Ends of the Earth : ADVENTURES IN FARAWAY PLACES YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF : Burkina Faso

Why, friends demanded to know, was I determined to go to this remote and euphonious city, the capital of Burkina Faso known to its residents simply as Ouaga?

It started with a desire to attend FESPACO, the Pan-African film festival held every other year and considered the premier cultural event on the entire continent. Never mind that an overseas advisory service typically called Burkina “not near the top of anyone’s short list of travel destinations.” I found I couldn’t get the city’s name (pronounced wah ga DOO goo) out of my mind. It set off the kind of echoes that make places like Timbuktu, Angkor Wat and Borobudur sound so irresistibly romantic. What could be more foreign than Ouagadougou? What could it possibly be like to actually be there?

Since FESPACO is a biennial event, I had plenty of time to research both the West African country and its chief city, and what I found was not initially encouraging. Just for starters, Burkina Faso, known as Upper Volta when it was a French colony, was one of the least developed countries in the world, known, said one guidebook, as “desperately, and famously, poor.”

About 80% to 90% of the Burkinabe toil as subsistence farmers; 1 million others have moved to the neighboring Ivory Coast to find work; the country’s literacy rate is estimated as low as 15% and a recent U.N. Human Development Report ranked it 170 out of 173 nations.

And, with life expectancy at 48 years, health is also a problem, especially for visitors. During the 19th century, West Africa was known as “the deadliest spot on earth,” and even today buying medical evacuation insurance (it’s not as expensive as it sounds) is strongly recommended for all travelers.

Having rashly requested what turned out to be dozens of pages of faxed warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I became rather obsessed with health, even getting into arcane discussions with wilderness supply store clerks about the relative advantages of spraying or washing clothes with the powerful insect repellent permethrin. Things got so bad that when I boarded my Air Afrique flight from Paris to Ouaga and saw an elderly man with a portable oxygen supply, my first thought was why I’d neglected to bring one myself.

Politically, Burkina’s history is just as dicey. Full independence from the colonizing French came in 1960, and though the government was never particularly stable, nothing prepared the population for what happened after an army captain named Thomas Sankara seized control in a 1983 coup.

A charismatic populist and Marxist, Sankara turned what was then Upper Volta upside down, even changing the name to Burkina Faso, a combination of words in the country’s two dominant native languages that means “land of honest, upright men.” He struck out against corruption, sold off the government’s fleet of Mercedes, personally rewrote the national anthem, decreed that on one designated Saturday each month men had to do the family shopping and put slogans such as “Fatherland or Death, We Shall Triumph,” on everything from airport walls to tourist brochures.

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After four years, Sankara was overthrown and killed in a coup, and his close friend, Blaise Compaore, ended up installed in power. Compaore has made some gradual moves toward political liberalization, held elections in 1991 and, in a contest that almost all opposition political parties boycotted, won a seven-year term as president.

Yet despite all this upheaval, despite the health hazards and the poverty, I kept hearing that Ouaga was one of the most popular of West African travel destinations. More than ever I wondered what it had besides that romantic jawbreaker name?

I arrived, as most international flights do, in the cooler nighttime. Though Ouaga has so little electrical illumination that a well-lighted Elf gas station stood out like a spaceship, the main thing I noticed on the drive from the airport to my hotel, the Silmande, was the conviviality of the street life, how many people were out and about and the multiplicity of motorbikes, called Mobylettes after the most popular brand, whose taillights twinkled like fireflies in the pleasantly sultry night air.

Though the bikes, the city’s most popular vehicle, are even more conspicuous during the day, Ouaga when the sun is out is a different story. Because Burkina is part of the edge-of-the-Sahara area known as the Sahel (from the Arabic word for shore), it is a supremely hot and dusty place for much of the year, so dry it is rare to see a Westerner without a bottle of Lafi, the local mineral water. (When I was there in February, it was in the 90s.) Yet unlike neighboring Abidjan, the bustling capital of the Ivory Coast, Ouaga has the refreshing air of an overgrown village with few billboards, no skyscrapers to speak of and the ambience of a city under construction that is never going to be finished.

One of the more interesting things to do in Ouaga during the day is to take a drive around the area in one of the taxis that congregate near the main hotels. Even a 10-minute journey into the countryside brings you past traditional village compounds that look as they have for centuries: conical, thatched-roof huts inside a traditional, circular enclosure. And the city itself, where the streets are either completely nameless or grandly dedicated to heroes of liberation such as Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara and Kwame Nkrumah, features a never-ending parade of street life whose intensity and variety result in a kind of marvelous sensory overload to which even photographs do not do justice.

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Though Burkina is a poor country, it is an industrious one, with makeshift market stalls seen on many streets. Every drive brings you past women dressed in colorful print dresses balancing huge loads of everything from oranges to piles of mirrors on their heads. And bicycles do not just transport people, they convey huge loads of hay, massive water cisterns, sacks of coal, piles of ox skins, anything and everything you never imagined could be moved this way. Even my French-speaking driver would occasionally eye a precariously balanced load and sigh, “Ah, Afrique.”

Despite the dizzying nature of this panoply, it is impossible to move through Ouaga without noticing the poverty, visible in everything from persistent child beggars (often sent out by imams) to grimly substandard housing to the country’s paper money, which has been worn to a remarkable thinness by repeated use. And the fact that vultures can be seen everywhere, often just perched on buildings to have a look around, does not make for a prosperous ambience.

Yet to talk about Ouaga only in terms of its lack of material goods is to give a completely misleading impression. For if the broad cliche of African travel is that you go to East Africa for the wildlife and West Africa for the people, the Burkinabe are known to have perhaps the most wonderful spirit of any group on the continent. Warm, lively, with an enviable self-assurance linked to a dignified sense of who they are, the citizens of Ouaga have not been overwhelmed by their poverty and manage to turn almost every transaction with them into a restorative experience.

This proved especially true at the city’s only conventional tourist attraction, the Musee National, located inside the Lycee Bogodogo on Avenue d’Oubritenga, where I was the only visitor in a particularly steamy building. None of this fazed Jean-Pierre Bikienga, the museum’s guide, who took me on a passionate, detailed tour of the collection’s masks and artifacts, delivered in a musical French that was pleasant to the ear and easy to understand.

My favorite item was a gris-gris sack, confiscated by police after the arrest of a potent local sorcerer accused of using magic to kill his enemies. The sack had initially been hung on a branch of a blooming tree that proceeded to sicken and die within days. Afterward, the sack had been left outside in the heat and rain for a year before it was considered safe to touch. It did look considerably the worse for wear, but the sinister air about it was still unmistakable.

Unless you come for the film-intensive FESPACO (scheduled for February in odd-numbered years), or for SIAO, a huge Pan-African crafts fair that is also biennial (set in October of even-numbered years), one of the main things to do in Ouaga is shop in the Grand Marche, a completely involving, not to say exhausting, experience.

Impossible to miss in the center of town, the reinforced concrete market is one of West Africa’s newest, and reportedly one of the cleanest and most manageable as well. Shopping in it can still be intense, however, and it wouldn’t hurt to initially visit without any thought of buying. Instead, prepare to be confronted by an overwhelming combination of sights and smells, to see everything from slabs of salt and piles of dried fish to gorgeous fabric and imported Chicago Bulls T-shirts on sale from innumerable tiny booths, often presided over by heavily robed Tuareg nomads, descendants of the Berbers.

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If you slow down just to think about a purchase, or even if you don’t, a swarm of eager sellers will descend, importuning you in French and occasionally English. Should you decide to buy, bargaining is essential: to agree to the first offered price is unthinkable, like rushing right to the dinner table at a friend’s house without first saying hello to your host.

Once you get used to the idea that bargaining has everything to do with ritual and tradition and almost nothing with gouging money out of unsuspecting foreigners, it is simple to get into the spirit, though some familiarity with French helps as merchants insist “this is best price, best price” and feign shock as you suggest something somewhat lower. And if you indicate that your French is weak, the seller, even if he looks like he stepped out of the Arabian Nights, is sure to reach into his voluminous robes and come out with a pocket calculator to help things along.

Experiencing this heady combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, a mixture which occurred again and again during my nearly two weeks in Ouaga, was finally as close as I could come to explaining what taking a trip like this was, as well as why I had wanted to make it in the first place.

For to go to Ouagadougou is to rediscover what is the original purpose of travel, the experiencing of the simultaneous sameness and otherness of foreign lands. A visit underscores both how small-minded we are to think our world is the entire world and how silly we can be in not anticipating how much we have in common even with people in the most distant climes. To be at once a total stranger and a familiar friend is a sensation you’re not likely to experience by staying anywhere close to home.

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GUIDEBOOK: On to Ouagadougou

Getting there: There is no direct flight from the United States to Ouagadougou. Both Air France and Air Afrique make the six-hour nonstop flight from Paris to Ouaga several times a week, as does Sabena from Brussels. There’s a wide choice of carriers getting to Europe. Round trip from L.A. fares begin at about $2,100, including taxes and fees. While changing planes in West Africa can be daunting, Air Afrique does fly one day a week to Ouaga from New York with a change of planes in Dakar, Senegal; round trip from New York, fares start at about $1,050. All American travelers to Burkina must obtain a visa.

Where to stay: The most modern and comfortable spot is the high-rise Sofitel Silmande, P.O. Box 4733, Ouagadougou; telephone 011-226-30-01-76, fax 011-226-30-09-71; about $148 per night for a double room. The hotel is about two miles from downtown, which means a taxi will be needed to go anywhere. The rooms are spartan but spotlessly clean, and the hotel offers an elegant dining room and comfortable outdoor buffet area next to the most elaborate swimming pool in the city. For a central location, there’s Hotel Independence, Avenue de la Resistance du 17 Mai; tel. 011-226-30-60-60; fax 011-226-30-67-67; about $92 per night for a double. This is the best bet, though it is jammed during FESPACO, as are all of the city’s hotels.

Taxis, usually found around the hotels, also can be hired for the day.

Where to eat: The most celebrated restaurant in the city is L’Eau Vive, opposite the Grand Marche, which is staffed by nuns, some of whom stop work to sing “Ave Maria” every night at 9:30. Also recommended is La Foret, on Avenue Bassawarga, a tranquil whitewashed building in a garden setting. In most restaurants, you’ll find traditional food (chicken, for example) with a French influence.

For more information: The two best guidebooks are “West Africa” by Alex Newton (Lonely Planet, $19.95), and “The Rough Guide to West Africa” by Jim Hudgens and Richard Trillo ($24.95).

--K.T.