Tag Archives: Ogo Sow

the SUNDAY TRAVEL DIGEST

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A roundup of the good, the bad and the bizarre from the world’ best travel media

You already know about last week’s bombing by an al Qaeda terrorist of a popular tourist cafe in Morocco. Guys like this want you to think they represent the real Islam, which they don’t — except perhaps in some lunatic parallel universe.

But there’s one thing about Islam they really don’t want you to know about: The Muslim tradition of hospitality.

After the bombing, I went cruising the Googlesphere to learn more about it. This is some of what I found:

  • “A tradition within Islam actually stipulates someone is allowed to stay in your home for 3 days before you can question why they are staying and when they will leave.”
  • “Families judge themselves and each other by their generosity to guests when they entertain.”
  • “Among the Bedouins, whoever sees a stranger coming from afar and exclaims, “Here comes my guest!” has the right to claim him.”
  • “Failure to be hospitable is one of the sins of the Arab world.”

It all may sound a bit “over the top” to us, but it actually makes a lot of sense. The region that gave birth to Islam is one of the most unforgiving desert environments on Earth. Nomadic life was common, and settlements offering food, water and safety were few and sporadic.

In conditions like these, “the kindness of strangers” was how you stayed alive. It still is.

Christianity, Judaism and Islam all preach hospitality, but Muslims treat it as a duty, a matter of honor.

I experienced this firsthand in Senegal, where the daughter of our group leader insisted that we couldn’t leave the country before she prepared a meal for us of thieboudienne, the country’s national dish.

(That’s her up there on the right, holding one of her children, standing next to her father, our team leader, Ogo Sow.)

Thieboudienne

That meant taking time from her factory job to gather up the needed ingredients, then spend God-knows-how-long preparing this huge stew of spicy fish, vegetables and rice, served with green tea and mint. All this for her father and six non-Muslim American strangers.

We truly didn’t want her to go to all that trouble for us, but he made it clear that it wasn’t our call, or even his.

Indeed, had we just gone straight to the airport, I think she might have tracked us down in Dakar, 124 miles away, and fed us her wonderful thieboudienne.

Is this the mindset of people who reflexively hate foreigners? That is the lie that the Morocco cafe bomber and those like him are trying to sell you.

Resist the urge to buy.

And now, here’s this week’s Digest:

AIR
from Smarter Travel
Too early to start thinking about Thanksgiving and Christmas travel? JetBlue doesn’t think so. Apparently taking the view that it’s never too early to start filling seats on your airplanes, they’re stealing a march on their competition by opening their booking window through the end of the year. So far, Southwest and JetBlue’s other rivals aren’t matching the move, but you’d better believe they’re watching. Does the early bird get the holiday bargain?

from USA Today
A former Miss USA says she was “molested” by the TSA during one of their enhanced patdowns. Actual rape victims might take exception to the “molest” claim, but she does she have a point?

LAND
from the New York Times
Airlines aren’t the only ones beating down your travel budget with fists full of add-on fees. The rental car agencies are doing it, too.The NYT’s Frugal Traveler, Seth Kugel, shows you how to avoid the money traps.

SEA
from USA Today
A glut of cruise ships this year in European waters plus unexpectedly low demand equals nervous cruise lines…and maybe some unexpected Euro-cruise bargains?

from USA Today
Counting the vessels of rivals it has bought up over the years, Carnival Cruise Lines now has 100 ships. That’s more large ocean-going vessels than a lot of navies.

AFRICA
from Der Spiegel (Germany)
An influx of refugees from North Africa is causing European Union members to consider restoring border checks. It’s a touchy subject that’s having an impact on relations among EU member states.

from the Telegraph (London, UK)
The Rift Valley of East Africa is the only part of the Earth’s geography that you can see clearly from the moon. It would be a lot easier, cheaper and more worthwhile to see it from Kenya and Ethiopia.

AMERICAS/CARIBBEAN
from the Los Angeles Times
The State Department updates its travel advisory for Mexico as bodies start turning up in unmarked graves in border towns torn by violence between rival drug cartels.

ASIA
from the New York Times
Singapore — staid, stodgy and utterly uptight. You haven’t been here lately, have you?

from CNNgo
The Seven Deadly Sins — and the Asian city that best symbolizes each.

EUROPE
from the New York Times
Want to find classic Italy and lose the tourist mobs at the same time? Find Trieste.

America and Africa: Double frustration

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It’s bad enough when a black man is hassled in U.S. airports because he’s African. When he’s hassled in African airports for essentially the same reason, it’s worse.

Ogo Sow is a native of Senegal, a naturalized U.S. citizen and a veteran broadcast journalist. He’s dedicated himself to bringing America and Africa closer together. That makes him a man with one foot on two continents, which is a blessing.

Until he goes to travel. Then, it becomes a curse.

His story highlights the problems facing African emigres who wish to re-connect with their homelands and African-Americans who want to visit or invest in Africa.

It also shows how long and hard the road will be for the Mother Continent to raise her global profile as a travel destination.

On our side of the Atlantic, Mr. Sow faces extra scrutiny and heightened suspicion in U.S. airports if he shows up dressed as he is here, in the traditional garb of his birthplace.

On the other side, just trying to enter an African country can result in hours of delays and hundreds of dollars in fees — and that’s each time you try to enter or leave most of Africa’s 53 nations.

“SUSPICIOUS” ATTIRE
As a Georgia resident who flies frequently out of Atlanta, Mr. Sow is hardly unfamiliar to the TSA screeners. Senegal is not on the federal government’s list of nations that support terrorism, and to his knowledge, he is not on anybody’s “terrorist watch list.”

But wearing traditional Senegalese dress, he says, is enough to get him treated as if he were a suspect.

“If I go to the airport in Western clothes, they treat me like anyone else, no problems,” he says. “If I wear the traditional clothes of Senegal, they put me through the machine ten times.”

Okay, we know what this is about. Call it Post-9/11 Stress Disorder. But at least once his flight touches down in an African country, he can look forward to better treatment, right?

Well…no.

Mr. Sow’s Senegalese passport allows him to travel freely among all 15 West African countries belonging to ECOWAS — the Economic Community of West African States. Once outside of those 15 countries, things change, he says.

From left -- ATA board member Ogo Sow, ATA executive director Edward Bergman

On a recent trip to Kenya on behalf of the Africa Travel Association, he was held up at the airport for 12 hours. Kenyan immigration officers refused to recognize a passport from Senegal, he says.

With him was ATA president Edward Bergman, traveling on an American passport. He was allowed through, no problems.

“I am traveling on an African passport and I am delayed 12 hours — in an African country?”

HERE A VISA, THERE A VISA, EVERYWHERE A VISA
And it’s hardly just Kenya. While many Americans tend to think of Africa as a single, unified entity, the fact is that Africa is 53 nations, each with its own priorities, its own narrowly focused agenda — and its own immigration policies.

(Contrast this with the European Union, which did away with separate visa requirements for its member states. You can visit any or all of the EU’s 27 countries on a single visa.)

“You go to Benin, you have to buy a visa. You go from Benin to Mali, you have to buy a visa. You go from Mali next-door to Senegal, you have to buy a visa,” says Mr. Sow. “Each time, each country, you may be paying more than $100.”

Having to shell out a Benjamin Franklin every time to want to enter a different country can let the air out of your travel budget in a hurry. Who wants to bother with that?

This wilderness of red tape also discourages would-be investors who are looking for countries that offer fewer hassles, not more of them. Among those being discouraged are Africans living abroad.

THREE FAMILIES
“African emigres send billions of dollars every year back to their families back in Africa, more money than all the foreign aid that comes into Africa,” says Mr. Sow. “Many would like to come back to invest, to build, but they make it difficult to come back. African-Americans also should be welcome to come and invest. Instead, they make it difficult.

“In the African diaspora, we are three families together — Africans, African-Americans, African emigres. We should be united. We should be together.”

From here, it all seems a bit shortsighted. Visa fees may drop a few dollars into the national treasuries of individual countries, but a streamlined immigration control that makes their countries more inviting for travelers — and investors — could bring in a lot more, to all of them.

Indeed, there’s talk now of setting up a diaspora visa, allowing African emigres and African-Americans to travel throughout Africa the same way we can now travel throughout Europe, on a single visa.

Meanwhile, whether in the West or on the African continent, the frustration of men like Ogo Sow is growing.

“I’m tired of this blockade, on both sides,” he says. “We don’t have the respect we are supposed to have.”

Greg Gross is a member of the Africa Travel Association

—

Photos courtesy of O. Sow

The ultimate travel document

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The diaspora visa, an idea whose time is coming — gradually

African tourism, despite the lingering recession, continues to rise — but the Mother Continent wants more. In particular, African countries are targeting diaspora travelers — black Americans, black Caribbeans and African emigres who haven’t been home for awhile — and they’ve come up with an intriguing idea to help lure them.

The diaspora visa.

It’s an idea that was discussed at the recently concluded congress of the Africa Travel Association, held this year in The Gambia. And if it ever comes to pass, it could revolutionize travel and tourism in Africa. Basically, it’s a visa that would allow Africans in the diaspora — the descendants of African slaves in the United States, the Caribbean and elsewhere — to visit needing only their passport.

Ghana began five years ago offering a diaspora visa for black Americans wanting to visit that West African country, waiving the regular requirements (they also offer dual citizenship to black Americans who commit to long-term investment in Ghana).

But as African emigre, broadcaster and ATA director Ogo Sow explained to me, the idea discussed at this year’s congress goes much, much further.

“We talked about creating a diaspora visa that would allow you to travel all over the continent without a (regular) visa,” he said.

Currently, for every country you wish to visit in Africa, you need a separate visa from that country — and have to pay their separate fee each time. Depending on how many nations you want to visit on a single trip, it’s a huge headache, and expense, for the traveler.

With a diaspora passport, your black face and your U.S. passport would give you diplomatic entree to visit any or all of Africa’s 53 nations.

The impact of this for African tourism, were it actually to take hold, would be immense.

The concept itself is not new. One of the most popular things the European Union did when it came into being was to eliminate national visas among its member nations — and dump those same visa requirements for visitors from friendly lands. Which is why today, any American visiting Europe gets one visa stamp in his passport when he first enters the continent — and that stamp is good to enter any other EU country.

“In Europe, you can got anywhere you want to on one visa,” Sow noted.

I saw this in action for myself the day we crossed the Rhine from Strasbourg, France for a brief day-trip to the small German town of Kehl. No one was stopping vehicles to check anyone for papers. The checkpoints on either side of the bridge were long gone.

We crossed from France to Germany and back again on a Strasbourg city bus — and no one on either side thought twice about it. Commerce between the city of Strasbourg and the town of Kehl moved back and forth just as easily. It was a beautiful thing.

If it can work in Western Europe, the thinking goes — and clearly, it does — why not Africa?

It’s all part of a larger push to get the rest of the world, especially Europe and the United States, to see Africa and her 53 nations more favorably as a collective travel destination.

“After 50 years of independence,” said Sow, “we should now really start being part of the world in terms of tourism.”

Don’t look for this to happen in the next few months. The EU had its share of technical and political difficulties, not to mention centuries of conflict and mutual distrust, to overcome before streamlining Europe’s visa process. There’s little reason to expect Africa to have it any easier. And cutting bureaucratic red tape is but one of the challenges to boosting African tourism.

But if Africa’s governments can come together and make this work, it could go a long way toward encouraging black Americans to cross the Atlantic Ocean and connect with their African heritage first-hand, something that would greatly benefit African-Americans and Africans alike.

It’s an idea that deserved to be studied — and encouraged.