The Rough Guide to West Africa

Devastating news from Mali - kidnaps in Timbuktu and Hombori

2011-11-26T12:42:00.001Z

The kidnaps of two French men in Hombori and the killing of a German and the kidnap of three other men (Dutch, Swedish and South African) in Timbuktu (Tombouctou) this week are catastrophic news for thousands of people who work in Mali's beleaguered tourism sector. Mali had been hoping recently for a lifting of the foreign travel advisories that for so long have appeared alarmist and exaggerated.

For the first time, Europeans have been kidnapped in a large town, and in broad daylight. And the Hombori kidnaps are the first instance of kidnapping south of the Niger River, which has always been seen as a major security barrier, with no bridges anywhere between Ségou and Gao.

The only two previous kidnappings of Westerners in Mali (in 2009) had taken place in the extreme east of the country, near the Niger border southeast of Gao.

For really good analysis of some of the security and political issues around the latest kidnaps, read Andrew Lebovich's excellent post at Al-Wasat. As he shows, security in the Sahel is not simply about fighting AQIM (perhaps it's not even mostly about that), but about rough and dirty international relations - and by extension human rights and access to resources.

For now, though, what matters is getting the Timbuktu and Hombori hostages safely released and giving the Malians back some dignity and a reason to hope that the future will be better and not squandered by men in power. And that means making the country truly safe for visitors and locals alike.

Good, up-to-date travel news about Niger, Niamey

2011-11-24T11:15:00.000Z

There's a good thread of fresh travel news about Niger on The HUBB forum. Following the news about relaxation of travel restrictions in the north three months ago, reported by the Xinhua news agency, it feels like positive progress.

FCO "trouble abroad" figures: previously unpublished country-by-country details

2011-08-28T16:43:00.000Z

On my blog for another book, The Rough Guide to First-Time Africa, I've been posting the results of my chasing up the press office of the UK foreign affairs department (the Foreign & Commonwealth Office or FCO) for further information about their recently published "British Behaviour Abroad" report.

The report, covering March 2010 to March 2011, was published at the beginning of August, and contains broad-brush information about the numbers of Britons around the world requiring consular assistance. The numbers run into tens of thousands and include drug arrests, deaths, assaults and stolen passports. Apart from the busiest countries, however, the report does not go into any detail. No countries in West Africa get any mention.

I wanted more information, not just about West Africa, but about the other countries I'm particularly interested in in Africa. The results are posted on the First-Time Africa blog, here, and in subsequent posts as I've gleaned more information.

It's worth stating here that just two British nationals were murdered in West Africa between March 2010 and March 2011 – one in Cameroon and one in Nigeria. Neither case was related to terrorism.

Improved security in the Sahel: military escorts dropped in northern Niger

2011-08-19T10:04:00.000Z

This story about travelling in Niger, by the Xinhua press agency, "No more convoys under military escort in order to travel in the North", is highly significant, if it's entirely true. It says the routes radiating between Agadez and Arlit in the north, between Agadez and Abalak (on the route to Tahoua and Niamey) and between Agadez and Aderbissinat (en route to Zinder and Kano, Nigeria) are all open to the free movement of vehicles, without the need to travel in convoy with a military escort.

There's enough detail about the fact that it was a "unilateral decision of the governor of the Agadez region", about the "joy on the faces" of local people and especially businesses – which had been limited to one convoy every three days and who can now operate as they like – to make it sound completely credible, even though it comes as a surprise. The note about the authorities not recommending travel at night adds to the sense of normality. Interestingly, although the article refers to "the horrors" of the Tuareg rebellions, it makes no reference to AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), merely referring to "other forms of banditry".

Presumably, travel to the south of these routes remains straightforward. What it means for the current safety of travel north of Arlit – to Assamakka and Algeria – or indeed northeast past the Ténére Tree and on to Bilma, I have no idea. I think you wouldn't get a sense of that until you were actually in Agadez.

Travel in the Sahel: how safe are tourists in Northwest Africa?

2011-02-23T16:43:00.043Z

The recent deaths of two Frenchmen in eastern Mali, kidnapped from a restaurant across the border in Niger, was widely treated by the media as an example of a brazen new audacity by southern offshoots of the so-called “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” (AQIM). With foreign ministries in many countries, including Britain, France, USA and Australia, beefing up their advisory notices to travellers and expatriates in Mali and other parts of the Sahel, and various alarmist reports beginning to appear in the media, I think it’s a good moment to look at what has actually happened over the last few years and try to assess the real risks of travel to the Sahara and Sahel.

Although the earliest major incident took place in 2003, when 32 tourists in different groups were kidnapped in coordinated attacks in Algeria and held for ransom, the 27 cases described below (nine killed, twelve freed, six still held) go back to 2007 and cover Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Mali and Niger.

Deaths

The current perception of a crisis began in December 2007 when four French tourists were murdered during a roadside robbery in southern Mauritania. In June 2009 a British tourist kidnapped in southeast Mali was presumed executed (his body has never been found). In the same month an American aid worker was shot and killed in Nouakchott. In mid-2010, an elderly French kidnap victim died or was executed in Niger. And then in January 2011, two Frenchmen were abducted in Niamey and killed less than twenty-four hours later over the border in eastern Mali, either before or during a rescue raid by French and Nigérien forces.

Freed abductees

Since the beginning of 2008 a total of twelve other travellers and expatriates have been abducted and released unharmed, some after more than a year in captivity. Of the twelve, two were tourists kidnapped in southern Tunisia early in 2008 and eventually released in Mali; two were Canadian diplomats kidnapped in Niger in December 2008: four were abducted in two different incidents in January 2009 after the Andéramboukane Music festival on the Mali-Niger border and subsequently held together, and five were abducted in Mauritania, again in two different incidents, also in 2009.

Current captives

Five French mining expatriates abducted in Niger in 2010 (together with two colleagues from Togo and Madagascar) and anItalian tourist kidnapped near Djanet in southern Algeria in February 2011 remain in captivity at the time of writing.

Sahel travel in the balance

It’s a depressing tally, and the impact on the victims and their families is impossible to overstate. Nevertheless, when measured against attacks attributed to Al-Qaeda around the world over the last decade, including bombings and other attacks in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Turkey, Kenya, Tanzania, London, Madrid, Bali and of course New York it’s an extremely small number (more about the statistics below). Although we never get to hear the full story about hostage negotiations and ransom payments, it is widely believed that millions of dollars were paid by government intermediaries on behalf of the Italian, Spanish and Swiss hostages (the French and British governments are notable for publically declaring they will not pay ransoms to hostage-takers).

Ransom money is the main factor in the Sahel abductions, not ideology. If AQIM is a jihadist organisation, its methods are different from those of Osama bin Laden’s other followers. Rather than planning coordinated suicide bomb attacks on iconic targets such as embassies and hotels, AQIM is content to extort money from susceptible European governments, much after the style of Somali pirates hijacking tankers in the Indian Ocean. And perhaps surprisingly, too, AQIM don’t seem to be spending their millions on new attacks (although they did recently launch an abortive assassination raid on the president of Mauritania) or even on ramping up their hostage-taking.

It seems clear that the initial capture of hostages is often carried out by freelance bandits who sell their victims on to AQIM, who then run the propaganda and negotiations, invariably in the same remote region of northeast Mali. The same freelance gangs, also traffic cannabis, weapons and migrants across the desert and run major cocaine rackets, taking part in the shipment of South American cocaine consignments from coastal creeks in Guinea-Bissau to North Africa and Europe.

Somewhere in all this, you also have to reckon with the deep-seated and well-founded resentment of some of the Tuareg nomad communities of the southern Sahara over their treatment as second-class citizens by the national governments of Algeria, Mali and Niger. Major Tuareg uprisings in the 1990s in Mali and Niger ended with a successful peace agreement in Mali, but fizzled out inconclusively in Niger, only to rage into life again as a full insurrection in 2007. Since then, anti-government hostilities, banditry and AQIM attacks have often been ascribed to Tuareg perpetrators, without much clear evidence. Tuareg websites have been vociferous in dissociating their community from any links with AQIM and there is certainly no cultural affinity between hardline interpretations of the Koran and the more pragmatic and tolerant lifestyle of Tuareg communities.

Whatever the truth about AQIM’s membership and origins*, the repercussions for travellers have been many: closed routes across the Sahara**; threats to Mali’s music festivals***; and a very uncertain future for the nascent tourist industry in Mauritania, which was just beginning to enjoy the fruits of success with the opening of the new tarmac road from Nouadhibou to Nouakchott, allowing overlanders to drive on tarmac the whole way from Europe to Dakar, and regular charter flights on the French airline Le Point to Atar, Tamanrasset, Djanet and Agadez.

While Niger’s tourist industry has effectively dried up completely because so much of the country is deemed too unsafe to travel in, the relatively healthy tourist industry in Mali has been steadily growing for many years, fuelled by the lure of the Niger River, the music festivals and the scenery and culture of the Dogon country east of Mopti. The new travel warnings – especially the British FCO’s lurid map of Mali – treat completely safe regions, including Mopti and the Dogon country, as “too unsafe to travel”. This sledgehammer approach to travel advice is confusing to travellers who cannot see its logic, and damaging to local communities that rely on a steady trickle of tourist income for much of their cash needs. I’d say there’s also a strong chance that one of the consequences of advising against all travel to Timbuktu, Djenné, Mopti and the Dogon country is exactly the kind of incident that the British embassy in Bamako is hoping to prevent. For those travellers who robustly cross the line, having spent long enough on travel forums to realise how many others are doing the same, being pickpocketed or robbed seems more likely in a region whose economy has been slammed by a diplomat’s red infill on a map.

My advice

Of course it’s extraordinarily difficult to give advice when any new event can change the map. In Mauritania, my sense is that travelling on the main tarmac highway between Nouadhibou and Nouakchott, is currently relatively safe. The Mauritanian security forces are out in numbers patrolling around the country and the fight seems to be more with them these days and less with tourists. So if your plans are to travel overland between Morocco and Senegal, you should have no serious worries about following through. I would still be extremely cautious about venturing out and about in the interior of Mauritania, however, and especially in the southeast.

In Mali, I can’t explain the recent blanket “we advise against all travel east of Ségou” government travel advisories. To me these seem like a massive over-reaction to a spotty catalogue of incidents over many years that have all taken place many hundreds of miles to the northeast. You don’t have to search far on the travel forums to find glowing accounts by returning travellers of their recent experiences in central Mali – in the Dogon country, in Mopti and Djenné, along the Niger, and in Timbuktu – and mystification at why their governments are advising against anyone following in their footsteps. Admittedly, crossing the Niger River feels like a genuine increase in risk, especially if you’re planning to cross it at Gao. I personally would not visit Gao at present or travel along the north bank of the Niger anywhere between the Niger border and Timbuktu, and obviously from what I have said I wouldn’t venture further east or north, or go to either of the festivals in the area. I’m prepared to accept even this may be an exaggerated response to perceived threats. Timbuktu itself reportedly feels perfectly safe and the recent Festival au Désert was a great success. What I find remarkable is the statement on the FCO Mali travel advice page that not a single British person in Mali required consular assistance between April 2009 and August 2010. That seems a pretty good record.

Niger, sadly, is bearing the brunt of the current security situation. I think a repeat of the January attack in Niamey itself is extremely unlikely – particularly as it was so spectacularly unsuccessful for the kidnappers – so the idea of flying to the capital feels safe enough. As does, frankly, taking the road east along the Nigerian border as far as Zinder. To the north of this route I think you would be pushing your luck and I wouldn’t go into northern Niger myself at present. The British travel advisory map seems reasonable enough, bearing in mind their generally over-cautious approach, though it doesn’t quite match the references in the text to the road between Niamey and Gao.

Statistically, how safe is the Sahel?

In terms of numbers, somewhere around 100,000 European and North American tourists, business travellers and expatriate workers visit Mauritania, Mali and Niger annually. The total area of the three countries, including the empty desert areas, is more than 3.6 million square kilometres, and although their combined population of 33 million people live in only about a third of that area, that slab of land – the one third that is inhabited – still accounts for an area that is twice the size of Texas and five times as big as Britain. By my calculation, based on the nine visitors who have been killed since December 2007, the “tourist murder rate” in these three Sahel countries is around 3 per 100,000. The homicide rate for the USA is currently 5 per 100,000 and for the UK and Australia it is 1.3 per 100,000.

So there you have it. The Sahel does carry some increased risk of kidnap or murder compared with staying at home – although that will depend on your neighbourhood (no doubt there are feisty travellers who could demonstrate that staying back home in LA, Glasgow or Jo’burg is much more dangerous). The small increased risk is spread very thinly over many years and among hundreds of thousands of visitors and you can reduce it considerably by staying out of the more risky areas. Be sure to take out travel insurance, and if your insurance broker won’t cover you for certain countries or regions, then find one who will, or ask what the extra premium would be.

Further reading

There’s very useful information on the security situation in the Sahel on the brilliant Horizons Unlimited; at the always thoughtful Sahel Blog; in a couple of posts on a blog I hadn’t heard of before called Selected Wisdom, here and here; and in this interesting article about Organized Crime and Terrorism in the Sahel.

And of course there’s lots of pertinent information in the current edition of the Rough Guide to West Africa.

Forums

Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree has a huge international user base and you’ll get feedback from people on the ground, including many whose first language isn’t English. It’s fairly loosely moderated, however, and if you like to subscribe using RSS you can only do so at the Africa level.

Trip Advisor, while very Anglophone and less adventurous than Thorn Tree, can be subscribed on RSS country by country.

Guide du Routard, in French, is very useful for the Sahel, and again you can keep in touch with threads on each country using RSS.

Horizons Unlimited, principally for motorcyclists, runs two carefully monitored and relevant Horizons Unlimited Bulletin Boards (HUBB), one for North Africa and the Sahara and one for Sub-Saharan Africa where you’ll often find the most up-to-date and informed travel advice for the region.

*Some Sahara analysts believe AQIM is little more than an agent provocateur organisation, created by the Algerian intelligence service to justify the country’s authoritarian government and draw their American military partners into the region in the “Global War on Terror”. The picture is almost impenetrably complex, with the identity of participants sometimes altering (jihadist one day, businessman the next) according to company and circumstances. Jeremy Keenan at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies is a well known exponent of this view. There’s a fascinating interview with him in German.

** The Tanezrouft route between Adrar and Gao, closed for most of the 1990s during Algeria’s civil war, was sporadically open to tourists and trans-Saharan trade between 2003 and 2008 but is currently closed, while the Route du Hoggar, between Tamanrasset and Agadez has remained technically open, but requires great flexibility and confidence: if you’re not robbed by bandits you may well be ripped off by demanding local officials as they insist you be escorted, at great expense, on sections of the route.

*** The Festival au Désert at Timbuktu takes places each January, and hundreds of foreign visitors attend, so far without incident. The lesser known Festival sur le Niger, in Ségou, is acquiring a similarly devoted following. There are other festivals: the Tamasonghoï festival at Bourem north of Gao and the Tamadacht festival at Andéramboukane in the far southeast of Mali. Four Europeans leaving the latter festival in January 2009 were held hostage for a number of months before their respective governments paid ransoms for three of them. The fourth, a Briton named Edwin Dyer, was executed.

Malian troops raid Dyer murder suspects' camp

2009-06-18T15:00:00.002Z

This major step-up in Mali's northern war with AQIM between Tuesday and today doesn't seem to have much press coverage (nor the murder of a Malian intelligence officer, Lt Col Lamana Ould Cheikh, in Timbuktu last week, which presumably prompted the big assault). Or maybe I'm reading the wrong papers. Maybe the Sun has it again? Anyway, various reports are saying that a raid on a camp at Garn-Akassa (don't know where that is, one source says "west of Tessalit", ie west of the Tanezrouft route from Algeria to Mali, 100km in side Mali) has resulted in the deaths of around 20 fighters. There's a lot of speculation at the kidal.info forum about what's been going on. This is where to go if you're interested in getting a more nuanced picture of what's happening in the Sahara. But even if you read French, some of the contributors can be pretty opaque, and Google's translation tool if anything makes them even harder to understand in English.

Why was a British plan to rescue Dyer cancelled?

2009-06-11T07:30:00.002Z

An SAS mission to rescue Edwin Dyer is reported in the Sun, of all places. They surely have this sort of plan in mind for every hostage situation, but it's unusual for them to talk to the media about it – a measure of their anger at the decision not to carry it out. Unfortunately it sits very uncomfortably with Jeremy Keenan's analysis. Thanks to Jim Mann Taylor at the 153 Club for circulating the Sun story.

Get the Americans out of Mali

2009-06-10T22:15:00.002Z

What are they doing in Kidal, anyway?

Easy to forget how long and deeply involved the Americans have been in a part of the world that most US taxpayers would struggle to identify on a world map. But I wouldn't want all the Americans out of Mali - sorry, terribly arrogant thing to say. The Peace Corps have been doing a fantastic job in recent years, helping promote just the sort of tourism that Edwin Dyer loved.

Dyer's murder in Mali: do the Americans share the blame?

2009-06-08T19:24:00.004Z

I wish this post wasn't here, but it needs to be marked that the British hostage Edwin Dyer was killed last week in Mali, and the web of motives and connections behind his murder needs some exposure. I've no idea how close Jeremy Keenan's analysis here, in the Independent, is to the truth, but it feels uncomfortably plausible that the US has supported al-Qa'ida in the Maghreb. This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's nothing new – the Mujahideen in Afghanistan were supplied by the US to oust the Russians. And look what a mess that got us all into. Then again, there may be further levels of complexity beneath what Keenan outlines. And perhaps Barack Obama would like to do something about this. . . Perhaps he would dearly like to clear his "advisors" and intelligence people out of West Africa. But perhaps he simply cannot. Perhaps Bush's legacy, described in Keenan's book, The Dark Sahara: American's War on Terror in Africa, is going to persist, sickeningly, through Obama's first term.

Dyer's murder is a tragedy not just for his own family but for the desperately poor people of northern Mali, where a nascent tourism, based around music and cultural festivals along the Niger River, was just emerging. Insurance cover to go north of Timbuktu was already a problem, and the future of the festivals is seriously threatened if travellers stay away. But as Andy Morgan's article about the Festival in the Desert makes clear, this is an intrinsically safe part of the world, no matter what the British foreign office and the US State department might dryly advise, with their frightening statements and unhelpful lack of statistics.

Photo: on the road between Douentza and Gao: cracked windscreen, but cracking scenery and the buses felt safer than riding the K9 through Kingston on a Friday evening.

Visas for Mauritania now required in advance

2009-05-20T08:35:00.004Z

A long gap in my rigorous blogging schedule. . .
Apologies to anyone who thought this blog had given up the ghost.

Mail from another Mauritania reader:

I am emailing you because there has been a change in Mauritanian border policy that might affect the readers of your blog. I have recently embarked on a journey through West Africa. I flew into Marrakech and planned to go overland from there. However, when I got to the Mauri border on May 13, I was warned by a lot of French tourists on the Moroccan side who were turned back by Mauritania to get their visa in Rabat. I made the trip through no mans land myself with a Mauritanian trader who knew the staff well, just to be sure. However, there was (and is) no way around the new policy (bribery, forged documents didn't help), that had been instated only a few hours prior (at 13:00). Everyone who needs a visa now needs to get one prior to arrival.
Joris Bouwsma

Any further news on this?
--

Travel in Mauritania - Nouakchott, Nouadhibou, Atar, Chinguetti and Choum

2008-10-23T08:13:00.004Z

News from a correspondent working in West Africa who visited Mauritania at the beginning of October. He writes: "If you feel any of this is helpful please feel free to post." I think it paints a very good picture of the current social environment:
"Mauritania was a great travel experience for me. The local people were genuinely hospitable and in many ways "the everyday" feels safer than most of the other West African countries I've visited or worked in. Everyone you speak to is deeply critical of the extremists. Clearly it is impossible to say if you were nonetheless "being watched" by other elements, or were in some sense "lucky", and the intense interest some people take in your movements can prompt some uneasiness (and rather evasive answers....). I tried to keep a low profile, spent time integrating with the locals and taking local advice, and emerged unscathed after ten days. At the risk of some fairly clumsy imagery, if you can mentally deal with the "elephants in the room" (coup/political instability; extremist threat), and the elephants stay in the corner, it is a great experience.
"There seemed to be hardly any other tourists around, and you may have seen that Point Afrique has now cancelled for this year. This is such a great shame for a people with so much hospitality ingrained in their "habitude". The only other tourists I saw were on the overland coastal route with cars or bikes - there were five 4x4s and five bikes at the Auberge Menata in Nouakchott and two 4x4s in Nouadhibou. In the interior I met two French guys who had a family connection in Chinguetti and that was it. Even the chameliers had gone into the brousse and were hard to find!
I was finding accommodation on the move and found that a lot of the auberges/campements were effectively closed. I say effectively because occassionally a person was hanging around who could open up a room or the terrace for you but that was about it. For example in Atar, would you believe, I found no lodgings open but was fortunately taken in by a large family who lived next to one of the out-of-town auberges. I bought them a whole chicken for dinner which we ate together outside on their rug, drank lots of tea, and then passed the night on a nearby terrace in the auberge complex. The person who sold me the chicken claimed I was the first European he'd seen all year (surely not true?).
"The iron ore train had recently had some problems (some robbers or a derailment or something) and the schedule was ramped down and all over the place. For example, the train was 11 hours late (3.30am arrival at Choum) and there were so many people that it was physically impossible to get inside the passenger cabins at Choum so I had to spend the trip outside which was pretty unforgettable in the Saharan heat and the dust, which does indeed work its way into your soul. As another example of people's hospitality, at Choum I fell in with a group of young Saharawis and Mauritanians who I met en route from Atar. We found a family in Choum to share dinner with - the father turned out to be the local gendarme - and then slept in their courtyard awaiting the train's delayed arrival, and then spent the next 13 hours sheltering-up and sharing tea on the train.
"The whole airport experience (I flew up to Casablanca) is an abomination of inefficiency, corruption and Mr Big syndrome, and Royal Air Maroc's monopoly-ticket pricing is outrageous. In short, I hope never ever again to have to be at the airport!"

Good news from Africa

2008-07-10T09:07:00.002Z

Africa's economic growth seems relatively untouched by the credit crunch, according to this upbeat assessment on economist.com. But the same site recently covered a much more downbeat story on Africa's political scene presented by the World Bank's latest report on African politics, where the most resource-rich countries in Africa are fingered as the most corrupt and politically screwed up. Some of those emerging from disastrous conflicts, however – for example Liberia and Rwanda – are witnessing huge improvements in good governance.

Gashaka Gumpti in Nigeria

2008-07-09T13:44:00.002Z

Jeremy (Naijablog) Weate climbed Chapel Wadi in March, with friends from Abuja. His film is illuminating and adds considerably to the very limited info on p.1215 of the guide.

Cox & Kings in Mali

2008-05-29T11:41:00.004Z

Who'd have thought? The world's oldest tour operator is doing tours in Mali, including the 2009 Festival sur le Niger at Ségou. Pity about their decision not to include the Festival au Désert in Essakane, just because it's north of Timbuktu. Presumably insurance considerations have stuffed that option. And yet insurers take their lead from the British FCO, which doesn't even have an embassy in Mali (surely it's about time?).

Still, good on Cox & Kings for running these tours. Feedback from customers would be welcome.

Food and fuel inflation: would you work for two days to buy a gallon of petrol?

2008-05-23T14:54:00.010Z

The impact of food and fuel price inflation in Africa is truly shocking, as this BBC Radio 4 "File on 4" report by Michael Robinson makes clear. Flour from $280 dollars to $800 a tonne in the last 12 months, petrol at $5.50 a gallon (1% of the average annual salary in Ghana). Everyone's talking about the possibility of oil reaching $200 a barrel. But imagine if petrol was already costing you a couple of days wages per gallon. . . Imagine if a loaf of bread was out of your reach and you spent an hour or two earning enough for a couple of slices. It may be down to speculators, and they may get badly burned (here's hoping. . .). But meanwhile, Africans are already paying.

Photo: Kaneshie market, Accra, where the market traders were recorded.

Les Amazones de Guinée

2008-05-22T16:12:00.010Z

Lovely, rolling sounds from Guinea - a BBC audio report from Network Africa, about the all-female, 12-piece, gendarmerie band, Les Amazones de Guinée, formed 47 years ago, and their first album in a quarter century, Wamato (Sterns). Though the idea of trying to "fall into line with global musical demands" is a bit ominous.

Photo from the The Rough Guide to World Music Vol 1 © Graeme Ewens/Retroafric

Mauritania - what the attacks mean

2008-05-22T16:12:00.007Z

An excellent and thoughtful recent piece by Armelle Choplin on Mauritanian "Islamism" and "terrorism" – required reading if you're about to go to Mauritania and really want to try to understand it. Mauritania is the only Maghreb country to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel. Note: it's best to read it in the original French if possible.

From Hay to Timbuktu

2008-05-21T19:33:00.004Z

A new documentary, "From Hay to Timbuktu", is launching in Hay-on-Wye this weekend. There's free wine and music on Friday 23rd May in the evening at Addyman Books, accompanying an exhibition of photos by Rosanna Westwood, documenting her first trip to Mali with Anne Brichto, to make the case for Hay to be twinned with Timbuktu. Both towns are closely associated with books and learning – Timbuktu through its ancient collections of Islamic manuscripts, Hay for its world-famous secondhand bookshops and annual literature festival – and the twinning proposal was accepted. Rough Guides is giving away copies of the Rough Guide to West Africa.

Out now, The Rough Guide to West Africa 5th edition

2008-05-21T12:39:00.009Z

The new edition is out now, and should be in bookshops over the next few days. Here's a press release:

The Rough Guide to West Africa
5th edition, June 2008

First published in 1990, the Rough Guide to West Africa is the most detailed guide available to the region. Although relatively close to Europe, West Africa is less well-known than many more distant parts of the globe. Now accessible by a new tarred road linking Morocco with Senegal – as well as by air – West Africa’s diverse countries, ranging from the islands of the Cape Verde archipelago to Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, offer a vast array of sights and experiences and the chance to engage first-hand with one of the economically poorest, yet culturally richest, parts of the planet.

The Rough Guide to West Africa is the most comprehensive and user-friendly guide to this rewarding region, covering the fifteen visitable countries from Mauritania to Cameroon in fifty percent more detail than its only competitor (1384 pages compared with 904 pages). The Rough Guide includes thoroughly researched hotel and restaurant listings for all budgets, as well as essential sections on everything from food and language to media and sport, and thoughtful background on the environment, culture, history, politics and music.  

The colour introduction highlights West Africa’s attractions, and touches on its great range of cultural and scenic impressions. Colour photo sections on Arts and Crafts and Food plants offer fascinating information and useful advice. More than 150 accessible and accurate maps guide you from the urban jungle to the beaches and mountains. And an extensive index references every place mentioned in the guide.

Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) Like the Rough Guide’s only competing title, we didn’t send researchers to Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire in 2007. However, rather than compile chapters on the basis of “desk updates” we decided once again to omit these two countries until conditions improve to the point where we can cover them properly and recommend a visit.

Expect the unexpected If Niger River boat trips, slave castles, Dogon hikes and palm-fringed beaches are the (relatively) well-known side of West African travel, there are thousands of other ways to experience the region, all covered in the Rough Guide.

For example:

Watch bands rehearse in Conakry (p.605), see chimps in Freetown (p.688), meet a Yoruba priestess in Nigeria (p.1144) or photograph crocodiles in the Sahara (p.139);

Stay at a German-run lakeside resort in Cameroon (p.1329) or an eco-lodge in southern Gambia (p.310);

Buy a replica coffin in the shape of a plane in Accra (p.825), climb a mid-Atlantic volcano (p.478), or visit Victorian explorers’ houses in Timbuktu (p.402);

See salt-water hippos in Guinea-Bissau (p.553) or Youssou N’Dour play live in his club in Dakar (p.211);

Time your visit to Burkina Faso for the pan-African film festival (p.717), pick up a fetish remedy in Lomé (p.916), explore the palaces of the Dahomey kings in Benin (p.993) or go giraffe-spotting in Niger (p.1047).

New features
The Rough Guide to West Africa includes a host of new and improved features. All capitals and major cities feature newly formatted “Surface arrivals and departures” public transport tinted boxes for overland travellers, summarizing the bus, taxi and – where relevant – train and ferry options. In addition, look out for:

Colour sections 24 pages of colour compared with 8 colour pages in the only competing guide.

Background tinted boxes Background and further information on more than 120 subjects. New boxes in the fifth edition include:
THE MALI EMPIRE: the empire’s founding and demise, and the lives of its inhabitants;
THE SLAVE TRADE: fresh insights on its impact on the interior, the traders involved, the destinations of transported slaves and the abolition of slavery;
SPAIN’S HELLISH ALLURE: the 21st century economic refugee crisis;
PROJECT ZACA: the redevelopment of central Ouagadougou.

New and improved maps The Rough Guide has more maps than any other travel guide to West Africa and 32 maps that don’t appear in the only competing guide. All maps have been refreshed, revised and updated with more details. New maps in the 5th edition include:

BENIN: new map of Abomey, showing royal palaces in detail for the first time;
CAMEROON: redrawn and expanded country map, and new maps of Douala;
CAPE VERDE: new map of Sal island’s booming resort of Santa Maria;
GUINEA: new maps of Greater Conakry and Nzérékoré;
GUINEA-BISSAU: new maps of Bubaque, Bafatá and Gabú;
MALI: new maps of Djenné, Sévaré and Gao;
NIGERIA: greatly expanded map of central Lagos and a detailed new double-page map of the capital, Abuja;
SENEGAL: new map of the holiday resort of Cap Skiring;
SIERRA LEONE: new maps of Makeni, Bo, Kenema and Tiwai Island National Park (last published in 1990, before the war);
TOGO: new maps of Atakpamé and Dapaong.

Readers’ quotes Readers’ letters and emails are invaluable in telling researchers about new places to visit and old descriptions to refresh. In this edition we wanted to give readers more of a voice, so quotations from their contributions, sometimes offering opinions different from our own, are now printed as tinted boxes in each chapter.

Books, Music, Cinema Reading, listening and viewing suggestions for each country, with concise reviews, write-ups and the local back stories on literature, music and film.

Up-to-date information Recent information, incorporated throughout the guide, includes the latest security and travel updates, fuel prices, current events updates and much more.

Languages The Basics chapter includes a detailed section on West African ethnicity and languages, with a West African language map. Each country includes a language chapter, incorporating practical phrases, word lists and glossaries, giving the basic tools of expression for one or more important languages, a total of 24 language kits, ranging from Bamana to Yoruba.

Index Revised and expanded, with themed sub-indexes of the guide’s tinted boxes.

Publishing information
The Rough Guide to West Africa, 5th edition
Authors: Richard Trillo & Jim Hudgens
ISBN: 978-1-84353-850-9
Pages: 1360 pages in two colour, 24 pages in full colour
Format: paperback, 198mm x 129mm
Maps: 154 maps and plans
Price: £21.99, US$34.99
Date of publication: 2nd June 2008

Review copies and sales enquiries
Anna Paynton, Rough Guides: +44 (20) 7010 3701, anna.paynton@uk.roughguides.com

Barça ou barsax - Spain's hellish allure

2008-05-20T21:25:00.003Z

Thanks to Roger Norum for the following piece in the new edition of the Rough Guide:

One of the biggest issues in Senegal today is not taking place at home: Barça ou barsax (“To Barcelona or to hell”) is a common Wolof expression that has become emblematic of the record numbers of Senegalese fleeing to Europe. Many of these attempts take place in rickety wooden fishing boats that regularly capsize or sink – drowning dozens of migrants – before they reach the Canary Islands. Despite the bodies washing up regularly on Spanish shores, the numbers attempting the passage have surged. In 2006, more than 30,000 illegal migrants set off, an estimated 6,000 of whom died or went missing – a six-fold increase on 2005. In 2007 the numbers doubled again to 60,000 migrants and more than 10,000 lost.

For many Senegalese families, shipping a son off to Europe by sea is seen as an opportunity to obtain foreign currency for the family back home, as often for economic advancement as from salvation from abject poverty. Senegal receives EU support to buy equipment to monitor vessels that might be trafficking migrants. In 2006, a pan-European maritime surveillance force, Frontex, was created to help reduce the number of migrant boats making it into international waters. But the organization has so far only been able to stage small-scale patrols off the coast of West Africa. Moreover, human rights groups fear that such measures will only result in more deaths, as desperate migrants leave under more dire conditions and attempt to avoid surveillance by making longer, more perilous journeys.

Most recently, Spanish businesses have launched government-approved programmes engaging directly with Senegal to hire workers for European jobs in the fishing, construction and hospitality industries. With more than €25million in development aid, Spain has created job centres in several African countries to filter potential emigrants, ultimately providing a path toward legal immigration in Europe. The initiative is also intended to rid West Africa of people traffickers.

In an era of conservative immigration policies, in which European countries such as France have adopted less integrationist measures such as offering money to migrant families to return home, Spain’s efforts have had some very positive benefits. It remains to be seen whether the model will encourage other European countries to think more liberally about accepting migrants – ultimately necessary if any marked dent is to be made on illegal immigration.

Somewhat irrelevant photo shows Gaudí's sculptures on the top of his Casa Milá in Barcelona - they've always reminded me of the Osun grove in Osogbo, Nigeria. Much more relevant, however, is a stunning collection of photos by Charlie Mahoney, that popped up on the BBC's African page today, illustrating the miserable plight of African immigrants in Barcelona. Charlie Mahoney's site is here.

The food crisis is deepening

2008-05-07T09:35:00.005Z

What's particularly moving about this sequence of photos by the BBC's Andrew Walker is the connection between the 15-year old boy in Kano and his mother out in the village. The photo of the man chopping down a lovely shade tree is truly depressing. Thanks to Jeremy at the brilliant Naijablog for the heads up.

Thomas Kohnstamm and Lonely Planet

2008-05-03T22:24:00.002Z

Recent revelations that Thomas Kohnstamm, a Lonely Planet author (who also worked as a desk editor at Rough Guides' New York office for a while) took freebies while researching their guide to Brazil, have positively rocked our little travel-publishing world. It's not so much that Kohnstamm did it, but that he, or rather his new publishers, have made such a meal of it, in publicizing his book of revelations, Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? His book is an enjoyable, fast-moving shagadrugathon, full of self-doubt and bare flesh, in which cheating on Lonely Planet's rule – "we don't take freebies in exchange for positive coverage"– is the last thing that's going to register in most readers' minds after they've taken in the sheer disorganised, fumbling, narcotic mess of Thomas Kohnstamm's efforts to put together his corner of the Brazil guide (112 pages, we learn). So it's amazing that the folks at Lonely Planet have been getting their underwear so contorted trying to convince their readers that LP authors taking freebies is unheard of. Not everyone at LP seems so sure of that, and according to Peter Munro, writing in The Age (Australia), some of those who've left the publisher, now owned by the BBC's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, say it happens a fair bit.

In fact it happens with all travel publishers, because the economics of researching and publishing travel guides are so tough. What makes the good guides good – and all publishers have good and bad ones – is the authors behind them. Although it's now only the policy of one or two publishers, including Rough Guides, to pay royalties rather than a flat fee, royalty payments are the way to ensure that authors care about the success and reputation of the book, not trying to impose unenforceable rules about how authors conduct themselves while gathering information as the money leaks away. A good author will slam or ignore a place, or simply give it a jaundiced write-up if it's not up to scratch, even if they have eaten or stayed there for free. And a good publisher cares about the finished product and the response of readers, not what a renegade contributor spouts in order to sell his own book.

Now, who's going to be the first Rough rebel? Too late, LP's rebel got there first.

"Sliding Liberia" and Robertsport

2008-04-30T17:14:00.021Z

Thanks to Rich Folsom (see comment in in the Surf Africans post) for news about this wonderful-looking film about surfing and survival in Liberia, which somehow grabs the imagination in a way that a lot of worthy, important works don't. The marketing site takes a while to open, but it's worth the wait, beautifully constructed by Joyce Yu, and fabulous music too.

I was obviously quite wrong about the lack of big waves in West Africa. . . and in fact Rich's comment sent me back to the first edition of the Rough Guide to West Africa (1990), in which we had a complete Liberia chapter, researched just before Charles Taylor's murderous army invaded the country. Here, in all its yellowing glory, is the page about Robertsport, which was clearly about to become a little resort. Judging from Google Earth (which is pretty hi-res over the town), our map might not have been the most accurate thing ever created. . .But you can see those big old waves out at Sembuhun beach on the west side of the peninsula.

Nearly twenty years on, let's hope the town can make something of "Sliding Liberia" – not yet screened in the UK and still not on general release anywhere as far as I know.

A nice break for Surf Africans

2008-04-11T15:21:00.006Z

Good (if temptingly punning) news from the BBC for surfers, from three South Africans who reckon the coast of West Africa offers really good waves. That's never been my impression – plenty of nasty rip-tides, yes; big rollers, no – but I'm no surfer, and Senegal certainly gets some waves. I'm not so sure about Ghana (some surf west of Dixcove, perhaps?), but the idea that Ghana's beaches have "particularly large numbers of African surfers" doesn't quite ring true. . .

On the other hand, I hope they do, it would be tremendous for the coastal regions to get a boost from this kind of tourism. Sierra Leone, which the boys missed out because the road network doesn't reallly hit the coast, might turn out to be excellent.

I'd like to hear more from anyone who can fill in details. Meanwhile, a bit more background about the BBC's James Copnall's interview at here, at AfricanSurfer.com with some nice footage of the Senegal Surf Champs competition near Dakar and a rocky-looking break in Côte d'Ivoire.

Great travel news from Nigeria

2008-04-10T14:44:00.007Z

Jeremy Weate, of Naijablog fame, who never seems to do anything by halves, has recently visited Gashaka Gumpti (or Gumpti) National Park in the remote eastern mountains of Nigeria, hard up against the Cameroonian border, specifically to climb the highest mountain in Nigeria, the 2418m Gangirwal, also known as Chappel Waddi (which means “Mountain of Death”). His account is a compelling read and adds greatly to the minimal coverage we have in the Rough Guide – even the new edition which will be out shortly. Highly recommended.

Photo/screenshot © Google Earth (taken from what I assume is the top of Gangirwal, looking NNW into Nigeria).

A sad, true warning

2008-04-09T22:58:00.006Z

A beautifully told tale of trying to do something, and just not being able to, has been scattered across Sophie Sarin's always readable "Djenne Djenno" blog in recent days. In a small, light way it's completely heartbreaking that 14-year old, illiterate "guide", Fatumata is going to carry on getting nowhere. The tale, which seems to have ended with Fatumata's recent decision to ditch her links with Sophie and the hotel, and go off on another tourist-guiding-begging spree, is a sad, true warning that fly-in-fly-out aid and assistance is just a waste of time, ultimately (in fact rather quickly) doing more harm than good.

Photo: © Sophie Sarin, Djenné-Djenno Hotel, Djenné

Railways in Nigeria

2008-04-09T22:51:00.004Z

I'd heard that Nigeria's railways were possibly up for a refurb. And surely the Chinese can do it. It would be a huge example for the rest of Africa if the Nigerians could pull it off, but the story here from "This Day" doesn't sound promising.

Here's what we say in the new edition of the Rough Guide:

Food price rises

2008-04-09T22:39:00.010Z

Expect some stress and tension in many capitals, as people react to huge price rises in basic commodities, especially rice. There have been major outbursts in Cameroon, Senegal, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso in recent weeks. This excellent piece of reportage from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs focuses on how you support a family in Dakar when you have only a couple of pounds a day. Life goes on, but it doesn't get any better.

Photo: Dakar

Overland to West Africa through Morocco: Tangiers warning

2008-04-03T11:56:00.003Z

Just a heads-up that if you're planning on stopping over in Tangiers on the way south from Europe to West Africa, there's been a spate of muggings in the city in recent weeks. The slightly over-the-top UK FCO general travel advisory for Morocco notes:

"The overall level of the advice has not changed [but] since March 2008 there have been a number of robberies, at knifepoint, of Europeans, including British citizens, near the centre of Tangier".

Let's hope the people involved are quickly caught – it's usually just a small gang who think they can stay lucky – as the city has really become a pleasant place to stay in recent years.

Ghana environment chief ticked off for harassing loggers for the wrong reason

2008-04-02T22:12:00.008Z

Ghana has precious little tropical rainforest left: by some accounts, barely 20 percent of the rainforest that was standing at the time of independence, 51 years ago (80,000 square kilometres), is still there. Which makes a moratorium on logging of what's left even more urgent. When I visited in February this year, the big forest giants – often standing like lonely old sentinels in a wilderness of patchy agriculture – were still being chopped down along the road up from Akosombo to Wli, as this photo shows, and the trucks full of logs were coming down the road in the other direction. So this story from the Ghanaian Chronicle, confusing even though it is, is depressing: even in a country as relatively well-managed and on the up as Ghana, where an Environmental Monitoring Foundation exists, is screwed by corruption and short-term gain. There's more background from 2006, including discussion of Kakum National Park here (paragraph about Ghana near the bottom of the doc). To find out more, and get involved in halting the decimation of Ghana's remaining forests, contact ForestWatch Ghana, who act as an umbrella group for NGOs involved in the issue.

Guinea - trouble on the horizon again

2008-04-02T22:10:00.006Z

Petrol and diesel prices have just gone up in Guinea-Conakry, not by a few pennies, but by the equivalent of several days average wages per gallon. A litre – that cost around $1 or 50p until the end of March – went up to $1.62 (more than 80p) on 1st April. The reason? The government has cut fuel subsidies. President Conté's clique obviously need the money, and figure the latest sabre-rattling by the unions may signal their last chance to make some before it's curtains for their government. With over-dependence on imported (and increasingly expensive) rice also making it almost impossible for people relying on wages to keep going, the next few months are looking really shaky. If you go, keep your ear to the ground the whole time. You'll be welcomed, and it's a beautiful country, but take care.

Bob Geldof on George Bush on Africa

2008-03-31T14:01:00.006Z

Time magazine gave Bob Geldof space recently to describe his trip following some of George Bush's African tour – and time in the company of the leader of the free world. It's a fascinating piece, though hard to know how much freedom Geldof – or Dubya – had to approve all the copy. You've got to marvel at the president when he says "US solutions should not be imposed on African leaders" So just on certain other leaders, huh. . .?

Strangely, this article differs from the version supposedly reproduced in The Sunday Times. Not just minor subbing changes, but in somewhat different quotes from Bush in each piece, and reflections from Geldof that don't appear in both articles, as if both were sourced from a longer one. Go figure – as the "curious and quick" (Geldof's words) George W might say.

Missing traveller no longer missing

2008-03-31T13:40:00.004Z

He turned up in France and is a free man, according to the Wimbledon Guardian. It could have been a much bigger story, or so speculated the Mail on Sunday across two lurid pages. But it looks like it wasn't. So that's all right.

Missing gap year traveller

2008-03-27T18:23:00.010Z

A 20-year old south Londoner, Aydan Savaskan, has gone missing, having last emailed home from Benin on 3 February. He worked on a voluntary project in Kenya for several months, and then, from the places he's been, It looks like he may have flown from Nairobi via Addis on Ethiopian Airlines to West Africa, as he also visited Togo before the last time he emailed, and Lomé is on Ethiopian's network. Benin is not such a big country, or so packed with young British travellers, that he could just disappear. Most travellers would stand out, and local people do remember travellers well. He may have fallen ill, somebody must know where he is.

Strange there's been so little interest. . . Do Brits of Turkish origin count for less?

Stories are here, in the Wimbledon Guardian, in the Standard, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph.

Anger in the Niger Delta © Current.com

2008-03-25T15:19:00.006Z

This excellent documentary feature (wait for the naff studio intro to finish) by Mariana van Zeller is broadcast on UK Channel 4 TV on 30 March 2008, or you can watch the whole thing on the Current.Com website. Although it was shot in March/April 2007, it shows graphically the conditions for oilfield communities, which have not improved over the last year. The clip below is the first of four parts in a 24-minute film.

As Mariana notes: "Despite the tens of billions of dollars worth of oil produced here every year, the delta remains desperately poor."

Watch the guy who says "I'm telling you out of anger, because God knows, I'm angry". . .

Clip © Current.com

Corruption in Mali

2008-03-18T17:16:00.004Z

More news from the incredibly energetic and generous Tan Wee Cheng, from Singapore, who notes in his recent post from Timbuktu:

"Upon arrival, a half-Turaeg-Songhai guy named “Alibaba”, obviously a member of the local tourist syndicate aka mafia with a name that sounded probably less trustworthy than he had intended, picked me up and sent me to Hotel Colomb on a motorcycle ride through desert wastes into town. Alibaba tried hard to sell his guide services. After I dumped my luggage, we walked next door to the tourist office where Alibaba showed me his photo on the tourist office’s register of travel guides. In my presence, the official at the tourist office also concurred with Alibaba’s assertion that new rules require tourists to walk around town with a guide, as too many tourists had upset locals by taking photos indiscriminately. With a guide, permission to take photos would be more readily granted. No choice but to agree to a half day guided tour for an outrageous sum of FCFA 10,000 (about US23), in a country where GDP per capita is less than US$1 a day."

Can anyone confirm this new state of affairs?

Later, in Djenné:

"The Mosque of Djenne was once opened to tourists. Some years ago, it was closed to non-Muslims when a European director was found filming a skimpily dressed model in the mosque. We were approached by an acquaintance who is a mosque official. He said I could go into the mosque if I pay him FCFA 20,000. I declined the offer. Why should I pay FCFA 20,000 (30 euros) to see a mosque? Simply too expensive. World Heritage Sites elsewhere don’t charge that much. This also once again marked the problem of corruption in Africa. They should allow tourists to enter but charge a high but more reasonable entrance fee of, say, FCFA 5000, which is probably okay for a WHS. This would get quite a number of visitors and generate income for the community. (Rules on modesty should be enforced with fines). Instead, individual officials benefit from the very small group of visitors willing to pay ridiculous sums of money."

CFA5000 is plenty – in fact, frankly it's a crazy amount of money if you simply want to gurantee maximum revenue, as you'll put off probably 30% to 50% of potential visitors (Peace Corps, VSOs, low-budget travellers, etc) who wouldn't pay more than CFA1000–2000 ($2–$4) for the privilege.

You can read the rest of Wee Cheng's post here.

Guinea Bissau – carnival and hotel news

2008-03-12T15:19:00.009Z

Most of the little news coming out of Guinea-Bissau is about the country's steady decline into West Africa's first narco state (what a delightfully horrible term), with elements in the army and navy apparently colluding in the trans-shipment of cocaine from South America. So Rose Skelton's piece in last Friday's Guardian on the Bissau carnival was excellent good news. It must be one of the least-known, most rarely acknowleged carnavals in the world. If people can hop on charter flights and party away in Olinda, Brazil, then why not in Bissau, half the distance? Not that the world needs any more charter flights. But if you are going to fly to a carnival. . .

You can read the story here. And Rose's HowdiBohdi? blog is well worth following (link on the left).

Photo © Rose Skelton

Bissau has a good new hotel, writes Tan Wee Cheng (thanks Wee Cheng), whose blog is also linked on the left):

"Hotel Kalliste, centrally located at Praca Che Guevara. The exterior looks horrible but the rooms are immaculately clean, new and modern and the hotel has strong bank vault-like exterior doors, probably as a safeguard against major political disturbances. CFA 30,000 to 40,000 per night. Has a good café-restaurant and a room with jackpot machines."

Rainforest ransack

2007-12-19T20:43:00.002Z

The world's rainforests – including the little patches left in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria, and the much larger area on the fringe of the Congo basin in Cameroon – are under attack. Around the world every second, an area equivalent to a football pitch (half a hectare, 50m x 100m) is cut down, or burned.

A football pitch every second.

This animation gets the point across pretty well. Stop the loggers by paying local people to hold onto their trees. Visit CoolEarth.

Great new West Africa maps

2007-08-10T07:33:00.000Z

While editing the new edition of the Rough Guide to West Africa, I've been using an excellent new map of the region published by Reise Know-How, the lively German travel publisher, in their World Mapping Project Series. In fact there are two maps of West Africa, one covering the southern countries, from about 18°N southwards and one I haven't seen yet covering the northern part of the bulge. They're both double-sided, at 1:2.2m, in other words 1cm = 22km, which is almost twice the scale of the Michelin map of the region, the classic "Michelin 153", now the Michelin 741 which is 1cm = 40km. Curiously, the West Africa Michelin map has been out of print for several months and a new edition, due in May 2007, is still awaited. As Reise Know-How prints their maps on plastic paper called Polyart, they will actually survive a pounding for several months while you carry them around. They're certainly more detailed than the Michelin (compare these clips from the Bamako region), and indications are they're more accurate too. You can get them from good map stockists, like Stanfords in London, or direct from Reise Know-How. Highly recommended (and Michelin has had a long innings. . .).

Gambia President in attention-seeking video

2007-07-17T23:34:00.001Z

Well he has my attention. You have to see this. You'll need a supermarket trolley for your jaw.

Designer hotels in Mali

2007-07-05T13:28:00.001Z

There are several interesting new hotel ventures in Mali that visitors with a bit more disposable CFA will want to know about. One of the nicest, with great touches like homemade bread, real coffee and chilled millet beer, is the Djenné-Djenno, just outside Djenné (left), whose anglo-Swedish owner blogs about life in Djenné – and Mali in djeneral. Highly reocommended. In Mopti you've got La Maison Rouge and and in Timbuktu, or Tombouctou to use the local spelling, there's La Maison - both the work of a Parisian architect. Actually, I say these are likely to appeal to better-off travellers, but in fact the rooms at the Djenné-Djenno, for example,are incredibly good value in European/North American terms – as in £18 ($36) for a twin room [corrected by owner's comment as now £25 or $50 as they're all air-conditioned].
The "Maison" hotels are £35 for a double or twin ($70) which, considering they're good Hip Hotel candidates, is remarkably inexpensive. They make some of the other places that have been around for years look pretty poor value. And yet these new establishments are walking a tightrope with local authorities and vested interests. It's a wonderful sign of Mali's growing confidence and success that people want to put their money there – so long as that vote of trust is matched by sensitivity to the plight of local people at the bottom of the heap – for whom a £20 hotel room would represent a month's work, at least, if they had a job – and all the guides and wannabe guides who compete for enough cash to get by on. So far, however, it looks like the new hotels are having a very positive impact. Do leave feedback if you try them.

Meanwhile, in Mali. . .

2007-06-27T15:34:00.000Z

. . .they've just blown their wonderful press freedom position by prosecuting five journalists and a teacher for "insulting Mali's president" over a school creative writing assignment in which students were asked to write a humorous essay about the (fictional) mistress of a (fictional) president. Malian defence lawyers, quite rightly, boycotted the sentencing.

At least you don't get much of the sub-sub-News of the World/National Enquirer level of reportage that is so common in Nigeria.

But what a way to spoil an increasingly good record on press freedom. And now I've got to re-write the "Media" paragraph in the Mali chapter. . .

Missing Penis in Uncensored News Shock

2007-06-27T15:26:00.000Z

Thanks to Jeremy Weate's consistently entertaining and informative Naijablog for alerting me to this journalistic gem:

"Rivers: Police arrest woman over missing organ

CHINEDU WOSU, Port Harcourt

Tragedy struck in Port Harcourt, the Rivers state capital when a middle age young man male’s organ disappeared in a fast food restaurant located along the Trans- Amadi industrial area.

The sad incident took place Thursday evening at about 4.30pm as the victim was waiting for a taxi before a lady approached him and had a touch on his body before his male organ got missing. . ."

It goes on: read the whole crazy nonsense here

Que la terre lui soit légère…

2007-06-20T22:16:00.000Z

[photo © Point-Afrique unless I'm advised otherwise]
A very nicely written little obituary here, from the Point-Afrique newsletter, of one of Africa's pioneer film-makers, the Senegalese director, Sembène Ousmane. I'm not going to try to translate this; some expressions just sound so much better in French.

L’adieu,
c’est celui que nous voudrions adresser à Sembène Ousmane. Le doyen, l’aîné des pionniers comme on avait coutume de l’appeler, est décédé dans la nuit du 9 juin dernier. Né à Ziguinchor en 1923, il fut enrôlé dans l’armée coloniale en 1942, puis travailla après la guerre comme docker sur le port de Marseille, jusqu’en 1960. Il rentra alors au Sénégal pour se consacrer d’abord à l’écriture, puis au cinéma, dans une volonté de toucher le plus grand nombre de ses compatriotes. Pionnier parmi les pionniers du cinéma africain, il étudia le 7e art à Moscou et signa son premier court métrage, Borom Sarret en 1963. Avec La Noire de… son premier long métrage - le premier également à avoir été produit et réalisé en Afrique - il inaugura une longue série de pamphlets contre les exactions coloniales (Emitaï, Camp de Thiaroye), la bourgeoisie et les classes dirigeantes sénégalaises (Le Mandat, Xala), les religions (Ceddo) mais aussi en faveur des femmes (Guelwaar, Faat Kiné, Mooladé). Célèbre pour ses prises de positions tranchées et sans concession, il a toute sa vie milité pour des valeurs humanistes et pour la dignité de «l’homme noir». Sembène Ousmane, l’homme à la pipe va manquer au cinéma, au continent, à nous tous. Que la terre lui soit légère…

Filmographie :
1963 : Borom Saret (court-métrage)
1963 : L’empire Songhay (court-métrage documentaire)
1964 : Niaye
1966 : La Noire de...
1968 : Le Mandat
1970 : Taaw
1971 : Emitaï, Dieu du Tonnerre
1974 : Xala
1976 : Ceddo
1987 : Camp de Thiaroye
1992 : Guelwaar
2000 : Faat Kiné
2004 : Mooladé

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

If you don't know Point-Afrique, they're one of the best and cheapest ways of getting from Europe (France only) to West Africa: Djanet, Tamanrasset, Cotonou, Ouagadougou, Bamako, Gao, Mopti, Atar, Agadez (normally), Niamey and Dakar, with all their net profits being reinvested in the local economies of host countries. I'd urge you to check them out.

Attack on Agadez airport, Niger

2007-06-19T20:05:00.000Z

This is not good. The random attack on the international airport at Agadez on Sunday 17th June (no casualties or damage, they say) by a bunch of Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ) fighters, apparently firing from a 4x4, means it looks like the whole northern region of Niger may be off-limits to travellers for some time to come. Already travel between towns in the north is restricted to vehicles with military escorts. Using the trans-Saharan routes out of and into northern Niger is strongly advised against, though, as usual, at the time of posting, there was no up-to-date advice from the British FCO based on this news. It's probably hard for them to know what to say, as the UK has no embassy in Niger, the ambassador responsible for Niger being the British High Commissioner in Accra, Ghana, 2000 miles away.

The Gold Coast Slave Trade

2007-06-16T20:59:00.000Z

The first four editions of the Rough Guide to West Africa don't have a lot to say about slavery. I'm not sure why. Maybe when we first wrote the book it seemed too obvious or well known a subject to be able – or to need – to add any more. But there's a great deal of documented history, showing how the slave trade had a momentum of its own that swept up the slave-acquirers, the slave-sellers, and the slave-buyers. It's a fascinating and of course disturbing, complex, contradictory story. Anyway, when editing the recently updated Ghana chapter, I decided to add a separate account of slavery in Ghana. Here's the draft of what will apppear in the next edition.

The Gold Coast Slave Trade
The earliest Portuguese traders on the coast were seeking to outflank Europe’s traditional suppliers of gold from the region, the trans-Saharan caravans. There was also a ready supply of human captives available for trade. Although by the middle of the sixteenth century, the market for slaves was waning in Europe, it was booming in Portugal’s new island colonies off the African Coast – the Cape Verdes and São Tomé – and in Brazil, which by 1600 was a major slave importer. The pace of colonization in the Caribbean and the Americas soon became so fast, and the demand for slaves to work the plantations so great, that Dutch and English, together with a few French, Danish, Swedish and even Prussian traders, soon came to fulfill a trans-Atlantic demand that the Portuguese alone were unable to meet. The Gold Coast slave trade was one segment, perhaps a tenth, of an African trade that also featured Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the “Windward Coast” (present-day Liberia), the “Slave Coast” (present day Porto Novo to Lagos), the Niger Delta and Cameroons, the Congo and Angola.

In 1700, the population of what is now Ghana is estimated to have been about one million. During the course of the eighteenth century, the numbers of slaves from the Gold Coast forts sold into the Middle Passage (the central leg of the Europe–Africa–Americas–Europe trading triangle), rose from around 2,000 a year to perhaps 10,000, with up to two out of three being men and boys aged between 8 and 20. The majority of Gold Coast slaves were deported to the Caribbean, where they worked for the rest of their lives on British, Dutch, French or Spanish sugar plantations. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, there were relatively few slaves in the North American colonies. But by 1750, Charleston and other ports were starting to buy African slaves from Caribbean traders. By the end of the eighteenth century, the USA was importing slaves directly, to work the cotton and tobacco fields supplying European factories.

It is estimated that for every 100 slaves who survived the crossing, 50 to 100 died, perishing during capture, while on the overland trek to the coast, while awaiting shipment in the dungeons, or at sea. The impact of removing so many of the fittest and most able young people – perhaps averaging ten percent each year from affected communities – was devastating, akin to a pandemic: every family suffered direct consequences as husbands, brothers and sons, as well as wives, sisters and daughters, were captured or disappeared. The population in the Gold Coast, which had been increasing by forty percent each century, hardly changed for more than 100 years. The best available estimate is that around a million slaves were transported from the Gold Coast to the Americas between 1600 and the mid-nineteenth century, when the (by then illegal) trade finally dried up.

Some slaves were convicts, others were kidnapped deliberately, but the majority of slaves were taken from communities destroyed in wars or ruined in the aftermath of conflict – for example during famines when families often pawned children who they were unable to care for to richer communities. The period of the Asante empire’s greatest military expansion, 1699–1800, coincided with a period of rapid growth in the American colonies and the start of the industrial revolution in around 1770 (and the same period saw the deportation of an estimated 700,000 slaves). During this time, the Asante enslaved hundreds of thousands of enemy combatants, refugees and civilians – especially from truculent vassal states in the Northern, Upper West and Upper East Regions of present-day Ghana, as well as from further afield in present-day Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina and Togo – and sold them to Fante middlemen who passed them on to the fort-based traders, receiving payment largely in firearms, in a spiraling cycle of aggressive expansionism. The few dozen Fante-speaking Europeans based on the coast virtually never engaged directly in slave capture, only rarely venturing inland and remaining in the forts to manage their import-export businesses.

How much the slave trade drove the Asante military machine, and how much it was driven by it, is hard to say, but the trade itself was certainly driven as much by the African demand for European goods – cloth, liquor, metal tools, straight cash and especially firearms and gunpowder – as by the insatiable demand from the Americas for slaves and by the unquenchable appetite of the European cash economies for sugar and cotton.

Down on the coast, captives were canoed through the surf, then herded onto slave ships anchored offshore, where they sometimes waited months for them to fill. Or they spent long periods in overcrowded dungeons and holding pens in the forts – or “factories” as the early English traders called them – run mostly by British or Dutch chartered trading companies, with a mixture of paid and enslaved local labour. Once embarked on the Middle Passage, a voyage of five to seven weeks, conditions for slave deportees were grim and terrifying. On their backs, bent forwards, or paired together to save space, they were shackled in irons, in claustrophobic confinement, for hours on end. Captains concerned for their cargo’s health – or for reduced losses – brought the slaves onto the main deck during the day, but in rough weather they were confined between decks for days at a time. In Britain, the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788 stipulated a space allowance of 6ft by 1ft 4in (1.8m by 0.4m) for each adult man. But such legal niceties carried little weight and paled in relation to the reality: washing was rarely possible; excrement accumulated in the waste tubs; disease spread rapidly; bodies were disposed of overboard; and punishment beatings and forced feeding were not uncommon.

Although there was undoubtedly public consternation about the slave trade, the business peaked at a time when the legal rights of Europeans themselves were embryonic in comparison with today: in Britain, transportation to Australia (effectively as slave labour) was a routine punishment and burning at the stake still practised. From the 1760s, reformists lobbied for a ban, but it was the slave revolt on Haiti (1792–1804) that triggered moves toward an end to the trade. The trading nations, partly sensitized by French revolution and the newly independent United States of America, partly terrified of what the future might bring if more slave revolts should occur, steadily turned against the trade. The first Europeans to outlaw the slave trade were the Danish, in 1804, followed by the British in 1807. Other trading nations followed suit, but it wasn’t until the British abolition of the institution of slavery itself, in 1833, that the trade began to decline rapidly, to be replaced by a burgeoning trade in ivory, hides and, later in the nineteenth century, palm oil for the soap and chemical industries. In the Gold Coast, palm oil was produced mostly on Asante and Fante palm plantations – worked partly with slave labour.

US Troops in Mali

2007-06-15T19:29:00.000Z

We've heard before about US military personnel in West Africa – the story goes back several years and isn't denied. It just doesn't get much of airing. What are they actually doing? To get anecdotal chat about their presence in northern Mali, from this Kidal community website, is interesting. I think it probably tells you more about how resentment grows from idle chat – or is the opening remark below deliberately provocative? – to extremism and violence than any complex bird's eye analysis. For those who don't speak French, I'll try to summarise the conversation:

scipion (15 June 2007, 1.12pm) asks:
Sound of American boots in Kidal
What can we say about what the troops and the American tanks are doing in Kidal? Invasion? Colonisation? Training? Manouevres?

al-ansary (15 June 2007, 2.44pm) says:
they treat everybody who is against them or who asks questions about the purpose of these troops, that person is considered a terrorist or somebody giving support to terrorism. so, brothers on the ground, look out, and be aware that every word, each movement is noticed by uncle sam. He is always looking for excuses to plant himself on the ground. He even tries to provoke quarrels. The history of the usa abroad is full of that sort of thing.

diallo (15 June 2007, 4.46pm) doesn't agree:
Mali has agreements with the USA and they are here to train elite Malian troops. What's more, they don't have tanks or armoured vehicles. Let's not exaggerate.

scipion (15 June 2007, 7.03pm comes back:
Sorry Mr Diallo, but they certainly have come with armoured vehicles. I didn't say anything about tanks. And I'm not exaggerating.

–––––

Meanwhile, in a town not far away (Gao, down on the River Niger) a largely benign arm of American foreign policy, the Peace Corps, in the shape of one volunteer, is assisting in running the best travel website in Mali, and one of the country's poorest regions. Brilliant stuff from M. Kata Data Alhousseini Maïga and his team – more power to their keyboards!

A Ghana blogroll – kind of

2007-06-11T13:11:00.000Z

http://ekbensahinghana.blogspot.com (Trials/Tribulations of a Freshly-Arrived Denizen…of Ghana)
http://accradailyphoto.blogspot.com (Photo Blog of Accra by Day and Night)
http://www.globalvoicesonline.org (Global Voices, which seeks to amplify, among other things, non-Western blogs—supported by Reuters)
http://regionswatch.blogspot.com (Critical/Progressive Look at Regional Integration)
http://adamwestbrook.wordpress.com (recently-graduated Journalist from the UK writing about Africa, and the Media, with occasional focus on West Africa/Ghana)

Many thanks to Emmanuel Bensah for kindly sending me this list. "I'd like to recommend a few site on Ghana, including mine" he wrote. And indeed his (the first in the list), and the accradailyphoto.blogspot.com are both full of today's/this week's/this month's news and flavours, especially on Accra. The other three sites aren't particularly Ghanaian, though Global Voices Online and Regions Watch are both very worthwhile. Adam Westbrook's excellent journalist's blog has some very useful West Africa links, particularly Sociolingo.

More news from Casamance

2007-06-07T17:05:00.000Z

Rough Guide's Senegal updater, Roger Norum, was in Casamance recently. Here's his report on security in the area.

Security in Basse Casamance

"The bulk of the civil unrest in the Basse Casamance between the Senegalese government and various, disunified and dissident factions of the MFDC separatist movement had largely died down in 2004 once the peace treaty was signed with the rebels. At the time of writing, however, sporadic conflict had escalated in the region following the 2007 Senegalese elections, and there have since been occasional reports of highway banditry along the region’s borders.

Much of Casamance’s dangerous reputation has come from these intermittent road ambushes by rebels turned bandits: a Red Cross worker was killed in late 2006 when her vehicle struck a newly-placed land mine on an unpaved road in Tandine, northeast of Ziguinchor; four people were killed in early 2007 when their bus was attacked after being stopped at a roadblock; and in May, 2007 there were reports of shootings along the Gambian border. Such incidents have rarely involved tourists, but the British Foreign Office and the US State Department still advise visitors against travel to the region.

In practice, while some parts of Casamance were still no-go zones because of rebel activity and/or land mines – notably the forests south of the Kolda-Ziguinchor-Cap Skiring road, including the Basse Casamance National Park, and a couple of stretches along the Gambian border – other areas haven’t seen any armed conflict in years, if ever. During my visit in April, the main regional roads were on the whole considered to be quite safe during the day, thanks to army roadblocks and police checkpoints. And once inside Ziguinchor, Cap Skiring and other villages traditionally popular with tourists, the security risks were virtually non-existent – certainly smaller than being mugged in Dakar, for example.

The dilemma, then, seems not to be whether to go Casamance – since once you're there it feels quite safe, so long as you don’t venture far off the touristed routes – but how to get there in the first place. As the roads seem to be where the trouble lies, the best options for arrival are the daily flights or twice-weekly ferries from Dakar. Of course, things could deteriorate at short notice, so you should check the latest security situation before you go. Most people in other parts of Senegal will be full of dire warnings about Casamance, but unless you meet someone who has been there recently, it may be hard to discern some objective truth out of what you hear. You can get a more reliable account of the situation from the bush-taxi drivers who travel to Ziguinchor every day, or just by calling one of the Ziguinchor hotels, especially Le Flamboyant or Le Kadiandoumagne.

Casamance is safe!

2007-04-20T12:22:00.000Z

News from our updater Roger Norum, in Senegal, who had been advised in Dakar to give Casamance a miss, or, if he went, to be extremely careful. People made it sound like a war zone.

Roger writes:

"– Flew to Casamance, it was superb
– The friendliest people of my entire trip
– Great response from ppl, really excited to get tourism up and running again
– A few new projects going on, lots of campements restored over past few years
– Am amazed how much bum advice I was given in Dakar about going
– Completely safe in southern Basse Casamance and on new tarmac road from Zig–Cap Skirring
– A bit less safe (and certainly a lot more military presence) in the North and along the Gambian border"

President running out of diseases to cure

2007-04-05T14:05:00.000Z

President Doctor Yahya Jammeh of The Gambia has been much in demand in the country's handful of hospitals since the beginning of the year, when he discovered he could cure AIDS with special potions and a personal visit. Most officials are maintaining a dignified silence on the spectacle, though the health minister has endorsed the cure, but as the treatment requires a high level of commitment from the patients, including giving up their expensive anti-retroviral drugs, it can only be a matter of time before nature takes its course and somebody's relative feels they have to speak out. Meanwhile, Jammeh's talents are broadening to include diabetes and asthma.

Better news from Guinea

2007-03-30T11:19:00.000Z

President Lansana Conté is still hanging on, but his new prime minister, Lansana Kouyaté, has been given a good slab of credit by most Guineans and it looks like a new government is about to be formed.

On the practical side, the British FCO advisory has been downgraded to "Advise against all but essential travel" which is staying on the safe side during an uncertain period, but which, from insurance purposes, seems to mean that essential travel will be covered. You'll need to contact your insurer directly about this, tell them the travel is essential, and that should clear it. On the ground, I've heard no reports of further confrontations between army and demonstrators and most people seem to be prepared to be patient again. But you need to keep a close eye on the news. Students at Labé University, in the Fouta Djalon (a region traditionally at odds with the Susu ruling elite in Conakry) have been out on strike for the last few days, protesting against a completely neglected education system. Protest is habit-forming, especially when fully justified.

Guinea update from Ross Velton, Bissau

2007-02-15T12:08:00.000Z

“I have got to know the guy in charge at the Guinean Embassy here in Bissau quite well over the past few days. I went to see him this morning for an update on the situation in Guinea-Conakry. His assertion that it was “very good” is obviously diplomatic rhetoric, and it must be said that his take on what is going on in his own country has often contradicted what I have heard from NGO workers in Guinea-Bissau and, indeed, the BBC World Service reports. This is not necessarily his fault, since I imagine that the government in Conakry has bigger priorities at the moment than keeping embassy officials updated. Today he was reporting that the Guinea-Bissau/Guinea-Conakry borders were open from midday to 6pm. However, travellers staying at my hotel were turned away from the border yesterday, so I am sceptical that the borders are open today. On my last visit to the Guinean Embassy, I was told that the borders would be closed until at least tomorrow. Even if you can enter Guinea-Conakry, the curfew (from 6pm to midday) - which the army are enforcing, sometimes quite violently - will restrict travel, and a general strike means that nothing is open.”
Ross Velton, by email, 15th February 2007

Guinea – too dangerous to visit

2007-02-13T11:12:00.001Z

Guinea, one of West Africa's most stimulating and normally enjoyable countries to travel in, has now become more stimulating than most travellers would want, with the resumption of a general strike aiming to force the country's president to stand down, and his statement that the country was now at siege and that the army should restore order at all costs. Lansana Conté who has ruled since the country's first president, the dictator Sékou Touré died in 1984, has increasingly lost his grip on power. The final straw was the January general strike, when the country's powerful unions forced him to appoint an independent prime minister, and then rejected his choice as being too close to the presidency. The gloves now seem to be off on both sides, but it's not yet clear how much of the army Conté can count on to support him. Meanwhile, the streets of the capital, Conakry, and many other towns, are scenes of chaos and confusion, with official and unofficial roadblocks and incidents of banditry and looting on the increase as the long-suffering people of this rich and beautiful country – admittedly mostly the wilder young men of this rich and beautiful country – seize their opportunity to hit back and grab what they can. Our researcher on the ground in the region has just emailed from Guinea-Bissau to say that he managed to get a visa, but we've agreed he's going to stay clear of Guinea-Conakry for now and move on to his next assignment, Burkina Faso. Most expatriates living in Guinea have now evacuated to Dakar or Freetown and Air France has cancelled its Conakry flights.

The BBC, as usual, is updating regularly. You should also have a look at the following blogs, though they aren't all being updated frequently, and some owners are no longer in Guinea.

News from Guinea and Friends of Guinea
Bonnie's Peace Corps Experience in Guinea
Letters from Guinea

Attacks in Niger

2007-02-09T12:13:00.000Z

Look out for yourselves if travelling in northern and eastern Niger. An army base near Iférouane was attacked, allegedly by Touareg gunmen, yesterday. There was also at least one attack on some tourist vehicles in late December between Arlit and Agadez, reported by the 153 Club. They robbed everyone and took the vehicles. This was pure banditry, and nobody was reported injured, but being stranded out there with little food and water, before being rescued by Nigerien police, is no joke. As usual, travelling low-key is safer – though there's little public transport in the remotest areas so you'd probably end up in a big 4x4 anyway – but these parts of Niger remain lawless and not for the fainthearted.