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Published Jul 18, 2007
FINDING your way around Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso,
should be easy to do. Wide, ramshackle boulevards radiate from plazas and
monuments --this is French Africa, after all--and even the hovel-lined dirt
alleys are organized into a relentless grid. Buzzards perch on top of the
streetlamps that line the avenues, making you feel, as you drive down the
street, like a float in a creepy parade.
The trouble starts at night. The milky layer of wood smoke and dust that
during the day creates a bustling charm, at night becomes a vaguely
alarming, eye-watering fog. And forget the street lamps. The best they'll do
is flicker. So if you're driving around the city in a taxicab, as I was several
weeks ago, with an address in your pocket for a place you were told
showcases live music and cold beer, be prepared to drive around awhile.
I went to Africa for no real reason, except that a year ago I was offered a
spot in a three-week odyssey through the Sahara and North Africa. We
started with an ambitious itinerary--one that included Sudan and Libya--but
settled, ultimately, after a lot of wrangling with unhelpful foreign diplomats,
on a few key spots: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Algeria.
Africa, I'm here to tell you, is huge. Its immensity defies an easy summary,
but if you're absolutely dead set on one, try this: The two continents
currently in the news, Africa and Asia, have a key difference --Asia is an
overpopulated mess quickly becoming powerful and scary, and Africa is an
overpopulated mess quickly becoming powerless and scary. Thus, when
Chinese president Hu Jintao recently made a cruise through Africa (his
third), collecting chits for raw materials, distributing promises of investment
and money, a collective shudder went through the Western foreign-policy
establishment. If the Chinese--who, let's face it, know how to organize
stuff--can organize Africa, can figure out a way to exploit its material riches
without becoming embroiled in its chaotic, bloody politics, then we're all in
for a very different 21st century from the one we're preparing for.
Of course, the first thing the Chinese will have to do is get the U.N. out.
Everywhere I went--from the dusty squalor of Timbuktu, Mali, to the
hustling trans-Saharan crossroads of Agadez, Niger--purposeful white U.N.
vans darted about. It was hard to tell whether the U.N. vans are there
because the place is a mess, or that the place is a mess because there are
so many U.N. vans darting about, so many promises and programs and
development schemes blowing around like sand. "I think we've finally got it
right," an aid worker told me in Agadez, as we were sipping sweet Tuareg
tea in a shop. "I think with the right combination of incentives and
international aid, with strict oversight from organizations such as ..." But by
that time I had drifted away, busily buying some stunning Tuareg jewelry for
people back home. I'm not sure which organizations he was going to name,
but my guess is that they're already there, and already failing.
"Education is the key," another international-relief-organization worker told
me, in the oasis village of Timia, Niger. Education is routinely cited by aid
workers and Africa thinkers as a key solution to the continent's problems
and outrages. Education and its opposite, cultural respect, are often
twinned by those guys, who forget that to teach someone something
important--how to build a well, say, or why female circumcision is a stupid
idea, or that it's unlikely that your baby is possessed by demons--is to
place oneself in a necessarily superior position. You can't really have it both
ways.
"Education for women, especially," the relief worker continued, in a low
whisper. We were standing in the chilly night, watching an exorcism.
Correct: an exorcism. Apparently, a week or so before, a young girl from
the village had been possessed by demons, and the village turned out this
night to chant, sing, drum, and generally mill around the blindfolded girl who
sat in the center of a circle of other chanting, singing village girls. It was a
party atmosphere. A spooky party atmosphere.
We stood along the edge of the circle, nodding respectfully at the unfolding
event. Even with a full moon, the Saharan sky is spangled with stars; we
could easily make out the stricken girl swaying and weaving to the drums,
and as long as you didn't include the battered Toyota Land Cruiser in your
field of vision, it could have been a sight from any time in the past 400
years. You could just as easily have been a French explorer from the 19th
century, trudging across the desert toward Lake Chad.
In this part of Africa, the women do most of the work. They plant and
harvest and toil in the oasis, get the water, do the cooking, raise the
children. The men trade salt, or raid passing camel caravans--or at least
they did, until about 1911. Since then they've been lounging around the
village, ordering women around. Education, especially of women, is going to
bring with it a lot of social upheaval. Luckily for the Tuareg men of Niger, at
least, education efforts by the various NGOs in the region are spectacularly
unsuccessful.
"They come, they build a well, they go," said my Italian guide sadly, "then
six months later, we come back, the well is broken, nobody using it." He
shrugged. "I am an optimist," he said. "But this ... this is too much."
"But what can we do?" asked one of my traveling companions. "How can we
help Africa?"
"You could just leave it alone," said our guide.
But leaving Africa alone is something that for the past 400 years we simply
have not been able to do. The two most recent, most famous African
tourists--Hu Jintao and Madonna--each went home with a culturally
meaningful souvenir. Madonna followed in the footsteps of Victorian
missionaries by sweeping up a baby and leaving a religious institution--in
her case, not a spare Presbyterian schoolhouse but a Kabbalah-themed
orphanage. And Hu, like some kind of Chinese Cecil Rhodes, brought home
some mineral rights. President Hu probably made the wiser move. Africa has
a way of confounding our better instincts.
None of which occurs to you when you're driving through the night streets
of Ouagadougou, looking for cold beer and live music. When we arrive at the
address we've been given, we find a small shed with four old men sitting
outside by a camp stove. No music here, we're told. For music, we need to
go a few streets over.
Which we do, but by that time it's pretty late--too late to really settle for
recorded music, which is what we find at the next spot. But manning the DJ
booth is a young man in a T-shirt extolling the virtues of Blaise Compaore,
the president of Burkina Faso. President Compaore gives out T-shirts
during election season, and this one, emblazoned with his face and a
snappy slogan--"Blaise Compaore! The choice of the young"--you see all
over. Undeterred, we march over to the DJ booth and ask the kid where we
can hear some live African music. He looks at us for a second and says, "I
know where. I'll take you." And with that, he abandons his post at the
turntables, shuts the music off mid-beat, hustles us through the crowd of
(confused, disappointed) dancers, and leads us again through the streets of
Ouagadougou.
We find music. Great, live, African music, washed down by cold African beer.
There's dancing, international friendship, laughter, and no education
whatsoever. The next day, when I describe the events to a French
businessman who lives part of the year in Burkina Faso, he laughs. "So you
were going to one place, then to another, and then to a third place which
wasn't where you wanted to go originally, but you had fun?" I nodded.
"Then, my friend, you had a perfectly African evening."
FINDING your way around Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso,
should be easy to do. Wide, ramshackle boulevards radiate from plazas and
monuments --this is French Africa, after all--and even the hovel-lined dirt
alleys are organized into a relentless grid. Buzzards perch on top of the
streetlamps that line the avenues, making you feel, as you drive down the
street, like a float in a creepy parade.
The trouble starts at night. The milky layer of wood smoke and dust that
during the day creates a bustling charm, at night becomes a vaguely
alarming, eye-watering fog. And forget the street lamps. The best they'll do
is flicker. So if you're driving around the city in a taxicab, as I was several
weeks ago, with an address in your pocket for a place you were told
showcases live music and cold beer, be prepared to drive around awhile.
I went to Africa for no real reason, except that a year ago I was offered a
spot in a three-week odyssey through the Sahara and North Africa. We
started with an ambitious itinerary--one that included Sudan and Libya--but
settled, ultimately, after a lot of wrangling with unhelpful foreign diplomats,
on a few key spots: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Algeria.
Africa, I'm here to tell you, is huge. Its immensity defies an easy summary,
but if you're absolutely dead set on one, try this: The two continents
currently in the news, Africa and Asia, have a key difference --Asia is an
overpopulated mess quickly becoming powerful and scary, and Africa is an
overpopulated mess quickly becoming powerless and scary. Thus, when
Chinese president Hu Jintao recently made a cruise through Africa (his
third), collecting chits for raw materials, distributing promises of investment
and money, a collective shudder went through the Western foreign-policy
establishment. If the Chinese--who, let's face it, know how to organize
stuff--can organize Africa, can figure out a way to exploit its material riches
without becoming embroiled in its chaotic, bloody politics, then we're all in
for a very different 21st century from the one we're preparing for.
Of course, the first thing the Chinese will have to do is get the U.N. out.
Everywhere I went--from the dusty squalor of Timbuktu, Mali, to the
hustling trans-Saharan crossroads of Agadez, Niger--purposeful white U.N.
vans darted about. It was hard to tell whether the U.N. vans are there
because the place is a mess, or that the place is a mess because there are
so many U.N. vans darting about, so many promises and programs and
development schemes blowing around like sand. "I think we've finally got it
right," an aid worker told me in Agadez, as we were sipping sweet Tuareg
tea in a shop. "I think with the right combination of incentives and
international aid, with strict oversight from organizations such as ..." But by
that time I had drifted away, busily buying some stunning Tuareg jewelry for
people back home. I'm not sure which organizations he was going to name,
but my guess is that they're already there, and already failing.
"Education is the key," another international-relief-organization worker told
me, in the oasis village of Timia, Niger. Education is routinely cited by aid
workers and Africa thinkers as a key solution to the continent's problems
and outrages. Education and its opposite, cultural respect, are often
twinned by those guys, who forget that to teach someone something
important--how to build a well, say, or why female circumcision is a stupid
idea, or that it's unlikely that your baby is possessed by demons--is to
place oneself in a necessarily superior position. You can't really have it both
ways.
"Education for women, especially," the relief worker continued, in a low
whisper. We were standing in the chilly night, watching an exorcism.
Correct: an exorcism. Apparently, a week or so before, a young girl from
the village had been possessed by demons, and the village turned out this
night to chant, sing, drum, and generally mill around the blindfolded girl who
sat in the center of a circle of other chanting, singing village girls. It was a
party atmosphere. A spooky party atmosphere.
We stood along the edge of the circle, nodding respectfully at the unfolding
event. Even with a full moon, the Saharan sky is spangled with stars; we
could easily make out the stricken girl swaying and weaving to the drums,
and as long as you didn't include the battered Toyota Land Cruiser in your
field of vision, it could have been a sight from any time in the past 400
years. You could just as easily have been a French explorer from the 19th
century, trudging across the desert toward Lake Chad.
In this part of Africa, the women do most of the work. They plant and
harvest and toil in the oasis, get the water, do the cooking, raise the
children. The men trade salt, or raid passing camel caravans--or at least
they did, until about 1911. Since then they've been lounging around the
village, ordering women around. Education, especially of women, is going to
bring with it a lot of social upheaval. Luckily for the Tuareg men of Niger, at
least, education efforts by the various NGOs in the region are spectacularly
unsuccessful.
"They come, they build a well, they go," said my Italian guide sadly, "then
six months later, we come back, the well is broken, nobody using it." He
shrugged. "I am an optimist," he said. "But this ... this is too much."
"But what can we do?" asked one of my traveling companions. "How can we
help Africa?"
"You could just leave it alone," said our guide.
But leaving Africa alone is something that for the past 400 years we simply
have not been able to do. The two most recent, most famous African
tourists--Hu Jintao and Madonna--each went home with a culturally
meaningful souvenir. Madonna followed in the footsteps of Victorian
missionaries by sweeping up a baby and leaving a religious institution--in
her case, not a spare Presbyterian schoolhouse but a Kabbalah-themed
orphanage. And Hu, like some kind of Chinese Cecil Rhodes, brought home
some mineral rights. President Hu probably made the wiser move. Africa has
a way of confounding our better instincts.
None of which occurs to you when you're driving through the night streets
of Ouagadougou, looking for cold beer and live music. When we arrive at the
address we've been given, we find a small shed with four old men sitting
outside by a camp stove. No music here, we're told. For music, we need to
go a few streets over.
Which we do, but by that time it's pretty late--too late to really settle for
recorded music, which is what we find at the next spot. But manning the DJ
booth is a young man in a T-shirt extolling the virtues of Blaise Compaore,
the president of Burkina Faso. President Compaore gives out T-shirts
during election season, and this one, emblazoned with his face and a
snappy slogan--"Blaise Compaore! The choice of the young"--you see all
over. Undeterred, we march over to the DJ booth and ask the kid where we
can hear some live African music. He looks at us for a second and says, "I
know where. I'll take you." And with that, he abandons his post at the
turntables, shuts the music off mid-beat, hustles us through the crowd of
(confused, disappointed) dancers, and leads us again through the streets of
Ouagadougou.
We find music. Great, live, African music, washed down by cold African beer.
There's dancing, international friendship, laughter, and no education
whatsoever. The next day, when I describe the events to a French
businessman who lives part of the year in Burkina Faso, he laughs. "So you
were going to one place, then to another, and then to a third place which
wasn't where you wanted to go originally, but you had fun?" I nodded.
"Then, my friend, you had a perfectly African evening."
"Into Africa: to Timbuktu and back"
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_3_59/ai_n19312003
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_3_59/ai_n19312003
Jean Honore Fragonard
The Reader
The Reader