Friday, July 11, 2008
Travels in the Arctic and Africa
Hello! Welcome to this blog, which is essentially the rough draft of a travel book slated for publication in 2024, in which I will recount my extensive travels in the Arctic and Africa over a thirty year period. In that time, I have been everywhere from Alaska to Zanzibar, from the snowdrifts of Banks Island and Iqaluit to the sanddunes of Mauritania and Namibia. I have sailed halfway through the Northwest Passage, worked as a juggie on seismic crews on the ice and land of the High Arctic, and visited a total of eleven African countries from Morocco in the northwest, down to South Africa, and up the east coast to Mauritania, Tanzania, and just recently Kenya. I have also trekked on Baffin Island and climbed Mount Kenya, conducted consulting missions with the Inuvialuit of the Western Arctic and various governments all over coastal Africa. These fourteen chapters represent my reflections of those journeys. I hope you enjoy them!
Mauritania, May 1991
“Even people who have lived in this ‘God forsaken place’ and would never do so again agree that it’s a truly exotic and unforgettable place to visit”.
-from West Africa, a travel survival kit. Lonely Planet, 1988, p. 299.
Early in 1991 a German firm by the name of POGA, which is based in Bad Homburg, asked me, sight unseen, to go on a mission to Mauritania. So, in May of that year I found myself in this vast, haunting desert country in northwest Africa. I only spent a month there, but it was enough to make a lasting impression on me.
Like many others, I yearn to visit out of the way places, ones that are off the beaten track. At the time I visited it, Mauritania certainly fit that bill: I was told that no more than perhaps three to four hundred tourists visited the country each year. It’s not as if Mauritania was at the other end of the world; it is, after all, only a three or four hour hour flight from most European capitals. But the country feels like it is at the end of the world. The capital, Nouakchott ( "Nouakshit" to some expats ), is, or was when I was there at least, a sand-infested, feature-less town, with only one or two decent hotels and restaurants, and no paved roads. But in a perverse sort of way, this is what made the place so attractive: it is just so incredibly different. Everything you see is different, from the Moorish men in their pale blue and white robes to the noonday sun directly overhead that doesn’t even make you sweat, and dries your leathery skin within seconds of exiting the pool.
Sand envelops the country, so much so that when I was there there was not even a paved road between the capital, Nouakchott, and the country’s second city, Nouadhibou, located about three hundred kilometres north along the coast. I am told there used to be a paved road linking the two towns, but that within weeks of it being built ( no doubt with foreign aid ), it was buried in sand. Consequently, the only way you could get from one city to the other, flying aside, was by driving along the beach at low tide. I actually saw a French family doing this in their Mitsubishi Pajero. It must have been quite an adventure, since there is virtually nothing but surf and sand the whole way. Now, as I understand it, there is a paved road linking the two cities.
The Moors, who are descended from Arabs and Berbers, are a very austere bunch. The men are mostly tall and thin. Typically they sport a beard, a turban and sandals, all of which makes them look like they just stepped out of Franco Zeffirelli’s film Jesus of Nazareth. They tend to have a certain noble air about them. They are also inscrutable. In the past they were nomads, but nowadays they are almost all sedentary. A few diehards still maintain their herds of emaciated camels. One of these is a former President, who returned to the desert after being toppled in a coup. Moors make quite a sight, with their billowing robes and loping gait. The more affluent can be seen tooling around in their Mercedes. They are known as traders and businessmen: throughout West Africa they can be seen running their shops and trading in foreign exchange.
By all accounts, a good Moor does not like to get his hands dirty. This, after all, is what slaves were made for, or, if there are none of those around, women. Slavery is outlawed nowadays, but vestiges of it can still be found, I am told, in the system of indentured labour. Blacks actually outnumber the Arab Moors, but they are treated with disdain by the ruling, fair-skinned Moors, who control the economy and the government. But since Moors are too busy making money to do anything practical such as serve in the military, blacks occupy most of the posts in the armed forces. In 1989, the ruling Moors suspected a military coup, and in the ensuing purge several hundred blacks thought to be traitors were rounded up, tortured and murdered. Had I known this before I entered the country, I never would have gone on mission there.
Whenever I think back to the time I spent in Mauritania, I have this recurring image of myself on a domestic flight between Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the country’s second city, and undoubtedly one of the most godforesaken places I have every visited. The short-range propeller-driven plane was jam-packed. I suspect it always was, because of that paved road buried under the sand. In any case, I was the only Westerner on the flight; other than me, the whole plane was full of these Biblical characters from central casting, in their long gowns, staring into the great beyond. If you believe in cultural relativism, I suppose the scene was not all that much different from what you see on a business shuttle flight between Toronto and Montreal, Boston and New York, or London and Paris. In either case, when you are the only one dressed in civvies, you better be self-assured; otherwise, you are going to feel like odd man out.
For all their noble airs, Moors are not the friendliest of people. I am told they can be very hard to get to know. I therefore consider myself fortunate to have got to meet four Mauritanians during my stay: the clerk at the hotel I stayed at; a black newsagent at the hotel; a semi-retired governor of one of the provinces, and the head of a national marine park. It was through these four individuals that I got to know a little bit about the country. My clerk friend was incredibly friendly, and overly helpful. He complained incessantly about his plight as an underpaid desk clerk in a government-owned hotel. He also decried the way the country was run, for the betterment of those in power and the well-to-do rather than the common man. He was painfully thin, and said his wages did not even give him enough money to buy decent food. His main goal seemed to be to get the hell out of the country, to some sort of El Dorado like Canada. Who could blame him for that? Of course he wanted my address in Canada, but my policy in Africa is never to give it out; instead, I usually offer to send information on Canadian bursaries or other forms of assistance. I have heard too many stories about people who did give out their address, only to have the person they gave it to write them with a heartbreaking story; the letter usually ends in a request for money for some worthwhile cause, such as a brother’s operation or a little sister’s funeral. Unfortunately, when one is five thousand miles away from the scene, it is impossible to determine whether these solicitations are genuine.
The country he inhabited had few resources other than iron ore and fish. The vast majority of the population was illiterate. Mauritania was, and is, one of the poorest countries on earth, although now, as I write, there is revenue from offshore oil production. Graft and corruption were rampant, and racism was endemic. Whatever wealth the country did possess was being milked for all it was worth. A few people had loads of money, while most people had nothing. Most young people with any get-up-and-go had already got up and gone. Years of drought had forced tens of thousands from the interior region to the capital, where they had been swept off the streets by an embarrassed government and herded into a tent community on the outskirts of town. People swept sand off their sidewalks each day the way Canadians sweep off a light dusting of snow. When I was there the situation was especially critical, as Mauritania was suffering the wrath of the Western powers for its failure to come on board during the Gulf War. When I arrived in the country an Iraqi Airways jet was sitting on the tarmac at the airport; when I left one month later it was still there.
My second erstwhile Mauritanian friend was the newsagent at the Marhaba Hotel. I would meet him each day in the hotel lobby. He would be sitting there at his desk by the corner. His name was Bou. He was a retired Mauritanian postal employee. Now he sold stamps, postcards, newspapers and magazines at one of the principal hotels in the capital. ‘Marhaba’ means ‘welcome’ in Arabic. During my stay there, I got to know a little about Bou, his country and his past. The thing I remember most about Monsieur Gaye was his lovely smile. It was the kind of smile that announced to all the world: “ Welcome to my country. Maybe it is one of the most wretched, godforsaken places on earth. True, I am discriminated against because I am black. And, yes, I can barely earn a living from this kiosk. Nonetheless, I welcome you to my country, because it is the only one I’ve got.”
It was hard to tell how old Bou was just by looking at him. He had grey hair, to be sure, and he certainly looked much older than most people you see in black Africa. This is, after all, a continent where the average life expectancy is around forty-two. Let’s just say that Bou was, as the French quaintly put it, ‘a man of a certain age’. And from what I could glean about him, he had lived a full, if not an easy life.
He was in fact much older than the country itself, for Mauritania only gained its independence from France in 1960. Bou was born, therefore, into colonial French West Africa. Quite possibly he had been born into slavery, which was commonly practised in Mauritania by the dominant Moors, and was only outlawed in 1980. In any event, Bou grew up in a rural setting, and got his big break, if one can put it that way, when he was inducted into the French Army. He was assigned to the Camel Corps in the northern desert, where he and his regiment lived out of tents. This would have been sometime around the early nineteen-fifties.
Within a year or two Bou found himself in Indochina. He was rather vague about his time there. Whatever transpired during this period of his life, he obviously survived it, probably leaving Viet Nam around the time of the French debacle of Dien Bien Phu.
Upon his return to Africa, Bou took a job with the Post Office, or PTT as it is known in francophone countries. He delighted in talking about these years of his life. Evidently he steadily rose up the ladder in the Mauritanian union of postal employees, because before long he was attending various international conferences on postal labour. In this capacity he made many trips to Geneva. So, he and I would swap stories about that picturesque Swiss city on the shores of Lac Leman, where I had studied for many years. Geneva was a short three hour hop by plane from Nouakchott, but it seemed more like a million miles away from that dusty, dingy town sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and the Sahara Desert.
Monsieur Bou spoke excellent French. He was also very polite, in an old-world kind of way, but always with an African twist. For example, he would ask me two or three times how I was, the rationale being that the first and second times the question is posed no one ever tells the truth. Only by asking someone a third time do you find out how they really are. That, at least, is how the theory goes. When it was my turn to ask Bou how he was, we would sometimes engage in our own private joke. The dialogue would go something like this:
Me: How are you today, Monsieur Bou? Are you well?
Bou: Yes, I am well, thank you very much.
Me: And how are the camels?
Bou: They are well, too ( chuckling ).
Me: And the goats?
Bou: Yes, yes. They are all well ( more chuckling ).
Me: And the children? They are fine, I hope?
Bou: Yes, of course. They are very well.
Me: Oh, yes, how is your wife?
Bou: Which one? I have several!
Bou always impressed me with how seriously he took his work. He worked six days a week, Friday being his day off. He would be there at six thirty in the morning, and he would still be there at five thirty in the evening. He came in from the country. I never asked how he got there. I just assumed that he came on one of those rickety, jam-packed minibuses or 'matatas' that one sees all over Africa. To pass the time between customers he would listen to his portable radio, which he would press up to his ear. He was very trim, and he wore western-style clothes, which immediately set himself apart from most of his compatriots, and especially the ruling Moors, who flaunted their traditional indigo robes. The country he was now a national of was a typical African kleptocracy, ruled by forty or so thieves. A good chunk of the wealth had been siphoned off to the Canary Islands nearby, where a sizeable expatriate community flourished. Racism was endemic, and hundreds of blacks had been murdered the year before I arrived. While I was in the country, Mauritania was siding with Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. Reading, listening to the radio, and conversation were about the only pursuits that did not seem to be outlawed.
I never really determined whether he had a concession from the hotel to operate his desk in the lobby, or was in fact paid a wage by the government, which owned the Marhaba. Either way, he treated each item in his modest collection of stamps, postcards, newspapers, magazines and a few books as if it were a precious diamond. If I selected a postcard, he would help me choose an appropriate stamp for it. Or if the latest Jeune Afrique came in, he would put a copy aside for me until I dropped by. In this way, I began to see that my daily stops at his stand probably meant as much to him as they did to me. We both needed each other: I needed his companionship and access to the outside world, and he needed my companionship and truck. This seemed to me to be a fair exchange, especially in a country with so little ‘culture’ discernible to the temporary guest.
Monsieur Bou was especially proud of the Mauritanian stamps he had for sale. My being from Canada, he wasted no time in showing me the commemorative set which his old PTT had just released in honour of the upcoming 1992 Olympic Winter Games in Albertville, France. I was impressed by the quality of these stamps, which depict various winter sports, including figure skating, cross country skiing, hockey and Alpine skiing. We both found it highly amusing that a country that is ninety-five percent covered with sand should celebrate the glories of winter sport. Interesting as these stamps may have been to look at, I had no desire to purchase them. Then I noticed that on each and every one of them the letter “T” was missing from Albertville, a fact that did not seem to overly concern my African friend. A few years ago I showed these prized philatelic specimens of mine to an Ottawa stamp dealer at a collector’s show. He dismissed them as being of no interest whatsoever, partly on the grounds that they were not first day issue, and partly because they had been touched by human hands. So, I still have the stamps.
I also kept Monsieur Bou’s business card. It very proudly identified him as a Philatelist. I often think of him, and I have often thought of writing him. Something holds me back. Perhaps I am too afraid to find out what has become of him. He was, after all, a man of a certain age. If I ever return to Mauritania, I will make a point of stopping by the Marhaba Hotel, just across from the Place de l’Indépendence, to see whether he still has his kiosk. If he does, I will go up to him, shake his hand, ask him how he is, how his camels are, and so on and so on down the line. In the meantime, I prefer to guard the perfect memory I have of our brief encounter, when I was a stranger in a foreign land, and he made me feel welcome.
Someone in an entirely different situation also made me feel welcome in his country, under entirely different circumstances. Zein Gaye was a semi-retired Governor of a province of Mauritania. As a patronage appointment, he had been appointed director general of the crown corporation responsible for ship safety in the country. Mauritania was the site for the famous French painting “Le Naufrage de la Meduse”, which caused quite a scandal in France during the early nineteenth century, because it exposed the incompetence of French maritime safety practices. Thus, one might have expected Mr. Gaye’s agency to have a certain prominence in Mauritanian circles. In fact, quite the opposite had occurred, to the point where the agency he headed was considered something of a national joke. The agency’s office was located in Nouadhibou, where hundreds of wrecks clogged the harbour, having apparently been brought from afar and unceremoniously scuttled for insurance purposes. Since my visit in 1991, a French salvage firm was hired to salvage these hulks, but ran into legal challenges from people claiming to be the rightful owners. The Frenchmen, I am told, had to make a quit exit, leaving millions of francs worth of salvage equipment behind. Whether Mr. Gaye was responsible for this debacle, I have no way of knowing. All I know is that when I met him I found him to be of the utmost charm. Meeting him was like going back in time, to a bygone era of gentility and erudition. I had read where centuries ago the Moors were known for their education and cultivation; Gaye seemed to me to be the embodiment of this civility. He was probably in his seventies, and he spoke excellent French.
My German colleague Fritz had set up an appointment to see Mr. Gaye in his Nouadhibou office, which was located in a nondescript, two-storied building down a dusty cul-de-sac. Fritz had told me that Gaye was “an interesting character” whom he wanted me to meet. Wolfgang accompanied me to the meeting. We were kept waiting in an anti-chamber for several minutes before being ushered in to Gaye’s very small, cluttered office. In Africa, as in certain parts of the western world, these delays are often intentional, meant to convey a sense of the host’s importance and busy-ness. And just in case we felt slighted, a servant very quickly brought us mint tea, followed by another, and then yet another. Each tea was served the old-fashioned way, from a brass pot with a long spout, the server pouring the tea from a height of perhaps eighteen inches directly into the glass below, without spilling a drop.
Maloum’s office gave no hint of his rank. It was small and cluttered, with files strewn all over his desk. Overhead, a fan spun around, circulating stale air throughout the room. The walls were a pale green, a colour you see a lot of in Mauritania; it is the same colour as phlegm. The meeting went well enough, I thought. I had been sent to Mauritania to determine which marine environmental protection treaties the country should accede to in order to protect itself against oil spills. Mauritania was not party to any of the relevant treaties at the time. Mr. Gaye was aware of the treaties in question; he even pulled a dog-eared copy of one of them out of his drawer. He said that his inspectors were applying this particular one anyway. He explained that since Mauritania did not have any domestic rules to apply, the standards contained in the international treaties were the only thing to go by. I was flabbergasted by this revelation. It seemed like an eminently practical solution. Nevertheless, it relied on voluntary compliance, since you could not prosecute someone if they had not broken any law.
At the end of our meeting, Gaye suggested that he would like to have us over for dinner one night. I thought he was just being polite, but Wolfgang was quite certain that he was serious. Sure enough, two days later we were summoned to Gaye’s home for a 7 PM couscous meal. The scene was like something out of One Thousand and One Nights: tapestries hung from the walls, and instead of chairs there were cushions and pillows strewn all over the floor. We were introduced to the host’s two sons, both in their twenties. If there were any daughters, they certainly were not in evidence. In fact, the only time any women were present was to bring in the food and take away the dishes after the meal. Wolfgang explained to me that this was the custom among the Moors: women always stayed in the background, and when they did appear they were not to engage in social intercourse. Thus, for all I know, one of the veiled women who served the food might have been Mrs. Gaye, a daughter or a daughter-in-law. One or two black retainers did enter the room to serve us drinks before supper and mint tea after: Fritz surmised that they were slaves or ex-slaves. While slavery has been illegal for decades now, apparently the practice has been difficult to eradicate because however bad their plight may be, slaves are often considered members of the family.
I found the whole setting distinctly uncomfortable. This was really putting my moral self-righteousness to the test. I was sitting on the horns of dilemma, for on the one hand I wanted to challenge the way women and blacks were treated in this household, and on the other hand I did not want to offend my host. I could not but wonder whether Gaye was aware of the injustice of it all. If he was, he certainly did not let on. He wanted to know as much as he could about my own country, Canada. And his sons both spoke of their love for Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where they had gone to university. It seems that for a certain class of Moors Abidjan represents a kind of African Paris; Casablanca and Rabat had apparently been off limits because of Mauritania’s bitter dispute with Morocco over Western Sahara. I was impressed at how intellectual and sophisticated Maloum and his sons were. Hassaniya was their mother tongue, but they spoke beautiful French, and they were quite knowledgeable of world affairs. They were also very proud of their native land. While I was chatting and tossing these ethical problems around in my head, the women and servants brought the meal in. We were all seated cross-legged on the floor as platter after platter of steaming hot food was placed on the rug in front of us. It was like some sort of medieval banquet. Everything seemed carefully designed to impress us with the wealth and social status of our host, as well as the high esteem in which he held us, his honoured guests. Of course the plat principal was couscous, which we ate with our hands. Fritz explained to me that a Moor will always eat couscous with his left hand, the right hand being reserved for wiping his behind. The correct movement of scooping up the couscous resembles the trajectory of a steam shovel scooping up dirt or an elephant feeding itself: the arm moves forward in a downward-sloping arc, the hand dives into the dish, and cups the food in the palm before being drawn back towards the mouth. There was very little conversation while we gorged ourselves. The only noise was the occasional burp, plus the slurping of food and drink. Being a vegetarian, I simply ignored all the lamb that was offered. I found the whole meal rather disgusting. On top of everything, my legs were killing me from sitting Indian-style on the floor for so long.
After the meal, the conversation resumed for perhaps a half hour, when all of a sudden our host and his two sons got up and left. They did not even wait to see us out! When I expressed my shock to Fritz at this sudden exit, he downplayed the incident, suggesting that this was simply the Mauritanian way: eat and run. The next day, I wrote a thank you note to Gaye, and delivered it to his office. I was touched by his generosity in inviting us, and I was very grateful to him for providing me with a glimpse of Mauritanian life behind the walls. But I was also horrified by much of what I had seen. I suffered from culture shock. I had a sense of time warp; it was like being placed in a time capsule and travelling back many centuries to the time of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. I would like to think that Maloum was being genuinely friendly in inviting me to his house, although business and protocol were probably uppermost in his mind.
My evening chez Gaye was undoubtedly the highlight of my stay in Nouadhibou. The city exists basically because of two things: fish and iron ore. The industrial fishery here is very substantial, and the ore from Zouerate in the interior is transported by rail to Cansado near Nouadhibou, whence it is shipped abroad. So, Nouadhibou is a very workmanlike place. But it is a place totally devoid of charm, with nary a decent hotel or restaurant. The only memorable distraction while I was there was a short trip out to Cap Blanc, close to the border with Western Sahara, where one can see a few of the last remaining Mediterranean monk seals in the wild. When I was there, it was said that there were only two hundred seals left in this particular population. They were considered on the verge of extinction because they mate in caves along the rocky coast, and these sites were being disturbed. I was also told that the Mauritanian Navy used the seals for target practice, although sailors were belatedly being educated as to the extremely dangerous effects of this activity.
The last of the four Mauritanians I met was Mustafa Diouf, Director of the Parc national du Banc d’Arguin, a marine park located between the country’s two main coastal cities, which is noted for its abundance and variety of migrating bird life. I have no reason to doubt that Mr. Diouf was excellent at his job. He probably had all the qualifications ( his business card merely identifies him as an agronomist ). The problem was, in my meeting with him at park headquarters in Nouadhibou I found it totally impossible to take him seriously. Diouf was a Harratin, or black Moor. This in itself was no reason to dismiss him as a martinet; one sees a fair number of these descendants of slaves who have been assimilated into the dominant Arab culture. He looked very young, and he was very short; he was probably no more than five foot two. His head barely rose above his enormous desk. But what made him look rather comical was the fact that except for his big blue eyes, he was covered from head to toe in his robes and turban. I felt like I was talking to a mummy, or someone wrapped in an enormous blue and white bandage. Those piercing eyes kept staring out at me.
During the course of our hour-long meeting, I cannot recall him blinking once, although I am sure he did. What I can remember is that he carried a fly swatter in one hand. He seemed to use it to punctuate my sentences, for just about every time I attempted to make an important point, he would flail away at another fly that was buzzing in front of him. Notwithstanding the distraction, I was able to ask all the questions I had planned. The conclusion I reached about Mr. Diouf and his beautiful park was that he was there as a gatekeeper; and his role seemed to have more to do with keeping people out than letting them in. The park itself was more of a wilderness reserve than a park in the western sense. It was very inaccessible, and the permit required to enter it was both expensive and hard to come by. A well-placed bribe would no doubt also grease the wheels. Just about the only person I heard about who succeeded in getting in, aside from a camera crew which produced a wonderful film on the area, was the Duke of Edinburgh, in his capacity as Patron of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWW). The Banc d’Arguin is also home to the Imraguen, a tribe of fishermen who use dolphins to help them catch fish. In 1996 dozens of dead dolphins mysteriously washed up on shore, possibly as a result of a toxic spill.
As we prepared to leave Diouf’s office, I asked him for some written material on the park. He basically said there wasn’t anything, but Fritz, who had accompanied me to the meeting, knew better. As we passed through the anti-chamber on our way out Wolfgang slipped a lovely colour brochure of the park into my notebook. He took it from one of several piles of unopened brochures. It was produced with French aid money. When I got around to leafing through the brochure back in Canada I noticed there was a photograph of Diouf in the Foreword. The top of his head was like a bowling ball; no wonder his head had been covered with a turban when I met him.
I met two other Moors during my month-long stay: one was a bright young marine biologist who I later learned had been picked out by the United States Coast Guard for study in Alabama. The other was an incredibly stupid young lawyer who insisted that Mauritania had ratified the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, when I knew from the UN itself that they had not. To top things off, the young man’s boss insisted likewise; as head of the foreign ministry’s international law unit, he should definitely have known better. Further research on my part revealed that the Mauritanian parliament had authorised ratification, but that the instruments of ratification had never been sent. This was a case of bureaucratic stupidity on a grand scale. Six years later, and those instruments had still not made it across the Atlantic to 1, UN Plaza on the Lower East Side.
My German colleague Fritz was a character in himself. Compact in build, bearded, and with a perpetual grin on his face, he was a highly competent aid worker. His job was to run the country’s system for controlling foreign fishing, and he did a good job of things. Everybody liked Fritz, who had been there for four years by the time I arrived; prior to that he had spent six years in Nigeria. Fritz was one of those highly educated, well-read Germans you often find abroad. He had gone to Tubingen University, and liked to talk about the fraternity he belonged to; it was one of those typically teutonic organisations where the members became blood brothers, and engaged in various acts of self-mutilation as a way of demonstrating their courage. Wolfgang met me at the airport in his company-supplied Toyota Land Cruiser.
On the way into town, I asked Fritz what expats did for fun around there. He must have thought I was bored already, for he immediately took me to the outskirts of town for a quick spin through the dunes. For a minute or two he raced up and down the dunes like a madman. He explained to me that as he sped along the autobahn, every decent German dreamt of coming to Mauritania just to tool around the desert, preferably in a Mercedes four wheel drive vehicle. I did not want to hurt his feelings, but all I could think of was Rommel and his Desert Rats creating a sandstorm in North Africa, and running out of gas at El Alamein.
I met another little general in Nouakchott. He was the World Bank representative, an Indian who had spent some time in Canada. When I arrived for an appointment with him in his lavish set of offices, there was absolutely no one in the building. I waited half an hour before he finally arrived. He seemed utterly stunned to see me. Evidently he had totally forgotten our meeting; but instead of simply apologising and getting on with things, he insisted that I was wrong, and tried to give me a dressing down. The whole thing was completely ludicrous: this puny little Indian standing there ramrod straight, wasting time trying to make me feel guilty for something that he himself had fucked-up. Welcome to the wacky world of the World Bank, I thought to himself. The offices they occupied were obscenely lavish when compared to the surroundings of Nouakchott.
Most of the other foreigners I had occasion to meet in Mauritania were French. Although this is the country where Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote a number of his books, including Vol de Nuit, Mauritania tends to be a dumping ground for French bureaucrats and other officials. Nevertheless, the ones I met were a fascinating collection of somewhat amusing and even eccentric characters. There was, for instance, Michel Pare, the resident UNDP representative in the country. He kept giggling during our meeting, as if I were cracking jokes all the time, or as if someone was tickling him. It was most unsettling. I simply could not take him seriously; he was like a complete buffoon. And yet I learned later from Fritz that this very same man had been responsible for saving several hundred lives the previous year, when Moors were slaughtering any Senegalese they could get their hands on, in retribution for alleged attacks on Moors in Senegal. Pare organised the secret airlift of hundreds of Senegalese who would no doubt have otherwise been rounded up and massacred.
I heard a similar story about another Frenchman who I had occasion to meet, although this time the heroic effort was more modest, and yet more personal in nature. Francois Beaudoind was a rather sad character working in the fisheries ministry as a so-called 'cooperant'. He was a trained veterinarian, sent by the French ministry he had worked for in Paris. As told to me by Fritz, who worked alongside Francois in Nouakchott, Francois basically had no choice about coming to Mauritania: he had to either go or be fired. Discarded French generals used to be sent to Limoges, whence the French colloquialism for being fired ( limogés ). So, in Francois’s case, he was shipped off to Nouakshit. I must say, I quite liked Francois, in spite of what I had been told about him. Francois’s big crime was that he had ‘gone native’ in Mauritania, in one sense at least. For he had adopted this incredibly bad habit of riding in to work aboard his motorcycle at around 9:15 AM, and speeding away with great panache by 11 AM. This was the total extent of Francois’s day at the office: in by 9:15, out by 11. Beaudoin's 'je m’en foutism’ attitude was so flagrant as to be almost worthy of respect. It was one thing for the average, underpaid local bureaucrat to behave like this, but for a European to emulate the locals in this respect was absolutely unheard of. And yet, somehow he got away with it.
Who knows what Francois did to wile away the rest of his day. All I really can say is that he had a lovely house tucked away behind your typical cement wall, a nice, if somewhat soporific wife, two kids, a dog and tons of videos and music albums. One of his hobbies was to get in his four wheel drive and go out to the country looking for pottery shards. When I heard that he did this occasionally, I asked if he would take me along with him. Within a few days he obliged, and so we went on a fascinating little excursion to the outskirts of Nouakchott, where the hard-packed, ocre-coloured sand was littered with shards. There was nothing to prevent me from taking samples away as souvenirs, but I resisted the temptation, on the theory that if everyone did likewise there would not be any left. From what I gather, this particular site that he brought me to was approximately one thousand years old; but the way it looked it could have been brand new.
Ineffectual as Francois may have been, he was nonetheless responsible for at least one heroic act during his four-year exile in Mauritania. For, like his compatriot Michel Pare of the UNDP, Monsieur Beuadoin had saved at least one life during the reprisals against local Senegalese. It appears that at the height of the lynchings, in 1990 I believe, gangs of people would regularly come to the Macqueron’s door looking for their Senegalese housekeeper. Since handing her over would mean certain death, Francois simply told them each time they came that she was no longer in their employ. Evidently, they did not believe him, and so they persisted. So, for the longest time, a period of perhaps three or four weeks, the Beaudoin's simply hid their maid in the house, never letting the would-be murderers in, and keeping the lady out of sight at all times. They did this at quite some risk to their own safety, I am told. Then, one moonless night, under the cover of darkness, they bundled her out of the house and into the car, driving straight to the airport, where she boarded one of Michel Pare's planes for safe passage to neighbouring Senegal.
In the years since I visited Mauritania I have often wondered what became of Francois Beaudoin. When I saw him in Mauritania he had about one year left on his ‘sentence’, as it were. The rumour was that he was going to be offered another godawful posting somewhere. In the summer of 1996, I got my answer. Coming out of a meeting in the fisheries ministry in Windhoek, Namibia, who was waiting to go in the same office but Beaudoin himself. We shook hands, but did not have a chance to really talk. But I learned from Fritz, who by this time had been posted to Namibia full-time, that Francois had gone back to Paris, where he was now assessing programs for the French ministry responsible for technical assistance. It just so happened that he was in Windhoek the same time I was, seeing the same officials, on another fisheries project. This is what African fisheries consulting is all about: a very small world of people that you keep bumping into, wherever you go. Thus, it seems that in the end everything had worked out well for Frederic. I would like to think that his good deed in saving the life of his Senegalese maid ( who many others would not have cared about ), had something to do with the improvement in his fortunes.
Another Frenchman, who I have somewhat less sympathy for is Marcel de Rochefoucault. Marcel was a very fit, aristocratic advisor to the Mauritanian Navy. When I met him he had been in the country for two or three years. He had obviously had his fill of things, to the point where he seemed to spend most of his time around the beautiful pool at the Novotel, just down the road from the French Embassy compound. Colonel Marcelwas a charming man: well- bred, well-educated and a good talker. But he was also a broken man. How he ever ended up in this dump is beyond me. His family were back in France, probably living in a chateau somewhere, while he had a modest little apartment in Nouakchott.
Marcel’s problem was that a number of the Mauritanian naval officers he had been training had been executed in cold blood on trumped-up charges of treason. Following an uprising in the capital in 1989, the Moor-dominated government cracked down on the military. They accused the black-dominated military of plotting a coup. Hundreds of soldiers suspected of involvement in this internal revolt were jailed, tortured, and in many cases murdered. France’s involvement in this whole affair is shrouded in mystery. No one seriously accuses them of direct involvement in the massacres and/or assassination, but the fact that they were actively training military forces at the time, and continued to do so after the horrific bloodshed, makes them look like accomplices to wholesale murder. For Marcel to have to go on working in Mauritania, haunted by these memories, must have been close to unbearable.
Although France gave up her West African colonies three or four decades ago, she still plays a preponderant role in the region. France seems to regard the whole area as her own private reserve. Any attempts by other countries to exert influence in the region are jealously and energetically rebuffed. French influence extends to military support and intervention. Vast sums of money are spent on French military hardware, local armed forces are trained by French advisors, and the mother country reserves for herself the right to step in and apply military force whenever and wherever she sees fit.
According to my Lonely Planet Guide for West Africa, ten thousand years ago Mauritania had enough vegetation to support a variety of wildlife, including elephants, rhinoceros and hippopotamus. Now the permanent vegetation is confined for the most part to the banks of the Senegal River on the southern boundary with Senegal, therefore making agriculture possible. The creeping desert has invaded Nouakchott in the last twenty-five to thirty years. Sand piles up against walls, it gets in your nostrils, and even into your lungs. Every morning a vacuum cleaner sucked sand from the bottom of the hotel swimming pool. I am told that the problem is particularly acute when the Harmattan wind blows in from the interior, as it does at certain times of the year. Needless to say, the air is extremely dry in Mauritania. Within a minute or so of hopping out of the swimming pool, my skin would be perfectly dry; no towel would be needed. But the scorching equatorial sun very quickly made my skin feel like leather; it is a very peculiar sensation.
If I were to return to Mauritania, I would try to be there sometime between July and October, when the rains come. I am told that during this period the region around Nouakchott is transformed into a carpet of green, with plants and flowers blooming. I would also visit the interior, places such as the ancient city of Chinguetti.
Mauritania made an indelible impression on me. The light is very special, the sky is a deep blue and the sand is a red brick colour, just like a cinder tennis court. Like the Arctic, the landscape dominates everything. The horizons are endless, and there are few distractions. You have to make your own fun.
The desert around Nouakchott has its own particular scent, very musty, as if someone peed his pants. The local currency, the ougiya used to stink just about the same way, until they replaced the old, crumpled bills with newer, better quality ones.
There is a striking contrast between the desert and the sea, with the former scorching hot and the latter surprisingly cold. The sea tends to be very rough around Nouakchott, and the temperature differential produces a very strong wind at the beach. In downtown Nouakchott it can be 30 degrees Celsius with not a breath of air, while ten kilometres away at the fishermen’s beach you would be wise to wear a windbreaker with the hood up. In my spare time, I would sometimes cadge a lift to that beach, where I could watch the fishermen, who are all black, bring their pirogues ( big wooden canoes with a small outboard ) in with the day’s catch aboard. This could be a very dangerous operation as they struggled to keep the boats afloat in heavy seas. Most of them wore bright yellow sou’westers, just like I had worn in the days of my erstwhile sailing career aboard the M.V. Tundraland in the High Arctic. I marvelled at their bravery, risking their lives against the elements. I am told that theirs is a very hazardous profession. These days, of course, beaches like these are staging areas for the perilous journey towards Europe by desparate migrants, many of whom die or drown en route.
The pirogues tend to go out to sea around dawn, and return in the late afternoon. The boats are beached and the catch is apportioned among the crew, the owner of the vessel, and whoever else may have a claim to it. The men catch the fish whereas the women sort it out, clean it and market it. This is the way it is throughout West Africa. The fish are mainly demersals, or bottom dwellers, as opposed to the free swimming pelagics one finds further out to sea. The fishermen and their families migrate quite a bit along the coast, from Ghana right up to Nouadhibou in northern Mauritania. Thus, it is not uncommon to here English spoken on the fishing beach in Nouakchott. Africans show little respect for the political boundaries that were first established by the colonial powers, and then carried over into the independence era. And, let’s face it, some of these boundaries make no sense whatsoever. In the case of Mauritania and Senegal, for instance, it would have made much more sense to give the southern, black part of the country along the Senegal river to neighbouring, black Senegal than to Mauritania, with its dominant Arab/Berber culture. If this had been done in 1960, at the time of independence, much grief and sorrow might have been spared.
Many African countries make it extremely difficult for the temporary visitor to leave the country with a favourable impression of the place. Mauritania is a classic example of this problem. Just entering the airport terminal at Nouakchott can be a tremendous struggle. There are dozens of people trying to get through a single door at the entrance. Invariably, an illiterate guard asks to see your papers. Meanwhile, a bunch of screaming locals are being overly helpful, grabbing at your bags and offering to steer you through all the red tape that awaits you inside All this is being done in 30 degree weather, when you are hot and sweaty and tired. Just about wherever you travel on this continent, the local officials give you the impression of doing everything for the first time: this is the first plane that has ever left the airport, this is the boarding clerk’s first day on the job, etc. What this means is that you must always expect the unexpected, prepare for the worst, and never take anything for granted.
When there is a scheduled stop in Nouadhibou, for instance, on your flight from Nouakchott to Las Palmas, and you look out the window and see your suitcase sitting on the tarmac, you must never believe the stewardess as she tries to reassure you that everything is in order and that it will eventually be put back on board. She, after all, doesn’t have a clue what is going on! Instead, instinctively you run down the gangway and run after the trolley that by now is carrying it off to the terminal. Then you yank it off the trolley and rush back to the airplane and hop on before they take off without you. This is par for the course in Africa. It is not why we go there, but it is why they pay us to go there. Some places you go to they give you danger pay; in Africa you get frustration pay.
It is easy to look down own’s nose at Mauritania. But then you remind yourself that at the time of independence there was not one port in the entire country. Also, a capital city had to be built from scratch, since the old regional capital, St. Louis, ended up on the Senegalese side of the river. The first meeting of the President and his Cabinet back in 1960 was held in a tent. And when a President was overthrown in a coup several years ago, he went back to the desert to tend to his herd of camels and lead a nomadic way of life. So, maybe there is some hope for this country. Maybe if I return in another thirty years I will be surprised to find that Arab and African are on an equal footing, that well has been more equitably apportioned, and that women are emancipated. And maybe, just maybe, I will arrive to discover that the desert has stopped its inexorable advance, and that trees are growing again, just as they did thousands of years ago.
-from West Africa, a travel survival kit. Lonely Planet, 1988, p. 299.
Early in 1991 a German firm by the name of POGA, which is based in Bad Homburg, asked me, sight unseen, to go on a mission to Mauritania. So, in May of that year I found myself in this vast, haunting desert country in northwest Africa. I only spent a month there, but it was enough to make a lasting impression on me.
Like many others, I yearn to visit out of the way places, ones that are off the beaten track. At the time I visited it, Mauritania certainly fit that bill: I was told that no more than perhaps three to four hundred tourists visited the country each year. It’s not as if Mauritania was at the other end of the world; it is, after all, only a three or four hour hour flight from most European capitals. But the country feels like it is at the end of the world. The capital, Nouakchott ( "Nouakshit" to some expats ), is, or was when I was there at least, a sand-infested, feature-less town, with only one or two decent hotels and restaurants, and no paved roads. But in a perverse sort of way, this is what made the place so attractive: it is just so incredibly different. Everything you see is different, from the Moorish men in their pale blue and white robes to the noonday sun directly overhead that doesn’t even make you sweat, and dries your leathery skin within seconds of exiting the pool.
Sand envelops the country, so much so that when I was there there was not even a paved road between the capital, Nouakchott, and the country’s second city, Nouadhibou, located about three hundred kilometres north along the coast. I am told there used to be a paved road linking the two towns, but that within weeks of it being built ( no doubt with foreign aid ), it was buried in sand. Consequently, the only way you could get from one city to the other, flying aside, was by driving along the beach at low tide. I actually saw a French family doing this in their Mitsubishi Pajero. It must have been quite an adventure, since there is virtually nothing but surf and sand the whole way. Now, as I understand it, there is a paved road linking the two cities.
The Moors, who are descended from Arabs and Berbers, are a very austere bunch. The men are mostly tall and thin. Typically they sport a beard, a turban and sandals, all of which makes them look like they just stepped out of Franco Zeffirelli’s film Jesus of Nazareth. They tend to have a certain noble air about them. They are also inscrutable. In the past they were nomads, but nowadays they are almost all sedentary. A few diehards still maintain their herds of emaciated camels. One of these is a former President, who returned to the desert after being toppled in a coup. Moors make quite a sight, with their billowing robes and loping gait. The more affluent can be seen tooling around in their Mercedes. They are known as traders and businessmen: throughout West Africa they can be seen running their shops and trading in foreign exchange.
By all accounts, a good Moor does not like to get his hands dirty. This, after all, is what slaves were made for, or, if there are none of those around, women. Slavery is outlawed nowadays, but vestiges of it can still be found, I am told, in the system of indentured labour. Blacks actually outnumber the Arab Moors, but they are treated with disdain by the ruling, fair-skinned Moors, who control the economy and the government. But since Moors are too busy making money to do anything practical such as serve in the military, blacks occupy most of the posts in the armed forces. In 1989, the ruling Moors suspected a military coup, and in the ensuing purge several hundred blacks thought to be traitors were rounded up, tortured and murdered. Had I known this before I entered the country, I never would have gone on mission there.
Whenever I think back to the time I spent in Mauritania, I have this recurring image of myself on a domestic flight between Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the country’s second city, and undoubtedly one of the most godforesaken places I have every visited. The short-range propeller-driven plane was jam-packed. I suspect it always was, because of that paved road buried under the sand. In any case, I was the only Westerner on the flight; other than me, the whole plane was full of these Biblical characters from central casting, in their long gowns, staring into the great beyond. If you believe in cultural relativism, I suppose the scene was not all that much different from what you see on a business shuttle flight between Toronto and Montreal, Boston and New York, or London and Paris. In either case, when you are the only one dressed in civvies, you better be self-assured; otherwise, you are going to feel like odd man out.
For all their noble airs, Moors are not the friendliest of people. I am told they can be very hard to get to know. I therefore consider myself fortunate to have got to meet four Mauritanians during my stay: the clerk at the hotel I stayed at; a black newsagent at the hotel; a semi-retired governor of one of the provinces, and the head of a national marine park. It was through these four individuals that I got to know a little bit about the country. My clerk friend was incredibly friendly, and overly helpful. He complained incessantly about his plight as an underpaid desk clerk in a government-owned hotel. He also decried the way the country was run, for the betterment of those in power and the well-to-do rather than the common man. He was painfully thin, and said his wages did not even give him enough money to buy decent food. His main goal seemed to be to get the hell out of the country, to some sort of El Dorado like Canada. Who could blame him for that? Of course he wanted my address in Canada, but my policy in Africa is never to give it out; instead, I usually offer to send information on Canadian bursaries or other forms of assistance. I have heard too many stories about people who did give out their address, only to have the person they gave it to write them with a heartbreaking story; the letter usually ends in a request for money for some worthwhile cause, such as a brother’s operation or a little sister’s funeral. Unfortunately, when one is five thousand miles away from the scene, it is impossible to determine whether these solicitations are genuine.
The country he inhabited had few resources other than iron ore and fish. The vast majority of the population was illiterate. Mauritania was, and is, one of the poorest countries on earth, although now, as I write, there is revenue from offshore oil production. Graft and corruption were rampant, and racism was endemic. Whatever wealth the country did possess was being milked for all it was worth. A few people had loads of money, while most people had nothing. Most young people with any get-up-and-go had already got up and gone. Years of drought had forced tens of thousands from the interior region to the capital, where they had been swept off the streets by an embarrassed government and herded into a tent community on the outskirts of town. People swept sand off their sidewalks each day the way Canadians sweep off a light dusting of snow. When I was there the situation was especially critical, as Mauritania was suffering the wrath of the Western powers for its failure to come on board during the Gulf War. When I arrived in the country an Iraqi Airways jet was sitting on the tarmac at the airport; when I left one month later it was still there.
My second erstwhile Mauritanian friend was the newsagent at the Marhaba Hotel. I would meet him each day in the hotel lobby. He would be sitting there at his desk by the corner. His name was Bou. He was a retired Mauritanian postal employee. Now he sold stamps, postcards, newspapers and magazines at one of the principal hotels in the capital. ‘Marhaba’ means ‘welcome’ in Arabic. During my stay there, I got to know a little about Bou, his country and his past. The thing I remember most about Monsieur Gaye was his lovely smile. It was the kind of smile that announced to all the world: “ Welcome to my country. Maybe it is one of the most wretched, godforsaken places on earth. True, I am discriminated against because I am black. And, yes, I can barely earn a living from this kiosk. Nonetheless, I welcome you to my country, because it is the only one I’ve got.”
It was hard to tell how old Bou was just by looking at him. He had grey hair, to be sure, and he certainly looked much older than most people you see in black Africa. This is, after all, a continent where the average life expectancy is around forty-two. Let’s just say that Bou was, as the French quaintly put it, ‘a man of a certain age’. And from what I could glean about him, he had lived a full, if not an easy life.
He was in fact much older than the country itself, for Mauritania only gained its independence from France in 1960. Bou was born, therefore, into colonial French West Africa. Quite possibly he had been born into slavery, which was commonly practised in Mauritania by the dominant Moors, and was only outlawed in 1980. In any event, Bou grew up in a rural setting, and got his big break, if one can put it that way, when he was inducted into the French Army. He was assigned to the Camel Corps in the northern desert, where he and his regiment lived out of tents. This would have been sometime around the early nineteen-fifties.
Within a year or two Bou found himself in Indochina. He was rather vague about his time there. Whatever transpired during this period of his life, he obviously survived it, probably leaving Viet Nam around the time of the French debacle of Dien Bien Phu.
Upon his return to Africa, Bou took a job with the Post Office, or PTT as it is known in francophone countries. He delighted in talking about these years of his life. Evidently he steadily rose up the ladder in the Mauritanian union of postal employees, because before long he was attending various international conferences on postal labour. In this capacity he made many trips to Geneva. So, he and I would swap stories about that picturesque Swiss city on the shores of Lac Leman, where I had studied for many years. Geneva was a short three hour hop by plane from Nouakchott, but it seemed more like a million miles away from that dusty, dingy town sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and the Sahara Desert.
Monsieur Bou spoke excellent French. He was also very polite, in an old-world kind of way, but always with an African twist. For example, he would ask me two or three times how I was, the rationale being that the first and second times the question is posed no one ever tells the truth. Only by asking someone a third time do you find out how they really are. That, at least, is how the theory goes. When it was my turn to ask Bou how he was, we would sometimes engage in our own private joke. The dialogue would go something like this:
Me: How are you today, Monsieur Bou? Are you well?
Bou: Yes, I am well, thank you very much.
Me: And how are the camels?
Bou: They are well, too ( chuckling ).
Me: And the goats?
Bou: Yes, yes. They are all well ( more chuckling ).
Me: And the children? They are fine, I hope?
Bou: Yes, of course. They are very well.
Me: Oh, yes, how is your wife?
Bou: Which one? I have several!
Bou always impressed me with how seriously he took his work. He worked six days a week, Friday being his day off. He would be there at six thirty in the morning, and he would still be there at five thirty in the evening. He came in from the country. I never asked how he got there. I just assumed that he came on one of those rickety, jam-packed minibuses or 'matatas' that one sees all over Africa. To pass the time between customers he would listen to his portable radio, which he would press up to his ear. He was very trim, and he wore western-style clothes, which immediately set himself apart from most of his compatriots, and especially the ruling Moors, who flaunted their traditional indigo robes. The country he was now a national of was a typical African kleptocracy, ruled by forty or so thieves. A good chunk of the wealth had been siphoned off to the Canary Islands nearby, where a sizeable expatriate community flourished. Racism was endemic, and hundreds of blacks had been murdered the year before I arrived. While I was in the country, Mauritania was siding with Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. Reading, listening to the radio, and conversation were about the only pursuits that did not seem to be outlawed.
I never really determined whether he had a concession from the hotel to operate his desk in the lobby, or was in fact paid a wage by the government, which owned the Marhaba. Either way, he treated each item in his modest collection of stamps, postcards, newspapers, magazines and a few books as if it were a precious diamond. If I selected a postcard, he would help me choose an appropriate stamp for it. Or if the latest Jeune Afrique came in, he would put a copy aside for me until I dropped by. In this way, I began to see that my daily stops at his stand probably meant as much to him as they did to me. We both needed each other: I needed his companionship and access to the outside world, and he needed my companionship and truck. This seemed to me to be a fair exchange, especially in a country with so little ‘culture’ discernible to the temporary guest.
Monsieur Bou was especially proud of the Mauritanian stamps he had for sale. My being from Canada, he wasted no time in showing me the commemorative set which his old PTT had just released in honour of the upcoming 1992 Olympic Winter Games in Albertville, France. I was impressed by the quality of these stamps, which depict various winter sports, including figure skating, cross country skiing, hockey and Alpine skiing. We both found it highly amusing that a country that is ninety-five percent covered with sand should celebrate the glories of winter sport. Interesting as these stamps may have been to look at, I had no desire to purchase them. Then I noticed that on each and every one of them the letter “T” was missing from Albertville, a fact that did not seem to overly concern my African friend. A few years ago I showed these prized philatelic specimens of mine to an Ottawa stamp dealer at a collector’s show. He dismissed them as being of no interest whatsoever, partly on the grounds that they were not first day issue, and partly because they had been touched by human hands. So, I still have the stamps.
I also kept Monsieur Bou’s business card. It very proudly identified him as a Philatelist. I often think of him, and I have often thought of writing him. Something holds me back. Perhaps I am too afraid to find out what has become of him. He was, after all, a man of a certain age. If I ever return to Mauritania, I will make a point of stopping by the Marhaba Hotel, just across from the Place de l’Indépendence, to see whether he still has his kiosk. If he does, I will go up to him, shake his hand, ask him how he is, how his camels are, and so on and so on down the line. In the meantime, I prefer to guard the perfect memory I have of our brief encounter, when I was a stranger in a foreign land, and he made me feel welcome.
Someone in an entirely different situation also made me feel welcome in his country, under entirely different circumstances. Zein Gaye was a semi-retired Governor of a province of Mauritania. As a patronage appointment, he had been appointed director general of the crown corporation responsible for ship safety in the country. Mauritania was the site for the famous French painting “Le Naufrage de la Meduse”, which caused quite a scandal in France during the early nineteenth century, because it exposed the incompetence of French maritime safety practices. Thus, one might have expected Mr. Gaye’s agency to have a certain prominence in Mauritanian circles. In fact, quite the opposite had occurred, to the point where the agency he headed was considered something of a national joke. The agency’s office was located in Nouadhibou, where hundreds of wrecks clogged the harbour, having apparently been brought from afar and unceremoniously scuttled for insurance purposes. Since my visit in 1991, a French salvage firm was hired to salvage these hulks, but ran into legal challenges from people claiming to be the rightful owners. The Frenchmen, I am told, had to make a quit exit, leaving millions of francs worth of salvage equipment behind. Whether Mr. Gaye was responsible for this debacle, I have no way of knowing. All I know is that when I met him I found him to be of the utmost charm. Meeting him was like going back in time, to a bygone era of gentility and erudition. I had read where centuries ago the Moors were known for their education and cultivation; Gaye seemed to me to be the embodiment of this civility. He was probably in his seventies, and he spoke excellent French.
My German colleague Fritz had set up an appointment to see Mr. Gaye in his Nouadhibou office, which was located in a nondescript, two-storied building down a dusty cul-de-sac. Fritz had told me that Gaye was “an interesting character” whom he wanted me to meet. Wolfgang accompanied me to the meeting. We were kept waiting in an anti-chamber for several minutes before being ushered in to Gaye’s very small, cluttered office. In Africa, as in certain parts of the western world, these delays are often intentional, meant to convey a sense of the host’s importance and busy-ness. And just in case we felt slighted, a servant very quickly brought us mint tea, followed by another, and then yet another. Each tea was served the old-fashioned way, from a brass pot with a long spout, the server pouring the tea from a height of perhaps eighteen inches directly into the glass below, without spilling a drop.
Maloum’s office gave no hint of his rank. It was small and cluttered, with files strewn all over his desk. Overhead, a fan spun around, circulating stale air throughout the room. The walls were a pale green, a colour you see a lot of in Mauritania; it is the same colour as phlegm. The meeting went well enough, I thought. I had been sent to Mauritania to determine which marine environmental protection treaties the country should accede to in order to protect itself against oil spills. Mauritania was not party to any of the relevant treaties at the time. Mr. Gaye was aware of the treaties in question; he even pulled a dog-eared copy of one of them out of his drawer. He said that his inspectors were applying this particular one anyway. He explained that since Mauritania did not have any domestic rules to apply, the standards contained in the international treaties were the only thing to go by. I was flabbergasted by this revelation. It seemed like an eminently practical solution. Nevertheless, it relied on voluntary compliance, since you could not prosecute someone if they had not broken any law.
At the end of our meeting, Gaye suggested that he would like to have us over for dinner one night. I thought he was just being polite, but Wolfgang was quite certain that he was serious. Sure enough, two days later we were summoned to Gaye’s home for a 7 PM couscous meal. The scene was like something out of One Thousand and One Nights: tapestries hung from the walls, and instead of chairs there were cushions and pillows strewn all over the floor. We were introduced to the host’s two sons, both in their twenties. If there were any daughters, they certainly were not in evidence. In fact, the only time any women were present was to bring in the food and take away the dishes after the meal. Wolfgang explained to me that this was the custom among the Moors: women always stayed in the background, and when they did appear they were not to engage in social intercourse. Thus, for all I know, one of the veiled women who served the food might have been Mrs. Gaye, a daughter or a daughter-in-law. One or two black retainers did enter the room to serve us drinks before supper and mint tea after: Fritz surmised that they were slaves or ex-slaves. While slavery has been illegal for decades now, apparently the practice has been difficult to eradicate because however bad their plight may be, slaves are often considered members of the family.
I found the whole setting distinctly uncomfortable. This was really putting my moral self-righteousness to the test. I was sitting on the horns of dilemma, for on the one hand I wanted to challenge the way women and blacks were treated in this household, and on the other hand I did not want to offend my host. I could not but wonder whether Gaye was aware of the injustice of it all. If he was, he certainly did not let on. He wanted to know as much as he could about my own country, Canada. And his sons both spoke of their love for Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where they had gone to university. It seems that for a certain class of Moors Abidjan represents a kind of African Paris; Casablanca and Rabat had apparently been off limits because of Mauritania’s bitter dispute with Morocco over Western Sahara. I was impressed at how intellectual and sophisticated Maloum and his sons were. Hassaniya was their mother tongue, but they spoke beautiful French, and they were quite knowledgeable of world affairs. They were also very proud of their native land. While I was chatting and tossing these ethical problems around in my head, the women and servants brought the meal in. We were all seated cross-legged on the floor as platter after platter of steaming hot food was placed on the rug in front of us. It was like some sort of medieval banquet. Everything seemed carefully designed to impress us with the wealth and social status of our host, as well as the high esteem in which he held us, his honoured guests. Of course the plat principal was couscous, which we ate with our hands. Fritz explained to me that a Moor will always eat couscous with his left hand, the right hand being reserved for wiping his behind. The correct movement of scooping up the couscous resembles the trajectory of a steam shovel scooping up dirt or an elephant feeding itself: the arm moves forward in a downward-sloping arc, the hand dives into the dish, and cups the food in the palm before being drawn back towards the mouth. There was very little conversation while we gorged ourselves. The only noise was the occasional burp, plus the slurping of food and drink. Being a vegetarian, I simply ignored all the lamb that was offered. I found the whole meal rather disgusting. On top of everything, my legs were killing me from sitting Indian-style on the floor for so long.
After the meal, the conversation resumed for perhaps a half hour, when all of a sudden our host and his two sons got up and left. They did not even wait to see us out! When I expressed my shock to Fritz at this sudden exit, he downplayed the incident, suggesting that this was simply the Mauritanian way: eat and run. The next day, I wrote a thank you note to Gaye, and delivered it to his office. I was touched by his generosity in inviting us, and I was very grateful to him for providing me with a glimpse of Mauritanian life behind the walls. But I was also horrified by much of what I had seen. I suffered from culture shock. I had a sense of time warp; it was like being placed in a time capsule and travelling back many centuries to the time of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. I would like to think that Maloum was being genuinely friendly in inviting me to his house, although business and protocol were probably uppermost in his mind.
My evening chez Gaye was undoubtedly the highlight of my stay in Nouadhibou. The city exists basically because of two things: fish and iron ore. The industrial fishery here is very substantial, and the ore from Zouerate in the interior is transported by rail to Cansado near Nouadhibou, whence it is shipped abroad. So, Nouadhibou is a very workmanlike place. But it is a place totally devoid of charm, with nary a decent hotel or restaurant. The only memorable distraction while I was there was a short trip out to Cap Blanc, close to the border with Western Sahara, where one can see a few of the last remaining Mediterranean monk seals in the wild. When I was there, it was said that there were only two hundred seals left in this particular population. They were considered on the verge of extinction because they mate in caves along the rocky coast, and these sites were being disturbed. I was also told that the Mauritanian Navy used the seals for target practice, although sailors were belatedly being educated as to the extremely dangerous effects of this activity.
The last of the four Mauritanians I met was Mustafa Diouf, Director of the Parc national du Banc d’Arguin, a marine park located between the country’s two main coastal cities, which is noted for its abundance and variety of migrating bird life. I have no reason to doubt that Mr. Diouf was excellent at his job. He probably had all the qualifications ( his business card merely identifies him as an agronomist ). The problem was, in my meeting with him at park headquarters in Nouadhibou I found it totally impossible to take him seriously. Diouf was a Harratin, or black Moor. This in itself was no reason to dismiss him as a martinet; one sees a fair number of these descendants of slaves who have been assimilated into the dominant Arab culture. He looked very young, and he was very short; he was probably no more than five foot two. His head barely rose above his enormous desk. But what made him look rather comical was the fact that except for his big blue eyes, he was covered from head to toe in his robes and turban. I felt like I was talking to a mummy, or someone wrapped in an enormous blue and white bandage. Those piercing eyes kept staring out at me.
During the course of our hour-long meeting, I cannot recall him blinking once, although I am sure he did. What I can remember is that he carried a fly swatter in one hand. He seemed to use it to punctuate my sentences, for just about every time I attempted to make an important point, he would flail away at another fly that was buzzing in front of him. Notwithstanding the distraction, I was able to ask all the questions I had planned. The conclusion I reached about Mr. Diouf and his beautiful park was that he was there as a gatekeeper; and his role seemed to have more to do with keeping people out than letting them in. The park itself was more of a wilderness reserve than a park in the western sense. It was very inaccessible, and the permit required to enter it was both expensive and hard to come by. A well-placed bribe would no doubt also grease the wheels. Just about the only person I heard about who succeeded in getting in, aside from a camera crew which produced a wonderful film on the area, was the Duke of Edinburgh, in his capacity as Patron of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWW). The Banc d’Arguin is also home to the Imraguen, a tribe of fishermen who use dolphins to help them catch fish. In 1996 dozens of dead dolphins mysteriously washed up on shore, possibly as a result of a toxic spill.
As we prepared to leave Diouf’s office, I asked him for some written material on the park. He basically said there wasn’t anything, but Fritz, who had accompanied me to the meeting, knew better. As we passed through the anti-chamber on our way out Wolfgang slipped a lovely colour brochure of the park into my notebook. He took it from one of several piles of unopened brochures. It was produced with French aid money. When I got around to leafing through the brochure back in Canada I noticed there was a photograph of Diouf in the Foreword. The top of his head was like a bowling ball; no wonder his head had been covered with a turban when I met him.
I met two other Moors during my month-long stay: one was a bright young marine biologist who I later learned had been picked out by the United States Coast Guard for study in Alabama. The other was an incredibly stupid young lawyer who insisted that Mauritania had ratified the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, when I knew from the UN itself that they had not. To top things off, the young man’s boss insisted likewise; as head of the foreign ministry’s international law unit, he should definitely have known better. Further research on my part revealed that the Mauritanian parliament had authorised ratification, but that the instruments of ratification had never been sent. This was a case of bureaucratic stupidity on a grand scale. Six years later, and those instruments had still not made it across the Atlantic to 1, UN Plaza on the Lower East Side.
My German colleague Fritz was a character in himself. Compact in build, bearded, and with a perpetual grin on his face, he was a highly competent aid worker. His job was to run the country’s system for controlling foreign fishing, and he did a good job of things. Everybody liked Fritz, who had been there for four years by the time I arrived; prior to that he had spent six years in Nigeria. Fritz was one of those highly educated, well-read Germans you often find abroad. He had gone to Tubingen University, and liked to talk about the fraternity he belonged to; it was one of those typically teutonic organisations where the members became blood brothers, and engaged in various acts of self-mutilation as a way of demonstrating their courage. Wolfgang met me at the airport in his company-supplied Toyota Land Cruiser.
On the way into town, I asked Fritz what expats did for fun around there. He must have thought I was bored already, for he immediately took me to the outskirts of town for a quick spin through the dunes. For a minute or two he raced up and down the dunes like a madman. He explained to me that as he sped along the autobahn, every decent German dreamt of coming to Mauritania just to tool around the desert, preferably in a Mercedes four wheel drive vehicle. I did not want to hurt his feelings, but all I could think of was Rommel and his Desert Rats creating a sandstorm in North Africa, and running out of gas at El Alamein.
I met another little general in Nouakchott. He was the World Bank representative, an Indian who had spent some time in Canada. When I arrived for an appointment with him in his lavish set of offices, there was absolutely no one in the building. I waited half an hour before he finally arrived. He seemed utterly stunned to see me. Evidently he had totally forgotten our meeting; but instead of simply apologising and getting on with things, he insisted that I was wrong, and tried to give me a dressing down. The whole thing was completely ludicrous: this puny little Indian standing there ramrod straight, wasting time trying to make me feel guilty for something that he himself had fucked-up. Welcome to the wacky world of the World Bank, I thought to himself. The offices they occupied were obscenely lavish when compared to the surroundings of Nouakchott.
Most of the other foreigners I had occasion to meet in Mauritania were French. Although this is the country where Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote a number of his books, including Vol de Nuit, Mauritania tends to be a dumping ground for French bureaucrats and other officials. Nevertheless, the ones I met were a fascinating collection of somewhat amusing and even eccentric characters. There was, for instance, Michel Pare, the resident UNDP representative in the country. He kept giggling during our meeting, as if I were cracking jokes all the time, or as if someone was tickling him. It was most unsettling. I simply could not take him seriously; he was like a complete buffoon. And yet I learned later from Fritz that this very same man had been responsible for saving several hundred lives the previous year, when Moors were slaughtering any Senegalese they could get their hands on, in retribution for alleged attacks on Moors in Senegal. Pare organised the secret airlift of hundreds of Senegalese who would no doubt have otherwise been rounded up and massacred.
I heard a similar story about another Frenchman who I had occasion to meet, although this time the heroic effort was more modest, and yet more personal in nature. Francois Beaudoind was a rather sad character working in the fisheries ministry as a so-called 'cooperant'. He was a trained veterinarian, sent by the French ministry he had worked for in Paris. As told to me by Fritz, who worked alongside Francois in Nouakchott, Francois basically had no choice about coming to Mauritania: he had to either go or be fired. Discarded French generals used to be sent to Limoges, whence the French colloquialism for being fired ( limogés ). So, in Francois’s case, he was shipped off to Nouakshit. I must say, I quite liked Francois, in spite of what I had been told about him. Francois’s big crime was that he had ‘gone native’ in Mauritania, in one sense at least. For he had adopted this incredibly bad habit of riding in to work aboard his motorcycle at around 9:15 AM, and speeding away with great panache by 11 AM. This was the total extent of Francois’s day at the office: in by 9:15, out by 11. Beaudoin's 'je m’en foutism’ attitude was so flagrant as to be almost worthy of respect. It was one thing for the average, underpaid local bureaucrat to behave like this, but for a European to emulate the locals in this respect was absolutely unheard of. And yet, somehow he got away with it.
Who knows what Francois did to wile away the rest of his day. All I really can say is that he had a lovely house tucked away behind your typical cement wall, a nice, if somewhat soporific wife, two kids, a dog and tons of videos and music albums. One of his hobbies was to get in his four wheel drive and go out to the country looking for pottery shards. When I heard that he did this occasionally, I asked if he would take me along with him. Within a few days he obliged, and so we went on a fascinating little excursion to the outskirts of Nouakchott, where the hard-packed, ocre-coloured sand was littered with shards. There was nothing to prevent me from taking samples away as souvenirs, but I resisted the temptation, on the theory that if everyone did likewise there would not be any left. From what I gather, this particular site that he brought me to was approximately one thousand years old; but the way it looked it could have been brand new.
Ineffectual as Francois may have been, he was nonetheless responsible for at least one heroic act during his four-year exile in Mauritania. For, like his compatriot Michel Pare of the UNDP, Monsieur Beuadoin had saved at least one life during the reprisals against local Senegalese. It appears that at the height of the lynchings, in 1990 I believe, gangs of people would regularly come to the Macqueron’s door looking for their Senegalese housekeeper. Since handing her over would mean certain death, Francois simply told them each time they came that she was no longer in their employ. Evidently, they did not believe him, and so they persisted. So, for the longest time, a period of perhaps three or four weeks, the Beaudoin's simply hid their maid in the house, never letting the would-be murderers in, and keeping the lady out of sight at all times. They did this at quite some risk to their own safety, I am told. Then, one moonless night, under the cover of darkness, they bundled her out of the house and into the car, driving straight to the airport, where she boarded one of Michel Pare's planes for safe passage to neighbouring Senegal.
In the years since I visited Mauritania I have often wondered what became of Francois Beaudoin. When I saw him in Mauritania he had about one year left on his ‘sentence’, as it were. The rumour was that he was going to be offered another godawful posting somewhere. In the summer of 1996, I got my answer. Coming out of a meeting in the fisheries ministry in Windhoek, Namibia, who was waiting to go in the same office but Beaudoin himself. We shook hands, but did not have a chance to really talk. But I learned from Fritz, who by this time had been posted to Namibia full-time, that Francois had gone back to Paris, where he was now assessing programs for the French ministry responsible for technical assistance. It just so happened that he was in Windhoek the same time I was, seeing the same officials, on another fisheries project. This is what African fisheries consulting is all about: a very small world of people that you keep bumping into, wherever you go. Thus, it seems that in the end everything had worked out well for Frederic. I would like to think that his good deed in saving the life of his Senegalese maid ( who many others would not have cared about ), had something to do with the improvement in his fortunes.
Another Frenchman, who I have somewhat less sympathy for is Marcel de Rochefoucault. Marcel was a very fit, aristocratic advisor to the Mauritanian Navy. When I met him he had been in the country for two or three years. He had obviously had his fill of things, to the point where he seemed to spend most of his time around the beautiful pool at the Novotel, just down the road from the French Embassy compound. Colonel Marcelwas a charming man: well- bred, well-educated and a good talker. But he was also a broken man. How he ever ended up in this dump is beyond me. His family were back in France, probably living in a chateau somewhere, while he had a modest little apartment in Nouakchott.
Marcel’s problem was that a number of the Mauritanian naval officers he had been training had been executed in cold blood on trumped-up charges of treason. Following an uprising in the capital in 1989, the Moor-dominated government cracked down on the military. They accused the black-dominated military of plotting a coup. Hundreds of soldiers suspected of involvement in this internal revolt were jailed, tortured, and in many cases murdered. France’s involvement in this whole affair is shrouded in mystery. No one seriously accuses them of direct involvement in the massacres and/or assassination, but the fact that they were actively training military forces at the time, and continued to do so after the horrific bloodshed, makes them look like accomplices to wholesale murder. For Marcel to have to go on working in Mauritania, haunted by these memories, must have been close to unbearable.
Although France gave up her West African colonies three or four decades ago, she still plays a preponderant role in the region. France seems to regard the whole area as her own private reserve. Any attempts by other countries to exert influence in the region are jealously and energetically rebuffed. French influence extends to military support and intervention. Vast sums of money are spent on French military hardware, local armed forces are trained by French advisors, and the mother country reserves for herself the right to step in and apply military force whenever and wherever she sees fit.
According to my Lonely Planet Guide for West Africa, ten thousand years ago Mauritania had enough vegetation to support a variety of wildlife, including elephants, rhinoceros and hippopotamus. Now the permanent vegetation is confined for the most part to the banks of the Senegal River on the southern boundary with Senegal, therefore making agriculture possible. The creeping desert has invaded Nouakchott in the last twenty-five to thirty years. Sand piles up against walls, it gets in your nostrils, and even into your lungs. Every morning a vacuum cleaner sucked sand from the bottom of the hotel swimming pool. I am told that the problem is particularly acute when the Harmattan wind blows in from the interior, as it does at certain times of the year. Needless to say, the air is extremely dry in Mauritania. Within a minute or so of hopping out of the swimming pool, my skin would be perfectly dry; no towel would be needed. But the scorching equatorial sun very quickly made my skin feel like leather; it is a very peculiar sensation.
If I were to return to Mauritania, I would try to be there sometime between July and October, when the rains come. I am told that during this period the region around Nouakchott is transformed into a carpet of green, with plants and flowers blooming. I would also visit the interior, places such as the ancient city of Chinguetti.
Mauritania made an indelible impression on me. The light is very special, the sky is a deep blue and the sand is a red brick colour, just like a cinder tennis court. Like the Arctic, the landscape dominates everything. The horizons are endless, and there are few distractions. You have to make your own fun.
The desert around Nouakchott has its own particular scent, very musty, as if someone peed his pants. The local currency, the ougiya used to stink just about the same way, until they replaced the old, crumpled bills with newer, better quality ones.
There is a striking contrast between the desert and the sea, with the former scorching hot and the latter surprisingly cold. The sea tends to be very rough around Nouakchott, and the temperature differential produces a very strong wind at the beach. In downtown Nouakchott it can be 30 degrees Celsius with not a breath of air, while ten kilometres away at the fishermen’s beach you would be wise to wear a windbreaker with the hood up. In my spare time, I would sometimes cadge a lift to that beach, where I could watch the fishermen, who are all black, bring their pirogues ( big wooden canoes with a small outboard ) in with the day’s catch aboard. This could be a very dangerous operation as they struggled to keep the boats afloat in heavy seas. Most of them wore bright yellow sou’westers, just like I had worn in the days of my erstwhile sailing career aboard the M.V. Tundraland in the High Arctic. I marvelled at their bravery, risking their lives against the elements. I am told that theirs is a very hazardous profession. These days, of course, beaches like these are staging areas for the perilous journey towards Europe by desparate migrants, many of whom die or drown en route.
The pirogues tend to go out to sea around dawn, and return in the late afternoon. The boats are beached and the catch is apportioned among the crew, the owner of the vessel, and whoever else may have a claim to it. The men catch the fish whereas the women sort it out, clean it and market it. This is the way it is throughout West Africa. The fish are mainly demersals, or bottom dwellers, as opposed to the free swimming pelagics one finds further out to sea. The fishermen and their families migrate quite a bit along the coast, from Ghana right up to Nouadhibou in northern Mauritania. Thus, it is not uncommon to here English spoken on the fishing beach in Nouakchott. Africans show little respect for the political boundaries that were first established by the colonial powers, and then carried over into the independence era. And, let’s face it, some of these boundaries make no sense whatsoever. In the case of Mauritania and Senegal, for instance, it would have made much more sense to give the southern, black part of the country along the Senegal river to neighbouring, black Senegal than to Mauritania, with its dominant Arab/Berber culture. If this had been done in 1960, at the time of independence, much grief and sorrow might have been spared.
Many African countries make it extremely difficult for the temporary visitor to leave the country with a favourable impression of the place. Mauritania is a classic example of this problem. Just entering the airport terminal at Nouakchott can be a tremendous struggle. There are dozens of people trying to get through a single door at the entrance. Invariably, an illiterate guard asks to see your papers. Meanwhile, a bunch of screaming locals are being overly helpful, grabbing at your bags and offering to steer you through all the red tape that awaits you inside All this is being done in 30 degree weather, when you are hot and sweaty and tired. Just about wherever you travel on this continent, the local officials give you the impression of doing everything for the first time: this is the first plane that has ever left the airport, this is the boarding clerk’s first day on the job, etc. What this means is that you must always expect the unexpected, prepare for the worst, and never take anything for granted.
When there is a scheduled stop in Nouadhibou, for instance, on your flight from Nouakchott to Las Palmas, and you look out the window and see your suitcase sitting on the tarmac, you must never believe the stewardess as she tries to reassure you that everything is in order and that it will eventually be put back on board. She, after all, doesn’t have a clue what is going on! Instead, instinctively you run down the gangway and run after the trolley that by now is carrying it off to the terminal. Then you yank it off the trolley and rush back to the airplane and hop on before they take off without you. This is par for the course in Africa. It is not why we go there, but it is why they pay us to go there. Some places you go to they give you danger pay; in Africa you get frustration pay.
It is easy to look down own’s nose at Mauritania. But then you remind yourself that at the time of independence there was not one port in the entire country. Also, a capital city had to be built from scratch, since the old regional capital, St. Louis, ended up on the Senegalese side of the river. The first meeting of the President and his Cabinet back in 1960 was held in a tent. And when a President was overthrown in a coup several years ago, he went back to the desert to tend to his herd of camels and lead a nomadic way of life. So, maybe there is some hope for this country. Maybe if I return in another thirty years I will be surprised to find that Arab and African are on an equal footing, that well has been more equitably apportioned, and that women are emancipated. And maybe, just maybe, I will arrive to discover that the desert has stopped its inexorable advance, and that trees are growing again, just as they did thousands of years ago.
South Africa, 1996
In Dutch it’s called Cap Staadt, in Spanish Cuidad de Cabo. In English we call it Cape Town. Whatever language you use, it is without a doubt one of the world’s most beautiful cities. The very name is magic, conjuring up images of ships bringing silk and spices from the Orient to Europe, braving ferocious seas and fending off pirates. I had wanted to visit South Africa for a long time, but this was not to be so long as apartheid continued and the Republic was a pariah nation. As early as 1972 a former professor of mine at graduate school was hounded out of office for having accepted an invitation to visit the country. International aid agencies boycotted the country; thus, there was little work for consultants until after 1993, when free and fair democratic elections swept away the old guard and ushered in Nelson Mandela and his ANC-dominated government.
Everybody has an image of Cape Town, with its trademark Table Mountain looming in the distance. It has been photographed countless times. It is to Cape Town what Sugarloaf is to Rio, the Eiffel Tower to Paris, the Empire State Building to New York, or the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco. But what would it really be like, I wondered? Could you go up it? Was it shrouded in fog most of the time? These kinds of things that I wanted to, needed to know, took on an even greater importance than the consulting mission itself. Dare I say, the mission became just a pretext for getting to see a place I would probably never see otherwise. In effect, the chance to visit the Cape was for me the opportunity of a lifetime, so different from anything I had ever done before.
In preparing for my trip, I had read where the government of West Cape Province, where Cape Town is, was the only one where the old style National Party had won. Was I going to find nothing but right wing bigots in the Cape? Would it be a violent place? I had many questions I wanted to ask a close friend who was living there, a Canadian woman married to a South African man. They had moved to South Africa within the past year, and I was dying to see them; three weeks of travelling around in Europe and Namibia was already taking its toll on me: I needed someone to hug, and to unburden my thoughts on. Above all, though, I wanted to know from them whether the New South Africa stood a chance of surviving and prospering, or whether it was going to descend into anarchy.
The Cape from the air is an extraordinary sight. Our pilot zigzagged in and out of the mountains, as if we were on some sightseeing cruise. Off in the distance were more mountains, the jagged peaks of the Hottentot’s Holland mountains in the west, and the snow-capped mountains of Lesotho to the north. Broad expanses of beaches revealed themselves on either side of Table Mountain. As we approached the runway I could see smoke billowing up from the flats which go for miles behind Table Mountain; I would learn later that it was coming from fires that had been deliberately set in a ‘Cape-coloured’ neighbourhood, where residents were protesting what they saw as the lack of police resolve to halt drug gangs. ‘Cape-coloured’ is the old-fashioned term for the many people of Asian origin who inhabit this region. More about these proud people later. Aside from the plume of smoke, all I could really see was row after row of shanties, many of them quite close to the runway. Apparently, some of these illegal settlements, thrown together with corrugated tin and other scrap material, spring up literally overnight. All part of the “New South Africa” I had heard so much about, no doubt.
When I was there, they still hadn’t got around to renaming Jan Smuts International Airport. Could it be that the Afrikaaner leader was considered by the ANC-led government as a legitimate South African patriot, or was it just not much of a priority for a government beset with challenges? I never did find out. When the separatist government of René Levesque came to power in my home province of Quebec in 1976, his followers lost no time in knocking Lord Nelson from his perch atop a monument in Montreal’s Jacques Cartier square. Had Africans done to same to Smuts, I wondered?
The airport lies behind Table Mountain. On the ride into town from the airport I was struck by how fast all those BMWs and Mercedes are going along the four-lane highway, and how much poverty there is just the other side of the fence. Many of them have tinted windows, and none of them are open, I notice. Kieran tells me that a new shanty town has sprung up since his last visit there less little more than a year ago.
We stayed in a lovely, semi-detached bed and breakfast located in Orangemund (sp.) situated on the lower slopes of Table Mountain, facing the bay. It was a lovely neighbourhood, full of apple blossoms, whitewashed homes and quiet streets. No blacks here, that’s for sure, except for the servants, of course. Our host is a polite but bumbling Afrikaaner in his late fifties who speaks impeccable English; his wife, he tells us, is Anglo- South African. There are lots of them around here. We never did get to meet the wife; she was away on holiday, or so he said. No matter, the servant, a very sweet, shy black lady, did all the work, anyway, making us breakfast, cleaning our rooms, even doing our laundry at her home for a small fee ( you gave her whatever you liked! ). Under the apartheid regime, with its infamous ‘pass laws’, this poor lady would not have been able to spend the night in Cape Town. She would have had to go back to the township where she lived every night. Now that the pass laws were abolished, she could stay if she wished, but economic discrimination took over where the law left off. The overwhelming majority of blacks, or coloureds, too, for they were discriminated against as well, could nowhere near afford to stay in the centre of Cape Town.
You could see right away how Cape Town proper had inured itself from the teeming millions of blacks living in hovels outside the gates, as it were. For Table Mountain formed a natural barrier between the wide open flats and the port. The downtown area of Cape Town was therefore an semi-enclave of sorts, a bit like Gibraltar. Since public transportation was not very well-developed in the region, it was pretty difficult, and expensive, for the average black person to even venture downtown. This configuration gave the city a rather artificial air, as if it were a sort of ‘gated’ community. You could see from the quality of the shops and cafes on the Victoria and Albert pier ( check ) that the quality of life could be pretty high for a privileged minority. But, could anyone really enjoy this standard of living knowing that nine tenths of the population living in the hinterlands beyond the mount had bugger all? I somehow doubt it.
The only black I actually spoke to during the whole week I spent in Cap Staadt was a legless, middle-aged man who had been hit by a car near a busy intersection. I saw him lying there in the middle of the road, with all the traffic going around him. I ran up to him. He was lying on his back, and I could see blood trickling from the back of his head. I immediately ran to a nearby convenience store, where I got the proprietor to call for an ambulance. By the time I got back to the poor man, two gentlemen had managed to pick him up and carry him to the sidewalk, where he now lay, muttering and moaning. Passers by would stop and ask what had happened, and indicate their concern. Soon the police arrived, why I do not know. They tried in vain to speak to the man. Finally a black lady came by who managed to communicate with the victim, who, it transpired, was Mozambican. I have no way of knowing, but his legs had probably been blown off at the knee by land mines, of which there are millions in his native country. At this point I left the scene in order to get on with my business. But this episode had a profound impact on me; I was full of mixed emotions over what I had seen.
I asked myself, for instance, what happened to the driver who had hit this pedestrian; this seemed to be a pretty clear case of hit and run. The driver must have figured “What the hell, it’s only some kaffir begging or drunk; either way, it serves him right for being in the middle of the road! In sharp contrast to this callousness, however, was the reaction of other pedestrians, including the two men who dragged the victim to the sidewalk. These were good samaritans indeed. Even the police seemed to bend over backwards to help the wretched chap. I saw this unfortunate incident as a metaphor for The New South Africa: desperate handicapped man gets run over while begging in a prosperous neighbourhood of Cape Town, whereupon good Christian locals come to his aid. It sounds corny, but this seemed to capture the spirit of the times: a random act of kindness in an otherwise callous and hostile environment. If my reading of things was correct, then this was a good omen of things to come.
Alas, my professional encounters with the South African bureaucracy and civil service did not leave me with as much optimism for this land Alan Paton called The Beloved Country. In the course of a week of meetings, what I encountered was a display of racism, incompetence, arrogance and indifference so great it was almost worthy of respect. Don’t get me wrong: some of the officials, businessmen and academics we met with were top notch; somehow they had managed to keep abreast of what was going on in the outside world during the dark years of sanctions and political isolation. Others, however, were antediluvian in their thinking, and they did not take kindly to a bunch of foreigners poking their noses into South Africa’s internal affairs. Meeting with these people, it was as if the ‘good old days’ of apartheid had never been dismantled. I was not ready for this.
Things got off to a bad start with our first meeting at the fisheries ministry, early on a Monday morning. Although our hosts knew we were coming ( it was they, after all, who had arranged for our stay at the B & B ), there was no one there to greet us at the downtown office. Fisheries is obviously a contentious issue in South African politics, because to get to the executive offices of the ministry you have to pass through an iron-bar gate, just like in a prison! We were told this had something to do with the fact that anglers had to come to these floors to get a fishing licence. When someone finally did greet us, we were ushered into the cramped office of a Dr. Van der Zam, who was acting head of department. The meeting with Dr. Van der Zam turned out to be, without a doubt, the worst meeting of a professional nature that I have ever had in fifteen years of international consulting. Basically, we were stonewalled. Van der Zam and his cronies acted like we were from outer space. If we were going to get anything out of these people, we were going to have to fight fire with fire. This is what we did, and it did work, but it was a very gut-wrenching exercise.
Van der Zam started off by pretending that he knew nothing about our mission, its purpose, the length of our stay, or indeed anything at all concerning us. To make matters worse, he showed no interest in learning anything about the mission now that we were here. Essentially, all he did was talk about himself and introduce his policy analyst, a wizened old veteran named Rudi van den Berghe. We had been expecting a full briefing from these people, outlining how fisheries was organised in South Africa, the laws, the economics of it, the types of fish caught, etc. Instead, all we got was the lame excuse that Dr. Van der Zam had only been in the job a year, and that “things are in transition”. I suspect that he was just occupying an office until his retirement, which judging by his looks was due in about a year or two.
After about half an hour of this bullshit, during which time our side spoke nary a word, Van der Zam basically indicated that the meeting was over. I could smell a rotten fish a mile away: There was not even any talk of follow-up meetings with these or other officials. What the heck were we supposed to do for the rest of the week, I asked myself; sightsee? That would have been great, but this was, after all, a US $400,000 mission we were on. All I could think of was those poor Europeans who had been slaving away, paying their taxes so that this study could be done for the poor people of southern Africa. I knew that if we had walked out of that office at that moment that our mission not just here in South Africa but in all of southern Africa would have been a failure. I also sensed that this was the outcome Van der Zam wanted. So, at that very moment, I thought fast, and did the only thing I could think of: right then and there, I hijacked the meeting.
I summoned up all my courage, and, voice quavering, I said to our funereal hosts: “ Just a second, please! We have been very patient with you for half an hour. We have listened to what you have said. You have told us who you are. And now we would like you to listen to us. We would like to tell you, one by one, who we are, why we are here, what we need to know, and how you can help us”. It was an old Indian trick I had learned from public speaking, whereby you deliver a simple message by repeating it a number of times, varying it a little each time. Lincoln used the same technique in his Gettysburg address, to great effect. This was my Gettysburg!
It was a very emotional moment for me, and it is hard for me to pinpoint why. I was almost in tears! When I finished, there was dead silence in the room; you could have heard a pin drop. But I could tell from their body language that my colleagues were behind me. As for Van der Zam and Laan, I believe they were utterly flabbergasted! Probably no one had ever stood up to them before, and in such a brazen way. Caught off guard, they had no choice; they had to agree. I had, after all, put it in such a nice way. So, they sat there while we talked. Ever conscious of protocol, I asked Egan, our esteemed Irish team leader, to start by summarising our mission and its terms of reference. This he did in his typical wordy style; but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that we keep talking; for this was like a ping pong match, and for now the ball was in our court. The others took up the baton, one by one saying a word or two about themselves and what they needed to know. I was last. All the while, Van der Zam had been furiously taking notes. We had obviously turned the tables on him; for instead of us sitting there like stenographers, hanging on his every word, we were now calling the shots. It was the most stunning turnaround in atmosphere that I have ever seen.
When I finished giving my spiel, Van der Zam finished his notes and whispered something in Laan’s ear. For his part, Laan had been sitting there motionless through the entire episode, looking frightfully bored. Then Van der Zam turned back to us, and asked us how long we intended to stay. When we told him a week, he said that two days would be plenty of time to get all the information we needed. As for the information itself, he stonewalled us. With his Peter Seller’s looks and thick Afrikans accent, he pompously proclaimed: “ I am afraid that I am not in a position to answer any of the questions you have asked concerning fisheries at the present time “. Every successive request we made met with resistance; it was either “Unfortunately, this will not be possible.”, or “ You will have to speak to someone else for an answer to that question “. He acted as if we were putting him on trial, and he was afraid of incriminating himself with anything he said. Either that, or he was the most incompetent senior civil servant I have ever met, bar none. After half an hour of this ridiculous game, Van der Zam suddenly got up and left the room, leaving Rudi van den Berghe to launch into a one hour soliloquy on the pros and cons of a fishery in which licences are granted to the highest bidder. This was a topic of great interest to our great helmsman from Eire, but unfortunately was beyond the scope of our mission.
When Van der Zam returned, he had good news for us: the senior fisheries officer in South Africa, who reported directly to the Minister, was prepared to see us in his office right away! For the time being at least, our mission was saved, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Then the fun began again. We were herded into Mr. xx’s office, and seated in an anteroom for about fifteen minutes, no doubt to impress us with his importance. When he was finally prepared to see us, we were transferred to his office, and seated at a mid-sized boardroom-type table. It was starting to feel as if we had been hauled into the principal’s office for some disciplinary offence. I was tired before the meeting even began. Mr. xx greeted us warmly enough; I think he was terribly embarrassed by the whole affair. He had either been hoping we would just go away without even seeing him, or he wanted to be seen as the ‘good cop’, after his underlings had treated us so shabbily.
It was hard to take Mr. xx seriously. With little wisps of hair sticking up on an otherwise bald head, he looked a lot like Gorbachev. He did not have a big birth mark on his forehead, which made him better looking than the man who presided over the dismantling of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, Gorbachev did not have a hair lip! He wouldn’t really cooperate until I told him success or failure of mission was in his hands: without his department’s cooperation we could not complete our work. I reminded him that RSA had agreed to everything in advance. He claimed that his department was understaffed and overworked. Van der Zam’s predecessor had apparently committed suicide the preceding year. Racist slight of Minister; the New South Africa. Mr. xx’s real problem was that he was as slimy as an eel. You could never get a straight answer out of him. He always wanted to appear to be answering us sincerely and fully, and he was fairly forthright, but none of us trusted him one bit. After one hour of his slippery responses, we broke the code: any time he totally disagreed with us, he would say “You have raised a very interesting point; this is something we must definitely consider”, or “We must make a plan”. The plan bit was the real killer; when he came out with that, you knew your idea was dead in the water. I impressed upon him the fact that RSA played a pivotal role within SADC. Sympathised with Mandela’s reluctance, other priorities, etc. At least he opened doors to us. After that things went very smoothly the whole week.
Everybody has an image of Cape Town, with its trademark Table Mountain looming in the distance. It has been photographed countless times. It is to Cape Town what Sugarloaf is to Rio, the Eiffel Tower to Paris, the Empire State Building to New York, or the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco. But what would it really be like, I wondered? Could you go up it? Was it shrouded in fog most of the time? These kinds of things that I wanted to, needed to know, took on an even greater importance than the consulting mission itself. Dare I say, the mission became just a pretext for getting to see a place I would probably never see otherwise. In effect, the chance to visit the Cape was for me the opportunity of a lifetime, so different from anything I had ever done before.
In preparing for my trip, I had read where the government of West Cape Province, where Cape Town is, was the only one where the old style National Party had won. Was I going to find nothing but right wing bigots in the Cape? Would it be a violent place? I had many questions I wanted to ask a close friend who was living there, a Canadian woman married to a South African man. They had moved to South Africa within the past year, and I was dying to see them; three weeks of travelling around in Europe and Namibia was already taking its toll on me: I needed someone to hug, and to unburden my thoughts on. Above all, though, I wanted to know from them whether the New South Africa stood a chance of surviving and prospering, or whether it was going to descend into anarchy.
The Cape from the air is an extraordinary sight. Our pilot zigzagged in and out of the mountains, as if we were on some sightseeing cruise. Off in the distance were more mountains, the jagged peaks of the Hottentot’s Holland mountains in the west, and the snow-capped mountains of Lesotho to the north. Broad expanses of beaches revealed themselves on either side of Table Mountain. As we approached the runway I could see smoke billowing up from the flats which go for miles behind Table Mountain; I would learn later that it was coming from fires that had been deliberately set in a ‘Cape-coloured’ neighbourhood, where residents were protesting what they saw as the lack of police resolve to halt drug gangs. ‘Cape-coloured’ is the old-fashioned term for the many people of Asian origin who inhabit this region. More about these proud people later. Aside from the plume of smoke, all I could really see was row after row of shanties, many of them quite close to the runway. Apparently, some of these illegal settlements, thrown together with corrugated tin and other scrap material, spring up literally overnight. All part of the “New South Africa” I had heard so much about, no doubt.
When I was there, they still hadn’t got around to renaming Jan Smuts International Airport. Could it be that the Afrikaaner leader was considered by the ANC-led government as a legitimate South African patriot, or was it just not much of a priority for a government beset with challenges? I never did find out. When the separatist government of René Levesque came to power in my home province of Quebec in 1976, his followers lost no time in knocking Lord Nelson from his perch atop a monument in Montreal’s Jacques Cartier square. Had Africans done to same to Smuts, I wondered?
The airport lies behind Table Mountain. On the ride into town from the airport I was struck by how fast all those BMWs and Mercedes are going along the four-lane highway, and how much poverty there is just the other side of the fence. Many of them have tinted windows, and none of them are open, I notice. Kieran tells me that a new shanty town has sprung up since his last visit there less little more than a year ago.
We stayed in a lovely, semi-detached bed and breakfast located in Orangemund (sp.) situated on the lower slopes of Table Mountain, facing the bay. It was a lovely neighbourhood, full of apple blossoms, whitewashed homes and quiet streets. No blacks here, that’s for sure, except for the servants, of course. Our host is a polite but bumbling Afrikaaner in his late fifties who speaks impeccable English; his wife, he tells us, is Anglo- South African. There are lots of them around here. We never did get to meet the wife; she was away on holiday, or so he said. No matter, the servant, a very sweet, shy black lady, did all the work, anyway, making us breakfast, cleaning our rooms, even doing our laundry at her home for a small fee ( you gave her whatever you liked! ). Under the apartheid regime, with its infamous ‘pass laws’, this poor lady would not have been able to spend the night in Cape Town. She would have had to go back to the township where she lived every night. Now that the pass laws were abolished, she could stay if she wished, but economic discrimination took over where the law left off. The overwhelming majority of blacks, or coloureds, too, for they were discriminated against as well, could nowhere near afford to stay in the centre of Cape Town.
You could see right away how Cape Town proper had inured itself from the teeming millions of blacks living in hovels outside the gates, as it were. For Table Mountain formed a natural barrier between the wide open flats and the port. The downtown area of Cape Town was therefore an semi-enclave of sorts, a bit like Gibraltar. Since public transportation was not very well-developed in the region, it was pretty difficult, and expensive, for the average black person to even venture downtown. This configuration gave the city a rather artificial air, as if it were a sort of ‘gated’ community. You could see from the quality of the shops and cafes on the Victoria and Albert pier ( check ) that the quality of life could be pretty high for a privileged minority. But, could anyone really enjoy this standard of living knowing that nine tenths of the population living in the hinterlands beyond the mount had bugger all? I somehow doubt it.
The only black I actually spoke to during the whole week I spent in Cap Staadt was a legless, middle-aged man who had been hit by a car near a busy intersection. I saw him lying there in the middle of the road, with all the traffic going around him. I ran up to him. He was lying on his back, and I could see blood trickling from the back of his head. I immediately ran to a nearby convenience store, where I got the proprietor to call for an ambulance. By the time I got back to the poor man, two gentlemen had managed to pick him up and carry him to the sidewalk, where he now lay, muttering and moaning. Passers by would stop and ask what had happened, and indicate their concern. Soon the police arrived, why I do not know. They tried in vain to speak to the man. Finally a black lady came by who managed to communicate with the victim, who, it transpired, was Mozambican. I have no way of knowing, but his legs had probably been blown off at the knee by land mines, of which there are millions in his native country. At this point I left the scene in order to get on with my business. But this episode had a profound impact on me; I was full of mixed emotions over what I had seen.
I asked myself, for instance, what happened to the driver who had hit this pedestrian; this seemed to be a pretty clear case of hit and run. The driver must have figured “What the hell, it’s only some kaffir begging or drunk; either way, it serves him right for being in the middle of the road! In sharp contrast to this callousness, however, was the reaction of other pedestrians, including the two men who dragged the victim to the sidewalk. These were good samaritans indeed. Even the police seemed to bend over backwards to help the wretched chap. I saw this unfortunate incident as a metaphor for The New South Africa: desperate handicapped man gets run over while begging in a prosperous neighbourhood of Cape Town, whereupon good Christian locals come to his aid. It sounds corny, but this seemed to capture the spirit of the times: a random act of kindness in an otherwise callous and hostile environment. If my reading of things was correct, then this was a good omen of things to come.
Alas, my professional encounters with the South African bureaucracy and civil service did not leave me with as much optimism for this land Alan Paton called The Beloved Country. In the course of a week of meetings, what I encountered was a display of racism, incompetence, arrogance and indifference so great it was almost worthy of respect. Don’t get me wrong: some of the officials, businessmen and academics we met with were top notch; somehow they had managed to keep abreast of what was going on in the outside world during the dark years of sanctions and political isolation. Others, however, were antediluvian in their thinking, and they did not take kindly to a bunch of foreigners poking their noses into South Africa’s internal affairs. Meeting with these people, it was as if the ‘good old days’ of apartheid had never been dismantled. I was not ready for this.
Things got off to a bad start with our first meeting at the fisheries ministry, early on a Monday morning. Although our hosts knew we were coming ( it was they, after all, who had arranged for our stay at the B & B ), there was no one there to greet us at the downtown office. Fisheries is obviously a contentious issue in South African politics, because to get to the executive offices of the ministry you have to pass through an iron-bar gate, just like in a prison! We were told this had something to do with the fact that anglers had to come to these floors to get a fishing licence. When someone finally did greet us, we were ushered into the cramped office of a Dr. Van der Zam, who was acting head of department. The meeting with Dr. Van der Zam turned out to be, without a doubt, the worst meeting of a professional nature that I have ever had in fifteen years of international consulting. Basically, we were stonewalled. Van der Zam and his cronies acted like we were from outer space. If we were going to get anything out of these people, we were going to have to fight fire with fire. This is what we did, and it did work, but it was a very gut-wrenching exercise.
Van der Zam started off by pretending that he knew nothing about our mission, its purpose, the length of our stay, or indeed anything at all concerning us. To make matters worse, he showed no interest in learning anything about the mission now that we were here. Essentially, all he did was talk about himself and introduce his policy analyst, a wizened old veteran named Rudi van den Berghe. We had been expecting a full briefing from these people, outlining how fisheries was organised in South Africa, the laws, the economics of it, the types of fish caught, etc. Instead, all we got was the lame excuse that Dr. Van der Zam had only been in the job a year, and that “things are in transition”. I suspect that he was just occupying an office until his retirement, which judging by his looks was due in about a year or two.
After about half an hour of this bullshit, during which time our side spoke nary a word, Van der Zam basically indicated that the meeting was over. I could smell a rotten fish a mile away: There was not even any talk of follow-up meetings with these or other officials. What the heck were we supposed to do for the rest of the week, I asked myself; sightsee? That would have been great, but this was, after all, a US $400,000 mission we were on. All I could think of was those poor Europeans who had been slaving away, paying their taxes so that this study could be done for the poor people of southern Africa. I knew that if we had walked out of that office at that moment that our mission not just here in South Africa but in all of southern Africa would have been a failure. I also sensed that this was the outcome Van der Zam wanted. So, at that very moment, I thought fast, and did the only thing I could think of: right then and there, I hijacked the meeting.
I summoned up all my courage, and, voice quavering, I said to our funereal hosts: “ Just a second, please! We have been very patient with you for half an hour. We have listened to what you have said. You have told us who you are. And now we would like you to listen to us. We would like to tell you, one by one, who we are, why we are here, what we need to know, and how you can help us”. It was an old Indian trick I had learned from public speaking, whereby you deliver a simple message by repeating it a number of times, varying it a little each time. Lincoln used the same technique in his Gettysburg address, to great effect. This was my Gettysburg!
It was a very emotional moment for me, and it is hard for me to pinpoint why. I was almost in tears! When I finished, there was dead silence in the room; you could have heard a pin drop. But I could tell from their body language that my colleagues were behind me. As for Van der Zam and Laan, I believe they were utterly flabbergasted! Probably no one had ever stood up to them before, and in such a brazen way. Caught off guard, they had no choice; they had to agree. I had, after all, put it in such a nice way. So, they sat there while we talked. Ever conscious of protocol, I asked Egan, our esteemed Irish team leader, to start by summarising our mission and its terms of reference. This he did in his typical wordy style; but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that we keep talking; for this was like a ping pong match, and for now the ball was in our court. The others took up the baton, one by one saying a word or two about themselves and what they needed to know. I was last. All the while, Van der Zam had been furiously taking notes. We had obviously turned the tables on him; for instead of us sitting there like stenographers, hanging on his every word, we were now calling the shots. It was the most stunning turnaround in atmosphere that I have ever seen.
When I finished giving my spiel, Van der Zam finished his notes and whispered something in Laan’s ear. For his part, Laan had been sitting there motionless through the entire episode, looking frightfully bored. Then Van der Zam turned back to us, and asked us how long we intended to stay. When we told him a week, he said that two days would be plenty of time to get all the information we needed. As for the information itself, he stonewalled us. With his Peter Seller’s looks and thick Afrikans accent, he pompously proclaimed: “ I am afraid that I am not in a position to answer any of the questions you have asked concerning fisheries at the present time “. Every successive request we made met with resistance; it was either “Unfortunately, this will not be possible.”, or “ You will have to speak to someone else for an answer to that question “. He acted as if we were putting him on trial, and he was afraid of incriminating himself with anything he said. Either that, or he was the most incompetent senior civil servant I have ever met, bar none. After half an hour of this ridiculous game, Van der Zam suddenly got up and left the room, leaving Rudi van den Berghe to launch into a one hour soliloquy on the pros and cons of a fishery in which licences are granted to the highest bidder. This was a topic of great interest to our great helmsman from Eire, but unfortunately was beyond the scope of our mission.
When Van der Zam returned, he had good news for us: the senior fisheries officer in South Africa, who reported directly to the Minister, was prepared to see us in his office right away! For the time being at least, our mission was saved, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Then the fun began again. We were herded into Mr. xx’s office, and seated in an anteroom for about fifteen minutes, no doubt to impress us with his importance. When he was finally prepared to see us, we were transferred to his office, and seated at a mid-sized boardroom-type table. It was starting to feel as if we had been hauled into the principal’s office for some disciplinary offence. I was tired before the meeting even began. Mr. xx greeted us warmly enough; I think he was terribly embarrassed by the whole affair. He had either been hoping we would just go away without even seeing him, or he wanted to be seen as the ‘good cop’, after his underlings had treated us so shabbily.
It was hard to take Mr. xx seriously. With little wisps of hair sticking up on an otherwise bald head, he looked a lot like Gorbachev. He did not have a big birth mark on his forehead, which made him better looking than the man who presided over the dismantling of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, Gorbachev did not have a hair lip! He wouldn’t really cooperate until I told him success or failure of mission was in his hands: without his department’s cooperation we could not complete our work. I reminded him that RSA had agreed to everything in advance. He claimed that his department was understaffed and overworked. Van der Zam’s predecessor had apparently committed suicide the preceding year. Racist slight of Minister; the New South Africa. Mr. xx’s real problem was that he was as slimy as an eel. You could never get a straight answer out of him. He always wanted to appear to be answering us sincerely and fully, and he was fairly forthright, but none of us trusted him one bit. After one hour of his slippery responses, we broke the code: any time he totally disagreed with us, he would say “You have raised a very interesting point; this is something we must definitely consider”, or “We must make a plan”. The plan bit was the real killer; when he came out with that, you knew your idea was dead in the water. I impressed upon him the fact that RSA played a pivotal role within SADC. Sympathised with Mandela’s reluctance, other priorities, etc. At least he opened doors to us. After that things went very smoothly the whole week.
Na, Maybe, Ya!
Namibia is a country I had wanted to visit for a number of years. Back in the late seventies and early eighties, when it was still South-West Africa, a United Nations protectorate illegally occupied by South Africa, I had offered my services to the United Nations in its effort to bring it to independence. And in the early nineties, I was promised a short-term contract there which never came. I had also seen and read about the Skeleton Coast, and the exploits of Des and Jen Bartlett in search of elephants and lions along that famous stretch of desert coastline. So, it was with eager anticipation that I waited to board a Namibian Airlines jet in Frankfurt for the overnight journey from Europe.
“You’ll like it Harry: It’s just like Arizona!” That’s what an American friend of mine, who had completed a number of missions to Namibia, said about the country when I told him over the phone I was going there. He calls me “Harry” as a nickname. He also described Windhoek, the capital city, as “a pretty little town, very Germanic”, because of the country’s German past: for a time before the first world war it was a German colony. Still, until one actually visits a country, it is rather difficult to imagine what it is going to be like. In any event, I arrived at Frankfurt airport for the midnight flight reasonably optimistic for the first leg of my African voyage, the Namibian and South African parts in particular. However, I confess to having had deep misgivings about flying Air Namibia all the way to southern Africa: African airlines in general have a wretched reputation for service, their safety record is nothing to write home about, and there would be no frequent flier points on this trip, whereas with Lufthansa I would have picked up a whole packet of points. But, in the final analysis, I had no choice regarding the itinerary and choice of airline: everything was pre-arranged by my client in Brussels, without any consultation.
I arrived in the waiting lounge at Frankfurt airport naively thinking that I was headed for black Africa. Well, this may have been so, but judging by the predominant colour of the passengers, I really was headed for Arizona. I would hazard a guess that ninety percent of the people in that waiting room were white, including the airline ground staff. It turned out that the plane’s ultimate destination was Jo’burg, with just a whistle stop in Windhoek. I would have thought that most whites would prefer to travel either South African Airways or Lufthansa, depending on their nationality ( and maybe even their frequent flier programs! ), but not this crowd. Later, when I asked a fellow passenger about this, he explained that Air Namibia offered the cheapest fares. And as for the safety element, I was told that Air Namibia was operated by Lufthansa. In this way, I got my first surprise about Namibia before even setting foot in the country.
On the run to Windhoek, which transpired without incident and in relative comfort. My travelling companions were a white South African couple returning home from vacation in Germany. The gentleman was an enormous, good-natured, loquacious chap in his late fifties or early sixties; he was sitting next to me. His wife was a quiet, unassuming lady, somewhat petite. He had emigrated from Germany and she from England about twenty-five years earlier. He told me that they had two grown up children, and that he and his wife lived in the suburbs of Jo’burg. He had his own small business. The man saw his role as one of educating me into the reality of Namibia. To be more precise, he still called it South-West Africa, its old colonial name. Like my American friend Tom, this sweating, out of breath man assured me that I would like it there. He told me I would not like the heat there, which is constant ( in this he was way off the mark ), but that otherwise everything was very efficient, because, in his words, “We are still in control there”.
I could not believe my ears. Who, I thought to myself, is “we”? Was it the royal “we”? Was he referring to white South Africans, or was he perhaps referring to whites in general. I did not have the heart to ask him what he really meant. I did not want to get into an argument with him; nor did I think it really mattered, since I didn’t like any interpretation which could be placed on his words. But what irked me most about his statement was its arrogant assumption that we, he and I and his wife and all the white passengers aboard flight #845, for that matter, were part of some great big club like the Ku Klux Klan. He said it so matter-of-factly that there seemed no point in challenging it. It was almost as if he had looked out the window and said “It’s dark outside”. I could see already that this was going to be a difficult trip, and that the apartheid spirit was alive and well in this man’s heart. The fact that he seemed like such a nice guy otherwise made it especially hard to swallow. He even gave me his busy card and invited me to his home in Jo’burg whenever was in the area. Thanks, but no thanks.
Flying over Namibia in the light of dawn, all I could really see of this enormous land was sand and dry river beds. As the plane touched down on the tarmac, a seven week southern Africa adventure was about to begin.
African airports are very revealing. Namibia’s principal airport on the outskirts of the capital, Windhoek, is a tidy little place, but the slowness of the luggage to appear on the carousels ( at least forty five minutes ), the lack of air conditioning even though you are in the middle of the desert, and the bureaucratic insolence of the clerks at the bureau de change remind you that this is indeed Africa. I have arrived. Standing in line for foreign exchange, a black man jumps the queue; I guess he thinks he is entitled to preference, because this is his country. I protest, for one obvious reason: I got there first. He relents. Welcome to Africa, where dog eats dog, and he who is fittest survives.
A SADC representative ( SADC stands for Southern Africa Development Community, the people we are doing this study for ) is there to greet us. Actually, ‘greet’ is not quite the right term for it. What he really does is pump my hand, grin from ear to ear, and plunk a manila envelope full of briefing documents in my arms. The message here is simple: you are here to work, so let’s not waste time with formalities. The man at the end of the handshake is Ole, a six foot, 70 kilo, beer-bellied, bearded Icelandic peasant around forty years of age, with a booming voice, a good disposition and a drinking problem.. I can see right away that this trip is going to present a challenge. We are then shepherded into two cars for the ride into town. A family of monkeys sits by the side of the road, staring at us with indifference as we pass. I am struck by two things: the cleanliness and the proliferation of English signs. I learn later that English is an official language here. Namibia is also a member of the Commonwealth, alongside Canada, Australia, and many other countries, including black African states with a British colonial past. It is almost as if the powers that be were saying, “Hey, wait a minute! So what if we were not a British colony; we want to be treated as if we were one anyway”.
The peculiar tapestry of Namibia was revealed very quickly when we were dropped off on our ride from the airport at the Thuringer Hof Hotel in downtown Windhoek. This is indeed Little Germany or Little Austria, wherever the owners were from originally . With its cross and timber exterior, beer garden, and bratwurst and sauerkraut on the restaurant menu, one could be forgiven for thinking one was back in the old country. It was a nice enough place: not too lavish and a bit old-fashioned. I thought it was reasonably priced at about fifty US dollars per night, until I found out that a waitress works about 10 hours per day, six days per week, for the equivalent of about seven hundred dollars per year. No wonder one of my breakfast waitresses looked thrilled when I left a hefty tip for her on the last day of our week-long stay. Nor did she seem to mind when I asked her to share it with her colleagues, most of whom were standing idly by. In this institution at least, the staff were polite, and they seemed genuinely friendly, which cannot be said for many West African countries I have visited.
If Ole, our Icelandic minder, was gruff and boisterous, then his black Namibian counterpart, Mr. ?, was formally polite and taciturn. Like Ole, he was a big man of around forty, and he did have a certain amount of bearing. The trouble was, he had some sort of limp, with the result that he was always shuffling along, as if he was dragging some sort of imaginary bag. He told me that he had been a soldier in the army of liberation. I asked if that was how he got his limp, and he said that no, he had had polio as a child. Apparently he had been given this position as a reward for his efforts in the colonial struggle. He certainly was not appointed because of any knowledge he had of the fishery. If the truth be known, Mr. X was totally incompetent. The best that could be said about him was that he get up, walk around and stare out the window during important meetings we had; the worst thing that he slurped his soup, ate like a pig, and was always late for meetings. He also used to like to throw his weight around when other Africans were present. And whenever he thought a black waitress would make a mistake or not bring his food quick enough, he would give her a dressing down which invariably started mockingly with the words “My sister...” It was always “My sister, this is not what I ordered!, or “My sister, where is my coffee? Bring it to me right away”. It was hard to tell if he was joking, or whether this was some sort of greeting left over from the liberation struggle. More often than not, a waitress would just laugh it off. I had to teach him to say please whenever he wanted something at the dinner table, and thank you when he got it. In fact, his ignorance ran so deep it was almost worthy of respect.
And yet, he had his gentler side as well. I asked him if he happened to know a Namibian acquaintance of mine from my years in Geneva. His name was Mr. Waraka, and he was quite a fixture around the Law Library at the UN European HQ, as well as in the newspaper room of the Graduate Institute of International Studies. At the time ( this was back in the late seventies ), Dr. Waraka was what the French evocatively call ‘apatride’, or a stateless person. He was a very quiet individual, soft-spoken, and he had a very dignified air about him. To my astonishment, Mr. X did in fact know him; apparently they were from the same village. I was dying to hear what had happened to Waraka after all these years, because when I knew him he was already in his late forties or so, and that was almost two decades ago. Had he died, I wondered? Had he gone back to Namibia after it became independent in 1990? What had become of him. Mr. X was able to assure me that Waraka had indeed ‘come back’. In fact for several years he had been Namibia’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York, and was just now preparing to come back to Windhoek! Mr. X knew all this apparently because he and Waraka regularly spoke on the phone. He said that Waraka was always asking about news from their village of origin. News of Mr. Waraka’s whereabouts pleased me greatly, for here was a man who had wiled away half of his adult life in exile in Switzerland, living in obscurity. And then finally his motherland becomes independent and he ends up representing his country at the UN. Wow!
There was not all that much to see or do in Windhoek; the hottest items in town are the Herrero women from the north of the country who can be seen walking up and down the sidewalks in their colourful costumes, a hangover from the German colonial era. According to Martina, their dresses are in the style of nineteenth century German nannies. Other than that, Windhoek is basically an administrative centre, with every second building housing a government ministry. But it is a nice place in which to work for a while. When I was there in late July and early August the weather was lovely; it was springtime in the southern hemisphere, and the mornings were quite chilly. Every day was filled with beautiful sunshine, and things never got too hot. In my spare time I would go for runs, window shop, or people gaze. Their was an air of real prosperity about the place. About half the people in the streets were white. There was very little evidence of overt racism. Nevertheless, I could see what my South African companion on the airplane meant when he said that “We are still in control here”, for whites seemed to occupy the best houses and drive the flashiest cars. On my early morning runs by the railway station I would see this typically African phenomenon of trucks transporting dozens of black labourers to work; they would be huddled together on the open flatbed of the vehicle. It always seemed to me that they were tied up with rope and were on there way to a public execution.
Every night our group would go the same Texas imitation restaurant for supper. It was called Spur. It was evidently part of a chain owned by South Africans. We found another one of these at Jo’burg airport, with the same decor and an identical menu. Everything was ‘white’ in these establishments, from the waiters to the choice of drinks to the canned music coming through the loudspeakers. Namibia was a fresh, young country, and it seemed to attract a number of young, and some not-so-young foreigners. Most of the younger visitors were South Africans eager to explore a bit of frontier not far from home. Many of the older visitors were foreign investors and Consultants, determined to fill the tremendous appetite for foreign capital and expertise in the drive to develop. Because for all the apparent prosperity of Windhoek, with its paved streets, abundance of shops and restaurants, and neat, suburban-style homes, this was still one of the poorest countries on earth, with an average annual per capita income of around five hundred dollars.
I had mixed feelings about what was happening to Namibia. On the one hand there was an air of tolerance and freedom in the country. Foreign investment was starting to come in, even though the government of Sam Njoma was socialist. But the government did not seem to have its priorities set right. Windhoek itself was testament to a bloated civil service and bureaucracy; there was much pressure to stack ministry payrolls with illiterate former freedom fighters. Unfortunately, I did not see much evidence of a desire to improve the lot of the common man. The country is very rich in mineral and other resources, much of which are untapped. The government controlled much of that wealth, but again, the proceeds had not yet filtered down to the people. Diamonds alone must have filled public coffers to overflowing, and uranium was another big ticket item; but where did all the profits go from these ventures? The country seemed to be in the clutches of corrupt government ministers and officials, in cahoots with a bunch of fast-talking snake oil salesman from South Africa and other foreign parts.
Foreign fisheries consultants, for example, had descended on the country like vultures. Word had got around that Namibia had a lovely climate, beautiful scenery, and lots of fish offshore that needed to be regulated. So, soon after independence, every failed fisheries expert from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Great Britain, Germany and the Nordic countries seemed to be trying to land a cushy, long-term posting in this part of the world. South Africans would have been the natural first choice for an assignment, but South Africans were by and large persona non grata as a result of the deadly war launched against South West Africa by the apartheid regime in Pretoria. Thus, non-Africans gravitated to the region. There were small fortunes to be made here in jobs paid for by the FAO, UNDP, and national aid-granting institutions of the donor countries. The standard of living was high and the cost of living was generally low. Compared to other African countries, crime was insignificant, the education system was adequate, and when you got bored you could always slip over the border into South Africa for a little bit of excitement. Meanwhile, Namibia itself was a touch of paradise, with plenty of mountains for hiking, swollen rivers for kayaking, and abundant wildlife both along the coast and in the interior.
Word about Namibia’s idyllic status was getting out. Although it had only become independent in 1992, tourism was already making a sizeable contribution to the country’s economy. All of a sudden, Namibia was becoming an ‘in’ place to be. South Africans flocked to the beaches in their four-wheel drives to engage in angling, an increasingly popular recreational activity. The country is a vast one; with a population of only two million it is largely uninhabited and unspoiled. In addition, there are plenty of national parks.
I got a small taste of the good life in Windhoek when I went running with the Hash Hash Harriers one zany evening. A vestige of British colonial times, when RAF officers stationed in the Orient would go for a group run and follow it up with a ‘joint’, ‘hash’ clubs are now ensconced all over the globe. They normally meet once a week for a run, which is now followed by a beer. Originally this was an all male affair, but the Windhoek club was an exception, with about as many men as women in the group. I had heard that these runs could be loads of fun, but the one I went on was completely ridiculous. First, it started too late; around six thirty. This gave us only about half an hour of daylight. Second, the object of the running seemed to be to find some object on the ground; once that was found then we would all scurry off in search of another object planted somewhere else. This went on for what seemed like an eternity. So, although I ended up running at least seven or eight miles, it was not continuous running, which I like. But, everyone else seemed to enjoy it. The best part was meeting the group before and after the run.
That particular week the group met at the home of an American named Frank. Frank had his own computer business, and owned or rented this lovely house perched on the side of a hill with a beautiful view of Windhoek and the mountains beyond. Three or four of the other members were Americans as well, including two very friendly secretaries from the U.S. embassy in town. In addition, there was an Australian from his High Commission, a New Zealander in the fisheries business, plus two Germans: Wolfgang, who invited me along on the run, and Jurgen, from the European Union office in town. Funnily enough, we had a meeting with Jurgen on our first day in Windhoek, at which time I found him very stiff and “Prussian”, even though his English was excellent. After hours, however, in civvies ( actually running shorts and T shirt! ) he was an altogether different person. That’s one of the great things about running: it’s a real leveler. Social occasions like these are precious to me on African trips. There is just no substitute for chatting with like-minded people over a soft drink and snacks when you are half a world away from home.
I get terribly lonely on these assignments far from home. The work is what sustains me, but when that is put aside for the day there is usually precious little to do. I go for walks morning and evening, and I read anything I can get my hands on, local and especially international papers. But if it were not for the BBC World Service which I tune in to on my portable short wave receiver, I would go completely nuts. Put simply, this is the best damned source of news and current affairs anywhere on the planet, twenty-four hours per day, free of charge! You can get it virtually anywhere, and at any time of day, in English. In fact, it is so good I use it as my primary source of news at home in Canada. I know I am not alone: a friend of mine in England, for instance, sleeps with the BBC World Service entering his head via headphones, all night long! Apparently, according to his wife, he has been doing this for years. Somehow the couple still managed to have three kids. I am not that outrageous. But when I am on mission in the Arctic or Africa I get really hooked on it; I will often spend a whole evening lying on the bed in my hotel room with the ‘Beeb’ on. I suppose in a way it is my lifeline to the rest of the world; it also helps me to forget that I am in a crummy hotel room in a boring city in a strange country miles from nowhere.
Another thing I am in a habit of doing while on mission is to seek out the local Roman Catholic Church. I believe it was Graham Greene who said he always felt at home anywhere in the world where people made the sign of the cross. I know the feeling. There is something very reassuring and comforting in being able to walk in to a church on a Sunday morning and participate in a mass that is for all intents and purposes being celebrated in other churches around the world, including our own parish of Blessed Sacrament in The Glebe, Ottawa. I have had this same feeling in Morocco on business, and in Brisbane, Australia while on holiday with my wife. In the case of both Brisbane and Windhoek, I was visiting cathedrals, no less! Sometimes I will introduce myself to the priest celebrating the mass after it has ended. I have never actually introduced myself to members of the congregation, but it is nice to know that I could if I desperately needed to talk to someone. The downside to these church visits tends to be that I imagine the congregation all going home to a nice family meal, whereas I can only go back to a soulless hotel room. C’est la guerre, as we say in English.
Ten days in Windhoek veritably flew by. The daily routine of meetings was broken only by a quick, one day excursion to the coastal fishing community of Luderitz. To get there we rented a Cessna airplane. Six of us flew in this noisy, cramped little machine. It was about a two hour flight in each direction. Our chartered plane was only authorised for visual flying, which meant that we could not leave Windhoek until just after sunrise at 7 AM, and we would have to be back by nightfall, which occurred around 6:30 PM. ( It took some time to get used to the fact that the days were so short at that time of year in the southern hemisphere, quite the opposite of what I am used to in the northern hemisphere, with our long summer nights ). This meant that we had a pretty tight schedule in Luderitz, with just about enough time for three or possibly four appointments. The scenery more than outweighed the discomfort felt: it was breathtaking. The pinkness of the sunrise, the grey morning mist over the beige -coloured sand of the Namib desert, plus the mountains here and there which looked like sphinxes, made it all a memorable journey. One and one half hours into the flight the outline of the coast appeared, the dark blue waters of the south Atlantic meeting the sandy shoreline.
From the air Luderitz reminded me very much of an Arctic community; no Arctic community in particular, just any old Arctic community. There are, for instance, thirty-four Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic, and all but one of them is on the coast. Luderitz could have been any one of them. What Luderitz and the Arctic have in common, in addition to the coastal aspect, is the barrenness of their location. Most of the Arctic is, in fact, a desert, and a sizeable portion of the region is called the Barren Lands. Well, in Namibia, same thing: barren lands virtually everywhere. The lack of trees, in particular, is something I could never put up with in either the Arctic or parts of Africa like this. It makes me feel naked. Funny thing is, the coastal waters off both the Arctic and Africa are teeming with life: the cold waters in both regions support large quantities of a relatively few species of fish. And like the Arctic, there is a significant seal population around Luderitz. Not only that, but seal hunting is an annual activity in these parts. I could not see seals first hand in the limited time I was there, but I got some nice postcard shots of them lying on rocks.
Luderitz is a very special place. As you fly in we saw numerous fishing boats in the cape-shaped harbour. Right by the airport is Kolmanskop ghost town, an abandoned mine site that looks like a relic from a Hollywood western. The town itself is replete with German period architecture, and the main street is called Bismark Strasse! We were here to talk with the regional fisheries inspector, visit the big Pescanova fish processing plant located on the outskirts of town, as well as the maritime training institute. I was looking forward to these meetings after ten days talking with paper shufflers in the capital city, Windhoek; I wanted to see how things operated first hand.
Because our pilot arrived late, we didn’t get off the ground until around 7:30. Then upon arrival at the airport in Luderitz, there was no one from the fisheries ministry to meet us. Thus, it was 10 AM before we were able to get into town, which is a long ten kilometres from the airport.
To get an overview of the fisheries sector we met first with the Inspector in his office. Unfortunately, he kept us waiting half an hour. When he finally did arrive, he was one of the most unassuming men I have ever met. He was wearing one of those navy blue jump suits that mechanics wear; and he kept going in and out of his office so as to deal with other business from time to time. Being about 5 ft. 4 ins. Tall, and very stocky, he wasn’t much to look at. But he turned out to be very knowledgeable. He told us that he had a staff of twenty-eight or nine under him, mainly for fisheries inspections, but that they were under-equipped and poorly trained.
When we finished with MR. X, we headed for Pescanova, where we had an interesting tour of their impressive plant. The owners are Spaniards, and everything is run with clockwork efficiency, from their own boats to the processing operations, packing, etc. They seem to be making oodles of money out of this plant, largely because the hundreds of locals they employ to process the fish, are paid a pittance, a fraction of what a Spaniard would cost in the home country. The Spaniards in general have a dreadful reputation throughout Africa, and indeed in my own country, Canada, when it comes to fishing. They are notorious for engaging in piracy and plundering the resource. Right here in Namibia, in 1991, two Spanish trawlers were seized for fishing without a license within the 200-mile exclusive economic zone. This seizure sent shock waves through the international fishing world. Observers were stunned to learn that a relatively small, newly-independent country like Namibia, a place most people had never even heard of, would be so daring as to seize these two ships caught in flagrante delicto. The captains were eventually convicted, and the two vessels in question were sold to the highest bidder. But here, five years later, at the gleaming Pescanova plant, everything seemed to be smiles ‘n chuckles. The manager of the plant, a slight, dignified gentleman in his early fifties, received us in his office and had tea brought in on a trolley. He and I seemed to get along just fine, in spite of the fact that I was a Canadian and my government had recently arrested Mr. X was there with us, slouching in his chair, wearing his navy blue overalls. What he made of all this was anyone’s guess; he never said a word.
After the tour and the meeting with the manager had ended, we had 30 minutes in which to eat before our next appointment. We went to a nondescript cafe above a supermarket. Service was very slow, and although most of us only ordered grilled cheese sandwiches and a bowl of soup, they took ages to arrive. Ever punctual, I gobbled mine up, and was ready to pay my bill by around 1:55 PM. But I was amazed to hear my colleagues, some of whom were on their second sandwich, discussing desert! I could not believe my ears! Sure enough, four of them ordered home-made chocolate cake. By the time we got out of there it must have been 2:15 PM, with the result that we arrived twenty minutes late for our appointment at the maritime training institute.
The Director, a Brit, looked somewhat peeved as we came in the door, and rightly so; one of his subordinates had seen us enter the cafe earlier, so he knew where we were. For my part, I was simply flabbergasted that a bunch of professionals would put their desert ahead of a business appointment. A day like this in Luderitz was costing the European Union, who paid all the bills, about US $8000 in fees and other expenses, not to mention the cost of the Cessna. We only had about two hours to go before we had to get back on the plane, so time was of the essence. But these turkeys I was with did not seem to give a damn. After our institute meeting we scooted over to the fisheries research institute, where a bright young South African marine biologist filled me in on the threats to the rock lobster fishery posed by offshore diamond mining. It appears that this kind of mining involves raking the sandy bottom of the ocean, sifting through it to find diamonds, then returning the dredged spoils to the sea. The government, which has a fifty-fifty interest in the project with De Beers, the South African mining giant, claims the operation is harmless to the fishery, but the fisher people say otherwise.
At four fifteen we had to cut our last meeting short and trundle off to the airport again for the flight back to Windhoek. There was dead silence all the way. The vagaries of international consulting! That evening, we had our usual meal in the Spur restaurant, which by this time I was completely fed up with; but, there was an unwritten rule in this group that we should all eat together whenever possible.
Within another couple of days, we were off to the coast again, this time in our van. Our destination: Walvis Bay, principal port city, and Swapokmund, resort town just north of it. From there we would head south by plane for South Africa. The ride through the desert was a lovely one. There were plenty of impressive sights, including the famous Spitzkoppe mountain jutting out of nowhere; at 1829 metres high, it is also known as the Matterhorn of Namibia. The distance between Windhoek and Walvis Bay is about 325 kms, and the trip took us about 4 hours. Our van was a VW, without any guts, and we had quite a load, being at total of six passengers, with tons of luggage. Walvis Bay itself turned out to be a big surprise. I had known that it was an important port which had for a long time been a semi-enclave of South Africa. I also knew that it was the centre for the thriving Namibian fishing industry. What sets Walvis Bay apart is the fact that it is the only developed deep water port along the Namibian coast. It had great strategic significance for South Africa, which used it as the railhead for its own bulk imports and exports.
The port area of Walvis Bay is predictably utilitarian and industrial. What really surprised me about the community adjoining it, however, was how neat and tidy everything was. The town is laid out in a grid pattern, the streets are quite wide, and there is a very nice mix of shops, cafés, and bungalow-style housing. Overall, there is an air of middle class comfort and prosperity about the place. All except for the black township of Kuisepmund, which lies just outside of Walvis Bay, beside the road to Swapokmund. Kuisepmund is a reminder that you can create your own country, but you cannot eliminate poverty and discrimination overnight. Beyond the port area, there were beaches to the north and a lovely boardwalk to the south. Early each morning while I was there, I would get up and go to the mudflats at low tide to see thousands upon thousands of flamingos; but come back an hour later and almost all of them would be gone, scared off by photographers who had got a little too close, I presume. Given this and a wide assortment of other seabirds, I was disheartened to learn from the port captain that Walvis Bay was sadly deficient in oil spill prevention and response capability. Steps were being taken to rectify this deplorable situation, but there had already been several incidents involving tanker discharges, whether accidental or deliberate. Thus, as part of my report I recommended an oil spill response component, not just for Namibia, but the whole SADC region. The rationale for inclusion of such a component in what was essentially a fisheries project was that urgent steps were required to protect and preserve the fishery from pollutants such as hydrocarbons.
Unfortunately, many African coastal countries fail to take the threat of marine oil spills seriously. This is partly because few of them have much of a maritime tradition. Even the port captain, however, displayed ignorance of the true extent of the threat. He, like many others I met, was of the view that all of the supertankers going up the west coast of Africa navigate outside the 200 mile zone, and that in the event of a spill the oil would move out to sea rather than towards the coast. I asked Jurgen, our Danish fisheries patrol expert, to check this out with some fish captains he was meeting; the word that came back was that supertankers were regularly spotted on the fishing grounds just forty nautical miles from shore. And when I looked at some oceanographic charts of the Namibian coastal zone, I noted that at that distance the prevailing currents would bring the oil towards the shore. This was a good example of the flawed way of thinking: “Out of sight, out of mind”.
Our lodgings in Walvis Bay were quite a ways outside of town, in a holiday camp owned by a Boer. This was the first real Boer I ever had the pleasure of meeting. The term “Boer” has an unfortunate connotation, for me at least. For not only is it synonymous with apartheid; it also sounds like ‘bore’ in English, or, for that matter, ‘boar’. Whenever I hear the term, I immediately conjure up images of barnyard animals, as in ‘wild boar’. Imagine my delight, therefore, when I learn that ‘Boer’ is Afrikaans for ‘farmer’. You see Boer all over the place in Windhoek and Walvis Bay. You can spot a Boer a mile away. First of all, a Boer male is typically dressed in khaki from head to toe, as if he were in the Army or the boy scouts. Moreover, your average Boer will usually sport a beard. And finally, he will invariably have this enormous beer tumour spilling out over his shorts. If this has not provided the reader with an image of a typical Boer, then I urge you to thing of Eugene Terreblanche, the former right wing Boer leader in South Africa, now serving time in jail for atrocities against blacks.
Boers are legendary for two things above all: their stupidity and their pigheadedness. My first Boer certainly looked stupid. In actual fact, he turned out to be quite a nice fellow, although the accommodation we rented from him were substandard, with little privacy, a faulty shower, and ants everywhere. The best that could be said about our digs was that they were cheap: dirt cheap in fact. They were located on the outskirts of town, not far from a lovely boardwalk where I would go to watch the flamingoes each morning just after sunrise; thousands upon thousands of them would be feeding there at the crack of dawn. I am sure it is just a coincidence, but ‘flamingo’ is the nickname for people of Flemish origin, who are of course Belgian cousins of the Boers. By nine o’clock there would be hardly a trace of the flock of flamingoes. Presumably they would be scared off by humans and motor traffic, or perhaps this was just part of their daily routine.
In Walvis Bay we were briefed on Namibia’s fisheries surveillance efforts by a very serious black man in a naval uniform. He was in charge of the whole operation, and he was quite impressive, but he talked far too loud. Sweat dripped from his brow; he must have been incredibly nervous. I felt rather sorry for the man, for he seemed to take our mission very seriously. It was almost as if his job depended on the success of his presentation. Our group had only been together for less than a week, but I could already see that the wheels were going to fall off at some point. I seemed to be the only member of our party who knew how to ask a straight question so as to get the kind of information we needed. All Martina seemed capable of doing was to present burdensome demands for tons of documentation. Invariably she would begin by berating our hosts for not complying with a written demand, sent in advance, for material; hardly a way to get these people, many of whom did not even have access to a fax machine, to cooperate. As for our esteemed leader, the man from Eire, by this time his blarney was well honed. He would begin each meeting with a rambling, incoherent soliloquy as to what our mission was all about. Maybe the locals understood it, but I sure didn’t. I was beginning to see why I was expected to be de facto team leader; for this man had serious problems getting his words out.
Of the five countries I visited on this mission, this was the only one that mounted any creditable effort to control and manage the fishery, at least in terms of patrol vessels, inspections, etc. All the others talked a good talk, but in reality had little operational capability. The problem was, though, that like many other fishing nations, developed coastal states included, Namibia had let out to many licences, to the point where some species were seriously depleted. High ranking government officials were suspected of pocketing kickbacks in return for according licenses. Namibia did, however, spend a respectable amount of money on fisheries research, as we found out when we visited the country’s main oceanographic institute cum fisheries research station at Swapokmund, located about fifteen kilometres up the coast from Walvis Bay. The town used to be the base from which SWAPO ( South West Africa People’s Organisation ) launched their attacks on South African controlled Walvis Bay. It looks like a little Walvis Bay, though quite a bit more touristy. There are quite a few cafes and boutiques lining the main streets. There is even a casino. But, there is little if any industry other than tourism.
We made two or three trips to Swapokmund from Walvis Bay in order to visit the oceanographic institute and talk to fisheries scientists. What struck me about the research station was what a gigantic boondoggle it was. Spanking new and two thirds empty, it occupied a prominent place along the beach. The building itself was ultramodern and conspicuously well-appointed. In all honesty, I could not believe how lavish it was, particularly for a country with such a low standard of living. I understood that fisheries and oceans were considered a priority for Namibia in its development plan, but I asked myself how the country could afford such an expensive building. This was the question I put to the chap who ‘greeted’ us in one of the labs, a solemn-looking young Icelandic oceanographer by the name of Stefan ? It turns out that the institute was a gift of the people of Iceland. I was absolutely amazed to find that a country so small as Iceland, with only about 200,000 inhabitants, could afford to donate such a structure to another small country half-way around the world. Ole, the Icelander seconded to our team, explained to me that his country had unofficially adopted Namibia as a sort of ‘twin country’.
What a good idea, I thought, instead of doing what my own country, Canada does, which is spread the money thinly across many countries. Namibia would also, no doubt, make a nice place to visit during the bleak Nordic winter, or Canadian winter, for that matter! Nevertheless, the institute still seemed like an enormous waste of money, what with a fancy library and modern imported furniture, including expensive leather chairs in the boardroom. In other countries I was to visit I saw similar evidence of waste, usually on the part of Nordic countries, who have played an important role in the southern African region since the days of the struggle against apartheid. And then I remembered Graham Hancock’s depressing book Lords of Poverty, which documented dozens of failed foreign aid projects; he singled out the Nordic countries as having the worst record of all when it came to boondoggles. These countries tend to practice an inflexible, top-down approach to development.
Stefan, the stern-faced Icelandic oceanographer who greeted us at the Institute turned out to be an extremely personable fellow. He had the entire project team over to his house one night for a buffet. He was living with a lovely black Namibian lady in a tidy little bungalow in Walvis Bay; they had two very cute kids as well. Just about everyone was in a very relaxed mood; jazz music played in the background and the wine was flowing. Everyone, that is, except Ole, who got totally pissed and insisted on talking shop all evening. He just wouldn’t shut up! Amazingly, though, he was there the next morning for the ride back to Swapokmund for further meetings at the Institute.
I found these indoor meetings throughout our trip excruciating. All I really wanted to do was to be outside and walk along the beach. At the Swapokmund institute in particular, the beach was lovely; enormous breakers were crashing against the shore. There was a lovely, salty spray above the cafe au lait-coloured sand. But here we were, holed up inside, having a rather tedious meeting with the newly-appointed director of the institute, a Dr. Van Zyl, followed by others with fisheries researchers. What really got to me, however, was the fact that after three or four hours of meetings in the morning, the whole group trundled off to a rather fancy restaurant for lunch. The location and the view were spectacular, but all I really wanted to do was walk or run along that beach. This was a fisheries mission, these were all fisheries specialists, but no one showed the slightest interest at any time in going for a walk along a beach. Normally I would have just gone off and done my own thing, but I felt that I had to go along with the group for the sake of preserving group solidarity. I was beginning to realise that this whole trip was about work, and that any enjoyment I might get out of it was probably going to be purely accidental. This is not to say, however, that there were not meetings that I did enjoy. On the contrary, I got to meet many interesting people on the mission, and I learned an awful lot. It’s just that there was very little private time; everything, and I mean everything, was done together, and so much time was wasted sitting in god-awful restaurants.
As we crammed into a propeller-driven airplane at Swapokmund airport for the two hour flight to Cape Town, I was reasonably happy with the way things had gone. Namibia was a great place to take my first dip into southern Africa. I was quite impressed by what I saw, on the whole. This is a beautiful country, with lots of resources, and tons of empty space just waiting to be filled. Obviously, the country is not without its problems, but at least this is one place in Africa where there is an abundance of hope. Flying over the southern part of the country, along the coast, the vast diamond mining area, where public access is prohibited, was clearly visible. The diamonds here are being mined in a joint venture between De Beers and Namdev, a state-owned company. So, hopefully, the Namibian people will somehow benefit from enterprises like this. I couldn’t help but think that my South African friend on the flight from Frankfurt was mis-informed when he boldly proclaimed: “We’re in control there!” At best, he was only half right.
“You’ll like it Harry: It’s just like Arizona!” That’s what an American friend of mine, who had completed a number of missions to Namibia, said about the country when I told him over the phone I was going there. He calls me “Harry” as a nickname. He also described Windhoek, the capital city, as “a pretty little town, very Germanic”, because of the country’s German past: for a time before the first world war it was a German colony. Still, until one actually visits a country, it is rather difficult to imagine what it is going to be like. In any event, I arrived at Frankfurt airport for the midnight flight reasonably optimistic for the first leg of my African voyage, the Namibian and South African parts in particular. However, I confess to having had deep misgivings about flying Air Namibia all the way to southern Africa: African airlines in general have a wretched reputation for service, their safety record is nothing to write home about, and there would be no frequent flier points on this trip, whereas with Lufthansa I would have picked up a whole packet of points. But, in the final analysis, I had no choice regarding the itinerary and choice of airline: everything was pre-arranged by my client in Brussels, without any consultation.
I arrived in the waiting lounge at Frankfurt airport naively thinking that I was headed for black Africa. Well, this may have been so, but judging by the predominant colour of the passengers, I really was headed for Arizona. I would hazard a guess that ninety percent of the people in that waiting room were white, including the airline ground staff. It turned out that the plane’s ultimate destination was Jo’burg, with just a whistle stop in Windhoek. I would have thought that most whites would prefer to travel either South African Airways or Lufthansa, depending on their nationality ( and maybe even their frequent flier programs! ), but not this crowd. Later, when I asked a fellow passenger about this, he explained that Air Namibia offered the cheapest fares. And as for the safety element, I was told that Air Namibia was operated by Lufthansa. In this way, I got my first surprise about Namibia before even setting foot in the country.
On the run to Windhoek, which transpired without incident and in relative comfort. My travelling companions were a white South African couple returning home from vacation in Germany. The gentleman was an enormous, good-natured, loquacious chap in his late fifties or early sixties; he was sitting next to me. His wife was a quiet, unassuming lady, somewhat petite. He had emigrated from Germany and she from England about twenty-five years earlier. He told me that they had two grown up children, and that he and his wife lived in the suburbs of Jo’burg. He had his own small business. The man saw his role as one of educating me into the reality of Namibia. To be more precise, he still called it South-West Africa, its old colonial name. Like my American friend Tom, this sweating, out of breath man assured me that I would like it there. He told me I would not like the heat there, which is constant ( in this he was way off the mark ), but that otherwise everything was very efficient, because, in his words, “We are still in control there”.
I could not believe my ears. Who, I thought to myself, is “we”? Was it the royal “we”? Was he referring to white South Africans, or was he perhaps referring to whites in general. I did not have the heart to ask him what he really meant. I did not want to get into an argument with him; nor did I think it really mattered, since I didn’t like any interpretation which could be placed on his words. But what irked me most about his statement was its arrogant assumption that we, he and I and his wife and all the white passengers aboard flight #845, for that matter, were part of some great big club like the Ku Klux Klan. He said it so matter-of-factly that there seemed no point in challenging it. It was almost as if he had looked out the window and said “It’s dark outside”. I could see already that this was going to be a difficult trip, and that the apartheid spirit was alive and well in this man’s heart. The fact that he seemed like such a nice guy otherwise made it especially hard to swallow. He even gave me his busy card and invited me to his home in Jo’burg whenever was in the area. Thanks, but no thanks.
Flying over Namibia in the light of dawn, all I could really see of this enormous land was sand and dry river beds. As the plane touched down on the tarmac, a seven week southern Africa adventure was about to begin.
African airports are very revealing. Namibia’s principal airport on the outskirts of the capital, Windhoek, is a tidy little place, but the slowness of the luggage to appear on the carousels ( at least forty five minutes ), the lack of air conditioning even though you are in the middle of the desert, and the bureaucratic insolence of the clerks at the bureau de change remind you that this is indeed Africa. I have arrived. Standing in line for foreign exchange, a black man jumps the queue; I guess he thinks he is entitled to preference, because this is his country. I protest, for one obvious reason: I got there first. He relents. Welcome to Africa, where dog eats dog, and he who is fittest survives.
A SADC representative ( SADC stands for Southern Africa Development Community, the people we are doing this study for ) is there to greet us. Actually, ‘greet’ is not quite the right term for it. What he really does is pump my hand, grin from ear to ear, and plunk a manila envelope full of briefing documents in my arms. The message here is simple: you are here to work, so let’s not waste time with formalities. The man at the end of the handshake is Ole, a six foot, 70 kilo, beer-bellied, bearded Icelandic peasant around forty years of age, with a booming voice, a good disposition and a drinking problem.. I can see right away that this trip is going to present a challenge. We are then shepherded into two cars for the ride into town. A family of monkeys sits by the side of the road, staring at us with indifference as we pass. I am struck by two things: the cleanliness and the proliferation of English signs. I learn later that English is an official language here. Namibia is also a member of the Commonwealth, alongside Canada, Australia, and many other countries, including black African states with a British colonial past. It is almost as if the powers that be were saying, “Hey, wait a minute! So what if we were not a British colony; we want to be treated as if we were one anyway”.
The peculiar tapestry of Namibia was revealed very quickly when we were dropped off on our ride from the airport at the Thuringer Hof Hotel in downtown Windhoek. This is indeed Little Germany or Little Austria, wherever the owners were from originally . With its cross and timber exterior, beer garden, and bratwurst and sauerkraut on the restaurant menu, one could be forgiven for thinking one was back in the old country. It was a nice enough place: not too lavish and a bit old-fashioned. I thought it was reasonably priced at about fifty US dollars per night, until I found out that a waitress works about 10 hours per day, six days per week, for the equivalent of about seven hundred dollars per year. No wonder one of my breakfast waitresses looked thrilled when I left a hefty tip for her on the last day of our week-long stay. Nor did she seem to mind when I asked her to share it with her colleagues, most of whom were standing idly by. In this institution at least, the staff were polite, and they seemed genuinely friendly, which cannot be said for many West African countries I have visited.
If Ole, our Icelandic minder, was gruff and boisterous, then his black Namibian counterpart, Mr. ?, was formally polite and taciturn. Like Ole, he was a big man of around forty, and he did have a certain amount of bearing. The trouble was, he had some sort of limp, with the result that he was always shuffling along, as if he was dragging some sort of imaginary bag. He told me that he had been a soldier in the army of liberation. I asked if that was how he got his limp, and he said that no, he had had polio as a child. Apparently he had been given this position as a reward for his efforts in the colonial struggle. He certainly was not appointed because of any knowledge he had of the fishery. If the truth be known, Mr. X was totally incompetent. The best that could be said about him was that he get up, walk around and stare out the window during important meetings we had; the worst thing that he slurped his soup, ate like a pig, and was always late for meetings. He also used to like to throw his weight around when other Africans were present. And whenever he thought a black waitress would make a mistake or not bring his food quick enough, he would give her a dressing down which invariably started mockingly with the words “My sister...” It was always “My sister, this is not what I ordered!, or “My sister, where is my coffee? Bring it to me right away”. It was hard to tell if he was joking, or whether this was some sort of greeting left over from the liberation struggle. More often than not, a waitress would just laugh it off. I had to teach him to say please whenever he wanted something at the dinner table, and thank you when he got it. In fact, his ignorance ran so deep it was almost worthy of respect.
And yet, he had his gentler side as well. I asked him if he happened to know a Namibian acquaintance of mine from my years in Geneva. His name was Mr. Waraka, and he was quite a fixture around the Law Library at the UN European HQ, as well as in the newspaper room of the Graduate Institute of International Studies. At the time ( this was back in the late seventies ), Dr. Waraka was what the French evocatively call ‘apatride’, or a stateless person. He was a very quiet individual, soft-spoken, and he had a very dignified air about him. To my astonishment, Mr. X did in fact know him; apparently they were from the same village. I was dying to hear what had happened to Waraka after all these years, because when I knew him he was already in his late forties or so, and that was almost two decades ago. Had he died, I wondered? Had he gone back to Namibia after it became independent in 1990? What had become of him. Mr. X was able to assure me that Waraka had indeed ‘come back’. In fact for several years he had been Namibia’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York, and was just now preparing to come back to Windhoek! Mr. X knew all this apparently because he and Waraka regularly spoke on the phone. He said that Waraka was always asking about news from their village of origin. News of Mr. Waraka’s whereabouts pleased me greatly, for here was a man who had wiled away half of his adult life in exile in Switzerland, living in obscurity. And then finally his motherland becomes independent and he ends up representing his country at the UN. Wow!
There was not all that much to see or do in Windhoek; the hottest items in town are the Herrero women from the north of the country who can be seen walking up and down the sidewalks in their colourful costumes, a hangover from the German colonial era. According to Martina, their dresses are in the style of nineteenth century German nannies. Other than that, Windhoek is basically an administrative centre, with every second building housing a government ministry. But it is a nice place in which to work for a while. When I was there in late July and early August the weather was lovely; it was springtime in the southern hemisphere, and the mornings were quite chilly. Every day was filled with beautiful sunshine, and things never got too hot. In my spare time I would go for runs, window shop, or people gaze. Their was an air of real prosperity about the place. About half the people in the streets were white. There was very little evidence of overt racism. Nevertheless, I could see what my South African companion on the airplane meant when he said that “We are still in control here”, for whites seemed to occupy the best houses and drive the flashiest cars. On my early morning runs by the railway station I would see this typically African phenomenon of trucks transporting dozens of black labourers to work; they would be huddled together on the open flatbed of the vehicle. It always seemed to me that they were tied up with rope and were on there way to a public execution.
Every night our group would go the same Texas imitation restaurant for supper. It was called Spur. It was evidently part of a chain owned by South Africans. We found another one of these at Jo’burg airport, with the same decor and an identical menu. Everything was ‘white’ in these establishments, from the waiters to the choice of drinks to the canned music coming through the loudspeakers. Namibia was a fresh, young country, and it seemed to attract a number of young, and some not-so-young foreigners. Most of the younger visitors were South Africans eager to explore a bit of frontier not far from home. Many of the older visitors were foreign investors and Consultants, determined to fill the tremendous appetite for foreign capital and expertise in the drive to develop. Because for all the apparent prosperity of Windhoek, with its paved streets, abundance of shops and restaurants, and neat, suburban-style homes, this was still one of the poorest countries on earth, with an average annual per capita income of around five hundred dollars.
I had mixed feelings about what was happening to Namibia. On the one hand there was an air of tolerance and freedom in the country. Foreign investment was starting to come in, even though the government of Sam Njoma was socialist. But the government did not seem to have its priorities set right. Windhoek itself was testament to a bloated civil service and bureaucracy; there was much pressure to stack ministry payrolls with illiterate former freedom fighters. Unfortunately, I did not see much evidence of a desire to improve the lot of the common man. The country is very rich in mineral and other resources, much of which are untapped. The government controlled much of that wealth, but again, the proceeds had not yet filtered down to the people. Diamonds alone must have filled public coffers to overflowing, and uranium was another big ticket item; but where did all the profits go from these ventures? The country seemed to be in the clutches of corrupt government ministers and officials, in cahoots with a bunch of fast-talking snake oil salesman from South Africa and other foreign parts.
Foreign fisheries consultants, for example, had descended on the country like vultures. Word had got around that Namibia had a lovely climate, beautiful scenery, and lots of fish offshore that needed to be regulated. So, soon after independence, every failed fisheries expert from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Great Britain, Germany and the Nordic countries seemed to be trying to land a cushy, long-term posting in this part of the world. South Africans would have been the natural first choice for an assignment, but South Africans were by and large persona non grata as a result of the deadly war launched against South West Africa by the apartheid regime in Pretoria. Thus, non-Africans gravitated to the region. There were small fortunes to be made here in jobs paid for by the FAO, UNDP, and national aid-granting institutions of the donor countries. The standard of living was high and the cost of living was generally low. Compared to other African countries, crime was insignificant, the education system was adequate, and when you got bored you could always slip over the border into South Africa for a little bit of excitement. Meanwhile, Namibia itself was a touch of paradise, with plenty of mountains for hiking, swollen rivers for kayaking, and abundant wildlife both along the coast and in the interior.
Word about Namibia’s idyllic status was getting out. Although it had only become independent in 1992, tourism was already making a sizeable contribution to the country’s economy. All of a sudden, Namibia was becoming an ‘in’ place to be. South Africans flocked to the beaches in their four-wheel drives to engage in angling, an increasingly popular recreational activity. The country is a vast one; with a population of only two million it is largely uninhabited and unspoiled. In addition, there are plenty of national parks.
I got a small taste of the good life in Windhoek when I went running with the Hash Hash Harriers one zany evening. A vestige of British colonial times, when RAF officers stationed in the Orient would go for a group run and follow it up with a ‘joint’, ‘hash’ clubs are now ensconced all over the globe. They normally meet once a week for a run, which is now followed by a beer. Originally this was an all male affair, but the Windhoek club was an exception, with about as many men as women in the group. I had heard that these runs could be loads of fun, but the one I went on was completely ridiculous. First, it started too late; around six thirty. This gave us only about half an hour of daylight. Second, the object of the running seemed to be to find some object on the ground; once that was found then we would all scurry off in search of another object planted somewhere else. This went on for what seemed like an eternity. So, although I ended up running at least seven or eight miles, it was not continuous running, which I like. But, everyone else seemed to enjoy it. The best part was meeting the group before and after the run.
That particular week the group met at the home of an American named Frank. Frank had his own computer business, and owned or rented this lovely house perched on the side of a hill with a beautiful view of Windhoek and the mountains beyond. Three or four of the other members were Americans as well, including two very friendly secretaries from the U.S. embassy in town. In addition, there was an Australian from his High Commission, a New Zealander in the fisheries business, plus two Germans: Wolfgang, who invited me along on the run, and Jurgen, from the European Union office in town. Funnily enough, we had a meeting with Jurgen on our first day in Windhoek, at which time I found him very stiff and “Prussian”, even though his English was excellent. After hours, however, in civvies ( actually running shorts and T shirt! ) he was an altogether different person. That’s one of the great things about running: it’s a real leveler. Social occasions like these are precious to me on African trips. There is just no substitute for chatting with like-minded people over a soft drink and snacks when you are half a world away from home.
I get terribly lonely on these assignments far from home. The work is what sustains me, but when that is put aside for the day there is usually precious little to do. I go for walks morning and evening, and I read anything I can get my hands on, local and especially international papers. But if it were not for the BBC World Service which I tune in to on my portable short wave receiver, I would go completely nuts. Put simply, this is the best damned source of news and current affairs anywhere on the planet, twenty-four hours per day, free of charge! You can get it virtually anywhere, and at any time of day, in English. In fact, it is so good I use it as my primary source of news at home in Canada. I know I am not alone: a friend of mine in England, for instance, sleeps with the BBC World Service entering his head via headphones, all night long! Apparently, according to his wife, he has been doing this for years. Somehow the couple still managed to have three kids. I am not that outrageous. But when I am on mission in the Arctic or Africa I get really hooked on it; I will often spend a whole evening lying on the bed in my hotel room with the ‘Beeb’ on. I suppose in a way it is my lifeline to the rest of the world; it also helps me to forget that I am in a crummy hotel room in a boring city in a strange country miles from nowhere.
Another thing I am in a habit of doing while on mission is to seek out the local Roman Catholic Church. I believe it was Graham Greene who said he always felt at home anywhere in the world where people made the sign of the cross. I know the feeling. There is something very reassuring and comforting in being able to walk in to a church on a Sunday morning and participate in a mass that is for all intents and purposes being celebrated in other churches around the world, including our own parish of Blessed Sacrament in The Glebe, Ottawa. I have had this same feeling in Morocco on business, and in Brisbane, Australia while on holiday with my wife. In the case of both Brisbane and Windhoek, I was visiting cathedrals, no less! Sometimes I will introduce myself to the priest celebrating the mass after it has ended. I have never actually introduced myself to members of the congregation, but it is nice to know that I could if I desperately needed to talk to someone. The downside to these church visits tends to be that I imagine the congregation all going home to a nice family meal, whereas I can only go back to a soulless hotel room. C’est la guerre, as we say in English.
Ten days in Windhoek veritably flew by. The daily routine of meetings was broken only by a quick, one day excursion to the coastal fishing community of Luderitz. To get there we rented a Cessna airplane. Six of us flew in this noisy, cramped little machine. It was about a two hour flight in each direction. Our chartered plane was only authorised for visual flying, which meant that we could not leave Windhoek until just after sunrise at 7 AM, and we would have to be back by nightfall, which occurred around 6:30 PM. ( It took some time to get used to the fact that the days were so short at that time of year in the southern hemisphere, quite the opposite of what I am used to in the northern hemisphere, with our long summer nights ). This meant that we had a pretty tight schedule in Luderitz, with just about enough time for three or possibly four appointments. The scenery more than outweighed the discomfort felt: it was breathtaking. The pinkness of the sunrise, the grey morning mist over the beige -coloured sand of the Namib desert, plus the mountains here and there which looked like sphinxes, made it all a memorable journey. One and one half hours into the flight the outline of the coast appeared, the dark blue waters of the south Atlantic meeting the sandy shoreline.
From the air Luderitz reminded me very much of an Arctic community; no Arctic community in particular, just any old Arctic community. There are, for instance, thirty-four Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic, and all but one of them is on the coast. Luderitz could have been any one of them. What Luderitz and the Arctic have in common, in addition to the coastal aspect, is the barrenness of their location. Most of the Arctic is, in fact, a desert, and a sizeable portion of the region is called the Barren Lands. Well, in Namibia, same thing: barren lands virtually everywhere. The lack of trees, in particular, is something I could never put up with in either the Arctic or parts of Africa like this. It makes me feel naked. Funny thing is, the coastal waters off both the Arctic and Africa are teeming with life: the cold waters in both regions support large quantities of a relatively few species of fish. And like the Arctic, there is a significant seal population around Luderitz. Not only that, but seal hunting is an annual activity in these parts. I could not see seals first hand in the limited time I was there, but I got some nice postcard shots of them lying on rocks.
Luderitz is a very special place. As you fly in we saw numerous fishing boats in the cape-shaped harbour. Right by the airport is Kolmanskop ghost town, an abandoned mine site that looks like a relic from a Hollywood western. The town itself is replete with German period architecture, and the main street is called Bismark Strasse! We were here to talk with the regional fisheries inspector, visit the big Pescanova fish processing plant located on the outskirts of town, as well as the maritime training institute. I was looking forward to these meetings after ten days talking with paper shufflers in the capital city, Windhoek; I wanted to see how things operated first hand.
Because our pilot arrived late, we didn’t get off the ground until around 7:30. Then upon arrival at the airport in Luderitz, there was no one from the fisheries ministry to meet us. Thus, it was 10 AM before we were able to get into town, which is a long ten kilometres from the airport.
To get an overview of the fisheries sector we met first with the Inspector in his office. Unfortunately, he kept us waiting half an hour. When he finally did arrive, he was one of the most unassuming men I have ever met. He was wearing one of those navy blue jump suits that mechanics wear; and he kept going in and out of his office so as to deal with other business from time to time. Being about 5 ft. 4 ins. Tall, and very stocky, he wasn’t much to look at. But he turned out to be very knowledgeable. He told us that he had a staff of twenty-eight or nine under him, mainly for fisheries inspections, but that they were under-equipped and poorly trained.
When we finished with MR. X, we headed for Pescanova, where we had an interesting tour of their impressive plant. The owners are Spaniards, and everything is run with clockwork efficiency, from their own boats to the processing operations, packing, etc. They seem to be making oodles of money out of this plant, largely because the hundreds of locals they employ to process the fish, are paid a pittance, a fraction of what a Spaniard would cost in the home country. The Spaniards in general have a dreadful reputation throughout Africa, and indeed in my own country, Canada, when it comes to fishing. They are notorious for engaging in piracy and plundering the resource. Right here in Namibia, in 1991, two Spanish trawlers were seized for fishing without a license within the 200-mile exclusive economic zone. This seizure sent shock waves through the international fishing world. Observers were stunned to learn that a relatively small, newly-independent country like Namibia, a place most people had never even heard of, would be so daring as to seize these two ships caught in flagrante delicto. The captains were eventually convicted, and the two vessels in question were sold to the highest bidder. But here, five years later, at the gleaming Pescanova plant, everything seemed to be smiles ‘n chuckles. The manager of the plant, a slight, dignified gentleman in his early fifties, received us in his office and had tea brought in on a trolley. He and I seemed to get along just fine, in spite of the fact that I was a Canadian and my government had recently arrested Mr. X was there with us, slouching in his chair, wearing his navy blue overalls. What he made of all this was anyone’s guess; he never said a word.
After the tour and the meeting with the manager had ended, we had 30 minutes in which to eat before our next appointment. We went to a nondescript cafe above a supermarket. Service was very slow, and although most of us only ordered grilled cheese sandwiches and a bowl of soup, they took ages to arrive. Ever punctual, I gobbled mine up, and was ready to pay my bill by around 1:55 PM. But I was amazed to hear my colleagues, some of whom were on their second sandwich, discussing desert! I could not believe my ears! Sure enough, four of them ordered home-made chocolate cake. By the time we got out of there it must have been 2:15 PM, with the result that we arrived twenty minutes late for our appointment at the maritime training institute.
The Director, a Brit, looked somewhat peeved as we came in the door, and rightly so; one of his subordinates had seen us enter the cafe earlier, so he knew where we were. For my part, I was simply flabbergasted that a bunch of professionals would put their desert ahead of a business appointment. A day like this in Luderitz was costing the European Union, who paid all the bills, about US $8000 in fees and other expenses, not to mention the cost of the Cessna. We only had about two hours to go before we had to get back on the plane, so time was of the essence. But these turkeys I was with did not seem to give a damn. After our institute meeting we scooted over to the fisheries research institute, where a bright young South African marine biologist filled me in on the threats to the rock lobster fishery posed by offshore diamond mining. It appears that this kind of mining involves raking the sandy bottom of the ocean, sifting through it to find diamonds, then returning the dredged spoils to the sea. The government, which has a fifty-fifty interest in the project with De Beers, the South African mining giant, claims the operation is harmless to the fishery, but the fisher people say otherwise.
At four fifteen we had to cut our last meeting short and trundle off to the airport again for the flight back to Windhoek. There was dead silence all the way. The vagaries of international consulting! That evening, we had our usual meal in the Spur restaurant, which by this time I was completely fed up with; but, there was an unwritten rule in this group that we should all eat together whenever possible.
Within another couple of days, we were off to the coast again, this time in our van. Our destination: Walvis Bay, principal port city, and Swapokmund, resort town just north of it. From there we would head south by plane for South Africa. The ride through the desert was a lovely one. There were plenty of impressive sights, including the famous Spitzkoppe mountain jutting out of nowhere; at 1829 metres high, it is also known as the Matterhorn of Namibia. The distance between Windhoek and Walvis Bay is about 325 kms, and the trip took us about 4 hours. Our van was a VW, without any guts, and we had quite a load, being at total of six passengers, with tons of luggage. Walvis Bay itself turned out to be a big surprise. I had known that it was an important port which had for a long time been a semi-enclave of South Africa. I also knew that it was the centre for the thriving Namibian fishing industry. What sets Walvis Bay apart is the fact that it is the only developed deep water port along the Namibian coast. It had great strategic significance for South Africa, which used it as the railhead for its own bulk imports and exports.
The port area of Walvis Bay is predictably utilitarian and industrial. What really surprised me about the community adjoining it, however, was how neat and tidy everything was. The town is laid out in a grid pattern, the streets are quite wide, and there is a very nice mix of shops, cafés, and bungalow-style housing. Overall, there is an air of middle class comfort and prosperity about the place. All except for the black township of Kuisepmund, which lies just outside of Walvis Bay, beside the road to Swapokmund. Kuisepmund is a reminder that you can create your own country, but you cannot eliminate poverty and discrimination overnight. Beyond the port area, there were beaches to the north and a lovely boardwalk to the south. Early each morning while I was there, I would get up and go to the mudflats at low tide to see thousands upon thousands of flamingos; but come back an hour later and almost all of them would be gone, scared off by photographers who had got a little too close, I presume. Given this and a wide assortment of other seabirds, I was disheartened to learn from the port captain that Walvis Bay was sadly deficient in oil spill prevention and response capability. Steps were being taken to rectify this deplorable situation, but there had already been several incidents involving tanker discharges, whether accidental or deliberate. Thus, as part of my report I recommended an oil spill response component, not just for Namibia, but the whole SADC region. The rationale for inclusion of such a component in what was essentially a fisheries project was that urgent steps were required to protect and preserve the fishery from pollutants such as hydrocarbons.
Unfortunately, many African coastal countries fail to take the threat of marine oil spills seriously. This is partly because few of them have much of a maritime tradition. Even the port captain, however, displayed ignorance of the true extent of the threat. He, like many others I met, was of the view that all of the supertankers going up the west coast of Africa navigate outside the 200 mile zone, and that in the event of a spill the oil would move out to sea rather than towards the coast. I asked Jurgen, our Danish fisheries patrol expert, to check this out with some fish captains he was meeting; the word that came back was that supertankers were regularly spotted on the fishing grounds just forty nautical miles from shore. And when I looked at some oceanographic charts of the Namibian coastal zone, I noted that at that distance the prevailing currents would bring the oil towards the shore. This was a good example of the flawed way of thinking: “Out of sight, out of mind”.
Our lodgings in Walvis Bay were quite a ways outside of town, in a holiday camp owned by a Boer. This was the first real Boer I ever had the pleasure of meeting. The term “Boer” has an unfortunate connotation, for me at least. For not only is it synonymous with apartheid; it also sounds like ‘bore’ in English, or, for that matter, ‘boar’. Whenever I hear the term, I immediately conjure up images of barnyard animals, as in ‘wild boar’. Imagine my delight, therefore, when I learn that ‘Boer’ is Afrikaans for ‘farmer’. You see Boer all over the place in Windhoek and Walvis Bay. You can spot a Boer a mile away. First of all, a Boer male is typically dressed in khaki from head to toe, as if he were in the Army or the boy scouts. Moreover, your average Boer will usually sport a beard. And finally, he will invariably have this enormous beer tumour spilling out over his shorts. If this has not provided the reader with an image of a typical Boer, then I urge you to thing of Eugene Terreblanche, the former right wing Boer leader in South Africa, now serving time in jail for atrocities against blacks.
Boers are legendary for two things above all: their stupidity and their pigheadedness. My first Boer certainly looked stupid. In actual fact, he turned out to be quite a nice fellow, although the accommodation we rented from him were substandard, with little privacy, a faulty shower, and ants everywhere. The best that could be said about our digs was that they were cheap: dirt cheap in fact. They were located on the outskirts of town, not far from a lovely boardwalk where I would go to watch the flamingoes each morning just after sunrise; thousands upon thousands of them would be feeding there at the crack of dawn. I am sure it is just a coincidence, but ‘flamingo’ is the nickname for people of Flemish origin, who are of course Belgian cousins of the Boers. By nine o’clock there would be hardly a trace of the flock of flamingoes. Presumably they would be scared off by humans and motor traffic, or perhaps this was just part of their daily routine.
In Walvis Bay we were briefed on Namibia’s fisheries surveillance efforts by a very serious black man in a naval uniform. He was in charge of the whole operation, and he was quite impressive, but he talked far too loud. Sweat dripped from his brow; he must have been incredibly nervous. I felt rather sorry for the man, for he seemed to take our mission very seriously. It was almost as if his job depended on the success of his presentation. Our group had only been together for less than a week, but I could already see that the wheels were going to fall off at some point. I seemed to be the only member of our party who knew how to ask a straight question so as to get the kind of information we needed. All Martina seemed capable of doing was to present burdensome demands for tons of documentation. Invariably she would begin by berating our hosts for not complying with a written demand, sent in advance, for material; hardly a way to get these people, many of whom did not even have access to a fax machine, to cooperate. As for our esteemed leader, the man from Eire, by this time his blarney was well honed. He would begin each meeting with a rambling, incoherent soliloquy as to what our mission was all about. Maybe the locals understood it, but I sure didn’t. I was beginning to see why I was expected to be de facto team leader; for this man had serious problems getting his words out.
Of the five countries I visited on this mission, this was the only one that mounted any creditable effort to control and manage the fishery, at least in terms of patrol vessels, inspections, etc. All the others talked a good talk, but in reality had little operational capability. The problem was, though, that like many other fishing nations, developed coastal states included, Namibia had let out to many licences, to the point where some species were seriously depleted. High ranking government officials were suspected of pocketing kickbacks in return for according licenses. Namibia did, however, spend a respectable amount of money on fisheries research, as we found out when we visited the country’s main oceanographic institute cum fisheries research station at Swapokmund, located about fifteen kilometres up the coast from Walvis Bay. The town used to be the base from which SWAPO ( South West Africa People’s Organisation ) launched their attacks on South African controlled Walvis Bay. It looks like a little Walvis Bay, though quite a bit more touristy. There are quite a few cafes and boutiques lining the main streets. There is even a casino. But, there is little if any industry other than tourism.
We made two or three trips to Swapokmund from Walvis Bay in order to visit the oceanographic institute and talk to fisheries scientists. What struck me about the research station was what a gigantic boondoggle it was. Spanking new and two thirds empty, it occupied a prominent place along the beach. The building itself was ultramodern and conspicuously well-appointed. In all honesty, I could not believe how lavish it was, particularly for a country with such a low standard of living. I understood that fisheries and oceans were considered a priority for Namibia in its development plan, but I asked myself how the country could afford such an expensive building. This was the question I put to the chap who ‘greeted’ us in one of the labs, a solemn-looking young Icelandic oceanographer by the name of Stefan ? It turns out that the institute was a gift of the people of Iceland. I was absolutely amazed to find that a country so small as Iceland, with only about 200,000 inhabitants, could afford to donate such a structure to another small country half-way around the world. Ole, the Icelander seconded to our team, explained to me that his country had unofficially adopted Namibia as a sort of ‘twin country’.
What a good idea, I thought, instead of doing what my own country, Canada does, which is spread the money thinly across many countries. Namibia would also, no doubt, make a nice place to visit during the bleak Nordic winter, or Canadian winter, for that matter! Nevertheless, the institute still seemed like an enormous waste of money, what with a fancy library and modern imported furniture, including expensive leather chairs in the boardroom. In other countries I was to visit I saw similar evidence of waste, usually on the part of Nordic countries, who have played an important role in the southern African region since the days of the struggle against apartheid. And then I remembered Graham Hancock’s depressing book Lords of Poverty, which documented dozens of failed foreign aid projects; he singled out the Nordic countries as having the worst record of all when it came to boondoggles. These countries tend to practice an inflexible, top-down approach to development.
Stefan, the stern-faced Icelandic oceanographer who greeted us at the Institute turned out to be an extremely personable fellow. He had the entire project team over to his house one night for a buffet. He was living with a lovely black Namibian lady in a tidy little bungalow in Walvis Bay; they had two very cute kids as well. Just about everyone was in a very relaxed mood; jazz music played in the background and the wine was flowing. Everyone, that is, except Ole, who got totally pissed and insisted on talking shop all evening. He just wouldn’t shut up! Amazingly, though, he was there the next morning for the ride back to Swapokmund for further meetings at the Institute.
I found these indoor meetings throughout our trip excruciating. All I really wanted to do was to be outside and walk along the beach. At the Swapokmund institute in particular, the beach was lovely; enormous breakers were crashing against the shore. There was a lovely, salty spray above the cafe au lait-coloured sand. But here we were, holed up inside, having a rather tedious meeting with the newly-appointed director of the institute, a Dr. Van Zyl, followed by others with fisheries researchers. What really got to me, however, was the fact that after three or four hours of meetings in the morning, the whole group trundled off to a rather fancy restaurant for lunch. The location and the view were spectacular, but all I really wanted to do was walk or run along that beach. This was a fisheries mission, these were all fisheries specialists, but no one showed the slightest interest at any time in going for a walk along a beach. Normally I would have just gone off and done my own thing, but I felt that I had to go along with the group for the sake of preserving group solidarity. I was beginning to realise that this whole trip was about work, and that any enjoyment I might get out of it was probably going to be purely accidental. This is not to say, however, that there were not meetings that I did enjoy. On the contrary, I got to meet many interesting people on the mission, and I learned an awful lot. It’s just that there was very little private time; everything, and I mean everything, was done together, and so much time was wasted sitting in god-awful restaurants.
As we crammed into a propeller-driven airplane at Swapokmund airport for the two hour flight to Cape Town, I was reasonably happy with the way things had gone. Namibia was a great place to take my first dip into southern Africa. I was quite impressed by what I saw, on the whole. This is a beautiful country, with lots of resources, and tons of empty space just waiting to be filled. Obviously, the country is not without its problems, but at least this is one place in Africa where there is an abundance of hope. Flying over the southern part of the country, along the coast, the vast diamond mining area, where public access is prohibited, was clearly visible. The diamonds here are being mined in a joint venture between De Beers and Namdev, a state-owned company. So, hopefully, the Namibian people will somehow benefit from enterprises like this. I couldn’t help but think that my South African friend on the flight from Frankfurt was mis-informed when he boldly proclaimed: “We’re in control there!” At best, he was only half right.
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