Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Postcards from Africa

Hi there,

Some of you may remember that in 2004 I went to India and posted a series of postcards about the trip. Now I'm in Mali and will go on to other countries in West Africa, and I thought it would be nice to revive the writing of the postcards, just in case you are interested...

1. MALI

This is my first trip to Africa. Well, almost, I've been to Tunisia, but that does not really count, does it? I will confess that during the preparation of the trip I was quite scared. I mean, this is deepest black Africa, a place of poverty, famine, wars and epidemics, I thought. Or is it?

I arrived at the airport in Bamako, Mali with some trepidation. The first impression wasn't really that good, Bamako is not really the most appealing of places, it's just a city, hotter and dustier than most. But right from the start I liked Malians. It's funny, when dealing with them I was often reminded of black Colombians (just in case you don't know, I'm Colombian): the same lilt in the speach, the same quick, loud laugh, the same broad smile. The food is also similar to that of some places in Colombia, a really nice surprise. I guess I hadn't quite realized just how much of Africa there is in my own country...
In other aspects, however, Mali is extremely exotic. The first place I went was the Dogon Country, a region in central Mali characterized by a large faultline that produces a 300-400 meter escarpment. The Dogon live both above and below the escarpment in little towns of an architecure that is exclusively African: mud huts, mud granaries with pointy roofs, beautifully carved doors with all sorts of interesting figures in them. Embedded in the escarpment are tombs and granaries of a forgotten people, the so-called tellems. It turns out that the Dogon have one of the most intricate animist religions in Africa, full of secrets and tabus, and full of really interesting legends. While there, I listened to tales of flying little people that still come to take care of their dead. Those tales are constantly being retold, sometimes in the form of dances (I was really lucky to be able to see one), sometimes in the form of carvings in Dogon doors. The star Sirius is apparently quite important for the Dogon people, and I was surprised to learn that they knew it was a cluster of three stars much before modern astronomers were able to see that. The landscape is also really beautiful: the escarpment with the tellems above, and the little Dogon towns below, interspersed with groups of baobab trees. I am happy to report that I made quite an impression on Dogon women. I am 2 m tall and let's say not exactly ethereal, and apparently Dogon women, not all of them with teeth, find this very appealing. So on two occasions, when entering a Dogon village I ended up being serenated by 6-8 women. Quite embarassing, actually.
The next stop of the trip was the city of Djenne. What a jewel! Just that was worth the whole trip. It's not large, but it's made entirely of mud. The main mosque is also made of mud, it looks like something out of a fairy tale. Every year, the people of town get together for two days to repair the outside of the mosque, the mud is washed away during the rains. I was lucky to be in Djenne on market day, and the square in front of the mosque was full of really colourful people. Little by little I've started to recognize the different ethnic groups in Mali, they all dress and speak differently. The Peuls, for example, are pastoralists and cattle herders, and their women really like to look beautiful. But their standards of beauty are different than ours. For example, young girls like to tattoo themselves with a thick, two centimeter broad circle around their mouths; this makes them look quite... different, to say the least. Many people also like to scar themselves, often with two-three cuts on the temple behind the eyes. The hairdos are also really impressive...
After Djenne I took a three day trip along the river Niger to Timbuktu. It's a town that lives from its past, there's really not that much left, but that's OK: the allure of going to Timbuktu is... well, going to Timbuktu! But the best part of the trip came afterwards, I went to the Music Festival of the Desert, an annual event organized by the tuareg. It's in Essakane, a town ca. 100 km north of Timbuktu in the middle of the Sahara desert. There are no hotels there, one has to camp on the dunes. The music is just fabulous: several Malian groups, both black and tuareg, as well as really cool musicians from elsewhere in Africa. The whole spectacle is quite surreal: you get to see for example tuaregs wrapped in their blue, indigo-stained turbans dismount from their camels and start dancing to music from Britney Spears played by DJs flown from Bamako. Really cool, actually.
I also went to two other towns in different ends of the country: Gao and Kangaba. Gao is in the far east, close to the border with Niger, and the reason I went there is because I wanted to see an ancient mausoleum that was recently proclaimed world heritage. It turned out to be smallish, but I still think the trip was worth it. Kangaba is in the southwest, close to the border with Guinea, and is the spiritual home of the Mande people. The place is interesting, but I got scammed by the chief elder and several other people who wanted extortionate amounts of money to let me visit. Oh well.
Now I'm back in Bamako, and the day after tomorrow I leave for Burkina Faso. I've been absolutely LOVING this trip, mostly because the people are so wonderful (well, except for the elders of Kangaba). My fears have been definitely proven unfounded. And the food is delicious, especially for a meat-eater like me (vegetarians may have some trouble here, I'm afraid...)

I definitely recommend a trip to Mali. In a couple of weeks I'll let you know about Burkina.

Cheers,

Juan

sounds great! I was actually reading about that music festival in the NY Times recently... and you were there! I'm sooo envious!

Great to hear your stories again Juan. I look forward to hearing more.

Sounds awesome Juan. Sounds like a pulp comic adventure actually.

"The Elders of Kangaba" sounds like an interesting chapter. Also think it's really cool the ancient mausoleum. There are few world heritage sites in asia I would love to visit.

2. BURKINA FASO and northern GHANA

I'm finally getting the hang of this. I'm less scared now of side-of-the-road food (which I'm finding quite tasty, actually, except for the "cheese"), I'm finding it easier to find suitable transport, and (I think) I'm getting better at haggling prices. I still hate the long, dusty, bumpy unpaved roads, though...

Burkina Faso impressed me for the kindness of its people: they are talkative and really friendly. One day I was invited to spend the night at somebody's home; a great opportunity to see how the Burkinabe really live! In Bobo Dioulasso a young musician "adopted" me, he decided that I needed to go to all his preformances for the day. What a treat! Bobo is famous for its percussionists, especially the balanfon players (a type of xylophone-like instrument but with gourds underneath). And you should see the small children jumping to the music, they did more gymnastics than dancing! Ouagadougou, however, was in spite of its really cool name rather boring, just a big city in the middle of the Sahel. As a whole I enjoyed Burkina well enough, but the truth is that the country is a bit low on cool places to visit. There are a couple of ruins here, a pretty mosque there, but nothing to compare to the magnificence of some of the buildings in Mali. The richness of this country (and really the only reason to visit) are its people. But isn't that so wherever you go?

The Sahelian landscapes and African cultures of Mali and Burkina obviously blend into northern Ghana (borders in Africa have nothing to do with the peoples who live in the different countries and everything to do with politics at the time of European control), but you do feel quite a change when you cross the border. First of all, people speak English rather than French (although my impression is that more people speak French in Mali and Burkina than English in Ghana. Or perhaps I just don't understand the Ghanaian accent very well?). And the influence of the former colonial power spreads into other areas as well. Food, for example. In 'French' West Africa, you get baguette and omelette at breakfast; in Ghana you get fried eggs and sausage. Beer is much more common in Ghana than in the francophone countries. And the sumptuous dishes of African meats smothered in thick sauces are not that common in Ghana, you find more fried, very spicy things instead. Another area in which the influence of the former colonial powers shows is the money: French West Africa shares a common currency, pegged to the euro and thus relatively stable. Prices, however, are much higher than in Ghana, a country with a really soft currency, the cedi.

There are a few sahelian mosques in northern Ghana (but really, after the magnificence of Djenne in Mali it's very hard to impress me with that). Much more interesting is Mole National Park, one of very few places in West Africa where you can see African wildlife. And can you ever! Elephants, baboons and wild pigs are common visitors of the hotel there (there is a really funny picture of an elephant bathing in the hotel's pool...). Essentially you lounge at the side of the pool, at the edge of an escarpment with a full view of several drinking holes at the bottom of the cliff. And the wild animals just go for a drink there... There are worse things to do than to take a drink and spend an afternoon there, I think.
I also went to see a really cool animist shrine in a place called Tengzug. The landscape there is completely surreal, essentially just really big boulders piled up and making a mountain. It's obviously really difficult to walk there (perhaps that's why they built the shrine there), but pilgrims go with their poultry, their sheep, or sometimes even their donkeys to sacrifice to the deities there in exchange for favours. And you see piles of feathers, rotting goat carcasses and donkey skulls adorning the shrines... Quite eerie, actually. I've encountered several places like that in West Africa (in Burkina there's a place where they worship catfish), animism is really alive and well around here!

Next, I'm off to Togo and Benin.

Cheers,

Juan

Great, brings back memories. I did my Peace Corps in Gabon. Noone ever goes there.

I would love to go to Senegal/Isle de Goree and Ghana.

3. TOGO and BENIN

I'll jump to the punchline right away: Togo and Benin are an excellent example of the huge difference governments can make in the life of people, in the way countries 'feel' even to short-time visitors like me. In most aspects the two countries are very similar places. The dry sahel of the north gives way in both to a much greener south. People in both countries are very similar; cultures, religions and languages spread from one to the other. But the two countries 'feel' very different.

I don't like Togo. Most Togolese people are of course quite wonderful, as friendly as any in West Africa. But the country is saddled with one of those entrenched African dictatorships that doesn't want to go away: even if the country changed leaders last year, power passed from father to son via a manipulated election. And the problem is that it's a corrupt dictatorship, and corruption in high places has filtered down to the rest of the country. There are for example police checks all over the country, at the entrance and exit of every single town, or ca. every 10-20 min of route. The excuse they give is that they want to guarantee the security of travellers, but all they want is money. They extort money from every car that passes through, otherwise they embark in a two-hour 'inspection' during which they will certainly find something wrong with one thing or another. I was told that this goes on in essentially every aspect of daily life. In other places this goes on, too, but not to the extent I've seen it here. People have absolutely no respect for the law, and will do whatever they can get away with to get a bit more money. I've never had more fights about taxi/bus fares as in Togo: drivers there, probably to offset the cost of the bribes they have to pay to police, have an incredibly annoying habit of changing previously agreed fares at the end of trips. Unfortunately I'm allergic to that (I know that reasonably speaking these are very small amounts and I really shouldn't get that upset, but the fact is that I do. I think it's just the shamelessness with which they do it). And as a consequence I ended up being sulky during much of my time in the country. I also had to 'flee' a political demonstration. It turned out that the day after I arrived in the town of Kara they were having a 'demonstration' commemorating the one year anniversary of the death of the old president (the father of the new one). Demonstrations about old dictators in unstable African countries frighten me (maybe I'm just silly), so I left the city as soon as I could. Nothing actually happened, but I was nervous the whole time...

Benin couldn't be more different. First of all, hardly any police checks at the entrance of towns, certainly much less than in places like Mali or Ghana, never mind Togo. Taxi drivers are generally decent (well, most of the time...). Lovely people all around. The president here has been in power for a long time, too, but there is a (real!) election comming up, and people seem genuinely excited (and involved, something that I find perhaps more important). The country is in 'election fever' for the first time in ages, and there were town meetings happening everywhere. I hope this does translate in benefits for at least some...

Benin is also a very interesting country. In the north there's a national park with really cool wildlife (Parc National de la Pendjari), I spent two days birdwatching, walking around and driving on 'safaris' on the top of converted jeeps looking for lions (not that I saw any, mind you). But the country's highlights are cultural: remnants of old African kingdoms, the history of slavery, voodoo. In the center of the country lies Abomey, the capital of the Dan-Homey kingdom (the French francisized it to Dahomey), and the old palaces of the kings are still there, decorated with vivid panels full of stories of amazon warriors, bloody conquests, etc. A lot of the wealth of the Dan-Homey kings came from slave trading with Europeans: they would raid villages in the north of the country, transport the slaves to the coast and sell them there to Europeans (Cote d'Ivoire is Ivory Coast, Ghana used to be the Gold Coast, but Togo, Benin and western Nigeria have always been the Slave Coast, more slaves were shipped from here than from anywhere else in Africa). As a consequence, in northern Benin (and Togo) native houses are veritable fortresses, wonderful constructions full of turrets and traps to kill Abomeyan slave raiders.

And then there's voodoo. It's funny, on the one hand Christianity seems to have a strong hold on societies in southern Benin and Togo (a lot of people certainly go to mass every Sunday and participate enthusiastically), but voodoo is also still very, very present. In Benin, voodoo (or vodoun, as it is called) is a fully fledged religion, and very respected as such. There are all sorts of gods and godesses, and people pray to them as much as they pray to the Christian god. There is for example Legba, a god characterised by a perpetually erect penis that they put at the entrance of many (most?) houses for protection. Yemaya, the goddess of the sea, is virtually identical to the one that is venerated in places like Brazil, Haiti or Cuba. People wear ammulets around their necks, and there are incantations for essentially everything that happens in life. In Togo I went to a fetish market, and you wouldn't believe the things I saw there. Vodoun priests use parts of animals to prepare their concoctions, and there were rows upon rows of dog heads, crocodiles, dried-up bats, dead birds (parrot powder helps against stuttering :-)), antelope horns and all other things you could possible imagine. Here's what you do if someone gives you the evil eye: first you buy some owl powder from the local priest. Then you cut yourself deeply, and pour the owl powder into the wound. You rub it in, so that the owl powder mixes with your blood, and, if you've done everything right, your bad luck should cease. Of course I did end up buying a love amulet (I'll report on its effectiveness at a later stage) and a pair of fetishes that, I was assured, will do wonders for my PCR reactions in lab.

I don't want to give a completely negative image of Togo, though, there were some positive things about that country, too. The fetish market was in Lome, and that was a hoot. I also went to a pretty cool mass in the town of Kpalime: I've never seen more enthusiastic believers, the whole service was full of dancing and singing. But one does feel the difference between Togo and Benin: Togo with its dictatorship and its corruption, and Benin with its enthusiastic fledgling democracy. All in all very educational...

Next up, southern Ghana...

Juan

Voudoun has a long history of hiding inside of Christianity, it's Orishas ('gods' is only a loose translation) were never as vanquished as Europaganism was.

I am amazed by your decriptions; I eny you and your trip! West Africa has long fascinated me.

I just learned something about that: vodoun is now the name of the religion, but in Fon (the language of Abomey) it's the name given to the collective of all voodoo deities. Orishas are exactly the same thing, but in Yoruba (one language of southwestern Nigeria).

4. Southern GHANA

Crossing into Ghana from Togo was like a breath of fresh air. Life is simply much easier in Ghana, less bureacracy, things work better, people seem less stressed out. The border of the two countries is formed by low mountains covered in rainforest, the easternmost remnants of the original forest that covered southern West Africa (I thought that at least in historical times the forests of Western and Central Africa were connected. Not so: there's a gap in southern Togo and Benin where not enough rain falls to allow for true rainforest). This is a wonderfully untouristed region of Ghana full of lovely walks in the hills. The big thing to do around here is to look for butterflies (there are gazillions of kinds of insects around here, and I don't necessarily mean the biting kind, although there are those, too). The highest waterfall in West Africa is in this region, too, and although I was not particularly impressed by it (it's nice enough, I guess, but I've seen a lot of waterfalls over the years), I was certainly very, very impressed with the fruit bats that hang in the trees and cliffs around the falls. I've always had this image of bats being smallish and nocturnal, I had never seen them flying in daylight. Well, I certainly saw them doing that here: something spooked them while I was there, and all of a sudden thousands and thousands of really big bats started flying over our heads. That was really quite a sight (reminded my of a scene in the Batman movie...).

Unfortunately there's not much rainforest left in southern Ghana (or in its western neighbour, Ivory Coast), a lot of the land has been cleared for cacao and palm oil plantations. But there are a few corners where national parks have been set up, and there one can see how magnificent these forests were. I was in two of them: Ankasa and Kakum. Ankasa is in the southwestern corner of Ghana, right on the border with Ivory Coast, and is one of the wettest places I've ever been. My clothes were constantly wet there. I met another biologist there, an entomologist interested in making a species list of the moths in the park (you wouldn't believe how little is known about even the most basic things in places like this!). So in the evening he set up his moth trap, a white tent-like structure built around a really bright light, and as the night fell we started to collect moths. And not only moths, all sorts of insects. This is the forest where the largest species of insect lives (a gigantic monster of a beetle as large as your extended hand). We didn't see that, but there were really big praying mantises, dragonflies, grasshoppers, cycads, and of course, tons and tons of moths. It was a wonderful experience, but it's not for everyone: you are standing in the center of a cloud of insects constantly bumping against you. Some people don't like that. And in case you are wondering, no, you don't get stung by mosquitoes there any more than you would get elsewhere, mosquitoes aren't attracted by bright light. You do have to be careful of a few species of large wasps, however... ;-)

Kakum was a different experience alltogether. The big thing to do there is to go on a walkway built in the forest canopy, about 40 meters above the ground. Essentially you walk on narrow, swinging "bridges" from one tree top to the next. A group of bird watchers had set up camp in one of the tree platforms, and so I spent a whole morning birdwatching over the forest using really good telescopes. Really quite a treat. Unfortunately this abundance of wildlife does have its negative sides, too: I did have a live-snake-in-the-toilet-bowl incident. But I survived...

By what I've written about, one could come to the conclusion that Ghana is a 'nature' destination more than a cultural one. That is not the case: like in the rest of West Africa, Ghana's human history is really very interesting. In fact, there are as many (or perhaps more) remnants of the past in Ghana than in it's neighbouring countries. Central Ghana was the cradle of one of Africa's more powerful kingdoms, the Asante (anglicised as Ashanti). A lot of the Asante constructions were destroyed during constant wars with the British at the end of the 19th century, but around the city of Kumasi there are remnants of a style of architecture that give a very good idea of how towns in Asante may have looked like. And it's a really beautiful architecture, with really steep straw roofs and intricate geometric decorations in windows and walls. A lot of the decorations were so-called adiakara panels, very stylized symbols that remind people of Asante proverbs. Each symbol has a specific meaning, but unfortunately in some cases some of those meanings have been forgotten...

Southern Ghanaians are really, really Christian. This is really God country, missionaries have certainly been at work around here. And this has many consequences, some good, some bad, and some just funny. I tend to think that a lot of the really exceptional kindness of Ghanaians towards strangers (especially white ones) may have something to do with their religion. It is so extreme as to be sometimes disconcerting. People will be moved from their seats at the front of buses so that the tourists can sit in the best spot. When you walk on the street, you are greeted by way too many people, always with smiles and waves. Kids come to you, smile broadly and proclaim: "I want to be your friend.". I have said over and over that West Africans are really friendly people, but Ghanaians are exceptionally so. And this makes travelling around the country a very pleasant experience. However, I would be interested to know whether this degree of friendliness extends to non-whites, I suspect it might not. In other words, I suspect that there is a kind of reverse-racism going on here: whites are (in many people's view) both christian and quite smart, and so are adulated to a degree that is sometimes unconfortable.

There is also a general pursuit of European culture (and a desdain of their own prechristian, pagan culture) that I think is not healthy. Two examples: I was in Ghana in February, at the time of St. Valentine's day. I saw ads for St Valentine's day all over the country, but they needed to be explained, people didn't necessarily know what St Valentine's day means. Nevertheless, lots of people were into it, buying presents for each other, etc. On the other hand, old Asante festivals are viewed by more and more people as backward affairs for the people in the village, not appropriate for urbanized, forward-looking christians. And I think that's a great shame. My other example has to do with clothing. In old Asante there was a tradition of weaving textiles in a particular, very intricate way. These textiles have always been quite expensive, and so they have never been used by the majority of the people. However, cheaper versions of these textiles have; people have for a long time clothed themselves in gorgeous gowns of bright colours with patterns that are reminiscent of old Africa. This is changing now; more and more people are shifting to Western-style clothing. There are several reasons for this. One is surely that of course western-style clothes are cool. But another one, probably more important, is that western-style clothes are cheap. Many of them come from Europe and the US as aid items for Africa, and they are sold for very little money. This has a perverse effect on the local textile industry: local cloth-makers cannot compete, and go out of business. And so another bit of old Africa is lost little by little... I don't know, I just have a feeling that the country spends way too much energy chasing a westernized ideal of what they 'should' be, but of course they are always sort of running behind, instead of trying to make their own way... I don't know if I'm being too cynical about this.

One thing that is true is that Ghanaian christians often express their faith in ways that are just really, really funny. Would you really want to go eat at the Innocent Blood Restaurant? Or maybe one could go to the If God Wills Beauty Parlor. Or the Holy Spirit in Charge Communication Centre. There is actually a place called the Solace My Desire Spot, I really do have to wonder what one could possibly do there...:-)

Like the rest of the countries in the Gulf of Guinea, Ghana has had a very long history of contact with Europeans. In the old days this was the Gold Coast, and from very early on (since the 1400's) there have been European commercial interests in this region, at first relating to the trade of gold, ivory, etc., later on to the slave trade. But there is a physical difference between the Ghanaian coast and that of its neighbours: in Ghana there are occasional rocky outcrops, as opposed to the relentlessly sandy, straight beaches of the rest of West Africa. This had an important consequence: European forts were concentrated in the Ghanaian coast (ca. 60 forts in Ghana vs. 2 outside of Ghana). Not all of them survive, but enough do, and one of the nicest things to do in the country is to go from fort to fort and investigate native villages on the coast and flotillas of native fishermen in the water. Nevertheless, visiting these castles is also a troubling experience, because they also represent the most tangible remnants of the slave trade. The experience can be quite moving, especially when you see the apalling conditions in which these people were kept, the desperate scratchings on the prison walls, the door of no return. Interestingly, slaves only started to be traded from the Gold Coast relatively late, people were needed in the gold mines and Europeans generally preferred to buy elsewhere, at first. But the forts were here, and so people from elsewhere (notably the coast of what today is Benin, the place in Africa from where the most slaves were taken) would be taken to Ghana and sold from there.

All in all Ghana is a magnificent place to visit, especially for English-speakers. People are friendly, the country is cheap and there are lots and lots of places to see. In the tourist literature they call Ghana "Africa for beginners", and it's true, it's really quite easy to travel there. I certainly loved it. I did have a bit of a wardrobe crisis at the end of the trip, though. I managed to rip ALL of my trousers, always quite badly. The problem is that Africans really beat the clothes whent hey are doing laundry, and well, things don't last very long. Anyway, at the end of the trip I was reduced to my pyjama pants and my swimming trunks. And because of my size (I am quite big), I couldn't find anything that fit me. I suppose I could have looked for a tailor, but that would have meant losing sightseeing time, and well, I couldn't be bothered. And so I flew back in my pyjama pants... Nobody seemed to mind.

Cheers,

Juan (now back in Vancouver)

Thanks for taking the time to write up this account, Juan. Fascinating - sad, though, the way Africa is being depleted and westernized.