Dancing with White Folks

We were late to that evening’s festivities. Some of the male employees (we only saw one woman on staff) were drumming and dancing for all of the Spanish tourists staying there (and I don’t mean Spanish in the ghetto sense, they weren’t Puerto Rican, they were actually from Spain). Then of course they started pulling all of us to dance. So we danced and made fools of ourselves like all the others. It’s one of those moments when you are making fun of people for doing something that you too could easily be accused of, i.e. hypocrisy. Afterward our lovely drummers and dancers served us dinner (people in Africa are so nice!) Over dinner I met the other guide. The first guide was the one dancing super flashy. He spoke Spanish poorly but tried to make up for it with enthusiasm like when we were waiting for the bathroom and he congratulated my dancing by exclaiming that “Bailar es muy bueno!” I got the feeling he was the kind of gregarious dude that figured out that if he just danced and smiled for white folks he could get them to give him a lot of money. On the other hand, the other guide spoke great Spanish using words like “transgredido” that I don’t think I have ever spoken, and explaining concepts like a comparison between the Sereer’s more egalitarian social structure and the Wolof’s rigid caste system in Spanish, something that I could never do. I got the feeling he would rather have been studying Cervantes, but had to reconcile himself to the demeaning reality that he could make more money leading groups of middle-aged Spanish folks through his country. Dinner was good though.