Songs of the Baka and Other Discoveries

by Dennis James

  Algiers looks like a shopworn Paris. The major streets are broad and curve gracefully over and around the city’s hills. They are lined with whitewashed fin de siècle buildings resembling those of the Ile de La Cité in Paris. The city forms a crescent that embraces the Bay of Algiers. Its white hills tumble down to the sea. A corniche runs erratically along the waterfront, from which one can watch the busy harbor traffic—container ships, freighters, tugs, Navy gunboats, car ferries, and the fishing fleet. No cruise ships.

  Our hotel, the Safir, like most, was built by the French. It has a kind of oddball elegance, a combination of art deco and French period furnishings and two balky open-faced elevators. Our room on the fourth floor has a balcony that overlooks the harbor, compensating for the erratic plumbing and frayed white and pink Louis XV furniture. We wander into the third-floor dining room to claim our prepaid dinner, only to find it dark and vacant. I rouse a pot cleaner in the kitchen who says it opens at seven p.m., which is the time on my watch. It takes a few minutes for me to realize that I’ve gained two time zones since Frankfurt and that it’s only five p.m. in Algiers. Later, we have an excellent fish dinner with a half-bottle of Coteaux de Mascara, a sturdy Algerian Cabernet. It’s a pleasant surprise to get wine in Islamic Algeria.

  Wine, which cannot be found throughout the rest of the country, is available only in Algiers. However, the food we encounter everywhere is delicious. A typical Algerian meal consists of couscous, vegetables, and, occasionally, mutton, goat, or fish.

  Algeria in a Nutshell

  Algeria is home to thirty-five million people—99 percent are Arab or Berber and 1 percent is European. The predominant religion is Sunni Islam. Algeria is the largest country in Africa, with vast natural gas and oil reserves and virtually no national debt. It is also agriculturally self-sufficient because of its extremely fertile and productive coastal plain. The government provides free education, medical care, subsidized housing, and basic welfare support for the unemployed.

  From 1954 until 1962, the country endured a bloody war for independence from France, during which an estimated one million Algerians were slain. The FLN (National Liberation Front) veterans who led the fight have run the country since and been accused of the crony corruption that so often accompanies unchecked power. When Islamic parties won local elections and were poised to win national elections, the results were nullified and elections canceled by the ruling party, which was also backed by the military. This led, in 1992, to a ten-year civil war, during which atrocities were committed by both sides. The exhausted belligerents finally agreed to a cease-fire and amnesty in 2002, and there has been relative quiet since, with the occasional bombing or tourist abduction.

  Police presence is pervasive. There are “controls” (checkpoints) on the highways, back roads, and all over the cities, causing massive traffic jams. Most checks involve cursory look-ins. With Sidi N at the wheel, we generally sail through. But if the driver or vehicle is not well known, or the occupants of the car don’t have their ID papers in order, or the officer in charge just feels like it, the vehicle is emptied and searched.

  The development of tourism is a low priority. The government invests in its biggest cash cow, fossil fuel, and that means most development money goes south where highways, fully subsidized housing developments, manufacturing facilities, schools, and universities are being built in the sparsely populated Sahara to help exploit the country’s natural resources. As a result, Algiers’s corniche, museums, parks, metro, boulevards, bridges, and buildings are pretty much as the French left them in 1962, though deteriorated through neglect. The streets are full of unemployed young men, each claiming a particular stairway or wall as his hangout. The money and the jobs are in the South, and in the maintenance of a huge security apparatus.

  Although few Algerians speak English, most speak French. They tend to speak more slowly than Parisians, enabling us to engage in simple conversations.

  The Casbah

  The day after we arrive, we drive to the Casbah, the oldest part of Algiers, dating back to the Ottoman era. It sits on a hill of its own and occupies only a few square kilometers. Twenty thousand people live in the Casbah, most families occupying only one room. Toilets are communal, with one per eighteen residents, and water is obtained from a tap in the street. Food is cooked over bottled gas in the doorway of the family’s room.

  In bad shape to begin with, the Casbah was heavily damaged by an earthquake in 2003. The ruined dwellings are not being replaced but torn down, their sites converted to tiny parks or public squares. The government is relocating a few hundred residents each year to newer housing on the edge of the city, with electricity, running water, and interior toilets, though some resist leaving the homes of their ancestors and the conspiratorial intimacy of the Casbah.

  Entrance to the Casbah, Algiers

  Venturing into the Casbah alone is not a good idea for outsiders. It is honeycombed with alleys, stairways, tunnels, and one-meter lanes where the sun never shines. Signage is negligible. Even police are reluctant to go into it by themselves.

  At an entry point near the summit of the hill stands Dar Mustapha Pacha, a graceful, small palace, whitewashed and dark-timbered, with a central courtyard and fountain. This was the residence of the Ottoman deys of Algiers until the French invaded in 1830. Next to it is a low building with barred windows that looks like a jail from a Hollywood Western set. Appropriately, it is the local police station. The station commanders do not look happy to see us and Sidi N has to jolly them up for twenty minutes or so before they grudgingly agree to let us descend into their infamous precinct. They insist that a policeman accompany us.

  We start our journey going up a gradually sloping lane about three meters wide that soon narrows to two and begins tunneling and twisting its way through and between the aging stucco walls. There are few people, just darting figures briefly glimpsed through doorways. But thirty minutes later, when we come upon a tiny open space formed by the intersection of three lanes and an empty lot, several men are apparently waiting to see us. Even here, people know Sidi N and greet him with much embracing and cheek-kissing. They smile and wave to us, already aware that two American tourists were coming through the Casbah. “The Arab Telephone,” explains Sidi N.

  Meanwhile, the young policeman in jeans and a T-shirt who had accompanied us has disappeared. “Maybe he got bored,” says Sidi N.

  The FLN resistance in Algiers was based in the Casbah. The police station where the insurgents were tortured is now vacant. Pontecorvo’s film, The Battle of Algiers, was shot here. As we make our way down the other side of the Casbah we see a few tiny shops—shoe repair, tailor, tinsmith—scarcely wider than their doorways. There is also a haman, a communal bath, used by men in the morning and women in the afternoon. When women are using the bath, a pink towel is hung across the entryway.

  Outside the Casbah

  We emerge from the Casbah into a bustling street market, then cross a street to a seaside Ottoman fortress. It is vacant except for a small suite of rooms, about the size of an average Starbucks, hidden behind an unmarked door. A little old man sitting in an aging swivel chair in a windowless room presides over the “archives” of the war for independence. He is giddy with delight at our visit, probably the first by foreigners in years. Discovering that I have read Frantz Fanon, seen The Battle of Algiers, and know something about that struggle, he is in rapture.

  The archives consist of hundreds of paper boxes, one for each prominent insurgent or martyr, hand labeled and filled with documents, photos, and yellowed newspaper clippings. Pictures of the heroes cover every inch of the walls. The curator speaks no English but happily holds forth in French while Sidi N tries to keep up with the translation. Waist-high stacks of old newspapers fill an adjacent small alcove. A few military artifacts—a gas mask, a grenade, some bullets—lie in a glass-fronted bookcase. He gives us little Algerian flags. When we leave, he shakes our hands warmly, very pleased that someone else in the world is interested
in the events that are the focal point of his life.

  As rare solo tourists, we elicit stares wherever we go; as Americans, astonished exclamations; and as New Yorkers, smiles and nods. It is as if the third anomaly explains the first two. Very few Algerians speak English, but we often hear the phrase, Welcome to Algeria. Barbara takes many close-up photographs of people on the street. Her openness and smiles generate enthusiasm, and when she shows her subjects the photographs she has taken on the camera’s review screen, they burst into laughter.

  We end the day at the Jardin d’Essai, a huge public botanical garden with an impressive central avenue of palms, a tropical pond, and species of trees from all over Algeria. However, the gate is closed. Sidi N importunes a passing groundskeeper to let us in, invoking our status as the US’s entire tourist contingent to Algeria for 2011. The gate opens, and we have the place to ourselves. We walk the paths, admiring the lush greenery, then sit near the pond till late afternoon, soaking in its atmosphere of quiet beauty and contemplation.

  On Monday, we check out and drive up one of Algiers’s higher hills to Notre Dame d’Afrique, a small, lovely church in the Byzantine style. It holds ecumenical services for Christians, Muslims, and Jews and overlooks the old synagogue, the Jewish cemetery, and the sea. We attempt to visit the cemetery, but the gate is locked, so Sidi N reprises the Jardin routine. The gate opens. The cemetery is vast, the largest in Algiers. However, the living Jewish community in Algeria is decimated. At one time, it numbered in the tens of thousands, a vibrant, productive population well integrated with its Sunni Muslim neighbors. The combination of Muslim resentment of French favoritism toward Jews, antipathy generated by Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, and the rise of a particularly aggressive version of Islamic fundamentalism has reduced the Algerian Jewish population to less than five thousand. The cemetery has been neglected, if not vandalized. Many graves and mausoleums are broken open and empty. There are few stones of remembrance on the gravesites. The latest dates we saw on tombstones were in the eighties. It is a melancholy and desolate place.

  The Martyrs, Monument is on a hilltop overlooking Algiers. Ninety-two meters high, the swooping concrete abstraction was built by the Canadian government in 1982 to honor the Algerians killed in the war of independence. The monument dominates the skyline and can be seen from almost any point in and around the city.

  Nearby is the Museum of the Armed Forces, which Sidi N is very eager for us to see. The museum’s dioramas present the history of Algeria as an endless series of battles between indigenous North Africans and foreign invaders, from the Phoenicians to the Romans to the French. It makes the point that there was continual armed resistance to the French occupation—the defense by the Dey of Algiers at the time of the invasion in 1830, the insurgency led by Amir Abdel Kader in the mid-1800s, the die-hard holdout of the Tuareg in the South until the 1920s, the formation of FLN in the 1950s. Sidi N is intensely interested in each of the exhibits and comments on all of them, especially those of the final successful war of independence. One of these is a scale model of French paratroopers throwing bound Algerians off a high bridge in Constantine. Sidi N adds that French police threw insurgents captured in Paris into the Seine.

  Among the things we don’t see in Algiers are traffic lights, motorcycles, panhandlers, dogs, and, of course, Americans.

  Tamanrasset, the Tuareg, and Sidi of the South

  After a two-and-a–half-hour night flight, we land in Tamanrasset, the southernmost city of any size in Algeria. Tamanrasset is almost the same distance from Algiers as is London, England. We are met at the airport by two men in traditional Tuareg dress, one of whom holds a sign reading DENNIS DUANE JAMES. He welcomes us, introducing himself as our guide, Sidi. The other man is Khan, our driver, a large fellow who speaks Arabic, French, and Berber, but no English. It becomes painfully clear within a few minutes after we get in their Toyota 4x4 Land Cruiser that Sidi S has a very tenuous grasp of English. A frisson of paranoia quickens my heart. Who are these guys? I picture our real guide and driver, bound and gagged (or worse) in some dank cellar, where we are to be similarly restrained while our captors demand ransom in lieu of our decapitation.

  I ask questions only the real guide would be likely to know: the name of the travel agency, our itinerary in Tamanrasset, our US city of origin. Sidi S’s answers are non-sequiturs. Khan stares glumly into the desolate darkness. My paranoia shifts into high gear. Just then the 4x4 pulls into a driveway and stops at a sky-blue gate marked Garden of Outoul, the designated accommodation in our travel packet. Hoping my sigh of relief is not too noticeable, I downshift my anxiety level to the mundane problem of how we’re going to deal with the language barrier over the next few days. We are escorted to a garden apartment among twenty or so, all vacant, in a villa situated in an orchard.

  The next morning, Barbara and I walk around the walled property, which covers two or three acres, taking in the fruit trees, peacocks roaming free, and a penned enclosure for tiny deer. Our destination for the next two days is Assekrem, a jagged mountain on a high volcanic plateau of the Hoggar Range, seventy-three kilometers into the desert. After some delay because of reports of high winds and flooding in the mountains, we set off. The “road” to Assekrem is a piste—a French word for a track or trail. That’s all there is, and in many areas the track has been washed out by the recent rains, and only a gully remains. Khan slowly but skillfully negotiates around these obstacles, sometimes going at the pace of a slow walk for hundreds of meters. For six hours, we lurch, lunge, wallow, and jounce our way up into the plateau.

  The landscape is awesome. Rocks the size of cathedrals and mesas like a giant’s table rise straight up out of the desert. Camels, goats, and burros appear in groups, seemingly without attendants. A Tuareg, riding a white camel and leading three others, appears in the far distance. The rider wears an indigo-blue robe. His loose tagelmust (head covering) covers all but his eyes. Transfixed, we watch him approach. He greets Khan, obliges his mount to kneel, and, barefoot, adroitly climbs down from his saddle, using the camel’s neck as a step. He and Khan chat and we exchange greetings before he climbs back up his camel and his tiny caravan ambles back into the desert.

  Tuareg, Tamanrasset

  The Tuareg are a nomadic people who live in the heart of the Sahara in southern Algeria and Libya and northern Mali, Niger, and Mauretania. They raise and trade sheep, goats, and camels. Additionally, they are fierce warriors. They know the desert like no one else and move freely across national borders, riding their distinctive white camels. The Tuareg are nominally Muslim. The men typically wear blue robes and tagelmusts. The women decorate their hands with henna and do not cover their faces. Some Tuareg have settled in towns or cities and become expert silversmiths, exporting their wares to Europe and the United States. Those who remain nomadic have been known to engage in a little smuggling, and some hire out as mercenaries.

  Later, another Tuareg appears, walking alone across the trackless expanse. The same tableau ensues, after which he continues his walk until he disappears into the distance.

  Sunset, Sunrise

  Finally, in the early evening, our 4x4 grinds up a narrow, steep grade to the Refuge, a large stone building that constitutes a hostel for pilgrims such as we. The only other visitors are a Catalan couple and a woman from Lyon, with their respective guides and drivers. Barbara and I get a room to ourselves. After dire warnings from Sidi S about the strenuous nature of the climb and questions regarding our heart conditions, we set off for the summit of Assekrem. It is a piece of cake, a well-marked gradual switchback that gets us on top in thirty minutes. The plateau below, pierced by cones, arches, and mesas, extends to the horizon and is a spectrum of reds, from dusty rose to blood orange. As the sun sets, shadows and clouds compete in a race to change color, inventing both subtle and dramatic hues undreamed of by Benjamin Moore.

  At a height of twenty-eight hundred meters, the wind cuts through my light jacket. Near the summit is a stone hut once used b
y the esthete monk Charles Eugène de Foucauld. I shelter behind its entryway, watching the light show until I am thoroughly chilled, then head down in the near darkness.

  We learn from the Catalan couple’s guide that de Foucauld (1858–1916) was a French Vicomte and notorious roué who, in his late twenties, wandered North Africa, had a spiritual awakening, was ordained a priest, and founded a monastic order based in Tamanrasset. He eschewed any luxury, ate only dates and barley, and attracted a following of one. His life’s work was to translate the bible into Tamashek, the Tuareg language. Later, he was shot to death in Tamanrasset by a Tuareg who believed he was helping the French Army infiltrate Tuareg villages.

  When the guide is out of earshot, one of the Catalans tells us he is a journalist. “I did not put that information on my visa application,” he says. “If I had, I would never have been allowed to enter the country.” For our applications, we had disclosed that we are attorneys and that I also write. “A writer is as threatening to the government as a journalist,” he tells us. “Don’t mention that on any visa application.”

  The night is very cold. We strip the four empty bunks in our room of their covers and pile them on top of us.