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The virtual tour of Africa V
Mali
Half arid Sahara, half tropical savanna with a sahel area in between. Timbuktu is here! And the tomb of Askia the Great, AND the world's biggest mud-mosque. The Niger river is the main populated area, and iit mostly produces cotton and gold
We found another documentary with Zeinab Badawe about the Ghana Empire of the 6th- 11th century which confusingly was located mostly in Mali and Mauretania rather than modern Ghana. Notable for its gold-trading across the Sahara - copper was actually more expensive there than gold. Salt was traded weight for weight with gold. Basically, more gold than you can shake a stick at. And then the successor Mali empire, which included quite a bit of Senegal.
1236 - the Mande charter. Pp noted the closeness in time to the Magna Carta of England.
Mansa Musa! Famous richest man in the World. with 60,000 servants carrying gold staffs.
We met via youtube a Griot, a Kora-player, who spoke about the role of griots as I suppose, bards that keep history alive.
The Songhai empire succeeded the Mali empire, growing along the Niger river as a trading-boat-civilisation. We ran into the Songhai empire a lot in subsequent countries, they seem to have been a pretty lethal bunch.
Lots of mud buildings and manuscripts in Timbuktu, which is in the dry northern part of the country.
In the wet southern part, the capital ,Bamako, has some very weird modern architecture, including the Tower of Africa, and the Pyramid, which has some very iffy-looking windows.
Cape Verde
First settled as a Portuguese trading point and prospered due to the slave trade. When the slave trade was abolished, it was an economic disaster for the islands which were underfunded after that, and not able to supply themselves without imports. Sucks for the remaining people (including slaves) left on the islands. They scraped a living supplying whaling ships, which explains why there is a huge Cape Verdean diaspora at whaling ports around the world.
Eastern islands are dryer due to the Sahara winds, western ones are wetter, most of the population are mixed Portuguese and African of various origins.
Close links with Guinea-Bissau on the mainland. Went one-party communist for a bit, but gave it up for democracy after the fall of the Soviet union. Now seems to be a stable democracy with a good tourist trade, though the islands are still pretty poor. Still, one of the most prosperous and educated African nations despite lack of natural resources (other than people: diaspora sending money home seems to be a good earner)
Guinea-Bissau
A giant forested river estuary around the river Geba, and a whole bunch of islands (Bijagos islands! a hotbed of cocaine smuggling, apparently). Vast grower of cashew nuts : most of the population are poor agricultural workers and super young,. I want to know more about the pedecessor Gabu state.
Officially Portuguese speaking. Longest time in the world to register a business (33 weeks)
Slaves, gold & salt - a Mandinka empire. Nice to see the Mandinka putting an actual empire together as in previous countries they seem to have been fodder for the slave trade.
Best friends with Cape Verde, also a Portuguese colony. War of independence - like Cape Verde
We found a random African youtuber who gave us a brief tour of Bissau, the capital. It seemed a not unpleasant small city which weirdly reminded me of Exeter, which is also a slightly dull small city. If you gave Exeter a bunch of palm trees and made the inhabitants black, you'd have something that well, OK, would not be exactly like Bissau, but would be more like it than I was expecting.
The youtuber gave me a clear idea that Amilcar Cabral is someone very important I need to know more about, so we went to find out about him, and learned that he was an agricultural engineer and philosopher who led Guinea-Bissau to independence.
The Bijagos islands, about 3 hours from the mainland, seemed terrifically beautiful and are a protected nature reserve where the local people are traditionally ruled and organised by women. Men are fishers, but otherwise have fewer responsibilities - the youtube documentary said they had a status like children, but since we didn't hear from either the male or female viewpoints I'm taking that bit with a pinch of salt.
Guinea
Apparently the reason so many places are called Guinea is that it's derived from a word meaning 'black' in a language of the Berbers. This Guinea was a French colony, Guinea-Bissau being the Portuguese one next door, and it's sometimes called Guinea-Conakry after the name of the capital city.
The Guineans voted for full independence from France in 1958, the first time they were asked : this is a contrast to other French colonies that decolonised more gradually, and it sounds like the French took it badly, taking the lightbulbs with them as they left(!) and burning medicines rather than leaving them behind. Perhaps not surprising Guinea aligned with the Soviet Union for a while afterwards.
As if they didn't have enough trouble with various coups, Guinea is where Ebola got started. That at least seems to have been dealt with (I hope?) but they had a military coup in 2021, and 95% of the women in the country have undergone female genital mutilation. Guinea is also one of the wettest countries in the world, the roads are mostly mud and police corruption seems to be endemic and particularly nightmarish there.
Has a thriving bauxite / aluminium industry but that doesn't seem to have helped their economy much.
Surprisingly, we did actually find a youtuber that had visited Guinea, but he was clearly terrified during his 1-day stay and got out of there pronto, and I can't blame him. Still we did get to see some of the markets and people in Conakry. We also watched a video by a young local girl who was trying hard to find good things to say about the place.
Was left with the impression that when Guinea is just dull and moderately prosperous, that's as good as it gets. Still considerably less of a hellhole than the Central African Republic.
Sierra Leone
The documentary reckoned that the democratic government of Sierra Leone had deliberately underfunded its army to try to avoid a military coup. This meant when the RUF rebellion started, the army was in a terrible state and quite unable to stop it. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) seem to have been truly awful in terms of human rights abuses: terrorists in the true sense of people who will mutilate even children to spread fear.
Anyway, the underfunding backfired in that it actually precipitated a coup. And then four more coups, none of which worked until the British army and navy, backed by Nigeria, turned up to provide backup to the government forces which by then had been forced into the few cities and a strip along the coast. Then after that there was Ebola! Blimey, as if that wasn't enough to cope with. But at the moment they have a democratically elected anti-corruption president, even if his re-election in 2023 was possibly a bit iffy.
People wear shower caps to keep off the rain, in Sierra Leone.
Liberia
America's African colony founded to provide a home for freed slaves and free black people, much to the dismay of the people already living in the place. The Liberians seem to have brought a pile of American values back to Liberia... including slavery. A painful irony: being a people who had been subject to racism and slavery, apparently the Liberians arrived in Africa determined to be on the top this time.
We watched a video at a large market, and were impressed by the range of things the women in the video were carrying on their heads. Clothes! Fruit! Packets of random stuff! Oodles of pop bottles! Practically an entire bakery!
Also, motorbikes with umbrellas mounted on them seemed practical for such a rainy country, but impractical for anyone planning to travel much above walking pace, but were clearly a Thing. As were wheelbarrows for moving around generous amounts of food.
Ivory Coast/Côte d'Ivoire
This seemed a topical visit, since there was a news story this morning that a boat sank in the Mediterranean trying to reach Italy from Tunisia, and the four survivors were from the Ivory Coast.
Ivory coast is a relatively prosperous and peaceful country where they grow a lot of cocoa for export. The people are roughly equal parts Christian / Muslim / animist and the area seems to have come off relatively lightly from the slave trade.
We watched a vid from a Cameroonian-American youtuber and his guide, also originally from Cameroon, who had moved to Ivory Coast because of its prosperity. A lot of the video was him at the airport and then both of them stuck on a tarmac road in a traffic jam in the drizzle, and honestly if it wasn't for the odd palm-tree, it could have been Birmingham. Or, as the Youtuber said, Paris. Then he went to a supermarket and bought some French wine.
We watched an economics video comparing Ivory Coast, with a deliberate attempt to invest in businesses and manufacturing, with Ghana, which had a more left-wing approach, and invested more in education. Apparently Ivory Coast grew their economy more successfully.
Apparently 75% of the population work in agriculture, which I think is less than in a lot of West Africa. Still, I can see that if you are stuck working all your life on cocoa farm, Europe might seem to offer tantalising opportunities.
Burkina Faso
We took a break from proceeding along the south coast of West Africa and went a bit north to landlocked Burkina Faso, which is in the dry subsaharan Sahel region. Used to be Upper Volta (Oh, so *that's* where Upper Volta was and what happened to it...)
We found out a little about the Mossi people, and their war with the redoubtable Songhai empire.
BF has recently been much afflicted by islamic terrorism, and there was a coup by the military in January 2022, because they felt the government wasn't doing enough against the terrorists. The new military president was himself thrown down a year later by Ibrahim Traoré, for roughly the same reasons. Traoré is only 34, the youngest president in the world, and a very stern-looking gentleman. There are alleged links with Russia, though I was left with the vague impression that those might be pretty informal, and Traoré is most concerned with dealing with his internal problems without external involvement? He did expel the French advisors of the previous president but there didn't seem to be a lot of evidence he'd replaced them with Russian ones.
Anyway, a sad place with a lot of difficulties and a lot of refugees.
Ghana
Togo
A German colony transferred to France after WWI. One of the smallest African countries, tropical to the south, dryer to the north, and notable for its weird coastline where Benin owns basically a big strip of beach at the bottom of Togo, supposedly because someone in the Benin government had a mistress who lived there and hence ensured the map was drawn so he wouldn't have to cross the border to visit her.
Sometimes the borders of African countries seem utterly arbitrary: with Togo, we got a glimpse of 'it's more complicated than that' in that although the Ewe people live in both Togo and Ghana, when an Ewe state was proposed, all the people who would have ended up as minorities in a Ewe state were strongly against that. Sometimes it seems like there's no good place for a border....
Another nation with a dark past in slave trading and enforced cotton, coffee, and cocoa farming. Thriving phosphate industry, and increasing service sector, though very little tourism.
Oh, and a mixed religious setup with Christians, Muslims and Voodoo believers all living side by side and doing a certain amount of judicious blending. They pretty much all drink alcohol and there are even bars named after Mohammed.
A popular food includes fried cheese. No word on whether Togo has a dairy industry or imports the cheese to fry.
Closed its railways in the 90's, after building roads. Joined the Commonweath in 2022. I'd like to know more about how that's panning out for them.
Next; the other famous African Voodoo country, Benin.
Half arid Sahara, half tropical savanna with a sahel area in between. Timbuktu is here! And the tomb of Askia the Great, AND the world's biggest mud-mosque. The Niger river is the main populated area, and iit mostly produces cotton and gold
We found another documentary with Zeinab Badawe about the Ghana Empire of the 6th- 11th century which confusingly was located mostly in Mali and Mauretania rather than modern Ghana. Notable for its gold-trading across the Sahara - copper was actually more expensive there than gold. Salt was traded weight for weight with gold. Basically, more gold than you can shake a stick at. And then the successor Mali empire, which included quite a bit of Senegal.
1236 - the Mande charter. Pp noted the closeness in time to the Magna Carta of England.
Mansa Musa! Famous richest man in the World. with 60,000 servants carrying gold staffs.
We met via youtube a Griot, a Kora-player, who spoke about the role of griots as I suppose, bards that keep history alive.
The Songhai empire succeeded the Mali empire, growing along the Niger river as a trading-boat-civilisation. We ran into the Songhai empire a lot in subsequent countries, they seem to have been a pretty lethal bunch.
Lots of mud buildings and manuscripts in Timbuktu, which is in the dry northern part of the country.
In the wet southern part, the capital ,Bamako, has some very weird modern architecture, including the Tower of Africa, and the Pyramid, which has some very iffy-looking windows.
Cape Verde
First settled as a Portuguese trading point and prospered due to the slave trade. When the slave trade was abolished, it was an economic disaster for the islands which were underfunded after that, and not able to supply themselves without imports. Sucks for the remaining people (including slaves) left on the islands. They scraped a living supplying whaling ships, which explains why there is a huge Cape Verdean diaspora at whaling ports around the world.
Eastern islands are dryer due to the Sahara winds, western ones are wetter, most of the population are mixed Portuguese and African of various origins.
Close links with Guinea-Bissau on the mainland. Went one-party communist for a bit, but gave it up for democracy after the fall of the Soviet union. Now seems to be a stable democracy with a good tourist trade, though the islands are still pretty poor. Still, one of the most prosperous and educated African nations despite lack of natural resources (other than people: diaspora sending money home seems to be a good earner)
Guinea-Bissau
A giant forested river estuary around the river Geba, and a whole bunch of islands (Bijagos islands! a hotbed of cocaine smuggling, apparently). Vast grower of cashew nuts : most of the population are poor agricultural workers and super young,. I want to know more about the pedecessor Gabu state.
Officially Portuguese speaking. Longest time in the world to register a business (33 weeks)
Slaves, gold & salt - a Mandinka empire. Nice to see the Mandinka putting an actual empire together as in previous countries they seem to have been fodder for the slave trade.
Best friends with Cape Verde, also a Portuguese colony. War of independence - like Cape Verde
We found a random African youtuber who gave us a brief tour of Bissau, the capital. It seemed a not unpleasant small city which weirdly reminded me of Exeter, which is also a slightly dull small city. If you gave Exeter a bunch of palm trees and made the inhabitants black, you'd have something that well, OK, would not be exactly like Bissau, but would be more like it than I was expecting.
The youtuber gave me a clear idea that Amilcar Cabral is someone very important I need to know more about, so we went to find out about him, and learned that he was an agricultural engineer and philosopher who led Guinea-Bissau to independence.
The Bijagos islands, about 3 hours from the mainland, seemed terrifically beautiful and are a protected nature reserve where the local people are traditionally ruled and organised by women. Men are fishers, but otherwise have fewer responsibilities - the youtube documentary said they had a status like children, but since we didn't hear from either the male or female viewpoints I'm taking that bit with a pinch of salt.
Guinea
Apparently the reason so many places are called Guinea is that it's derived from a word meaning 'black' in a language of the Berbers. This Guinea was a French colony, Guinea-Bissau being the Portuguese one next door, and it's sometimes called Guinea-Conakry after the name of the capital city.
The Guineans voted for full independence from France in 1958, the first time they were asked : this is a contrast to other French colonies that decolonised more gradually, and it sounds like the French took it badly, taking the lightbulbs with them as they left(!) and burning medicines rather than leaving them behind. Perhaps not surprising Guinea aligned with the Soviet Union for a while afterwards.
As if they didn't have enough trouble with various coups, Guinea is where Ebola got started. That at least seems to have been dealt with (I hope?) but they had a military coup in 2021, and 95% of the women in the country have undergone female genital mutilation. Guinea is also one of the wettest countries in the world, the roads are mostly mud and police corruption seems to be endemic and particularly nightmarish there.
Has a thriving bauxite / aluminium industry but that doesn't seem to have helped their economy much.
Surprisingly, we did actually find a youtuber that had visited Guinea, but he was clearly terrified during his 1-day stay and got out of there pronto, and I can't blame him. Still we did get to see some of the markets and people in Conakry. We also watched a video by a young local girl who was trying hard to find good things to say about the place.
Was left with the impression that when Guinea is just dull and moderately prosperous, that's as good as it gets. Still considerably less of a hellhole than the Central African Republic.
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone is like the British version of Liberia: a colony established to provide a home for ex-slaves, the Black Poor of London, a group who had joined the British military forces during the American Revolutionary War and later evacuated to London, and then Africa (under awful conditions), and others that came from Nova Scotia, and eventually, once the British abolished slavery, where they dropped off slaves from any intercepted slaving ships.
Like Guinea notable for aluminium and Ebola, also for blood diamonds. We watched a documentary about the Sierra Leone Civil War, and the British-led UN intervention in 2000, Operation Palliser. I feel I should have remembered something about this, but I fear I don't.
The documentary reckoned that the democratic government of Sierra Leone had deliberately underfunded its army to try to avoid a military coup. This meant when the RUF rebellion started, the army was in a terrible state and quite unable to stop it. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) seem to have been truly awful in terms of human rights abuses: terrorists in the true sense of people who will mutilate even children to spread fear.
Anyway, the underfunding backfired in that it actually precipitated a coup. And then four more coups, none of which worked until the British army and navy, backed by Nigeria, turned up to provide backup to the government forces which by then had been forced into the few cities and a strip along the coast. Then after that there was Ebola! Blimey, as if that wasn't enough to cope with. But at the moment they have a democratically elected anti-corruption president, even if his re-election in 2023 was possibly a bit iffy.
People wear shower caps to keep off the rain, in Sierra Leone.
Liberia
America's African colony founded to provide a home for freed slaves and free black people, much to the dismay of the people already living in the place. The Liberians seem to have brought a pile of American values back to Liberia... including slavery. A painful irony: being a people who had been subject to racism and slavery, apparently the Liberians arrived in Africa determined to be on the top this time.
We watched a video at a large market, and were impressed by the range of things the women in the video were carrying on their heads. Clothes! Fruit! Packets of random stuff! Oodles of pop bottles! Practically an entire bakery!
Also, motorbikes with umbrellas mounted on them seemed practical for such a rainy country, but impractical for anyone planning to travel much above walking pace, but were clearly a Thing. As were wheelbarrows for moving around generous amounts of food.
Ivory Coast/Côte d'Ivoire
This seemed a topical visit, since there was a news story this morning that a boat sank in the Mediterranean trying to reach Italy from Tunisia, and the four survivors were from the Ivory Coast.
Ivory coast is a relatively prosperous and peaceful country where they grow a lot of cocoa for export. The people are roughly equal parts Christian / Muslim / animist and the area seems to have come off relatively lightly from the slave trade.
We watched a vid from a Cameroonian-American youtuber and his guide, also originally from Cameroon, who had moved to Ivory Coast because of its prosperity. A lot of the video was him at the airport and then both of them stuck on a tarmac road in a traffic jam in the drizzle, and honestly if it wasn't for the odd palm-tree, it could have been Birmingham. Or, as the Youtuber said, Paris. Then he went to a supermarket and bought some French wine.
We watched an economics video comparing Ivory Coast, with a deliberate attempt to invest in businesses and manufacturing, with Ghana, which had a more left-wing approach, and invested more in education. Apparently Ivory Coast grew their economy more successfully.
Apparently 75% of the population work in agriculture, which I think is less than in a lot of West Africa. Still, I can see that if you are stuck working all your life on cocoa farm, Europe might seem to offer tantalising opportunities.
Burkina Faso
We took a break from proceeding along the south coast of West Africa and went a bit north to landlocked Burkina Faso, which is in the dry subsaharan Sahel region. Used to be Upper Volta (Oh, so *that's* where Upper Volta was and what happened to it...)
We found out a little about the Mossi people, and their war with the redoubtable Songhai empire.
BF has recently been much afflicted by islamic terrorism, and there was a coup by the military in January 2022, because they felt the government wasn't doing enough against the terrorists. The new military president was himself thrown down a year later by Ibrahim Traoré, for roughly the same reasons. Traoré is only 34, the youngest president in the world, and a very stern-looking gentleman. There are alleged links with Russia, though I was left with the vague impression that those might be pretty informal, and Traoré is most concerned with dealing with his internal problems without external involvement? He did expel the French advisors of the previous president but there didn't seem to be a lot of evidence he'd replaced them with Russian ones.
Anyway, a sad place with a lot of difficulties and a lot of refugees.
Ghana
Ghana seems to be a pleasant and peaceful place. "Entry-level Africa" someone on youtube called it. Portuguese, then briefly Danish, Swedish, German, and then British (the gold was very attractive, apparently!). Now democratic, stable and relatively prosperous by African standards.
Invaded by the fierce horse-warriors the Mole-Dagomba in the early medieval period, followed by the Akans who established gold-trading kingdoms, and eventually the Ashanti Empire, which I've definitely heard of before though I can't remember now in what context. I'd like to know more about the Ashanti Empire, and particularly the War of the Golden Stool between the Ashanti and Britain in 1901.
We watched a video about chocolate production in Ghana: Ghana used to just export huge amounts of cocoa at bargain basement prices to Europe, but is now trying to get into the finished chocolate bar production industry directly, slightly hampered by the fact that Ghana doesn't grow sugar or have much of a dairy industry, and is also hot enough that keeping the chocolate production facilities cool is an issue.
But they do have a fledgeling chocolate industry. I went looking for Ghanaian chocolate, but it only seems to be available wholesale in the UK at the moment. Lots of places sell Ghanaian chocolate in Germany and Switzerland though. Would like to experience Ghanaian chocolate at some point! Also, another country where fufu is a thing, and I've never eaten it. Wonder what that tastes like. We met a food blogger who described a food made from fufu, semolina and sorghum, clearly expecting her viewers to go: Ah! Akan! Why did I never think of combining fufu, semolina and sorghum?! We've never had any of those things and wondered what it might taste like. It looked a bit like mashed potato.
Togo
A German colony transferred to France after WWI. One of the smallest African countries, tropical to the south, dryer to the north, and notable for its weird coastline where Benin owns basically a big strip of beach at the bottom of Togo, supposedly because someone in the Benin government had a mistress who lived there and hence ensured the map was drawn so he wouldn't have to cross the border to visit her.
Sometimes the borders of African countries seem utterly arbitrary: with Togo, we got a glimpse of 'it's more complicated than that' in that although the Ewe people live in both Togo and Ghana, when an Ewe state was proposed, all the people who would have ended up as minorities in a Ewe state were strongly against that. Sometimes it seems like there's no good place for a border....
Another nation with a dark past in slave trading and enforced cotton, coffee, and cocoa farming. Thriving phosphate industry, and increasing service sector, though very little tourism.
Oh, and a mixed religious setup with Christians, Muslims and Voodoo believers all living side by side and doing a certain amount of judicious blending. They pretty much all drink alcohol and there are even bars named after Mohammed.
A popular food includes fried cheese. No word on whether Togo has a dairy industry or imports the cheese to fry.
Closed its railways in the 90's, after building roads. Joined the Commonweath in 2022. I'd like to know more about how that's panning out for them.
Next; the other famous African Voodoo country, Benin.
no subject
Catching up on my virtual Africa tour synopses...
So much of the continent has such a bleak modern history; colonialism introducing immensely different culture and values, not to mention imposing borders that rarely had any any local significance, followed by independence without much guidance on how to operate a modern state (or totally ejecting anyone who had any clue, as happened in Zimbabwe and here) combined with a loss (or distortion, where convenient for personal political purposes) of old cultural traditions, really seems have been a catalyst for some extremely nasty business. That whole "we've been treated like shit, now we're going to get our own back... on people poorer and weaker than us" is such a godawful, yet pervasive, attitude. So immeasurably sad.
My nanny's family was from Ghana, my cousin has been to Timbuktu (she was working with a NGO harnessing rainwater and I'm so envious!) and my ex flew as a pilot with DHL in West Africa. He did not like landing in Conakray and after their first visit they never even left the cockpit. Abidjan in Côte d'Ivore was his favourite.(Great surfing, apparently.)
But reading this I realise I really know extremely little about the history of this area.
Hmph, Mahommed bars. That's hilarious.
no subject
Just as in Europe, I suppose. I wonder if anyone has written anything at a non-specialist level comparing the eastern european experience with the African one. Might look out for that.
Liberia doesn't seem to be doing too badly now, but the historical photos of the black American settlers - all dressed in American-contemporary clothing, sitting down, with their local African slaves naked behind them... ouch.
I read an amazing book about Timbuktu, 'The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu' which, wow, what a place! What a history!
We took a bit of a break from the Virtual Tour of Africa because we had guests visiting, and also because I'm desperately trying to get my TRSB fics completed.
I'm looking forward to getting back into it. We did several more countries before we stopped where I need to tidy up the notes. Maybe I'll do that today so I'm all ready to resume the Tour.