Conakry - Post Report Question and Answers
Is it easy to make friends with locals here? Are there any prejudices or any ethnic groups who might feel uncomfortable here?
Everyone is so friendly and I haven’t felt prejudice. There’s a lot of staring. There are some issues between local ethnic groups. - Sep 2022
Hard question. Expats of all colors do fine here. The Chinese population is huge here, and there's not much resentment toward foreigners, so Asian- and Euro-descended people (who are also incidentally referred to as “chinois”) won't be singled out or bothered. Afro-diaspora people also are at home here, and again are neither excessively lauded nor derided for being “different” from other foreigners or “similar” to locals. People kind of take you as you are, perhaps with some preconceived notions initially, but they pretty quickly come to judge you based on your own merit as a person (or lack thereof). I think local people will usually be open to friendship, but there are also certain deeply held values or ways of doing things that a non-Guinean might never bridge. Guineans are often fine with this, and willing to accept outsiders as friends or colleagues, without expecting to share all the same frames of reference as their foreign friends. The question is how comfortable you as an expat are to share space and time with people who may profoundly differ from you in certain ideas. I personally find it exhilarating to come into contact with such diverse conceptions of how to be human, while also seeing surprising commonalities amidst all this difference. But it may not be for everyone. For instance, the idea of universal human values or equality is not necessarily held by most Guineans. People accept differences in caste, and stereotypes about ethnic groups, without much critical thought. And the supposed inferiority of women is so ingrained that, when an outsider calls attention to it, sometimes the Guinean interlocutor doesn't even quite understand what you're getting at. People automatically register social differences in day-to-day interactions, and accordingly treat others in vastly different ways, ranging from aggressive displays of disdain towards working women, to almost servile scraping when dealing with an imam or a local authority figure. And they regard such different treatment as normal and self-evident, not at all contradictory or incoherent. This can obviously be grating to those of us brought up to believe in the essential equal worth of all humans. But I guess we're the ones whose cops can't stop shooting unarmed black folks, so go figure. - Jun 2021
No. There is a great deal of ethnic prejudice here among Guineans, but foreigners wouldn't be subjected to that. - Nov 2019
