It ain’t so easy getting to Ouagadougou from Johannesburg. Think about it. Get out your atlas and work it out if you can.
Where is Ouagadougou, anyway? And apart from that, how do you spell Ouagadougou before you decide to get up and go there? And once you’ve learned to spell it, how do you say it?
All I can say is that I had a typically pig-headed, native determination to get there. Every two years, in the same desolate spot, they hold a festival of African film there. It’s usually chaotic from an organisational point of view, but once things get rolling, it’s pure magic. And filmmakers from Africa and its diaspora do anything, bend the rules, move heaven and earth to be seen there, walk the walk, talk the talk till the small hours of the morning, and just generally interact with fellow practitioners and fanatics of the art.
But how do you get there? Well, in the old days it was not so difficult. You either had to be a Europe-based film fundi and fly there directly out of Paris (non-stop on Air France), or else you took your chances with Air Afrique (stop-start, stop-start from several cities on the African continent, none of them very reliable).
Yes, I have to make a confession. I wrote a series of articles about my misadventures on Air Afrique, not least of which was about not just getting to, but getting out of Ouagadougou. These articles might well have played a part in the demise of the airline. The airline was notoriously unreliable, for no good reason. Even when you had a ticket in your hand with confirmed bookings in both directions, you were bound to be told, on arrival at the check-in desk, that there was no record of you in the system.
The bored clerk on the other side of the counter would look you in the face from behind her impeccably made-up mascara and tell you from her bright red lipsticked mouth that you simply couldn’t fly that day — and this after you had spent days running around to reconfirm your booking.
You then had to scream, shout, call the airport manager, make a series of phone calls, and finally be grudgingly given your boarding pass — only to get on board to find that the plane was half empty, anyway. So what was all the fuss? you asked yourself, as the aircraft began to taxi on to the runway, and your blood pressure slowly began to subside. But that’s how it was with Air Afrique.
That airline that proudly united several West African states is now no more. It collapsed under the inertia of its own ineptitude, and nothing has replaced it. So whereas in the past you could have a trying but ultimately successful ride from Johannesburg via Abidjan to Ouagadougou (with obligatory stopovers in Niamey or Bamako most of the time, consequently arriving several hours later than anticipated), nowadays you have to devise far more complicated strategies if you are determined to get to Ouagadougou.
The bigwigs of the South African film industry got out their gold Mastercards and flew to Paris, from whence, after a 24-hour stopover, there is an occasional direct flight to the capital of Burkina Faso. The cost of this is prohibitive. Imagine it. They would probably have flown right over Ouagadougou while they were still only half way to Paris, got off the plane, slept in an expensive hotel, then got on another plane simply to fly back to where they had originally been a few hours before. This is one of the ridiculous things about our post-colonial infrastructure.
Another friend of mine (who presumably does not yet have her hands on that precious gold Mastercard, ‘cos she’s keeping the wrong company) flew to Luanda, got another plane from Luanda to Libreville in Gabon and spent the night there in a fancy hotel (and fancy in Gabon means relatively fewer rats and cockroaches in your room, at least one tap that is working in your bathroom, and hookers who stop pounding on your door at 2am, rather than 5am. The hookers in Gabon don’t care if you’re male, female or of the third persuasion).
She then had to jump on to another plane the next morning that was going to Accra, and from Accra do some fancy zigzagging in a northerly direction in yet another aircraft, which finally brought her down to earth in Ouagadougou. (Her homeward flight was exactly the same.)
I myself took SAA’s newly inaugurated flight to Dakar, Senegal. Ah, Dakar, Dakar, Dakar! But I digress.
Well, OK, let’s digress. I had to digress into Dakar because I had been told by my travel agent in Johannesburg that there was a possibility of getting a flight on Air Burkina or Air Senegal International from there to Ouagadougou, via Bamako. This seemed less outrageous than going all the way to Paris. After all, one was still on the African continent.
The only problem was that the African continent is not yet wired up to talk coherently to itself, so my Joburg travel agent (who comes from Serbia, by the way) spent days trying to find a way to purchase a ticket on one of those distant airlines, but failed in the end. Their computers wouldn’t talk to our computers, and our computers couldn’t talk to theirs.
My only option, she told me over the phone in her languid, Serbian, spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold sort of voice, was to hop on the flight to Dakar and try to sort myself out from there. Which I did, finally, in the end.
So in the end Ouagadougou was a blast. I suppose getting there was also a blast. The only thing is it would be nice if there was less blast in the air and more quality time on the ground. And it would also be nice if all these fancy New Partnership for Africa’s Development and African Union initiatives paid less attention to providing our leaders with fancy aeroplanes that can zip them around to all these interesting destinations without batting an eyelid, and paid more attention to how ordinary natives from Africa can get from A to B on their own patch of ground.
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