Africa – wanderwarbler

March 3, 2024March 11, 2024

Marrakech: Confusion

Allahu Akbar. The words stretch and turn like yarn from the spindle, glistening in the sun with the crackling from outdated amplifiers. From the rooftop terrace of Café de France on Jemaa el-Fnaa Square, one can see a group of men gathering in the dark triangle of shade behind the souk. They have taken off their shoes and kneel on colourful carpets laid out on the cobblestones. Their eyes are closed, their hands rest firmly on their thighs as they bend forward in devotion. Then another muezzin from another mosque nearby begins his adhan, his call for prayer. Allahu Akbar. Then, from another mosque somewhere in this city, another, then another, and another, and another. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. In the air thick with Saharan heat the words float; they plunge and surge like the swallows, entwine in mysterious patterns, weaving a thick fabric that envelops all.

It is unusually hot this February, which could easily pass for June. But the people in the streets wear long-sleeved woollen shirts called haiks under hooded, ankle-length kaftans called djellaba or chalwar, under down jackets called Northland or Columbia. They’re dressed for the freezing nights of the desert, for the snow-capped peaks of the Atlas towering behind the city. What saves from the cold, saves from the heat, Abdel the taxi driver says. The old Moroccan adage might explain why no one died from heat stroke last summer, when on three consecutive days the mercury soared to some unprecedented 52C. As the orange fireball of the African sun melts into the palm studded skyline, it is only the tourists’ shoulders at Café de France, that shimmer salmon red like the city below.

Al-hamra, the red one, as Marrakech is dubbed, was built from red clay of the Sahara. Nomadic Berber tribes had roamed the dunes for tens of thousands of years. (Or possibly much longer: In 2017, 300,000 year-old human fossil were discovered in North Morocco, the earliest evidence of homo sapiens.) A thousand years ago, the then ruling Almoravids, the first Muslim Berber dynasty, whose empire stretched from present day Dakar far into present day Spain, drafted craftsmen from Cordoba to build a new imperial city and turn this deserted land into the Land of God: Amur n Akush, from which the name Marrakech is supposedly derived, literally means the sanctuary of God in the local Amazigh (Berber) language.

The master builders applied a construction technique. As evidence suggests, Tabia, or rammed earth, had been used on African soil since neolithic times. This method consists of mixing damp clay with sand, straw, and lime, then compress it to half its size inside a high wooden frame. The process is then repeated over and over until the frame is filled. When the wooden scaffolding is finally removed, a solid brick wall stands on its own. Upright soil, pointing skywards.

This way they built palaces, gardens, bathhouses, and mosques, and a city wall around it all, everything bearing like navels small holes in their facades. These are where once the frames’ wooden beams held up the still damp clay. Pigeons nest in these holes, but it is said that through these holes the walls breathe.

It is impossible to not get lost in Marrakech. The historic center, the medina, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is overwhelming in its abundance of colours and sounds and scents. Sputtering mopeds fly by like jinns, leaving but a whiff of black diesel smoke. There is the demure clacking of ragged donkeys, and the rattling of their overloaded carts. At the shopfronts, polychrome ceramic pots are piled man-high. Leather-slippers in primary colours dangle from every wall as eagle-eyed vendors prey on hapless, disoriented tourists, and lure them into their cavernous shops where more carpets and pillows and copper lampshades wait. The medina is one never-ending souk – or has one been going in circles? As the lanes twist and turn, the destination is out of sight, or long forgotten. The sky is but rare blue glimpses between the sun sails, the cotton veils suspended from the roof tops; daylight is but glowing pillars of white that lift the intricate wooden trellis above. The entire city is veiled.

Moroccan women don’t cover their faces. Some wear a headscarf; some flaunt long black hair and golden earrings. Moroccan Islam is traditionally moderate. (In 2017, ahead of any European country, the Moroccan government ruled out the production and import of burqas.) In the tradition of the Imazighen, the Berbers, only men cover their faces with a tagelmust or litham. The long piece of indigo-dyed cotton is wrapped around the head, its loose end covering mouth and nose to protect from the sandy Saharan winds. This fashion stems from prehistoric times, as desert rock engravings depicting human faces without mouth or nose suggest. But within the city walls, there is no need for protection. The city itself is a turban, a veil, a head wrap: the lanes spiral endlessly, narrow into dead-ends, disappear into underpasses that lead to another souk, another house, another souk. Marrakech is a cacophonous cocoon that keeps warm and cool, and safe.

Within the chaos and confusion, there is silence. It can be found at every corner: a zawiya, Arabic for corner, is a sufi prayer room or monastery. Silence waits in the myriad mosques and madrassas, the quranic schools, secret hideouts in the back lanes, given away only by a heap of shoes at their doorsteps. Peace and calm drift from these doors like heavenly scents.

Contrary to the mosques and zawiyas, Madrassa Ben Youssef from the 14^th century, is open to visitors. The square building with its courtyard is captivating not only in its serenity, but in its disorienting melange of patterns, patterns, patterns. The tiled floors are kaleidoscopic arrangements of contrasting triangles and shingling loops, of greens and blues and yellows, of brilliant whites and sparkling golds. Sunlight filters through wood-laced windows, staircases lead up and down, a cool breeze spirals like the water that flows upwards from ancient cisterns. Lost in the multitude of shapes and shades, one wanders. It is a pleasant feeling to be lost. To be lost is a solace.

The Medina is scarred. There are cracks running through the old buildings. Shockwaves of the catastrophic earthquake of September 2023 in the nearby Atlas mountains caused many of the old buildings to collapse. Now, after 1,000 years, scaffoldings are back up in the Medina. They secure the buildings barely left standing. The locals walk by with equanimity. They tell of this or that neighbour that was buried in the rubble. Are they scared of another earthquake? They shrug their shoulders. It’s God’s will, they say. Inshallah.

The birds are always singing in the Medina. Goldfinches and weavers, chaffinches, and buntings whistle and warble from the walls, from shop doors, from upper floor windows one hadn’t noticed until then. The tiny birds are kept in little cages furbished with mirrors and fresh fruit and water fountains. Their owners look after them with great care, they shower them, feed them, keep them warm in the night and cool in the day. It’s because these birds weren’t born in the wild, they say, that it is up to them to provide for them. Safeguard them from the stray cats that are out on the streets in the thousands. Do the birds sing in gratitude? Or do they sing to remember and honour their ancestors, those who flew freely?

In the black of the night, Jemaa el-fnaa Square vibrates with rhythm. There are drums. There are wailing songs and croaky call-and-response chorus. There is the ragged, cyclic galloping of the qraqebs – heavy, double-headed, cymbal-type instruments. And there is the all-commanding reverberating bass of the guimbri, the three-stringed African lute. Its player sits cross-legged on a threadbare carpet and slaps the strings with his thumb while his curled fingers knock against the camel-skin-face of the wooden corpus.

“I determined to go and live where I could be surrounded by sounds like those, because there seemed to be very little else one could ask for in life,” Paul Bowles wrote in the 1950s.

The musicians are Gnawa. The term, which refers to the music and its players as an ethnic group, means ignorant or black in the Amazigh language. The Gnawa are the descendants of sub-Saharan African slaves who for centuries were walked through the desert to be traded in Marrakech, not far from Jemaa al Fna, on Rhaba Khedima square where today only spices and carpets are sold. The slaves brought with them their African music styles: The polyrhythms, the call-and-response chanting, the dances: music to heal the wounds of exile. Music to remember; to honour their ancestors.

Uprooted and orphaned, the slaves didn’t find solace in their music alone, but also in Sufism. The mystic branch of Islam had arrived from the east around the same time. Contrasting with the stark, then Andalusian Islam, it established itself as a counter reformist Islam. Its soothing message of love and transformation appealed to the poor, and was easily married to traditional African belief systems. Half prayer, half folksong, a new Moroccan music was born, mirroring the winding lanes, the intertwining patterns, telling of a life in search of freedom and home, like the songs of caged birds.

Traditionally, Gnawa rituals are held in the secrecy of private homes, religious ceremonies, to enforce social bonds and mental healings. It is only since Western musicians had fallen for its charms, that Gnawa is performed on stage, and – stripped of its spiritual and social importance. Paul Bowles, who had set out to record and preserve strictly authentic Moroccan music, had with his recordings Music of Morocco of 1959 kindled its full commercialization: American musicians from Jimmy Hendrix to Frank Zappa, from Pharao Sanders to Ornette Coleman, from Paul Simon to Madonna have since integrated Gnawa in their music. Gnawa, the mysterious Blues of the Sahara.

A circle of onlookers has formed around the musicians. In the middle, young men in bright coloured robes are dancing, twirling, whirling their heads on their necks, slowly entering a state of trance. Or appearing to. For all of a sudden, they stop, take off their hats and approach the sunburnt tourists in the crowd. The coins clink as they tumble and whirl in the crocheted cotton hats, an intricate counterpoint that could be taken for noise.

It is safe to say, that the Qraqebs on Jemaa el-Fna don’t evoke any animal sprites or Sufi saints, but the marketable image of the mysterious Orient, the dances spark showers of gold. Dollaruh Akhba.

Marrakech is Africa’s most visited city and tourism its major economic driver, especially in the aftermath of a major tragedy like the 2023 earthquake. But tourism in Africa can never be separated from the continent’s colonial past: since the days of French colonialisation (1923-56), Marrakech (and its Medina) have served as a screen for Western projection of exotism and orientalism, a role with troublesome ethical implications: the romantic poverty of the back lanes, the thrill of tragedy, the moral inferiority of deprivation and misery. ‘No one escapes Orientalism’, Edward Said, who coined the term, wrote. Not Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, nor George Orwell who, while criticising colonialization, described in their famed travel accounts of Marrakech a city of poverty, chaos, and conflict, peopled by mysterious, dark-skinned donkey-drivers. A Haunting, undecipherable place; not God’s land, but a city in distress.

It is not without irony the notorious pushiness of the vendors in the souks, the notorious henna tattooists and snake charmers of Jemaa el-Fnaa, that shatters all illusion. With a merciless determination — undoubtedly owed to a bitter cocktail of poverty and questionable entrepreneurial cunning — they act their part in a play all tacitly agreed to play: but this is not the play of an entrancing, adventurous journey into the mysterious Orient. It’s that of capitalism, and the tourists’ role is to keep the money rolling, and the show running.

Marrakech has always been a marketplace and will always be: then of camels and slaves, now of tourists and babouche slippers. Maybe the real Marrakech is the enthralling ornaments, the very action of getting lost in the mazes of streets, in the kaleidoscope of songs and colours and the smell of cumin and peppermint: A reminder that one is never centre of the world, the measure of all things, but a tiny piece in a giant, colourful mosaic. That life is one sparkling maze in which one is lost, until one dies. Marrakech is multitude; a city to help us transform from a unitary character to one that includes the other; or to quote Edward Said: A meeting of counterpointing lines that make for a great composition.

February 2, 2024February 5, 2024

Madagascar: Sticky Tongues

Lizards are stealth predators. Motionless, they blend in, turn invisible. They crouch into oblivion, waiting, suspending time. Why hurry? the Madagascan poet Raharimanana wrote, watching a gecko on the ceiling of his room. Things are bound to happen. The fly won’t know what hit it when the reptilian tongue darts out, faster than lightning. There is no escape from its sticky grip.

Ny vava tsy ambina no ahitan-doza – an unguarded mouth spells danger – is a Malagasy proverb. The people of Madagascar live up to it. They speak with deliberation. They avoid confrontation. They search to agree. Even though the twenty different peoples of the world’s fourth largest island share one language, the Malagasy prefer to leave many things unsaid. It’s an eloquent silence. On this island of natural marvels and unique biodiversity unspeakable things have happened.

The language Malagasy, originating in Melanesia, from where a few thousand years ago the first settlers arrived, holds traces of Arab and African languages, and English and French. As if history had added syllables like rings of a tree, the words are long, sinuous, and dizzying. Ambohimanatrika, Fianarantsoa, Ampandrasoatanimbary, Analamitsivalana, are typical names of typical towns that huddle along the National Road RN7. Running from the capital Antanararivo in the center to the sea town Toliara on the West coast, it is one of the island’s few tarred roads, an anachronism in a society that mostly relies on sandaled feet for locomotion, and cattle-pulled carts for transportation. There are no traffic jams on the RN7. The overloaded trucks or climatized tourist cars that manoeuvre around the potholes move with slow consideration. As the RN7 winds up high mountains, passing by the intricately laid out rice terraces, street vendors and cattle herders, then descends straight into the fairy tale formations of the canyons of Isalo and finally reaches the palm studded beaches at the Mozambiquan channel, it girds the fishermen on the coast to the cattle herders in the South to the rice farmers on the highlands like a dark, dead snake.

Men are like the creeping stem of the pumpkin and if traced they are found to be one. The Malagasy adage is expressed in the concept of Fihavanana, which, not unlike its African Bantu counterpart Ubuntu, defines the individual but as a part of the group. Fihavanana can loosely be translated as solidarity or interdependence: People help each other when in need, lend a hand when the fields must be tilled, or the rice planted, or a zebu cattle was lost. As charmingly altruistic as this sounds, it is a solidarity confined to family, or those regarded family. Life in Madagascar is lived along bloodlines.

Lineage is paramount. The Malagasy adhere to a strict hierarchical system that places age and ancestry on top. It decrees the young to serve the elders and the elders to serve the ancestors who in return offer guidance, protection, and identity.

The Malagasy spend their lives in closest proximity to their dead. Villages are laid out around family tombs. Lavishly decorated, painted, sometimes colourfully tiled, they stand by little rice plots, or in the midst of vast grazing fields. In the rocky canyons of Isalo, caves up the holy mountains serve as family crypts. The deceased family member lives on as part of the family, albeit one of elevated standing. Death is a step up the social ladder.

A family tomb towers over the terraced rice fields

Almost half of the world’s species of Chameleons are endemic to Madagascar. The gecko’s spectacular lizard-cousins famously change colour, although not according to background, as it is commonly believed, but to their emotional state. They turn dark in fight mode, and bright to assert dominance. To attract a mate, they transform their scaly skin into an enthralling kaleidoscope. Colour is their only means of communication, for they are completely mute: chameleons possess no vocal cords, no words. Their eyesight, however, is excellent. Equipped with the uncanny ability to swivel their eyes 360 degrees in their sockets, each eye individually, they see all. The Chameleon sees the future with one eye and the past with the other, another proverb goes. The Malagasy believe chameleons to live in the world between tomorrow and yesterday, between here and there. They’re regarded ambassadors of the dead. Most Malagasy fear chameleons.

It takes years for a deceased to enter the ranks of the ancestors, a status, which, due to its proximity to God, instils them with divine powers. The progress of decomposition of the body is therefore closely monitored. Every three to seven years, the bodies are exhumed, and their silk burial shrouds exchanged. Extreme importance is placed on this so-called turning of the bones, or dancing with the bones – Famadihana – a ritual for which even émigrés regularly return from abroad. In 2017, during an outbreak of the Plague, the government searched but failed to outlaw these reburial rituals, a failure which purportedly claimed the life of several hundred people from contagion.

To constantly renew the bond with the ancestors is essential. Ancestors are still invested in the here and have the power to interfere should they be displeased: The harvest will fail. The rains won’t come. A zebu will be stolen. To be dead is a position of ultimate power, a power that is invisible, ubiquitous, and omniscient.

To recapture a stolen or escaped Zebu is a group effort

As the dead appear alive and the living dead, paralyzed in constant fear of admonition or malediction, time is suspended. The past bleeds into the future and drowns it.

Immobility is an impossibility, Raharimanana writes, still watching the gecko on the ceiling, the transparent skin, the large eyes, the foetus face; an oxymoron, born from all that’s impossible. A living dead. A fast stillness. A visible invisibility. The Gecko is everywhere, in the folds of sleep, in the fear he induces. And yet, the Gecko eats mosquitoes.

Communities define themselves through their oaths, their symbols, their ordeals, the late American anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber wrote in his seminal work “Lost People.” Before he became a figurehead of the Occupy Wallstreet movement, Graeber studied the communities of the Madagascar highlands. According to Graeber, in Madagascar a king didn’t rely as much on military success as on his ability to gather everyone regardless of descent and make them agree upon his rule. In the beginning, people became a people by agreeing with each other.

Betsilea people in the central highlands

Graeber argues that Malagasy societies were hence an early form of enlightened democracies – contrary to the Western belief that concepts like democracy and enlightenment were brought to Madagascar (and Africa) by Europeans who arrived from the sixteenth century on, in form of traders (from Portugal), missionaries (from England), pirates (from the Caribbean), and ultimately colonialists (from France).

This idea might explain the typically Malagasy avoidance of the slightest conflict or disagreement even in the face of severe discomfort or disadvantage, which to a visitor is often disconcerting . But it could also be, Graeber concedes, an expression of a society kept at bay by fear. (It is equally surprising to a Western visitor how openly people admit to their fears in Madagascar, be it arachnophobia, bovinophobia, or xenophobia.) It is possible, Graeber says, that people purely recognized someone as a king due to his power of having brought them together and agree in the first place. It was a power they considered otherworldly. In the beginning was the word, and the word was magic.

Magic still plays an important role in Madagascar, and even Western-educated Malagasy will surprise a visitor with their belief in the supernatural and their belief in oaths, taboos, and charms. While more extreme expressions of what the Western world calls superstition, or paganism, like animal and human sacrifices, ordeals, witch trials and floggings, are certainly a thing of the past, charms are still in use.

Every object, animate or inanimate, material or immaterial, can be instilled with magic powers and act as a charm. A stone, a tree, a bead can be instilled with a person’s fears and desires, the rain, the wind, nature, can all be but extensions of a single person. And mostly so the word. The island of Madagascar is not a place of natural wonders, but of ultimate human agency.

All magic is political. Malagasy traditional life went within strict social strata that drew their legitimacy from spiritually influential ancestry. The top class of nobles who claimed direct ancestry from the founding kings benefitted from many privileges, like wearing red beads or tiling their family tombs, but most importantly from Fanompoana. This was the obligation of the lower class of commoners, whose royal descendants lay more than seven generations in the past, to perform free services and works for them. The commoners themselves could rely on the free work of the lowest class, those who didn’t have family tombs and couldn’t claim any royal descent at all, for they had been brought against their will: slaves.

Madagascar’s history of slavery is long and complex. Thousands of years ago, when the first settlers arrived in Madagascar, they raided the surrounding African coast for slaves, and continued to do so within the island. Kidnappings happened between neighbouring villages and kingdoms, the captives were then traded in highland slave markets, purchased for labour on the rice fields, or exported to the nearby French and British colonies, Mauritius and Réunion. In 1895, when the French annexed Madagascar, dismantled the monarchies and in 1897 abolished slavery, the complex societal pyramid toppled. The nobles fled and took on administrative jobs in the capital or in Paris; the former slaves took over the rice fields and, at least in the fertile areas of the North, reached relative wealth.

Urchin. Poverty is extreme in Madagascar

Graeber argues that to some extent, colonialization had a unifying effect on Malagasy society. Those who remained identified as a single people, made equal by a common oppressor. They suffered equally from an exhaustive colonial tax system and the corvée – the unpaid work for the colonial power. Yet, the deep dividing lines within village society itself remained: the line between former slave owners and slaves. Although no one talked about it, nobody could ever forget it.

To this day, Graeber describes in Lost People, Malagasy people are proud of a noble descendance yet afraid to come across as a slave holder, as a person who has the power to command another one. Slavery remained – as an invisible, intangible silence. A word not uttered. An impossibility.

As a species, chameleons have been around for hundreds of millions of years. While it is believed that there are still undiscovered species hidden in the wild, many known species have already gone extinct. Forty percent of all Madagascan reptiles are threatened. It hence came as a pleasant surprise when in 2018 Furcifer Voeltzkow was rediscovered, a little, green chameleon believed to have gone extinct one hundred years ago.

Furcifer, the scientific name for the genus of chameleons endemic to Madagascar, translates into yoke bearer, which was derogatory term for slave.

Voeltzkow’s chameleons have a tragically short life span. They spend the biggest part of their life enshrined in their eggs, then die four months after hatching.

Almost a century into the Anthropocene, the era of human interference into our ecological system that caused the fastest mass extinction ever faced by this planet, the tiny, ephemeral Furcifer Voeltzkow seems to be laughing open-mouthed into the face of modern humanity. But this might just be its physiognomy. Chameleons don’t laugh.

Malagasy bibles for sale in Antananarivo

Madagascar stumbled into independence in 1960. But the ancient hierarchies that had dominated social life for so long remained at odds with modern notions of democracy. The island’s post-colonial past was characterized by instability and military oppression, the country dogged by corruption and poverty. In the 1970s, the government took on vast loans for development which it could not service. The results were insolvency, dependence on the IMF, austerity measures that slashed the state budgets and led to the withdrawal of welfare and services from the countryside. Impoverished rural communities became “temporary autonomous zones,” where police never went, nor the fire brigade, nor the tax collector or public schoolteachers. There, magic took over the reins, again.

Gold Dust Day Geckos are sometimes called living jewels for their colourful skin. Their tongues are forked, and like their snake-cousins they flick them to taste the air and so track down their prey. Their eyes are 350 times more potent than human eyes, but they lack eyelids. Condemned to see all, they clean their eyes with their tongues.

The Madagascan Day Geckos are currently under threat of extinction due to loss of habitat through deforestation and mining activities. When in January 2013 conservation groups protested against the Mandena titanium mine run by the Canadian company the Rio Tinto (QIT-Fer and Titane, Inc.) in Taolagnaro, the military used tear gas to dispel the protester. In 2021, uranium levels downstream were at 52 times the WHO drinking water standard, lead 42 times.

Words, Raharimanana writes on the flap of his book “Les Cauchemars du Gecko,” are his passion. Born in Antananarivo in 1967, as a child he often stayed with his grandmother in Northern rural Madagascar, where he became entranced by the tradition of oral story telling. “I cherished the words in my mouth. I cherished my listeners, keeping them glued to my lips.”

Malagasy didn’t have a writing until British missionaries put it on paper in the early 19^th century. Raharimanana bemoans the stiffness and inflexibility of the written, official language – a language that to him reflects the brutal military oppression of the Ramanantsoa presidency that incarcerated his father. He left Madagascar to study literature in Paris. Now he writes in French, the language of the former colonial power. Though an official language in Madagascar, many Malagasy refuse to speak it.

Participation at a political rally (here for the 2023 presidential election) is often remunerated and therefore abundant

Raharimanana says, once he too was lost for words: The gap between the beauty of nature and the stark political reality was unbridgeable. Unspeakable things have happened. He searched for a language, for the distance of another language – not the cumbersome language of politics, of ancestry. All Africans are condemned to being bilingual, he says. Or we are destined…

In his poems, Raharimanana uses words like tools he etches from stone, like weapons. He attacks them, he grinds them, he mixes them until their musicality penetrates the reader and absorbs them, it says on the flap of his book. Apparently, that’s how he cleanses them from the past, instills them with meaning, and saves them from extinction. Words have died, buried by slogans, he writes. Rahirimanana turns the words. He dances with words. He exhumes them and redresses them.

We don’t name things anymore, we have drowned in a pre-fab language that reassures, flatters, that kills time, that makes one forget death and masks our fall.

Nothing is more important, than words that carry death with them, and the fear of death. Nothing is more important than the cold lucidity of fear. To be alive. To be of this world. To inherit the foolishness of the centuries. To stuff oneself with words and die laughing.

December 22, 2023January 4, 2024

Madagascar: Supernatural

One night in 1589, the survivors of a shipwrecked Portuguese caravel camping on the beach, were woken by eerie, unearthly sounds. Someone was wailing in the dark, weeping at the top of their lungs. Looking around in the black night, they saw, to their horror, eyes glaring at. The Portuguese sailors believed that these were the ghosts of their drowned companions. Shaken to the core in their catholic belief, they named them after the restless sprites of ancient Rome, lemures. Or so goes the lore of how Madagascar’s iconic lemurs got their name.

There must be something supernatural about lemurs. For the local Malagasy people, who had been living on the island for about 2000 years before the Portuguese supposedly discovered it, also called them ghosts, gidro, and revered them as reincarnations of passed away family members. It was therefore a fahdy – a taboo – to hunt, let alone eat a lemur. According to other Malagasy legends, lemurs are our human ancestors who had become lost in the rainforest and turned into lemurs to survive. Despite their fox-like faces and monkey-like bodies, their demeanour is indeed humanesque.

Like humans, lemurs have opposable thumbs. They cast meaningful glances like humans do, especially since they are only other primates in which blue eyes occur naturally; and, like humans, they smile as a sign of sympathy or submission. Other than that, they follow their own idiosyncratic habits. Most lemur species – there are more than a hundred – organize in matriarchal troops. When cold or frightened, or when in need of some TLC, ring-tailed lemurs cuddle up in one furry lemur ball, interlacing their long tails. Male ring-tailed lemurs settle their disputes in non-violent ‘stink-fights,’ in which they wave their tales to overwhelm each other with their scent. But things get stranger still. While the Indri lemur grows to 70cm in height, Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur reaches only 9cm, and is therefore the smallest primate in the world. The slightly bigger Northern giant mouse lemur has testicles that make up 5.5 per cent of its body mass – imagine a man with testicles the size of cantaloupes. Or, rather, don’t. The Aya-aye, a solitary, nocturnal lemur, has teeth that never stop growing and a third finger that is double the size of the rest of its ten fingers. The white-furred sifakas, excellent tree climbers, have lost their ability to move on the ground and once down from their lofty treehouses, they leap only sideways – a strange way of locomotion, but impressive nonetheless, given that lemurs jump the length of ten meters in one single bounce. Perhaps the most astonishing fact about lemurs, though, is that they are still around. Lemurs are critically endangered.

Lemur eccentricity is the result of having evolved in the isolation of a remote island for tens of millions of years. The island of Madagascar began breaking off the supercontinent Gondwanaland and drifting east 180 million years ago. The oldest lemur-fossils date from around 60 million years ago, but, strangely, were found on mainland Africa. How the lemurs crossed the Mozambique channel is still a mystery. But crossing the channel was what saved lemurs from their direct competitors with whom they and we humans share a common ancestor. Apes were much more adaptable than lemurs, but also much more aggressive. Madagascar became the lemurs’ safe haven and their paradise: an entire tropical island covered in forest. Rain forests. Dry forests. Spiny forests. Alongside other strange creatures like giant and tiny chameleons and giant and tiny birds and long necked beetles and transparent frogs (90% of all species are endemic to Madagascar and occur no where else in the world), lemurs not only thrived. As mammal pollinators they became quintessential to the island’s ecosystem. Then humans arrived. The Indri that haunted the Portuguese back in the 16^th century knew why they were crying.

If Madagascar was a paradise for lemurs, it was so for humans as well. But it could not be a paradise for both. The fertile volcanic soils offered themselves for the cultivation of rice, and as grasslands for the large cattle herds. However, the traditional slash-and-burn-method led to imminent deforestation. By 1600, the arrival of the Portuguese, Madagascar’s central highland forests had to the biggest part already disappeared. French colonialization exacerbated deforestation, a process that hasn’t stopped since the independence of Madagascar in 1960, and, even though slash and burn became illegal in 1987, still goes on, undisturbed by changing governments, the bloody coup of 2009, and the political upheavals of the past years. Today 80% of Madagascar’s original forests are gone. And with them, the lemurs.

If Madagascar is not the poorest country in the world, then one of the poorest. The island’s population has doubled since the year 2000 to 30million people, of which 80% are currently living in extreme poverty (less than $2 USD per day). The pandemic brought tourism, the country’s main source of foreign currency, to a complete halt, and it still hasn’t fully picked up. On top, climate change and deforestation have made cyclones more frequent, more unpredictable, and more devastating. Many Malagasy, long suffering from poverty’s usual side effects – malnutrition, poor health, crime, corruption, prostitution, and lack of education – are now threatened by starvation, if not for a tiny rice field to feed a scrawny zebu cow. Where that doesn’t yield enough, the fahdy of not eating lemurs is ignored. If one can find a lemur.

Millions of years ago, lemurs crossed the Mozambique channel to survive. Now they are one of Madagascar’s main tourist attractions – especially since the movie Madagascar turned them into pop icons of the natural world. Ecotourism could indeed be one way out of the misery, when done sustainably, and in combination with conservation and educational programs: Nature can provide for the locals, for every player in the ecosystem, as it did for millions of years. If lemurs can provide for the Malagasy they will be more important than zebus to the locals, and original forest more important than rice fields. And if lemurs can pollinate the trees again, they can re-create their own habitat, and make sure that children don’t starve, don’t work the rice fields, but go to school. That way, to some extent, they will provide for all us, by helping us in our joint effort to stop climate catastrophe.

Lemurs aren’t the ghosts of our ancestors, but they might have the super powers to save us. Indeed, they are supernatural.

Until then your donation is welcome:

https://www.lemurreserve.org/

Or:

Planet Madagscar

April 20, 2023May 17, 2023

Johannesburg: Dance Against The Machine

The sky is heavy. Dark clouds threaten to break any second. Unfazed, the dancers are out on the street, ressed in identical lose-fitting pants and smart button shirts. Their impeccably white high-top Converse will soon be caked with the blush red mud of the African soil. Parapara! – one pair of feet stomps the ground, a brisk command for the other dancers to break into a fast, intricate footwork. Their arms move in synchronous precision, as they twist and turn and kick and high jump, their rubber legs flying, their hands shooting through the air like bullets, signalling a secret code. The dancers whistle and shout, as they pound the ground like angry tap dancers, or drag their feet, as if trying to etch a message into the soil, as if trying to leave a trace.

It’s a late summer afternoon in Tembisa, Johannesburg’s 2nd largest township, and one of the largest in the world. The name, in isiZulu, means hope, or promise, but for her inhabitants, Tembisa holds little promise: Unemployment rate is as high as the druggies at the street corners. Where the streets are paved, they’re potholed, pitfalls for the little schoolchildren in short olive skirts and striped ties. There are stinking heaps of garbage sitting next to the makeshift stalls of the street vendors, women in brightly coloured headscarves waiting stoically by their high piles of mangoes, and onions in red net bags, as their chickens cackle noisily from their cages. All around, the squatters’ corrugated iron- and cardboard shacks keep sprouting, growing into the football fields and along the busy high-way to Johannesburg. One of the battered white omnibuses, the perilous but only means of public transport, stops with a jolt, spitting out black billows of fumes. It brings home Johannesburg’s workforce, tired men and women, who live in the tiny, single-story row houses with barred windows and barbed wire hanging like tinsel from the roofs and walls. They walk home slowly, their faces worn and worried.

The dancers, though, look focused and determined. They are in their thirties, about as old as the rainbow nation, the democratic republic of South Africa. They weren’t around when their parents and grandparents fought the apartheid regime for freedom and equality. They weren’t around when their forefathers were robbed of their lands and cultures. The township is all they know, all they have. They call their dance Pantsula – a slang word meaning to waggle like a duck, a metaphor for the demeanour of a gangster. And they call themselves Amapantsula, gangsters, even though dancing is the only thing that saves them from a career in crime.

Dancing is their cultural heritage. Dancing is what their parents and grandparents and grand grandparents did. Silenced, they danced to express themselves, neglected, they danced to re-affirm themselves, oppressed, they danced to keep their faith as their world kept crumbling. They danced to survive against all odds.

Pantsula is a living socio-political document, the expression of black identity in the township. It is a dance of resistance. Counterculture, rooted in African tribal songs and dances, but catalysed by the experience of systematic oppression.

In the 19th century, overburdening taxation and segregation laws of the British colonial administration robbed the native African population of any means of self-sustenance and forced them into labour in their gold and diamond mines. Dispossessed of their land, and resettled in overcrowded workers’ compounds, music and dance were the only creative or emotional outlets. The experience and hardship of migratory work changed the traditional songs and dances. The sung epics of the Sotho, or the expressive Zulu dances soon recounted the misery of the migratory worker. In the compounds, the African working-class hero was born, sung about even on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1925 Langston Hughes wrote his poem about the Witerwatersrand goldmine In the Johannesburg Mines:

In the Johannesburg Mines

There are 240,000

Native Africans working. What kind of poem

Would you

Make out of that?

240,000 natives

Working in the

Johannesburg mines.

The natives made more than a poem out of that. They made music. In the slums andtownships that grew around the mines as more and more men and women arrived, one- stringed guitars were fashioned from empty cases of cooking oil; rusty battered barrels served as drums, and empty bottles as flutes. The townships were flooded with music, the late Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera wrote, because “…with music they soar higher than the clouds, sink deeper than stones in water.”

Despite the squalor, the townships were creative melting pots, giving birth to the first vernacular music styles, marabi, (“junk”) and later kwela (“get up!”), from the wedding of traditional African and Western music – not their oppressor’s music though, but the song and dance of Afro-America.

Black American music arrived in Southern Africa from the first half of 19th century on, in the form of touring minstrel shows and gospel choirs, later with radio and printed sheet music, and finally records. From their first encounters with ragtime, tap dancing, and harmonic singing, Africans were infatuated with black American culture. They admired black Americans for their confidence and their styling, their relative autonomy. But there was also a strong sense of solidarity and identification, as an uprooted and oppressed people, but most importantly, as Africans. Although Afro-American music hails from Western-African traditions, which rely more heavily on drums and poly/rhythms than the more voice and dance-centred Southern African traditions, the arrival of Black American culture was a seed falling on fertile ground; it was its homeland.

That the up-rooting and replanting of Africans came with their loss of cultural heritage, and most importantly their music and dance tradition, was never unintended. Music and dance, which governed every aspect of African life, from daily work chores to ceremonies, was not only an expression of humanity, but it bestowed humanity. The term Bantu – human in the African languages – comprises also the moral aspects of being human, like solidarity, empathy, respect. It was hence what colonizers needed to erase, if they wanted to exploit “natives” as workforce.

Africans were characterized as uncivilized pagans in need of education and saving. Missionary schools (British as well as American) and various Christian churches provided African children with Western clothes, Western education, Western values and beliefs. Not surprisingly, this drove a wedge between the rural Africans, who proudly stuck to their tribal values and mores, and the Westernized, missionary- educated Africans, who strove towards self-improvement, self-realization and personal advancement. The two groups, the new working class, and the trained lawyers and doctors, the new a middle class, eyed each other with growing suspicion. The workers who entertained themselves in the beer halls, with their “marabi” music, were frowned upon by the self-declared “elite,” who had acquired a taste for classical music and spiritual hymns. It was only in their growing discrimination, that they were equal. Restrictive segregation laws and measures like curfews, prohibition, and strict monitoring, subjected all black people alike. Then a miracle happened: Sophiatown.

Dancer Bhanzela Masango in Sophiatown styling — Dancer Bhanzela Masango in Sophiatown outfit

In the freehold Johannesburg suburb, the two classes united. Shunned by whites due its poor drainage and its vicinity to a municipal sewage facility, Shophiatown was home to a fast-growing racially mixed but predominantly black population. Although notorious for its violence, and poverty, it was a place of relative freedom, autonomy, and neighbourly solidarity. Given its racial and social diversity, Sophiatown was as a cultural and political hothouse leading to the renaissance of black African identity. And to Pantsula.

In so-called shebeens, illegal liquor lounges, to the sound of Marabi-Jazz, as it was now called, politics were discussed across social lines, giving rise to new political consciousness. With the help of Langston Hughes, via letters from Harlem, an African intellectual and literary scene flourished. Magazines catered to a black audience, most notably Drum magazine. With its sassy signature style, it featured investigative journalism that denounced the exploitation of black workers in apartheid South Africa, but, maybe even more importantly, it glorified Sophiatown. In the photos of German photographer Jürgen Schadefeld, Sophiatown was a bubbling, sprawling city. Men were cool cats in Borsalino-hats, the dancers at the many dance halls were caught airborne, taps sparkling on shiny patent leather shoes. The singers, songbirds, were sultry and glamorous like Lena Horne.

Although extremely violent, gangs often played the role of Robin Hoods in the tightly- knit communities. They had distinguished tastes in fashion, dressing in Cab Calloway style zoot suits that were all the rage, and music. Particular gangs protected particular orchestras or bands. Most performers were either affiliated to gangs, like Miriam Makeba, or gun-toting gangsters themselves.

Music flourished. Jazz bands and orchestras imitated the sound of Duke Ellington and Count Basie to the T, while tappers and Lindy Hoppers perfected the routines of the Nicholas Brothers or Fred Astaire, in their marabi way.

A dress with Miriam Makeba’s iconic DRUM cover

If Sophiatown didn’t live up to the glitter, its image gave the black urban Africans something to be proud of: an identity and political consciousness. In the Shebeens and dancehalls, where Nelson Mandela clinked glasses with Miriam Makeba, the Anti- apartheid movement was born. To drink and dance was an act of civil resistance.

By the end of the 1950s, the apartheid government put an end to the socio-political utopia that was Sophiatown. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, Sophiatown bulldozed, and its more than 70,000 inhabitants resettled in townships. Diversity had proved to be threat to totalitarianism, so people were resettled according to their ethnicity, even though in African culture, where people organized their lives along kinship, not race, this had never played a role.

Now there were streets of identical four room houses reserved for Zulu, others for Xhosa and so on. Estranged, the Africans were not only robbed of their past and their newly gained identity, but of their future, as the Bantu Education Act system came into effect: Afrikaans, which black Africans rarely spoke, was legally instated. It was a policy of active de-skilling of the black population. As pupils didn’t understand their teachers anymore, they were rendered fit for menial work as nothing else. Any organizations were monitored and regulated, and as gatherings were forbidden, dancing, the very expression of humanity, pushed into the underground.

“Now when we grouped, the police would beat us. Now when we make Pantsula, they think we are just there for happiness.” Daniel Mokubung says in a documentary about Pantsula. “It’s where we started talking about our lives. It’s not only dancing, it’s where we start to know politics.”

Dancer Msindo Lingo in his home, which serves also as his atelier.

In the 1960s, at the height of the oppression, when tap shoes fell silent, Pantsula took over. The movement didn’t stop, only the shoes changed.

In the 1980s, an international boycott isolated South Africa, but American Hip Hop reached the country on contraband tapes. To the lo-fi sound from rattling boomboxes, the dancers in the townships recreated their style. “You had to respond to the political oppression in creative ways, so that you can have dignity.” Pantsula Sicelo Malume, who danced in the 1980s, says. Politically active musicians like Miriam Makeba were barred, and censorship rendered South African music so anodyne, they called it Bubblegum Music. Pantsula, though, got edgier.

As the death toll rose and the Anti-apartheid struggle turned increasingly violent, the steps quickened. The moves gained a new percussive quality, or fierce abruptness, as if the body was barely able to contain its forces. So was the country. In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released. The days of the apartheid regime were counted.

Redefinition: Dancer Msindo Lingo creates art from discarded soda cans, and recreates Tembisa, the township built by the oppressor, as art.

Now, thirty years after the formal end of apartheid, Pantsula is about carving out a niche in a world that doesn’t hold much in store for those who still suffer from economic discrimination. Since dancing and drinking is no longer an offense, Pantsula has lost its political charge. Many young dancers regard it as a way out of misery. But if they admire American gangsta rap, they have none of the cool nonchalance of Snoop Doggy Dog or Jay Z. The amapantsula rehearse with extreme discipline, matching the military drill of a Russian Ballet school. They dream of an international career – a dream that hardly ever comes true, even though in the past ten years, Pantsula has reached a broader public. TV shows like South Africa Got Talent, frequently feature Pantsula, as did Beyonce in her video to “Girls run the world.”

Pantsula as heritage. The next generation waiting in the wings.

“If we were 20 or 30 in the 1970s and 1980s we would have been using everything we had to fight Apartheid… but now we have the freedom and space to do what we want with our talent and we have the ability to really manifest our dreams…” Poetess Lebogang Masile says, referring to South Africa’s post apartheid youth, dubbed the “Freedom children”. “If our parents fought for freedom, we fight for identity,” Pantsula dancer Malume says.

With the commercialisation of rap, the word township has recently got a sexy ring to it. Media like MagY and youth radio stations, catering to the freedom children, showcase “Ghetto superstars” in glossy pictures and high-end video productions. Local fashion brands like Loxion Kulcha (a malapropism of Location Culture, with location being another term for township) sell high-priced township fashion and converse sneakers to the hipsters in the gentrified neighbourhoods of Johannesburg. But their paying costumers rarely live in the townships.

In Tembisa, far from the craft gin bars and vegan coffee shops of Johannesburg, Pantsula is more than shoes and fashion. It is pride, it is identity. It is hope in a hopeless place. To dance is to be alive, to dance is to be human. Parapara! – the clouds break, and the potholes turn into puddle. The red mud splashes from the shoes of school children as they dash home, and from the flat tyre of an omnibus that got stuck, and from the dancers’ feet, as they keep stomping and whirling, skipping and sliding. The rain falls on fertile ground.