A/I WEST AFRICAN JOURNAL: A TRAVEL ACCOUNT THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By Jacquelyn Fuller Hudson, B. A. Denton, Texas December, 1980 Hudson, Jacquelyn Fuller, West African Journal: A Travel Account. Master of Arts (English), December, 1980, 368 pp.. West African Journal: A Travel Account is a narrative of the author's trip in twelve West African countries. In the first chapter the author describes her previous travels and preparations for this trip and introduces her husband. She begins the second chapter with a dis- cussion of the benefits and hardships of independent travel and describes the hotels, restaurants, forms of transportation, and difficulties with language. The re- mainder of Chapter II is a close account of the first sixteen days of travel. The narrative continues chronologically in Chapters III through VIII. Each chapter pertains to a distinct stage of the trip. In Chapter IX, the author reviews her personal accomplishments during the journey, relates her and her husband's reactions on their return to the U.S., and concludes with some evocative descriptions of West Africa. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION II. IVORY COAST AND GHANA . 19 III. TOGO AND UPPER VOLTA . .r . 93 .139... IV. MALI AND SENEGAL . ..". .216... V. SIERRA LEONE AND LIBERIA . .282 VI. RETURN TO MALI . 314.... VII. NIGER AND BENIN.. .. .333... VIII. CAMEROON . .360... IX. CONCLUSION . 0... iii * c- IL2 1 1 42J C- r- C- C\- -) tJ It -- - - I f ho - fN .< Y. - s \- -- ___\__--7 - * ~. 2KK~' ib0~S tc't / 4 Cs $ t ~ o. C' - / 1< r -n 'N, Cr' r!ThL U4 ~Th ~' ri -~ F- 'A t -N - Y 4fl~ ~KI~ 9) ' C- '-N -~ S cc A SCJ F ~A L Vi4'v~ -' IC' / 5k ~ CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION When I was a child, traveling and carsickness were inseparable. I hated trips; my parents hated taking me on trips. When I was fifteen, though, my parents in- dulged a rather extravagant whim of mine which changed my attitude about trips and consequently the next fifteen years of my life: I went to Europe with several hundred other high school students to study French for six weeks. I came home and began studying German in addition to French, wrote off for more international study programs, and cried because life in Phoenix was not at all like life in Europe. I determined to go back to Europe; I intended to see the rest of the world. Also during that memorable fifteenth year, my jour- nalism teacher told me I could write well and would prob- ably be editor of the school newspaper my senior year. I didn't believe him at first, but by the time his predic- tion came true, I had incorporated journalism into my travel fantasies. In 1968, I entered college in Dallas with plans to major in journalism and become a foreign correspondent. Neither plan survived the boredom of my first-year journalism class, but I did become a traveler. 1 2 The first month I was at college I met someone else who wanted to travel: Will. Will was an eccentric. He went to class barefoot before hippies were fashionable; he frequently ran several miles to my dorm in cold.weather, wearing only gym shorts and long underwear; he did hand- stands in front of the arts building sculptures, and with an equally eccentric friend, skulked around on the library roof and rappelled off the stately rotunda building. I was embarrassed, but I admired him: here was a guy who would not end up wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase, and commuting on the freeways to work. I imagined him tanned, in khaki, on archeological digs in Africa. After three years of college, we married and began seriously planning our travels. After graduation we would take a yearlong trip. We would buy a Toyota Land- cruiser, take it on a freighter to Africa, travel the length of the continent, and then go to Europe. We con- tinued to work summers and part-time; we ate a lot of eggs and only went to cheap movies; we saved our money zealously. We also did some research: seeing Africa and Europe in one year would be impossible; we chose Europe as being more familiar. A small car, then, would be more practical than a Landcruiser; we bought a BMW and arranged to pick it up at the factory in Germany. By October fol- lowing our May graduation we were ready to leave. Everyone was enthusiastic about our trip. Our older relatives and 3 friends thought it was wonderful that we were taking a trip while we were "still young," before we were "tied down." But it was an obvious time to be taking such a trip. Western Europe was a popular destination for back- packing young Americans on vacation between terms or fol- lowing graduation. The duration, extent, and result of our travels were not so typical, though: we traveled eleven months and visited most of Eastern and Western Europe, plus three countries in North Africa. When we returned, we intended to work two years and travel again for a year. But living in the U.S. had more distractions, including opportunities for short trips, than we'd realized, and it took longer to save the money for an extended trip than we expected. Six years passed--and six jobs between us, three trips to Mexico, two trips to the West Coast, one trip to the East Coast, and numerous trips within Texas and the surrounding states--before we were preparing for another Africa-Europe expedition. But during those six years, during those short vacations, we established travel as our first priority, a pursuit more satisfying than careers, more exciting than home and children, more necessary than the security of possessions or routine. When friends and family realized we really were going on a second long trip, they reacted somewhat differently from the first time we left to travel. There were only a 4 few comments about how wonderful it was to travel while we were "still young"--at twenty-eight and twenty-nine we were not as "still young" as we used to be. We were re- peating our "once in a lifetime opportunity"--our first trip--and people were very impressed, as if we were working a small capitalistic miracle. "How did you do it?" they asked wistfully. "How did you save so much money? How can you just leave everything for a year?" We were sur- prised by their surprise: hadn't we been saying for years that we were going on another trip? Their admiration pleased and embarrassed us. Yes, we had saved a bundle of money, but our economies hadn't been particularly strin- gent, and both of us had had reasonably good-paying jobs for most of the past six years. We had no house and little furniture, but we were comfortable in our furnished apart- ment. We had no children or pets, and we enjoyed being free to come and go impulsively. Our cars were not luxury models, but they ran economically and were paid for. Steak was a stranger in our kitchen, but we preferred enchiladas, spaghetti, and curry anyway. Leaving for a year of travel did mean abandoning our jobs, but I was between careers, and Will would have wanted a change in his work soon anyway. Packing and storing our belongings was a troublesome but not insurmountable task. So saving the money and preparing for a long trip weren't particularly amazing, we thought. Anybody who 5 really wanted to travel could do what we were doing. "It's a question of priorities," we explained. "But why is travel your first priority?" our non-traveling friends and relatives persisted. Will used to explain in behavior- ist terms, "We are always reinforced when we travel; that's why we keep on doing it." I would answer something equally inane; I found it hard to explain my hunger for the unknown. I thought of the world map with its distorted continents in our dimly-lit hall and how I walked my fingers over the unvisited countries and wanted to say, "I've been there . and there . and there"; to make those unpro- nounceable names familiar; to see people, cities, and countryside in my mind instead of the pinks, purples, and oranges of the political map under my fingers; to make those places mine. I wanted, when the immediate sensations of travel were over, memories perfumed and embroidered with the exotic. I didn't want to look back on my life when I was old and wish I had seen more of the world. I would be an old woman with stories to tell, wearing strange jewelry and surrounded by pictures and mementos: of all my travels. I would not regret how I had lived my life. If our desire to travel didn't mystify people, the choice of Africa as our destination often did. Africa definitely suffered from a bad press in the late 1970s. If people knew anything up-to-date atTall about Africa, it was of the riots-in-Soweto/guerrilla-fighting-in-Angola 6 genre. Many people were genuinely concerned that we would find Africans hostile to whites or that we would somehow become involved in violent current events. "Stay out of Rhodesia and Uganda," we were warned. Although nearly everyone felt fairly sure that heat, disease, and poverty were much too plentiful, a number of people took Africa much more lightly, as if it were too far away or too un- known to be quite real.