Literary Break: Guinea Highlands

The sudden three-week full-stop of posting has been mainly due to some exciting, life-changing preparations and the travel and distractions that go with them; the time since the last week of March has flashed by. Secondarily, the social and journalistic atmosphere of this stretch of West Africa has been dominated by the near-panic of the Ebola outbreak which started in innermost Guinea, in the mountainous frontier near Sierra Leone and Liberia, to which the virus has spread via the well-plied trade routes down to Monrovia.

Amidst the paranoia and panic, and my own preoccupations, I thought it'd be timely to post the below book excerpt, which has been sitting in the Drafts folder of this blog for literally years. It's beautiful, evocative description is the best anecdote to the hysteria around the place of origin of the Ebola virus. I hope you'll enjoy, and in the meantime I am getting myself situated and I'll be back to more regularly postings shortly.

©Google Earth.

High up in the wooded flank of the Guinea Highlands, a land of icy streams and alpine pastures, rises the stripling Niger, and its affluents, the Dion, the Sankarani and the Milo. Southward, beyond the rocky watershed, the mountain streams have bored their way down the cliffs and are lost in the vast stifling rainforest that blocks off the Highlands from the Gulf of Guinea. But on this northern flank, each river has carved out a delightful valley of its own, and the most delightful of all is the Milo Valley, an African garden of Eden.

It was here, in the district of Konya, that the kola trade had flourished since the Middle Ages, providing its own bonanza. The kola nut was grown in the clearings of the forest, marketed in the valley and then carried laboriously across the wilderness for hundreds of miles to the mud villages and mud cities of the Sudan and beyond. The nut, one of the few stimulants allowed by Islam, was served as a luxury throughout Islamic Africa, and the Middle East. To organize this demanding trade came the Dyula, Muslim immigrants from the coast. The Dyula metropolis was Kankan, a teeming village of mud huts on the banks of the river Milo.

The lines of trade pushed out and became more sophisticated. The arterial trade routes designed for the delicate and perishable kola nut-- fair markets, dry storehouses, trustworthy guards, able porters -- could also supply delicate girl slaves from the forests. In return back came ingots of salt from the Sahara and the luxuries of North Africa that the caravans had brought from still further away: fine cloth from Morocco, pottery from Tunis, horses from Arabia.

Sometimes, a passage in a book can, in a few sentences, transmit the essence of an entire world. Thomas Pakenham's ‘vast, scholarly and delightful’* 1991 epic, The Scramble for Africa details many of the European campaigns, and the figures who led them, into the interior of the continent for the sake of crown and glory. The above passage, conjuring a tropical Switzerland is itself so intriguing and magical, and in Pakenham's history, sets the scene for the French campaigns from both the coast and the desert to source the Niger River. The book as a whole is a vast, essential chronicle how the global slave trade, stretching its wicked tentacles deep into the the remotest redoubts of the region—increasing their vulnerability just as the European armies penetrated further into indigenous domains.

Today, the heart of the Guinea Highlands is nominally protected by a National Park designation: The deep verdancy at the center of the above in the Google Earth image is the Parc National Haut-Niger. Three symmetrical clouds float over its center. At right, a slightly larger bit of cloud hovers just to the west of a white-grey mass that is the city of Kankan. The Niger, quickly widening as it enters southwesternmost Mali, can be seen at upper right. West African Manatees have been scientifically verified as far upriver as this border region; the Parc's population, thought to be several thousand, have reported dugong sightings deep in the park's interior, thousands of miles from the delta, and the Gulf of Guinea. 

Illustrations from Excerpt of "House at Sugar Beach," 2008

These two illustrations, by Laura Carlin, accompanies an excerpt from New York Times journalist Helene Cooper's House at Sugar Beach, and appeared in the NYT Magazine a few months before its September, 2008 publication.

Ms. Carlin was younger than 30 when these works appeared in the Sunday magazine. Although much in keeping with Ms. Carlin's extensive oeuvre, her illustrative style, childlike in its frenetic linework yet hauntingly moody holds an unmistakable kinship (though not patronizingly imitation) of contemporary African graphic art, with elastic interpretations of scale and perspective. The collage of objects, some seemingly plastered from, its fitting to imagine, newspaper clippings, power the works with contextual and visual depth, drawing the eye into their shadows from the flat plains of the water and scratched ground and cloudy, crayon-like skies, surrounded by transparent, hurried outlines of ships, palm trees, and figures.

This all makes Ms. Carlin's pieces a serendipitous match for Ms. Cooper's narrative of list childhood roots and connections, both in her own account, and beyond that countless horrors of the War, so many of which remain untold either in word or art.

And yes, I love that there are Pan Am jets.

Literary Break: The War Came

Two excerpts from two excellent, recently-published books.

Sinkor, Monrovia, July 1990

"We scattered. We all ran between the houses, everyone fleeing in different directions. Some were getting shot down. Others were escaping. I went inside an abandoned building. I climbed into the eaves of the roof. There was a little platform where the roof meets the wall. I saw that there were three other men who had done exactly the same. We could not be seen from below. We lay there in absolute silence, not daring to say anything to one another...

We stayed there, the four of us, for a long time, nobody speaking in more than a whisper. It grew dark. The new morning came. We were still lying there.

At about eight o'clock, the other two decided to climb down to the ground…Augustus and I deliberated. We did not think it was safe. Throughout the night we had heard soldiers, gunfire, shouting. Early in the morning we had heard them again. We stayed where we were.

So the two went down and left, and just a few minutes later, we heard shouting, then pleading, then gunshots. And then silence; we were sure they were dead. We heard men cursing in Krahn.

And so we just stayed. On and on and on. Augustus and I. In the end, we stayed in those eaves three nights. At no point did it seem safe to come down. The gunfire was always too near. But on the third morning, we could not take it any more. We had both dehydrated. We had both become sick.

So, we came down. Augustus was our point guy. He was checking around to see where the soldiers were. We had gotten a block, maybe just a block from the building where we had hidden, when the soldiers saw Augustus, and we both ran.

I ran into a house. I was very, very fortunate. It was one of those houses you call a "straight" : you know those buildings where the front door leads straight to the back down a passage. I ran through the front door and closed it, through the back door and closed it. They thought I was in the house, they searched it, but I was still running. Ideas were just flowing to me: do this, do that, ideas were just flowing to me. I threw myself in the long grass. Lie down.

I heard people scream in the house. They were beating them. Then I heard my friend Augustus. He was crying: "Don't kill me! Don't kill me!" They said: Where's the other rebel? Where's the other rebel?" "I don't know."

And then Ba Ba! Ba Ba!

I didn't hear his voice again."

--Little Liberia, Jonny Steinberg. pp.86-88

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Kilungutwe, Congo, June 2000

The soldiers herded the traders and the locals into a small house below the road, a sturdy cement structure about twenty feet by forty feet, with blue wooden doors and windows and a corrugated iron roof. The sixty people stood packed like sardines in the small house. The sun went down, leaving the room in darkness except for some cracks in the window, through which they could see a fire that the soldiers had lit outside. It was hot and humid, and the air was filled with the sound of muttering and breathing. Several people prayed out loud. A baby's cry turned into a persistent wail, until finally her mother began sobbing and said that her baby was about to suffocate.

"We called the soldiers outside and asked them to have pity on the newborn," Michel told me.

Without asking any questions and as if one cue,t he soldiers let the woman out. Suddenly, the prisoners heard screams coming from outside, first from both mother and child, then just from the child, then silence…All of a sudden, the room was full of people crying and praying to God in French, Swahili, and whatever other language came to their lips.

Michel was in the back of the room, where he was crushed against a wall as the others tried to get as far as possible from the door, through which the soldiers came and grabbed people one by one. As the people thin ed out, he was bale to get a better look at his surroundings in the half-light. He saw that one of the thin ceiling boards was loose. He hastily climbed up and bumped into several other people lying in the small space between the ceiling and the roof. It was even hotter and danker here, and he could feel the bodies of his neighbors trembling with fear. He was close to fainting and felt like vomiting.

After a while, the screams faded below them and they could hear soldiers shuffling around the sound of bodies being moved outside. Someone was counting, then a voice in Kinyarwanda said:

"How many did we put in the house? Did you count?"

"Yes there were at least sixty."

"Are you sure? Where did the rest of them go?"

"I'll check again."

Feet began to scrape the floor below them and then someone piked the ceiling boards.

"We! You up there! How many are there?" Michel's neighbors' trembling increased until he was afraid they would begin to rattle the ceiling boards. "I can hear you up there! How many are you?"

After poking for a while, the soldier went outside. They hear the men muttering with each other, and then several came back into the room. Suddenly, an iron spear tip burst through a ceiling board not far from where Michel was lying. The boards were made out of flimsy plywood and the spear pierced it easily. The next jab hit Michel's neighbor in the leg, who cried out.

"Come down now, or we will get out guns! Just tell us how many you are, and then come down!"

Several more spear jabs came through the roof. Three of Michel's fellow prisoners climbed down from the hideout. Michel turned to a woman who was lying next to him.

"We must pray now, " He told her. "we are going to die." She started crying.

****

"When I looked to my side, I saw a woman in white lying next to me," Michel finally said. "I hadn't seen here before, and It bought it was strange that she was wearing all white. I turned to the woman lying on my other side, who was sobbing, and asker her, 'Do you see her? The woman in white?' It was very strange to see a woman dressed all in white. It was ver dusty then; it was the dry season. White clothes were maybe things you wear to church or to a baptism. And she seemed--she seemed to be glowing. My neighbor shook her heard and continued sobbing. Then the woman in white said--her voice didn't seem to be coming from her mouth, but from inside my head-- she said, 'Stand up! Stand up now!" And I gathered my strength and just stood up. The roof was very low-- you couldn't even kneel there-- but as a stood up, a sheet of roofing came undone from its blots, and I could see the night sky. Thee was no moon that night, I remember. I stood up and slide down the roof. 'Someone's getting away!' one of the soldiers cried out, and they opened fire. I could hear the bullets whistling by me and going into the ceiling where I had been lying with the others. But I wasn't hurt. I jumped down from the roof and began running into the bush that surrounded the house. My legs were moving on their own." Michel looked at me. 'That angel saved me. God saved me."

He ran through the palm trees and the cassava fields that surrounded the village as shots rang out behind him. He kept on running until he found the hut of a relative of his on a hill several miles away. Together, they watched the village burn in the valley below them.

--Dancing In the Glory of Monsters, by Jason K. Stearns, pp. 258-260

Literary Break: Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

Kisangani, 2006. Image courtesy Flickr user Julien Harneis.

Last week I finished reading Jason K. Stearn's incredible book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. In less than 400 pages, this awesome volume gives a sweeping yet concise, multifaceted yet lucid history of the wars in the Congo, and their causes, characters, and consequences.

The book details several locations, especially the Great Lakes region in the east, and the capital, Kinshasa, in the far west. But the events, like the Congo River itself, turns decisively at Kisangani, the jungle metropolis of Stanley Falls, which in many ways links the two halves of the huge country.

Stearn provides a description of the city that is romantic and majestic, yet hopeless and horrifying.

While the book is hugely important in understanding the events of the Congo's complex conflicts, many of its pages take the time to describe not just the facts and events of the country, but its places and its people. Highly recommended reading.

Interspersed in the passages below are borrowed images of Kisangani/Stanleyville, as well as the fish weirs of the Wagenia.

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Kisangani, c.1970

In May 1999, The city of Kisangani, later dubbed the City of Martyrs, fell victim to the worst bout of urban warfare the Congolese war had ever seen. The battle had dramatic consequences: it spelled the end of the Rwandan-Ugandan alliance and brought to the fore the plunder of the country's riches.

The city's reputation had not always been so bleak. The town of a million people was located in the middle of the country at a bend in the Congo River. In the 1960s, it had been an attractive city laid out along grand evens lined with jacaranda and mango trees. It is clear that the Belgians had had big plans for the jungle city: Italianate turrets and futuristic, Art Deco architecture; streets named after Chopin, Beethoven, and Belgian royalty; and a city divided by the great river into "Rive Droite" and "Rive Gauche" reminiscent of Paris.

Map of Kisangani, 1997. From the University of Texas Libraries Collection

Kisangani formed a trade hub with the eastern provinces by road and with Kinshasa by river. Roads branched out into the jungles to the north, where there were large ranches and coffee plantations, and merchants brought huge bags of rich palm oil down the river in dugout canoes. However, Mobutu's kleptocracy had reversed the flow of time in the town, as buildings crumbled and the jungle reclaimed land.

Building in Kisangani, built in 1925.

Image courtesy Panoramio user Jambo Sana, 2009.

The war had further sapped the life out of Kisangani. The whitewash had faded from the Art Deco facades, the pavement was cracked and overgrown with grass, and most shops were boarded up and empty. River traffic had all but ceased, as no boats were allowed up the river from Kinshasa into rebel-held territory. With no fuel or spare parts available, the only motorized traffic on the streets were a few dozen vehicles belonging to humanitarian organizations. The only means of leaving town--unless you wanted to trek on foot for a week through the forest--was by plane, so all luxury goods had the cost of an air ticket slapped on to their price tag.

Kisangani, 2008.

The isolation had its impact on the locals. Almost 10 percent of children were severely malnourished, retarding their physical and mental development and making them prone to disease. The inhabitants now had to rely on the tens of thousands of toleka ("let's go" in Lingala), the bicycle taxis with cushions bolted onto their baggage racks for passengers. Except for the parish and several hotels, which had diesel-run generators that sometimes worked, the city was left in the dark after sunset. Kerosene lamps and candles flickered in bars at the roadside.

Stanleyville, Belgian Congo, 1957

Kisangani became the graveyard of Rwandan and Ugandan reputations, where the two countries' lofty rhetoric gave way to another, more tawdry reality.

---above passages from pp.235-6

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Other than finger-wagging by diplomats, there were few consequences for the occupying forces. A joint investigation by the Rwandan and Ugandan army commanders arrived in town and agreed on taking steps to prevent further fighting, but little was done…They banned toleka riders--around 2,000 in the whole town-- from working, accusing them of complicity with Wamba and the Ugandans. They even dismantled the famous scaffolding set up by the Wagenia fishermen in the Congo River; they said the fishermen had helped guide the Ugandans to safety during the fighting. The scaffolding, imposing thirty-foot-tall pieces of timber lashed together and anchored in the rapids, has been a tourist attraction in Kisangani since the first Belgian colonial postcards were made. The Rwandans certainly did not know how to make themselves loved.

--above passage from p.246

Zaïrien postage stamp, c.1973.

Excerpt from Teju Cole's Open City

The following passages are from the recently-published novel by Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole's Open City, which has already met with wide acclaim, from the New Yorker, and the New York Times, and has been discussed in the Economist, and on Bombastic Elements.

The book describes several months 2006-7 in the life of Julius, a young Nigerian-American Columbia University psychiatry resident. Set largely in Manhattan with a side trip to Brussels, parts of the main character's childhood in Nigeria included. Aside from his African identity and some great passages recalling his Nigerian youth, Julius visits an immigration detention center with his girlfriend's church, and encounters a young Liberian man there, who tells of how he came to be locked up in Queens (pp. 64-69):

The man who sat in front of me had a broad white smile. He was young, and dressed in an orange jumpsuit, as were all the other inmates. I introduced myself, and he smiled immediately and asked if I was African. He was as good-looking, as striking in appearance as any man I had ever seen. He had delicate cheekbones, a dark, even complexion, and the whites of his eyes were as vivid as his white teeth...

He lowered his voice a bit, leaned toward the glass, and said that America was a name that had never really been far away when he was growing up. IN school and at home, he had been taught about the special relationship between Liberia and America, which wa like the relationship between an uncle and a favorite nephew. Even the names bore a family resemblance: Liberia, America: seven letters each, fur of which were shared. America had sat solidly in his dreams, had been the absolute focus of his dreams, and when the war began and everything started to crumble, he was sure the American would come in and solve the whole thing. But it hadn't been like that; the Americans had been reluctant to help, for their own reasons.

His name was Saidu, he said. His school, near the Old Ducor Hotel, had been shelled, and burned to the ground in 1994. A year later, his sister had died of diabetes, an illness that wouldn't have killed her in peacetime. His father, gone since 1985, remained gone, and his mother, a petty trader at the market, had nothing to trade. Saidu had slipped through the shadows of the war. He was pressed many times into fetching water for the NPFL (the National Patriotic Front of Liberia), or clearing brush, or moving bodies away from the street. He got used to the cries of alarm and the sudden clouds of smoke, he learned to lie low when the recruiters came calling for either side. They would accost his mother, and she would tell them he had sickle-cell disease and was in the throes of death.

His mother and her sister were shot in the second war, by Charles Taylor's men. Two days later, the men returned and took him away with them, to the outskirts of Monrovia. he carried a suitcase with him. At first, he thought the men would make him fight, but they gave him a cutlass, and he worked on a rubber farm with forty or fifty others. At the camp, he saw one of his mates, a boy who had been the best soccer player in school: that boy's right hand had been severed at the wrist, and had healed to a stump. Others had died, he had seen corpses. But it was seeing that stump where the hand used to be that did it for him; that was when he knew he had no choice.

That night, he packed his soccer shoes, two spare shirts, and all his money, around six hundred Liberian dollars. At the bottom of his tattered backpack, he placed his mother's birth certificate. The rest of the things in the suitcase he emptied into a ditch. The suitcase itself he threw into the bush. He did not, himself, have a birth certificate, which was why he took his mother's. He escaped the farm, walking the road alone in the darkness, all the way back to Monrovia. He couldn't return him, so he went to the burnt ruin of his school, near the Old Ducor Hotel, and cleared a corner there. He thought that if he went to sleep, maybe he would die. The idea was new to him, and it felt good. It helped him sleep…

That night he slept in the breeze from an open window, until a hissing sound woke him up. He opened his eyes, but kept his body still, and in the charred darkness he saw, across the long room, all the way at the other end, a small white snake. He tense, wondering if the snake had seen him, but it continued to move, as though it were looking for something. Then a gust came through the window, and Saidu saw that the "snake" was actually an open exercise book, its pages fluttering in the wind. The memory of that apparition remained, he said, because he often wondered, then and later, if it meant something for his future. Morning came, and he stayed at the school all that day, hiding, and slept there when night fell. That night again, the book moved in the darkness and kept him company; he stayed half-awake and watched its pages rising and falling, and sometimes he saw it as a snake and sometimes as a book.

The following day, he saw some ECOMOG soldiers from Nigeria, who have him boiled rice. He pretended to be retarded, and he hitched a ride with them, traveling in their armored truck as far as Gbarnga, in the north of the country. Then he went on foot to Guinea, a journey of many days, switching between his sandals and his soccer shoes. Both gave him blisters, but in different places. When he got thirsty, he drank water from puddles. He was hungry, but he tried not to think about it. He couldn't remember how he walked the ninety miles to the small town in the Guinean hinterland, or how that brought him, on the back of a farmer's motorcycle, to Bamako.

By now, the idea of getting to America was fixed in his mind. In Bamako, unable to speak Bamana or French, he'd skulked around the motor park, eating scraps at the marketplace, sleeping under the market tables at night, and dreaming sometimes that he was being attacked by hyenas. In one dream, his mate from school came to him, bleeding from his severed hand. In other dreams his mother, aunt, and sister showed up, all of them crowding around the market table, all of them bleeding.

How much time passed/ He was unsure. Maybe six months, maybe a little less. He eventually befriended a Malian truck driver, and washed his truck in exchange for food. Then this driver introduced him to another one, a man with light brown eyes, a Mauritanian. The Mauritanian asked him where he wanted to go, and Saidu said America. And the Mauritanian asked him if he was carrying any hashish, and Saidu said, no he had none. The Mauritanian agreed to take him as far as Tangier. When they left, Saudu wore a new shirt the Malian driver had given him. The truck was packed with Senegalese, Nigeriens, and Malians and they had all paid except for him. It was extremely hot during the day, and freezing at night, and the water in the jerry cans was carefully rationed…

In Tangier, he said, he had noticed the way the black Africans moved around, under constant police surveillance. A large group of them, mostly men, and mostly young, had a camp near the sea, and he joined them. They wrapped themselves in blankets against the cold wind from the sea. One man next to him said he was from Accra, and told Saidu that journeying through Ceuta was safer. When we enter Ceuta, the man said, we have entered Spain, we will go tomorrow. The following day, they went to a small Moroccan town near Ceuta in a van, a group of about fifteen of them, then they went on foot to the border with Ceuta. The fence was brightly lit and the man from Accra led them down to where the fence met the sea. A man was shot last week, he said, but I don't think we should be fearful, God is with us. There was a boat waiting, operated by a Moroccan ferryman. They held hands in prayer, then loaded up, and the man rowed across the shallows. They completed the ten-minute journey to Ceuta undetected, rolled ashore, and scattered into the rushes. Ceuta, as the Ghanaian had said, was Spain. The new immigrants split up in many directions.

Saidu entered Spain proper after three weeks, through Algeciras, on a ferry, and no papers were required. He found his way across the southern part of the country, begging in town squares, lining up at soup kitchens. Twice he picked pockets in crowded corners, throwing out the ID cards and credit cards, keeping the cash; this he said, was the only crime he had ever committed. He went all the way across southern Spain until he crossed the Portuguese border, and he kept going until he got to Lisbon, which was sad and cold, but also impressive. And it was only after he arrived in Lisbon that the bad dreams stopped. He feel in with Africans there, working first as a butcher's assistant, and then as a barber.

Those were the longest two years of his life. He slept in a crowded living room with ten other Africans. Three of them were girls, and the men took turns with them and paid them, but he didn't touch them, because he had saved almost enough for the passport and his ticket. If he waited another month, it would be one hundred euros cheaper, but he couldn't wait; he had the option of saving money by flying to La Guardia, and he'd asked the ticketing agent if she was sure La Guardia was also in America. She had stared and him, and he shook his head, and bought the JFK ticket anyway, just to be sure. On the passport, which was made for him by a man from Mozambique, he insisted on using his real name, Saidu Caspar Mohammed, but the man had had to invent a birth date, because Saidu didn't know his real one. The passport, a Cape Verdean one, arrived on a Tuesday; by Friday, he was in the air.

The journey ended at JFK Terminal Four.