Notes from a fascinating world.
The world is like a bazaar, full of interesting odds and ends, and I've been exiled into it. This is my all-over-the-map (literally and metaphorically) attempt at capturing some of the world's many wonders.
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To the uninitiated, Namibia sounds impossibly distant. Where is it anyway? The President of the United States recently called it “Nambia.” And I doubt everyone realized right away that he’d made a gaff. But actually, as Lonely Planet puts it, Namibia is “Africa for beginners.” A German colony until it was taken over by British South Africa in 1915, and not actually independent from South Africa until 1990, Namibia often feels like a misplaced corner of Germany with its Lutheran churches and streets with names like Bahnhofstrasse and Luderitzstrasse, and especially in its relative orderliness. This Germanic orderliness, I learned on a trip to Sossusvlei, extends to Namibia’s wilderness areas.  Sunrise in Sossusvlei. My coworker Teresa was the first person to draw my attention to Devil’s Pool at Victoria Falls, the infamous swimming hole on the edge of the waterfall that some call the world’s “ultimate infinity pool.” It was four or five years ago, and we were having one of those water-cooler conversations. As soon as I got back to my office I googled for images of the Devil’s Pool. And as soon as I saw it I decided that one day I would go there. And finally I have. From Nairobi I flew into Lusaka, Zambia’s nondescript capital. From the airport, at 2:45am, I shared a taxi with a Nigerian man to Lusaka’s Inter-City Bus Terminal. At 6:30 the bus left for the dusty eight-hour ride to Livingstone, the town on the Zambian side of Victoria Falls named after the famed missionary-explorer.  At Devil's Pool.  The trilingual inscription stele (Chinese, Persian, and Tamil) that Zheng He left in Sri Lanka, now in the Galle Museum. April 2016. In the early-15th century, the Chinese government sent the so-called Eunuch Admiral, Zheng He, on a voyage of exploration that reached East Africa and perhaps beyond. A muslim of Mongol-Uzbek extraction, he was often known by his honorific name “Sanbao,” and he may have been the inspiration for Sinbad in the Arabian Nights.
Six hundred years later he is the poster child of contemporary China’s foreign policy. Called “One Belt One Road,” the policy calls for China to reconstitute the ancient Silk Road across Eurasia as well as to build supposedly mutually beneficial relationships with many of the countries that Zheng visited. And the building of relationships mostly involves the construction of factories and bridges and roads and other capital projects for these countries. Zheng left a stele in Sri Lanka commemorating his visit, so now China has built an international airport and a deepwater seaport for Sri Lanka. I’ve been seeing and marveling at many indications of China’s “OBOR” policy around the world for some time. There was the China-Maldives Friendship Bridge, for example. And there were the children in Ethiopia crying “China, China” upon seeing me, which annoyed me until I learned that, with so much Chinese investment in that country, the children thought that all foreign-looking people were Chinese, even if they had blonde hair and blue eyes. And most recently I have been in Kenya. Nicholas laughed at my jokes a lot. And he had a way of half-covering his face with his hands when he did so. He had closely cropped hair like that of Obama, whose official portrait was everywhere in Nairobi as stock image for shops offering passport photo service. And when he turned his head to show his profile, I thought the shape of his skull rather resembled Barack’s as well. He had his own travel agency, of which he constituted its entirety. “All right,” I said. “Let’s do it.” “You go?” “I go.” We were talking about Masai Mara, the nature reserve in southwestern Kenya that formed the Kenyan portion of the Serengeti, arguably Kenya’s top attraction.  Continuing the previous post’s theme of Indiana Jones and tales I should have told when I visited the relevant scenes, here is the story of how the Ark of the Covenant — yes, the one with the Ten Commandments inside — may or may not really be in northern Ethiopia. According to Exodus and Deuteronomy, Moses built the Ark with wood with gold covering. The Israelites then carried it with them during their 40 years in the desert before Joshua led them, with the Ark at the head of the column, across the Jordan River and into the Promised Land.  Artist's rendering of Joshua marching with the Ark. Public domain.  Gondar castle, October 2016. For now, while they were cloistered in this hotel, the newbies’ summer camp attitude seemed oddly more appropriate. Indeed the volunteers were hopelessly bored and trying to entertain themselves as best as they could. Card games went on in the lounge. As a group, the volunteers went out to Bole, the hip neighborhood near the airport, for salsa dancing. Parties were thrown, and on more than one night they migrated to one of the so-called “villas” outside of the hotel’s main building. Weed got passed around. “Never Have I Ever” was played, revolving around the themes of sex and drugs. “Never have I ever dropped acid.” “Never have I ever had a threesome.” “Never have I ever done meth.” “Never have I ever slept with my professor.”
Beer pong featured prominently, although with water in the cups instead of beer. “Don’t drink the water!” Someone admonished. “It’s sink water,” which in Ethiopia could make you very sick indeed. The volunteers had tried to get a keg in here, but the logistics proved too complicated. Indeed, for a party, there was a shortage of alcohol, and everyone nursed her drink as a precious commodity. They could’ve bought six packs, but the way things worked in Ethiopia they would’ve had to put down twice the money for bottle deposits. So these were relatively tame gatherings. At another hotel where the Peace Corps sometimes put up its volunteers, after one night of debauchery, the hotel had to replace the wall papers.  Ceiling of angels, Debre Berhan Selassie Church, Gondar, October 2016. Liane and her friend Alana (along with as many as two million others) were at the Irreecha festival in Bishoftu where dozens had been killed. She was still visibly shaken by what she saw, which she would not describe. Yet she was delaying her departure from Ethiopia. “I don’t want to be home for Halloween with all the revelry,” she said. The contrast would have been too jarring.
Alana went so far as to describe the government’s policy toward the Hamar people of Ethiopia as “acts of genocide.” Reportedly, the government had been forcibly removing the Hamar people, a small and isolated tribe living in the Omo River valley in southern Ethiopia, from their homeland into villages. A clash in 2015 between soldiers and tribesmen allegedly killed dozens. But her outspokenness was far from universal. Lana, a nurse from Maine, carefully circumvented every political discussion as long as she was in-country. John for his part endlessly quoted vague proverbs. “I like to talk in Ethiopian proverbs,” he explained, “to avoid taking a stance on politics.”  The castle of Gondar, the only castle in east Africa, October 2016. John had a much more personal reason for being here. The couple had talked about joining the Peace Corps but never got around to it. “We had this ad for the Peace Corps cut out from the New Yorker and pinned on our fridge.” Now that she was gone, he decided to get away from the States and do what they’d always talked about in her memory. “I made the good will gesture of giving everything I owned to Goodwill.”
Actually there were several young couples here, couples in their twenties, some of whom looking as though they got married on graduation day and promptly went off to Africa. There were Norma and Jason, Shawna and Cliff, Tessa and Barry. Others left boyfriends and girlfriends behind. Some, like Liam, managed to keep the flame going despite the odds. Others had long since broken up. “It’s horrible” being so much older than most everyone else (the average age of a Peace Corps volunteer is 28), John admitted. Indeed, he wasn’t much loved among his fellows, not least because, in an overwhelmingly liberal group, he declared, “Trump is a buffoon, but Hillary is just as bad.”  A lone clergyman inside the Ethiopian Orthodox Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa, October 2016. “You don’t work for the Ethiopian government, do you?” John (all names have been changed) was asking me. He was less than half-joking. “Because I’ve realized that one fifth of the times when I go anywhere, there’s a government person tailing me. There was a guy here just the other day from the Ministry of Defense.”
It was the latter half of October at the landmark (if terrible) Ghion Hotel in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, and John had good reason to be worried. Nearly a year earlier major ethnic groups largely left out of the country’s governance began protesting the government dominated by the minority Tigray people, who represented only about six percent of the population. On October 2, a religious festival in Oromia, the region surrounding Addis, turned bloody when police confronted protestors. Official and local accounts of how over fifty individuals (and perhaps many more) died remained conflicting. According to Human Rights Watch, hundreds more had already died in the preceding year.  Alexander Pushkin, with African sideburns? Public domain. It’s a well-known story in Russia. But I assume that most non-Russians haven’t heard it. And in this age of ours when Russia appears to be instigating white supremacist movements abroad, maybe even Russians need a reminder.
Abram Hannibal was a black man born in today’s Cameroon in 1696. At the age of seven he was kidnapped by Ottoman Turks before being presented to the court of Peter the Great as a gift. In Russia he came to be known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal (the Russian language has a way of changing Hs to Gs, so much so that “Harry Potter” in Russian is “Garry Potter”). Peter took a liking to the young African boy and took him into his household. He faithfully served the Tsar and later his daughter, the Empress Elizabeth, first as a valet and eventually as a general in the Russian army. Fast forward a hundred years to Abram’s great-grandson Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. Like so many Russian aristocrats of his day, as a child Pushkin knew French better than he knew Russian, a defect he would remedy soon enough. By the age of fifteen he had published his first poem and gained a literary reputation. But his politics were far too liberal for the Tsarist autocracy, and he got himself exiled to the Crimea, Moldova, and the Caucasus, that romantic part of Russian imperial territory where I am as of this writing, a place that would inspire other Russian writers as well, like Mikhail Lermontov. |
AuthorWriter, traveler, lawyer, dilettante. Failed student of physics. Not altogether distinguished graduate of two Ivy League institutions. Immigrant twice over. "The grand tour is just the inspired man's way of getting home." Archives
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