Kololi

Kololi was a small Kombo village of farms and palm bush until the 1970s, when the Gambian government began developing the coast south-west of Banjul as a tourist area. Swedish tour operators had started flying winter-sun holidaymakers into the country in 1965, and in 1970 an 800-metre-wide coastal strip from Kololi south to Kartung was reserved for tourism development. The hotels at the foot of the road gave their name to the Senegambia strip, which came to stand for the whole resort in visitors' minds.

Growth continued as visitors from Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany joined the Scandinavians, and the strip filled with restaurants, craft stalls, bars and tour operators. Tourism became one of the Gambia's largest sources of foreign earnings, and Kololi its shop window, employing large numbers of people from Serekunda and the villages inland. The trade proved fragile: political crises and the Ebola epidemic in neighbouring countries in 2014–15 each emptied the hotels for a season.

The strip today is still the centre of Gambian tourism, though development has spread south towards Bijilo and along the coast beyond, and the Kololi area has grown into a residential suburb of the wider Serekunda conurbation as well as a holiday destination.

Kololi is the point where the Gambia, known as the Smiling Coast, meets its visitors, and much of its culture is about that meeting. Craft stalls sell batik, carved masks and fabric; drumming and dance troupes perform at the hotels; kora players from griot families, many of them from Brikama inland, play in restaurants and bars. The results are commercial, but the skills are real and the musicians are often from long lines of professional performers.

The hassle that visitors most often mention is part of the same economy. Young men known locally as bumsters attach themselves to tourists on the beach and the strip, offering guiding, friendship or romance in the hope of money or a visa; a polite but firm refusal is the usual advice.

Away from the strip the customs are those of the rest of the country: Islam observed by nearly everyone, long greetings that ask after family before anything else, food shared from a common bowl, and attaya, green tea brewed in three increasingly sweet rounds, drunk slowly over an afternoon. Sunday and public holidays fill the beach with Gambian families and football games on the sand.

Kololi is not a town with its own centre so much as a district of the built-up coastal area around Serekunda, which holds several hundred thousand people. Its own population is modest and hard to separate from the neighbouring settlements of Bijilo and Kotu. Most of those who work in the hotels, bars and stalls live inland and come in by minibus or shared taxi.

The economy runs on the seasons of the charter flights. Between October and April there is work in hotels, restaurants, taxis, guiding and crafts; in the rains many businesses close, staff are laid off and the strip goes quiet. That pattern makes household income unpredictable, and many families combine tourism work with farming, fishing or trade. Remittances from relatives in Europe are important here as everywhere in the Gambia.

Behind the hotels the area is ordinary Gambian suburb: compounds of concrete rooms around a shared yard, small shops, mosques, tailors and a scatter of newer apartment blocks built for returnees and for rent. Electricity cuts are frequent and generators common. The day starts before dawn with prayer and the first minibuses, the middle of it belongs to the beach and the shade, and the evening brings grilled fish, attaya and football on television.

Eating in Kololi splits in two. The strip serves what package visitors expect — grilled barracuda, ladyfish, snapper and prawns, chicken and chips, pizza, Lebanese mezze and full English breakfasts — usually well done and cheap by European standards, with Atlantic seafood the thing worth ordering. Beach bars cook the same fish over charcoal a few steps from the sand and pour cold beer.

A few streets inland the food is Gambian and Senegalese. Benachin, called thieboudienne in Senegal, is rice cooked in a thick tomato and fish sauce with vegetables, and is the classic midday dish; domoda is a groundnut stew over rice; yassa is chicken or fish in a sharp onion, lemon and mustard sauce; superkanja is okra and palm oil with smoked fish. Afra — meat barbecued over wood, chopped with onions and chilli and stuffed into tapalapa bread — is the standard late-night food, and akara bean fritters and egg sandwiches are the standard breakfast.

Fruit sellers work the strip with mango, papaya, pineapple and small sweet bananas, and cashew fruit appears in season. The drinks that matter locally are attaya green tea, wonjo made from hibiscus flowers, baobab juice and ginger drinks, all sold chilled in bottles or knotted bags. Oysters from the mangrove creeks nearby, harvested by women, are sold roasted.