Burkina Faso: FESPACO

Burkina Faso is the country, its capital Ouagadougou, a second city Bobo, they knew they were at the end of the planet when they named it and decided to host a film festival. This place had captured my eye as I scanned my atlas at home, its name a testimony to the obscure. The capital is lined with unpaved, red dirt roads, a city centre that was demolished and never rebuilt, a few lone buildings left standing in a barren wind swept hollowed out centre with an ever rising dust storm. A land with a limp handshake that dissolves into index fingers and middle fingers intertwined to produce a joint finger click and finished off with index fingers pointed at each other.

Down a gear from Ghana, I haven't paid for a nights accommodation, Apo, a guy I met on couchsurfing picked me up when I arrived in Ouagadougou and took me into the life of his family. We trawled the roads on a pedal powered motor bike that required servicing every half an hour, three flat tyres in a day, going to movies in French with French subtitles where I caught up on sleep. The film festival is called FESPACO, it is, apparently, the premier pan-African film festival, it is the biggest foreign draw card for the country. I saw a film that makes me want to head up the Congo River on a floating metal island in search of solders, ruined mansions of a dictator, the overgrown remnants of colonial industrial past and salvation by Jesus. A Malian film about white tourists, a documentary about Guinean jazz band and short films for the U.N. conference against Racism. The festival was opened in the national stadium in front of 40,000 people by the President, shorts for the films were shown, bands played, dance troupes performed, men ran laps on stilts and fireworks started proceedings. I can't help but be impressed by a country that fully packs its sports stadium to open a film festival. In Afghanistan they hang people in stadiums, most of the world ingratiate themselves with our pre-homo sapien past, but in the semi-desert of Western Africa they proudly host an international film festival in a country that ranks 173 out of 175 on the U.N.'s quality of life index. Maybe this is a byproduct of French colonialism, or maybe all they left were the old fat white French women that fly in and buy the young slim black dread-locked local men, asserting gender equality on Asia's usual fare of old fat white men buying young slim Asian women who are balanced by the Japanese men flying into Central Asia for the cheapest white women in the world and the Ethiopians who go to Hong Kong and everyone of every persuasion who go to Thailand.

I went to a Burkina wedding, attended by a thousand people in a hall converted to a church, full of singing and a sermon from a Pastor that discussed the problems of a wife who refuses sex, advice to the groom on how to seduce her, advice to her on the unholiness of refusing sex, and laughs from most of the congregation, except for the children. The reception was alcohol free event in line with their Assemblies of God anti-drink philosophy. On Sunday I went to church for their service which involved a lot of singing, a sermon I couldn't understand that had something to do with maize, the preacher disemboweled the plant to prove a proverb in Mose and then in French.  In the backyard of a house, surrounded by drying clothes and women doing laundry was the local bar and brewery. On the ground lay millet, in giant pots it cooked in water and was then transferred to vats where it fermented for 3 days guarded by flies before been dispensed from an old oil container into bowls the size of half a coconut sitting on tripods covered by cloths to keep the flies out. It was a warm, very sweet drink called they called local beer whose only relationship to beer lay in it been alcoholic.

I started my trip concerned about malaria, I am taking no anti-malarials, and am trying to avoid getting bitten by mosquitoes. I have received two very different sets of advice, a lot of the other travellers have been in shock at my carelessness, the locals have been in shock at my concern, they tell me not to worry, getting malaria is part of the West African experience, every local I've spoken to has had malaria and they say so long as you are not a child or old then its just a hard week and its rare for someone to die. Been Africa I have seen some exceptional live music, stages where audience members, waitresses strut and windmill in a flurry their favorite dance moves. Guys climbing over xylophones, an army of drums and an involved audience. Tomorrow I'm off to Mali and then into Niger at some point after.

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