Sahara (2002) Read online

  Sahara (2002)

  Michael Palin

  MICHAEL PALIN is a scriptwriter, comedian, novelist, television presenter, actor and playwright. He established his reputation with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Ripping Yarns. His work also includes several films with Monty Python, as well as The Missionary, A Private Function, A Fish Called Wanda, American Friends and Fierce Creatures. His television credits include two films for the BBC’s Great Railway Journeys, the plays East of Ipswich and Number 27, and Alan Bleasdale’s GBH.

  In 2006 the first volume of his diaries, 1969-1979: The Python Years, spent several weeks on the bestseller lists. He has also written books to accompany his seven very successful travel series: Around the World in 80 Days (an updated edition of which was published in 2008, twenty years later), Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway Adventure, Sahara, Himalaya and New Europe. Most have been No 1 bestsellers and Himalaya was No 1 for 11 weeks. He is the author of a number of children’s stories, the play The Weekend and the novel Hemingway’s Chair. Visit his website at www.palinstravels.co.uk.

  Basil Pao began his photographic career in 1980 on his return to Hong Kong after ten years in the United States, where he was an art director for Atlantic, Polygram and Warner Bros. He first worked with Michael Palin on the design for the book accompanying Monty Python’s Life of Brian. They have since collaborated on the books based on his seven travel series. In 2007 he wrote and photographed China Revealed: A Portrait of the Rising Dragon.

  SAHARA

  MICHAEL PALIN

  Photographs by Basil Pao

  A WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

  Copyright (c) Michael Palin, 2002

  Photographs copyright (c) Basil Pao, 2002

  Original map on pp.vii-ix by Stephen Conlin

  The moral right of Michael Palin to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Quotation from p. 4 from Their Heads are Green by Paul Bowles, published by Peter Owen Ltd; on p. 111 from Travels into the Interior of Africa by Mungo Park, published by Eland Editions; on pp. 139-40 from The Strong Brown God by Sanche de Gramont, published by Houghton Mifflin Co.; on p. 209 from ‘For the Fallen’ (September 1914) by Laurence Binyon, by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Laurence Binyon.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 0 2978 6359 5

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  For Helen, Tom, Will and Rachel

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Map

  GIBRALTAR

  MOROCCO

  ALGERIA

  WESTERN SAHARA

  MAURITANIA

  SENEGAL

  Plates

  MALI

  NIGER

  ALGERIA

  LIBYA

  TUNISIA

  ALGERIA

  Afterword

  Background Reading

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  My father was in charge of the Export Department of a steelworks and every Christmas he received an enormous box of dates from their agent in Algeria, addressed to a Mr E. M. Palm. I remember wondering if he should tell them, but he never bothered. Perhaps he thought the supply of dates might dry up if they discovered his name wasn’t Palm.

  I didn’t want them to stop coming either, not because of the dates, but because of the box they came in. The illustration on the packet fuelled powerfully romantic fantasies of somewhere hotter, drier and even more exotic than south Yorkshire; a place where men with turbans, baggy velvet pants and wicked moustaches reclined under palm trees with veiled and sequinned ladies, whilst their faithful camels stood in picturesque silhouette against the setting sun.

  The first ‘proper’ book I was ever given was Tales from the Arabian Nights. Its seductive illustrations, by A. E. Jackson, combined with the date boxes to fan a precocious fascination for things of the desert. Curved swords, soft silks, tassels and see-through skirts. Mirages and genies, huge jellies and lubricious oils and unguents. The desert world seemed, apart from the odd beheading, to be a place of complete sensual fulfilment. Even delight itself was Turkish.

  Almost fifty years later there came a chance to expose my childhood fantasies to the harsh glare of reality.

  In the first spring of the new millennium I met up with Roger Mills, director of many of the travel programmes I’ve done, at a pub opposite Notting Hill police station. Over a pint or two he suggested a journey through Francophone Africa, those huge and empty countries from Cameroon northwards, once loosely federated as part of the French empire. Rarely visited by British television, they might provide fresh pickings and new discoveries.

  I got home, unfolded a map, and saw one word spread across most of these countries. Sahara.

  The French empire was interesting, but it had come and gone. The Sahara is a potent, evocative reality. It is one of the world’s great brands. No one name so completely epitomises an environment. Oceans can be Atlantic or Pacific or Indian, mountains can be Himalayas or Andes or Alps, but if you want to convey desert, you only have to say ‘Sahara’.

  It embodies scale and mystery, the thin line between survival and destruction, the power to take life or to transform it. A self-contained, homogenous, identifiable world, uncompromising and irreducible.

  In other words, a challenge. And by no means an easy one.

  As big as the United States, with a population the size of Norfolk, the Sahara is only 15 per cent sand, and though the great ergs, the sand seas, are among the most exquisitely beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen, there is a dark side. The Sahara is also a killer, scorching the life out of crops, people, and all but the most tenacious living creatures. It’s growing larger every year as drought turns pasture back into sand, which the remorseless desert wind carries into towns and villages until they die of suffocation. It has its share of war and conflict. Many areas we wanted to see were inaccessible because of minefields and military activity.

  Yet how close it is to us. The Sahara lies just beyond the borders of Europe. The heart of the desert is three hours’ flying time from Paris, four hours from London. This proximity is not lost on the many thousands of sub-Saharan Africans who cross the desert to escape what they see as poor, unstable and oppressive regimes back home.

  Today, the Sahara, far from being a cosy date-box illusion, has become a bridge from Africa into Europe, and a bridge that is increasingly well used by those prepared to risk their lives for a better life on the other side of the Mediterranean. If the Sahara was my fantasy, Europe is theirs. Perhaps they will learn from their journey, as I did from mine, that fantasy and experience never quite match up.

  Michael Palin, London, 2002

  www.pal
instravels.co.uk

  Sahara was filmed between February 2001 and February 2002. For various reasons, it was impossible to shoot it as one continuous journey. Summer heat and all-year-round bureaucracy forced a number of breaks upon us. The diary days in the text represent days at work, give or take the very rare day off, and not time spent travelling out to the desert.

  GIBRALTAR

  Day One

  GIBRALTAR

  Only 300 miles from the Sahara Desert there is a place where brass bands play, warm beer is served and a blue lamp marks the police station. Where people shop at Marks & Spencer and twenty-one gun salutes sound on royal birthdays. Where Noel Coward played cabaret and John Lennon got married.

  This corner of a foreign land that seems forever England is a gnarled limestone rock, nearly 4 miles long and 1400 feet high, tucked into Spain’s lower regions like a prostate, dominating the dozen miles of ocean that separate Europe from Africa.

  For the Berber chief Tariq Ibn Ziyad, who first settled on the Rock thirteen centuries ago, it held the promise of escape from the hostile Sahara and a stepping stone to the rich underbelly of Europe. It became known as Jebel el Tariq, Tariq’s mountain, which, eroded down to the single word Gibraltar, it has remained ever since.

  The Britishness of Gibraltar, which began with Admiral Rooke’s invasion in 1704, is well entrenched. Contemplating my map of North Africa outside Pickwick’s Pub, I order a coffee. No messing with latte or machiato here.

  ‘Coop or Moog?’ I’m asked in a thick Geordie accent.

  I choose cup.

  Cars are squeezed into a pleasant shady square beside me. Buildings are squeezed around the cars: an attractive colonial house with deep balconies and freshly painted wrought-iron railings on one side, the handsome Georgian facade of the garrison library on the other and, next to it, the offices of the Gibraltar Chronicle, the veteran local newspaper, which broke the news of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar.

  For me, a first-timer in Gibraltar, there have already been surprises. First of all, that there are buildings of quality which are not just selling duty-free booze or fish and chips, and secondly, that Gibraltar’s Britishness is one layer of a deceptively international cake. The balconied, green-shuttered cottages that stretch up the steep alleyways leading off Main Street were largely built by Portuguese and Genoese, and the Catholic cathedral was converted from a mosque by the Spanish. There are, I’m told, more working synagogues on Gibraltar than in the whole of Spain. The Alameda gardens reflect Andalusian taste. The uncharitable view is that Gibraltar is an ordnance depot reinventing itself as a tax haven, but the reality is more complicated and a lot more attractive.

  Nevertheless, it is Britishness that holds this polyglot community together. Sitting on the terrace of the Rock Hotel as the day fades, it is quite possible to believe that the sun will never set on this tenacious shred of Empire. Sipping a cocktail, surrounded by comfortable, chintzy, Home Counties decor and the soft sound of Daily Telegraphs slipping from snoozing laps, I imagine the Rock of Gibraltar as a liner, loosing its moorings and sailing slowly off, bearing inside its crumbling white flanks the last traces of the old order. This, I must admit, is after a couple of quite generous whiskies, of the sort I am unlikely to find elsewhere on this trip, together with marmalade, eggs and bacon, cups of tea, pints of beer, Match of the Day and all those things that I miss idiotically when I’m in foreign parts - and parts don’t come much more foreign than the Sahara Desert.

  Later, I settle into bed and with one long, last, loving glance at the Corby trouser press, turn out the light.

  Day Two

  ACROSS THE STRAIT

  At the highest point of the Rock of Gibraltar, where a sheer cliff face plunges 1400 feet into the Mediterranean, there is a gun emplacement called O’Hara’s Battery capable of lobbing artillery shells from Europe into Africa. I’m assured it’s never been used in anger and, indeed, as I climb the last few steps on this idyllic Mediterranean morning, the only signs of anger are from seagulls swooping at my head to warn me off their nests.

  From up here, the confrontation of the continents is quite a sight to behold. The two land masses don’t just meet, they rise to the occasion. The white cliffs of Gibraltar facing up to the serrated black crest of Jebel Musa on the Moroccan shore. The Greeks and Romans were aware of the symmetry and called the twin peaks the Pillars of Hercules, the end of the known world, beyond which lay outer darkness.

  Gibraltar remains protective to the last, as if testing my resolve to take on something as bleak and inimical as the Sahara. Since the beginning of human history people have been trying to leave the desert behind, from Tariq Ibn Ziyad and the Islamic armies who crossed the Strait in the eighth century, to the African migrants trying to cross it today. On the morning news there is a report of a boat-load of immigrants capsizing in the Strait last night. Amongst them were three pregnant women. They were only saved from drowning because one of them carried a mobile telephone. I try to find a Spanish newspaper for more details, but no Spanish dailies are sold anywhere in Gibraltar. I sense a glimmer of paranoia here, as if the natural siege mentality that seems to hold Gibraltarians together might be threatened by too much information.

  So I’m not persuaded to linger, not by the fine books and leather armchairs of the garrison library, nor by the sound of the British Grenadiers, nor even by the sight of the midday flight back to London roaring across the airport runway, which also happens to be the main road out of Gibraltar.

  Once the plane has raced past us and soared out over the Atlantic, the barrier opens and it’s a short walk to the frontier. This is not a happy place, for either side. Spain has never concealed its irritation over what it considers British occupation of Spanish territory, and the referendum of 1967 in which Gibraltarians voted overwhelmingly to remain British was followed by closure of the frontier for sixteen years.

  Now things are less confrontational but just as niggly. The Spanish examine drivers’ papers with elaborate care, causing huge traffic jams, and the Gibraltarians reply with a large sign pointing out who’s to blame: ‘Gibraltar regrets the inconvenience caused to you due to frontier restrictions imposed by the Spanish authorities contrary to your European rights to free movement’.

  The next sign we encounter reads ‘Policia’, and after a perfunctory going over we’re out the back door of a long, low, anonymous customs shed and into Spain, where a huge welcoming billboard directs us to the nearest McDonald’s.

  The ferries that cross the Strait of Gibraltar leave from Algeciras, 3 miles from the frontier. We board a solid, ponderous old vessel called City Of Algeciras, which will take one and a half hours to cover the dozen nautical miles between here and Africa. As the new generation of lightweight ferries has clipped the crossing time to thirty-five minutes, I’m not surprised to hear that this is her final voyage.

  I’m puzzled, though, by the lack of any ceremony. If this had been, say, the last journey of an Isle of Wight ferry, it would surely be full of people in anoraks pointing cameras and tape-recording the last blasts of the ship’s horn. Instead, it’s like a ghost ship. In the saloon the television screens beam American basketball to rows of empty seats. In the main lounge ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ thuds out to a few thin Moors with wispy beards and close-cropped black hair.

  A vigorous westerly rips in as we reach the open sea, where the bottle-neck entrance to the Mediterranean shrinks to a mere 9 miles. This is dangerous water, a tide race of accelerating currents and a thousand ship movements a day, a difficult stretch to navigate at the best of times, but in a tiny boat, at the dead of night, potentially suicidal.

  The bonus of this urgent west wind is a panorama of dramatic clarity. The fingers of Europe and Africa almost touching and between them, dead centre, the sun merging slowly with the horizon. I feel for a moment a jubilant sense of freedom, of being in limbo, beyond tribal loyalties, national boundaries, anthems, flags, customs, papers, permissions and prejudices, free from all re
straints except the elements themselves. I feel positively Homeric. Then a particularly fierce gust picks me up and hurls me, bodily, into the bar.

  MOROCCO

  Day Three

  TANGIER

  ‘When I meet fellow Americans travelling about here in North Africa, I ask them, “What did you expect to find here?” Almost without exception, regardless of the way they express it, the answer reduced to its simplest terms is a sense of mystery.’

  Thus wrote Paul Bowles, the American writer who adopted Tangier, in the book that lies where it fell from my bed last night.

  Earlier in the evening, a group of elderly Moroccan musicians had played a thin, tinkling version of ‘Happy Birthday’ for me in the hotel restaurant. It was such an uncompromisingly Arab sound that it was only halfway through that I realised it was ‘Happy Birthday’ at all, and for that reason alone I shall treasure the memory of it.

  It’s six o’clock now and I’m trying to shake off the first hangover of my fifty-ninth year. The new day glows cruelly bright behind the curtains and I can’t ignore it. I swing myself out of bed, surprised by the cool touch of a marble floor, and throw open the curtains. But the smarter the hotel the less easy it is these days to throw open the curtains, and by the time I’ve found the right cord to pull and disentangled the net from the main drape I’m seriously irritated and irreversibly awake.

  The view is less spectacular and much friendlier than I’d expected. It’s a painter’s view. Below me is a small verdant garden, dominated by the luxurious crown of a palm tree and a solitary Norfolk pine standing with its branches out like a cake stand. Running roughly in line from west to east are a harbour wall, with a ferry boat alongside, a distant beach already covered with tiny figures and, rising gently behind the curving bay, the headland, beyond which a pipeline dives beneath the Strait, carrying 10,000 million cubic metres of Algerian natural gas into Europe every year.