Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  Don’t have a running board on your car? No problem: Just undress and snuggle next to the AC on max. Be careful not to overdo it and cause frostbite. A frostbitten appendage is not a pleasant sight, nor easy to cure, as I unfortunately had occasion to research one cold and stormy evening in Chamonix after skiing Mont Blanc at a windchilly 40 below. I located an article in a medical journal whose physician/author advised against the old-fashioned method of hopping into a hot tub, warning that the sudden increase in temperature might damage the family jewels. The good fellow recommended gently slipping the frozen member into something soft, lubricious, and at body temperature—and keeping it there for about two hours.

  A touch of tinea cruris was hardly the worst affliction acquired on my travels. I’ve dearly paid my dues: I tore a hamstring in a glacial crevasse during a rescue operation; broke two ribs after I slipped off a cliff and landed chestfirst across a felled tree trunk; broke another rib in a freak accident in Casablanca; tore the rotator cuff in each arm in high-speed ski accidents; contracted a paralyzing case of Lyme disease from the bite of a deer tick; required rescue during a disabling bout of nitrogen narcosis when a malfunctioning depth gauge led me down to 160 feet when diving off Curaçao; almost lost my left arm in Canada when a drug-resistant strain of staph took up housekeeping in my elbow following a nasty bicycling fall; and contracted that virulent case of giardiasis in India that knocked 25 pounds off my weight in three weeks—and saved my life from the lynch mob.

  I also sliced my kneecap to the bone when my motorcycle skidded in a sand drift at the bottom of a steep hill on Aruba, which presented me with yet another opportunity to advance medical science with a brilliant technique for cleaning and disinfecting a wound with chlorine when no first-aid kit is handy: I searched for the nearest unpopulated backyard and jumped into their swimming pool.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Just Call Me God”

  In this chapter, I’ll let God speak for himself. But first, a bit of background.

  God was the fourth of 13 children born to a poor fisherman and his fishmonger wife in a tiny village on the coast of Togo. God grew up in Ghana, educated himself as best he could, and, after his parents died when he was 19, took many lowly jobs to provide food and shelter for Bernard, his youngest brother, and himself until he advanced to become a tour guide.

  I was not aware of any of this, nor was I a happy camper, when I first met him in November of 2003 in the steamy, crowded airport terminal in Cotonou, the seat of government in Benin. I was exhausted after 23 hours of traveling from New York and I knew my luggage had missed the Air France flight when I changed planes in Paris, because the baggage handlers at Charles de Gaulle Airport had called one of their periodic wildcat strikes. Moreover, I had serious misgivings about taking a tour, something I rarely do and usually hate. I’ll only purchase a tour if I’m totally ignorant of the language in a large country where few speak any language I can comprehend (e.g., Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and 1980s China), or if the country required me to book one to obtain a visa (e.g., North Korea and Bhutan). This tour was different: I’d been seduced by a promo piece promising an in-depth cultural tour of the “Golden Kingdoms”—Benin, Togo, and Ghana—with an emphasis on voodoo, funeral rites, and slavery, an irresistible trifecta of creepiness.

  A smiling, sweating giant of about 40, dressed like a game warden, greeted me: “Welcome to Benin, Mr. Albert. I am your guide, Godfried Peters Agbezudor, owner of Continent Explorer. But you can just call me God.”

  We drove toward our hotel to catch a few hours of sleep before an early departure for a two-day drive to a voodoo sacrificial site 330 kilometers north of Cotonou in that Kansas-sized country of nine million. I asked God about voodoo and, as he waxed ecstatic, I extracted my microcassette recorder from my carry-on bag and turned it on:

  “Voodoo is a very serious religion all across West Africa. It is the worship of the natural things around you, how to make peace with them, like the thunder, fire, the wind, and rain, even smallpox. My father was a voodoo priest, and the oracle chose me to be the next one. I am a reincarnate of my father’s father’s father. I got the voodoo religion when I was a boy, going with my grandfather and father from ceremony to ceremony. At 21, grandfather initiated me into the high priesthood. I was taught how to call unto my ancestors, how to sacrifice, how to call upon the spirit of the elders, to chat with them. When I speak to the elders they reply. But the reply comes back in the form of an oracle that is manipulated by shells. And this oracle is something that is done by a specialist who sits beside me whilst I perform my rites. My asking for it comes out from the village, from the family, from everyone around me who says: ‘Why don’t we ask this question?’”

  I interrupted him, a touch rudely: “Why don’t we ask the question whether my luggage is likely to arrive from Paris before we leave here tomorrow?”

  “No, that is not a question for the elders,” he replied without taking offense. “I have spoken with Air France, and it will arrive tomorrow night. I’ll arrange for my brother to get it and drive after us, so you will have it within two days. We should not wait for it. We need to get to the pilgrimage site to arrive at an auspicious day for making the sacrifice.”

  Apostate that I am, I asked him if he was sure the strikers in Paris were not making a sacrifice of my luggage.

  “We take sacrifice very seriously here,” he replied, still smiling, still without the stern rebuke I deserved. “I sacrifice first to the almighty God, because the voodoo religion teaches that there is one omnipotent God. And this God created man and the voodoos. The voodoos have supernatural powers that man cannot see, unless they reveal themselves. When we make sacrifices we pass it through them because they have easy access to the almighty God. When we need to send a message, we call on the spirits of the voodoos to take this message through our ancestors and then to our almighty God. The voodoo spirits are never wrong. They may not tell you exactly what to do. They may tell you to go ask this person because he is authorized to give that answer. You may find your answer, or you have to keep looking.”

  Godfried Peters Agbezudor—“Just call me God.”—owner of Continent Explorer in Ghana, exits the barber shop where we had just gotten the best one-dollar haircuts available in Lome, the capital of Togo.

  I had visions that I’d have to keep looking for my luggage for the next two weeks, a long time to hang in a hot, humid climate with one T-shirt, one Jockey, and a pair of bush pants.

  God explained that he was going to sacrifice to thank the powers for helping him get his own tour company and the ability to earn far more than the average Beninese, a third of whom earned less than the poverty level of $1.25 a day in a land where the average GDP was below $1,300 a year—less than a quarter of what I was paying God for this one fourteen-day trip. (Benin is one of the 48 poorest states in the global economy, peoples so shockingly impoverished that the combined annual GDPs of those 48 poorest nations is less than the combined net worth of the three richest men in America! And that is not a typo.)

  We pulled into the hotel parking lot and, as I exited the old Land Cruiser, I noticed, in the backseat, two trussed-up somnolent chickens.

  “God, why do we have two chickens in the backseat?”

  “For the first sacrifice.”

  “Why don’t we just buy a couple of chickens when we get there?”

  “Because the voodoo religion requires me to talk to them for three days.”

  “About what?”

  “I am required to explain to them why I am going to kill them.”

  And so, for the next two days, as we drove north on a bouncy two-lane tarred road toward the Dankoli Pilgrimage Site, I sat in the car in my same sweated-through clothes and listened to my tour leader explain to the two doomed birds that he had to sacrifice them to thank the gods for rewarding him with his own touring company, of which—lucky me!—I was his first client.

  We left the humid, marshy, coastal region of long lagoons connected to the sea, passed
through a hundred-mile stretch of undulating plains dotted with forest remnants in a savannah mosaic of thorn scrub and big baobab trees, and, after two days, reached a low plateau of flat land bordered by deforested, rocky brown hills, while God continually talked to the chickens, and the chickens continually pooped all over the car.

  “God,” I asked, “is it really necessary to explain your motive to the chickens over and over?”

  “Very necessary,” he replied. “Sacrifice is not that you get an animal and just cut the throat and let the blood spill out. You first talk to the animal. You have to consistently explain the reason why you are going to sacrifice it. You have to keep talking to it until you are sure the animal has got the message, because the first splash of the blood from the animal carries the message that has been introduced to this animal for the past three days or more. And this blood is going to go through the object on which this animal has been sacrificed and goes out into the world that is unknown to you and I.”

  “Are these regular chickens, like from the butcher shop?”

  “We do not get our chickens from any shop. Every family raises a few chickens. For sacrifice we get a chicken from our own family. Always a male, a rooster. Never brown. Black chickens when we want to invite the spirits of the dead to listen. For my sacrifice, white is the right color.”

  “But why a rooster?”

  “To send a message you need the proper animal. It could be a chicken, a sheep, a cow, a horse. Or a dog, because dogs are security; they watch while the owner sleeps. It will be sacrificed to the guardian god of a village. And dogs are special when it comes to messages. They run faster than anything, and they carry the message because they are the first link with humans. Different situations require different animals. If you are having a disaster in your family, you need at least a male sheep. We sacrifice sheep to Shango, the god of thunder. He is the giver of law, like a judge who raps his stick to make noise to command attention. If you killed somebody, which is against the laws of voodoo if you did not kill for a good reason, and you have been punished by the gods, offering a chicken will not be enough ransom for your guilt. The gods will tell you what animal you should sacrifice for your sin to be washed away. It may start from a cow—from one to two or three.”

  “God, we have a crucial election coming up in my country and I don’t want our president to be reelected. I was planning to donate, as I always do, several thousand dollars to my political party when I get home, but maybe I should, instead, get a goat, talk to it for three days, and cut its throat?”

  Without realizing I was joking, he replied, “No, I am sure a goat is not enough to get rid of a president. You will have to promise the gods at least ten cows. But do not sacrifice all the cows in advance. Start with two cows. As the election gets closer, two more. Then, if that politician is defeated, you must quickly sacrifice the other six cows.”

  Unfortunately, I never got around to killing those cows, instead wasting my money on my political party, and my dear country ended up with “four more years” of that president and its worst recession in 80 years.

  On our third evening Bernard reached our campsite with my luggage, for which he’d been compelled to pay a “commission” to the baggage clerk of $100. Petty corruption of this sort is rampant in Africa, and Benin was no exception. It was beset with corruption and the typical problems of many African states: insufficient electric power, a weak business climate, chronically high unemployment, low literacy, high infant mortality (203 deaths per 1,000 births), inadequate potable water, limited natural resources (only some limestone, marble, and timber), underdeveloped subsistence agriculture, few food-processing facilities, overreliance on one crop (cotton, which constituted 40 percent of its GDP, 80 percent of export earnings), low wages for women workers, child labor, forced labor, an unreliable land tenure system, a rudimentary commercial justice system, game poaching, deforestation, desertification, a large external debt, little tourism, and a woeful shortage of cash.

  But Benin, the first in that continent of 54 states to ever make a peaceful transfer of power from a dictatorship to a democracy, had resolved to deal with these problems and give its citizens tangible benefits of their democracy, and it was making progress toward that goal.

  * * *

  As we were nearing northernmost Benin, I asked God why we had to drive so far to make a sacrifice.

  “It is very, very necessary to go to specific points where sacrifices are done. You cannot just sit somewhere and say, I am sacrificing. In our societies we have various altars, and each sacrifice has a specific place to go,” he answered.

  The roosters woke us the next morning at the first hint of dawn. God fed them, and the condemned pair ate a hearty last meal while he again explained the necessity for their impending demise.

  We drove a few miles and pulled over at an unmarked and unremarkable spot that only the initiated knew. We followed a well-worn path up a hummock, then down, then up to a capacious fly-covered mound of animal parts, feathers, bottles, handwritten notes, papers, and other sacrificial objects, invisible from the road.

  “Do you know why we have two roosters?” God asked me.

  “Backup?” I ventured. “In case one escapes?”

  “Not exactly. There are two kinds of blood sacrifices. One when the animal is shared as a communion with everybody. You take a piece of the meat to eat. The second is a sacrifice that goes only to the gods. Nobody touches it, not even the feathers or the fur; it goes out whole onto the altar. I am going to make both kinds now because I want Continent Explorer to be successful. It is very important to me, my son, my family, our future.”

  He untied the legs of the first bird and held it at shoulder height. “For this bird,” he said, “I will cut its throat and sprinkle its blood on the pile. After three minutes he will be dead. And we will keep him. And Bernard will cook him for our dinner tonight.”

  And so it was done.

  “But this other one is only for the gods. We will not take it. We will leave it all for them. And I will sacrifice it in a different way. No knife for him. I will pull out his tongue. And the bird will bleed to death. Also in three minutes.”

  And so it was done.

  * * *

  In a remote Upper East region of Ghana, I had an unexpectedly provocative experience. We were in the Tongo Hills, ten miles southeast of the regional capital of Bolgatanga, hiking a thousand vertical feet to the Tengzug shrine, a cave at the top of the hill that contained the most revered oracle in the land. After an hour of sweaty scrambling up the bare gray rocks—relieved by the shade from hundreds of thin, twisted trees whose radiant whitish trunks grew from cracks in the boulders—we were about 30 minutes from the top. A guard stopped us, as he did the other pilgrims and tourists, and told them that if they wished to proceed farther, they had to remove all clothing and jewelry above the waist, the disrobing to show purity in the presence of the spirits, the abandonment of adornment so as not to compete with the gods.

  I was fascinated by the reaction of the foreign females, teenage to elderly, many of whom, judging from those reactions, had never been to a nudist beach or ever gone skinny-dipping. I sat near the guard and observed the scene for half an hour in the company of several dozen native idlers who had lots of time on their hands and a little lust in their hearts. I watched as each woman wrestled with this Hobson’s choice: Do I, after all my planning, spending, driving, and climbing, abort my visit to the famous cave, or do I, for the first time in my life, strut topless before dozens of strange men?

  * * *

  We drove south from the Tongo Hills and reached the torrid, muggy Ghanaian coast in three days, there to inspect a brutal remnant of man’s inhumanity to man: Elmina Castle, the oldest surviving European building south of the Sahara, keystone of the Triangular Slave Trade.

  When the Portuguese constructed Elmina in 1482—with the help of a young Italian sailor named Christopher Columbus, whose ship brought some of its building blocks from Lisbon—it serve
d as a trading post, the first in Africa. After gold was discovered nearby, Elmina shipped, during the early 1500s, close to 24,000 ounces a year. As the precious metal petered out, the traders began buying slaves from neighboring African chiefs. Then, reaching farther, they bought slaves from the king of Dahomey (now Benin) on what they called the Slave Coast. Then, farther still, they purchased those captured by Arab slavers in Niger and Mali; and, finally, they bought from victorious warrior tribes all over West Africa those enemy captives that had not been killed.

  Thus began the highly lucrative triangular trade, where enormous profits were made by the nation that controlled it—first the Portuguese, then the Dutch, finally the British.

  When the slaves arrived in that New World they were bartered for the locally grown sugar, rice, coffee, tobacco, cotton, molasses, and rum. This produce was then shipped to Europe, to be exchanged for copper, textiles, glass, pots, guns, and ammunition that were, in turn, shipped to Elmina and the other forts to pay for yet more slaves, with a profit made on each leg. And on it went, for 300 years, until ten million had been torn from their families and villages.

  According to Godfried, up to half of those captured died on their long forced marches—sometimes a thousand miles—to Elmina, to Cape Coast Castle, and to the other holding pens we visited. Another third are estimated to have perished inside those slave fortresses as a result of poor food, unsanitary conditions, and inadequate ventilation, while awaiting shipment to the New World.