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because of her successful business. In less than
3 years, Zeida alone managed to establish the
most successful lodge in Ouadane today.
I have only time here to make a stop
together with you - too short a one, alas - at her
guestbook and the placard she displays in the
canteen of her lodge with an eye informed by
her life history that I could not here describe in
detail (Fig. 15.7).
In both guestbook and placard, what Zeida
displays by means of messages, photos sent by
tourists, friends and visitors is, before anything
else, irrecusably, her racial complexion, and after
that her smile, her coolness 'like an oasis', her force
in face of adversity, her ability to work. Zeida's
photos emerge in the middle of maps and a
panoply of images that advertise Mauritania as a
tourist destination, and she sees herself (tacitly
there, but explicitly while having a chat with me)
as part of the 'landscape', or shall I say, as an
attraction in a landscape that, as we have already
seen, the semiotic battalions of tourists come to
consume (Zeida did not have to read Urry or
MacCannel to understand that). At the same
time, she displays her legality and professional-
ism: diplomas, statutes, local legal framing for
her lodge. This legality and entrepreneurship
have attracted members of humanitarian NGOs,
regular customers, of her lodge who have often
asked her to tell the history of her success and to
participate as mediator in the implementation of
local development projects. That interest in her
life history has her toying with the idea of writing
it in French to display it - as a leafl et - for the
tourists that visit her lodge. 'Tourists get inter-
ested by that' - she said to me (probably recall-
ing that I was a tourist as well).
Behind Zeida's virtues - that are totally
deserving and which she does not shy from
knowingly taking advantage of - there is some-
thing enigmatic that enhances them and that
explains even better her magnetism for tourists,
members of NGOs and unprepared anthropolo-
gists. I believe it is the frailty raised by the fact
that she belongs to a minority - being a woman,
black, divorced and living in an environment
that endangers all those characteristics - that
has earned her admiration and invites solidar-
ity. These features appeal to the same conserva-
tionist and redeeming spirit tourists experience
in view of ruins, the past, the Environment and
endangered cultures (Butcher, 2003). From
Fig. 15.7.
Placards: fragments, memories, mirrors, visual resources to build narratives and identities. Copy-
right Maria Cardeira da Silva, CEAS/CRIA, FCT.
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