Last week, during one of my daily sessions perusing the Lonely Planet message boards, I received an interesting message. A forum member had read about my time staying with a local family in Ouagadougou, and sent me a bunch of questions. Among the mundane (“how did you find the family?”) was a very… interesting question:
“Is it easy for any foreigner to get a girlfriend in Burkina Faso?”
Now, I was in a grumpy mood already, so I shot back a rather bitchy response: “Yes, it is easy for any foreigner to get a girl/boyfriend in Burkina Faso. But I’ll tell you this: if you meet a woman that you really, genuinely care for, then by all means, date away. But otherwise, I’d think hard about your decision, because I have found that many relationships between foreigners and locals contain a troubling power dynamic.”
Anyways, I’m might have come off as unnecessarily harsh, because of the aforementioned bitchy mood. However, I’ve been thinking about the question and my response for the last week, and I can’t really resolve the debate in my head.
On one hand, I don’t want to portray those potential Burkinabe significant others as passive and victimized. Surely, young people everywhere have agency, and are capable of deciding whether to become involved with a given foreigner. If a young man or woman in Ouagadougou decides that it would be enjoyable to date a pasty nasara, then who am I to tell that nasara that their actions are wrong? And, besides, the romantic in me wants to believe that nationality, race and class can’t stop two people from caring for each other.
But, on the other hand, some issues still nag at another part of me. I am the product of a liberal, late 20th century Canadian upbringing, and I have always thought that a healthy relationship involves an even distribution of power. If one half of a couple has all or most of the power and leverage, how can the other person participate in a meaningful way?
And in the case of many Burkinabe-foreigner relationships (certainly not all, as the country’s people are not a homogeneous group), unfortunately I feel that usually the foreigner wields the majority of the power. In a country where 70% of the population lives on less than 2$ a day, a foreigner’s wealth and status has enormous leverage.
I guess I don’t know too much about what I’m talking with, because I’ve never been really involved with anyone in Burkina Faso (or Africa). I felt a few hints of the power dynamic, however, when I went out on a couple of innocent dates with a young man in Ouagadougou. Nothing ever really happened between us (maybe because the young man told me “the reason I like you so much Caitlin is that you are Canadian. Otherwise a woman is a woman.” That’s a direct quote.) Regardless, though, I had this overwhelming sensation that I could act however I wanted, and a relationship could progress as far as I wanted. I went to the wedding of the young man, met his lovely family, and I knew: if I decided right now that I wanted this to be my family, it would be. Because I felt I had all the power. Even after a couple times hanging out with the guy.
Anyways, I still don’t really know what I think. I have, after all, seen some of these relationships work. The wedding I went to in Ouagadougou was between a Burkinabe man and a French woman. They had been together seven years and nobody could dispute that the expression on both their faces were genuinely happy. So I guess, if the two people care enough about each other, these issues can be overcome. But I still think that the idea of “get me to that country so I can easily pick up some hot local lass” is dangerous, because the power dynamics are far, far more complicated and even unfair than they would be at home.
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