HOLLY WOOD BABEL: Peruano, Africano, Colombiano, Angeleno… Novalima, guey

Did you know that Peru had Africans?  If you’ve heard (of) Susana Baca, then you did; or should, anyway.  They’ve been there since the early days of Spanish colonialism, though never in huge numbers, apparently.  Still it doesn’t exactly fit the image of an Andean nation with an Amerindian culture defined by its high degree of advancement and largely unassimilated entrance into the modern age.  That’s the point, that the races in Peru never really mixed, natives confined to the Cordillera, and whites content to stay along the coasts where they—and their African slaves—landed.

“My Life” by Sia Tolno: Another African Success Story

When you hear the name of the country “Sierra Leone,” music is not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind, more likely being the movie “Blood Diamond,” the Leonardo D vehicle which portrayed it largely as a tiny remote West African nation enmeshed in a violent revolution funded by corrupt and illicit mining, a portrayal at least partially true.  I think of it as the slave-era British counterpart to Liberia, a territory where freed slaves were released and allowed to make their way as best they could without the baggage of the past infringing, hence the emergence of Freetown as capital and major city.

“My Life” is the title of the new album by Sia Tolno, and this is the cultural milieu into which she was born and raised, for a while at least.  She, too, like many others, was forced to leave to escape the brutal civil war, and begin a refugee’s life of crowded cramped restless wandering, first in Guinea, then elsewhere as her fame grew.  Her music reflects that harsh reality she had to endure to survive.  Still she never forgot home, even when ir was largely reduced to ruins.  The title to her first song, “Blamah Blamah,” is the name of the town where an annual festival used to be held, back in the good ol’ pre-war days.  Such is life, one of makeshift impermanence.  Sia Tolno takes it to heart, brooding and growling and cursing the corruption and decadence, while never losing her optimism.  And still she’s pure African at heart.  If many “world music” artists seem like nothing so much as enlightened hybrids, Sia Tolno is refreshingly pure and authentic, and so is her music.


From that pure percussive African starting point, Sia proceeds to stake her claims to all the styles for which African is famous.  If she opened the album singing scat, she follows it up in “Odju Watcha” singing balls-to-the-wall blues, and to good lyrics, too: “People fight here for power… with all the gold and diamonds we’ve got…  human pride does not exist…”.  There’s some kick-ass good brass and lead guitar showcased here, too.  Then she changes it up.  This is the mark of the consummate artist, and the place where most fall short, the ability to mix it up in a variety of styles and still resonate (pun intended).  “Di ya leh” does just that, with soft and smooth balladry, Sade-like, the moody female reduced to type without being reduced in artistry.  The title song “Malaya (My life)” explains: “I spent my life making people happy when I was so sad…Oh God, take me back to your peaceful home…,” slow and brooding and accompanied by some nice clean guitar.


Just as abruptly she shifts right back into defiant mode. “Polli Polli” is a kick-ass rocker—complete with some screamin’ sax—and a blistering critique of corrupt local politics: “what did they say…sister, what did they do?... polli polli no good at all,” Sia all the while growling, cursing, kicking and screaming—yet never losing her cool.  Then another signature sound emerges in “Aya ye,” neither harsh nor soft, neither brass nor ballad, more like a jazzy reggae, light and lyrical, prophetic yet fun, “Kongossa” following in a similar vein.  “Blind Samaritan (Poor Man)” starts similarly, a reggae-like ballad, “Here comes the blind man, hoping to see the beauty of this world…no man is an island, no man stands alone.”  But it also adds another distinct sound, just when I thought Sia had pretty much shown her full palette.  She has a Latin side, too.  If this is hinted at in several songs, it’s overt in “Tonia (The Truth),” which just may be the most compelling song on the album, or at least a close second to the Afro-Beatish “Odju Watcha.”  Slow brooding and romantic and with some biting sharp guitar, Carlos Santana would be right at home on this song and Sia seems right at home with the style, too.   This could be a whole new growth area for her.


“Toumah toumah” also features some elegant guitar, and flute, and some whispering vocals that only leave one continually astounded at the range of Sia Tolno’s musical, acoustical and emotional depth.  Most of all, though, she’s an African patriot.  “Shame upon u” closes the album rocking and rollicking, “We are the owners of Africa… it belongs to us… shame upon you.”  BTW, did I mention that the album is elegantly produced, also, by Francois Breant?  She’s a keeper.  That’s “My Life” by Sia Tolno, out on December 6 on the Lusafrica label.  Know what I’d do if I were you?  I’d check it out.

Crossroads Music Festival Rocks Zambia

It's not like I traveled across the planet just to come to this small regional festival, but it's not like I didn't either. Opportunities for true 'cultural travel' are few and far between, and generally more staged than spontaneous (otherwise it might not happen, right?). X-Roads is still in that category, shifting dates and flakey info, never sure if it'll happen, much less WHEN. Festival du Desert has long ago become just another world music festival, albeit in Timbuktu, but don't expect to hang out with Tinariwen these days. X-Roads doesn't have names like these, of course, and it's not even fully professional even, more like tomorrow's stars paying today's dues. But it's good, and fun. It revolves around the five countries of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, and Tanzania, almost everything, that is, except Francophone Africa. Surprisingly enough, France is chief sponsor of this event. Merci beaucoup.

Unfortunately I was fighting flu-like symptoms at the time and couldn't participate fully, but the music was a welcome tonic, and the vibe was cool... and lively. I'm better now. The pictures don't really do it justice. Check out their MySpace site.

Globalization Reconsidered

America is a hard subject to talk about, because though I may be a warm-weather expatriate, I’m not an ex-patriot. I defend America against cheap shots all the time. If you want to take your shots with me in hearing distance, it’ll cost ya’. Mostly though I don’t want to make light of a tragic situation, but I’m more often accused of being ‘too heavy’ than ‘too lite’, so I’ll forge on. In my wildest dreams I’d like to shine some light on an increasingly tragic situation. Since my creative MO tends to be to put something heavy in a light format, please don’t misunderstand. My heart goes out to all those affected by the most recent mass murder on a college campus, as it went out to all those who went before, as it goes out to all those affected by the tragedies of Iraq, as it goes out to anyone who has ever been the victim of a death for anything other than ‘natural causes.’ I mean my heart really goes out. I mean my heart really really really goes out, to the point that I’m not sure if there’s anything left. I let my ‘virtual heart,’ a hypothetical entity constructed of memory and algorithms, cover most of the mundane tasks just to protect the real thing for emergencies. Marriage will do that to you. Some of the most intense love I’ve ever felt was when I was single with no prospects nor any desired, intensified through non-fulfillment I suppose. I could find love in a child’s smile, a kitten’s purr, or under a rock. “If tears could turn turbines… ,” but I’ve said all that before. The American golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” that’s sex. The Chinese equivalent, “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want them to do unto you, that’s marriage.

So the body count of American mass murder victims and Islamic suicide bomber victims would seem to be in about a psychological dead heat, if not a statistical one, so maybe it’s time to ask just what the Hell is going on. Is this as much a part of our modern era as video-on-demand, universal wi-fi and low-carb diets? Have we come this far forward only to collapse in upon ourselves for lack of a compass to show us a better way? It’s not just Imperial America, nor Islamistan. It’s the whole world, nations and cultures becoming caricatures of themselves, either for lack of imagination or better options. Call it cultural drift. For example, when or where could you go in Latin America and not see political demonstrations, blocked roads, mass marches, or tin-horn dictators, both left and right, making fancy speeches that accomplish absolutely nothing? I’ve traveled in Latin America for thirty years and that has only increased with the increased freedom to do so. What has changed is the emergence of a middle class due largely to closer economic and political cooperation with the US, where many of their citizens have been and continue to go. I’m sorry if that’s not politically correct; I call them as I see them. All the labor strikes and political manifestaciones accomplish little.

Asia, where such things are generally proscribed by law or tradition, has surged far ahead economically from far behind a century ago. They’ve got other problems, though. When or where could you go in East Asia and not find stifling individual conformity, monopolistic greed, obsession with status and prestige, and educated women unwilling to look beyond the kitchen and the bedroom for self-fulfillment? None of that’s going away any time soon. The first thing ex-premier Thaksin did as premier of Thailand was to propose a law that would put all his competitors out of business. Nice guy. His political disciples were just re-elected while he celebrated in Hong Kong. When or where could you go in South Asia and not find a racist caste system, assembly-line prostitution, crushing poverty, and systematic social injustice? Though the caste system was abolished by the Indian constitution, it persists. Most temple prostitution was ended by the British during their rule, though it is rumored to still exist in the south. Literacy in India now hovers around fifty percent with women in lopsided disparity. Many historically have opted for Islam, where there is at least some caste-less dignity, especially for the darker-skinned people.

When or where would you go in the Arab or Muslim world and not find the subjugation of women, restricted personal freedoms, religious hypocrisy, and near enslavement of the lowest classes? This shows no improvement with the rise of religious fundamentalism. Saudi Arabia finally outlawed slavery in 1962, though Mauritania didn’t get around to it until 1980, and it is rumored to still exist. Though politically sensitive to discuss, much of the current problems in Darfur and Chad relate to the ongoing ‘Arabization’ of the Sudan and Sahel which tends to further reduce the status of African blacks, even when Muslim. It also reflects traditional rivalries between herders and planters. As elsewhere in Africa and other parts of the world and other historical times, herders tend to dominate their sedentary agricultural subjects, in some cases adopting the culture of the ruled, the better to rule them. When or where could you go in sub-Saharan Africa and not find the world’s worst poverty, a double-digit AIDS rate, and political corruption that creates and sustains the worst problems? Options are not much of an option when you’ve got a life expectancy about equal to that of a gorilla in captivity. Hit songs in Nigeria tell about duping Western suckers in the numerous scams that long pre-date the Internet.

Europe may offer the most hope these days, given their self-reinvention as a unit, if indeed that succeeds after two disastrous World Wars, seventy years of Communism and subsequent ‘ethnic cleansing’ that has left scars that will not heal any time soon. Northern Europe leads the world in political liberalism, social justice, and economic well-being, largely made possible by low population densities, high education levels, and lack of social divisions, but that’s not the half of it. The South and East are still locked in a medieval past of Machiavellian morality and Mafia-like institutions. Where would you go in the former Communist heartland and not find archaic industries, environmental degradation, massive unemployment, and political instability? Women are the biggest export these days except in a Soviet Union and Central Asia lucky enough to have significant oil deposits. If America is any different from the rest it may only be in the fact that you can find some of almost all the other pluses and minuses in one single country. The Pacific Northwest is as politically, environmentally and socially liberal as anywhere in the world though, like Scandinavia, short on ethnicity. The South has yet to rid itself totally of the same instincts that fostered slavery. The Rust Belt has environmental degradation and high unemployment to boot. Wall Street is second to none in corporate greed, nor Microsoft slack in its love of the Monopoly board.

Isn’t the danger of globalization the homogenization of culture and loss of traditions? If that means loss of prejudice, intolerance, degeneracy, and injustice, then it seems like we could use some of that if there were some reasonable standards of what to expect. Generic development is probably not a bad start, if socially and environmentally enlightened. Ironically America and Islam share some of the most dubious traits- religious fundamentalism, violence, and oil-based politics. At least America can still put a little ‘fun’ into fundamentalism; it goes down better with a little lead guitar. Those Muslims got no sense of humor. Maybe people will get so depressed that they will stop reproducing. That might be a blessing in disguise. Lower populations could likely solve all of our problems except one, racism. That’ll take some creative inter-breeding. Sounds good to me. We all started out as one people before the diaspora. Why not re-shuffle the deck?

The Long Way Home from Africa to Thailand

This trip as a whole has been basically a salvage operation- initial shock, kicked while down, and arduous comeback. Maybe I was unfair to Africa, with unrealistic expectations. After all Thailand has its share of unsolicited guides and scammers, too. I’ve just long learned how to deal with them. But nothing was what it was supposed to be, just the opposite usually. Africa being dirt poor, it should have been dirt cheap, right? Not quite. That lack of development means that any development will be very expensive. What kind of role model is France anyway, with its monopolies and protections and labor strikes? Paris is retail incarnate, a boutique country for those with time and money. Ironically and conversely Marseille is very reasonable, as if the industrial revolution never really arrived in the southern ‘old’ Europe. Rome certainly has none, but it makes up for that with millions of tourists. Others aren’t so lucky, or unlucky, depending on your point of view. The industrial revolution was not pretty, probably the reason it caught on first in Britain and only later on the continent. Artisans working in their workshops are certainly more romantic than sweat shop assembly lines.

In another example of misplaced expectations the picturesque villages I expected to see in Africa seemed even more so in rural Spain, especially between Madrid and Zaragoza, almost even more African in fact. Those spires look less like Christian steeples than Islamic minarets, and villages seem to be perched high on hills for protection in a futile feudal world. The houses themselves are mud inspired, like negative space, something carved out of block rather than something erected from components, something more feminine than masculine. This would seem to be the connection between the adobe pueblos of northern New Mexico and western Africa including Morocco. The word ‘adobe’ after all comes from the Egyptian via Arabic and Spanish; so did the building techniques I think. The original Indians had to use rock or we would hardly even know of them after five hundred years, like the dirt ‘Indian mounds’ of the Mississippi Culture. Mud’s good but not that good. I suspect the true adobe pueblos of the northern Rio Grande were of later design. Of course the buses all pass these places by, just like they do in Mali and Morocco, so one is left largely to one’s imagination.

In the wildest science fiction scenarios, if the countryside were ignored, it could conceivably cease to exist. Once we’re accustomed to boarding the plane, closing our eyes, then waking up in some strange place, then how do we know that we really traversed all the distance between? One account of Australian aborigines relates how every piece of the landscape has a story associated with it. The researcher was overwhelmed when driving across that some landscape, as the speech was too fast to follow! What if the world were vertical, not horizontal? How would you know if you didn’t physically experience the distances and relationships between your points of measurement? Such scenarios seem absurd, but form the premises of many Hollywood movies of the past decade, The Matrix trilogy possibly being the best example. Like the best conspiracy theories, none of it can be disproved, and that’s the beauty of it, and the danger. By the same token, the most successful scientific theory ever, quantum mechanics, is totally foreign to common sense, and it has been proven over and over and over. Prime time on TV was once devoted to a theory that the moon landing was a hoax, and those people are not stupid, however misguided. I got sucked into the notion myself, for a day or two. But the transition from reality to fantasy is rarely shown in the movies, nor is the act of conspiracy ever revealed in real life. Both depend on a leap of logic to retrofit the past to fit present circumstances. I’ve lost friends to the warm fuzzy logic of Conspiracy. You can’t rescue them. You can only maintain communication and an arm outstretched. It’s up to them to grab hold, or not. They tend to think that we’re the ones who need help. Moral of the story: maybe common sense can’t always be trusted, but solid evidence and double-blind-controlled testing can; and don’t get so lost in a buzz-box that you forget to experience the world for yourself.

But the reason I stopped in Spain anyway was so that I could speak the language in case I needed emergency medical care. Well in Barcelona everybody knows Castellano, but only grudgingly use it, if they’re local. Welcome to Quebec. Catalan is the big deal, and you could get lost if you can’t read it. Appropriately it falls somewhere between standard Spanish and standard French in the spectrum of Romance languages, so it’s not impossible, at least to read. If a local makes you for a tourist, though, he could refuse your Castellano. If some trinket vendor’s got a language erection and wants to stick it in your face, then he’ll do that, to gain the upper hand so to speak. Welcome to psycholinguistcs and ESL, the empire as a second language. So much for Spain feeling like home because of the language; home is more complicated than that. Still I’d rate Spain as probably the coolest place to be in Europe right now, experiencing a renacimiento after decades of Franco’s strong-hand darkness. A cheap country doesn’t necessarily mean a good country, though, right? Right, Mr. Prez? Still, Spain is not too expensive, about like the US. Hostales will even give you the full set of keys, so you can come and go as you please. In Marseilles they lock the doors before midnight. In Spain, the party’s just starting at midnight.

I didn’t see many Gypsies in Europe this time, just one group camped with all their belongings at the Barcelona bus station, giving new meaning to the word ‘furtive’. What’s Europe without Gypsies? In Spain they toss the word around a lot, mostly in connection with Flamenco music, a la ‘Gypsy Kings’. Those guys obviously speak a dialect of Spanish, not Roma, though Iberian gypsies are apparently of Roma ancestry, originally at least. Flamenco music and dance has obvious connections with Arab culture and song; they did have significant cultural inter-mixing over the course of seven hundred years. In Spain flamenco bands are a dime a dozen, but the Gypsy Kings had a hit. That’s the difference. In Senegal a Gypsy Kings video on TV was titled ‘salsa’ music. That sounds like a line item cultural mutation. In East Europe Gypsies are not so highly prized culturally. There are lots of them, and for the most part unassimilated. They’re despised. Music could possibly be a selling point for them, as it is for many cultural minorities. This is one good thing about world music. It might just save the world, if it can save itself. Global warming and over-population can ultimately be solved; it’s just a question of time. Racism is the one problem that can’t be solved by controlling emissions, exhaust or otherwise. It can only be solved by intermixing, culturally if not otherwise. This is the role of America, both north and south, a test tube for societies and environments in turbulence. Europe doesn’t know the half of it. When is the last time Chinese New Year and Carnaval fell in the same week? It should have been a riot. It wasn’t. It was quiet. The parties were elsewhere. Where would be a good place to experience both Chinese New Year and Carnaval? I’d vote for San Francisco.

Abortion in Africa! Blame it on the Stones!

You gotta’ have a good headline. Pain! Misery! Anxiety! Get it right here! The good news is that readership’s up. Apparently people can appreciate my misery more than my metaphysical meanderings. At least it’s nice to know that if I lay dying, blogging it for the public, I might achieve in death what has always eluded me in life. Maybe I should do a webcam? Death can be a good career move. There are other disadvantages of course. So as I sit on the cusp of a severely mutated trip, praying for divine intervention, I guess it’s time to pause and reflect. What went wrong? In a word, everything. There’s probably a reason I’ve avoided Africa so long, especially the heartland, even if I couldn’t verbalize it. I still can’t, because I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the African reputation for aggressiveness and violence. But I’ve seen nothing like that, just maybe a little excessive aggression from the sales teams. Maybe it’s because I don’t especially like rap music, and extrapolate that into a general avoidance of modern black culture. That ignores the fact that there are many other genres of African-derived music that I DO like, especially the ones that they themselves tend to like at the source. I hear more rap in Thailand than I did in Africa. Maybe it’s all too close to home, home being Mississippi, Mississippi being the heart of the old South plantation slave system, that being one of the more disgusting periods of human history, in direction contradiction to the general trend of things gradually improving over time throughout history. Now I’ve never disavowed my connection to and affection for Mississippi and never will, nothing personal to it, and that’s the whole point. An entire era got wrapped up in something it couldn’t move past, and the more hopeless it became, the tighter they held to the old ways. We all know people like that, don’t we? Countries are no different. South Africa certainly wasn’t. That is what God invented 2x4’s for, beating some sense into the intransigent.

That is why democracy is good, because small units are better suited for evolution. Does that make sense? The dinosaurs are all gone and will never come back, beneficiaries of a sparsely inhabited world that is not likely to return. The largest mammal during that time was scarcely the size of a rat. They weren’t more powerful. They were more adaptable. Obviously democracy is slow and cumbersome, “the worst of good systems, the best of the bad ones,” a mighty dictator being able to accomplish in one sweep of the pen what a democracy might take years debating. But who knows whether that dictatorial edict will be ultimately good or bad? Aren’t a bunch of little mistakes ultimately better than one colossal one? Sometimes the best offense is a good defense. That’s usually the way I work, gradually insinuating myself into situations while always leaving multiple exit options. The one-trick pony is at a career disadvantage. All this is by way of saying that you have to remain flexible, adaptable, even if it means foregoing life’s biggest prizes. I don’t know what role fame plays in human evolution, natural or cultural. I do know that when somebody posts photos of himself in battle fatigues and then proceeds to systematically slaughter innocent people just because it’s there to be done for the sake of the evening news and Warhol’s dictum, then something is wrong. The problem is that I can’t just write them all off as crazy. The problem is that I DO understand them, as they stand on the brink of being and nothingness and decide to take the big plunge. This is a human condition, but particularly an American one, it seems. This is the price of individualism. This is the price of ‘believing in oneself’ to the exclusion of everything else. Religion is about believing in something bigger, whatever it might be, father figures optional. This is the price of fame. People get hurt.

So I bit the bullet. I split. I just got on the plane and split. I bit the same bullet I had just dodged, pain. I had just gotten over the bout of gout, when the kidney stones struck, screaming for attention. You don’t take this lightly. I’ve passed a kidney stone or two before, and it’s no fun. Even if it’s just a warning call, not the real thing, you don’t take chances. You certainly don’t plan a butt-breaking two-day overland trek back to the most primitive part of the world. The flight back to Mali would be $300 and still commit me to an unchangeable Air France flight back to Europe, or I could just pay $500 and catch a flight to Europe immediately, booked and paid online from the privacy of my own computer, and then take it from there, Europe, next day. So I did. Like the old saying goes, “better Expedia today than AirEvac tomorrow. That’s what my mother always said; didn’t yours? Okay, that’s not true. No, I had a mother, but she never said that. She said lots of other things, though. We used to keep a running greatest hits collection of her prophesies and witticisms. She used to say, “A dollar is a dollar.” I remember that one. She didn’t know Jack, at least not Jack Free. She didn’t need to. She knew everything else. Mothers are like that. They offer love at low interest with multiple repayment options. Now I have a Thai mother-in-law. She makes me spicy food that comes back to haunt me.

So I booked a flight on Iberia and left within a day, just one-wayed it outta’ there. I considered Algerian airlines, change planes in Algiers, just to put another country under my belt, but thought better of that idea. You don’t take chances with health. So I bought a ticket to Paris, and hopped off in Madrid. This is the privilege of traveling without baggage, jumping ship when you like, as long as no flight segments remain. The airlines don’t like it. I don’t like some things they do, or the trains either. The Eurail pass is an outright rip-off. I’ll tell you how to cheat that if you want. The Dakar airport has all the charm of Guatemala City’s and the Air France food was better, aubergines and potatoes braised with chicken in a light Dijon sauce, but Iberia was okay, the milk run to Africa through the Canaries. Sunny Spain sounds better than cold rainy Paris any day, and my Spanish is much better than my French if I need to negotiate my existence with some doctor who looks like Billy Bob Thornton with a Bolivian miner’s light on his forehead in a lesser-known Cohen Brothers’ movie. I know, I feel like a wimp, but when it hurts to fart, and I almost passed out from pain after a sneeze, then we need to hedge bets. Let’s make this clear: it’s not the fear, but the pain, that I succumb to. At fifty-three years old and counting, time is the greatest asset. So now I sit in a hotel in Barcelona, to which I immediately came from Madrid. You’ve got to have priorities, and I’ve already seen Madrid. My main regrets are that I really haven’t seen the entire scope of Mali, and I didn’t eat the mumbo gumbo in Senegal. I was working up to it, eating the local baguette sandwiches regularly, not the tourist ones, but not the goop over rice. The Senegal sandwiches were certainly better than the Spanish bocadillos, rather dry crusty affairs. I ate a lot of cheese sandwiches in Senegal, too, dodging the bacteria, but that’s not what I go to Africa for. I go for the goop.

Then I got hit by the calcium deposits. I even drank all the icy stuff on the train coming across and never got sick. Maybe I’ll return to Mali some day as conquering hero of the music industry. Who knows, maybe next year? The visa’s still good. But for now I’m just trying to salvage a trip, so guess I’ll check out the north of Spain and south of France. If I can’t afford it in February, then when can I? The stones have stopped hurting so much by now, so I’ll deal with them later. A doctor might say something I don’t want to hear. I’ve got a trip to salvage after all! I’m even missing the French language, like I was finally ‘getting it’ after all these years, though it’s nice to be in a country whose language I can speak, when in pain. I never minded the Francophony in Africa, anyway, just the cacophony. At least Africa doesn’t seem so exorbitantly expensive now, compared with Europe, as it did compared with America. We’re still not back up to fifty channels on TV, though certainly better than the one or two we were down to in Africa. You can drink the water! Hopefully cranberry juice will cost less than five bucks a liter. That’s more than gas, I think. Now I know what’s wrong with Africa. It’s just too bloody expensive for what you get. That’s a bullet that’s hard to bite.

The Accidental American… Somewhere in Africa

I wouldn’t say anything as clichéd as “this is the life” or anything like that, both because it’s not that great here, and clichés are to be avoided like the, uh, peste, by any writer worth his, uh, paper (dodging clichés can be difficult). Of course I hear people refer to Thailand as ‘paradise’ and I don’t know what they mean. I guess it can be an ego booster for someone with low self-esteem, though perhaps the opposite for someone truly talented. There’s certainly an element of village communism present there and in most small communities, jealousy and resentment, the great equalizer. I usually relegate such platitudes to the ‘superficial impressions’ folder. Nevertheless, it’s always nice to find a place worth hanging, time to wash the clothes, buy some bread, and make some tea, especially after a week or two of rough travel. This is the way I like to travel, like serial monogamy, never exactly settled down, though hardly extreme adventure. I guess it’s a backpacker style, or maybe an American one, but probably my own. That’s the way I do everything, never totally committed to any one thing, but unwilling to ever totally dump anything or anyone, almost. In addition I’m a terrible tourist, often preferring to riffle through postcards rather than actually get up at dawn to get the best light for that sublime view of some God-forsaken ruin. Where I differ from the typical backpacker is that they tend to congregate with ‘their own kind’ whereas I tend to eschew such. A modern-day backpacker can travel throughout Southeast Asia from one safe haven to another and never really see anything else. While not wishing to be judgmental, the disservice seems to be that he might think that what he’s seeing is the totality of the landscape. This plays into frightening ‘artificial reality’ scenarios, a la ‘Matrix’, ‘Vanilla Sky’, ‘Truman Show’, ‘Pleasantville’, or many others (most of which I like), in which the Berkeleyan dictum esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) gets carried to absurd, if plausible, extremes. After all, if we just followed common sense perception, we’d still be worshipping the Sun god on his daily rounds, and far from even considering multi-flavored quarks for Mr. Mark that sit and spin to a regularity that somehow underlies the very fabric of our physical reality.

I was in Mexico so many times when somebody saw an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe in his tortilla soup that I swore they were running that tape for me every time I crossed the border. Twice I was there during the worst pollution ever recorded, the second being worse than the first. They found a mutated rat about a meter long. I hope there’s nothing like that here. By some quirk of fate, or some butterfly that happened to flutter by, I find myself in Dakar, Senegal. This is how most of life works really, isn’t it? Is natural evolution really anything other than a series of brilliant mistakes? Is cultural evolution any different? Conscious decision-making and pompous philosophy usually come only after a big meal. Hunger can speak any language. So here I am, the accidental American on a busman’s holiday. But for a few quirks of fate I would be thinking about Quiche’ Indians right now instead of the price of quiche downtown. But for another quirk or two I would’ve lived the last ten years in Bolivia freezing my buns and learning Aymara’ instead of steaming them and learning Indo-Aryan. This is more than just ‘funny how life plays out’; no, this is indeed at the very core of our being. It’s almost as if the Lord said, “Go forth and divide,” and the rest is history.

In my research of mail-order brides, I learned a very interesting statistic. Do you know how most couples meet? Chance encounter, pure dumb luck and fortuitous circumstance. That makes Internet encounters seem relatively inspired and calculating now, doesn’t it? Downright rational, I might add. Should we re-think planned marriages? Maybe Mom does indeed know best. Now there’s a scary thought. Enter the dumb tourist into this lively mix, whether in Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts, or backpack and dreadlocks, or me. We’re here to test the tourist uncertainty principle by accident or design; it makes no difference. That means that our experience is not only limited to our perceptions of that experience, not the thing itself, but that nevertheless the thing itself will be altered in the very act of being perceived. This is a lively ground for interaction, in direct proportion to the distance from the original source. Like lightning drawing a spark up from the ground to meet it in mid-air, travelers draw out the most susceptible locals from the teeming masses, those just dying to meet us. Hard things on both sides will be seeking out soft spots in the other simply to test their resilience and because they are there. Beware three-body problems. They’re unsolvable.

So the signs all say ‘Dakar’ and so it must be. If they all said ‘Abidjan’, I wouldn’t know the difference. What there is here is a street scene that has to be seen to be believed. Think something between Khaosan Road and a Dead show. Apply pigment. It seems like everybody is selling something, especially cell phone SIM and top-up cards. You Americans have been spared most of this hysteria, with your two-year plans and two-page contracts. One guy’s got shirts draped over his arms, the next guy’s got pants, then there’s shoes displayed on the pavement every block or so, so I guess you could outfit yourself on the way to a party without having to go home and change. The problem is that it can be hard to walk down the street having to dodge vendors. Fortunately my cell phone’s got a radio, so not only can I listen to the local tunes, but I’ve also got plausible deniability, in case someone is offended at his entreaties being ignored. “Hey! Chill, dude! I didn’t hear you!” I’ve taken to using earphones even with the radio off. They’re too much hassle, the constant sales pitches and general hangings on and followings along. I guess it’s part of African culture or at least big-city African culture. It wasn’t like that on the train or in Mali, and to be honest, it’s no worse than Kuta Beach in Bali. I’ve caught at least one guy secretly following me for an hour or two, pacing his steps to match mine, always managing to be right there every time I changed my mind and turn around. The important thing is that I haven’t felt physically threatened once, only annoyed, and that’s good, ‘cause these are some big brothers. My wife asks, “Aren’t you scared?” Yes I am, and frequently, but not from aggression, not yet, at least. I’m scared to eat the gumbo, and I really want to, ‘cause it looks pretty good, but the last thing I need here is to get the runs or stomach distress. This is a calculated fear, logically inferred from premises, not merely fear itself. Fear itself is transcendent. Unlike Mali, at least there are options for eating here, though I’m not likely to get restaurant fatigue any time soon. I’m considering a boredom diet. It works.

I’m not the first who’s washed up here in the path of least resistance. If Americans wash up on the beach in Mexico and Brits tend to wash up in Thailand, then this is where more than a few Frenchies find themselves when the euros run low. I suppose they’ve got a few stories to tell. The Europeans used to always rag on us Americans back on the Gringo Trail. “You Americans only want to work,” they’d accuse. Hey, we got no gap year or continental grand tour or month-long paid vacation every year before we go back to our predictable life in the same town where our great-great-great-grandfather was born. We’re immigrants by nature, always on the look for something better. My g-g-grandaddy got on a boat, in steerage I presume, because it couldn’t be any worse than ‘back home’. Much of northern Europe did the same, looking for liebensraum. We need it. We’re not the romantic type; we’re the Germanic type. We’re not looking for each other; we’re looking for the other. We’re not looking for style; we’re looking for substance. Civilization is not limited to cities, and we’ll invent computers and cell phones and rocket ships to prove it, if that’s what it takes. It just takes space, and time, and lots of edible purple berries until the first crops come to harvest. This is our mission, mission impossible. It’s a way of life. Still the French implant their patisseries and boulangeries on the cuisine and their breathy ‘je t’aime’s and syrupy love songs on the airwaves without the slightest trace of self-consciousness or irony at the juxtaposition of such fluff in deepest darkest in-yo-face Africa. It takes all kinds. I wish they’d implant some of it in Mali.

Less Miserable… Dakar d’accord

No, I haven’t taken to writing way-off-off-off-Broadway plays. I’d only end up blogging them for release to the public. No, sometimes when it’s fourth and ten and you’ve got linebackers rushing the punt, you just gotta’ grab the ball and do an end run. So I reverted to plan B. You’ve got to have a plan B. This is an axiom of free-style travel, especially if you’re going to a region for the first time, especially if the travel guides steer you wrong, as they sometimes do. I’m still pissed off. I respect my readers more than that, both of you. I’ll tell you the truth, even if it hurts (sales). I won’t play up to false political correctness that does you no good when you’re standing on the side of the tracks on the edge of town at five in the morning without a clue, without a brew, all strung out on her or him. No, I’ll tell you the truth, even if it causes you to re-think a certain portion of a certain trip. The truth is that the ethnologist in me found Mali awesome; the traveler in me found it awful. Words fall short of the reality. Still I try to be positive and put the best face on things. I have to, because I have to go back. This happened once before, in Haiti. Plan B was the Dominican Republic.

I’ll tell you straight up that even though Mali is probably one of the most incredible places in the world, sometimes the most incredible places are locked in some of the most impossible situations, e.g. Burma, Cuba, etc. In Mali that situation is not political so much as simple under-development. I just can’t afford to really like Mali whole-heartedly. It’s not practical. It would mean I’m slumming, watching poverty from the safety and superior vantage point of my tour-bus window, enjoying the spectacle. Poverty in the countryside can still have dignity and status, that of tradition and homeland. In the city it just plain sucks, though it still speaks volumes. You can see the history of West Africa laid out right before your eyes on the streets of Bamako, likely part of the larger area where black Africa became black Africa, in a large population pool from which the Bantu speakers spread out to dominate the rest and populate the continent, displacing the aboriginal ancestors of the modern Khoisan speakers. They arrived at the cape not long after the Dutch. Of course many Africans from this area wound up in the American South from the slave diaspora. I think I see some familiar faces. Still, Bamako is hardly a city, more like a hundred villages in search of one, a dozen tribes in search of a nation.

Mali is like the Guatemala or Cambodia of Africa, picturesque and inspiring, but cumbersome for travel. But cost-wise it was starting to look more like Bhutan. I don’t mind some culture shock. This was sticker shock! Guatemala and Cambodia are cheap. Do the math; the numbers just don’t work for Mali. So I booked a train to Dakar, Senegal. If Senegal doesn’t get the same marks for authenticity, it at least gets higher marks for ‘livability,’ at least for West Africa. “The roads are bad,” they say, so I booked a seat on the train, thirty-five hours, but at least maybe I can get some sleep, train tracks not being so bumpy, usually, by definition. The train leaves in the evening, so I’ll arrive in the morning, and what I save on two nights’ hotels will pay for the trip. Well, the travel writers blew it again. They don’t tell you that this is the train from Hell. One look at that sorry caravan made me quickly regret that I had contracted for thirty-five hours of such abuse. It gets worse. Apparently that thirty-five hours refers to only the actual travel time, not including the interminable delays and waiting time on the tracks, nor the meal and pee-pee stops at least three times a day. The bathrooms were unspeakable, of course, so I held my own for the whole time, which only works if you don’t eat much. I didn’t, surviving mostly on something like rose hips and the kindness of strangers. Times like these are when you do that long-postponed fast, when you finally shut off the caffeine to your free-wifi-with-coffee-addled brain and concentrate simply on being and nothingness, staying awake, thinking outwardly, no internal dialog, pure perception without the curse of consciousness that language brings in its wake. There were some magic moments, too, like when the whole car breaks into song at one extroverted lady’s instigation. Bunuel’s Subida al Cielo (Mexican Bus Ride) has got nothing on this. Then there were the endless expanses of baobab trees, looking nothing so much like little African baby dolls rising from the landscape with thick trunks gradually tapering to tufted hair and stubby limbs. It was like a dream and a nightmare handing off the baton through the night.

When the train finally rolled into the station, almost sixty hours had passed, or would have, anyway, if it had actually rolled into the station. It didn’t. The train dropped us off at the edge of town at five in the morning, we final travelers looking and feeling like compost after being squeezed together for the better part of three nights. What to do now? Bite the bullet. Find a hotel and hope it’s late enough that I’ll only be charged for one day if I leave the next morning, a small consolation prize. No such luck; they hit me for two nights and I didn’t even have a key for the door since it’s mostly for short-term use, if you know what I mean. There was a condom on the floor, if you know what I mean, mute testimony to some disembodied desire at least filled full, if not exactly fulfilled. On top of that, the taxi driver over-charged me. On top of that, I got a signal on my cell phone but I couldn’t get a message out to my wife ‘out there,’ might as well be the moon. Worst of all, my feet were so squeezed on that train that I got a case of swollen-foot thrombo-phlebitic ‘economy class disease,’ and feel a screaming bout of gout coming on. There’s some pills left over from last year, but they won’t last long. I’m traveling in a foreign country and now I can’t walk? That’s usually almost all that I do. I could use some inspiration. Still I never lost my faith in my fellow men, and that’s what sustains me, the basic goodness of men and women, cultivated through religion and honed through practice. These are ‘people of the book,’ too, the Qur’an, and it shows. I was never offered so much food and drink as on that train, even by Thais, and they’re good at that, and including Deep Southerners, ditto. This, too, will pass.

The whorehouse wasn’t that bad, really, right next to a honky-tonk that I could look right into from my window. I wasn’t going anywhere fast anyway after sixty hours on a train and an attack of gout. If you don’t know what gout feels like, count your blessings. The pain is excruciating, only slightly mitigated by the fact that it can go away as fast as it comes on. That doesn’t mean that it will, of course. So when the Senegalais band started playing around midnight and went on until four or five in the morning, that was fine with me. I got a free concert. I’d only be drifting in and out of consciousness otherwise anyway. The next day will be better. It has to be. I get an early start and start walking. The foot is serviceable. I pick up some speed, and then a sudden realization hits me. I have no idea where I’m going. I had expected to be let off at a train station, which usually confers a certain centrality to its location. Why that train dumped us on the edge of town I’ll never know. There’s a ‘cyber café’ open, so I check my e-mail and look for maps online, spurning the advances of a little baobab doll of a teenager looking for a ride to the US. I couldn’t understand much of what she said anyway, since they’ll never speak their language the way they expect you to speak yours when English has to be reverted to. It’s the white man’s curse. Anyway, the maps are junk, so bid the little girl good-bye and revert to instinct, in no certain order. She’s cute, but it would’ve never worked. I flag a taxi and ask to go to the train station. There has to be a real one somewhere, and I’m betting that it’s close to the center. It is, and the taxi driver didn’t even rip me off. My French must be improving. At least French actually gets used here between locals, which I never heard in Bamako. There’s an obvious Arab middle class here, probably Moroccans in addition to peripatetic Lebanese, so that must be the difference. Still there are no hotels in sight. This is a breach of logic, a traveler’s last line of defense. Anywhere else, Asia or Latin America at least, and there’d be bunches. It’s time for the sixth sense, a kind of traveler’s radar, to flush out the elusive goal, a cheap but good hotel.

Fortunately I travel light, rule number one. Like an ant following familiar smells where no lines are drawn, I gravitate toward the dense part of town. It shouldn’t be far. It’s not, and there’s an auberge sign pointing up above a commercial courtyard. They size me up quickly and show me a room back by the staff’s kitchen, my kind of place. The price is right. We’re in, and right in the center of the city. Dense commercial area? Hmmm… I wonder. I flip the lid on my laptop and look for a wi-fi signal. It hems and haws, then locks on, Skype and all. We’re really in! I need a line! Quick, Trinity, give me a number! The Skype rate to Thailand from Senegal is the same as from the US! The phone is ringing! In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit… A voice comes on the line. Could it possibly be? “Sawatdi kha.” It’s a miracle.

4th and 10… and Surrounded by Mali’s Middlemen

Fortunately for me, Timbuktu is just a metaphor, right? It represents the ends of the Earth, right? We all knew that somehow somewhere deep down in our subconscious, right? I mean, if I ever actually got there, then what would I call the blog then? So the moral of the story, of course, is “be careful what you ask for; you might just get it.” Now that’s appropriately vague enough to fit most circumstances, and I’m not sure exactly what I expected, but certainly Mali gets raves as ‘the real thing’ so I guess that’s what I wanted, I being a strict aficionado of authenticity in all its multifarious manifestations. Oh, it’s real all right. We hear much of ‘developing countries’ and ‘under-developed countries’ and ‘least-developed countries.’ That last category must be Mali’s. There’s nothing there; okay, there’s hardly anything, hotels, stores, restaurants, anything, and what there is, is hard to find. Well, nyaa nyaa, bitch bitch, precious little American fell down and can’t find his beer; what a pity! No, I’m serious; there’s nothing, and that’s not the worst of it! To find what there is, you almost have to resort to the free-lance guides that prey on you while you pray to them. This is anathema to independent travel, to resort to the hybrid multi-cultis that comprise the interface between tourist and foreign country. Feeling sorry for me yet? No, it gets even worse. It’s expensive, even exorbitant! This is definitely anathema to independent (read ‘budget’) travel. When the cheapest backpacker hovel is $25 a night, then we got a problem. They never heard of credit cards of course, and ATM’s are not ubiquitous.

Travel writers are not doing their job here. Maybe when they specialize in a country they become accustomed to it and lose their objectivity. I’ve been to over fifty countries and researched this trip extensively and no one ever mentioned the high prices, only that Timbuktu seemed high. If that means Bamako is comparatively low, then maybe I’ll pass on Timbuktu. They also said there isn’t much in Timbuktu! That’s what I’d say about Bamako. Let me clarify this. A fifty dollar hotel in the US is better than a fifty dollar hotel in Mali, by far. That the fifty bucks is easier to come by in the US should go without saying. Lonely Planet is in on the collusion, too. They don’t tell you actual prices, unless you’re actually booking through them, only rating them $, $$, or $$$. Well, that doesn’t mean much when a $ in Mali is $25 and a $ in Chiang Mai is $5. I’m thinking of filing a lawsuit. Lives are at stake here, not just psyches. Sure, we love that roller-coaster empty feeling in the pit of our stomach, but the epiphany is in transcending it. Much has been written of the ‘instant illiteracy’ you feel upon first arriving in China. Mali’s worse, and it’s not about the letters. Though I haven’t mastered French, I can certainly get by, especially if reading. The first Phoenicians arrived close to where I’m sitting right now more than two thousand years ago and conducted trade by mute barter. Many mixed couples in Thailand do this as a way of life. It works. That’s not the problem. The problem is the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness you get when confronted with untenable situations. There’s next to nothing there, and what little there is, is expensive and poorly organized. So what do you do? I did the unthinkable. I played parasite-host with a free-lance guide, even staying in his hovel apartment with his so-called ‘family’, while buying myself some time to re-think my plans. That was an eye-opener to be sure, the Mali equivalent of a slum project, full of color, to say the least. Well, Mohamed and I parted company a bit not so amicably after a couple days, he scamming up my rent steadily, but still I bought a little time and some vivid images for the mind’s eye, so basically a successful maneuver. Never say never.

How can a place so poverty-stricken and undeveloped be so expensive? What’s wrong with Mali is what’s wrong with Africa, just more so. We Americans chastise ‘developers’ with our choicest curses, preferring to save a solitary tree than stoop to WalMart’s central dogma. In Bamako I dreamed of Whataburgers and greasy chicken legs when confronted with the choice of very expensive restaurant food or street food of an uncertain sanitary nature. That’s the problem in Africa, that huge gap between rich and poor, no entrepreneurial middle class. They could use some Chinese businessmen here, and I suspect they’re on the way, given China’s infrastructure investments on the continent. The Lebanese only go so far, doing what those same ancestor Phoenicians were doing two thousand years ago. They’re in Thailand, too. But Chinese represent a modern production capacity and global distribution capability unlike anything the world has seen since Britain’s head-start on the Industrial Revolution and America’s mop-up of WWII. Chinese study their history and learn their lessons well while just doing what comes naturally in monopolizing trade and working within extensive family-based networks. What Zheng He could never accomplish six hundred years ago with his ‘treasure fleets’ of Chinese sailing junks, modern Chinese conquer every day with their container loads of inexpensive Chinese junk. Of course, while a ‘conspiracy person’ might see a pattern to all of this, in actuality it’s mostly just a situation of individual Chinese trying to feed their families and willing to give up citizenship in order to do so. After all overseas Chinese still count and are counted by a country that worships its blood line.

So why is Africa so far behind in the first place? Certainly business acumen is not the same as rocket science, basically just common sense- buy low and sell high, but old habits and fears are hard to break, and complex organization can be difficult to establish. Is it simply a trait of ‘negritude’, or of Africa, or maybe of French cultural overlay? I suspect ‘all of the above.’ After all, the closest out-of-Africa analogy in my experience would be to Haiti, similarly impoverished, over-priced, and very interesting, ultimately. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t say “there is no there there.” That’s Oakland. There’s plenty there in Mali; it’s just not economic development. It’s music, and tradition. Street names are replete with names like Diabate, Keita, and Toure’. You can watch Amadou and Mariam on the evening news and hear Salif Keita coming from cassettes (yes, cassettes). Malian musicians are a regular feature at music festivals world-wide and no less respected back home. I stopped to rest from a long walk at the same time and place as an itinerant cassette vendor, and a magic hour transpired, just listening to Malian pop music blaring from a car battery-powered ghetto blaster. I watched the top 15 music video Friday countdown, and I’d never heard of any of the musicians, but it was all good. Comparisons could be made to ‘60’s Cambodia, where an entire era of music was bigger and better than any of its individual stars, and widespread poverty was not an overriding obstacle to cultural excellence. The comparison is interesting, because modern Cambodia is a beehive of industry and development, quickly moving out of the ranks of ‘least-developed countries’ with the help of its neighbors and cultural cousins Japan, China, and Thailand, etc. They’ll expect a return on their investment of course. This is old news, as most of Southeast Asia would be developmentally retarded without their Chinese immigrant merchant class well established. Who’s going to help Mali, and some thirty other sub-Saharan African countries? Do they really need it? Do they even want it?