African ins and outs
July 2, 2008
George Fetherling

One of the interesting things—one of many—about To Timbuktu for a Haircut: A Journey through West Africa (Dundurn, $26.99 paper) is that its author, Rick Antonson, is the president and CEO of Tourism Vancouver, as the local convention and visitors’ bureau is styled. What does he do when he needs to get away from the air of bureaucratic confinement that must inevitably accompany such a high-level position in the tourism industry? He certainly doesn’t become a tourist himself. Instead he assumes the role of a serious traveller, the kind that can turn out a book such as this one, relaying the story of a rough and rugged journey (he loved every arduous minute) while, at the same time, providing the necessary historical, geographical and cultural context, expressed with charm and sensitivity.

Of course Timbuktu struggles under the weight of so much old-fashioned romance as to make it an easy place to write about badly and an especially difficult one to write about well. I suppose all of us have a mental picture of it, stuck out there in the Sahara, an ancient city of low buildings with walls made of mud (using a technique the local people called banco). And I suppose most everyone knows by now of the uncounted thousands of ancient Arabic manuscripts to be found there, many still in private homes, where they’re being eaten away by sand and insects. Significant numbers of people in the West, including Antonson, are working against the odds to help Africans preserve these writings, whose presence is perhaps the most vivid reminder of what a great seat of Islamic learning the city was centuries ago, when it was also, not in the least coincidentally, a place of great wealth. Add to its appeal for travellers the fact that, although no longer forbidden to infidels as it was once upon a time, it is still almost absurdly remote, even in the context of Mali, one of the world’s poorest countries, with abysmal transportation and communications. As Antonson writes, “Although Timbuktu exists, there is a consensus that it is, in fact, nowhere.” Yet at a certain point in his life, when he was in his late fifties, Antonson felt there “was no more fitting” or symbolic a place to visit than Timbuktu. The very name gives off a sense “of ‘beyond,’ of ‘difference,’ and ‘silence.’” The city rose to greatness as a centre of the trade in salt, gold and slaves. It achieved its zenith in the fourteenth century, and ever since then its name “has meant ‘can’t get there’ to Westerners, and every traveller dreams of having been to such a place.”

Timbuktu first appeared on a European map in 1373 but centuries passed before Europeans themselves visited. The eighteenth century saw the idea of going to Timbuktu become something of a geographical fad, somewhat as searching for the fate of Sir John Franklin would be in the late nineteenth. In one twenty-year period, forty-three expeditions set out to reach the already folkloric city. None made it. The name most commonly associated with this particular ambition is that of Mungo Park, a Scot, who nearly but didn’t quite reach his goal in 1795 and again in 1805. Shortly after the second attempt, he either drowned in the Niger River or was murdered by the Tuareg, a people Antonson spends some time with on his way back out into the world. Finally, in 1826, another British explorer, Major Alexander Gordon Laing, found his way into the city, only to be murdered a month later. Many others perished from the journey itself. A number of the early explorers started out from Tripoli or Fez on the Mediterranean, thereby maximising the time spent in the desert.

For his part, Antonson began on the Atlantic coast, at Dakar in Senegal, travelling to Bamako, the capital of Mali, by rail. No one he talks to is sure such a train even exists. So, having once been on the Transsiberian Railway, he naturally seems to have suspected that he must be ready for anything. He ends up crammed into a tiny compartment with three African men, one of whom, Ebou, asks him why in the world he’s going to Bamako. “‘I’m going to Timbuktu,’ I said. ‘Tombouctou,’ Ebou corrected. And with that he added, ‘It’s very far.’ I listened to them talk among themselves, and noticed my frustration with the West Africans’ French accent. I asked about French words that Ebou said were not French. They were speaking Bambara, interspersed with French phrases and uttered with a French lilt. Their conversation and the slapping of wet branches on our window lulled me to sleep.” Later, he switches to road and river travel.
           
Like much of the most rewarding travel literature, Antonson’s narrative turns out to be more revealing of the terrain travelled through than of the intended destination. He has a good eye. “If you saw a thousand people in Mali, no two would be dressed alike”, he writes. “Occasionally they would look similar, but only by chance. Absent was the Western commonality of fashion, similarity of suit and skirt, slacks and jacket. It seemed true, too, of their personalities. The individuality was intense, based on the struggle for life, the indifference to community judgment, and the fact that one ate and wore what was handy. The uniformity of poverty seemed to result in an absence of the ambition to conform in dress.” Antonson will no doubt be interested in Bogolan: Shaping Culture through Cloth in Contemporary Mali by Victoria L. Rovine; the book, to be published later this year by Indiana University Press (US$24.95 paper), shows the effects of globalisation on the methods and motifs of the traditional Malien textiles.

Strangely, Antonson writes very little of Timbuktu and Mali as Muslim cultures specifically, though you might expect the important role the city once played in spreading Islamic teaching and trade to be one of the key considerations in assessing its present interest. It’s surely no coincidence that this is the third Canadian book on the subject to appear in as many years. Another is Timbuktu: The Sahara’s Fabled City of Gold (McClelland & Stewart, $34.99) by the well-respected husband-and-wife team of Marq De Villiers and Sheila Hirtle, who have done other books on Africa as well. Then there is 52 Days by Camel: My Sahara Adventure by an Ontarian, Lawrie Raskin. This is an illustrated book for adolescents. The revised edition to be published in August (Annick Press, $26.95 cloth) contrasts contemporary cell-phone-using Africa with antiquarian Timbuktu while retaining the previous edition’s topics, such as the position of Muslim women in Malien society.

No doubt the current confrontation between Islam and the West is also responsible for the new edition, the umpteenth in various languages, of To Timbuktu: A Journey Down the Niger (Penguin Group Canada, $17.95 paper) by the American adventure journalist Mark Jenkins. He travelled there by kayak and tries to write somewhat in the tradition of Hemingway without stinting on the similes whose absence is what made Hemingway’s style seem fresh in its day. Not all Jenkins’ books are written this way. Off the Map: Bicycling across Siberia—also Penguin, $17.95 paper—is less hokey, though the means of transport it describes is no less contrived. But to see what a more skilled author can do within such epics of solitary travel, I recommend Traversa:  A Solo Walk across Africa, from the Skelton Coast to the Indian Ocean by Fran Sandham (Penguin, $30).

But I have let myself wander away from the subject of Antonson, who can be quite wry when such is called for. On a Timbuktu street, he watched as “a lady used a flat pan to remove lumps of bread from the oven and slipped them onto a tray beside the stove. We purchased two loaves, breaking pieces from them and eating as we walked. The garnish of sand was subtle.” In the end, he returns to Canada with self-knowledge as well as information. “Those who call [Timbuktu] home do not share the foreigner’s fascination”, he writes. “The city’s mystique is powerful only until you arrive. I’d like to pretend it’s different, but it isn’t.”

Mali won its independence from France in 1959 (at the same time as Senegal). Since then, following a coup, it has slowly emerged as one of the most stable nations in Africa, a genuine multi-party democracy. This places it in especially stark contrast to its neighbours to the west. Why have most of the countries that touch the Atlantic on the bulbous nose of Africa been mired so often in civil war and related tragedy? A dozen years ago, Robert D. Kaplan, in his book The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century, offered that the answer may lie in a dangerous contradiction: the fact that rivers in the region flow east-west whereas tribal allegiances run north-south. If I interpret him correctly, he was suggesting that European colonialism, which existed in West Africa only because the rivers emptying into the ocean permitted trade, did not always adhere closely to the other factor when carving the area into political units. Perhaps they felt they had to act as they did, given  all the competition between and among the Europeans. The Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the British were quite active and successful in the region at various times, though the francophone powers were always the dominant players (and so French remains the lingua franca). This slice of history is complicated and more than a little dirty.

Consider the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Belgium superimposed its rule on this piece of the map in 1877, supplanting the various indigenous leaders. For a generation beginning in 1885, the territory was called the Congo Free State. This was during the period when it was in fact not free in the least, because Léopold II of Belgium took personal ownership of it and ran it as a lucrative private business venture. In the process, about half of the population met their deaths. It was this fiefdom that Joseph Conrad made the setting of  Heart of Darkness. The “horror” referred to in the novella is slavery, a practice introduced to wring profit from ivory and rubber. The arrangement was a major scandal even at the time, so that even before the king’s death in 1909, the land ceased being a commercial corporation and reverted to colonial status as the Belgian Congo. So it remained until its hard-fought independence in the early 1960s, whereupon it emerged as the Republic of the Congo. More recently, from 1971 and 1997, it became, as a result of one of the numerous coups in the region, Zaire. The current name, Democratic Republic of the Congo, is not a boast about the democracy to be found there, for the country has managed to elude such status. Rather, it is a way to distinguish the Democratic Republic of the Congo from its next-door neighbour. the Republic of Congo (without the define article before Congo), which from 1880 to 1910 was simply the French Congo. Many outsiders still tend to confuse the two present states. For this reason, the pair of them encourage the informal inclusion of their capital cities (which are in sight of each other) as part of the names: “Democratic Republic of the Congo―Kinshasa” (formerly Léopoldville) and “Republic of Congo―Brazzaville”. The fact that the latter and much smaller nation lives somewhat in the shadow of the other only makes Brazzaville Charms: Magic and Rebellion in the Republic of Congo by Cassie Knight (Raincoast, $35) all the more valuable.

Knight is a British specialist in Africa who, following the civil war of 1998–99, worked for an NGO, Catholic Relief Services, from a base in Brazzaville. Her book’s subtitle is not ironic, for she did indeed find many of the people charming. Although charm, however scarce, is universal, those particular individuals no doubt stood out all the more in a culture that must strike many westerners as bizarre (Bizarreville?). In thoughtful prose that is not overdressed, she also builds up, gradually, layer upon layer, a picture of the country’s decidedly less endearing side, a land where weird occult rituals are commonly observed and many taller residents keep the so-called pygmies as slaves. She is not judgemental, though she has a serious purpose, as when she writes of how the president,  Denis Sassou-Nguesso, a former communist who filled a vacuum brought on by coups and assassinations and was himself deposed, only to elbow his way back to power six years later. The president uses the country’s oil revenues to strengthen the military while exhibiting “an absolute disregard for human life and for human suffering. Like the French before them, [he and his cronies] are interested only in profit [rather than] development. Since independence in 1960 there has been no official enquiry into the conduct of the French administrators and concessionary companies that wreaked so much destruction across the country, and the French similarly turn a blind eye to the wrongdoings of the Congolese government […]” Various militias roam the countryside, including one headed by a man who claims to be the resurrected Jesus. “Independence”, Knight writes, “was not an easy new beginning for Congo.”

My good fortune in stumbling on Brazzaville Charms makes me look forward to seeing, for example, The Uncertain Business of Doing Good: Outsiders in Africa by Larry Krotz, a Canadian who has written frequently of humanitarian projects on that continent. The book is to be published by the University of Manitoba Press ($24.95) in September, a month before Dust from Our Eyes: An Unblinkered Look at Africa by another Canadian, Joan Baxter, who has reported on African matters for the BBC World Service and the Sunday Times in London as well as for the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. In 2002, for instance, she was one of the first journalists to penetrate the rebel-held areas of Côte d’Ivoire, another former French colony, during its own most recent civil war. Her book is scheduled to appear from Wolsak & Wynn ($19 paper). Then in November comes Shrines in Africa: History, Politics and Society edited by Allan Charles Dawson (University of Calgary Press, $39.95). This is a collection of essays on the singular combination of roles that spiritual shrines play having once been on the Transsiberian Railway in different African cultures, and is part of Calgary’s admirable “Africa: Missing Voices” series. Of course, a significant number of university presses in North America, and not always the ones you might think of first, publish entire series in the field of African studies. One of the most admirable is the “Blacks in the Diaspora” project from Indiana University Press. Among its forthcoming titles is Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora edited by Edda L. Fields-Black (US$34.95), appearing next December. Looking much farther ahead than that is risky. But don’t be surprised to see mention of several new works on Nigeria, now that the oil fields in that predominately Muslim nation are drawing closer attention from the United States (whose military created its first-ever Africa Command last year).

           
George Fetherling’s most recent book is Tales of Two Cities: A Novella Plus Stories (Subway). His “Books This Week” column appears in Seven Oaks exclusively.           
           
        
        
        

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