Africa #1--bumsters and toubabs

Okay, so what I really need is pictures to go along with these posts, but I'll have to wait to see if my sister took any ;)

So, whether this is good or bad, (and its probably bad) the first thing that jumps into my mind when I think of Africa, and African pictures, actually, is the presence of 'bumsters.' One of the most obvious things about being in Africa is the fact that you, as visitors, are different. And this difference is the color of your skin, so its not like you can fake it and blend in, really. This means that you are treated differently in a couple of ways...the first and most obvious is the fact that the Gambian peoples teach their children to yell 'toubab' at any passing white person. The good thing is that this word just means 'foreigner' and really doesn't seem to have a bad connotation to the Gambians. The bad thing is that it is very wierd to have people yell 'foreigner!' at you randomly. The only good thing was that this was mostly yelled by children, who are cute, so you can more easily ignore it/not get offended.

The second and more annoying thing that happens when you walk around with white skin on is that you seem to gravitationally attract the bumsters mentioned earlier. By bumsters I don't mean specifically dangerous or creepy people as the term would suggest here (although they are occassionally creepy) , but rather beggars and other people who want you to buy either goods or services. These bumsters magically appear pretty much everywhere you go, and if you don't want a random native person telling you where to go or what to do, you have to be very firm and occasionally rude to get rid of them. Some of them are okay and if you just politely say no they will leave you alone, but the majority of them don't leave you alone until you resort to rudeness or running away...and even then you have to run fast...

Considering these bumsters and their part in Gambian society: I would have to guess that the getting rid of them would be rather difficult. The problem is really an economic one (not very surprisingly, all the worst problems are). These people see all the rich tourists and feel that they have a right to some of their money. There is a limited number of ways to get tourists to buy things off of you, so the pushiest people usually sell the most of whatever they are selling. This basically means that anyone nice enough to leave when you tell them no don't actually sell enough stuff to make it economically feasible for them to keep selling to tourists. So they go back and take the more stable and limited financial possibilities of being a tailor or a maid, or somesuch.

So these supremely annoying bumsters are obviously a self-propelling problem, and the government doesn't really want to get rid of them since they probably do pull more money out of the tourists than they would spend normally. Which means that bumsters and toubabs (the bumsters target the toubabs, if I didn't make that clear) are probably the most defining thing of the Gambia--which is sad really, but economics are a powerful thing.

I don't know how economics explain the toubab thing though...