Walking into a coup d'etat in Ouagadougou
Lesego Nswahu Nchunga | Thursday February 10, 2022 11:04
Hot humid and dusty! Those were my first thoughts as we disembarked from the very small East African airline. French filled the air! The language, the culture. There was a dusky hue to the horizon, like a scene in a high-end film when the protagonist arrives in Africa. This looked like the Africa of cinema – something set in the early 1980s, with women dressed up in Ankara and gele head wraps, babies on their backs, and men in bellbottoms with short-sleeved suit blazers, high top afros, and shiny shoes! There was a romance about it.
There was also an undercurrent of tension. We couldn’t quite put our finger on it. Even as we stepped outside the airport building (nothing grander than the Sir Seretse Khama Airport building), we could tell that something was looming. In retrospect, I’m sure that closer attention to the news and current affairs would have readied us for what was to come! When we bought the Moov Africa sim cards and 5gigabites of data, we were not expecting that they would soon be rendered completely useless, when life would stop temporarily, to stare us in the eye, for a check-in. It wasn’t easy to find our chauffeur.
Nothing like when you arrive in the cosmopolitan cities’ airports like OR Tambo or Jomo Kenyatta, or what I imagine landing in Marakesh, Algiers, Cairo or even Stone Town would be. It had none of that organized, manicured finishing, and drivers in grey, navy blue or black suits and a stark white shirt, holding your names up on shiny placards, waiting to lead you to their shiny clean German machine! No! When we eventually found our guy (yes, we found him because we went looking for him an hour after we arrived), he was hanging out with the other locals, chatting away.
His shoes were off, and the squashed pieces of papers with our names on them were tucked away in his pocket. We identified him by the branding on his shirt with the name of the hotel we were to stay at.
If ever a guy was chilling, this was him! It already started to feel like we’d walked in on something that was none of our business, and which we wanted no part in, but here we were, lucky to have found him. We introduced ourselves, and he led us to the car, only helping us with our bags when we arrived at the car. I let my hair down, hot as it was, and decided then and there, to surrender myself to the city! We were relaxed over here. Eventually, an hour after we found him, we left why an hour later! Well, he asked us to wait with him for the next group of tourists he was expecting on a flight that hadn’t even landed yet. Despite the fatigue from travelling for two very long days, we obliged. When in Ouga...! The drive through the city, from the airport to the hotel wasn’t as kind as I have now come to learn some cities are.
This was a city under construction. The prettiest buildings I saw were a mosque and a bank. Everything else was greys and browns and dusty, or unfinished, even when bedazzled with the most colourful flashing fairy lights. There was something unfinished about it. It felt like an incomplete thought; like the late Thomas Sankara was just about to make the land as upright as he could before his dream was curtailed. Even as we drove down the driveway of the hotel, on the one side was that well-manicured lawn and gardens and on the other side, within plain sight, was the area where the shrubbery from manicuring the lawns was disposed of.
An incomplete thought! If someone could just sit longer with it, they’d make a plan for the trash, you know what I mean! I don’t know if I know what I mean though, because in all of it, the overwhelming realization of the diversity of African lives, I was overwhelmed with the understanding that our priorities are vastly different. I say this all the time, we are not homogenous. I think though, that in my internal consideration of Africanness, there has been a lingering obsession with commonality beyond the agreements made at the African Union.
Anyway, when we woke up the following morning and tried to go for a stroll in the city, and the hotel employees strongly discouraged it, that’s when we realized that something really big was happening. Someone told us that it was just a strike.
So we thought maybe it was something like the strikes South African truck drivers or mail officers have, periodically, protesting various economic injustices in the system. So we weren’t too shaken. Even when an elderly man of Ghanaian descent walked into the restaurant, announcing that there were gunshots heard in the morning.
I thought to myself, “Wow! So much drama!” I spent that morning trying to call home or trying to do work, futilely, because the network was down. We thought nothing of it, at first. I am constantly fighting with my wifi providers back at home, for their unreliability, despite my remote work.
So naturally, I assumed it was that. On last Monday morning of January 2022, when we walked down to the restaurant for breakfast, there was a very drastic shift in the atmosphere.
The angst was palpable, and the quasi-romance of the space now felt like an attack. Televisions in the lobby, in the restaurant, at the bar and even in the curio-shop were tuned to the news.
We weren’t paying too much attention until the Ghanian man from the previous day walked into the restaurant and addressed the international publication’s photographer who was just trying to get sardines and mayo sauce, said “Did you hear about the failed coup d’etat this morning?” Only then did we stop in our tracks, and thought, and so goes the construction of another West African country.
Burkina Faso was revolting; and we were going to witness it, whether we liked it, or whether we would much rather have been home! It was happening! And I could not help but think, “But of course! If I am to visit the African region of my dreams, it must be like a scene from Half of a Yellow Sun, when the Biafran war broke out!” I knew it must be dramatic. I have a flair for it – drama! And oh how dramatic Ouaga was!