Thom Sank

Though previous entries of these ramblings swore never to engage in any sort of discussion regarding African cultural and historical matters, one towering figure in the history of Burkinabè (the fairly nifty adjective denoting something from Burkina Faso) politics demands mention: Thomas Sankara. No trip to the capital Ouagadougou can be complete (at least for those who have a love for politics) without a visit to the garbage-strewn cemetery in the city’s Sector 29. In a graveyard despoiled by thousands of discarded plastic bags, rotting garbage, refuse fires, itinerant ne’er-do-wells, and chipped graves, there is the freshly repainted tomb of Comrade Captain Thomas Sankara (Thom Sank) and several of his ministers.

Depending on who’s counting, Burkina Faso is the world’s second or fourth poorest country (really, you can find data to support both) – how they have contrived to fall behind the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a mystery to me, yet the fact remains that the country is desperately poor. The country’s former colonial rulers, the erstwhile French, tended to make a hash of it in most of their African countries (well, I shouldn’t single the French out, what country actually benefited from the civilizing mission of the European imperialists?), but at least successor states like Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire tended to inherit a bit more infrastructure. Burkina, on the other hand, had little on the ground at independence; like most countries in Africa, the nation contains a highly homogenous ethnic mix (an outcome of the “rational and enlightened” Western countries’ drawing of irrational lines in the sand to create artificial and illogically conceived African states) that militates against effective nation building.

Duly, it came as little surprise that the fledgling state suffered coup after coup in the decades following independence. Most newly installed military administrations made soothing noises about a quick return to civilian rule and an end to wanton corruption (Pervez Musharraf, anyone?), only to join the parasitical class they sought to eliminate. The man who bucked this trend and became a hero to a generation of African youth was the ambitious young military man, Thom Sank.

Sankara’s revolution was only four years old when the “rectification” came, an overly optimistic and euphemistic term that sanitizes the fact that the Captain was overthrown by his former friend and ally, Blaise Compaoré, and received a bullet in the back of the head for his trouble. Despite the somewhat inglorious end (although such ends always tend to immortalize those that would have remained extremely mortal had they not walked the path of martyrdom), his policies earned him the title of the “Che Guevara of Africa.” His ascetic, populist, industrious, and charismatic approach drew adoration from the poorer sections of Burkinabè society: He succeeded in a mass vaccination campaign for children nationwide, championed women’s rights, encouraged literacy, and kept his word about stamping out corruption. Long a believer that economic colonialism was continuing even if official French occupation had ended, Sankara sought to redirect the country’s economy along a more autarkist path in an effort to encourage domestic industry.

But while such efforts were wildly popular among the lower strata of society, other measures tended to grate against more privileged sections of the country (calling rich people thieves probably was not conducive to cross-class bridge-building). Sankara slashed civil service wages, and sold the ministerial fleet of Mercedes in favour of more modest Renaults. Echoing Mao, he also “encouraged” ministers to go out and help in the countryside, lest such paper-pushers get too comfortable in their white collar jobs. Alas, such policies proved too much both for the country’s traditional elite and the state’s former colonial powers: Sankara, along with several of his ministers, were deposed, gathered together, and shot in Compoaré’s “rectification of the revolution.”

Though undoubtedly a man of certain excesses, Sankara remained true to his anti-corruption principles in the end: A survey of his personal effects revealed a beat-up Renault, a bicycle, a few guitars, and a couple hundred dollars. Fittingly, then, one of the superstars of 1980’s African politics rests not in a great mausoleum (those deposed in coups rarely are mind you, Adnan Menderes notwithstanding), but in a rubbish-strewn cemetery that has become a place of discreet pilgrimage for newer generations appalled by current levels of corruption and elitist excess. In dying so early, Thom Sank guaranteed his own immortality.

The Sun Never Sets in Mali?

Starting off the day in Mopti, Mali















Sound conveyances, ready for takers















Not particularly exciting, but Timbuktu is supposed to look like a frontier town
















Sky over Bandiagara, Mali













Loading up in Koro, Mali

Africa Shots

Towards Home... Dapoyah, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Unnecessarily artsy shot, 30 km from Djenne, Mali

Burkina Faso-Mali border

Market day in Djenne with the mosque adjudicating the proceedings

Bazaar and mosque encore

Crossing the River

My previous entry discussed general matters of land-based conveyance systems in West Africa, but failed to provide either specific examples from this terrestrial mode of conveyance or explore the modi operandi of more aqueous forms of transport.

The historic town of Djenne lies on a large, sandy island on the Bani River in Central Mali. Known locally for its diverse Monday market that draws traders from the surrounding area, the town is more famous internationally because of its mosque, the world’s largest mud structure and a UNESCO world heritage site.

Despite the notoriety, the town is somewhat illogically underserved by transport options: Travellers coming from either the west (Bamako) or the east (Mopti) usually find themselves not so ceremoniously dumped at a junction some thirty kilometres from the town. Onward transport, of course, can only be arranged following the usual procedures (waiting in the sun until the bush-taxi is just a bit fuller than full, sharing your seat with protruding metal things, taking pictures of the driver/master mechanic underneath the hood miles from anywhere, etc., etc.). Once en route, however, everything is in order -- until one reaches that which even the chutzpah-laden African car dares not traverse: The Bani River. The Bani is certainly not the Amazon, but its width and depth are sufficiently enough to ensure that our car, possessor of a body that one could charitably describe only as somewhat porous and of questionable buoyancy -- and uncharitably only as a P.O.S – would not come through the fording with particularly flying colours. The answer, thus, was a ferry.

I use the term ferry only in the broadest, instrumentalist conception of the term: A long metal plank, equipped on one side with a motor and bedecked with several Bob Marley stickers would perhaps more accurately illustrate the nature of the conveyance. Having arrived in one piece from the road junction some 26 km away, I took my place in the departure terminal (there was a large metal crate on the shore whose 4 foot high ledge gave a commanding view of the river – I took this to be the departure lounge) and waited for the next sailing.

The Bani River, however, is somewhat infrastructurally challenged, in that it is singularly devoid of a dock. The river itself is laden with sediment and is consequently quite shallow. Given this lack of port infrastructure, the river’s shallowness, and the geometric composition of our plank-cum-ferry, there was precisely zero opportunity for a dry boarding procedure. In my opinion, the night we went to Djenne probably wasn’t so bad; in a Herculean effort, the ship’s captain managed to wedge his floating plank just some 4 m offshore in preparation for our embarkation. The other vehicles’ occupants were able to keep their feet dry since their transport was of sufficient enough construction to manage a short river-bound excursion immediately prior to boarding. Our conveyance, alas, in her asthmatic, wheezing, porous, and rusty (though I must say very stoic!) condition would most certainly not have had the stamina to ford the 4 metres of shallow water and board the plank with us occupants also on board. It was, thus, a reversal of the Normandy Invasion (or perhaps, more appropriately, Dunkirk?), with groups of people running through the water to board a quasi-buoyant sheet of metal immediately before departure. Though I’m not sure my feet necessarily took a liking to Bani River water (nesting worms anyone?), the embarkation was at least accomplished without the accompaniment of any sort of Normandy-style gunfire.

Once boarded, the captain dispensed with the standard safety demonstrations and instructions as to where to find personal floatation devices and life rafts in the event of an emergency in transit (I’m sure such safety procedures are a regular occurrence on Malian ferries, but we just happened to catch our captain on an off-day). Out of the vehicles, the ferry comfortably held room for about 20 people, although was filled on our crossing by about 20 more.
Though daylight was waning fast, I took an inventory of the plank’s fellow passengers, cargo, and conveyances. In the front, there was our anaemic bush-taxi (a lack of light precluded me from taking another photo of our driver industriously diving underneath the hood in an attempt to conjure up a new engine through a bit of alchemy or other such magic trick), followed by a two story bus – one story for the bus itself, a piece of machinery that at one time very much might have been painted orange, and one story for the varied collection of boxes, rice bags, and wildebeests tethered to the top (OK, there were probably no wildebeests, but it was too dark to ascertain absolutely that there were no wildebeests present). Behind the large, vaguely orange bus was a Mercedes that had remarkably succeeded in maintaining its blackness. It is with great regret that I failed to quiz the vehicle’s owner as to how he had succeeded in achieving this on an African road. Lastly, and lest one forget the conveyances that all of us used in yesteryear, there came a horse and buggy. The horse, looking none the worse for wear after fording part of the Bani, was evidently transporting a precious cargo to the market in Djenne. Closer inspection, however, revealed a multitude of rusty metal bits on their way to the bazaar (such an impressive collection of rusty metal things in all shapes and sizes conjured up memories of Mardin’s Hotel Başak, and their toilet facilities which happened to double as a rusty-metal-bit depository – I imagine the allusion is helpful to precisely no one, given that few sane people would ever darken the door of Mardin’s elegant Hotel Başak, nor have had the pleasure of ever spending two long nights there); I was regretfully unable to locate the purveyor of these metal bits the following day during the marché.

Our three minute crossing completed, I silently acknowledged my fellow passengers (be they man or beast) and returned to our stalwart bush-taxi (our driver had apparently constructed some headlights during the crossing using metal coils and prayer during our ferry-ride) for the remainder of the journey to Djenne.

Our asthmatic bush taxi in a rare, kinetically inclined moment.

De Transportatione Africana (Some General Observations)

De Transportatione Africana (Some General Observations)

It has been nearly nine months since my last entry – a lack of correspondence on my part that I ascribe to the vagrancies of graduate school and the fact that my whinging about said education would not make for particularly engaging reading. Such lack of correspondence ends today, for this is my first communiqué out of..... Africa! (At this juncture, I should further apologize to the vast majority of people who hold my acquaintance for sloughing off to the sun of West Africa (Burkina Faso and Mali, to be precise) with nary a mention from me --- I attribute such antisocial behaviour to the aforementioned vagrancies of graduate school, as poor an excuse as that may be).

I should iterate at the beginning of these ramblings that I am far from being an ustad on Africa. I might remember all of Roger Milla’s goals at the 1990 World Cup, cried inconsolably when Cameroon lost to England at that same competition, and written a second-rate exam about Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta in first year university, but I think that hardly constitutes any sort of substantive corpus of knowledge about African customs, culture, history, or social practices. Thus, lest I glibly make sweeping generalizations about various cultural matters that are not within my prevue, this entry is necessarily devoid of the cultural and historical minutiae of any one geographical location; it is, instead, a cursory overview of one of the dominant themes -- at least in the eye of the beholder -- of African travel: Transportation (here, I autocratically reserve the right to glibly make sweeping generalizations on this theme despite my earlier indications to the contrary).

In regards to the means of vehicular conveyance available throughout West Africa, the following can generally be observed:
-All taxis must be green.
-If your prospective taxi driver gives you a low-ball price, it usually means one of that the engine doesn’t work, the radiator is non-existent, the car needs a push start from three fairly fit males to start, one or both headlights detached themselves from their holder sometime in the 1980’s, or that your driver has to stop every six seconds or so to ask directions to your hotel in the very centre of town. Alternatively, all of these factors might be evident in the same vehicle.
-Expect dust.
-When possible, the inside of your taxi should be as gutted as possible. Rusted metal with protruding sharp bits is definitely a la mode. Better bus companies should also display this trend.
-In keeping with this minimalist theme, seats are mostly characterized by their unadulterated metal nature. Any randomly adhering bits of vague, upholstery-like material on your lumbar support device are purely accidental.
-All taxis must be issued with a musical selection that alternates between West African kora music, and reggae. This is non-negotiable.
-All vehicular door handles fell off shortly after post-colonial independence. Any taxi that doesn’t possess a clothes hanger or other sort of contraption in lieu of the factory handle is no taxi at all.
-Longer-haul minibuses should also display this lack of door-handle accessorization. Rope is usually the preferred method of maintaining the conveyance’s structural integrity.
-For longer-haul minibuses, departure time should invariably be when the minibus is just a bit fuller than it has been for the previous 43 minutes spent on baking tarmac at midday. When the captain has indicated that things are full enough, it is best also to wait just a few minutes more should any stragglers come.
-Expect wind and dust.
-One should naturally assume that a maximally long bus journey should be mirrored by maximum personal discomfort. No matter what seat you choose, your seat will always be the worst; you will be reminded of your profound personal discomfort/length of journey about every three seconds on account of the inexplicably placed piece of protruding metal burrowing into your kidney.
-All photos of vehicles in Africa will invariably portray them with their hoods up and several men working industriously inside trying to coax the engine’s brakes/radiator/sparkplugs/transmission/fans/filters/all of these back into life. Alternatively, those labouring might be trying to coax the engine back into life without the benefit of one or all of these standard features (Africans are master automotive bricoleurs and, at that, master mechanics). These photos, meanwhile, will be taken somewhere between the middle of nowhere and the end of the earth, for that is invariably where your breakdown will occur.
-Expect dust to inexplicably cover every inch of your body and possessions, no matter how much you bundle up.
-A hot day to make Dante sweat, coupled with a lack of onboard water, will invariably ensure that your driver chooses to take longer and more unnecessary chatting/cigarette breaks in locations devoid of disposable water.
-Although your long-haul transport has been booked several hours in advance, and although the minibus has been sun-tanning under the open skies for even longer, your mass conveyance device will invariably fuel up with gasoline only after you have all packed in (inclusive also, of course, of the extra 43+ minutes of time spent waiting on the tarmac for the driver’s cousin to appear). Minibuses, as a rule, cannot be fuelled up before a journey.
-Expect half of Noah’s Ark to accompany your bags on top of your minibus. If your minibus is one story high, expect an additional story of bags, metal things, and local florae and faunae lashed on above.
-Expect to hack up red dust coloured mucus at least five days after your last voyage.
-Expect cavernous potholes.
-And, lastly, expect to get there eventually, come hell or highwater (and given African weather, hell and highwater are usually apparent on the same day) – come what may, your chosen form of conveyance will invariably deposit you (more or less) at your destination at some finite point. You may have only accomplished 400 km in 17 hours, but the guy at the ticket booth (or rough approximation thereof) didn’t promise the EuroStar to Calais either.

So there you have it: An unerring portrayal of transport in West Africa that importantly avoids the pitfalls of overgeneralization so common to other travel accounts.

Bonne soirée!

Obligatory picture of African transport with hood raised, miles from anywhere...