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Mali photo politics Senegal United States of America

Obama in Africa

Dakar, Senegal

As everyone knows, Barack Obama is popular all over the world. He is popular because he is not George Bush and repudiates Bush’s failed policies, because he gives everyone new hope for America and the world, and because his victory itself seemed to restore a sense of righteousness and justice to the world, to set something straight that was so gravely out of kilter. Part of Obama’s mystique is, of course, his skin color and biography. Even without understanding the details of his domestic or foreign policy, one knows right away that Obama represents a different kind of America, is from an ethnic/racial background and generation that has not yet been represented in the highest seats of power. He is black, he is biracial, his father was a Muslim, and he grew up in Hawaii and also in Indonesia. So many things about Obama seem fresh and different, to offer new perspective and hope.

The whole world is excited, yes, but Africa particularly so. When we mention these days that we are American, we are often met with “Obama” as a response. We’ve seen Obama stickers on shop signs and one Obama t-shirt. One American living in Mali told us that there is even a hair salon named after Obama in Bamako; the hand-painted business sign, characteristic of such signs all over West Africa, went up just days after the election.

Dogon Country, Mali

Ile de Goree, Senegal

Why the excitement? For one, Africans can with some justification claim Obama as one of their own. Obama is not only black, but far closer to Africa than the typical African-American, whose ancestors came to the American continent centuries ago as slaves and lived through the horrific and heroic African-American experience; Obama’s father was himself a Kenyan, a true African and citizen of Kenya, and essentially all of Obama’s father’s family (however poorly he may know them, given that his father left Obama and his mother when he was a baby) still lives in Kenya. For Africans, even Obama’s name is a very tangible reminder that he is just one generation away from the continent, that he is almost one of their own. Religion also serves as a common link. So many in the Muslim world seem to know that Obama’s father was a Muslim, and many even erroneously believe that Obama himself is a Muslim (as some Republicans so badly wanted Americans to believe). As Muslims themselves, the West Africans of Senegal and Mali seem to find it easier to identify with Barack Obama, and hope that Obama will usher in foreign policy that is not as anti-Islam as Bush’s appears.

But, perhaps more powerfully, Africans’ identification with Obama comes not only because of Obama’s specific ties to the continent but for similar reasons as African-Americans’ exaltation. For African-Americans, Obama’s election was tangible evidence that black Americans can make it to the very top of American society, that racism, while still alive, did not stop a clear majority of Americans from voting for a black man as President of the United States. Obama’s election was tangible evidence that anything is possible, despite race. This sort of affirmation was likely necessary in part because African-Americans have had a long-held suspicion that it was not possible, or almost impossibly difficult, for a black man to succeed in America, because there were too many barriers, including possibly race-motivated violence, in the way. To a population that is often made to feel downtrodden, Obama’s election was an event for great jubilation.

Africans recognize that they live in a continent that is, economically and politically, well behind the rest of the world. They recognize that Africans make up a significant percentage of the world’s most poor and that many African governments are among the world’s most corrupt and oppressive. This mild sense of shame is tangible–a hotelier showing us the relatively primitive plumbing of his bathroom described it as “toutes africaines” and a taxi driver described his nearly-falling-apart car as “une voiture africaine.” There is some pan-African pride, too, yes, but more often there is a sense that Africa, unlike North America or Europe or Asia, is a place that is backward and dysfunctional.

And so, just as an African-American may be sorrowful for all of the problems blacks face in America, and take pride and comfort in knowing that, despite it all, blacks can still rise to the very top of American society, some Africans we have met see in Obama proof that an African or a near-African, despite all of the problems the continent faces, can become the most powerful man in the world. As a young man in Dakar explained to us, now anything is possible, not only for African-Americans and other minorities in America, but also for Africans from Africa.

Will people be disappointed? Perhaps. Obama can’t be everything that the American left expects and desires, and everything that Europeans want of America, and everything that the Muslim world and the developing world think may come from a black President whose father was an African Muslim. He simply can’t please everybody. But as we keep telling people, everything may not be good after 4 or 8 years with Obama as our President, but everything will be better. Given the fiascos and disasters of the last eight years, everyone seems to be content with this expectation, with much nodding of heads, heartfelt pats on the back and even a few inshallahs. The African people, like the rest of us, are tired. They need what we all need, for America to lead again.

One funny story. We met a couple of Peace Corps volunteers who are working in a small village in Niger. Early morning on November 5, they woke up to the sound of great cheering as the villagers heard on the radio that Barack Obama had been elected the next President of the United States. The Americans, too, were overjoyed. Also living in their village was an American Christian missionary, who was apparently, as evangelical Christians were likely to be, a McCain supporter. Later that day, one of the villagers approached the Peace Corps volunteer, confused because Missionary Mark wasn’t excited and happy for Barack Obama. The villager just assumed that everybody wanted Obama to win, and couldn’t understand why one of the actual Americans among them wouldn’t be celebrating. Grinning broadly, the Peace Corps volunteer answered simply, “Because he’s dumb.”

Djenne, Mali

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Mali photo religion

Tabaski, or On Sacrifice

For the most part, our itinerary within the Muslim world has been planned based on visa procurement, climate and, most of all, routings to minimize air travel and maximize our ability to see related places in close succession, the better to compare and contrast them. However, there are some detours we have made for the sake of experiencing special days, such as holidays and festivals, in special places. Perhaps our most significant such planning was to spend Ramadan in Egypt, where it is said to be the most festive (which in hindsight might have been a mistake, see post of 9.23). We arranged our time in Mali to spend Tabaski, also known as the Eid el-Kbir (and countless other names, depending on from where in the Muslim world you hail), in Timbuktu.

Tabaski is a commemoration of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to God. According to Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition, God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son, and in full obedience Abraham took his son up the designated mountain, the son carrying wood for the fire to follow the slaughter. At the last minute, after his son had already been bound and as his throat was about to be slit, an angel announced that the whole thing was a test, and Abraham offers God a ram in place of his son. Now, every year, Muslims around the world slaughter a ram (or some other animal) in the name of God, and celebrate a feast, which is shared not only with friends and family but with less fortunate neighbors.

Tabaski is, as I mentioned above, sometimes called the Eid el-Kbir, which means the “Great Feast,” and indeed it is one of the largest holidays in the Muslim calendar, at least by nomenclature even greater than the festival ending Ramadan, Eid ul-Fitr, which is also known as the “Lesser Feast.” The build-up to Tabaski is tremendous. All over Senegal and Mali, we saw huge herds of sheep and makeshift sheep markets (consisting of adult rams, the only animals considered suitable for the sacrifice), the vendors often Fulani, the nomadic herding people seen all over Africa, in their characteristic hats. We were told that, predictably, the price peaks prior to the holiday, with the leftovers sold at a discount starting the late afternoon of the night before. (To clear confusion (we certainly were confused in the beginning), the animals pictured here are all sheep–West African sheep do not have the woolly fleece that most of us are accustomed to, and so look like goats.)

Sheep on the Faidherbe Bridge in St. Louis, Senegal

Sheep being washed at a market in Bamako, Mali

Sheep at the Monday Market in Djenne, Mali, chased from behind by Fulani herders

Sheep being led to market in Timbuktu, Mali, past the Sankore Mosque

Sheep market, Timbuktu, Touaregs in their blue bubus

I do not recall the name of the author, but it has been postulated that man created religion in order to explain how we could eat other animals. Especially in the case of domesticated animals, such as sheep and cows, to whom we as fellow mammals can grow attached, we needed some kind of justification for why we had the right to kill them, in order to consume them for food. Just as a young child growing up on a farm may be disturbed the first time he sees what he thought a household pet go to the slaughterhouse, our distant ancestors saw a moral conflict and created the framework of religion in which to couch it. It may all have started as a ritual or ceremony to commemorate the life of the animal, the sacrifice that it is making for our survival; from there, the slaughter developed into an offering of the animal to the gods, although of course the meat generated would turn up in our stomachs. This theory would explain why animal sacrifice has played and continues to play such a big role in many religions–because the slaughter of animals was the reason that the religions developed in the first place. I personally don’t take much stock in this theory–the religious impulse seems much more primal and less rational–but I like it because it paints such a sympathetic picture of mankind. We are, at some deep level, all ethical vegetarians, and had to create the tremendous byzantine construct of religious dogma in order to justify our murder of fellow living creatures.

And so, today, that is how I will think of Tabaski. Not as the celebration of a Judeo-Christian-Muslim God who would order his subject to commit filicide–to a nonbeliever such a lord, urging his follower to act against all sense of decency, would not seem to represent a religion worth respecting, let alone believing–but as a sort of tribute to the animals we eat. Not a statement on the expendability of the life of living things as a gesture of our subservience to some master, but as recognition that an act that may seem ordinary, slaughtering an animal for meat, is actually one that is fraught with moral problems, one that is to some extent comparable to killing a fellow human, though perhaps not your own son. Yes, the animals are being killed in the name of God, but the “animal sacrifice” here is neither primitive or savage (neither I nor likely you, dear reader, are vegetarians, and contribute to the deaths of hundreds of animals each year); that in the case of Tabaski (and all halal meat, for that matter) the slaughter is (quickly) performed in the name of God makes it if anything less barbarous, an attempt to place the slaughter within an ethical framework that is conscious and takes note that a life is being taken and to justify it with the loftiest aims.

Our Timbuktu Tabaski experience? We began Tabaski by attending prayer just north of the town, in the desert location preferred by the town’s Touareg/nomad population (the black African population prays in the mosques in the town itself). At first we weren’t sure to what extent we would be welcome to observe, but any such concerns were quickly allayed by the number of people telling us exactly where and when to go to see the prayer and happily mimicking photo-taking by clicking an imaginary camera. Our primary concern, it turned out, was to be the breakdown in discipline we seemed to be causing when dozens of boys, not much interested in praying, crowded us for pictures.

After prayer and a brief sermon was the time of the sacrifice, when the families returned to their homes for the preparation of the feast.

Pools of blood were a common sight in the sandy streets of Timbuktu.

We took our Tabaski meal with our generous hosts, Shindouk and Miranda of Sahara Passion (link), who welcomed us to join them for Tabaski as they did for all meals during our stay. We were told that the extended family would slaughter two rams, one on Tabaski and one on the next day, all to be shared with family and neighbors.

As we ate our meal in the courtyard of the house, we heard the plaintive cries of Sheep #2, who was tied to a post a few feet away–did he know what had happened to his friend? did he know what was to come? He seemed thirsty, and hungry, as he bleated and tugged at a nearby thatch basket, as if to unravel it for food.

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Timbuktu

We made it–to Timbuktu. In a sense it was inevitable–Timbuktu is the sort of place that most travelers aspire to have on their travel resume; even if there were nothing to see, tourists would flock here for the sheer cachet of its name alone. Timbuktu is a byword for distant, for remote, for that place to which, if you have been, perhaps you have been everywhere else as well. As a souvenir t-shirt on sale here puts it, “I’ve been to Timbuktu and back”–no other destination sounds like such an achievement. It is one of those places, like Zanzibar or Samarkand, that everyone has heard of, even if they’re not sure whether it really exists and don’t know its location. Well, the legendary city of the Mali empire, the city of Mansa Musa, the city so long closed to Western explorers, does exist, even if it has seen better days, deep in the Malian Sahel, a few miles from the Niger River.

But there are a couple of ugly truths about Timbuktu. The first is that, in some respects, it’s not so remote at all. Few places in this day and age are all that remote, and this is true even for Timbuktu, as infamous as it is for its remoteness. Timbuktu has an airport with regular flights to the city of Mopti, the second biggest city in Mali, and, believe it or not, Mopti has direct flights to Paris (not to mention connecting fights through Mali’s capital Bamako to various other destinations). I don’t know the actual schedules, or how good the connections are, but possibly you can fly in from Paris in the morning, change planes once, and be in Timbuktu by the afternoon. If you’re willing to fly, Timbuktu is just hours away, however unadventurous that may be. (Flying to Timbuktu, in my opinion, largely defeats the purpose of going.)

For that matter, we didn’t even have to get on a plane to arrive at Timbuktu in an unusually (for Africa) carefree and comfortable manner–we took a cruise. Well, perhaps cruise slightly overstates the situation, but COMANAV, Mali’s state boat company, operates a weekly boat service up and down the Niger, from Mali’s capital Bamako, through Mopti, Timbuktu and Gao, in the far east of the country, and back. The boat’s not a sure thing–it runs only when the river level is high enough and is sometimes subject to serious delays–but it offers a level of comfort that one doesn’t find too often in West African transport, let alone for a destination as exotic as Timbuktu. The fares are not cheap (about USD 100 from Mopti to Timbuktu, a 36 or so hour run, in a first class cabin for two with sink but shared bath), but the ride allows one to enjoy the traditional route to Timbuktu from the south–the Niger River–while maintaining a sense of journey and adventure and without having to shell out for a private pinasse (up to USD 1000) or suffering the conditions on a public pinasse (see post of 12.04).

There are many classes of service on the boat, but the most luxurious (which we did not take) includes your own spacious cabin with air conditioning, mini-fridge and bath, while a few of the classes include decent meals served in a basic but spacious dining room, complete with karaoke machine. A second class cabin, with four bunks.

And quite a journey the COMANAV is. Even if your immediate surroundings are almost luxurious, and out of keeping with general conditions in West Africa, I can think of few better ways to witness life on the Niger than from the comfortable deck of the COMANAV ship.

With ample deck space–the boat was surprisingly uncrowded, especially considering that fourth class tickets are actually quite affordable–you can peacefully survey the natural beauty of the Niger, as it expands into its inland delta and then contracts toward the top of its bend.

Villages passed en route provide glimpses of traditional Sudanese mud-brick architecture, with its elaborate ornamentations and textures. At some stops, there was enough time to take a short walk into town. Following the route on our map, we found ourselves chuckling as we described ports as “halfway to Timbuktu” or “three quarters of the way to Timbuktu.”

The voyage is especially notable for the amount of commerce that it facilitates. The first picture shows villagers selling prepared food to the passengers on board. While meals of decent local food were included in second class and above (the classes that most foreign tourists take), those in third and fourth classes either prepared their own food or bought food from ladies who rowed pirogues up to the boat with plates of (usually) dried or fried fish. We even saw a few live chickens change hands, but it was unclear whether passengers were actually slaughtering and cooking them onboard. The second picture shows a procession of women departing the ship with baskets of produce. The boat acts as a sort of moving market, and these women seemed to be riding not to go anywhere but to sell merchandise. At each stop, regardless of time of day (or night), the boat would play loud dance music, letting people know that the boat had arrived, and the ladies would set up a sort of market right in front of the boat, selling produce to the villagers. The third picture shows a sort of convenience store set up on the lower level of the boat. Apparently, in addition to certain fruits and vegetables, the villagers on the boat’s route lack pomades, matches, cigarettes, candy and toothpaste (some of these items may also have been for sale to the boat’s passengers). Villagers would board the ship, when in dock, to purchase items from these onboard stores.


When going to a destination such as Timbuktu, the journey should be at least half the fun, and our COMANAV trip did not disappoint. We arrived well-rested and well-entertained, having enjoyed the scenery, interactions on board and brief village stops, and even having gotten a little work done (as there was electricity on board).

What is the second ugly truth about Timbuktu? As the guidebooks warn you, there is actually very little here. The state of Timbuktu of today speaks more to its remote location and less to its past glory as the great city of a fabulously wealthy empire. Back in the 14th century, Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, was so rich from the gold mines of West Africa that on the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, his spendings depreciated gold prices in Cairo for over a decade. It was starting from those times that Timbuktu became, in the eyes of much of the rest of the world, a city of great exoticism and allure. Now? Yes, there are some ancient mosques, which have been lovingly restored and are fine examples of Sudanese mosque architecture, but the Great Mosque of Djenne [post to come] is far more impressive and, like the Djenne mosque, the mosques of Timbuktu are closed to non-Muslim tourists. Yes, there is something like an old city, but it is nothing compared to dozens of other old cities we have seen, and certainly far smaller and less interesting than, again, Djenne. How about the desert? Well, as any world atlas can tell you, Timbuktu is not located in the truth Sahara, but in the Sahel transition zone, a sandy area yes, but one with regular hardy vegetation and not too many of the high dunes of one’s childhood fantasies. Just as one would not go to Timbuktu for its architecture or a tangible sense of history, one would not go to Timbuktu solely for the desert scenery.

Foremost among the sights of Timbuktu are three ancient mosques (the Djingarey Berre mosque is pictured below), “explore
rs’ houses” said to be the buildings in which the first European explorers to Timbuktu stayed (that of Rene Caillie is pictured below)and libraries holding the medieval manuscripts for which Timbuktu is famous (the Ahmed Baba Institute is pictured below).


Typical Timbuktu street scene: more sewage than romance

So why go to Timbuktu at all? Is it even worthwhile? Well, our stay in Timbuktu was greatly enriched, perhaps even redeemed, by our choice of lodging: Sahara Passion (link). We saw the two proprietors, the unlikely husband-wife team of somewhat grizzly Touareg Shindouk and youthful Canadian Miranda Dodd, advertising their hotel at Timbuktu’s port when we arrived into town. They were embarrassed at trolling for customers at the port but due to recent and confusing changes in location, they needed the additional visibility despite being recommended in multiple guidebooks. The two drove us to their guesthouse-cum-family home, located on the northern outskirts of town. On the way there, we were afraid that the location might be inconvenient, as it was located a good kilometer or more from the “old city,” and at first sight we were concerned about the relatively spartan conditions (e.g., the city’s power grid does not reach their home, posing difficulties for travelers as electronically dependent as we (see post of 8.20), though they do have solar power for smaller items and can charge larger items in their town office on request). But if the charm of the two hosts and the insights they offered into life in Timbuktu weren’t enough, and they would have been (we were especially impressed by Shindouk’s wise and cosmopolitan worldview), we soon realized that their location was also a tremendous benefit, for it helped us to understand and appreciate what is special about Timbuktu.

Shindouk

The edge of town–to the north, the wilderness and the way to the Maghrib

As I mentioned in my post of 12.04, much of the strategic significance of Mali, the reason it played such an important role in medieval African history, is the bend in the Niger River, which facilitated communication between Arab/Berber North Africa and black sub-Saharan Africa. The swoop of the Niger northward to Timbuktu allowed for camel caravans to relatively easily cross the Sahara to a sub-Saharan port, with access to goods such as gold, ivory and slaves. Timbuktu is, in other words, the gateway between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. From Sahara Passion, this is demonstrated more clearly, more plainly, than I thought possible.

Just south of us is Timbuktu, largely an African city, not dissimilar from the mudbrick town of Old Djenne or others in Mali. The residents are mostly black and dressed in colorful clothes, their markets (and behavior) also colorful. The heart of the city is surprisingly dense, crowded in the way that African cities can be.


To the north? Still the Sahel, yes, but mainly sandy desert, a wilderness of emptiness. We were told that a day’s drive away there were some settlements, but even there encampments are said to be scattered a great distance apart, so that there is essentially nothing in the way of dense neighborhoods. And the residents? Almost all Touareg, a fiercely independent and historically nomadic North African Berber group, in skin color tan and not black at all.

Nomad-style encampments on the edge of town. These were mostly populated by people who were ethnically/racially black but culturally Touareg, presumably the former (some would say current) slaves of the Touareg.

Touareg camel caravan on its way out of town

Even if the history of Timbuktu is not palpable in the city’s remaining monuments, the significance of its location, the role it has played as a transition or pivot point between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, is still very much tangible, especially from the northern edge of town. Topography, ecology, mode of living, race–everything seems to shift from the few miles south to the few miles north of Timbuktu, and the city, just as it has often switched hands from black African powers (the Mali Empire and the current state of Mali) to North African ones (the Touareg and the Moroccans), is truly halfway between the worlds of sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa.

Two of the many shades of TImbuktu’s residents

There are many other interesting points of interest surrounding Timbuktu, which make it a place far more fascinating than it superficially appears. One of the most intriguing is the 40-day salt camel caravan, which brings mined salt from Taoudenni in the Sahara to Timbuktu to be sold in other parts of Mali and beyond. Another is the status of the former slaves of the Touareg, black Africans who have been culturally integrated into Touareg society, with some clinging on to a familial/employee role, if not still outright chattel. We were told that, to this day, the people working at the Saharan salt mines are black in skin color. Then there are the famous manuscripts, thousands of volumes bearing evidence of Timbuktu’s past history as a center of education and culture (however hard it seems now to believe). But my knowledge on these topics is limited, and many websites touch on them, and so I encourage you to use google to learn more.

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Mali photo

Mopti Harbor

We know we haven’t seen it all, but we’ve seen a lot, and so when we see something that qualitatively or quantitatively stands out compared to things we’ve seen before, we are all the more impressed and astonished. Such a place is the port of Mopti.

Mopti is a medium-sized city on the banks of the Bani and Niger rivers, halfway between Bamako, Mali’s capital, and the legendary city of Timbuktu. The Niger River is the lifeblood of Mali–as the country is located at the edge of the Sahara, largely in the transition zone known as the Sahel, the river is an essential source of water, food and transport in the country, a sustainer of life and commerce. The northward horseshoe turn of the Niger River in particular, known as the “bend” of the Niger, has acted for centuries as a conduit for communication and trade between “Arab” North Africa and the savannah and jungle of sub-Saharan “black” Africa, helping now Mali become a center of several empires. Timbuktu is at the northernmost part of this bend; Mopti can be seen as its westernmost point, the base from which trips to or from the north and east started or ended.

Link to map of Mali at the Perry-Castañeda Library
Map Collection

Mali’s river ports have the same significance today that they had in the past. Much of the population lives along the Bani and Niger Rivers, and given Mali’s relatively primitive road infrastructure, river travel is still competitive in time and cost, and the choice for many, making the Port of Mopti one of the busiest, most hectic centers of river transport we have ever seen. On market day, the level of frenetic activity is comparable to that of transportation centers in urban India and the lack of development and filth comparable to Indian cities or, what came to our mind, the watery slums of Jakarta–but what makes Mopti stand out is that, compared to similar hubbubs in India or scenes in Indonesia, the setting is more rustic and the conditions more primitive, making Mopti altogether more overwhelming, especially given the relatively small size of the city compared to those of urban Asia.

Walking around Mopti’s harbor, especially on market day, is an unforgettable experience. The harbor is shaped something like a square, open to the Bani River on one side with boat access by paved ramps all along the other three. The heart of the city lies on one of those three sides, and market districts on the other two. Starting from the city corner, it is an easy walk around the three sides of the square to the refuge of bar/restaurant Bar Bozo on the fourth corner, a ramble that can take anywhere from 20 minutes to a few hours, to take in the diversity and energy of the many activities of the harbor.

Primary and most important is the loading and unloading of cargo and passengers from the many pinasses that travel up- and downriver. As I mentioned above, given Mali’s relatively poor road infrastructure, river transport is an essential means of getting around, and getting goods around, the country. Given the high cost of fuel and the poverty of the country, unsurprisingly Malians try to maximize the utility of any transport run. We had become accustomed to the fact that minivans and buses in Mali generally do not run until absolutely full, and that any vacant space is used for passengers or cargo. For example, on one minivan ride, our driver insisted on stopping for every single opportunity to carry extra freight, whether it was a sheep or a bunch of wood waiting at the side of the road, and squeezing passengers into every available space, with some sharing the floor with an adorable tiny lamb. We were still incredulous, however, at the extent to which the pinasses of Mopti are loaded, well beyond any reasonable capacity.

When a boat can no longer be filled at shore, because the weight of the load makes it sink into the mud in the shallow of the harbor, it is floated to the middle of the harbor, and loaded further.

Two thoughts immediately come to mind. The first is safety. An overloaded car or bus may be uncomfortable, yes, but at least there isn’t the danger of sinking. With the boats crammed so full that they float just inches above the water, and with cargo and passengers sitting on top of their roofs, it is all too easy to picture the boats tipping over, with the passengers left to swim to shore or drown (it goes without saying that there are no lifejackets on board).

The second is the overwhelming discomfort of a long pinasse journey. A typical pinasse ride from Mopti can take anywhere from 6 to 36 hours–destinations and fares are often painted on the boat–and it is hard to imagine the physical discomfort of such a journey, given that each passenger has barely enough room to sit, let alone sleep. The trips grow even longer if the ships, overloaded, run aground in shallows, in which case the ship has to be unloaded, freed to deeper waters, and then reloaded, a process that can means additional hours of delay. Hardier backpackers than we opt to take such public pinasses from Mopti to Timbuktu–we opted for the big COMANAV ship, with our own private cabin.

Smaller pirogues for intracity journeys. Some of these are clearly lived-in, like the floating homes of Vietnam or southern China.

There are many more activities, however, than just the loading and unloading of ships. On one side of the harbor, salt is sold. Now, this is not just any salt, but salt from the Sahara, brought by camel caravans some fifteen or so days from Taoudenni to Timbuktu, and then by river to Mopti, to be cut and sold to Fulani herders. The salt trade is an ancient one, and one of the principal commodities North Africans offered in exchange for gold and slaves. It is simply amazing that this trade still lives on, that this is still the most economical means of obtaining salt in Mali.

On another side of the harbor, fish is dried and sold. Entire clans, it seems, from elder to juvenile, are involved in the preparation and sale of river fish, dried or smoked to an unappetizing black. Fish is an essential source of calories and protein for Malians.

While walking along, it can be difficult to take pictures because at any given moment, in any given frame, the camera is likely to catch a man, woman or child squatting (urinating or defecating) at the water’s edge. The amount of garbage and general filth is depressing, and it is heartbreaking to see those responsible for the port’s upkeep.

Finally, starting just above the water’s edge and stretching several blocks inland, there are markets, with a wide range of goods being sold, urban goods for those boarding ships and products from the countryside unloaded off ships and sold to the residents of the city.

The pinasse pictured here seemed to be traveling back with a tremendous stack of empty containers, which presumably brought goods for sale at the market.

Tourism is a big industry in Mali, and many try to make a living through dealings with tourists. One of our walks around the harbor w
as nearly ruined by a young man who we think must have been on drugs, and rattled on incessantly about absolutely nothing (including about how black Africans are now free, and get paid to have sex with white women), eventually becoming quite belligerent when we asked to be left alone. (A while later, he came back to apologize.) Other times, men would come up to us announcing themselves as “captain pinasse,” saying that they have a “big pinasse” and asking if we wanted to ride–no pun intended, but nonetheless inducing much giggling on our part. Derek’s favorite was the boat tout who approached saying, “I have a big pinasse with two tourists on it, but I need two more.”

At the end of the walk, at the corner most distant from town, lies Bar Bozo, a neo-colonial perch of foreigners seated to watch the sunset and the endless show of the port, located next to a workshop for the repair of pinasses and pirogues. As the sun sets, one can see not only the activity of the harbor but the relative calm of the river just beyond, with fishermen bringing in their nets.


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Secondary Cuisines

Traveling through the world, one gets to taste some terrific (and some not-so-terrific) food. Considering the wide availability of many of the same ingredients all over the world, it’s astonishing how much cuisines vary, from East to Southeast Asia, Southeast Asia to India, India to Iran, Iran to the Levant to Turkey, Turkey to Europe. The food, and the types and availability of restaurants, tell you a great deal about a place–the level of economic development, historical trading patterns and contacts, maybe even the character of a people. This post is, however, limited to one small category of food, which I call “secondary cuisines.”

A secondary cuisine is a cuisine once removed. Not Italian food as served in Italy, for example, but American Italian food. Not Chinese food as served in China, but Korean Chinese food. Not Indian food as served in India, but British Indian food. Secondary cuisines have interesting histories. Sometimes, they are just adaptations of an immigrant class, perhaps modified for broader consumption in the country of immigration. Other times, they are local visions of what a foreign cuisine is, or attempts to create such cuisines without proper training or ingredients. However they originate, some secondary cuisines develop lives of their own, perhaps not exceeding in quality and variety the primary cuisine, but differentiating itself sufficiently that even the primary cuisine would not serve as a substitute for someone looking for that particular secondary cuisine dish. An American tourist could easily be disappointed by pizza the way it is served in Italy, and I have heard from many who prefer American Chinese food over food in China. There have even been cases of transplantation of secondary cuisine dishes into the country of the primary cuisine, whether for consumption by locals or foreigners. Lest this sound rather abstract, let us move on to concrete examples.

The country in which the widest range of secondary cuisines exists is probably the United States, a country of immigrants. Chief among these is probably American Chinese food. Ever since Chinese workers first arrived in the United States in the 19th century, they have been cooking food (as Chinese emigrants do all over the world–see below), and a unique cuisine developed. The greatest concentration of American Chinese food restaurants is probably in San Francisco, the oldest Chinese community in the United States, where restaurants have big signs advertising that most American Chinese dish, Chop Suey. But not far behind are restaurants in big cities all over the U.S., and even in rural areas–Chinese food is omnipresent. Other dishes of American Chinese cuisine include such classics as General Tso’s and Sesame Chicken, and an entire range of American Chinese food is often available in cheap buffet or fast food restaurants in strip malls across America. I read that General Tso’s Chicken, originally a Taiwanese-American invention, has made it back to Taiwan–but I have not seen it on a menu in the Mainland… yet.

There are numerous other American-XXX cuisines. After American Chinese food, American Italian probably comes a close second. Indeed, Italian food served outside of Italy is often not an adaptation of Italian food from Italy, but of American Italian food. Whether served at Pizza Hut or numerous smaller local restaurants, American-style pizza is perhaps the single most popular food in the world. Pizza by the slice being sold in Venice looked and tasted suspiciously like New York pizza, leaving me to wonder whether pizza-by-the-slice is an American invention that has traveled back to Italy, together with the recipe for American pizza. American Japanese food also exists, to a small extent, in the form of newly invented sushi. I’ve read that the California, Philadelphia and Alaska rolls have all, to some extent, traveled across the Pacific to be served in sushi restaurants in Japan. Similarly, a cut of rib grilled for Korean barbeque is known even in Korea as “L.A. Galbi,” after its place of innovation, and I know of a pho restaurant in Saigon that imports “rooster sauce” (Sriracha Sauce), a tomato and chili condiment made by Vietnamese Americans and ubiquitous in Vietnamese restaurants in the United States.

America may be home to the the largest number of secondary cuisines, but the country responsible for seeding the largest number of secondary cuisines is, no doubt, China. “Chinese” food is among the most varied in the world (it is probably silly to call it a single cuisine, although of course regional differences are largely lost when exported to other countries), and among the most adopted in the world, not only by Chinese emigrant communities but by non-Chinese locals. We have eaten (some sort of) Chinese food in the U.S. (of course), Europe, Korea, Southeast Asia, India, the Levant, Mali and Madagascar.

Of secondary Chinese cuisines, the two most distinctive, from my perspective, are Korean Chinese food and Indian Chinese food. I am not sure how Korean Chinese food originated, but I believe it was created by Chinese immigrants to Korea (from Shandong Province?) who opened restaurants and modified existing Chinese dishes to suit local palates. Now, it forms a cuisine on its own, its dishes recognizably Chinese but prepared in a distinct style. Every Korean child’s favorite food is Jiajiangmyeon, similar to but different from the Beijing-style noodles, and anybody could tell Korean-style Sweet and Sour apart from its Chinese original. Given the lack of a significant Chinese population in India or Sri Lanka, I am inclined to think that Indian Chinese food is a local creation, a vision of Chinese food by (evidently skilled) South Asian cooks. I am told that some of the dishes, such as Chili Chicken, Chicken Manchurian, etc., are available in Indian restaurants in New York. In Madras we went to the restaurant that supposedly invented Chicken 55, another popular (and delicious) Indian Chinese dish. There are numerous other secondary Chinese cuisines–we were unsurprised to find at a restaurant in Sofia Bulgaria an entire page of Chinese dishes, some more recognizably Chinese in inspiration than others. I should also note that Chinese is often a premium cuisine in many parts of the world, surprising to big city Americans to whom some kind of Chinese food is available at highly competitive prices.

Western food has also been adapted. All over Asia there is some variant of adapted western food, such as pizza with corn as a topping (or thousand island dressing in lieu of tomato sauce, as is available at Pizza Hut Hong Kong), “hamburger steak” made of ground meat and various cream soups. The most well-developed, almost sophisticated version, however, is Japanese western. The Japanese adopted certain western dishes from their interactions with the Portuguese in the 16th century and with the British in the 19th, and some of the dishes have grown quite popular, served not only in Japanese restaurants in Japan but all over the world, including especially Korea. Foremost among the dishes of this cuisine are curry and katsu, both foods I grew up with and love. It was fairly late in my life when I recognized that my love of chicken fried steak and wiener schnitzel (and other similar dishes–every country seems to have its own) came down to their resemblance to Japanese katsu.

When I was recently in Milan, I had to try the local milanesa, the namesake of the breaded meat dish in all parts of the Italian- and Spanish-speaking worlds.

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Mali photo

Thanksgiving Special – For What Am I Thankful?

We’re not that big on holidays. Maybe it’s because I grew up in an immigrant household, in the awkward place of not really being able to fully appreciate the holidays of our origin, for lack of public acknowledgement and others with whom to celebrate, nor those of our new home, which were foreign and unfamiliar to us (I think every immigrant family must have a story involving its first Halloween). Or maybe it’s because from college to law school to clerkship to working abroad, we’ve moved around so much, and often been far from our family and friends with whom we would wish to commemorate a special day. Whatever the cause, routinely we see holidays come and go, marked only by an office function, perhaps, or a day off and an excuse to get out of town. Thanksgiving for us for a few years meant a time to go up to Canada for the weekend, where things would be open. This year, the time of Thanksgiving dinner passes on a bus, bound from the Malian border with Senegal to Mali’s capital, Bamako.

Thanksgiving on the road

Our Thanksgiving lunch (no Thanksgiving dinner)

For what am I thankful? However contemptible I feel for feeling it, and however nonsensical it is, while traveling in Sub-saharan Africa, it’s easy to feel a sense of relief for not having been born here. The conditions on this continent can be so challenging, that to my spoiled first world eyes, they seem almost impossible to endure. To live in 40 degree Celsius weather with no accessible place air-conditioned, to be constantly pestered by flies and mosquitoes that in addition to causing the usual itchiness carry disease, to have to keep myself and my clothes clean without water much less hot water on demand, to have to work so hard for so little and be appreciative for having any job at all… Of course, had I been born here, or were I really forced to live it, I am sure that I would adapt and make do. But I was not, and I am not.

Backpacking is, from the most cynical perspective, a voyeuristic “slumming it.” Backpackers travel to countries that are, generally, cheaper and poorer than the places we come from. In doing so, we sleep in airports and train stations, in hotel-cum-brothels, in dorms with shared bath; ride in minibuses, share-taxis and boats crammed full with freight and humanity; grow disheveled, with scruffy faces, patched and dirty clothes and grungy backpacks; exert ourselves, carrying our loads on our backs, taking 24-hour bus rides and hiking hours between villages. Why do we do this? Why not just travel in the developed world? In part it’s cost, but it’s also because we want to see the less developed world, in part because it is less developed, to see things that no longer exist (never existed?) back home. The contrast between places such as Africa or India and the world we come from, whether New York or Hong Kong or Paris, is so great that it is almost unbelievable that such disparate places exist at the same time in the same world.

So I am thankful for the incredible privilege of seeing it all. For the ability to travel from Venice to Dakar in 24 hours, at an expense that is manageable for me. For having a job back home that allows me sufficient money, and time, to do what I am doing. At no point in the history of the world has travel been so easy, so accessible, to so many (though of course still only a tiny sliver of the world population). With the advent of discount airlines, the proliferation of guidebooks, the rise of English as an international lingua franca and the ubiquity of the internet and ATM machines, with a bit of money and time almost no destination is beyond reach. And despite the homogenization and globalization of the last fifty years, fascinating differences, truly exotic (to us) locales, still exist. To experience more than it seems one person has a right to experience, for that I am thankful today.

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Laos photo religion Senegal

Religious Education in West Africa

An African notebook, to be wiped and reused

Islam, like the other great religions of the world, has a long and rich tradition of teaching and learning. Universities in the Islamic world, such as those of Fez and Cairo, are among the earliest anywhere, and Muslim scientists contributed much to many disciplines, especially during Europe’s so-called dark ages (see post of 6.13). In addition to general learning in the Islamic world, however, there is of course also Islamic education–religious education–which takes place in the madrasa, or Islamic religious school. A prejudiced western mind might imagine that the Islamic world is full of madrasas, of mullahs and imams and eager bearded students. Well, it’s possible that Islamic religious education in the east is more popular than Christian religious education in the west (one reads that seminaries are gravely empty these days), but, in this modern age, it is most definitely secondary in prevalence to secular education, to the fields and disciplines, from the humanities to the sciences, that are more likely to contribute to someone’s livelihood. Even as tourists who seek out mosques, it was not that common an occurrence for us to run into crowds of madrasa students in the Middle East. Which is why, traveling through Senegal, we have been astonished by the visibility of large numbers of religious students, called talibes, in the country.

Talibes are an interesting phenomenon. For the most part, they seem to be quite young children who come from all over the countryside to learn from religious leaders called marabouts. The students finance their education–feed themselves and pass along money for their upkeep to their teachers–by begging for alms, which in addition to being their only possible source of income, given that most come from poor families and are too young to do most kinds of work, is intended to teach them humility and give fellow citizens an opportunity to fulfill their religious requirement of charity. In a city such as St. Louis, the old French colonial capital where we are now, the little kids can be found by the dozens, carrying around their characteristic empty tin cans or plastic buckets and begging for money and food.

The easiest comparison, and a very apt one, is to the boy monks of Laos. Just like the Buddhist monasteries of Laos, the madrasas of Senegal provide kids who may not otherwise be able to afford much of an education with essentially free lodging and tuition, and the system of begging and almsgiving provides a way for the community (and generous tourists) to support their schooling. The kids beg, yes, because they are poor and have no other source of money, but the religiously-sanctioned nature of the begging is intended to give the process a dignity and meaning that keep from turning the kids into mere beggars.

Almsgiving, Laos

This comparison, however, reveals the strengths of the Laotian system over the West African one. While I recognize that giving alms is one of the five pillars of Islam, it is problematic that the talibes are begging in countries where extreme poverty and reliance on begging are all too common. In Laos, there is almost no begging, and so there is no mistaking the boy monks, clad in saffron robes, for homeless beggar children. In Senegal, talibes are poorly clothed and often dirty, indistinguishable from child beggars found in Senegal or other poor countries around the world. In Laos, almsgiving is ritualized to an extent (performed at certain times of the day, in a regular procession, with regular donors) that there is no mistaking it for “regular” begging. The citizens and tourists giving alms kneel to place themselves lower than the monks, showing that the almsgiving is not an indication of greater wealth or status on the part of the giver, but an offering recognizing the higher spiritual status of the receiver. In Senegal, there little of this ritual, and it is all too easy (especially to the casual tourist) to mistake the student children as mere homeless street urchins, and one wonders how the begging might affect their sense of dignity.

A further concern I have is the type of education that the West African talibes receive. While Laotian monasteries are extremely basic, with the teaching done largely by the older students, the curriculum consists of a wide range of subjects, from English to mathematics. Visiting Laos, it is hard not to be surprised by the apparent ambition of the monks, many of whom come from extremely poor rural families, and their hunger to learn English by practicing with tourists (some monasteries set up regular chatting hours to encourage such language practice) or to gain experience using computers by visiting the local internet cafes where owners give them discounts or even free usage. One particularly adorable little monk in Luang Prabang explained to us that he wanted to be a computer programmer, which seemed to us sadly unlikely given local resources, but epitomizes the drive and hope of secular success that these students have, and that they hope their monastery educations will make possible for them.

In Senegal? Admittedly we did not converse much with these children (who speak no English and little French), but the curriculum seems to consist mainly of Islamic studies and Arabic. What of their futures? For what jobs is such an education suitable? It is hard for me to say with the little background that I have, but we were told by a Peace Corps volunteer from West Africa that, in their village, young people study in madrasas to become imams, because imams make good money attending births, circumcisions and other life-cycle ceremonies, uninvited, and receiving honoraria for their religious guidance. According to the Peace Corp volunteer, the local youth saw it as a good career choice, a way to make a decent living in an impoverished African village. (Meanwhile, the villagers complain that there are too many imams, too many people to pay off come ceremony time.)

Waiting outside of the mosque at sunrise

A typical secular liberal viewpoint, and one that one may be skeptical of for its commonness, is that lack of education and economic opportunity drives people toward religion–this argument is tested true from our experience and learning about madrasas in West Africa. If the public school system were more effective or better financed, perhaps children would have more opportunities to get an education outside of the madrasa. If French- and English-learning opportunities were more readily available, perhaps Arabic would not be as appealing a second language (although I do acknowledge that, to Muslims, some knowledge of Arabic should be considered essential and that learning Arabic could open some opportunities in North Africa or the Middle East). If there were more jobs in the public or private sectors, more economic opportunity, young people might not be dreaming of becoming imams (nearly no-one in the west these days wishes to become a Christian cleric, as the churches’ recruiting problems show–indeed, first world countries now import Christian priests from Africa and Latin America, showing that the same phenomenon plays out with the Christian faith and seminaries as with Islam and madrasas).

Most West Africans certainly don’t look like fundamentalists, and I do not doubt that the brand of Islam being taught in these madrasas is quite moderate. And, no doubt, along with the Quran and Arabic come a valuable education in literature, philosophy, ethics and so forth, which would b
e valuable in any field. But religious education and the religious life, even if sometimes called a vocation, is a choice. In the west, particularly in Europe, it is a choice that fewer and fewer people are making, because there are so many other (more appealing) life choices. This in turn is making much of the western world less and less religious, and less driven by religion. In West Africa, it seems, the trend may be in the opposite direction.

Inside a madrasa in Dakar

NOTE: I have left out of this post the fact that many of the talibes are in fact receiving little to no education at all, but simply being used by their so-called marabouts as a source of income–a troop of semi-enslaved children to go begging for them, with beatings for children who do not bring home specified amounts. This is of course appalling, but I have left it out of my discussion above to focus on more general thoughts.

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Italy photo Senegal

Traveling Rich and Poor, or From Venice to Dakar

Teatro alla Scala, Milan

Street scene, Senegal

Travel is not only about transporting yourself across space, from one set of latitude and longitude coordinates to another. At its most magical, travel simulates movement in other dimensions as well. One of the most intoxicating examples is time. Whether crossing the moat of Angkor Wat, inspecting remnants of a Christian fresco at a Crusader castle in Syria, watching rural life in an ancient Chinese village, walking the alleys of Quebec City’s basse-ville or admiring Shanghai’s Pudong skyline, travel allows us to transport ourselves, if only in our minds, to a different century. Another example is personal freedoms. When an Iranian woman boards a plane to France, or a young lesbian leaves Kansas for the lights of the big city, she sees before herself a world of different possibilities, new horizons unrestrained (see also posts of 6.08 and 11.08).

In this post, I wanted to share some thoughts on another dimension along which people travel: in socioeconomic class and material comfort.

We are by no means rich, but any first world traveler, by going to a poor, developing country, becomes richer, at least relative to his surroundings. I can afford more and better goods and services in, say, Indonesia than I can in the U.S. In Bali, I can easily eat in some of the best restaurants or pay for spa services–every day if I wanted. Even if traveling in more expensive, developed countries, some people, knowing that travel time is a limited resource, may choose to “live it up,” spending what it takes to buy comforts that they might not usually allow themselves at home–eating in top restaurants in Paris or staying at an extravagant resort hotel. All of this, I would term traveling “rich.”

There is also traveling “poor.” No matter how cheap things may be in some countries, that they are less developed will often mean that standards or comforts will not be at the levels a first-world traveler is used to back home. I may be able to hire a car and driver in India, but the vehicle is certain to be much older and in many ways less comfortable than what Avis would give me at LAX. Almost regardless of what one spends, there can be hardship with travel. But budget is also a critical consideration. As a long-term traveler, I am without an income, and have to be careful about expenses. Back in the “real world,” I might enjoy a big evening out, and know that my next paycheck will be able to cover the credit card bill. If I had such special nights frequently while on this extended trip–it’s not like I have to work the next day–I would eat up vast sums of money. Were I on a vacation from my job, I could stay in comfortable hotels, knowing that it’s just a matter of maximizing my enjoyment of limited free time. For 365 nights? I cannot prudently afford it. Every day, I have to pay for a hotel room and two or three meals, in addition to transportation and numerous other expenses. Given the constant choices I have in expenditures, I have to budget wisely, and this sometimes means having less comfort than I would have back home, or even spending less than I can realistically afford, in anticipation of future expenses. Traveling “poor.”

The way we travel, and the way that many others travel these days, involves frequent transitions between traveling rich and traveling poor. We get off business class plane seats (redeemed with miles) to cram into minibuses for the ride into town from the airport. Surprisingly often, we’ll eat a meal that costs more than the hotel room we happen to be staying in that night. We’ll opt for a $15 room instead of a $25 room one night, for sake of cost, to spend hundreds of dollars on an eco-resort the next.

This topic came to my mind because we experienced in the last 48 hours or so a particularly dramatic example of travel in this dimension. Yesterday, we left our Venice inn overlooking the Accademia Bridge to travel by express train to Milan’s Teatro alla Scala for an opera. After the opera? We suffered into the wee hours outside in the cold at Milano Centrale train station waiting for our 4:15 AM bus to Malpensa airport, and after our flight we are now settled into a hotel-cum-brothel in Dakar, Senegal. After such a dramatic shift, from Venice to Dakar, from sitting at a box in La Scala to huddling for heat on top of a subway grate, from a charming Grand Canal-side inn to an African brothel, we could only look at each other and ask what went wrong in the last 48 hours for us to end up where we are. But of course, it was all deliberate, each choice thought out. In the case of Milan, we didn’t want to miss an opportunity to see an opera at La Scala, but we also didn’t want to pay for a full night’s lodging (much less at euro-denominated, first world big city rates) for the few hours between our show and our flight. In the case of Dakar, we just found local hotel rooms to be such poor value that we decided to stay in the cheapest acceptable option–which apparently also rents by the hour.

We could be criticized for “slumming.” But it’s not some sort of morbid curiosity that drives us to travel poor sometimes. (As a matter of fact, there are actual “slum tours” that tourists can take–and I must disclose that I’ve been on such a tour, of a Rio de Janeiro favela–but even these I would argue are healthy and valuable, a unique way to see a neighborhood that you could not visit on your own.) Nor do we consider ourselves to be “rough” or “hardcore” travelers on the basis of a few nights at a cheap hotel when we know that we can eventually retreat into a more comfortable one if and when we need it. But just as traveling rich has its obvious advantages–such as comfort–traveling poor often has its advantages. One American tourist (one of few we’ve come across on our trip) suggested to us over a (relatively fancy) hotel breakfast that we “get to meet more people” by traveling poor. But it’s much more than that. If you wake up every day in a comfortable hotel on a hill or in a ritzy suburb, you miss out on a lot of things, including experiencing or sometimes even realizing the hardships of the local people that you see around you. Your air conditioning and sealed windows keep out the swarms of mosquitos and the sweltering heat, or your heater allows you to forget how cold it is outside. You’re more likely to eat bland tourist food with other tourists. You could come to have little idea of how people in the country that you’ve come to see really live, how they get from place to place, what they eat.

But, generally, when we travel rich and when we travel poor, we’re not moving between rich and poor for the sake of doing so, but doing what feels right in the circumstances and what our budget permits. We are just trying to find the best value and make optimal use of our resources while getting as much out of the experience as possible. In some places, that is “rich” travel–one would be a fool to pass up a body scrub in Ubud–in others, lower end.

Travel is not only about the jets that whisk us from the rarefied relics of Venice to the markets of Dakar, within a space of hours. Just as it’s hard to believe that it only takes a few hours to travel from Hong Kong’s frenetic urban lifestyle to the watery floating markets of Vietnam’s Mekong delta, traveling rich and poor in quick succession, experiencing that shift in class and economic development–it brings to the fore the magic of travel. Travel, to us, is a mode of living in which we can seamlessly transition, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, from sitting down in a Venetian restaurant for dinner with wine to eating from a street vendor in Senegal; from sharing a box at the opera at 9 p.m. with a wealthy couple in formal dress to chatting outside the train station at 3 a.m. with African immigrants warning us about drug dealers nearby; from taking vaporettos on the Grand Canal to walking across downtown Dakar, backpacks fully loaded.

La Scala *and* a Dakar brothel? In some sense, it would be surprising that those two experiences were available at all to a particular person over his entire lifetime–but we experience them in a matter of hours, in sequence, almost in the blink of an eye. Seeing the highs and lows of the world, from both high and low vantage points, all of this is afforded to us by travel.

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Italy photo

Venice, Entrepot of the East

When traveling in the more exotic parts of the world, such as India or Bali, we sometimes arrogantly wonder how people could want to travel to places like Western Europe–how bourgeois, how boring, we think. We know of course that some of the world’s greatest travel destinations are in the developed first world, but we tell ourselves that we’ll save them for when we’re sixty. We figure that they’re unlikely to change very much between now and then (unlike, say, China), and so we may as visit them later, when we might be less keen on enduring the hardships of traveling as backpackers in the developing world. In traveling to Milan to catch our cheap flight out to Senegal, however, we found ourselves passing through Venice, and couldn’t resist. We’d never been, and, well, it’s Venice. Not only did we expect that it would be beautiful, but our historical curiosity was also piqued, for the city-state’s role as Europe and the western world’s connection to the Levant and the East, from the time of the Crusades to Marco Polo and beyond. We knew Venice was known as something of a tourist trap–a city often with more tourists than residents and in some ways more of a museum than a real living place–but having visited New Orleans just months before Hurricane Katrina, we also reasoned that Venice is not one of those places we can wait to visit when we’re old–it could cease to exist. And so, weather warnings aside (late fall/early winter is supposed to be Venice’s dreariest season), we booked ourselves at the Hotel Galleria and spent three days in Venice.

It did not disappoint.

Part of the pleasure of Venice is the pleasure of traveling anywhere in Italy, such as eating well and drinking coffee and wine (both, even with an expensive euro, much cheaper than at home). But mostly, the pleasure of Venice is for its sheer beauty and the uniqueness of it all, and the feat of human creativity and determination, and apparently power and wealth, that led to the construction of such a city on water. Within minutes of our arrival we understood the cause of the city’s fame, why so many canal cities around the world would want to think of themselves as “the Venice of” whatever, why the Las Vegas Sands Corporation modeled casinos on the city, why, when a character was near death in the Simpsons Movie, he would say, “But I haven’t seen Venice!”

Venice captivates: Macau’s Venetian.

We cannot imagine anybody disliking Venice, although the unseasonably beautiful weather (blue skies, no heat, no canal stench) and relative lack of tourists must have weighed in our favor. So do yourself the great favor and go.

But this post isn’t just “Venice appreciation.” In my first post of this trip, I noted that places are generally by their nature connected. And so it is with Venice. We are traveling through Venice because it currently lies, by rail, between Istanbul and Milan, but one could generalize Venice’s historical role to state that it has always lain between the Muslim east and the Christian west, making it in some ways an essential stop on our Islamic journey.

First and foremost, Venice was a commercial power, using its location on the Adriatic, easternmost in the Latin world, to become the primary entrepot for goods from the east, which during the period of Venice’s height meant the Islamic world. Venetian traders and ships operated all over the eastern Mediterranean, and Venetian (along with other Italian) traders were very active in the Levant. In Aleppo, a city that has come to be known in the west through the obviously Italian form of its name (in Arabic the city’s name is Haleb), we saw a caravanserai that once housed the Venetian consulate. Marco Polo, one of the most famous Venetians of all time, purportedly traveled through Bukhara as far as Beijing.

Secondly, Venice became an important military power, from the time of the Crusades on. Venice led the campaigns of the Fourth Crusade, an invasion by Latin Roman Catholics of Greek Orthodox Constantinople, and looted the city, in the thirteenth century. During Venice’s height Crete and Cyprus were among its Mediterranean possessions, although it would eventually lose both to its greatest adversary, the Ottoman Empire. Venetian advisors could be found as far east as Esfahan, where they were helping the Persian Safavids harass the Ottoman Empire’s eastern border.

Tomb of Henricus Dandolo, the Venetian commander of the Fourth Crusade, in Istanbul’s Ayasofya

Some of the loot from the Fourth Crusade, now found outside St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice

Note the similarity of the cross carvings at the base of the columns above to the carvings in the photograph below from Istanbul’s Ayasofya.

Venetian bridge built to facilitate caravan trade, Cyprus

Venetian walls built in a failed attempt to protect Nicosia, Cyprus, from Ottoman conquest

But Venice’s relationship to the Muslim East was not always a hostile one. Back during the Christian Crusades, the Venetians continued trade with the Islamic world, until prohibited by the Pope. Although the Ottomans were in many ways the Venetians’ greatest foes, they were also their greatest trading partner, and at most times the two governments were at peace. There are numerous examples of economic and cultural interchange between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, including many tangible examples to be found in Venice.

The Fondaco dei Turchi, the commercial center of the Ottomans in Venice

Mosaic from St. Mark’s Cathedral depicting the theft of the relics of St. Mark from the city of Alexandria in now Egypt, then part of the Arab Empire. The remains were supposedly smuggled out in a basket filled with pork–the Muslim examiners, disgusted by the pork (see post of 11.12), did not bother to examine the basket too thoroughly, and the relics of the evangelist were successfully brought to Venice. Though acquired by deceit, the relics were held by the Venetians to enhance the city’s religious prestige.

The history of the Campo dei Mori (Field of Moors) is unknown, but sculptures outside a nearby palazzo point to the residents’ extensive dealings with the Islamic world.


Of course, with trade also comes ideas. The decorative motif on the top of the Doge’s Palce (first picture below) is said to have been inspired by the modified merlons on Cairo’s Ibn Tulun Mosque (second picture below).

The windows in many Venetian palazzos and the second floor of the Doge’s Palace (see the first picture in the post) are identical to those found on the Koutoubia minaret of Marrakesh, Morocco (below).

After a treaty signed with Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, the Doge of Venice sent artist Bellini to paint the Sultan’s now-famous portrait.

PS. Soon after we left, Venice had some of the worst flooding ever. November is supposed to be one of the worst months to travel to Venice, but we were lucky with almost completely blue and clear skies, pleasant cool temperatures and crowds reduced from summertime highs. But I guess the flooding that’s supposed to happen in early winter sometimes does. Link to BBC Article

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Egypt Italy Jordan photo Slovenia Syria United States of America

Persistence of Iconography

It’s amazing how some images persist through the centuries and are reused again and again, sometimes in entirely different contexts and with totally changed meanings. In this post, I thought I would show you some symbols we have run into on this trip, repeatedly and unexpectedly.

Caduceus of Hermes

The caduceus (or wand) of Hermes is a symbol of somewhat uncertain origin of the Greek god, and it is still used as the astronomical symbol for the planet Mercury (and sometimes mistakenly in place of the rod of Asclepius as a symbol for medicine). We saw this image in two odd places on our trip.

The first, the Roman-era catacombs in Alexandria. Alexandria, founded centuries earlier by Alexander the Great, remained a great center of Greek culture for many centuries. This tomb complex is believed to have been built by the resident Greeks; however, it was built largely in Egyptian style, showing that local Greeks had to some extent adopted Egyptian art and forms. Here, the caduceus is shown (on left) with a snake wearing the pharaonic crown of Upper and Lower Egypt.

The second, Mount Nebo, Jordan. Mount Nebo is an important pilgrimage site for Christians (and presumably Jews, although we did not see any Jewish pilgrims), who believe that it was the spot from which Moses saw the Promised Land (and passed away). On this spectacular vantage point are located ruins of Byzantine churches and an active Franciscan complex of worship. Why a caduceus? No clue.

Four Evangelists

It is believed by some that the popular depiction of the four Evangelists (Matthew, Mark, John and Luke) as four “animals” (bird, bull, bear and human, respectively) is derived from ancient Egyptian funerary tradition, in which bodily organs were placed in four canopic jars of which the lids depicted four Egyptian gods (Imsety, Hapi, Duamutef and Qebehsenuef) in four animal forms (human, baboon, jackal and falcon, respectively). If so, Egyptian Coptic depictions of the four Evangelists in animal form–here they even look like canopic jars–must be some of the earliest.

Chapel, Monastery of St. Paul, on the Red Sea, Egypt

An illustration of the animal forms of the four Evangelists from the medieval Irish Book of Kells

All-seeing Eye

The “all-seeing eye” or “eye of providence,” the cyclopean eye at the apex of a truncated pyramid, is one of the best known of icons and features prominently in some of the most persistent conspiracy theories. Here is the all-seeing eye on the Franciscan Church of the Annunciation in Ljubljana, Slovenia and the U.S. one dollar bill.


Pyramid

Part of the all-seeing eye is of course the pyramid. The pyramid form has been used as tombs from the 26th c. BC on, as other examples from the 4th c. AD and 19th c. AD below show.

Red Pyramid of Dahshur, the first true Egyptian pyramid

Pyramidal Byzantine Christine tomb at al Bara, one of the Dead Cities of Syria

Tomb of sculptor Antonio Canova inside the Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, Italy

Why are these images and forms used again and again? In part, I think it’s becuase they’re what artists know how to draw and are used to drawing (or, in the case of the pyramid, a shape of simplicity of stability to which architects may be attracted). But mainly I think it’s because the new tradition (whether the Franciscan priests in Jordan or the Catholic Church in Slovenia looking to ornament their place of worship or the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing brainstorming designs) wants to latch on to the talismanic power that such icons have derived over centuries of use, to base their images on ones that are accepted or believed to be powerful, the grafting of a new idea on an older tree, the same reason that religious sites are so often re-used (see post of 11.10) and ancient stories (from Isis to Mary and the flood of Gilgamesh to the flood of Noah) are incorporated into newer faiths.