Posted by on October 12, 2017

West Africa, starting in 1989

 

A Mosque in Bamako, Mali

Takoradi, Ghana

Waiting for the Lake Volta Steamer

 

 

After nine years, I had enough of Europe. It was wonderfully civilized, and I enjoyed the people and I especially enjoyed the safe streets. I like to see women out and about at night, walking unconcernedly from pub to subway to apartment with no concerns beyond that which concerns prosperous, secure folk; bad hair days, boyfriend issues, yoga class…

I was getting bored, however. And it was finally too white for me. I grew up, like any American musician, surrounded by black American musicians, the best anywhere. They in fact raised the bar for white musicians as well, and actually made life more interesting. And I had been really really trying to find time to take a long journey into Sub-Saharan Africa. And the only way I could do that would be to pull up “stakes,” disencumber myself of everything but a camera and a rucksack and just go.

So I flew to Moscow, which was then still the capital of the USSR. I couldn’t get anything other than a transit visa, so I was taken to an airport hotel, given a room, and put under the charge of a husky, unsmiling babushka, who sat by the elevator and monitored everybody’s comings and goings. She was remarkably similar to a prison guard, in fact, right down to the blank, expressionless face. The next day, I flew out, changed planes in Libya, where my American passport kept me isolated from absolutely everything except hostile, suspicious soldiers. But I was also treated to the best airline food I have ever had in my life. We took off and landed in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Africa, like the Himalayas, smelled like the planet had before industrialization. Small wood fires, charcoal burning, domestic animals, unlit yet safe streets, food being prepared outdoors, life being lived outdoors, actually. There was very little street crime, except in the designated Tourist Zones. The people on the street were friendly and helpful, if called upon, otherwise they would leave you alone. So you could stroll around without being pestered about chances for their future employment in Pittsburgh, which had made Asia so insufferable.

BURKINA FASO, TOGO

 

A pub in Ouagadougou, one that specialized in pigeon with Escoffier-inspired sauce, 1989

Burkina Faso seemed like it still wanted to be a French colony. French tourists were everywhere, and I landed there during the FESPACO week. I have to say that African films have not impressed me in the way that African music has.

Like every other African ex-colony, Burkina Faso – formerly known as Upper Volta–had undergone a military or at least strongman coup, shortly after emerging as a democratic republic. All over Africa, power was just sitting there, uncertainly, and once the hard guys near the throne felt that their current leader was getting fat and lazy with success—to paraphrase Tom Wolfe, it could break at any seam—why, they took a swing at him. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

The guy in charge when I got there, 1989, was another good-looking fellow, “Handsome Blaise” Campaore, a former captain in the national army and the quintessential Last Man Standing. He was undoubtedly handsome, but in all the other aspects of competent governance he fell well short of the mark. Seizing and then presiding over an economy with 50 percent unemployment, he spent his time fooling around with Quadaffi and jailing his political enemies. He proclaimed that the national slogan, La Patrie ou la morte! Nous Vaincrons! (The Fatherland or Death! We shall Overcome!) would be handwritten on every official and commercial document. It was on billboards all over the country. I hired a guide to an animal reserve, and that’s how he signed the receipt.

As a captain in 1983, along with a tough guy named Thomas Sankora, he toppled the government of the time, itself the product of a coup by another bunch of tough guys. Then, in 1987, he held another coup, forcing Sankara out, whereupon Sankara was “accidentally” killed. Campoare then ruled as part of a triumvirate. Then, as luck would have it, his other two members were convicted of plotting to overthrow the government–that would be the one that they were running–and were executed for treason. I tell you, it’s a jungle out there.

Handsome Blaise ran the country for 27 years, from 1987 to 2014. Among his “accomplishments” were introducing Muammar Quaddaffi to Charles Taylor, the Liberian “rebel” leader and friend of Pat Robertson, who was apparently a very helpful guy for the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) in Sierra Leone. The RUF “fighters” were best known for roaring into villages and chopping everybody’s hands off, just to terrorize, just to destabilize the place, and create a power vacuum that they could step into.

They succeeded, too, at least for a while. Foday Sankoh, their hand-chopper-in-chief, whose other favorite tactics included gang rapes and attacks with names like Operation Pay Yourself, was set up in a handsome house in Freetown and given a high, utterly undeserved government post (vice-president), patently just to get him to stop chopping people’s hands off. Then, not too much later, his bodyguards shot and killed some protestors outside his house. At that point, whatever spark that sizzles through regular Africans that tells them that enough is enough, that the incompetence and injustice out there has suddenly become intolerable and they don’t give a fuck if they get killed or not, kicked in. Residents of Freetown suddenly snapped, charged his house, and Foday scuttled out the back door and hid in the bush.

A few days later, he–and his witch doctor–snuck back out, and somebody recognized him. A mob grabbed him, beat him up, ripped off his clothes, and turned him in. This led to impromptu celebrations all over Freetown, an outburst of joy and relief not dissimilar to V-J Day.

He died in jail, awaiting trial, reportedly of a stroke. It could be true, or somebody could have forced some ground glass down his throat. Either one was far too good for him.

I like to think that the last thought going through his head was, “I shoulda settled for postmaster general.”

As for Handsome Blaise, he is currently on trial in absentia for some 24 murders his security forces allegedly carried out against protestors during the time that the same sort of popular revolt that drove him out, another familiar feature of African politics.

 

Blacksmiths, Burkina Faso

Togo was once a German colony, snatched up in the 19th century scramble for Africa, and snatched away by France after WWI. I walked into a pub full of husky blonde guys, with German language books on the shelves. I had gone in to ask directions to a nearby village named Avepojo, which featured all-day drumming on Sundays. I asked about it, in German, and got polite and accurate directions in the same language, without the slightest bit of curiosity about total strangers popping into a West African pub and speaking a language that perhaps 0.0001 percent of the population speaks.

The village and the drumming were all that I could have hoped for, and I think it’s still a Sunday tradition. If you happen to be in the area, don’t miss it.

I had taken a bus out of Ouagadougou through all of Burkina Faso, somewhat sick and uncomfortable, and the border guards between the two countries were assholes. Border guards often are. They kept sneering at my bad French and the fact that I hadn’t put a hundred dollar bill inside my passport when I handed it to them. What kind of rich American are you, they kept asking. Or at least I think that’s what they were asking.

They decided to put me through some bother; they held up the bus and started going meticulously through every pocket and cranny of my bags. Suddenly one of them stopped cold. He called his colleagues over and pointed to something. It was my book of photos. Photos of other lands.

I never travel without at least two or three such books. I had learned how important that was on a train from Vienna to Venice a couple of years back. I shared a compartment with an old Wehrmacht grunt, a guy who had been an infantryman for Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s idiot invasion of Russia. He had snapshots of this debacle. And without passing judgment on him, I had to admit that the pix were as fascinating as any other piece of legitimate history can be. I didn’t have any pix of Nepal or Burma or Detroit, and when he asked me to show him something from my collection, I had nothing. Never again, sez I.

So, what I had going into Togo were a couple of photo albums, which included some pictures of street life in Harlem. These African guys were stunned, transfixed. They asked me where Harlem was, they asked me what Harlem was, they asked me if the streets were always like that, they even asked me if I thought that the Harlem ladies would like them. And they let me through without prejudice.

The other people in the bus, all Africans, heard about this and I spent the rest of the journey showing pix and explaining about Harlem, all the way to Lome.

 

Harlem blues busker, mid- 1980s

Harlemites dancing to his music…

 

Once I got there, I had been told to look up a drummer named Bongo Joe. I tracked him down, and while we were talking, a middle-aged lady, bare-breasted, like most older, traditional African women, came out and started scolding him. He told me later that she was scolding him for associating with white lowlife backpackers like me. I didn’t understand what she was saying, but her inflections and outraged speech patterns were indistinguishable from those of the little old ladies in Vienna complaining about somebody’s sloppy overcoat. And while she was berating him for his low moral character and delivering these bullets of searing righteousness, her boobs kept bobbing up and down.

Sometimes you wish for movie cameras…

GHANA

 

The Sahara neighborhood, one of the friendliest spots on earth, hand-crafted in the middle of machine-built Accra…

 

In Northern Ghana, there is a village famous for its crocodiles. This fellow was the first inhabitant I saw, kinda like a greeter at Walmart…

 

 

I walked into Ghana from Lome. Ghana is where I first heard the music of C.K. Mann, with whom I later played in D.C. He was one of the leading lights of early 1960s HiLife music. He played guitar, sang, and wrote and performed A-Level songs. Adwoa Yankey—his biggest hit, pirated to death, of course–about a former girlfriend, was coming out of speakers everywhere.

Ghana was charming from the first minute, and remained so for the month or so that I was there. One of the African guidebooks put it best:  “Everybody likes Ghanaians.”   I agree completely.

Economically, it was just as crowded and poor as any other African land, but there was a dignified friendliness about the place that I never lost sight of.

So, I spent most of my African evenings visiting the bush bars, sitting in on congas or drum kit whenever possible. I was rarely refused the chance, as white musicians are something of a novelty and status symbol with African bands. As long as I didn’t screw up the rhythm I was welcome.

After a couple of weeks of this, the word was out on the bush bar circuit/telegraph, this white American guy could keep the beat. From then on, I was welcome everywhere. I learned lots and lots. All of the bars were open-air spots, and this kind of playing, after smoky Western nightclubs, spoiled me almost for good. It was months before I could even enter a place with a roof, never mind gig in one.

One night I went to Kwame Nkrumah Square, one of Accra’s main intersections. The Square, through some twist of geometry, has six corners, each one with an open-air bar. I sat down, and was suddenly joined by another white man. This was no big deal. Tourists in Africa are drawn to each other, at least briefly, because it’s obvious that they are having the same kinds of experiences, and each may have some tip or insight that could save a lot of bother, up to and including getting killed.  So I nodded hello.

“Nice country, this,” I said, and I meant it. Ghanaians are either among the nicest people on earth or they hold the full title. His reply, however, was a bitter snarl.

“I suppose. If you’ve got money!!!”

Well, this implied that everyone in Ghana was well-fed and prosperous, one step away from founding their own charity. And anyway, a double-sized beer in a nightclub with a live band playing cost 79 cents. How much fucking money does one need?

This guy, British, was, as far as I could tell, a classic remittance man, straight out of an Evelyn Waugh novel. Subsidized (and lightly, in his case) by Mumsy and the Governor, paid to stay out of England and avoid bringing shame upon the family. If Nigel must sully the family name, the reasoning is, let him do it in some obscure spot that doesn’t have a Daily Tattler.

I didn’t say any of that, however. I just said, “Yeah, damn shame.”

I looked him over. He seemed to be in his mid-20s, handsome and capable-looking, and I could easily imagine him strolling through the halls of Eton with a cricket bat. But it was just looks. Otherwise, there wasn’t much to him. He gave off an aura of tensed power and depth, but I think he had merely learned how to project the image. In the words of Michael Innes, he looked like he belonged “to that sizeable flock of black sheep which the English upper classes, collectively regarded, are concerned to maintain at pasture in regions of the globe as remote as possible.” Innes, aka J.L.M. Stewart, an incredibly prolific author and Oxford don, never met a convoluted, ornate and excessively erudite sentence that he couldn’t stretch even further. But he was not, in this case, inaccurate.

“So, down on your luck, are you?”

“I could use a drink, all right.”

I bought him one. I mean, 79 cents…once, in a bar in Panama, where a Cuba Libre cost 65 cents, I burst in, looked around, and saw that there were only four other patrons. So, like Zero Mostel in The Producers, I called for drinks for the house. It’s pathetic, but I felt really good for two full days afterwards.

Not in this case though. He barely thanked me, and launched into a snippy, hissing tirade of injured innocence and betrayal, explaining how the English upper classes were destined to rot in place and completely deserved their current endangered species status. I was beginning to sympathize with Mumsy and the Governor. Finally, I’d had enough.

“Yeah, well,” I said, “You don’t know how lucky you are. I’ve had to work all my life. I started when I was 14, washing dishes in a greasy spoon after school. And I fucking hate it. I’m probably gonna have to face more day jobs when I get back to the States. I would absolutely love to live out my puff in such a peaceful, cultured country as this one. Hanging out in the pubs, sitting in with the bands, cashing a monthly check, reading all day long–”

I stopped because I was losing my audience. He had noticed a couple of blonde, European-looking women at a nearby table. His eyes took on a reptilian gleam. I could almost see the wheels turning in his little hustler’s brain: Here’s my dinner. And maybe even a flop for a week or so…

“S’cuse me, gotta go,” he said, standing up, taking his drink–make that “his” drink–and strode purposefully over to the ladies’ table.

Well, fuck him, I muttered, cleverly. For my part, I went up to the band, presented myself as one who plays congas, and asked if I could sit in for a song or two. They of course agreed, mostly because the novelty of it increases the tips from the audience. In fact, while I was playing, a nice young lady ran up, moistened a bill–well, spat on it–and pressed it onto my forehead. This is the way people tip in Ghana, in the Balkans, and a lot of other places as well. I’m not sure how many bodily fluids are passed along in this manner, and I have the feeling that it’s a dying tradition.

I got offstage, and, with the money still stuck to my forehead, thought I would create a visual wisecrack. I would go to the Brit’s table, point to the money and say, “You’re right. It is a nice place when you’ve got money.” Then I would give him the note.

Happily for all, especially the two blondes, he was gone.

A drum in every port…

 

Beach party, Accra, Ghana

 

My journeys through Mali, Dakar, the rest of SeneGambia and Nigeria had a few chuckles as well, and those stories will be a part of these “adventures,” to be added at a later date.

 

 

 

 

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