Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  When Steve and I had driven through the dehydrating deserts on our way around the world, we’d talked about our desert dreams. His was to drink an ice-cold beer in the middle of the Gobi. (And we had, for the past ten years, been talking of visiting Mongolia together, where he’d have the opportunity to quaff that brew.) My desert dream—also a dessert dream—had been to suck up an ice cream in Timbuktu. To help move this fantasy closer to a reality, I had, way back in 1988, bought and stored a foil-wrapped packet of freeze-dried ice cream. Shortly before I left on this trip, I’d dusted it off, ignored the expiration date, and put it in my duffel bag. The evening we reached Timbuktu, I dined splendidly atop a blanket spread on the cooling sands as the round red orb of the sun set over the Sahara, savoring the ice cream for which I’d waited more than 40 years.

  While God and Bernard voted for the comforts of a hotel near the auto repair shop, I pitched my sleeping bag in an old caravanserai on the edge of town where there was a warm wind blowing the brilliant stars around a cloudless black sky.

  I met a Tuareg caravan driver there who invited me to his tent for some tea and goat, and where, in broken French, we exchanged stories, during which I consumed at least four pungent glasses of Tuareg tea laced with fermented camel milk. He told me how, like his father and grandfather before him, he ran his caravan of 120 camels, which plied the ancient route from the salt mines 700 km to the north. And I told him—to his astonishment—about subways, snowball fights, ice-skating, apartment buildings, elevators, skyscrapers, and—Allah forgive me—bikinis.

  I felt at ease with the caravan driver, but not with other Muslims I met when I wandered the sandy streets of Timbuktu alone. For more than 30 years I had been comfortable with Arabs and greatly enjoyed their company. On several visits to Morocco I’d shared friendly meals with them in the casbahs and souks. On vacations in Israel I’d spent much time in East Jerusalem, where I had a favorite Arab barber. But on my last visit there, the faces were hostile, and three angry teens had thrown rocks at me. I sensed that attitudes and actions were changing, that the Arabs were no longer as friendly and welcoming. I was even becoming a little afraid of them. This feeling had been negligible, even after February 1998, when the leaders of various jihadi groups promulgated a fatwa titled, “Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and the Crusaders.” I didn’t take it seriously—until September 11, 2001.

  After I put 9/11 in context with the bombings of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, of the Khobar Tower apartments in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania in 1998, and of the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000, I began to perceive that ordinary Americans visiting Islamic lands might become targets. Yet I personally encountered no animosity based on my nationality until around 2005.

  Most of the 1998 fatwa castigated the U.S., but the operative section that increasingly worried me as I traveled in Muslim countries and took note of increasing acts of Islamic terrorism, was this edict: “By God’s leave, we call on every Muslim who believes in God and hopes for reward to obey God’s command to kill the Americans and plunder their possessions wherever he finds them and whenever he can.” Furthermore, before this trip I had scanned the hadiths, which elaborate the Koran and the utterances of the Prophet, and was shaken to find many exhorting the faithful to armed militancy. Those dictates didn’t leave any wiggle room, yet I had six more Islamic nations to visit.

  It’s difficult for most Westerners to comprehend the dominant role religion holds in the lives of devout Muslims. I had a surprisingly frank conversation with two thirtyish Muslim high school teachers in Timbuktu, men who appeared modern and reasonable, wherein they told me, without equivocating, that their duty to jihad would continue until all of us infidels either adopted the Muslim faith or were forced to submit to Muslim rule.

  Delighted as I was that I’d finally made it to Timbuktu, I doubted if I’d ever return.

  Two years later, a fierce group of radical jihadis and Tuareg swept into Timbuktu, ousted the elected government, took control of the town and all northern Mali, imposed a brutal form of Islamic law, and turned it into a magnet for international terrorists—Afghans, Pakistanis, Nigerians, Ansar Dine, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. They destroyed three UNESCO World Heritage Sites revered by the townspeople, replaced the gentle style of personal worship practiced by the locals with a severe and repressive version of sharia law, stoned a couple to death for adultery, beat and imprisoned those who disagreed with them, sent hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing, and vowed to end all Western influence and visits. French commandos eventually drove them north into the mountains, where they are still alive, dangerous, and determined.

  When the repairs to our vehicle were finished, we headed south-southwest, from whence we’d come, after a day of which we would turn east toward Bandiagara and the Dogon Country, about 600 kilometers distant. After an hour of intense shaking on the washboard track, which had been worn down several feet to the unforgiving rock and hard-packed earth by generations of users, God, who’d had his fill of welding shops, instructed Bernard to drive on the softer desert but stay parallel to the sunken track.

  Easier said than done. The sands were so dry and loose they offered little purchase, especially when we had to climb the numerous 20- and 30-foot dunes. After we’d gotten stuck three or four times, and had to dig, drag, and push our way out, Bernard avoided the dunes. Whenever he approached one, he’d veer around it, but invariably to the left, I noticed, southeasterly. Soon we’d lost sight of the track.

  I have an excellent sense of direction, and after an hour of dodging dunes, I was sure we were heading southeast and getting way off course and far from the road, but God disagreed. I’d stored my compass in Bamako with most of my gear, making it hard to prove my hunch. We ran into a sandstorm, through which Bernard continued to drive, albeit slowly. The storm intensified and it blocked out the sun for an hour, adding more disorientation. Soon after the air cleared, we reached a track that showed clear signs of having been used by trucks and cars. God was sure it was the track we wanted, and chided me for my lack of faith in his sense of direction, but I was positive it was the wrong track. I looked at my map of Mali and concluded that it was a track toward Ansongo, a small town near the border with Niger and several hundred miles east of where we needed to be. I told this to God and complained that he carried no compass or GPS in this landscape without landmarks.

  “I agree that it is very easy to get lost in the Sahara,” he replied, “but only if your brain bearings are not working properly. We need no compasses. We go by the wind and, by night, we drive by the moonlight. GPS is something new in the world. It didn’t use to exist when I was starting to guide. It is still new to Africa. I do not have a GPS because I do not think it is necessary. Getting lost sometimes in the Sahara is part of the fun as an explorer. It makes you discover new lands and more interesting places. A compass could be helpful, but I don’t think it is also necessary. We don’t use a compass. We don’t use a GPS. We just travel as we feel.”

  I, for one, was feeling very unhappy. I knew that if we were indeed headed toward Ansongo, we could well be stranded there for a week if it had no gas, which was not my idea of “fun as an explorer.”

  When we stopped for a bathroom break, I took off my watch, laid it flat on the sand, and, with the help of a straight twig and the bright sun, used it as a compass. You align the hour hand with the shadow of the upright twig, and true south will then coincide with a point halfway between the hour hand and the twelve o’clock position on the dial. This technique confirmed we were heading southeast, but God was too proud to yield to a client’s sense of direction or my makeshift azimuth indicator.

  After half an hour we came to a well under a stand of palm trees where a score of people were encamped and watering their herd, the only people we’d seen in four hours. They spoke not a word of English, or French, or any of the many other languages God knew, but when I carefully repeated the world “Bamako�
� to them five or six times, they appeared to recognize it, and nodded. Although we were not planning to go all the way to Bamako, it lay in the general direction in which we needed to go, and I felt that, since it was the capital of their nation, they might know where it was. By gestures and a quizzical look I did my best to convey that we wanted to head toward: “Bamako. Bamako! Bamako!” They finally understood and pointed us in the correct direction—far to the right, more than 100 degrees west of the way we’d been heading.

  God gave in and drove west-southwest. It took us two anxious hours before we reached the sunken track we sought and knew we were correctly headed toward Bandiagara.

  Since then, God has let me guide him on four other trips—one over the Brooklyn Bridge and three along the sidewalks of New York, where he has a girlfriend whom he visits each year when it is the rainy season in West Africa.

  In Bandiagara we had to wait 24 hours for a sandstorm to abate, then left for the all-day drive to the Bandiagara Escarpment to spend three days camping among the Dogons, one of the few ethnic groups to have retained their ancient customs and avoided conquest, thanks to their formidable mountain redoubts.

  I’d been fascinated by them for 30 years, ever since I’d bought an elongated Dogon sculpture of what I thought was a dachshund but turned out to be their fanciful vision of a horse. I felt some trepidation, however, as we approached their redoubt because I wasn’t sure the Dogons and I were compatible. They equate a woman’s vagina to an ant hole and her clitoris to a termite mound, and I’d never thought about them that way. Nor did I want to.

  The 400,000 Dogons inhabit the central plateau of Mali, south of the big bend in the Niger, in a region bisected by the Bandiagara Escarpment, a sandstone cliff 1,600 feet high and a hundred miles long. They fled there from other parts of Mali a thousand years ago, after they refused to forsake their ancestor worship and animist beliefs for those of Islam, and took up defensible positions along the cliff and within its caves. Under Islamic law, they were classified as ar al-harib, fit for slavery. The Arab slave traders had murdered the men they caught and shipped their women and children off to servitude in the burgeoning cities of West Africa.

  They are not an aggressive people. They strive for peaceful tribal harmony, which they warmly display at periodic ceremonies where the women praise the men, the men thank the women, the children express reverence for the elders, and the elders acknowledge the contributions of the young.

  They first lived here as subsistence farmers, channeling rivulets of rainwater that flowed to the base of the escarpment to grow pearl millet, rice, sorghum, tobacco, peanuts, and vegetables. They later fashioned an ingenious irrigation system and now make good money raising a substantial cash crop of sweet onions that are in demand throughout West Africa. As we drove through the otherwise monochromatic, khaki-colored topography toward the escarpment, we passed field after field of these onions, incongruously dark green, lush and cool.

  The Dogons believe in female genital mutilation. FGM is widely performed through Africa, primarily as a tactic by male-dominated societies to deprive women of sexual pleasure, believing this will keep them faithful. The Dogons, however, employ FGM for an entirely different and, to them, totally fair and helpful reason. They believe that when their god created the universe, He was inexperienced and made some mistakes, leaving men with a useless feminine part, the foreskin, and women with an unnecessary masculine part, the clitoris. The Dogons, men and women alike, seek to correct these “errors” and enable each sex to assume its proper identity through circumcision, making men more masculine and women more feminine, by eliminating those “superfluous” parts—sort of equal-opportunity mutilation. They conduct the ceremony with great care and pride in a special circumcision cave using the sharp and sterilized instruments of the village blacksmith, after which they watch over the circumcised youths until all danger of infection has passed.

  Far from being sexist, the Dogons accord women more esteem and equality than most African societies. A Dogon woman is not regarded as a servant or chattel, but as an independent person who comes and goes as she wishes. She is not required to share her husband with another wife, leaves her home whenever she wants, and is economically self-sufficient. She has her personal granary, where she keeps her clothes, grooming supplies, jewelry, food, and any money she earns from farming, basketmaking, or selling sculptures.

  So how should our supposedly enlightened Western civilization confront the Dogon practice of FGM? Should we accept and respect it or try to impose our values on them? Are we right? Are they wrong? Who are we to judge?

  We returned to Bamako and bade each other a fond farewell. Bernard gave me his XL Oakland Raiders T-shirt (which can be dangerous to wear on Jets turf), and I reciprocated with a Big Apple tee bearing the picture of a bright yellow taxi, which he treasures. God flew to Casablanca to meet his New York girlfriend and Bernard took a three-day bus trip back to Ghana. I was now a week behind schedule because of the breakdowns, so I flew to Mauritania instead of going by land as I’d planned. We left the battered Cruiser in a workshop in Bamako, waiting to receive a replacement radiator, although I think what it really needed to receive was Extreme Unction.

  I chipped in for the repairs, but the decline of the dollar was a shocker. Its value had eroded 25 percent since I’d traveled the past summer, and merchants throughout Africa now shunned it. On previous trips, my dollars were always in demand. People had desired the dollar, saved it for a droughty day, and much preferred it to any other currency. Now they didn’t want it, and it was almost embarrassing for me to ask them to take it. Its slide had been so precipitous and continuous that the money changers were afraid to hold it even one day, lest their profit on the exchange evaporate. It was a humbling experience for one who’d always felt proud and powerful dispensing greenbacks.

  * * *

  I was not looking forward to the part of West Africa south of Mauritania. I take no pleasure in visiting once peaceful and prosperous nations destroyed by stupid wars. I’d delayed these visits for more than five years, waiting for most of the killing to stop in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and Nigeria. I was heartened when, a few days before my departure from New York, the Ivory Coast announced it was peaceful enough to start delivering the five million pieces of mail that had accumulated during its civil war. But I’d need a lot more good news to make me look forward to this slog.

  Each of these states was sure to be, in its own way, distressing and depressing because of their recent civil wars and internal disputes. Most Africans had received, and therefore expected, little from life, but the citizens of three of these states had been well on their way to having it all before they blew it, and they therefore felt the loss ever more deeply. How humiliating to have been the shining success of the continent and to have pissed it away. How ironic to call such a country “developing” when it was sliding backward. I frankly admit that I was only going there to check them off the list, and I wanted to get through them as quickly as possible.

  But I was thwarted right from the get-go. The flight schedules along my route were a shambles because the civil wars had so severely disrupted air traffic that they’d bankrupted many African airlines. Others had fallen victim to government corruption: The ruling elite in many of these countries treated the airlines as their personal toys, often commandeering them on short notice to fly their families somewhere, bouncing the paying passengers, eventually forcing them out of business. My plan to fly directly from Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, just a few hundred miles down the coast, proved impossible. I was compelled to fly from Mauritania to Dakar in Senegal, from Dakar to Abidjan in Nigeria, from Abidjan to Accra, the capital of Ghana, and, at long last, to a dilapidated airport in Sierra Leone, from which I had to take a five-hour journey by bus and ferry to reach Freetown because so many roads and bridges had been demolished, consuming two days for what should have been a two-hour jaunt.

  Sierra Leone, w
ith its abundance of gold and diamonds, had been a flourishing economy before it erupted into a ferocious civil war from 1991 to 2002. It was now one of the ten poorest on earth. It had been set back decades, with a crumbling infrastructure and dire poverty. I saw Freetown’s dusty streets filled with the armless and legless victims of its recent fratricide, so numerous that the amputees held daily soccer games on homemade crutches, a pathetic poor man’s Paralympics. I did not stay long.

  The Ivory Coast had been, in the 1980s, widely hailed as an economic miracle and a model of West African stability. It began to destabilize in the late 90s, with the decline in cocoa prices and mounting foreign debt. It crumbled on Christmas Day of 1999, when the military staged a coup over unpaid wages, poor living conditions, and government corruption, and it collapsed into chaos in 2004 when machete-wielding mobs of thousands attacked French homes and military bases. By the time I felt it safe to visit, I saw only a decayed hulk, drab and lifeless, of peeling paint, crumbling concrete, buildings whose walls had been sprayed by machine guns, high inflation, high unemployment, the irreplaceable loss of the French expats who had run the economy, and few prospects. I did not stay long.

  Liberia had been ruled for more than 150 years by former American slave families who constituted less than 5 percent of the population and treated the indigenous folks like dirt, but who nevertheless managed to create, until the 1970s, a profitable economy based on rubber and other natural resources. It was now an economy where the only ones doing well were those who sold barbed wire or supplied armed guards. Razor wire and broken bottles embedded in cement bristled atop every wall. Hundreds of UN soldiers with blue armbands protected the government buildings, most of which had been burned or ransacked. Security personnel in army boots and carrying nightsticks were stationed outside most shops. Yet, thanks to the paternalistic attitude and financial assistance the U.S. has long maintained toward Liberia (which the Liberians reciprocated with a strong and genuine love for America), I witnessed the hope for a better tomorrow there, with dozens of rebuilding projects dotting Monrovia, many sponsored by USAID. But tomorrow is not today, so I did not stay long.