Home ›› 26 Nov 2021 ›› World Biz
Aboubacar shared tea and sugary snacks with his colleagues gathered on a mat at a UN camp in battle-scarred Mali.
He speaks plainly but with a hint of irony about his transformation from a tour guide of 14 years experience up until 2014 into a frontline military interpreter.
After the war upended his business, he sought out work as a translator for the British contingent of the UN’s mission in Mali MINUSMA.
“Before we were protecting the white tourists, but now it’s the whites who protect us in the bush,” he said with a smile.
There are dozens of others like him who work with the British blue helmets every day, speaking Tamasheq, Songhai or Arabic.
He pulled a scarf over his nose, donned dark glasses and became almost unrecognisable.
“It’s very different from what we did before, but the goal is the same: to show the country to foreigners,” said Aboubacar, an alias to protect him and his colleagues.
There were numerous tour guides in the region during the golden age of tourism in the 1990s and 2000s.
They took visitors to see the famed mosque at Djenne, the manuscripts of Timbuktu and to bathe in the Banfora waterfalls in Burkina Faso, among other places.
But they lost their livelihoods in the 2010s when separatist movements and jihadist groups unleashed a cycle of deadly violence that made the region, rich in heritage and natural beauty, too dangerous for tourists.
Most did not find other work.
From tourists to troops
After several years of unemployment, Aboubacar followed a friend’s advice and used his strong English learnt guiding tourists to approach the UN. He flew to their base at Gao which is home to the peacekeepers as well as French forces.
