Coming back 2022 – you really have to want to

It was in Aix-en-Provence in May this year, when a thought hit me.

I was looking for an “African” restaurant and I found one online, right in the centre of the town. Chances are that if it’s France, it will be a West African restaurant, so – a Senegalese or, even better, a Cameroonian one.

Most of such places are still marked as “African” or at best, West African, on Google Maps. Normally only then from the list I can filter out the Ethiopian venues.

Anyway, the African restaurant in Aix is right in the centre of the town, on a small street, packed with small, cozy, pretty-looking restaurants of most of the world. They all were full on a Friday evening. Almost all were full. Among them, one solitary, probably Senegalese restaurant, empty, with torn menu pages hanging sadly outside.

I even hesitated to go in. So many nice places around and I am going to eat in this? But, yes, I did go in. Inside two men were sitting and chatting, one of them the proprietor. The smell inside was already off-putting, damp and cold, on a verge of rotting.

There was no Guinness. Of beers I was offered Heineken, so, no thank you. I ordered rice and groundnut sauce. It was delicious. Very tasty. The proprietor was extremely friendly and when I asked where I can find piment, a chilli sauce made of fresh peppers and oil, he went on telling me of places I can find it (nothing exciting anyway, I was also advised to go to a Carrefour), then told me his own he is making by himself. Of course he is making it himself.

And the thought that hit me, was that other than people stubbornly seeking out African cuisine, noone would ever get in to this place out of curiosity, just passing by, attracted by dishes or by the decor or by the vibes. Maybe this was done on purpose, maybe only those in the know are welcome in this restaurant, but it’s such a shame.

The thought that came to my mind and it’s still sitting in my head is that you really must want to go to Africa to go there, there is always something that will put a casual passer-by off.

The thought came to me some months later in Warsaw. There is a Nigerian restaurant there, on one of the city’s bazars, fresh-looking and with a proper Nigerian vibe (at least to my white-gaze eyes) and the proprietor is extremely friendly. Yet even there I felt something was off, when I had to pay a different price what was on the menu (“because prices are rising and we had no time to update them”), when I was lied about the price of Guinness. I mean, it’s disappointing.

The thought it’s still bouncing around my head as I am trying to get to Abidjan and from there overland to Accra, an impromptu trip that shouldn’t be done impromptu. It’s 2022 and it still takes an effort to move around that part of the world.