British pensioners sporting bright red lippy and bleached blonde bobs are arriving in their droves at Banjul International Airport in The Gambia this weekend.
But the balmy temperatures, pulsating nightlife and exotic food on offer at the main beach resorts aren’t the only things enticing some randy OAPs.
For while package holiday deals costing as little as £529 are certainly a draw to tourists, many visitors are after something far spicier on their West African adventure.
In the last 30 years, The Gambia has become an open sex market for wealthy European women who come here to romp with men decades younger – and substantially poorer – than themselves.
The practice is so common here that gigolos known as ‘bumsters’ are rife on every beach and in every bar and restaurant on the popular Senegambia Strip.
Two years ago, The Gambia Tourist Board issued a plea asking elderly Brits to go elsewhere to look for young lovers as they attempted to revamp their image.
But since then, the problem has got worse, with sex tourism said to be “rampant” in the nation dubbed ‘The Gran-bia’ – a place that has become a real-life Tinder for geriatrics.
Grab-a-granny crackdown
Peak season for the Gambian sex industry is approaching thick and fast – with punters eager to find a toyboy in time for Christmas.
The Sun last visited The Gambia two years ago at a time when authorities were promising a crackdown on the grab-a-granny culture – promising to bring in laws to make it easier to arrest local beach boys and older women engaged in suspect relationships.
Abubacarr Camara, director of the country’s office of tourism, said: “What we want is quality tourists. We want tourists that come to enjoy the country and the culture, but not tourists who come for sex.”
However, we found that – despite pleas for them to stay away – scores of lusty, middle-aged women were back on the hunt for muscular young men following the pandemic.
Since then, locals tell us the situation has reached new lows.
Campaigners say that the popular Kololi beach resort is already swarming with women from Sweden, Russia, Germany, Holland and the UK that have only one thing on their minds.
‘I’m not harming anyone’
While prostitution is officially illegal in The Gambia, the fact that Western women rarely pay directly for sex – but tend to foot all their lover’s bills during the holiday then send them financial gifts when they return home – means arrests are hardly ever made.
The Gambia – a former British colony – took off as a tourist destination when Thomas Cook started selling budget package holidays including cheap flights in the 1990s.
Thousands of Western women now travel there every year and it’s not clear how many are sex tourists.
Many would insist they are not, saying they only take on a toyboy after genuinely falling in love.
British mum-of-nine Heidi Hepworth, 51, converted to Islam so she could marry her Gambian fiancé Mamadou Salieu Jallow, 14 years her junior, back in 2018.
She said: “No-one imagined this would last but we love each other and are making plans to marry. I’ve never been happier.”
She is not the only one – posts on social media show that huge numbers of British women have married Gambian men.
Others admit they have no interest in long-term commitment as they trawl the beach looking for young hunks.
Barbara, 65, from Dartford, Kent, who declined to give her surname, told us: “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I’m not doing anything illegal. If you go to somewhere like Thailand you see loads of old men with young girls, but no one talks about that.
“The minute a woman gets together with a younger man, there’s an uproar and we’re called cougars and sex tourists and all that. I came here for a bit of fun and I’m not harming anyone.
“If I want to take a good-looking bloke to my hotel room it’s no one’s business but my own.”
‘It’s rampant’
Ali Cham, 39, plays at music venues along the notorious Senegambia Strip, where gyrating OAPs sip £1 bottles of beer and the sound of reggae music clashes with the grind of walking frames scraping against the floor.
He says poverty here is so dire that many young men feel they have no choice but to sleep with older people.
Dad-of-five Ali, who performs under the name Killa Ace, said: “Older women are still coming to The Gambia to have sex with younger men – it’s rampant.
“When you go to the strip or the tourist resorts, you will come across it, it’s happening in plain sight.
People are dying at sea in the search of a better life… Many of those left behind have little choice but to go out and look for Westerners that can support them.
Ali Cham
“It’s two grown people so there’s nothing you can do about it.
“For me, with my principles, it’s not something I would want to do, but there are people here that are desperate for a better life.
“So for them, a situation like this is just one of the setbacks of living in a Third World country where corruption is high and the economy is getting worse.”
Tragically, some try to escape by jumping in a small boat to attempt the perilous, 600-mile journey to the Canary Islands in Spain.
EU statistics show that 9,000 Gambians took the Atlantic Sea route known as ‘the backway’ to land illegally in Europe last year.
Ali added: “After 20 years of dictatorship, we have a democratic government that promised the youth would be given more opportunity. Unfortunately, we’ve seen the opposite.
“We’ve had inflation, there still isn’t much opportunity and the cost of living keeps going up, so just buying food for your family can put you in debt.
“All of these factors put together makes people frustrated about the system.
“People are dying at sea in the search of a better life – and it’s both men and women trying to escape.
“Many of those left behind have little choice but to go out and look for Westerners that can support them.
“The men are not working as prostitutes, it’s more that the women have a financial advantage that is appealing.
“The £1,000 they change into local currency is a lot of money here and that makes these guys want to be with them.”
Remittances, or international money transfers, sent from abroad now account for 50 per cent of The Gambia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Tourism makes up 15.5 per cent of GDP and more than half of The Gambia’s 2.5 million residents live in poverty, according to a 2021 report by the World Bank.
The average wage is just £181.25 a month and 41 per cent of young people are out of work, which means the £50 a day the average tourist will spend holidaying in The Gambia makes them seem rich.
Life-changing love
One male beach worker claims randy British holidaymakers sometimes initiate contact by asking for massages.
The man, who gave his name as Nana, said: “The biggest culprit is the huge inequality between us and the tourists.
“The rich women, but also sometimes the men, they come up to you and ask for a massage. That’s how it all begins.”
Hotel boss Lamin Touray, 35, says even a short-lived romance with a Westerner can be life-changing for poor Gambians.
He told The Sun: “You have to remember these women are trying to get a man, because they can’t find one in their own country.
“They know that if they come to The Gambia, they can use their money to have a young guy.
“I don’t see it as a bad thing because for these boys, it changes their life.
“It can help them buy a car or a compound (house) and open a business.
“Some of them want to travel to the UK or US and once they are married, they want to help them, but that happens less now because the women prefer to live in The Gambia or send money here.
“The women do this because they know that if they take the boys home, they will betray them.
“Once they get to Europe, they will find their way out, or they won’t want to work and the woman will be the one doing everything for the boy.”
Lamin, who runs the Tendaba Camp two hours outside Senegambia, says he has been saddened to see any increasing number of local women forced into prostitution over the last few years too.
He added: “Two years ago, a man from Poland came here with a girl, who was not a sex worker, but you know how it is here – every girl wants to marry a white man to change their life.
“She spent one night and left because he wouldn’t give her the money she wanted. She wanted 10,000 dalasi (£108) because she had problems at home.
“He refused, he didn’t want to give her more than £30 and she didn’t agree, she said she’d prefer to go home. After that, he was trying so hard to find another woman to sleep with.
“He even asked me and I told him, ‘Sorry we don’t have prostitutes here, if you want to find one you must go somewhere else.”
‘Turning blind eye’ in bid for better life
Social entrepreneur Olimatta Taal says Gambians have had enough of tourists dubbed ‘Dirty Sarahs’ and ‘Dirty Harrys’ coming to their country.
Speaking to a local television station, she said: “At the end of the day, if a family is poor – they are making 1,000 dalasi (£10.77) a month.
“All of a sudden this white European male or female comes with thousands of pounds, offers to take their child to Europe, gives them a visa, give them a better life, they turn a blind eye.”
Mum-of-one Alainna Nichol, 43, from York, is not a sex tourist.
But it did not take long for her to see why the country is dubbed the granbia when she visited with her husband on a TUI package holiday last December.
She said: “My husband did see a middle-aged woman from Leeds marrying a local man at one of the beach bars.
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