Seyi Rhodes was intrigued by the British women he met when first visiting Gambia in Now, he's returned to investigate those looking for sex. I first visited The Gambia over ten years ago. It was my last stop on a short backpacking adventure around West Africa and I never forgot the experience. So much so that I wanted to unpack some of the things I saw when I first visited the country, so this year I went back to make a documentary for Channel 4 called Sex On The Beach.
Back in The Gambia was becoming known as a tourist destination for Brits looking for cheap holidays with guaranteed winter sun. Nobody told me the other bit: The Gambia is a place where an older white woman could easily have sex with a young black man, as long as she showers him with gifts and money.
In Gambia, the bars are full of white women mingling with black men half their age. On my first trip I was treated like a local β and not just any local.
I was stopped from entering certain hotels and restaurants as the security guards were always conscious that their establishment was a place where women would come to escape the male attention they get outside. So if I was allowed in, it would only be at a white persons request. The British tourists I met on my trip were brazen. At one point I was standing in a bar and a pair of hands pulled me backwards by the waist.
I fell into the lap of a drunk British woman in her late 50s. Within seconds her hand was up my t-shirt, having a grope, and then she offered to buy me a drink. This happened years before MeToo , but I knew what had just happened. The Gambia was once a major slave-trading port and The British Empire used this region for its people. Black people could be bought, sold, shipped abroad, raped and forced to work β legally.
