News reports are full of the recent attack(s). Ankara and Grand Bassam were hit on the same day, though the resulting news stories read quite differently. As seems too often to be the case with Africa, special attention is paid to the foreign victims of the tragedy. Everytime I read about the "French nationals" my mind rebels with images of the local children flipping into the waves and gorgeous young couples holding hands and laughing as they walk the beach.
Grand Bassam, described as a playground of the expatriates, has always struck me more as the "sleepy oceanside town" with a funky artistic underbeat. It reminds me a lot of places I once considered home. I like it because it exudes an air of reality and humbleness. It is not where the uber rich usually spend their time (they gravitate more to Assine and San Pedro I think, where the undercurrents are said to be calmer and surfing is popular.)
When we head out to Grand Bassam, we often stop by to say hello to a missionary family who has a sweet little house just across from the beach. While they do have a wall surrounding their home, there is no barbed wire. No sense of danger or unease. It is a beautiful town striving to keep afloat.
The family has a few friends in the neighborhood and we always make time to see them, too. Most often we gather at the beach sometime just after lunch and play in the waves, shovel piles of sand into buckets and listen to the music coming from any one of the little restaurant-bar huts lining the ocean edge. There are often crowds of local kids practicing their acrobatics or playing a game of soccer. There are couples walking and young guys on horseback trying to get you to snap a photo- or, for the more adventurous-hop on the saddle and ride off into the breeze.
It has a family feel. A solid, small town local flair. Definitely not the kind of place one would think as a target for a terrorist group looking to make a statement. It seems more like terrorists targeting their own fellow Africans. Or like they weren't really targeting anyone at all but everyone in general.
This account, especially vivid and heartwrenching, brings it all together. In the midst of the terror, there is no separation of local or expatriate. Everyone was hiding. Some managed to escape with their lives, others did not. Reuters at least mentions 'Foreign citizens from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, France, Germany and Mali were among the victims' seeming to put them all on the same level. The Washington Post tries to get it right, but what's with including statistics on Americans included in other attacks as if they hold some sort of prestige? BBC is the worst, simply stating "four of the dead were Westerners" as if that is all that really counts. While they go on to mention that nationalities of victims hadn't been released, the pictures clearly show this event affected the local population.
It's anyone's guess where they will strike next. Speculation is on about Senegal and apparently in Guinea they have made some arrests. The only thing that seems certain is they will strike again, it will be unexpected (in the way that no one can really prepare or prevent) and it will affect us all, as humans.
Discouraging. Distressing. Too close to home. For all of us, not just the rich or the Western.
