In Senegal, there’s only one international (train) line -to Bamako, Mali’s capital- and one national, a short one, to Saint Louis. Bamako’s train rides twice a week and the Saint Louis train, once a day. Therefore, it’s quite usual that the station is deserted (…) Only when the sun shines over the city, the first travellers appear (…) A little earlier I met, at the platform, a young couple from Glasgow that were travelling through Western Africa from Casablanca to Niamey (…) The train broke at the big station of Tambacounda (…) It seemed we’d be stranded for a while. Shortly, a group of curious local people gathered around. I tried to encourage the scottish to join me off the train to look around and talk to the people. They refused. They didn’t want to meet or talk to anyone. They refused to establish any relation at all and wouldn’t visit anyone. If anyone approached them, they’d turn around and walk away (…) This attitude of theirs was a result of a brief but bad experience. They were convinced of one thing: if they talked to someone, this person would always end up asking for something, taking for granted diverse things: that they could get him a scholarship, find him a job or give him money (…) These kind of complaints had soon begun to be repeated. They didn’t know how to react. They felt powerless. Finally, dissapointed and defeated, they’d made a decision: no contact, encounters or chatting with anyone. And they were true to their determination. I explain the scottish that their interlocutor’s demands are a consequence of the conviction, shared by many africans, that white people have everything. Or have much more than the black people, at least. And if a white person crosses his path it’s as if a hen laid a gold egg for them. They have to take advantage of the opportunity, they can’t let it go (…) Although there’s a difference of habits and expectations in this. The african culture is one of interchange. You give me something and it’s my obligation to retribute you. And not only my obligation. My dignity, my honor and my humanity demands it. In the course of interchange, interpersonal relations adopt its highest form (…) In such culture, everything becomes a gift that demands to be compensated. The unretributed gift is a burden for the person, his conscience bothers him, and even can cause him some disgrace (…) Many misunderstandings arise when one of the parts doesn’t understand that values of diverse nature are susceptible of being interchanged, for instance, that simbolic assets are changed for material ones and viceversa. If an african man approaches a couple of scottish, he will provide them lots of presents: his presence and attention are gifts, also by pointing out some thiefs they are providing information, safety, etc. It’s logic that such a generous man expects some retribution that satisfies his expectations. Nevertheless, he sees, astonished, that the scottish frown or even turn their back on him adn walk away!

Riszard Kapuscinski, “Madame Diuf returns home”, at Ebano. Barcelona, Anagrama, 2000.

Some time ago, I talked about how uncomfortable it is for many travellers to find it impossible to establish an interaction with many natives without this implying, in a certain moment, the possibility of a material interchange or a commercial transaction. Put simply: that in many places, people only approach us to sell us something, recommend a hotel, a tour, to get something out of us. In that occasion, I wondered (spanish only):

Why would a person who lives in a touristic location approach a particular tourist, when he sees thousands every week? Do we think we’re special, the “nice tourist” everyone was expecting?

And I answered myself:

The truth is that, if they tolerate our massive presence it’s so because they can profit from it. It it didn’t exist that possibility, they would’ve already invited us not to show up there ever again.

Kapuscinski’s text cited in the beginning of this post is related to this concern: what do we do when the expectations of an interaction don’t match? It’s somehow what the anthropologist/psiquatrist Gregory Bateson stated with his notion of metacommunicative frame: to be able to establish an interaction, the participants must be clear about certain common premises. In the case of the scottish and the africans, they both don’t share the metacommunicative frame. While for the scottish, the phrase that organizes the frame is “this is a conversation motivated by a personal sympathy” (which taxatively excludes the possibility of an interaction motivated by material interests), for the africans, the premise would be “this is a business opportunity”. Such disagreement in the basis of the interaction lead to a conflict and eventual rupture of the communication. But the interesting thing is that both parts operate from a common sense notion; the other’s attitude, in this frame, is incomprehensible, and eventually, annoying. It’s not about one of the parts being right; in its way, both sides of the interaction proceed in the way they assume as “socially natural”.

Facing this, it’s understandable that both, natives and tourists, in multiple occasions are unable to communicate in the terms they both state as “natural”. First, their metacommunicative frames are organised from quite different implicit assumptions. While tourists assume natives should talk to them because they find them “interesting”, the other side sees them as part of a big poorly differentiated mass of visitors they can profit from; otherwise, their presence there wouldn’t be welcomed. In fact, tourists are not welcomed everywhere; certain areas of the city and towns are usually prohibited, and their presence doesn’t generate much pleasure.

Starting from here, a wide field opens up, going from the common sense to the construction of the difference between natives and tourists. But we’ll talk about that later.