Generally speaking, older white women only go to Gambia for one thing.

Cori Shepherd Stern recounts her “humanitarian” travels across Africa in her blog Girl Seeks World.

“I was travelling through The Gambia with a remarkable kid named Ousman. He’s about twenty, although he doesn’t know for sure.”

He wants to come to the US for school – or actually almost anywhere but there. There’s no college in the Gambia and Ousman desperately wants a good education – specifically to go to journalism school. One day we were reading a Gambian newspaper together and noticed an article about stolen cows that said “The police were called in to shit light on the issue.” When I pointed it out to Ousman, we both agreed it wasn’t a typo – the journalist really thought that was the correct term. Ousman said (after we laughed for ten straight minutes), “See! That was written by our TOP national journalist! That will be what happens to me if I stay in The Gambia for school!

His goal is to become a photojournalist and cover children’s rights issues. He spent hours taking photos with my camera of the little talibe boys on the street – talking to them, telling them how he used to be just like them. They looked at him like he was an alien – so clean in his new clothes (my husband’s old shirt), speaking English to me.

So she brings him clothing, electronics, then travels around the country with him. Sounds like a very typical relationship in Gambia.

The tiny West African nation has had a reputation of being a ‘real-life Tinder dream for geriatrics‘ for the last 30 years, since budget airlines started offering cheap package tours to the former British colony. In 2020, a shocking documentary titled Sex On The Beach showed bars packed full of elderly white women in search of younger Gambian men.

Gambia has few job opportunities and low wages, so many men seek relationships in exchange for much more money than they could ever usually earn. While prostitution is illegal there, Western women rarely pay locals directly for sex, but will instead pay their bills and send them lump sums of money when they return home.

Despite her attempts to paint the relationship as motherly, I have my doubts.

I went to visit Ousman’s family – I’ve been paying his school and living expenses for the last three years and have become his “American mom.”

So she has been in a long term relationship with him since he was 17?

The country is now sick of its reputation as a sex hotspot for mature women from Britain and Europe.

“What we want is quality tourists. Tourists that come to enjoy the country and the culture, but not tourists that come just for sex”, Abubacarr Camara, director of the Gambia Tourism Board, said.

While she never claims to be in a romantic relationship, she describes events that sound like dates, like reading the newspaper and laughing together or displacing her admiration of him in her husband’s clothing onto the children looking at him. There’s also this this tale of meeting his family.

Ousman took me to his family’s ancestral village (they live in the relatively large city of Serekunda, but are from a tiny village originally). It was a two day trek involving three bush taxis, an overcrowded ferry (where I luckily managed to avoid both a stampede and an overzealous riot cop), a donkey cart, a short walk, and finally a horse ride into the village. The people in the village were amazing. They killed a chicken for me (presenting it like a fine wine for my approval) and then we stayed up late in the night with the village elders.

“They killed a chicken for me… presenting it like a fine wine. ” This is a massive gesture of honor and hospitality. In many cultures, including in West Africa, slaughtering an animal, especially a chicken, for a visitor is a way of showing respect and celebrating their arrival. It’s not done for every visitor.

Late at night, after the moon rose over the huts and they all laughed at me for wanting a photo of it (“do you not have the moon in America?”), we were all feeling very happy and one-love-like. That’s when it was agreed that the next donkey born in the village would bear my name. (There was a running joke about how much I love donkeys, and how I wouldn’t let any of the donkey cart drivers beat them when they drove us.) Since Ousman’s family name is Cham and my maiden name is Chambers, it was decided that the newest donkey to the village would be named “Cori Cham-bers.”

From context clues provided, this doesn’t seem like a casual visit. In West African culture, where family approval is paramount, bringing someone home is a sign of intent to marry. It seems likely that Ousman thought the relationship was real or he wouldn’t have introduced Stern to his family.

By merging her name with the family name (“Cham-bers”) and bestowing it upon a village donkey, the community symbolically adopted her. In a part of the world where clan identities are often intertwined with animals, this act integrated her into their community in a long term way. The lifespan of a donkey is 25 to 40 years. Do you really think they want to bestow a decades long community honor on a white woman they will never see again? Or worse, one that broke Ousman’s heart? Seems unlikely to me.

Jezebel did an extensive article on the phenomenon.

While the demographics of female sex tourism differ from place to place, female sex tourists are usually older white women from developed countries who might struggle to find love or a sexual connection in their home countries and travel elsewhere for the promise of excitement and romance. 

One of the key differences between male sex tourism and female sex tourism then, is that men, for the most part, are aware of their status as sex tourists. 

Many female sex tourists on the other hand, do not see themselves in this way, instead identifying more with the term ‘romance tourism,’ since their relationships with local men often involve more ‘romance’ and intimacy than the more typical transactional relationship that we see between male sex tourists and female sex workers. 

To these female sex tourists, the term ‘sex tourism’ oversimplifies the reasons why they are engaging in relationships with these men (or perhaps, they just don’t want to see what other people see). 

Additionally, I read this article with the contextual knowledge that Stern has a long history of public narratives that do not match the private reality.

Let the reader decide for themselves.