Accra, Ghana

I have been trying to interview sex workers for an article I have been envisioning for the past five weeks. I had one awkward and unsuccessful attempt at interviewing one woman I met on the street on a Saturday night a few weeks ago. She was picked up by a customer as we were exchanging pleasantries. My nervousness about approaching women kept me from pursuing conversations on several occasions. It seemed that each time we were in the high tourist areas that sex workers frequent, I would be with friends who didn't have anything to do with the project. And it seems that I am like a sex worker repellant for Sean and Nate because when I am around, they steer clear of us as a group.

Finally, we were sitting in Osu on a relatively slow Wednesday night and I happened to see the woman I had tried to interview a few weeks prior. We say hello, but as I am in a group of friends, I do not want to embarrass her by starting to talk immediately about an interview. Instead, I wait until she gets up and starts walking down the road. I tell the others that I think I should follow her; they agree. I race to get some paper to write on but by the time I have found some and I catch up with her, her pimp has joined her and they enter a club with an entrance fee of something like 50,000 cedis. I recognize the guy from a few weeks ago, he had come around to check on the woman several times as we were talking.

I return back to the terrace where we are sitting in a group and dejectedly announce that I have failed. The boys encourage me to look around. There are plenty of other women here that fit the bill. Nate tells me that he thinks that I am making this harder than it should be and that I should just go and talk with a young girl sitting next to us who looks extremely bored. She would be glad to talk to you, he says.

With meeting this young student, my nervousness about talking with these women instantly disappeared. She was a smart, humble, if somewhat sexually innocent girl who was just looking to make a bit of money so that she could pay her way through school. At my encouragement, she was extremely honest about her sexual experiences with white sex tourists (one of whom joined us at the table quite rudely as we were talking). She talked about her life and family and how she learned about sex in a way so open, that I was surprised. I had been creating imaginary blocks in my mind about how hard it would be to relate to women with what I thought would be such a different set of life experiences. I was wrong to have thought that there were too many things to differentiate our experiences as women. The fundamental facts remained: we were both women, we had both had a sexual awakening at a young age, we both had ambitions and goals, and we both struggled to survive through school with minimal parental financial support.

As I returned to our table, the other woman that I had chased down the road returned to the terrace and I got up again to offer her a drink. This time, she accepted. She wondered why I hadn't come to meet her, as we had planned. She looked very tired today. Her story was a little harder to swallow. Her expressions reminded me of the detached faces of some of the women that I visited while I was working in the jail in San Francisco. I could tell by the way that her eyes rolled back in her head when she was contemplating a question, that she had problems with addiction. She didn't seem to have any support system in the country to help her and her situation seemed hopeless. She didn't see a way out for herself. I tried to encourage her, but she ended up becoming withdrawn. I didn't take it as a failure to communicate, her experiences must have been very painful for her. God knows why she actually left her country, Nigeria. She said she had too many outstanding debts that she was unable to pay off, but God only knows what that means. This woman is from Lagos, one of the, if not the most, violent city on earth.

There are many women in West Africa that are driven from their home countries by war, violence and other types of trauma. Sometimes, you will see these women in places like San Francisco, as international trafficking of women is big business. But in West Africa the numbers are bewildering. In almost every city, there are displaced women from Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other war-torn places. Some of these women have post traumatic stress disorder and lash out at local authorities, their customers, and people they are communicating with. Often they are ignored. They are shunned. Some develop addictions to mask their pain. They have few familial support systems. If they are lucky, they team up with refugees from their home country and form informal support groups that offer nightly protection. Most of the time, they are not able to access governmental social support networks or even medical care. When they get tired of life on the streets, they pile into refugee camps by the thousands where apparently even the aid workers who are supposed to be helping them, solicit them for sex.

There are many more stories that I want explore on the subject of these women, but I think that it would be unwise to do so before exploring how the concept of sexuality is different here in Africa. As Westerners, we cannot hope to understand the African sex industry or even relationships between men and women, in all of their formal and informal gradations, unless we understand more about the economic situation of women in general. I hope to delve into this subject in my next article. The article is the product of these interviews.
* posted by Tuuli at 11:38 AM