even the contacts of a Swedish professor. Why else would anyone recommend such a nightmare of a guide? And then all the mess with the payment and the scene in the street, threats and an angry professor. Everything went wrong.
So let me just say this: Don’t trust recommendations. At least not if they were made by a middle-aged man with power. What he finds recommendable doesn’t say anything about the quality of the service for a young woman. Because, as everyone knows, young women are gullible and easily cheated. There simply is no reason to do a good job when your employers are blonde, blue-eyed, in their twenties and women!
Make a written agreement of what the responsibilities of the guide are. Pay the guide as little as possible in advance, and fire him the moment he misbehaves. Don’t think about the money, it’s not worth ruining your holiday.
And: Rastafaris are creeps. I’m really sorry to all decent and nice Rastafaris out there, I’m sure you’re in majority, it’s just – almost every single Rastafari that I encountered in Burkina Faso sooner or later forced me to put my feminist warrior suit on. And that’s not nice. Don’t get me wrong, I can definitely hold my own, but constantly having to fend off persistent unwanted attention of a sexual nature, and then being called a racist for saying no. That’s just a lot of bad energy building up in my body. Those are the associations that I get from dreadlocks, Bob Marley t-shirts and necklaces in red, green and yellow now.
Which is really sad, because it made the end of my Burkina Faso visit turn kind of sour. I don’t like being the bitter feminist. I’m just forced into it sometimes.
The joke of a car that the guide cheated us into riding in.
Katja Malmborg 