Chris Smith’s blog

The World Cup has finally begun (read my new South Africa piece here, starting at pg. 71), and in honor of the globe’s most popular game, I’ve compiled a quick portfolio of soccer-related photos from Africa and the Middle East. You can see most of these images, in larger form, on Flickr.

Pimville, Soweto, South Africa, 2009.

Midan Hussein, Cairo, Egypt, 2000. I took this photo of an impromptu midnight game during Ramadan.

Maputo, Mozambique, 2002.

Colesberg, Northern Cape, South Africa, 2002. Note the color differential between players and coaches. It's the same with many of Africa's national teams today.

Gaza City, Gaza, 2001. I took this photograph in Beach Refugee camp, close to the Mediterranean but locked away from the world. Things were bad then, during the second Intifada. Things are worse now.

Atar, Mauritania, 2007. Mauritania is an insular place, and most people don't go out of their way to make you feel welcome. These kids were the exception.

Soccer field, Jabulani, Soweto, South Africa, 2006.

Note for note, Sudan produces some of the most infectiously happy-sounding music I’ve ever heard. Maybe it’s the country’s position at the fulcrum of Africa, its mixing of North and South, East and West, Arab and sub-Saharan Africa. All of these influences–the pentatonic scales, the brass and strings, the crisp percussion and soaring, crooning vocals–are on display in this clip by the legendary Mohammed Wardi, recorded during a concert he played in Addis Ababa in the 1990s. Wardi, who was a teacher until Sudanese state radio plucked him out of obscurity in the 1950s, has seen more than his share of hardship–he spent years in prison, then went into exile for pissing off the thugs who pass themselves off as Sudan’s legitimate government–but you wouldn’t know it from this clip.

I’ve never seen Wardi play live, but I have seen another Sudanese legend, a guitarist and singer named Sharhabeel Ahmed (naturally, he has a Facebook page), when I was working in Cairo about ten years ago. He played a free show somewhere in Gezira, I think, to an open-air courtyard stuffed front to back with Sudanese. Cairo, of course, has a huge population of Sudanese–workers, refugees, exiles of all sorts–and it seemed like they all came out on this hot July night. Ahmed wore a galabeyah, his guitar slung over his shoulder, something of the wise old man about him. His band was tight, the sound sugary and kind of liquid in the heat. The guys around me were losing their minds. Near the end of the show, he played one of his signature songs (if memory serves, it’s El Leil El Hady) and the place went nuts. After he finished the song, the crowd continued to chant the chorus, a wave rolling across the courtyard.

Then Ahmed did something I’ve never seen a musician do, before or since: He played the song again, note for note. And the crowd went crazy all over again.

So check it out for yourself: This stuff positively buzzes with joy.

Out this month in California magazine, my piece on Mauritania (.pdf), possibly the single strangest place I’ve ever visited.

Outside our windows the desert is silent, malevolently hot, and virtually empty. Every so often, though, we see things: knots of camels grazing the scrubland; hulks of cars left for dead by the roadside, their skeletons filling with sand; wraithlike men engaged in the Sisyphean task of sweeping the blowing sands off the blacktop.

…

The man driving the Land Cruiser has seen it all before. Our guide is a whippetlike man of indeterminate age. His face is deeply lined; a meticulously cared for goatee frames his mouth. Like everyone else we’ve met in Mauritania, Sidi Al Moktar is taciturn to the point of caricature. He is a font of knowledge about camels–how long they can go without drinking, how far they can walk without resting. About almost everything else, he’s mum.

You can read the whole thing here, and here’s a link to some of my Mauritanian photography.

The news of a terrorist bombing outside Hussein Mosque in Cairo hit close to home. Back when I worked there, I spent a lot of time wandering the alleys of Islamic Cairo (as it’s sometimes called), a portion of the city so ancient that buildings from the 16th century are generally considered “new.” At the end of 2000, I was working on a photo project for grad school, and spending more or less all of my time down there. It was the month of Ramadan, and you’re not supposed to eat or drink from sunrise to sunset, so most people lie low during the day (it’s not uncommon to see office workers sleeping under their desks) and stay up for most of the night, eating a big meal at three or four in the morning. Midan Hussein, which is near both the famous Khan Al Khalili bazaar and a bunch of local markets, is always pretty busy. But on those Ramadan nights it just pulsed with life: every cafe was full, and huge banquet tables were set up in the square, overflowing with families celebrating the holidays. As a foreigner whose command of Arabic was limited to pleasantries and directions, I was humbled by the friendliness of virtually everybody I met (this was, of course, before George W. Bush took office–lots of people were actually excited about him, believing that he would follow his father, who was tougher on Israel than most recent presidents). People invited me to eat with them, plied me with tea, held their children out for my admiration; I remember a long, midnight conversation with a bunch of Islamist students from Tanta, the Egyptian Fresno. We talked about faith and TV shows.

All told, it was a peaceful time in Cairo. The government had pretty much crushed the Islamist insurgency of the 1990s, going so far as to burn the fields in the Nile Valley to deny its enemies cover. But these things don’t so much die as simply burrow underground, only to reemerge later. Egypt is a dictatorship (witness the saidi soldiers on every street corner), and so long as that doesn’t change, nothing else will: its citizens will get poorer and angrier, and the insurgencies will reappear, just as brutal as ever. And yesterday the tourists in Midan Hussein paid the price.