05 August 2009: At the Dakar Airport

I’ve been away longer than this before, but there’s something about a perpetually transitory lifestyle that prevents you from ever really settling for a moment.

And so, I miss home.

I miss stupid things like bubble baths and wearing heels and cranberries and terribly stupid horror flicks, and I miss important things like libraries and safe streets at night and, of course, my family. I miss things I knew I would, like driving, but I also miss things I didn’t realize I would: urban bustle – that uniquely American brand of sarcasm – free speech. I miss all these things and so many more, and I feel a sort of deep-seated fatigue that tells me I’m ready to go home. S o, here I am at the Dakar airport, counting down the hours.. and even minutes.. until I see my family.

The silly part is that I know even now that within 15 minutes of getting into my family’s car at the airport I’m going to see something and think – oh, Africa…

Valuable Skills Africa Has Taught Me

(I look forward to applying these to my graduate student career.)

• How to ride on the back of a motorcycle (with luggage)
• How to haggle
• How to pee anywhere, with some grace
• When to trust strangers
• How to speak Sheep [an international language]
• How to tell the difference between sheep, who will pursue a conversation, and goats, who won't
  
• How to eat a mango, passionfruit, papaye, watermelon and pineapple with only a penknife
• How to ignore men (and eventually, anyone) yelling for my attention
• How to bluff
• When to bluff
• When to call someone else’s bluff
• How to bucket-bathe
• How to conceal valuables in a mailed package
  
• How to kill a mosquito with sniper-scary accuracy
• How to find the Southern Cross
• When to walk in front of a speeding car
• How to tell whether someone is Christian or Muslim
• How to sit still
• Why crocodiles are malevolent sons of bitches and should be avoided at all costs
  
• How to accept being dirty
• How to hitchhike
• How to launder money (both literally and criminally)
• How to charge a camera battery on the most rickety of outlets
• And how to close my heart to beggars

… and, unfortunately, Skills I Really Should Have Learned, Considering, But Didn’t

• how to patiently wait ten minutes for a website to load
• how to speak Arabic (other than insha’allah, which has become a frighteningly frequent part of my otherwise secular speech)
• how to gracefully wake up at 6:45 am in the absence of fire or other immediate bodily danger
• how to quickly count fat stacks of bills (well, won't need that in grad school anyway)

Guine-Bissau

The last country on the trip.. but one of my favorites. Why is it that friendly people mix so well with dictatorship? Somebody should do a study..

Food: Interesting mix of Portuguese and African. Mediterranean spices mixed with game and West African staples – delicious!
Best Eaten: Alhieras – a Portuguese dish I’m probably spelling incorrectly. A bit like the chicken version of meatloaf, only with a fried egg on top and not foul. Delicious, in fact, with ketchup.

Quote: David and I spent a bit of time wandering in and out of the old presidential palace, imposing in front of a wide, beautiful rond-du-point but most striking for its bombed-out roof and bullet-riddled sides. Needless to say, it’s not really occupied anymore, and what with the doors being kicked in and all we took the opportunity to check out the interior a bit.

We thus picked up a friendly stranger who was pretty excited to tell us about the history of the place, and walking with him a bit after we saw a posh abandoned SUV with small round holes all over one of its back-seat doors. I asked him about it, and he replied with bursting enthusiasm: “Oh, that one’s not even that good. You wanna see other cars of assassinations?? We got a lot of those out back!”

Other Hygienic Lows – This really is a ‘hygienic’ low; I cut my foot getting off a bus in southern Senegal, and two days of rainy season (read: street sewage season) later I decided it was time to start covering that sucker up with a band-aid before leaving my room in the morning. Yessss Neosporin!

Could I live here: You know, it feels foolish to say it about an obviously unstable country, but I think I could. The language is beautiful, the people are some of the nicest I’ve ever met, it doesn’t feel angrily post-colonial like Côte d’Ivoire or (worse) Senegal. So you have the risk of the occasional abrupt governmental takeover and accompanying unpleasantness. But really, as everyone’s pointing out nowadays, coups are going out of revolutionary fashion… they’re like, *so* 1980s.

The Good Old Days... ?

So, Senegal remains one of Africa's most dynamic countries, one of West Africa's great movers and shakers, a cultural treasure-trove for literature, art, and music.

It's also a treasure-trove of secluded French ex-pats and high-class Senegalese who will cringe daintily at your French grammatical mistakes. The rest of the country, despite illiteracy, can read the writing on the wall and has fallen in line with the value system, understanding that survival is best pursued through manipulations of a France-aligned hierarchy. (Begging is big.)

Food: As a proper "almost-France" country, the food is delicious and varied. Baguettes are fresh and hearty, and peanut butter is packaged under "groundnut paste" and oddly textured.

Best Eaten: I actually left the airport during a layover and spent over $10 to go into the city just to go back - a fifth and sixth time - to The Best Pastry Shop In The World. You cannot imagine. France can compete.. but only just barely.

Quote: There was a French family along with us on the boat trip, a very sweet couple with two young children who sang in nerve-shattering high-pitched French for most of the ride. It was darling if you're into that sort of thing, and even better because the kids were sheltered from the midday sun by a nice big umbrella.. held, of course, by their black "adult companion".

Despite the choral concert David and I spent the time intently discussing the possible relationships between this family and their obviously local 'friend', piecing together the clues: he never seemed to interact informally with the parents, occupied himself with keeping an bored eye on the kids, did not participate in conversation on board, and was always holding that umbrella - so much so I began to call him the Umbrella Man. He held it for the kids, then he held it for the mother, then he held it for himself a bit because no one else wanted shade, then he held it for the kids again at the parents' request.

We started to make fun of it, but it kind of made me feel sick in my stomach. Of course, that doesn't take very much these days, but still. We were both reminded of a quote from an archaeologist who spent some time in the area - "Colonialism hasn't ended for the French yet."

Worst Experience: Getting into a taxi on my last day in Africa, being so excited about seeing my family that I was friendly to the driver, and realizing that he was passing up the airport to go somewhere totally different just as he began to explain to me in several different languages that he loved me and wanted to kiss me. He quickly discovered my much frostier side. Needless to say, I henpecked the crap out of him at top volume until we pulled up at the airport lobby.

Best Experience: Dakar is great fun to walk around, and an incredible city. Between the pastries, the fruit market, the hip-hop scene, the bustle, the buildings, the boats, and the sprawl I am going to miss Dakar.

Could I live here: No.. I occasionally forget a preposition when speaking; my French isn't nearly good enough.

Size Doesn't Matter!

It may be one of Africa's smallest nations, but the Gambia is up there with the best of 'em for friendliness, culture, natural loveliness, and (my most important indicator) dictators...

(And I am typing this from a non-Gambian computer, so I can say that.)



Food: I didn't get to sample much local food while I was here - having had domoda recommended to me, I kept trying to order it at restaurants, only to receive an apology and, oddly enough, the recommendation that I try one of the other (European) dishes. Oh well. The European food was really good, anyway.. and I did get to try some excellent local fish.

Best Eaten: Magnificent Italian food made by a basket case of an Italian chef, who moved to the Gambia to open a luxurious Italian restaurant currently patronized by the American ambassador, and.. us. Interesting to talk to, but lost all ability to follow a conversation if he heard the sound of wheels crunching outside. Poor dude. I'm not sure if a small Gambian town was the right place for his talents. But his Italian food was, I kid you not, without equal.

Worst Eaten: This is getting harder and harder to think up. Nothing comes to mind at all for the Gambia, despite my assuring myself that there HAS to be a "worst".



New Hygienic Lows: We took a day off near the coast and went to the beach - the sand there was so fine that it was virtually silt. It also felt really, really good on your skin. Always one for tactile experiences, I ended up rolling around in it in my shorts and shirt until I was completely covered in thick muddy dribbles of dark grey silt. It was probably pretty clean silt, but I had to leave behind those clothes anyway. Smooth silty sand on your skin = yes. Fine bits of sand stuck in the wrinkles and trickling out of your pockets for the next year = no.



Quote: You (I) always get a bit nervous at border checkpoints. Bribe demands, medical vacc scams, baggage searches, currency declarations, there's just a host of opportunity there for the unscrupulous official. When I'm not busy humming Criminal, I spend most of my time trying to look as innocent as possible and leave as soon as possible without looking like I'm trying to leave as soon as possible. I usually get by okay, but at the Gambian office I was a bit over-eager and took off out of the control office before I had gotten the stamp. Er, oops.

But if I was worried that this would peg me as a suspicious suspect and win me some unofficial detention - which it would with some zealous officials - I was wrong. One of the first things that was said to me in the Gambia, and I think it's pretty apropros for how friendly the country really is: the border official just took my passport and stamped it with a laugh, saying "Well, I guess you just can't wait to leave and go see the Gambia!"



Worst Experience: Though I did not have high hopes for my relations with crocodiles, not even I was expecting the intensity of my abhorrence upon first contact. To look at a crocodile, I now feel, is to openly gaze into the face of evil. There is no other creature I would work harder to avoid, and no creature I would be less willing to trust. A snake can pull off the same eerie reptilian coldness, but snakes are also cool - they are, in fact, too cool to care. A snake is so cool, he's not going to bother with the likes of you - he's just gonna keep chillin' and keepin' it real in his slithery way. A crocodile, on the other hand, would probably go well out of his way to mess up your face. And, I suspect, thinks about nothing else all day long. Between a room filled with one thousand large cockroaches and one sleepy crocodile, I would take the cockroaches any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

The above sentiments should clarify my state of mind when, to pursue David's religious interests in back-road Bakau, we visited the sacred crocodile pools and were invited to - can you guess? - pat them.

I was less than anthusiastic about even being in a forty-foot vicinity of crocodiles without a high cement wall or electrified wire fence to separate us. From afar, I was happy to take pictures of David patting the massive crocodile, but the experience was not one I was looking to share in a more direct way.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience!!" The eager, pat-happy guide urged me.

I explained to him that I was eager for it not to be my last lifetime experience.

He was unconvinced, and throughout his explanation of the crocodile pools and their local religious significance, kept un-subtly coming back to that point of croc-patting. I don't know what foolishness prompted me to finally agree just as we were leaving, but I did, just a few quick horrible pats. It was indeed every bit as horrible as I imagined. I get the shudders just thinking about it. All I could think about for the rest of the day was taking a shower to wash away the scaly evil that was surely seeping into my very skin despite the liberally soapy hand-washing that followed at first opportunity.

There is a silver lining though - David took the camera for the Moment of Patting, and while the Pat pictures themselves are somewhat anticlimactic he brilliantly captured my reaction afterwards. HI LA RI OUS. I never knew I could contort my face that way.



Best Experience: I managed to meet up with a few former students of a Peace Corpser, and after the initial awkward intro we managed to get on the [taboo] topic of the government. Sirens hailing the presidential cavalcade were sounding behind us, soldiers were lining the streets, and it was pretty much not a good place to discuss freedom of expression. One of the students, though, highly intelligent, managed to say volumes with just a few words in the classic comment I will hereafter associate with the Gambia - "Did you know that.. our president can cure AIDS?"

Another high moment is the calm afternoon we spent on the River Gambia. After a considerable amount of un-success, we finally managed to figure out where the boats were and how to board one. Being on that little boat, conversing with the highly interesting boatman, quietly weaving in and out of calm mangrove trees (and in and out of a typical rainy-season cloudburst), will definitely be one of my favorite moments from the Gambia.

Boys Not Allowed

In our bush taxi from Sokoto to Kaduna, I was thrilled to find myself sharing the 'way back' with two Muslim girls my age who were both friendly and skinny (two precious qualities for seatmates in any Nigerian transport). When naptime came, as it did for all three of us about 20 minutes into the six-hour drive, the girl in the middle settled herself comfortably against my shoulder. The girl on her other side did likewise, and within half a minute the three of us were snuggled up like bugs in a rug - despite not having yet exchanged more than two words. David, looking back to our row, quipped to his seatmate, "It looks like a trio of dominos just went down."

While it might have been creepy to have a strange woman sleeping on my shoulder in an American bus, here it was totally okay, and even normal - an outgrowth of gender-segregation that has produced one of the most (to me) surprising things I've discovered on this trip.



In traditional Islam, men are not really supposed to talk to female strangers and vice versa, a taboo I found startling at first and alarming in theory, but soon came to appreciate. Moving cities every few days makes friendship of any sort difficult to maintain, and since dating is hardly an option for me on this trip I'm not missing any opportunities there, either. Instead, the ban on male-female friendship means that for the first time in my life, I don't have to give the time of day to every yahoo who hollers for it on the street. And the effect, I admit, is liberating. It is a uniquely blissful experience to be able - without violating any code of manners - to just flat-out ignore unwanted male overtures. In fact - and this is the best part - by my rudeness I'm really only following the rules!

(I should clarify, this is typical of traditional Islam as it is practiced in more conservative areas of Africa and possibly the Middle East; I know nothing about Islam as it is practiced in the West, and little of Islam at all that I haven't learned on this trip.)

Moreover, this restriction means that all friendship is necessarily limited to those of one's own gender. In a society where co-ed contact is strictly regulated, social networks will flourish in symmetric but unconnected patterns - and those looking for friendship will scout among their own gender. A friend of mine, visiting her boyfriend in Tunis, clicked instantly with a girl she met there, and the two self-segregated to show off and try out hairdos - a 'no-boys-allowed' procedure for the veiled Muslim girl. In a culture of gender segregation, boys won't be allowed for considerable portions of female social life, and the result can be a delightfully warm, uniquely female social space.

My friend's story is anecdotal, but I wonder if it is in fact typical - and something similar happened to me on my mid-March flight from Dar es Salaam to Paris, where I was headed for the weekend to take care of money issues. While I was thrilled for the unexpected chance to see friends and family, getting on that first plane I knew I was separated from them by fourteen flight hours and a looong overnight layover at Dubai International Airport. In other words, sleep was high on my in-flight agenda.

There's always that tension when you make first contact with your airplane seatmate; locked in for six hours with only the prospect of a bathroom trip to get up, you are deprived of all the normal resources for politely ending an unwanted conversation. Starting to talk at all is seriously a risk. So burned have I been by this in the past that now I typically don't say a thing until the end of the flight; I make use of that otherwise dull taxi-time to discover whether the person next to me all along was a fascinating individual or a sociopath.



When Fatma first sat down next to me on the first flight, this was all going through my head, but we ended up striking up a conversation anyway. In fact, we clicked effortlessly. The friendship that sprang up between us and lasted through the entire transcontinental flight was surely due in part to a natural similarity in minds or temperament or what have you, but I attribute the fact that it sprang up at all to my being in hijab. Fatma was not a terribly conservative Muslim, but that first connection - we're both hijabed - has the most interesting effect of solidarity. We started to talk, at first about the flight, then about ourselves, and finally about our countries - and the information that I'm not actually Muslim didn't alter our connection at all. On the contrary, when I explained that I veil in conservative areas out of respect for local custom, she seemed impressed.

Landing at Dubai International Airport should have been the normal occasion to part ways, but instead we found ourselves just... walking out of the plane together, and then.. going to the main terminal together, and then.. well, it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world to keep hanging out. (Six hours of chat hadn't been enough already.) So we walked around, looking for a belt for her too-big pants or a camera card for me or a watch for her boyfriend, and when we got tired we wandered into the private 'female religious area' (read: mosque) to sleep on the floor amid a set of other tired Muslim women. This was my first time being inside a mosque, and I was very much expecting to feel like a turnip in the carrots.. but I didn't. The same cordiality I had noticed from Muslim women in the past was strongly present here, despite it being a random assortment of exhausted strangers, and walking in behind Fatma I was warmly greeted as 'one of us'. The best part is that there was nothing specifically religious about it - Fatma liked me just as well after she found out I wasn't Muslim; the veiling acquaintance of my friend knew full well she was Jewish; and the other women in the airport mosque were hardly interested in sharing prayer stories with me - it was more an outgrowth out of a group consciousness of space 'just for us'.

This was an incredible revelation for me. I've always assumed that all-female spaces would promote cattiness at best and back-stabbing bitchiness at worst. When alumna of all-girls schools have insisted otherwise, I admit I was never quite able to believe them. I just assumed that they were too popular to have been affected. Even on this trip, I have cynically suspected that the female-specific friendliness I felt from Muslim women was motivated by conversion attempts. I was wrong - I would now rather hazard the opinion that Muslim women are too marginalized by their own religion to give a shit who's a part of Islam and who's not, at least not in the same way that Muslim men do. (I just pissed off a few people there, didn't I.) The friendliness of Muslim women is related to Islam, though - for what better than gender segregation to inspire female friendship?


This, my friends, is the consolation prize for putting up with what few Western women would - share your husband with other women, get no protection from divorce, very little agency in family affairs, DEFINITELY no pet dog, no more cocktails or pork either, and a relative non-role in the same religion making your life a dependent sober petless hell.


But it's a pretty good one.

update of the week: i am less than four days from arriving in the united states and i have no way to get home

Donkey Depression

I have lately been finding the same thing that one of my fellow Africa-bloggers notices in her own writing (My posts are getting longer.. and darker), so to lighten up the intensity a bit before the bitter end here I'll put up some entirely frivolous thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for a few months about some of the most interesting characters you will meet in Africa - the farm animals.

Meet, first, the Goat. This is an entirely frivolous animal that behaves in an exclusively frivolous way; the species has just managed to collect two wits to rub together between the lot of them, and rubbing those two wits together is about all they can handle. The goat typically spend most of its time eating absolutely anything in sight, trying to stand on two legs in order to get at more things to eat, or skittering around like a ninny after having its eating interrupted. Occasionally they will take a break from eating and skittering to emit high-pitched bleats, or to pursue some illicit behavior with the nearest munching goat or the opposite sex (or otherwise), before going back to eating, climbing and skittering.

Frivolity isn't really a sin in my book, and eating can only be a good thing, so I have a pretty good feeling about goats in general. It seems the rumors are true and intelligence really isn't conducive to happiness, for goats seem pretty thrilled with their lot in life - a never-ending meal with breaks for sex and self-expression.

The goat is, in this and several other ways, almost indistinguishable from my favorite of all farm animals, the Sheep. For me, the key distinctive feature between the two lies in attitude, for while goats skitter around acting like ecstatic idiots, sheep are much more chill. Yeah, they're into eating, but they're also heavily into just hangin' out. When you meet a sheep, it might be eating; it might also just be standing around, or lying down, or taking in the sun. Though goats and sheep are almost exactly the same in size, general shape, relationship to humans, bleating sound, and probable intelligence, to me sheep just seem so much cooler. (For those less attuned to animal 'tude, look for tail diversity - goats will always have a tufty, up-pointed tail-fluff, while sheep will probably have a floppy thing of variable length, width, size, and color.)

Either one of these animals, though, is infinitely happier than their larger farm counterpart: Meet the Donkey. One of the first ways in which you are likely to meet Mr. Donkey is by wildly swerving to miss him as he saunters in front of your car. The Ethiopians tell a story explaining this strange behavior; they say that a donkey, a goat, and a dog all boarded a bus. The donkey paid the full fare and with exact change, and as a result will unabashedly waltz right in front of any vehicle that comes his way because he knows he's already paid up. The goat, however, cheating little ninny that she is, scooted off the bus without paying, which is why she skitters away every time - runnin' from justice, you see. My favorite, though, is the dog - he paid, but then the driver screwed him out of his change, so now every time the dog sees that bus again he goes chasing after it wildly barking for all he's worth, ''GIMME MY CHANGE!!! GIMME MY CHANGE!!''

(Shortly after hearing this story for the first time, our bus was chased down by a wildly barking dog and since then I've never been able to think of anything but Gimme my change! whenever I encounter a car-chasing dog.)

The dog and goat theories match up pretty well, but I confess I'm not satisfied with the explanation for the donkey. Who walks in front of a bus just because they've paid for it? Are paying customers routinely the tragic victims of vehicular manslaughter? No, there's pretty much only one reason why anyone intentionally walks right in front of a speeding vehicle, and that leads me to my own theory about why donkeys aim for any vehicle in their proximity - they're all suicidal.

I didn't come up with this out of thin air. Just by looking at him, you quickly realize that the donkey is the saddest of all the animal friends you will meet in Africa, and not just because of A. A. Milne's representation either. After seven months here I have seen a lot of silly animals doing a lot of silly things, but I have never seen a donkey smile. They seem to take pleasure neither from eating nor from resting in the shade, and I have certainly never seen any goat- or sheep-like frolicking. I have seen donkeys staring despondently at the ground; I have seen donkeys plodding along with a disheartened, kill-me-now air; I have seen donkeys hurrying with grim determination for the empty road in front of the nearest speeding bus. Donkeys, it is plain to see, are the most miserable of all of Africa's creatures.

The cruel irony of this, of course, is that in a land of goat, lamb, and beef-eating carnivores, the donkey is actually the *only* farm animal that can count on living a long life and seeing old age. And so they plod on, head down, aimless and dejected, knowing that their only ticket out of years of drudgery is that speeding minibus headed their way.

But don't worry... before anyone accuses me of getting plenty dark in a deliberately frivolous blog-post, I'll happily affirm that despite donkeys' best efforts, the cars always miss. And every time, the failed donkey gazes balefully after, lost in our dust, sighing and likely thinking in an Eeyore-ish voice: ''Lost another one.. next time.''

Guinea-Conakry!

... Ahh, another country where my chief souvenirs are those rosy ones of the toilet and my hotel bed. But at least now I can say that, after a childhood of skiing and snow days and an adulthood of Japan's Snow Country in a paper house with no heating, I've finally gotten pneumonia... now that, you know, I'm in Africa.

Food: Understandably, this is not something I can talk a whole lot about.

Worst Eaten: While I was sick, everything tasted like thick pasty sawdust.

Best Eaten: In Conakry, I had the absolute, hands-down best schwarma plate of my life. Incidentally, it was also one of the first things that actually tasted like food again. Still couldn't finish it, but merde was it good.

(Other) Hygienic Lows: To help my campaign to consume as many calories as physically possible towards recuperation, David kindly brought me a can of AriZona Green Tea. The tea-flavored syrupy mixture left me with considerabe doubts at first, but after an hour I began to get used to it and was even, I dare say, beginning to enjoy it when suddenly there was a fly in my mouthful of tea. It was very much alive, and very surprised to find itself buzzing around my gums, though probably not as much as I was. My carefully thought-out reaction to the fly in my mouth resembled an explosion of green tea direct from mouth all over floor and some furniture. Subsequent steps included washing mouth out, peering into can's dark and sketchy interior, and throwing rest of can away. Oh well, I thought. Back to water.

Quote: While I was sick, my only social contact was a protracted Sick-man's War with my broken-ankle neighbor over the armchair in our hallway; every morning I would screw up two hours' worth of energy to drag it over in front of my door and every evening he would crutch his way over to drag it back to his. (Note: Total chair displacement was probably less than five meters.) We each heard the other's clandestine operations, but never said a word to one another until my last evening, when we literally had to pass one another, and exchanged a stiff "Bon-soir."

Other than that, my social contact in the country was pretty limited to David and a man I talked to while watching pick-up soccer on the street. While I don't follow sports teams and have only most sporadically watched the World Cup, I love watching pick-up soccer. The enthusiasm is ten times what you'll find in a professional game - just look at what the players put up with in order to play. Misshapen, badly-bouncing balls, shirts v. skins for uniforms, two pots for goalposts, on a pothole-pitted playing field lined with sewage. If the pros had to put up with that and weren't getting paid for it, I seriously doubt they would play at all. But these kids do.

And they're good! You see some pretty incredible kicks in pick-up soccer and some pretty frightening saves, frightening because there may be oncoming traffic involved. The average pick-up soccer player commands a much broader skill set than the professional - dribbling up the field is not enough, you must also be able to steer around (or use) potholes; in addition to dodging defenders, be ready to dodge cars; know how to fix the ball when it has been smushed; rock-climbing skills will soon be necsesary for ball-retrieval when it goes over the neighboring wall.

Moreover, the game is rendered more exciting for the spectator by the greatly increased chances of actually getting hit with the ball.

I was watching one such game in Conakry one evening; David was somewhere in central Guinea, and I had nowhere else to be, so I stood around on a curb and watched some kids my age play. The game very nearly took an ugly turn when a wild shot nearly took the nose off a 'patrolling' soldier, but luckily the situation was quickly diffused. Soon after that, united in comraderie by the sudden fear of police, the man next to me struck up a conversation about the game; I continued it with a compliment on how talented the players were.

It could have stayed on the relatively innocent and apolitical topic of pick-up street soccer, but instead the man chose to nurse his personal grudge and launched into a political harangue about how racist Europe is because if those kids went to Europe, they wouldn't be allowed to play since they're African.

....Abundant evidence *disproving* this aside, it really pissed me off that the man just had to look at me as OH MY GOD YOU'RE WHITE instead of what it could have been - just a conversation between two kind-of soccer enthusiasts on a really interesting but unimportant game of street soccer. It could have been so simple. But no, it couldn't... we had two different skin colors. It just had to be about race. The incident prompted a rush of Africa-related bitterness that probably came out on this blog (apologies).

It's also possible that pneumonia may have seriously damaged my love affair with Africa.

Could I live here? I sort of did live here, consider I spent a full week in the capital alone. It would be, I think, a fairly easy city to live in for most people, provided you didn't mind the de-facto military curfew on the city, but sadly the city will always be a bit tainted with the memory of sick for me.

Futility of Martyrdom

There's no other way to disclaim it, so I'll be blunt: this post is going to piss some people off.

In school we learn about slavery; all children hopefully walk away from the necessarily disturbing lesson with an understanding of why slavery is evil, and the importance of (never letting it happen again) The precise effect, however, varies in shades of subtlety, weighing a little more uncomfortably on those white students who cannot claim to know when every last one of their ancestors immigrated to the US. How awful, to potentially be descended from a slaver! MLK may have been enough of a saint to think forgiveness no big trick, but I suspect few modern Americans are frothing at the bit to boast about the slaves held by their forefathers.

While such generic 'white guilt' is a relatively useless phenomenon, considering the way that slavery is taught in American schools, it's natural that a white student would come away with an impression of belonging to that race with the most historical power - and the most historical abuses of it.

On the other hand, the same lesson inspires on African-American students something like a cultural martyrdom. In learning about slavery, they have the satisfaction of genetic solidarity with the innocent oppressed, not the raping, pillaging sadists. They may hold their heads high, untainted by historical gulit.

Visiting the old Portuguese 'slave castles' of Ghana, we received much the same treatment. Horrible whites oppressing innocent blacks, and this is where they did it. It's enough to make you want, as Leah of Poisonwood Bible wanted, to 'scrub the whiteness' out of your own skin.

(Never mind the fact that the African slave trade cut across racial lines in a huge and historically unignorable way.)

But where does the race-based oppression paradigm lead? A white and non-white student learning about human trafficking in such a way will both inevitably, though perhaps subconsciously, come to the same conclusion: whites are intrinsically more powerful than blacks, or more cruelly intelligent, or possess some other inherent advantage. How else could Europeans arriving on the coasts of Africa manage to brutalize so effectively the locals living there? And considering crews of only a hundred, max sailors, presumably pitted against the millions of the African continent, you have to wonder how far a military advantage can really take you.

I wondered the same thing privately as a child. Didn't the Africans in port cities along the West Coast eventually get wise to the impending danger of a European ship? If it really was white against black, why didn't a few coastal villages combine forces to kick the shit out of the foreign abductors, guns or no guns?? They had the home-field advantage, they controlled all the natural resources, they had numerical superiority and they had the motivational bonus of literally fighting for their lives. The Europeans shouldn't have stood a chance against that.

I could never understand this simple problem, and was always afraid to ask for fear of the abhorently racist conclusion it implies - whites must just be that much more powerful than blacks.

But the truth, stifled though it is by most African museums, is actually not racist at all - it wasn't whites against blacks. Hugely powerful kingdoms existed in Africa, the likes of which the modern [racist] American textbook cannot imagine - Dahomey, Benin, Zanzibar, Asante - warring kingdoms who frequently made slaves out of their prisoners of war, commercially-savvy kingdoms interested in guns and goods, with which Europeans were thrilled to do business. The port city locals who thrived first on international trade of coffee/cocoa/ivory/gold thrived equally well on 18th-century trade in human beings. Ironically, some of the biggest opponents of Britain's 1807 ban on the international slave trade were Africans, who lost in that stroke their livelihood. The self-righteous local guide at Cape Coast's slave castle museum was actually more likely to be a direct descendent of a slaver (or profiter of the trade) than I was, though that didn't stop me from feeling white-guilty as I stood with him in the castle's dark warehouse-cum-dungeons.

But perhaps I'm splitting hairs; regardless of how enthusiastic African cooperation with European slavers may have been, that was nothing compared to what the Africans and their descendents suffered at the hands of whites once they arrived in the New World, especially the Caribbean. In many ways, the worst aspects of triangle-trade slavery are not on the African side, but the North/South American. What difference does it make if Kunte Kinte was captured by enemy African warriors or pillaging European ones? It doesn't change the nature of his suffering on white plantations in Virginia.

However, it does change hugely the way Africans are portrayed in history vis-a-vis Europeans. To speak about them as a cultural group - which is incorrect and unfair besides, but everybody's doing it so I'll plunge ahead - Africans in a historically accurate narrative of the slave trade lose some moral purity.. but in exchange for agency. They weren't idle innocents sitting up in the trees and gawking at the first Europeans to come crashing through the bush, manacles in hand. They were kings and generals, with thrones of enemy skulls and poisoned spears, who engaged in extensive international trade centuries before the Portuguese ever got there. Little African-American children walking home from history class are holding their heads high for the wrong reason - and it has huge consequences. For what does a sense of martyrdom really buy you? Moral superiority and satisfaction, okay, but what is that really worth?

Just look at the feminists - in a triumph of idiocy, a certain feminist faction has chosen to reposit history as one long tale of male oppression of nameless female martyrs. They argue that in fact all his-tory is just a male-centric tale of keeping women down, and that behind the stature of the illustrious general there is presumably a beaten wife hiding in the kitchen crying on a dish towel.

Well gosh, centuries of abuse like that, and no wonder those feminists are so damn pissed.

And equally no wonder that chauvenism persists. 'Cos who can respect a gender that's always oppressed? snivelling behind the scenes with no influence on major decisions? inevitably winding up as victims? Sure, martyrdom can be hugely satisfying to one's self-righteous muscle, but give me the truth instead - women are powerful, and we always have been. (Ahem, Alexander the Great.) We exert power in different ways, true, but our influence is no less meaningful, and to say that we've always been oppressed is just to deny our own agency. We've occasionally been victims of men, but we have also (as several guys I know would eagerly testify) made some of them our victims, too.

I feel the same way about the truth behind triangle trade, though it's taken me much longer to realize it. By positing Europeans as the only actors and Africans as only the victims, aren't we denying their consierable historical power? By teaching African kids that all slaves were descended from innocent Rousseauian natives naive enough to invite the big ships in to play, aren't we implying that Africans didn't do much of anything worthwhile? Perhaps there's a certain bizarre satisfaction that can come from knowing, "Hey, my people weren't always on the shafted end of oppression! We had power too, and [the big conclusion] we can have it again." Even under massive tactical, numerical, and military disadvantages, the successes of various slave revolts in the 18th and 19th centuries managed to maintain a continual state of fear for their lighter-skinned peers, who loudly claimed Africans couldn't actually get anything done - and then waited up at night with a shotgun.

The race-based slaver myth is still alive and well, though. Racist whites will quietly note - and misread - the incredible international commerce of the slave trade and credit European handiwork; maybe it will seem only natural to African-American kids that they fall behind other ethnic groups in traditional measures of success, since they're the descendents of America's greatest victims. But what does martyrdom tell you anyway? It's not "I did!!", but "They wouldn't let me." Frankly, I prefer "Yes we can," and the truth - that Africans have indeed kicked some serious ass in history.

African One-Liners

Since I'm stuck recuperating in Conakry with the kind of internet connection that comes once in a lifetime in Africa, seems like as good a time as any to dump a collection of quotes that, over the past few months, have made me laugh.. or tilt my head and think: "?"

David, in Arusha, Tanzania, on finding a guide: "If we stand around and look white, sooner or later we'll find someone."

"Now we're full." -- the herder of a 14-passenger bus in Rwanda, on boarding his 26th passenger. (Several of us immediately protested amid general laughter that we could surely fit at least two more...)

Butros Butros Ghali, on being asked to distinguish between the Arabic bukra, insha'allah and the Spanish mañana: "The Arabic 'bukra' has none of 'mañana's sense of urgency."

David to me, haughtily, after I made a snarky remark about how unexpectedly luxurious our Congolese hotel room was: "Unlike you, I don't need to be in a nest of cockroaches to get a good night's sleep."

Debating whether or not Libya was a swell country, in response to my comment on the governmental status the (pro-Libya) Nigerien dude responded: "Well, yeah.. but who gives a fuck about democracy??"

On the mass of hair that came away from my head when I took out my braids from Zanzibar - "Man, you could stuff a pillow with that." And pressed as to the color of that still attached to my scalp: "Uh... if I had to say, I would probably say... indeterminate."

"Hey, it takes a lot of willpower to go through a can of tuna!" --David, defensively, to my stare of disgust as he tuna-stank up our squalid hotel room in Kenya.

Anna and Matt, two friendly Peace Corpsers, on the obstacles to tourism in coastal Benin and Togo: "The tourists come out here in the morning with their towels and there are like six to eight people shitting on the beach."

"And this is for.. grabbing and strangling something, I guess." --David, in all seriousness, describing an item at the label-less National Museum of Ethiopia.

(This one I can't claim to have seen myself, but it's good enough to merit repeating) On a billboard in Nigeria: Do you suffer from virginal drip?

From me to David, on a random street in Masindi, Uganda after leaping out of the way of yet another honking taxi: "You know, I'm getting kind of sick of people threatening me with vehicular homicide as a means of getting my attention."

An idealistic museum docent in Benin, showing a morality statue of a woman naked to the waist, explained to the assembled Beninese (and me) how female nudity to the waist is 'okay' in African culture. One of his countrywomen heartily disagreed, and a spot of bickering ensued. The man was persistent, but the woman soon won it beyond all claim with: "Now just what do you think would happen to me if I wandered around the street naked to the waist??"

On the crowds of people swarming around our huge bus and waving their arms madly as we attempted a cramped 3-pt-turn in congested Nairobi: "Gee, everyone here's a budding traffic director."

"Hm.. One minute." -- David's estimate for how roughly how long it would take to break down the rickety plywood-and-rusted-bolt combination ambitiously calling itself my hotel door.
(15 minutes - time spent relocating all furniture in my room to directly in front of said door.)

And finally, one more to make his parents proud: David, discussing my student health plan in the EG airport, in response to my apprehension about the insurance supplier: "Man, I would take Satan himself if he was offered to me at a 75% discount!"

(Which, with insurance companies, is more or less the same thing.)

Something I wish I could stop thinking

"a culture that treats animals this badly deserves whatever it gets"

Jana Gets The Plague

I wasn't feeling like the pick of the litter Friday, but just chalked it up to CTF (cumulative travel fatigue) until I began vomiting Saturday night. My stomach, inspired by South African's labor unions, had decided to go on its own strike in protest of Africa. By Sunday afternoon I didn't seem to be throwing up any more, but I wasn't eager to put anything else in there to find out until evening the next day. Though I didn't know it at the time, that Monday night dinner, the first meal I'd had in three days, would also be my last for about a week or so. At the time, thinking myself already well en route to chipper health from a simple flu, I assumed my recovery would follow the normal trajectory and by Wednesday I'd be chowin' it with the best of 'em.

Wednesday I was definitely feeling better, if troubled by a bit of a sore throat that had come out of nowhere; Wednesday was also our travel day from Sierra Leone to Guinea. As we crossed the border we had to do the normal formalities, and though I didn't notice it when I gave him my passport, the border official had sores all the way up and down both arms. I only noticed it when, as I was giving my profession, etc., I overheard him complaining to his coworker about the chicken pox. That got my attention, alright.

"Chicken pox can kill you if you get it as an adult," I whispered, wide-eyed, to David.

"I know!" he said with seriousness, adding that he basically was an adult when he got it at 16.

I paused. "I've never had it."

He gaped. "You haven't? Have you had the vaccine?"

"Er.. no." (Was that foolish of me?)

We let that information hang in the air for a moment, and then I got out my Purell and coated both my hands and forearms with it.

When I did begin feeling really awful again a couple hours later, it was, the doctor later confirmed, too fast after exposure to be related to the chicken pox. The fever that came on around the time we finally arrived in Conakry was not "the sickness of chicken" (what the heck is 'chicken pox' in French anyway?), but it was definitely something nasty. I have, in fact, never been this sick in my life. Whatever I got I strongly suspect doubled as population control in the good ol' days before the advent of modern medicine. (In other words, THE PLAGUE.)

I believe it started with some sort of lung infection, because aside from fever, body aches and fatigue the first thing I noticed was chest pain. My lungs felt like they were filled with lead, and deep breaths caused an exquisite pain to shoot throughout my chest. By Wednesday evening breathing had become extraordinarily difficult and painful, and the effort required just to keep doing it over and over exhausted all available energy resources. Every now and then I would have a coughing fit and nearly choke on my own disgusting and occasionally bloody phlegm. I didn't bother to eat. Fevers alternated with chills; David assured me that my room was a thousand degrees, but it felt like a refridgerator to me. The Guinean summer sun outside was even worse, and I protected myself against it on my frequent trips to the loo by wrapping my sheet and towel around myself. I noticed on these trips that the sky was a brilliantly sparkling pinky-purple. Most of the time, though, I lay in my bed like a useless slug for several days, hacking and retching, sweating and shivering, stomach cramped for lack of food but definitely still on digestive strike.

If I was in Japan right now, I thought to myself, they would have me on an IV before you could say ganbatte, and I would be up and about like lickety-split.

But I was not in Japan. I was in Guinea, I was damned lucky to be in the capital of Guinea where a licensed doctor was able to prescribe an antibiotic and some other badtasting pills and syrups. Not the rainbow armful I would have bagged in Japan, but nearly as cheap. An IV wasn't offered, but I wasn't about to get anywhere near anything intravenous here anyway. That left one alternative: I began forcing food into my stomach the pre-needle way.

Eating became, next to breathing, the worst part of my life. I felt like I did nothing but eat for three full days, yet the sum total of my efforts was never more than a couple hundred calories. After two exhausting hours of concerted eating, I would realize that I had eaten like five saltines, and feel like crying. Periods of eating were broken by periods in which I willed food so hard-won to stay put in my union-inspired stomach. As I stared hatefully at the saltines, I cast about for foods that, if not appetizing, were at least not wholly revolting, and found myself oddly attracted to foods I normally hate - gatorade.. cheeze-pretzel combos.. a hamburger. Subconscious American nostalgia? The hamburger ended up not working out so well - at least the ants enjoyed it - but in one epic six-hour session of determination I finished two full snack-packs of combos.

Saturday morning I woke up after a record five hours of continued sleeping with no improvement and a fierce determination to accomplish two goals that day - (a) to shower, cos I smelled like a nursing home, and (b) to eat at least 1500 calories' worth of food. That night found be having accomplished goals, and I was highly pleased with myself.

I was also highly pleased that I was not roughing it into the center of the country the 13 grim hours to Kankan with David the next day. Though it had been the original plan that we would go together and then continue overland to Guinea-Bissau, we decided that he would do it alone and then we would fly on to Dakar from Conakry. I felt bad pooping out on David in French territory... but not bad enough that I was prepared to go. I would instead be spending my Sunday very much as I had spent my Saturday - eating, and showering.

So many hours lying awake gave me ample time for reflection, and I kept coming back to reflecting on the foolishness that makes people want to shed fat. After eight days of not eating, whatever fat I carried over my bones was quite literally the only thing keeping me alive. More than ever, I realize why your body works so damned hard to store a bit away - 'cos if you get the plague and you look like one of the Hill girls, you ain't gonna make it.

Why I feel bad for African internet users:

Due to high fraud in your area, this website is currently inaccessible to you. If you feel you have been blocked in error please contact a representative via email at helpdesk@travelsupport.com. Please present this value as your IP address: 41.207.30.154

Sierra Leone

Liberia and Sierra Leone have both had bloody diamond wars, but while Liberia nurses its emotional scars SL seems to have chosen a different route to recovery: wiping away the memory with a party! Freetown parties late into the night, and after 5 p.m. in some neighborhoods cars don't have a chance against the throngs of people for control of the streets. Not that the cars give up trying, though. In an interesting marriage of the two, David and I saw an apparently fascinating fender bender in the middle of one intersection. It was so delightful to have people gawking at something other than us for a change that we stood around for a while and gawked, too.

Food: About a day after crossing into the country, I showed my respect for the national cuisine by promptly throwing it up. Repeatedly. And then I showed my interest in its capital by spending most of three days lying on a hotel bed. So I'm not really sure I'm qualified to say anything about the food in Freetown.. except that you can find it, and you can also throw it up.
Best eaten: I guess I would have to go with the first meal I kept down, something very simple but delicious - steamed vegetables, couscous, and gently fried plantains. After little or no food in three days, it felt marvelous to eat such nutritious, hearty, and easily digestible food.
The memory is all the fonder now, after the lapse of another week of sickness; I didn't know it at the time, but that meal would be my last worthy of the word for over a week.
Street food is also easily available, and David said the barbeque'ed and fried chicken he found from curbside vendors was among the best he'd ever had.
Worst eaten: that which I had to see again, slightly modified by stomach glop


Jana gets her comeuppance: I've mentioned before my fondness for sheep, and the hilarity I find in their floppy-tailed African counterparts, so it shouldn't be too surprising that when David and I happened to be walking past a ram, I absentmindedly baa'ed at it.
I didn't expect a reply, so I nearly crapped my pants when the ram whirled around and unleashed a raucous BAAAAA! of his own, head swivelling in search of the other sheep. David just about laughed himself silly. Apparently I do a pretty good sheep impersonation, for since then I've tried it out on other sheep and its never failed to elicit an excited response.

Hygienic lows: It don't git much better than vomit

Strange musical trends: As I did nothing but lie in bed for a couple days, I had ample opportunity to observe the 24-hour playlist of the street party stereo outside my room. As I possess earplug and generally love music, this did not bother me in the slightest at first. Only when even my slow-on-the-uptake mind began to recognize a song I thought I'd just heard did I begin to get annoyed. No joke, the entire time we were there our neighborhood blasted three and exactly three songs (Eye Wadwin Na, Falling in Love, Yore.). They are songs to which I can now sing all of the words.

Worst Experience: definitely being sick.

Best Experience: Walking around the city, visiting the lighthouse and a quiet, lonely little beach in the residential section of town, and looking over the water towards home.

Could I live here? In all honesty, I don't really know. I was sick for most of our time in SL, and consequently can't describe the national character nearly so well as I can my hotel bed. Freetown is a fun and interesting city though, and I can at least say I would definitely come back.

SICK

i have not been this sick since the epic death flu of february 2005
will post again when can eat

Liberia

Being in Liberia is a very sobering experience, and the collective sadness is palpable even to outsiders. After a few moments casual conversations seem to peter off, the other person falling into an absent silence highly uncharacteristic of most Africans I've met. If I wanted to be melodramatic about it, I could have a field day - how people will gaze past you into space distractedly, how they seem to carry a weight, how they lack that easy, playful humor you find so often in Africa. I did not hear very much laughter in Liberia, and everyone assumed I was with the UN.

The food's really good, though.

Food: See above.
Best eaten: I had a chocolate ice cream milkshake in a Monrovia restaurant that made me see the face of god.
Also, litchis!! Sold on the street for nickels each, delicious, only these ones you can't eat (tried), you just suck on them like candies.

Worst eaten: I guess I've been pretty spoiled in mango territory, 'cos I found the Liberian mangos to be seriously disappointing.
There, that's the worst I can come up with for Liberia. Monrovia has some good eatin'.

Numbers you should call Right Now: This should have gone with Côte d'Ivoire, but I forgot. The youngish aviator-sunglassed rebel soldier who mans the last military checkpoint before the Liberian border will demand money from you unless you give him your number. (And people say the good men of the Forces Nouvelles aren't professional... such slander!) But please, call KEVIN for a good time - 03-38-07-56, country code 225.

(somebody should TOTALLY do this on skype or something. and then tell me about it.)

Quote: The morning after crossing over from what may have become Satan's Province In Africa, in which strange men with extremely large guns will scream obscenities at you, David and I found ourselves on a share-taxi ride that began for all five passengers with the driver's suggestion, "Let us pray."

We all bowed our heads and I thought, dang, not in CI anymore...

New Hygienic Lows: I know everyone talks about how gross money is, and yeah, American bills may have the dubious distinction of containing more crack residue than any other nation's, but they ain't got squat on Liberia for stench.

Taking a few folded bills out of my pocket after a cloudburst, I was overwhelmed by the same smell I use to identify where the public outhouses are. Just like when you see a horrible accident and can't stop yourself from getting a better look at the carnage, I actually brought the bills to my nose for a closer sniff. And choked a little.

Trouble was, we'd just crossed the border into Sierra Leone, making the bills unspendable and (if you're me) unthrow-away-able. Faced with the extremely unsavory prospect of tucking this obviously used toilet paper back into my suitcase, I decided to wash them - bringing a whole new soapy-clean dimension to the term 'money laundering.'

They smell much better now, and I think I've got some extras.. anyone want one? ;)

Worst Experience: Witnessing the public justice of the music sellers wasn't necessarily so awful, but it was very sad in a profound way. I'm glad I had the experience because I hope it will enable me to have a better understanding of the social climate, but it was probably the most negative one I had in Liberia.

Best Experience: Getting clean. After the joy that is overland travel in the rainy season, we both seriously needed a breather. The shower I took upon arrival in Monrovia was, like above-mentioned milkshake, a religious experience.

Could I live here? It's not chaotically unstable, it's musically well-connected, and the people are polite and honorable, but I don't think I could wake up happy and bound out of bed like an eager squirrel to chirp HULLO! to my PTSD-afflicted neighbors. I could not live here.. it's just too sad.

Micro-Democracy, and Micro-Justice

While the war in Côte d'Ivoire may have degenerated into a convenient excuse for everything from pregnant goats to my untied shoelace, it's a different story across the border in Liberia. Liberia feels, literally, traumatized. I saw more UN forces here, more rubble, more lingering sadness here than in any other country.

And people are desperate. In downtown Monrovia, I became a witness to a small helping of public justice, a highly educating and highly saddening extension of the micro-democracy pervading popular levels of African society.

Talking with some music-sellers around their sidewalk stand about Nigerian versus Ghanian artists, I briefly felt a man brush past behind me, subtly fingering a pocket. I instantly half turned to see him already walking away, and breathed a relief that I don't keep things in my back pockets.

Turning back around, and probably still chattering away, I caught the alarmed glance of one of the seated young men around the stall - who suddenly leapt up to chase down the man and retrieve the CD he had spotted in his hand. The culprit had only gotten a few paces away, and within seconds an ugly scene developed involving most of the young music-sellers and an umbrella seized from a nearby cart. I was unwilling to watch, but thankfully the actual violence was brief and perfunctory - the CD was retrieved before a big and swiftly gathering crowd, and the owner of the stall stomped back up to his cart. Sure enough, the real punishment was to be the awful public shaming.

From where I stood, I saw him sitting glumly on the sidewalk with his elbows on his knees, blood coursing down his ear from a cut on his head, unable to raise his eyes to meet the faces of the massive crowd gathered around him on all sides, but never closer than ten feet away. Someone was yelling, a member of the crowd - I looked forward and saw a dignified middle-aged woman wholly unconnected with the actual crime, but who had assumed the responsibility of dealing with the incident. Speaking for the crowd, she scolded and shamed him while he sat, bleeding and utterly despondent, surrounded by several dozen of his peers. The returning music-sellers shook their heads sadly at the situation, no longer angry, and said something about, Look at what our country has come to. My pity for the man must have shown on my face, for they asked me if I was going to give him money or something along those lines. I told them no, that I would rather support the hard-working honest, but that I appreciated what was happening to the man - that honor is the most important thing, and to lose it publicly like that, though deemed fair punishment, must have been awful.

Before long it was over, and the woman - a true Arbiter - brought some water and poured it gently over the man's head in front of the crowd while he washed off most of the blood. Then he stood up, and limped away, head down; the crowd dispersed.

A just punishment fitting the crime? As judged by witnesses and impartial peers, yes. Does it deter theft? I'm not sure. Probably it does just as well as two weeks' jail time, or whatever the Western top-down court decree would have been for a single cd theft attempt. Will the man steal again? Well.. sometimes you get a situation where people are so desperate, where life has been so unstable, that a job is anything you can find to keep body and soul together. Sometimes people just have nothing left to lose - except honor.

"Because of the war"

We arrived in Côte d'Ivoire expecting the country to be in a total shambles because of the civil war that has wrecked and now split the country in two. On one hand, we were right - the country really has been split in two, and the destruction is still pretty evident even though both sides have long grown bored with actually fighting. On the other, Côte d'Ivoire is in far better shape than several of the places that we've visited.. it has excellent roads between major cities, a bustling international center of commerce, pretty reliable power and water infrastructure, a world-famous musical tradition, good facilities, and between the Basilica and national parks, excellent tourism prospects. Heck, it even has international recognition as actually existing, and that's more than some places can claim.

But none of the locals are aware of any of that. No, as every Ivoirian will tell you, there's nothing left anywhere at all ever now, and all a cause de la guerre. Never mind that Yamassoukro has electric lighting along every major street - functional, too, mind you - and Christendom's most lavish basilica, or that Abidjan has West Africa's most thriving downtown, or that the country is lined with excellent beaches in the south, rainforest reserves to the west, and legendary mosques to the north - none of that is worth anything, because of the war. The fact that unions have a stranglehold on travel - because of the war. An illiteracy rate among adults worse than the average kindergarten - because of the war. That unpaved road heading down to Tai - because of the war. The fly I found in my otherwise delicious lasagna - because of the war!

Now I'm only a tourist an' all, but I get the feeling that some of these problems might be unrelated to - or go deeper than - a war that is still a recent phenomenon.

Eh, what do I know. The Ivoirians are probably right - every thing that isn't perfect in the country, it's all the war's fault.


Food: The food in CI was pretty good, and pretty varied. We were almost always able to find schwarma and continental staples alongside local favorites. I tried a plantain mash with arachid sauce that was unexpectedly delicious, and very filling.

Best Eaten: Sold along the road to Yamassoukro and inside the capital, but nowhere else in the country or even in this entire section of the continent, near as I can tell: PASSIONFRUIT. I never had one of these in Africa until the Congo train ride, when the friendly Arbiter woman in front of me bought some of these round fist-sized yellow fruits off the window market. Seeing my confusion, she split open the top to reveal a delicate white skin bursting with vivid yellow seeds, falling off the weirdly-fingered white walls of the fruit in clumps that you could lick up with your tongue. Marvelous!! Tangy and sweet and sour, all at the same time... but despite looking hard, I would not taste another of these fruits until Yamassoukro. I must have eaten two or three every day the entire time we were there.

Plus, it's delightful fun to go and tell people to hold on, you're goin' to go get some passion.

Worst Eaten: The food was pretty good here, and when we didn't eat well, it was because we didn't eat at all - i.e., our few-hour journey of the morning became an all-day adventure, and we got in well past dark and too late to go find food. In our last week of CI, this happened more often than it didn't. Thank goodness for granola bars.

Citiest City Seen Yet: While Nairobi puts up some decent competition, for urban personality I would still pick Abidjan. A dense downtown cluttered with cafes, clothing stores, banks, business centers, and offices; a magnificent ship-shaped cathedral and delightfully creative architecture scattered around the city; skyscrapers whose nighttime lights reflect off a river criss-crossed by bridges humming with traffic. One of the most incredible cities in West Africa... and it's not even the capital.

Music: While I did miss hip-hop here, CI makes up for it with a few genres of its own. Coupe decalle has made CI famous all over West Africa for its frenetic beat, wild singing and melodic accompaniment, but I think my favorite is zouglou, with a beat reminiscent of coupe but more of a rap feel.

The general paradigm typing a country's international language to its musical expression seems to hold true - franco countries blast zouk/soukouss, and the anglos boom back hip-hop.

Worst Song Ever: I was raised on reggae the way some kids are raised on Barney, and I never could have thought you could get sick of it. Like my sisters, I know most Marley and Jimmy Cliff songs by heart, and could probably write out the entire Legend album given enough time and paper.

The same Alpha Blondy cassette, however, played on loop for six slow hours, might be just cause for outlawing the album and disbanding the group. Exhibit A in my case against them? A bouncy, clipped re-make of one of classic rock's most powerful ballads, Wish you were here. That song can make you cry. But apparently it wasn't perfect in its rock form, for Alpha Blondy saw fit to replace the riffs and soulful singing with knee-jerk dinky beats to accompany a clipped, impertinent voice chanting, "We just-! two lost souls! singin' in de fish-bowl!!" Gah! It is my personal conviction that every artist responsible for that abomination should be taken outside and publicly slapped, along with whatever agent got them off composing cat litter jingles and into massacring international music legends.

New (?) Hygienic Lows: Let's be honest, I can hardly call this "new" anymore. But in the competition of Stinkiest between David and I, I decidedly gained an advantage the day I convinced him to discard his old backpack, which had come to have the perpetually moist feeling of Eastern European money under Soviet rule, in favor of a new clean one. I didn't even have a chance while he was cartin' that thing around, but now...

Quote: It's no accident that the classic lines of CI come from transit. Among the most delightful things I overheard was the indignant line of a man behind me in a passenger van, stopped to play Musical Vans by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. We were going on three or four passengers for every two legal seats, and it already cramped enough that I actually couldn't see the herder stuffing more people in, or hear anything other than the herder directing people where to sit - until one line broke through loud and clear, a quite indignant male voice declaring in response, "OH NO HE CAN NOT SIT ON ME! It is WAY too far."

(Snicker snicker.)

At another game of Musical Vans a few days later, I was trying to divine the causes behind the game from one of the herders. "Why doesn't each van just go its own way? Carrying its own passengers to the destination it's already headed towards?" ...Kind of like how every other African country, no, scratch that, every other COUNTRY does. He explained something vague about the Point-A van belonging to Point A, and the Point-B van belonging to Point B, and they each 'needed' to end up in the right place, etc. The whole thing smacked of red tape, and I was giving him a pretty skeptical look when, fumbling for a good explanation, he blurted, "It's all because of the war, you know."
I shot him a dirty look. "War nothing.. it's because of the syndicate."
He broke out in shocked laughter - and then shared in a conspiratorial whisper his agreement about the real source of CI's travel frustration.

Worst Experience: Collectively, fighting to get away from the unions/ dodge armed thuggery/actually arrive at our destination made most travel in CI a somewhat unpleasant and highly fatiguing experience. If you're not trying to actually go anywhere, though, the country is great, people are happy to see you and ready to chat, the food is excellent, the infrastructure is pretty reliable, there are lots of interesting buildings, and the music's got a delightfully lively spirit that I just wish was shared by most of the drivers.

Best Experience: For David, this remains our interview with the rebel organization Les Forces Nouvelles at their headquarters in Bouake, whose commanders welcomed us off the street and answered all our questions with an endearly stiff military professionalism unshared by any of the bottom feeders of their organization. This is a high point for me too - and rivals another top memory, that of visiting the incredible Basilique de la Paix at Yamassoukro. This jaw-dropping basilica, visible for miles away from the city, is (despite the pope's request) just a teensy bit taller than his own Saint Paul's (thanks to a cross of solid gold), and could fit four or five Notre-Dame's inside its pearly dome. It's incredible what dictators can do when they put their forced labor to it. My very favorite moments of CI, though, were those spent wandering around the bustling Deux-Plateaux neighborhood that comprises the official heart of Abidjan.

Could I live Here: I would happily live in Abidjan, a city cosmopolitan enough to give you variety, big enough to keep you busy, and with a touch of crazy to keep it interesting. Sooner or later, though, you'd want to get out beyond the well-connected coast, which would require selling your soul and most of your time to the unions. Unfortunately, Côte d'Ivoire is gonna be a no.

And not because of the war.

Fortune.. and misfortune.

I'm not sure when exactly it was that I took it into my head to visit a rainforest. It was definitely at least a couple months ago, but not much more than that. We were discussing how to configure our remaining time in Africa on the last third of the trip, when I blurted out something along the lines of, "Hey - let's go see a rainforest!"

David was up for it, and a few were tentatively chosen; one of these was the recently reopened Parc National de Tai in Côte d'Ivoire. Heading west from the capital, we figured it'd be a quick trip to pop south from Duekoué the 90km (56mi) to Tai, see what we could, if anything, and then return up to Man to cross the border to Liberia. We had almost no information about it (LP's "bold and off-the-beaten-path" couldn't put together between them the required complete set of, ahem, nerves necessary to actually visit CI for their book on it), but it wasn't that far out of the way, we saw rave reviews on travel forums, and the plan involved a minimum of dreaded back-tracking.

Nighting at Duekoué Friday, we roused ourselves at the crack of dawn Saturday to catch the first transport to Tai at six. It was fortunate that we got there just at six, for by 6:20 the van was full and ready to go. It took another hour to strap down the market-day bags, have a couple fistfights among the herders, and find the driver, and then another half-hour immediately after at the police checkpoint, but considering Ivory Coast standards, that ain't bad.

Unfortunately, it was still Ivory Coast, and no trip longer than half an hour in Ivory Coast is complete without a rousing - literally - game of Musical Vans. Everyone run to get a seat! After hauling every single bag, chicken and passenger off two vans in the fly-speck town Zegne in order to entirely swap the contents of both, we were (fortunately) on our way again within a couple hours.

Unfortunate was the condition of the road - unpaved, and heavily pockmarked by the rainy season. Past experience taught me to be thrilled that we didn't get stuck in mud once, despite the light rain, and we arrived in Tai without the mud caked past my knees that I would have a day later. We were very happy to be there, and set off with a bounce in our step as we asked the way to the park administration.

It was unfortunate that the admin was staffed entirely by bureaucrats who saw no need to let a couple of tourists see the park. At all. It was reserved for scientists, they told us, and unless we had a fancy-sounding NGO to back us up, we could piss off.

I was broken-hearted. I just wanted to see the trees, to know whether it was true that in a rainforest you can't see the sky - or even the top layer. "Can't we even just... walk around the edges or something?" I begged. "Isn't there anything you can do?"

Of course there was, the oldest and best bureaucrat trick in the book - he told us to wait for his superviser, thus simultaneously passing the buck, wasting more time, and cruelly giving me false hope. The trifecta!, as my dad would say. So we waited, me politely perched on the lawn chair I had been offered, scouring my mind for some charm to win them over. David, long a bureaucrat-hater, had no optimism for the venture whatsoever, and to entertain himself during the wait he began to pester me. I crabbily told him to piss off and go bother the monkeys instead. (There was a troop of small but seriously wicked vervet monkeys raising heck at the other end of the muddy, tree-lined yard; after harassing two goats, scaring the ish out of a piglet, attacking a chicken, and otherwise scattering all available targets, they ran out of things to pouce on and were enjoying a wild game of tag.) Taking my suggestion to heart, David immediately went to go pester them, and for reasons I cannot understand began to throw small missiles at them from close range. This is how he was employed when the higher-up arrived behind him and began to watch. (The answer probably still would have been no.)

I was again broken-hearted, and began to think some pretty bitter thoughts about how maybe Côte d'Ivoire deserved to have a collapsed tourism industry, 'cos if that's how they treat tourists I can't say I'm frothing at the bit to recommend their country. This was a seriously unfortunate stroke, compounded by the fact that after waiting an hour and a half for Mr. Higher-No, we had missed the return transport.

In a weird way, though, this was also fortunate, for we had spent the past four days almost entirely sitting in buses, and what better an opportunity to take a walk? It was still only a bit after noon, and frankly, I still wanted that damn rainforest walk. The 95-km unpaved road to Duekoué was a single straight road, no branches, with a village roughly every 10km through dense forest, and we figured our chances for getting picked up as we walked by whoever was heading north were pretty good. Beats me why, but despite abundant evidence to the contrary, people still trust random white people in Africa.

Our chances were indeed good. So good, in fact, that we hadn't even gotten 100m before we met with the Mercedes-Benz of the region's congressman, as well as Tai's two mayors. They were going the wrong way but, mildly intrigued by the sight of two white people walking along a dirt road in the rainforest, stopped and invited us back to Tai for a drink. What the heck? we thought, and hopped on in.

The MP's house was probably the nicest I'd been in since the touring the palace where Haile Selassie lived (before getting killed by Mengistu and buried under the palace privy). I immediately became aware of the sweat/dust/mud/bits of strange leaf adhering to my skin and clothes. David looked worse. The politicians were very diplomatic, however, pretending not to notice, and served us drinks, peanuts, and sweet French cookies called kitty tongues (no remarks please) as we discussed Africa, America, cultures, politics, the economic crisis, the distance from PA to TX, Michael Jackson, and the never-ending guerre. Then we watched a bit of news, during which I learned that it was July 4th. "Shoot," I told David, "Happy Independence Day!"

The mayors and MP duly wished our country a happy 233rd as well.

After drinks and snacks we were pressed to stay for dinner, and over fish stew, rice, manioc, and sweet pineapple we discussed the interplay between a culture and its cuisine. Then it really was time to go, and as we shook hands goodbye I thought of how oddly fortunate it was that we had just happened to meet them as we were leaving.

It was less fortunately now 3pm, and as David and I began our trek again we wondered whether the lateness of the day might not have critically damaged our chances of hitching a ride. Our hosts pressed us to buy tickets for the van leaving from Tai, but it was completely empty and we knew it wouldn't be going anywhere fast. "We'll pick it up en route," I explained to the perplexed mayors, "We could use the exercise."

Also, I still hadn't gotten my damn rainforest walk.

So we cheerfully set off again, on a red dirt road that was remarkably empty. Every now and then we saw some villagers carrying a bundle of wood on their heads, but I was far more interested in the thick bramble lining both sides of the road. The way I saw it, rainforest is rainforest, and just because the rainforest 1km north of a makebelieve park boundary isn't legally protected from a bit of local scavenging doesn't, in my view, make it any less rainforesty. At the first opportunity, I found a little hole in the leafy wall, and wiggled my way through to this:

[picture battle was decisively won by computer via a series of electric shocks repeatedly applied first to me and successively to a series of helpful strangers in the internet cafe. and yes, we all kept trying it. pavlov's dog could have beaten us in a battle of wits. ]

It wasn't quite what I had had in mind when I envisioned a Rainforest Walk, but it was still ecologically-classified rainforest, and damned if I wasn't walking in it.

We walked a while. We hitched for a few km with a truck going to fetch two nuns; then a few more km with a friendly motorcyclist who became the hero of his village upon rolling in with two blancs aboard. For the first 20km, though, these were the only vehicles we saw, and as the clock hit four and the shadows grew longer we began to have doubts about our rainforest plan. South Park's "Rainforest Schmainforest" began to run through my head, kind of like how Fiona Apple's "Criminal" starts going through my head every time I'm being questioned by police/military/security forces. I've caught myself humming it at more than a few barriers and control points (but happily, despite an atmosphere often charged with squinty-eyed suspicion, no one else has). I was beginning to notice an ominous potential in the deserted road infinitely bordered by those heavy green walls concealing the sources of strange clucking and chirping noises, but all in all I was still pleased as a pig in sh!t to be walking through a rainforest.

Fortunately, after another couple moto-rides we were only 12km from Zegne, where we knew we had pretty good chances of joining a game of Musical Vans. Unfortunately, we were still 12km from Zegne, it was past 5pm, and we were on foot. We met up with another walker going our way; his wife was sick with malaria and had gone to the hospital in Zegne a week before.

Joining forces with the husband was fortunate, for mildly unsavory bands of idle boys began to make an appearance here and there at the edges of villages, in the long empty stretches between them.

At 9km away, it unfortunately began to rain. We got desperate and hired two more motorcyclists to take us for one soul apiece - only to be overtaken by the much-awaited bus from Tai less than two miles from Zegne. We flagged it down, and hopped in... and made it back to Duekoué that night around 10pm. In the usual Ivoirian paradigm, local transport managed to blow our conservatively increasing time estimates for a journey's duration completely out of this dimension... twice. Traveling about fifty miles? We can do it in five hours! ...Coming back? Make that seven!

Well, at least I got to see my rainforest.. and I didn't get killed by anything in it, either.

Meet the Scammers

If scamming is indeed an art (which I would argue it truly is) and the masters of its trade thus artists, then Africans may hold their heads high as possessing as much ingenuity, creativity, charm, and persistence as the best that America has to offer. (And that's a high standard.)

There is the friendly self-appointed Guide, who follows you to wherever you're headed, maintaining an amiable banter until the destination and leave-taking, at which point you are informed that you were actually led there by his guiding services and kindly pay the proper fee for his time and effort. (And no, not an accidentally gendered word choice.)

There is the Yes! Taxi, in which arrival at the agreed destination is considerably complicated by the driver only pretending to know the way. Subsequent loss of gas and time while wandering aimlessly around a city must naturally be reimbursed by you, the passenger (just punishment for your foolishness in believing the driver when he said, "Yes! I know it! Get in!").

There is the Baggage Scam, most infuriating of all scams to David, produced by the shock of a passenger arriving at a long-distance bus station with - are you sitting down for this? - luggage. While no one else is paying for the ten chickens, bale of yams, children, or possibly goats that they are transporting, the two white people who just showed up with a suitcase apiece are sure to be hit with high fees for their passengerish extravagance.

And let us of course not forget the trusty Bait'n'Switch, when the original offer assumes new and exciting forms with astronomical proportions after services have been rendered - due of course to a misunderstanding on our part, or unforeseeable problems that were unforeseeably created by the party to be paid.

***ALLOW ME TO QUICKLY INTERJECT that by no means are all, or even most, Africans enterprising scam-artists. I would not even call it an appreciable minority. But if only one out of fifty people in your average African street are unscrupulous (a figure severely below that which you might estimate in any country), another honorable two hope to make legitimate clients out of tourists, and a final two are curious/bold/bored enough to come chat for kicks, then roughly one in five people approaching us of their own volition has a great NGO you've never heard of, and we will get the artificial impression that 20% of Africans are pseudo-criminals every time. In poor countries frequented by foolish and apparently high-rolling UN types and tourists, expect the above estimate to rocket skyward. It's simply an unfortunate fact of travel that we probably meet and talk to 2% of the inhabitants of a place we visit, and 90% of its scam-artists. (The other 10% were probably on the toilet at the time - they cursed their ill-luck later.) We're just too good, and sometimes too rare, for idle criminals to pass up.

So, we have (or more honestly, David has) developed a few tricks to protect ourselves from Les Trompeurs, while hopefully not shutting out opportunities for those casual exchanges with locals that make being in Africa so sincerely pleasant. We never reveal our hotel to strangers; we wait out followers or confuse them by diverging paths; we establish clear prices beforehand so no one gets peeved later. Of course we still get caught occasionally. Sometimes we can talk our way out of it, and sometimes we can't. But by and large we deflect the vast majority of flack that flies our way, sometimes in astonishing swarms, with a system of our own that can honestly only be called a scam itself... Please, meet the scammers.

The first part of it was formulated in Yaounde, Cameroon, in response to our difficulty getting rooms with two beds. Church missions had such rooms for low prices, but refused to hostel them to unmarried pairs; while they weren't about to demand a marriage license, it was an uncomfortable falsehood we were both unwilling to play, and failed anyway to explain why in the world we would insist on two separate beds.

David deserves all credit for the stroke of brilliance that has made hotelling a thousand times easier since - "What if you're my niece?" We worked out the details. He's my mom's younger brother, thus the surname difference, and no need to mention my older sisters who would seriously call into question my mom's age or his (almost 15 years apart). Finally, a simple explanation for why we travel together, inoffensive to this most religious of continents, and readily believed by everyone from hoteliers to market sellers to commanders of the rebel forces in northern Cote d'Ivoire. Even better, it has the added advantage of actually fitting our relationship rather well - David is definitely the senior partner on our team and deals with the everyday finances, and our rapport is one of obvious high familiarity and friendliness - yet lacking the romantic element that would normally be present in a co-ed pair on vacation.

Such has been the success of this 'scam' that we've expanded it from its original hotel-room dimensions to the marketplace and motorpark, enabling David to help me lower prices by 'refusing' to pay for a niece's frivolous excesses. I can show my willingness to buy to keep a negotiation going, normally risky because it screams Charge me ANYTHING!, yet with Uncle David, I also demonstrate a financially restricting force more tangible and immediate to the seller's eye than a vague, incomprehensible reluctance to pay ten times an item's value. For his prices, David plays the act of an interested but wafflingly indecisive customer, wholly dependent on the hip opinion of his highly skeptical niece. It's a fabulous scam, and I only wish we had thought of it earlier.

(Pardon the second interjection, but I would like to pre-empt any criticism that the above behavior is unfair to local business, that my post-colonial duty as a white tourist in Africa is to distribute as much money as possible among the locals. I suspect that such behavior is hardly likely to engender mutual respect and genuine cultural exchange, and doesn't provide a fair or sustainable source of aid anyway. Besides, may I assure the audience that Africans are *just* as intelligent as anyone else and generally more canny than most cultures I've met, and no seller is going to part with something at a price not worth their while. They don't want handouts, they want business - and hopefully a lively haggle.)

Part Two of our scam, formulated exclusively for francophone countries, is even better. The inspiration for this dates back to purchasing our Dem Rep of Congo visas at their consulate in Kigoma, Tanzania. I was interpreter, but once visas were obtained I skedaddled gleefully to the sunshine outside, stamped passport in hand, leaving David to shake hands goodbye with an official keen to extract a bribe. "Ah, j'ai beaucoup travaillé pour faire ces visas..." I heard him falter behind me to a blankly smiling David, who quickly exclaimed a heavily accented "Merrcee! Mercee!" over the diplomat's delicate attempts to suggest that we could peut-être offer something de petit for his travail exceptionel. His travail exceptionel (which, considering the current demand for DRC tourist visas, it probably was) would unhappily for him be recompensed only by the visa fees and his salary, for without an interpreter present, he had no access to the party identified as Mr. Pocketbook. Though we hadn't planned it that way (or foreseen the bribe attempt), it was the perfect devise for sidestepping a scam. "Merrcee!" David cried with naively broad grins as he waved goodbye, confiding later that he had indeed understood. (But why give that away?)

In francophone West Africa, we've combined David-the-French-buffoon with Uncle-David to produce the ideal situation - one in which we understand that which goes on around us and communicate what we need to, while conveniently 'not' understanding scam attempts. At many Côte d'Ivoirian motorparks/military barriers/random spots by the roadside where we stopped to play what I came to call Musical Vans, random herders or pseudo-soldiers would occasionally demand immediate payment of extra 'fees'. In the face of their fierce demands, the interpreter inexplicably sat silent as a stone, chatty just a moment earlier but apparently moneyless, while Mr. Pocketbook fumbled back a classic je-ne-parler-francais-pas that would make any good Français cringe. A few frustrated scammers were ultimately driven to screaming "Give money! Money!" at David in English in an attempt to break through our joint incompetence, but that was decidedly less eloquent, persusasive, and crowd-convincing than whatever they had to say in French, and soon after they generally gave up.

It's a rollicking good scam.

Yet we're still only amateurs among the best that NGO- and tourist-experienced West Africa has to offer, and trying to foresee the traps that will materialize out of thin air with snaky ropes already around our ankles occupies a considerable amount of my time in motorparks, that most fertile of scam-havens. Herder fees, union fees, baggage scams, van-switches, false destinations - it's definitely enough to keep you busy (and also probably entertained).

"They're gonna try to scam us," I complained out loud of the sketchy herders in a recent motorpark, plotting out some possible escape route. "Oh well," David shrugged, unconcerned: "If they scam us, we'll scam them right back."