Timbuktu
(From the upcoming 4xAfrica show at Rayko SF. Click on the image for a larger version.)
Teenager at the Grand Market. Timbuktu, Mali, 2007.
Legendary places rarely conform to expectations. The pyramids in Giza are just as massive as you’d think but, at the same time, they’re strangely underwhelming, as if decades of camera-toting visitors had robbed them of their power.
Timbuktu—shorthand for back of beyond—is just as satisfyingly remote as you might hope, a dun-colored labyrinth on the edge of the Sahara. It’s been a bad couple of years for Timbuktu, though. There’s the global financial crisis—getting to northern Mali is neither easy nor cheap. Worse, Colombian cartels now ship drugs to Europe via West Africa, and Timbuktu, at the crossroads where Mali, Algeria, and Mauritania meet, is a prime spot on the smugglers’ route. There is also the regional Al Qaeda franchise, which has set up camp in the lawless deserts north of the city. They’ve kidnapped or killed both Westerners and locals. Just after New Year’s, a bomber hit the French embassy in Mali’s capital, Bamako.
Local friends tell me that much of the violence (such as the murder of a cop in the center of Timbuktu a couple of years ago) is just criminal score-settling, nothing political about it. Washington, D.C. appears to think otherwise. Special Forces teams are training the Malian army in counterinsurgency, along with the “hearts and minds” work of inoculating children and meeting with village elders. Indeed, the U.S. presence is small, but it’s noticeable. At the airport in Bamako, I watched an unmarked, narwhal-gray transport plane taxi to a stop the next runway over. The men who emerged had a distinctively American swagger, little flags on their flight suits.
First we buy the meat, a pile of spicy red sausage, at a strip-mall butcher shop. Then we get the beer, lugging it past an armed guard at the door who zealously tears our receipt. Then the grilling commences, at a public fire-pit on the grassy verge separating the mall parking lot and the main road, which cuts through northern Soweto in a roar of honking minibuses. Hip hop and local house music blare from one of our cars. We eat and drink under the highveld sun.
My friend Tumi turns to me. “The first time you came here, were you expecting lions and tigers?” he jokes.
Take Soweto, the largest of South Africa’s black townships, 20 miles south of Johannesburg and home to some 4 million people. It is a geography of extremes. Some neighborhoods are filled with tin-roofed squatter shacks, where people get their water from communal standpipes and filch electricity from the main grid. But it is also a place of crisp, modern housing complexes bristling with satellite dishes and monolithic new fieldstone-and-glass shopping malls. There are banks, luxury shops, and cafes where young professionals peck away on Macbooks.
Indeed, what used to be an undifferentiated grey mass on apartheid-era maps, a warehouse to store Johannesburg’s black labor between working hours, has become a city in its own right. And Soweto is now part of a nearly unbroken strip of office towers, low-rise suburbs, and shantytowns stretching from southern Johannesburg to Pretoria, 30 miles away. Maybe 9 million people live here now, and more arrive every day in search of opportunities the countryside can’t provide. They call it Egoli, or City of Gold.
My friends come from these places. Zé was working for a rental car company in Maputo, Mozambique, when I met him, and living in a decrepit Chinese-built skyscraper in the capital. The elevator hadn’t worked for years, so he trudged up and down the 14 floors to his apartment in the subtropical heat. Dale, a 32-year-old political organizer and jack-of-all trades, grew up in Lusaka, Zambia, part of the first generation of Zambians to be born in cities in large numbers. He sometimes goes out to his father’s small wildcat mine “in the bush,” as he calls it, and I get the sense that it’s almost as much an adventure for him as it would be for me.
Urbanization, of course, brings with it a loss of tradition. Many of us have seen the news reports about Masai warriors working as night watchmen in Nairobi. But some of the old ways endure. There’s an African concept called ubuntu, meaning that one’s identity is bound to that of the family and the neighborhood. More or less, ubuntu enjoins people to look out for one another. In South Africa, it staved off the collapse of black society under apartheid. What the concept means nowadays for my friends is responsibility. These guys hold up the sky for everyone around them. Thami, a 30-year-old activist in Soweto, supports his son, his girlfriend, his mother, and her two teenage daughters by another father. Plus, because he has a job, every corner kid hits him up for cash. They call him a “cheeseboy,” and sometimes threaten him if he doesn’t cough up beer money.
Years ago, Thami’s elders marched in the streets, firebombed buildings, and at great cost won political freedom. Unlike their fathers and grandfathers, whose lives were largely defined by the anti-apartheid struggle, guys like Thami face different challenges. Unemployment in Soweto is estimated at 40 percent, so everybody has to hustle. Most everyone is an entrepreneur of some sort: door-to-door salesman, restaurateur, even car thief.
Back at the barbecue, the bottles are piling up. Thami proposes a toast of sorts. “Sometimes when it gets too hard I think of how far I’ve come,” he says. “Just staying alive until now is something to celebrate.” He raises his beer.
I’ve always been obsessed with music. When I was a kid, I eagerly awaited each new Rolling Stone and Creem magazine, even though I didn’t necessarily understand the record-geek Aramaic in which they were written. (What’s an 11-year-old to make of a sentence that name-checks both Camus and Ozzy Osbourne?) It hardly mattered, though. It was a wide new world.
I’ll be reading some of my stuff at Litquake Saturday night, at one of the stops on the (apparently notorious) Lit Crawl. The event is called Where Travel Can Take You, sponsored by 
