Category Archives: Africa

by | 15 June 2007 · 8:19 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Haint Blue

In Savannah, Georgia, last month the Far Outliers toured the Telfair Museum of Art‘s Owens-Thomas House, where we saw haint blue paint on the walls and rafters of the former slave quarters that now serves as a gift shop, waiting room, and exhibit (upstairs). Such blue paint is common in areas influenced by slaves from Africa.

The blue paint is said to ward off evil spirits and, by some accounts, insects. I lean toward the more practical explanation, for reasons elaborated below, but first I want to note an odd set of sound correspondences, where one member of each pair is not just nonstandard, but highly stigmatized.

  • haint ~ haunt
  • aint ~ aunt
  • ain’t ~ aren’t (in r-less dialects)
  • cain’t ~ can’t

I don’t know anyone who pronounces every member of the set with the ai vowel. Nor do I know anyone who has the same vowel in each member of the set. Nowadays, I pronounce each with a different vowel: (roughly) hawnt, ahnt, arnt, kænt. As a kid, I used to say cain’t (as my father still does), but I made a conscious effort to expel such (self-)stigmatized regionalisms from my speech during my youth. Worse yet, I used to tease my Southern Baptist missionary kid cohorts who returned from their furlough years with their regional accents in full flower. Some of my southern Virginia relatives also pronounce aunt the way Andy Griffith did in the name of Aunt Bee on Mayberry RFD (said to be based on Mt. Airy, NC), but I don’t know anyone who pronounces haunt the same way, except in jest.

Has anyone else noticed this odd correspondence set? Are there other possible members of the set?

Enough linguistics; now back to insects. Last year in Japan, I heard that indigo dye had mosquito-repellent properties, among other magical qualities. Historian and librarian Jennifer Payne has compiled some interesting evidence for the beneficial effects of indigo plantations, not just its blue dye. Here are a few excerpts (omitting footnotes).

Agriculture, disease, and slavery were three basic and interconnected aspects of life in Colonial South Carolina. Where one existed, the other two were sure to follow within a very short time. By the mid eighteenth century, rice culture, slavery, malaria and yellow fever were well established as a self-perpetuating cycle which had an adverse effect upon the life spans of the colonists. This study examines the establishment of the “rice-slavery-disease” cycle, speculates on how this cycle was broken by the introduction of indigo, and postulates how indigo effected the yellow fever/malaria mortality rates of Colonial South Carolina….

During the very same fifty years in which indigo took hold in South Carolina, an interesting phenomenon occurred. Persons in Berkeley County near Charleston began to live longer; the number of persons dying during the malarial months [August through November] began to drop. Furthermore, the frequent outbreaks of yellow fever in Charleston began to slow down and eventually, for a time, discontinue entirely….

The most dramatic change occurred between 1760 and 1800 during the years in which indigo gained its height. Only 20% of the males died before forty and some 45% lived to be sixty or more. Moreover, only 18% of adult women died before fifty and some 70% survived beyond seventy. Those statistics involving women are especially revealing for women tended to become victims to malaria during their childbearing years. The fact that a greater percentage of the female population survived past fifty is significant. Thus, according to this evidence, something was enabling the people of Christchurch and St. Johns parishes in Berkeley county to survive malaria and malarial complications during the last forty years of the eighteenth century….

Why was there a decline in malarial mortality and a cessation of yellow fever epidemics? One medical historian jokingly suggested that perhaps the Mosquitoes simply went away for forty years. This might be true. Interestingly, the yellow fever epidemics ended just as indigo gained ground as a staple cash crop. Even more fascinating is the fact that the yellow fever epidemics resumed as indigo culture was rapidly phased out after the Revolution. Although in 1788, 833,500 pounds of indigo were being exported, in 1790, only 1694 casks of the stuff were exported. By 1796, indigo had been virtually eliminated from the agricultural economy. Conversely, the epidemics raged within three years of this decline. Thus, it is quite possible that the introduction, rise, and subsequent fall of indigo production had an effect upon mortality rates in colonial South Carolina….

Was it simply coincidence that yellow fever and malaria experienced a decline during indigo’s rise, or are the two related in some manner[?] Whatever the connection between indigo and the mosquito is, the is little doubt that during the years of indigo’s sudden and swift rise in cultivation, the number of people dying from malaria related complications and those dying from yellow fever dropped markedly. Eliza Lucas Pinckney introduced a new cash crop which helped to make South Carolina one of England’s wealthiest colonies. However, her actions might have also helped the population of South Carolina reduce the fever mortality rates. The introduction of indigo broke the vicious cycle of rice cultivation, slavery, and fever by introducing a method of agriculture which did not rely on large amounts of standing water. Furthermore, the return of yellow fever epidemics in the mid 1790’s coincided with the rapid decline of indigo production due to the loss of the incentive of the bounty. Although the exact nature of indigo’s influence on the mosquito can only be speculated, research conducted to date indicates the probability of a connection between the two.

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Filed under Africa, language, slavery, travel, U.S.

by | 27 April 2007 · 6:23 pm

Rhodesia, 1940: War, Copper, and Race

There had been strikes by white workers in two of the mines in March over pay and conditions, resulting in pay rises which inflamed already tense relations with African mineworkers, who earned in a month about the same as the whites received in a day and got none of their benefits. The public beating of the wife of a black miner after an argument about rations sparked further discontent, culminating in ugly riots in which police opened fire, killing thirteen Africans and injuring many more. Copper was vital to the war effort and Northern Rhodesia was the Empire’s main producer, so the mines had to be kept operating seven days a week, and Gore-Browne had been called in urgently by the Governor to mediate. Summoning up all his courage, with faithful Henry by his side as bodyguard and interpreter, he had braved thousands of angry black miners brandishing spears and broken bottles, all backed by the menacing thump of tribal drums, to enter the compound of the ringleaders on the third day of rioting. Many were Bemba, and seeing ‘Chipembele‘ they had agreed to speak, but it had taken all his persuasive powers to get them to down arms and return to work, having wrangled them a few concessions and got the Governor’s blessing to promise an official British government inquiry into conditions. I thank the Lord for my gift of getting on with people, he wrote to [his aunt] Ethel.

Now the Commission was under way, and, along with Sir John Forster who had come out from England to head it, and Thomas Sandford, the Secretary for Native Interests, he had been meeting managers and workers, trying to get them to work together, and going underground to see conditions in the mines. Visiting native compounds, known as the ‘locations’, he was shocked by the squalid shacks, describing them in his diary as so different to the neat bungalows with the square green lawns of the white workers. European employees had their own club with swimming-pool, tennis courts and golf course, and during the rainy season their residential area was full of purple bougainvillaea, red flame trees, hibiscus and white frangipani.

Gore-Browne hated the Copperbelt, finding it a queer uneasy place, perhaps because of its mixed population dominated by South Africans. Ndola, which he remembered from before the copper boom as a one street place consisting of six corrugated iron huts, was a pleasant enough town with its neat white bungalows and avenues of mahogany trees, trunks painted white to prevent them being eaten by the white ants which devoured everything in the area, though it was hardly the ‘new Johannesburg’ everyone had predicted when the extent of the copper mines had first been realized. The road to Nkana, following an old Arab slave trail, was lined with beautiful thick teak forest. Mine shafts and derricks dominated the skyline, and there was something about the place that created mutual mistrust and suspicion between all the people—black and white, workers and officials, management and government. Gore-Browne was convinced that the situation would never be properly resolved until African workers were put on an equal footing with their white colleagues, a heretical suggestion for the times, and told Ethel, the whole experience has left me feeling rather Bolshevik—the pettiness and narrow-mindedness of the managers (who deal in millions of pounds) is quite unbelievable. The General Manager of Roan and Mufulira mines for example refused to allow the Trade Unions a phone merely out of spite.

SOURCE: The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream (HarperCollins, 2004), by Christina Lamb, pp. 221-223

This is as opportune a time as any to inflict upon my dear readers the following old chestnut I first encountered in a footnote in African Language Structures, by William E. Welmers, which I read during an introduction to African linguistics course one summer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Chibemba, like Kiswahili and most Bantu languages, marks noun classes with prefixes that also mark singular and plural for that class. Thus, bantu is ‘people’, muntu is ‘person’ (for some speakers, this only refers to black people, like kanaka in the Pacific). Similarly, in Setswana, ‘people’ are batswana and ‘a person’ is motswana. The same principle applies to loanwords, so the singular of batenda ‘bartender’ is mutenda, while the plurals of kitabu ‘book’ and kipilefti ’roundabout, traffic circle’ are vitabu and vipilefti, respectively.

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Filed under Africa, language, U.K., war, Zambia

by | 22 April 2007 · 10:36 pm

Rhodesia, 1927: Keeping Up Appearances

She found her way along the dark corridors to the library, where a lively fire was burning. Her husband was nowhere to be seen. Instead a servant whose name she had forgotten appeared as if from nowhere and led her wordlessly downstairs to the dining-room, where the long table had been set for dinner with one place setting at either end. [Stewart] Gore-Browne was standing at the window with his back to her, one arm folded behind his back and one hand in his pocket, but turned and came forward to take her hand as she entered. He was dressed stiffly in black lounge suit and white tie and looked as if he was fighting off an urge to look at his watch.

Nodding to a waiter who held out a chair for her at one end of the long table, Gore-Browne took a bottle of Pol Roger from a silver bucket on a side cabinet to celebrate their first night. There was no ice in the bucket and he apologized for it not being chilled, though the cellar kept bottles fairly cool. He always opened champagne himself, as the house servants tended to get so carried away shaking the bottles that guests ended up having a shower. Popping the cork with the suavity of one who has done so many times, he wrapped a white cloth round the neck of the bottle and poured it into two crystal flutes. Taking his place at the opposite end of the table, he waited for Jackson the servant to serve them, then lifted his glass in a toast. ‘Chin, chin, my dear Lorna. To life at Shiwa.’

‘Chin, chin.’ She raised her glass and drank, the tiny bubbles tickling her nostrils.

Another servant entered, mincing uncomfortably in the black patent shoes which Gore-Browne insisted all waiting staff wore, and bearing a silver tray in his white gloves from which he served slices of chicken liver pate on to their gold-rimmed Meissen plates. It must have made an odd scene, the husband and wife so far apart, the large silver candelabra in the centre casting shadows on the white linen cloth, the room silent except for the grind of their cutlery on the plates and the loud tick of the grandfather clock in the hall. Various oil-painted ancestors looked down on them from the walls. In the centre was Gore-Browne’s grandfather, Sir Thomas Gore-Browne, Ethel’s late father, who had been Governor of St Helena, New Zealand, Tasmania and Bermuda, and whose prominent nose had clearly been inherited by his grandson. Next to him was a chubby-faced man in bishop’s robes, Gore-Browne’s uncle Wilfred Gore-Browne, the first Bishop of Kimberley. On the other side of Sir Thomas was his wife, the beautiful raven-haired Lady Harriet, Gore-Browne’s late grandmother from the Campbell family of Craigie in Ayrshire, whom he had always called Grammy.

Having cleared away the first course, Jackson and another servant entered with silver platters of wild duck in orange sauce, sweet potatoes and green peas. The servants were always forgetting to warm up the plates, to the irritation of Gore-Browne, who found cold plates a particular dislike, even noting the event in his diary. His rebuke unnerved Jackson, who was already having difficulty manipulating the serving fork and spoon with the tight-fitting gloves. Nervous herself, and not used to champagne, young Lorna must have found it hard not to giggle, but she had been warned to behave by her uncle Major Goldman, who had always complained that she was an unruly creature, and she was eager to impress her new husband and show him that she was a worthy mistress of this great house.

SOURCE: The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream (HarperCollins, 2004), by Christina Lamb, pp. 143-145

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by | 22 April 2007 · 10:35 pm

Rhodesia, 1922: “A Very Desirable Kind of Socialism”

The whole village had turned out to make bricks, as well as some other Bemba who, to [Stewart] Gore-Browne‘s delight, had returned to the lake on hearing of the ‘mad English bwana‘ and the chance to earn a few shillings. Having never seen a building made from bricks before, they were all intrigued by the process and everyone wanted to join in. ‘We had seen Europeans before and knew they liked building houses,’ recalls Paramount Chief Chitimukulu, who as a young boy worked as a brick carrier at Shiwa, ‘but we had never seen anything like this and it was wonderful to see right in the middle of the bush.’ Already the biggest employer in the whole Chinsali District, Gore-Browne had 110 people on the work register; men at 5d a day, and women and children at 2d. Two men cut the clay out of anthills and the river bed, then others took it to a pit where it was mixed with water brought from the river by small boys. The women mixed the mud and carried it from the kneading pit to the brickmaker who cut and levelled it into a rectangular mould. Once the bricks were made, the women then carried them on their heads to the drying floor, making a jolly sight, Gore-Browne noted in his diary, walking with that classic grace which English women seem to have lost. Behind them follow the old chief and his wife, rounding them up, everyone singing all the while. By midmorning the whole place is resonant with harmony as different work-gangs go back and forth in various directions, all singing. Some came with bundles of grass for thatching, others with poles and blocks of wood which they took to Cowie and Austin who were in charge of the carpentry, building the wooden frame for the house as well as furniture. Gore-Browne smiled as he saw a group of children, none of whom looked older than five, carrying spears, returning from an expedition to search for lime. They had obviously been successful and had chalked their faces with it, causing the dogs to bark in fright.

I feel like a missionary but without the hymn singing, he wrote, watching the scene. He assured his aunt and uncle that he was not about to start urging the natives to copy white man’s ways, and give up their beer-drinking, drumming and polygamy, though he had no qualms about dressing them in European clothes. In fact he hoped that in years to come the skills he was imparting would be passed on, so that the children and grandchildren of his workers would be building their own red-brick houses rather than primitive mud huts. He told Ethel:

It seems a wonderfully right state of affairs and a very desirable kind of socialism. I am cleverer and better equipped than these people so they all work to provide me with what I want, a roof and a garden, but I get them meat and protect their crops from marauding eland and find them money for their tax and few luxuries they can’t get otherwise. Also if an enemy came and burnt their houses or carried off their women, they’d expect me to take up their cause. It’s a fair arrangement and we don’t pretend we’re all equal which we obviously aren’t and when I pass through the village, they fall down and clap their hands and shout my praises. But I know that if I renege on my side of the bargain and take their crops or rape their women, they would soon rise up. In the old days they would have killed me, now I suppose they would go to the magistrate. Or maybe not.

SOURCE: The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream (HarperCollins, 2004), by Christina Lamb, pp. 86-88

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by | 19 March 2007 · 9:43 am

Black Immigrant Model Minorities

Clarence Page takes a closer look at a well-camouflaged model minority in the U.S.—new black immigrants.

WASHINGTON-Do African immigrants make the smartest Americans? The question may sound outlandish, but if you were judging by statistics alone, you could find plenty of evidence to back it up.

In a side-by-side comparison of 2000 census data by sociologist John R. Logan at the Mumford Center, State University of New York at Albany, black immigrants from Africa average the highest educational attainment of any population group in the country, including whites and Asians.

For example, 43.8 percent of African immigrants had achieved a college degree, compared to 42.5 of Asian Americans, 28.9 percent for immigrants from Europe, Russia and Canada, and 23.1 percent of the U.S. population as a whole.

That defies the usual stereotypes of Asian Americans as the only “model minority.” Yet the traditional American narrative has rendered the high academic achievements of black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean invisible, as if it were a taboo topic.

UPDATE: Please read the attached comment, which far outweighs this blogpost.

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by | 18 March 2007 · 6:51 pm

Two Film Roles: Scottish Moron vs. Stasi Mensch

This weekend, the Outliers went to see the excellent, award-winning German film The Lives of Others. Last weekend, we saw The Last King of Scotland, for which Forest Whitaker won a well-deserved Oscar. In between, we watched the German film Der Tunnel (via Netflix), which inspired in me an inchoate train of thought about people who understand living in a world of sometimes deadly moral compromise and those who don’t have a clue. But it was the sharp contrast between two starring roles in The Last King of Scotland and The Lives of Others that finally clarified it for me.

The fictional character in The Last King that most incensed exasperated me was not the disarmingly witty and manipulative, but increasingly brutal and paranoid tyrant. (I had expected him to be a monster.) It was the bloody fool of a Scottish doctor: a cocky, self-satisfied, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing, culturally ignorant, sexually predatory, criminally naive moron who endangers more lives than he saves–a type all too common on university campuses worldwide (and, of course, in governments). The doctor finds out too late that others play by different rules with more deadly consequences than he has ever imagined. You’d think a real do-gooder might have exercised a little more caution and self-restraint as a guest in someone else’s house. But he is really an adventurer, not a do-gooder. The world is both his oyster and his china shop, and he manages to destroy three pearls he touches–the health minister, one of the dictator’s wives, and a fellow doctor–while leaving other lives shattered as well. You start out sympathizing with him, but when he finally escapes Uganda, my reaction was “Good bloody riddance!”

The Stasi spook at the center of The Lives of Others presents a stark contrast: a pathologically repressed, anal-retentive automaton whose only emotions are vicarious, the sole purpose of whose odious vocation is to incriminate others, not to heal or rescue them. And yet, this meticulously mistrusting drone knows very well how his world works and where its dangers lie. He studies his quarry long and hard before deciding what action to take (or not), finding ever more reasons to doubt the motives of his bosses and to empathize with his prey. In the end, he manages to carry out an anonymous good deed that allows at least one pearl to form in this slimy milieu of universal suspicion, deception, and betrayal. This repellant slimeball turns out to be ein guter Mensch after all. You start out loathing him, but you end up appreciating the self-effacing derring-do of this spook cum guardian angel, and so does the writer he has spied upon. Even though I had anticipated how the writer would convey his thanks, my eyes still flooded over as the moment arrived.

The story in The Lives of Others begins in 1984, and conveys only too well the Romania I encountered in that same year, about which more anon. It will take some time to compose. In the meantime, let me close with an excerpt from John O. Koehler’s Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police (Westview, 2000).

“The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people,” according to Simon Wiesenthal of Vienna, Austria, who has been hunting Nazi criminals for half a century. “The Gestapo had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed 102,000 to control only 17 million.” One might add that the Nazi terror lasted only twelve years, whereas the Stasi had four decades in which to perfect its machinery of oppression, espionage, and international terrorism and subversion.

To ensure that the people would become and remain submissive, East German communist leaders saturated their realm with more spies than had any other totalitarian government in recent history. The Soviet Union’s KGB employed about 480,000 full-time agents to oversee a nation of 280 million, which means there was one agent per 5,830 citizens. Using Wiesenthal’s figures for the Nazi Gestapo, there was one officer for 2,000 people. The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi’s case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests.

Like a giant octopus, the Stasi’s tentacles probed every aspect of life. Full-time officers were posted to all major industrial plants. Without exception, one tenant in every apartment building was designated as a watchdog reporting to an area representative of the Volkspolizei (Vopo), the People’s Police. In turn, the police officer was the Stasi’s man. If a relative or friend came to stay overnight, it was reported. Schools, universities, and hospitals were infiltrated from top to bottom. German academe was shocked to learn that Heinrich Fink, professor of theology and vice chancellor at East Berlin’s Humboldt University, had been a Stasi informer since 1968. After Fink’s Stasi connections came to light, he was summarily fired. Doctors, lawyers, journalists, writers, actors, and sports figures were co-opted by Stasi officers, as were waiters and hotel personnel. Tapping about 100,000 telephone lines in West Germany and West Berlin around the clock was the job of 2,000 officers.

Stasi officers knew no limits and had no shame when it came to “protecting the party and the state.” Churchmen, including high officials of both Protestant and Catholic denominations, were recruited en masse as secret informers. Their offices and confessionals were infested with eavesdropping devices. Even the director of Leipzig’s famous Thomas Church choir, Hans-Joachim Rotch, was forced to resign when he was unmasked as a Spitzel, the people’s pejorative for a Stasi informant.

UPDATE: Historians of Africa on the H-Africa discussion list have weighed in with a lot of good critical commentary on The Last King of Scotland. Here’s the best take I’ve read so far, by Brian Coyle at UC Berkeley.

In three recent films about African atrocity, The Last King of Scotland, Blood Diamond, and Hotel Rwanda, it interesting what gets said but not shown.

In Hotel Rwanda, an excellent film in my opinion, the conflict’s root cause is briefly posited in a didactic moment among key characters. The fact is given, unquestioned, that Belgians introduced a false distinction within an amorphous African population, granting some the ethnicity Tutsi to dignify a ruling, if non-European, class. The ethnic distinction that Hutu and Tutsi claim to be physical and deep is really a crafty Belgian charade. This neatly fits a dominant paradigm of social construction, but is hardly a scholarly consensus. In Blood Diamond, an average film in my opinion, the European-American-South African root cause is even more pedantically coded, right into the title. Little if any reference is given to the Liberian origin of the conflict, run by invaders from Liberia (though some were Sierra Leonians returning from time spent in the Liberian conflict). The diamond mines were fuel thrown on an already blazing fire. Also, the audience is left to assume that it was diamond-interest mercenaries who finally uprooted the rebels, which is untrue. In Last King of Scotland, a lousy film in my opinion, the English are made unequivocally responsible for Amin’s rise to power, and of course the Scottish doctor plays a key role in causing the deaths of the people we see.

Behind each of these geopolitical explanations is the same dynamic. Causal agency is granted to non-Africans, and removed from Africans. The big-budget films dare to say that the West is the root of African evil, and Africans are history’s mere pawns.

But what isn’t shown? Atrocities. Hotel Rwanda does show scattered corpses, and has a very effective scene where a car rides over bumps that we learn are people. But the Rwandan genocide involved hatcheting people to death, by hundreds and thousands. Film critics agreed the filmmakers chose wisely to refrain from such graphic imagery. Blood Diamond had a brief exposition of chopping off of hands, but the rest of the picture showed splays of machine gun fire and explosions. I can attest, having been in Sierra Leone during the war’s beginning , that guns were plentiful, but not bullets. Children were not given license to waste Rambo-scale rounds of ammunition. The worst violence was again by machete, and again it occurs off camera. In Last King of Scotland, Amin’s atrocities are barely shown. Instead we remain as ignorant as the foolish doctor, getting information from newspaper images he reads.

In all three cases, the films spare audiences from graphic recreations of the actual atrocities. The is rather unusual, since other big-budget movies have no scruples about such displays. Uber-violence is Hollywood’s idea of freedom of expression. Perhaps it takes a special kind of producer/director team to make an African movie, who are temperamentally uninclined to recreate atrocities. Or maybe not. If presented with wide-screen recreations of hundreds of innocents hacked to death in gruesome realistic detail, the audience might “mistakenly” conclude that Africans, by themselves, are capable of epic brutality that stamps history for millennia.

This contrasts sharply with another virtue of many German films like The Lives of Others (or The Harmonists, which we also saw recently): The German films don’t blame everything on the Russians, or the French, or the Brits, or the Americans. They acknowledge that many—if not most—people in East Germany (or Nazi Germany) were complicit to some degree or another.

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by | 22 February 2007 · 5:44 pm

What Distinguishes Coastal Peoples?

The December 2006 issue of the Journal of World History (Project Muse subscription required) starts off with an interesting article by Michael N. Pearson on littoral society.

Who are the people who live on or near the beach, those who inhabit the coastal zone, not just the beach? They have been called the shore folk, or sea nomads, or members of a littoral society. The place of port cities in littoral society is a matter of dispute. In terms of location they may qualify, though Ashin Das Gupta in his classic book on Surat made an important distinction. “To begin with there was coastal Gujarat, marshy, irregular, often broken by estuaries of the rivers and dotted with tidal flats which were submerged at high tide…. It was peopled by the truly maritime men who fished and who sailed the vessels on which trade depended. The coastal cities usually stood back a little.” On our other two criteria, occupation and culture, definition is more difficult, and things change over time. In premodern times port cities had more of a whiff of ozone about them than is the case today. The occupations of many of the inhabitants were intricately connected to the foreland and hinterland, thus making these people truly littoral. However, their economic functions and influences extended much further than their fellows on the coast, with much more extended forelands and hinterlands. Culturally, the port cities, where populations are more concentrated, are more exposed to external influences, such as élite norms from the inland, or the attentions of seafaring scholars and religious folk. Ibn Battuta traveled around the Indian Ocean, calling at port cities and being recognized for his scholarship. In return he tried to improve the quality of Islam in these places.

One way to separate out littoral from port city is to insist that littoral people live on the coast and seldom travel. Some people in the port cities—sailors, merchants—indeed go to sea and have important maritime experiences, but my concern is with fisherfolk, or people who tend the lighters that go out to meet the big ships. These folk live on shore, but work on the sea: they are very precisely littoral.

Greg Dening wrote, “Beaches are beginnings and endings. They are frontiers and boundaries of islands. For some life forms the division between land and sea is not abrupt but for human beings beaches divide the world between here and there, us and them, good and bad, familiar and strange”—an extravagant claim indeed, even if meant metaphorically. I would argue exactly the opposite, as does Jan Heesterman. He stressed that “The littoral forms a frontier zone that is not there to separate or enclose, but which rather finds its meaning in its permeability.” Braudel wrote evocatively about coastal society, stressing that it was as much land oriented as sea oriented. The life of the coast of the Mediterranean “is linked to the land, its poetry more than half-rural, its sailors may turn peasant with the seasons; it is the sea of vineyards and olive trees just as much as the sea of the long-oared galleys and the round-ships of merchants, and its history can no more be separated from that of the lands surrounding it than the clay can be separated from the hands of the potter who shapes it.”

Several modern scholars have described the shore folk of the Indian Ocean. John Middleton focused on the east African coast. “Part of the coast is the sea: the two cannot be separated. The Swahili are a maritime people and the stretches of lagoon, creek, and open sea beyond the reefs are as much part of their environment as are the coastlands. The sea, rivers, and lagoons are not merely stretches of water but highly productive food resources, divided into territories that are owned by families and protected by spirits just as are stretches of land. The Swahili use the sea as though it were a network of roads.” The very term “Swahili” means “shore folk,” those who live on the edge of the ocean. As Randall L. Pouwels has it, Swahili culture was “a child of its human and physical environment, being neither wholly ‘African’ nor ‘Arab,’ but distinctly ‘coastal,’ the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.”…

Certain languages achieved wide currency, this providing commonality around the shores of the Indian Ocean. In the earlier centuries it was Arabic. There are some five thousand words of Arabic influence in Malay, and more than that in Swahili, and about 80 percent of these are the same in Malay and Swahili, so that we have a “corpus of travelling Arabic words.” Later, a sort of nautical Portuguese and, today, some variant of English, have achieved a quasi-universal status.

Languages know no boundaries, and this also applies to coastal people. For most of history they knew little of political borders. Smuggling was an occupation, not a crime, as was the plunder of ships driven ashore. Dian Murray, an expert on piracy, wrote of a “water world,” where boundaries were indistinct, just like Villiers’s delta region. Robert Antony recently modified Murray slightly, writing of a water world of “shared social, economic, and cultural activities, and patterns that are not easily defined and delimited by ethnic and linguistic differences or by national boundaries.” He and Murray are concerned with the southern China coast, but their findings apply precisely to other coasts.

In a water world, coastal religion is also distinctive. Littoral people, living in a more cosmopolitan environment than those inland, are more likely to convert. In the case of the Indian Ocean, the cosmopolitan, international aspect of Islam has often been cited as a prime motivation for conversion, and while this applied most strongly in the port cities, it also was evident on the coasts between them. Coastal people especially found their indigenous beliefs, localized and very specific, to be inadequate as their world expanded. When they were exposed to a universal faith—Islam as exemplified by visitors from the north—the attraction was obvious, and the results can be seen all over the Indian Ocean world from the early modern period onward. There were and are widespread Islamic religious connections around the coasts. In Zanzibar one group uses a certificate of authenticity and authority issued in Indonesia. In Mayotte, off Madagascar, South Asian Islamic reformers are active. A devotional text in Indonesia was probably originally written in Arabic, either in the Middle East or in Indonesia itself, and is now available in Javanese and Acehinese. In Zanzibar Islamic books, including Qur’ans, come from Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, and Pakistan.

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by | 31 January 2007 · 8:52 pm

Ibn Battuta’s Impressions of Mali, 1352

This desert is bright, luminous. Traversing it, one breathes deeply; one is in good spirits, and safe from robbers. The desert here contains many wild cattle. A flock of them might come so near to a caravan that people can hunt them with dogs and arrows. However, eating their meat creates thirst and, as such, many people avoid it as a consequence. If killed, water is found in their stomachs and I have seen the Massûfa squeezing the stomach and drinking the water. There are also many snakes.

A merchant of Tilimsan known as al-Hajj Zaiyân was in our caravan. He had the habit of catching these snakes and playing with them. I had asked him not to do this but he would not desist. He put his hand into a lizard’s hole one day and found a snake there instead. He grasped it and was about to mount his horse. But the snake bit the finger of his right hand, inflicting severe pain on him. The wound was cauterized, but in the evening the pain worsened. He cut the throat of a camel and kept his hand in its stomach all night. The flesh of his finger loosened and then he sliced off his finger at the base. The Massûfa told me that the snake must have drunk water before biting him, or the bite would have killed him.

When the people coming to meet us with water had reached us, our mounts were given water. We entered an extremely hot desert. It was not like the one we had just experienced. We would leave after the afternoon prayer, travel all night and stop in the morning. Men from the Massûfa and Badama and other tribes brought us loads of water for sale. We reached the city of Iwalatan at the beginning of the month of rabi’i [17 April 1352] after a journey of two months from Sijilmasa. It is the first district in the country of the Blacks. The Sultan’s deputy here is Farba Husain; farba means ‘deputy’.

On arriving, the merchants deposited their goods in a clearing and the Blacks assumed responsibility for them. The merchants went to the Farba who was sitting on a mat in a shelter. His officials were standing in front of him holding spears and bows, and the Massûfa notables were behind him. The merchants stood in front of him, and he spoke to them through an interpreter as a sign of his contempt for them even though they were close to him. On observing their bad manners and contempt for white people, I was sorry I had come to their land. I retired to the house of ibn Badda’, a kind man of Sala from whom I had let a house by request.

The inspector of Iwalatan, named Mansha Ju [lit. Royal Slave], invited those who had come in the caravan to a reception. I refused to attend. My companions urged me very strongly to accept, and finally I accompanied the rest. At the reception coarsely ground anli was served mixed with honey and curdled milk. This was put in a half gourd shaped like a large bowl. Those present drank and then left. I asked them: ‘Is it for this that the Blacks invited us?’ They replied: ‘Yes. For them it is the greatest hospitality.’ I became convinced that no good could be expected from these people, and I wished to join the pilgrims travelling out of Iwalatan. But I decided to go and see the capital of their king before leaving. I stayed in Iwalatan for about fifty days in all. Its people treated me with respect and were hospitable… The town of Iwalatan is very hot. There were some small palms and they had sowed melons in their shade. Water came from underground sources. Mutton was plentiful. Their clothes were of fine quality and of Egyptian origin. Most of the inhabitants belong to the Massûfa. The women are of exceptional beauty and are more highly respected than the men.

SOURCE: “Ibn Battuta, World Traveller (b. 1304),” in Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, edited by Tabish Khair, Martin Leer, Justin D. Edwards, and Hanna Ziadesh (Indiana U. Press, 2005), pp. 294-296

Also see Ibn Battuta and His Saharan Travels and Ibn Battuta on the Web.

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by | 10 December 2006 · 4:50 pm

Darfur Conflict Spreads into Central Africa

Lydia Polgreen of the NYT reports on the southward spread of yet another conflict not worth stopping, although France has intervened at the request of the current government of the CAR.

KALANDAO, Central African Republic — The Central African Republic — so important as a potential bulwark against the chaos and misery of its neighbors in Chad and the Darfur region of Sudan — is being dragged into the dangerous and ever-expanding conflict that has begun to engulf Central Africa.

So porous are its borders and ungoverned are parts of its territory that foreign rebels are using the Central African Republic as a staging ground to mount attacks over the border, spreading what the United Nations has already called the world’s “gravest humanitarian crisis.”

The situation is so bad in some places that 50,000 residents have fled the Central African Republic to find refuge in Chad, of all places, while starvation threatens hundreds of thousands who remain.

“This is the soft belly of Africa,” said Jerome Chevallier, a World Bank official who is trying to help stabilize the Central African Republic. “It has little protection from whatever might strike it.”

There’s much more on Darfur and the fighting in Chad at Passion of the Present.

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Filed under Africa, Central African Republic, Chad, Darfur, war

by | 10 December 2006 · 4:35 pm

Head Heeb on the Somalian Regional Proxy War

The ever-vigilant Head Heeb has been closely following the growing likelihood of a regional proxy war in Somalia. Here is are the final paragraphs of his latest post.

Ethiopia and its local allies will push south from Puntland at the same time as they try to break the encirclement of Baidoa. This may, in turn, spiral into a proxy war; the same UN report that estimated the Ethiopian troop presence at 6000 to 8000 noted ominously that up to 2000 Eritrean soldiers may be in the country fighting on the Islamist side. In addition to Ethiopia’s jitters over the possibility that an Islamist state in Somalia might support domestic insurgencies, its fears of a second front against its long-time regional enemy now seem to be materializing.

And as if this isn’t enough, the possibility of Somalia being torn apart in a regional proxy war has a truly ironic postscript. A report on the fighting in the Independent notes sardonically that “the Palestinians are next in line to take over as head of the Arab League – raising the bizarre prospect of the Somali peace talks (if they are ever restarted) moving from Khartoum to Gaza.” Bizarre this may be, but not necessarily inappropriate. Given the number of contending factions in Somalia, the diversity of their interests, the unlikelihood that they can be persuaded to compromise and the number of foreign countries that want a hand in the outcome, Gaza might be the perfect place for them to negotiate.

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Filed under Africa, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, war