Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  The river, about a half-mile wide, curves languidly towards us through what might almost pass for meadows, which dip down to tall reed beds. Occasionally, the slim, wooden canoes they call pirogues will put out from either shore, precariously packed with foot passengers, all standing.

  On the far side are low buildings, a single palm tree, a water tower and a small crowd watching us as keenly as we’re watching them. The fact that the town on both sides is called Rosso seems to misleadingly minimise the difference between the two banks. In fact, the River Senegal, rising over 1000 miles away in the mountains of Guinea, is an important boundary. It separates not only Mauritania from Senegal, but also Sahara from Sahel, the transitional land, half desert and half savannah, whose name means ‘shore’ in Arabic. More significantly, the River Senegal divides Arab Africa to the north from Black Africa to the south.

  The last few passengers hurry aboard, urged into a sprint by the long-awaited rumble of the diesel engine. We move stiffly out into the stream. I want to stare into the dark brown tide and think romantic thoughts of Saharan rivers, but it’s impossible. I’ve been trapped by a cheerfully persistent ten-year-old boy called Lallala who wants something, anything, from me.

  I try to shut him up by giving him a tin of Smith and Kendon travel sweets I have with me. It doesn’t work. He wants me to translate all the words on the lid.

  ‘Ken-don? What is Ken-don?’

  On Senegalese soil just before four o’clock. Our minders engage in a long negotiation over equipment and visas at the handsome customs shed, built like a small French town hall. It bears not only the inscription ‘Directeur General des Douanes de Republique de Senegal‘, but also a motto, ‘Devenir Meilleur Pour Mieux Servir‘ (Become Better to Serve Better). Very un-African.

  Another long wait. Buses and trucks squeeze out of the narrow car park. Currency changers move amongst the recently arrived, offering deals on the Mauritanian ouguiya, which, on account of the foreign aid propping up Mauritania, is stronger than the CFA franc used by Senegal.

  A tall man in a white robe wanders around calling out ‘Me bank!’ and waving a wad of notes.

  To begin with, the roads this side of the border are much rougher. Tarred but severely pot-holed, they ensure a jolting, punishing ride towards St-Louis. Then, quite suddenly, we appear to have time-travelled to provincial France. The road surface becomes smooth and white-lined. Every village leading into St-Louis has speed restrictions and signs warning us to belt up, back and front. And there are cyclists everywhere, turning out of leafy lanes and emerging from the university campus on drop-handlebar bikes, wearing Tour de France T-shirts. I can’t remember seeing bicycles at all in Mauritania. Basil agrees.

  ‘Beat-up old cars and donkey carts and nothing in between.’

  Shortly before six we cross a wide estuary onto a narrow island with a cathedral and cinemas and draw up beside the clipped hedges, shady balconies and colourful awnings of the Hotel De La Poste, where a long line of Monsieur Hulots is waiting to sign in ahead of us. I can even use my mobile to phone home. This is more than culture shock. It’s cultural convulsion.

  SENEGAL

  Day Thirty-Three

  ST-LOUIS

  I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours in France. It was unadventurous, but it was easy, pottering around the hotel from bar to restaurant to the Piscine Jardin with its wrought-iron flamingos, or just sitting on my hibiscus-clad balcony watching the majestic River Senegal sweep beneath the majestic seven-span girder bridge built by Louis Faidherbe, Governor of Senegal, in the 1860s. After a bit, the Frenchness became almost suffocating, from the check tablecloths to the endless pictures and models of the colon, the caricature of the Frenchman in Africa, complete with pipe and pith helmet.

  The overriding obsession of the Hotel de la Poste is with the 1920s, when St-Louis was the most important town in French colonial Africa and a company called Aeropostale launched a regular mail service from Toulouse to Dakar. The pilots flew their fragile planes alone, often through the night, without radio or radar, in all weathers. They became national heroes, with one of them, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, writing bestselling books about his experiences. On 12 May 1930, a young man called Jean Mermoz took off from St-Louis and headed out across the Atlantic Ocean to make the first successful airmail connection with South America. The sky was no limit. Soon they were flying as far as Buenos Aires and even over the Andes to Santiago, Chile. Then, in December 1936, Mermoz left St-Louis in his sea-plane ‘Croix du Sud’ to make his twenty-fourth crossing of the Atlantic. He was never seen again.

  Mermoz-mania still grips the hotel. Paintings of the planes and the epic route they covered are spread across the walls and even on the ceiling of the restaurant. In reception there are framed press clippings and evocative posters, and in a mural halfway up the stairs the head and shoulders of Mermoz rise from the cold grey waters of the Atlantic, as if gasping for one last breath.

  Before flying he always stayed at the Hotel de la Poste, and always in room 219, on the corner, with the river on one side and the Art Deco post office on the other. It’s the room I’m in now.

  Today I venture out of this tempting haven and take a longer look at St-Louis. No sooner have I stepped out into the street than a score of voices compete for my attention, crutches and wheelchairs race towards me and arms beckon me towards the pony and traps that wait listlessly by. I hire one for the morning and we set out across Faidherbe’s bridge, which clangs and rumbles beneath a constant stream of foot, car, bicycle and hoof traffic.

  One book I’m reading describes its builder as ‘a visionary’, a man who more than anyone embodied the ideal of a West African empire built upon the virtues of French culture and the French way of life. Faidherbe believed unquestioningly that la mission civilisatrice, if decisively and compassionately applied, would benefit the indigenous people, enabling them to set aside their ancient superstitions and divisive tribal loyalties and share in the Gallic enlightenment. They would become les evolues, the evolved.

  It was already too late. The mixing of French and African cultures had been going on long before Faidherbe. Soldiers and traders from Bordeaux settled the town in the mid-seventeenth century and many married the local Fula women, creating an aristocratic class of mulattos, or metis, as the French called them. Many of these women became powerful and successful matriarchs, known as signares, and they wielded great influence in St-Louis.

  My thin and straining horse, his coat worn black by the harness, seems happier when we are off the bridge, on which he slithered awkwardly. As we explore the quieter backside of the island, along by the wharves where the warehouses for the rich trade in gum arabic were located, it becomes clear that the French dream of urban orderliness is not shared by the majority of the Senegalese. The roofs of the old, red-tiled, balconied colonial buildings are full of holes. Their once neat shutters are missing and the rutted dirt streets beneath are full of people, talk, small-scale enterprise, food and rubbish.

  Another, shorter bridge takes us onto a long thin finger of land between the river and the ocean. Having water around is such an unfamiliar experience that I hire a pirogue to take me back to the hotel. On the way, we pass an extraordinary Dickensian scene. Stretching along the banks of the river is a great concourse of fish smokeries. Long racks of darkening fish stretch across a fuggy landscape of makeshift ovens, tended by fierce and grimy women. They scream abuse and wave their arms at us when the camera turns towards them.

  Eat a late lunch at the house of Jacob Yakouba, one of the best-known Senegalese artists. His house is surrounded by a pinkwashed wall covered in bougainvillea and there is a large tent in the garden, where friends, fellow artists, writers and politicians can hang out. Here Jacob, like a cultural Godfather, dispenses advice, encouragement and artistic protection to a considerably extended family.

  He’s a stocky bear of a man, a Senegalese Picasso, with a massive head and thick calves emerging from capacious navy-blue shorts. He’s been painting
since he was seven. Despite his bull-like size, his gaze is gentle and his speech unexpectedly soft. I watch him working in his studio on a disappointingly conventional portrait of a pretty, loosely clad woman. The walls of the studio are thick with similar paintings, all quite joyfully sexy.

  ‘I prefer to paint women, first because of my mother, who helped me to become an artist. Then, because of my wife Marie-Madeleine. When I meet her it give me strength to focus my work on women.’

  He admits that painting women so explicitly in a Muslim country could be a problem, but he has an international reputation and, anyway, fanaticism doesn’t exist so much in Senegal.

  ‘In St-Louis all the big families are Catholic or Muslim. We have always lived side by side. At Christmas the Muslims celebrate with the Catholics and during Tabaski, the sheep festival, the Catholics celebrate with the Muslims.’

  He completes a last, long brush-stroke, caressing the outline of neck and shoulder, and stands back, head cocked.

  ‘Anyway, women are beautiful. I was born from a woman so I don’t see why there should be any taboos.’

  At that moment there is a swirl of pink at the door and the aforementioned Marie-Madeleine makes a modestly grand entrance, to see if we are ready to eat. I realise that not only is she a formidable presence, but also her formidable figure is the subject of many of the paintings.

  We sit round the table and all dip into a single dish containing a powerfully delicious concoction called domoda. Fish balls, made with green onions, parsley, garlic and spices, are served in a rich stew with sweet potatoes. When I ask how long it must have taken someone to prepare all this Jacob beams at the womenfolk.

  ‘They did it all,’ he says generously, before adding, ‘in the Moulinex.’

  Much laughter.

  Marie-Madeleine is probably better known in Senegal than Jacob, as she appears regularly in a TV soap opera, in which she plays a tough woman refusing to be traded between husbands. All of which makes for an interesting insight into marriage a la Senegal.

  Jacob explains that Islam gives the man the right to have up to four wives, but legally, under the Family Code, he must choose monogamy or polygamy. Once chosen the option cannot be reversed.

  Marie-Madeleine remembers the day she and Jacob went to the tribunal to get married.

  ‘They asked Jacob, “Do you want to be monogamous or polygamous?”’

  Jacob goes on. ‘When I said monogamy, the judge just looked at me and said, “Hold on. Are you crazy, man?” I said why. He said, “You’re a man, you’ll regret this.”’

  Marie-Madeleine heaves with laughter.

  ‘And how long have you been married?’ I ask.

  ‘Thirty years.’

  As I leave I tell them we have to be in Dakar next morning. Jacob grimaces.

  Has he ever thought of moving to the capital?

  He shakes his head dismissively.

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Dakar has no soul, no life! Pas d’ame!’

  Day Thiry-Four

  DAKAR

  I peer desperately through the window of our vehicle looking for the soul of Dakar, but all I can see is a 30-foot-high Coca-Cola bottle and a lot of sheep. Then we plunge down beneath a flyover and onto a thickly clogged four-lane highway leading to the centre of the city.

  Six hours after leaving St-Louis, we’re picking our way slowly through suburban neighbourhoods sporting parking meters, traffic lights, health clubs, even a cyber cafe, and more sheep.

  I’m bewildered by all this ovine activity, until I learn that we are a week away from Tabaski, the day on which Muslims commemorate the story they share with Jews and Christians of Abraham being commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, only to spare him at the last minute and allow a sheep to be substituted. At Tabaski the head of every Muslim household must kill a sheep and cook it for his family. The deed must be done personally and the sheep must be alive on Tabaski morning, so a frozen supermarket sheep will not do. Which must account for the enormous number of fluffy white creatures massed in the city of Dakar this afternoon. Wherever a few blades of grass can be found they’re nibbling away - on traffic islands, motorway verges and football pitches. Jarga, a sheep-fattening product, is advertised on billboards, and a banner spread across the street proclaims ‘Promotion Tabaski! Gagnez des Moutons!’‘ - ‘Win A Sheep!’

  It’s not only sheep they’re selling. Every traffic jam is a retail opportunity in Dakar. Salesmen come tapping at the glass, offering up a formidable array of carved heads, sunglasses, hi-fi equipment, shirts, cutlery sets and carving knives (presumably for doing the deed on Tabaski morning). So slow is our progress that at one point salesman’s enthusiasm successfully coincides with occupant’s boredom, and Peter, our camera assistant, purchases some irresistible electronic bargain. The goods are handed over and Peter is sifting uncertainly through his CFAs when the lights change and we move unexpectedly rapidly across a busy intersection. The salesman plunges into the traffic and races suicidally after us. Just as he catches up, another bottleneck clears and we accelerate down a main road. All of us inside are now rooting for the waving figure behind, who, with total disregard for personal safety, leaps, vaults, twists and turns his way through the traffic to reach us just as the lights flick to green. Like a relay runner stretching for the baton, he grasps the money, and a great cheer goes up as we pull away.

  Evening at our hotel overlooking the sea. Yellow weaver birds are busy in the trees, which swing and bend in a pushy westerly breeze. A couple of miles offshore is the low rocky outline of Goree Island, dark as its history. Goree was a trading depot for the rich produce of the African interior, gold, skins, gum arabic, but above all the several million slaves bought from Arab and African traders and shipped to the plantations of America by Portuguese, English, Dutch and French. Not that it was a business for which Westerners were originally responsible, for it had been going on long before they arrived. It’s estimated that between ten and fourteen million slaves were transported across the desert between 650 and 1900. Goree has become the symbol of this most cruel of all Saharan trades, and is now a World Heritage Site, with many black Americans coming over to remember ancestors for whom Goree Island had been their last view of Africa.

  I order a Gazelle beer and open up my map. I’m at the most westerly point of the African continent. However, there is a train that leaves this city twice a week for Bamako, the capital of Mali. It will take us back into the interior and to within striking distance of Timbuktu. That, I remind myself, is why we are here.

  Dakar has a reputation as a lively, liberal, cosmopolitan town with a thriving music scene, which is why we find ourselves, late on this first evening, in a thatched shed down by the Fish Market. One side is open to the sea and the Atlantic slurps gently against a jetty, causing soft breezes to waft in and aerate the sticky atmosphere inside. Unfortunately, these cooling breezes also carry a pungent aroma of sewage and rotting fish. This seems to make absolutely no difference to the enthusiasm with which everyone throws themselves into dancing, foot-tapping and drinking to a six-man band called Nakodje. The sound is a fusion of Western and West African, with saxophone, clarinet and guitar lining up alongside Fula flute from Guinea and a balaphon (like a xylophone) from Mali. The audience embraces white and black, men and women in equal numbers. I find myself sitting next to a group of staid-looking Senegalese men in suits. They show a surprising interest in our filming and are keen to know if my programmes sell in Senegal. When I shake my head apologetically their eyes light up with relief, and they explain that they are Muslim and if it had been on Senegalese TV their wives would have seen them drinking beer.

  The manager, a rangy black man with rubbery legs and red eyes, has taken a shine to me and announces my presence here to a bemused audience.

  Towards the end of the evening, I’m at the bar drinking a last Flag beer and talking to Malek, the young Senegalese bass guitarist, who’s halfway through a business manage
ment course, and Tom Vahle, an American member of the band, who has taught himself to play the Fula flute.

  ‘It only has three holes in it. It’s a combination of singing and blowing at the same time.’

  An arm snakes round my shoulder and the face of the club manager looms close to mine. He’s seriously unsteady now and I’m not altogether sure what he’s on about.

  ‘I’m Lebou,’ he says with a flourish. ‘We are fishermen, right. Dakar belongs to us.’

  He’s also an ex-basketball player, now sixty years old. I’m impressed and ask him how he stays in shape. He leers, wobbles, grabs my head and whispers loudly in my ear.

  ‘Making love. Every single night.’

  This boast completely convulses him and induces a brief coughing fit. My recollections of the ensuing conversation are hazy, to say the least, but I do remember a nicely surreal exchange when he was expanding on his previous experience.

  ‘Is this different from the other clubs you’ve managed?’

  ‘Oh … yeah.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The other clubs were,’ he pauses for quite a while, searching for the right word, ‘rectangular.’

  Day Thirty-Five

  DAKAR

  The national sport of Senegal is la lutte, wrestling, and there is a competition tonight out in Pikine, one of the poorer suburbs of Dakar, which will be attended by Mor Fadan Wade, the great hero of Senegalese fighting, and one of the president’s bodyguards. Though we have an early start to catch the Bamako train tomorrow, this sounds like an unmissable opportunity.

  It’s a long drive across town and the paved roads have turned to sand by the time we pull up beside a collection of low, dimly lit buildings. We’re warned to watch our belongings, but the young men who crowd around the bus offering to carry our gear are exuberant rather than threatening, and I feel more secure out here than in the centre of town.

  A circle of white plastic chairs marks the ring where the wrestling will take place. The sandy arena is illuminated by floodlights on tall poles and a PA system is already in operation blasting out exhortations to the slowly gathering crowd.