by Tahir Shah
One of the most prominent success stories – not to mention one of the greatest architectural masterpieces in Fès – is the Bouinania Medrasa, the celebrated religious school. Found on Talaa Kebir, it’s recently been restored, and offers a window into a medieval realm that has vanished throughout the Arab world. Get there early, stand in the central courtyard, and you can’t help but travel back in time.
Another renovated marvel, a stone’s throw from the central thoroughfare, is the Fondouk el-Nejjarine, a fabulous galleried caravanserai. Nearby it is the Attarine Medrasa, yet another newly-restored tour de force of culture, built seven centuries ago.
Spend a little time traipsing through the medina, and you come to realize that it’s all about detail. Wherever you look, it’s there: A pattern sculpted into the plaster frieze above a doorway, a tarnished appliqué lamp that’s a work of art in its own right; a mosaic fountain at which a pack mule is pausing to slake its thirst.
And, according to some of the foreigners obsessed by Fès, it’s the attention to detail that makes all the difference.
An American scholar who’s lived in the medina for more than a decade, David Amster is one of them. He believes in ‘guerilla restoration’ on a micro scale. Whenever he’s raised a little money through his tiny 18th century guest house, called Dar Bennis, David ploughs the funds into hiring a team of master craftsmen. Often working at night when the streets are empty, they restore the ancient zellij mosaic fountains, and repair centuries-old walls with medluk,a traditional lime rendering.
‘The work isn’t fast,’ says David over a glass of tar-like morning café noir, ‘but what’s important is getting it right.’ He fumbles in his coat pocket and pulls out a crumpled twist of iron. ‘Look at this nail,’ he says dreamily, ‘it was handmade three hundred years ago by someone who cared about detail. If he cared so much about a single insignificant nail like this, imagine how much he cared about an entire building!’
Half way down Talaa Kebir, opposite the Bouinania Medrasa, is a small alley, beneath what’s left of the medieval water clock. Venture down it and, as it telescopes into nothingness, take a left again. You emerge into a small courtyard, once a home and now the celebrated Café Clock.
The Clock, as it’s known by all, is set over half a dozen levels, and is one of the medina’s most lively oases – popular with locals and foreigners alike. Serving up a mélange of Moroccan and continental dishes, it’s the brainchild of Englishman and former maitre d’, Mike Richardson.
Decorating a camel burger with a little garnishing as it leaves the kitchen, Mike flutters a hand out towards the labyrinth through which Talaa Kebir wends a path. ‘It takes time to understand Fès,’ he says. ‘And in some ways you’re more baffled the longer you stay here. I can’t claim to be an expert, but I admit that the city has seeped into my blood. Now I’ve lived here I don’t know if I could ever put roots down anywhere else. Look around you – Fès is a splinter of Paradise!’
Arranged inwards around central courtyards, many cooled by fragrant orange trees, traditional Moroccan architecture tends to be hidden from an outsider’s view. Roam the lanes of the medina and you can find yourself desperate to glimpse the jewels that lie behind firmly bolted doors.
A tip for anyone eager to peek inside – go in search of your very own home in Fès. Instantly, the arched cedar portals are pulled open from within, and you find yourself ushered in. It’s the best way to conjure the doors to open.
For the last five years, Fred Sola has been finding homes for foreigners and assisting them in renovations. A Frenchman born in Casablanca, he’s the owner of the palatial Riad Laaroussa, and has an eye for a home with potential. ‘House hunting in Fès is like nowhere else,’ he says, his eyes ablaze with delight. ‘This is the only city I know where you can find a palace for the price of a terraced house anywhere else…’
Pausing in mid-conversation, Fred Sola stares out at the street. He squints, then smiles gradually, as a bridal party pushes through. With much whooping and trumpeting, the bride is borne forwards waist-height on a dais. The Frenchman combs a hand back through his hair.
‘You really must believe me,’ he says gently, ‘life just doesn’t get any better than this.’
FOUR
A Price on Their Heads
EVER SINCE MY AUNT lifted me up to a glass case at the back of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, at the impressionable age of eight, I have been hooked on shrunken heads.
Like so many schoolboys before me, my lower jaw dropped as I gazed in awe at the array of miniature human heads, correctly known as tsantsas. There was something wholly captivating about their gnarled features, the sewn lips, little hollow necks and manes of jet black hair.
I longed to learn the secret processes, known to a tribe deep in the South American jungle, which enabled decapitated human heads to be shrunk to the size of a grapefruit.
Despite an ongoing debate about whether museums should harbour human remains, the Pitt Rivers Museum still holds five, and the British Museum has at least ten. Interest in the gruesome exhibits remains strong. A roaring private trade in the illicit handicraft has developed, with heads being snapped up by wealthy collectors, many from the Far East and Japan.
The genuine article comes from the Upper Amazon, a region on the Pastaza river between Peru and Ecuador.
For thousands of years a tribe called the Shuar (misnamed by Western observers as Jivaro, meaning ‘savage’), shrunk the heads of their slain enemies. Although historically dozens of tribal societies have taken trophy heads, only the Shuar ever came up with the curious idea of reducing these trophies in size. One possible exception is the ancient Nazcan and coastal civilizations of the Atacama desert, with whom the Shuar share a common ancestry.
The Shuar’s victims were subject to swift and brutal attacks. During surprise raids on enemy villages, warriors would hack off as many heads as they could. The tsantsa raids were their raison d’etre. They proved a warrior’s bravery and the community’s superiority.
Retreating into the jungle with their fresh harvest of heads, the Shuar would immediately begin work on their trophies. They believed that humans have three souls. One of these – the musiak – is charged with avenging the victim’s death. The only way of pacifying the enraged soul was by shrinking the head in which it lay.
During decapitation, a knife was used to peel back the victim’s skin from the upper part of the chest, the shoulders and the back. Then the head was chopped as far as possible, close to the collar bone using a stone-edged knife. The warrior would remove his own headband and thread it through the neck and out of the mouth, making it easier to carry, slung over the shoulder.
The face was literally peeled off the skull, before being sewn up into a neat pouch of skin. This was steeped in hot water for a few minutes. Baked pebbles were then placed in the pouch, causing it to shrivel and shrink, taking great care not to damage the features. When the pouch was too small for pebbles, hot sand scooped from a riverbank was carefully swished about inside.
Next, the lips were sewn tightly shut with a strand of twine. A machete’s blade was heated and pressed against the lips to dry them. Then the facial skin was repeatedly rubbed with charcoal. Sometimes a large red seed was placed beneath the eyelids, filling the hole, preventing the musiak from peering out.
Between four and six days of treatment were needed for the basic tsantsa to be completed, at which time it was about the size of a man’s fist. A hole was made at the top of the head and a string attached to it, so that the warrior could wear it around his neck for the celebratory tsantsa feast.
As far as the Shuar people were concerned, the tsantsas had no intrinsic value, and they were merely tossed back into the jungle as soon as the avenging souls had been appeased. But once Victorian trailblazers got their hands on the curious trophies, a thriving market began.
Search the Internet and you come across plenty of examples. Most of them are fakes, or made for the tourist trade, and are often fashioned fr
om plucked goat skin, which has overly large pores. Genuine tsantsas have delicate nasal hair, and a light oily shine to the skin. Only a finished one will have twine hanging from the lips, which signifies that three enormous feasts have been held in honour of the head.
On the Internet you can find black, white, and even Chinese shrunken heads. They are outright fakes – generally made in Guatemalan workshops at the turn of the last century. The Shuar would never have any cause to shrink a foreigner’s head, because they don’t believe that outsiders have souls.
On one expedition to the Upper Amazon, I hired a ramshackle boat and made for the remote Pastaza in search of the Shuar. My guide was a veteran of the USA-Vietnam war who told me that the Shuar tribe, ‘made the Viet Cong look like pussy cats’. Everyone en route warded us away. ‘The Shuar will chop off your heads,’ they told us, ‘and drink your blood and eat your brains.’
When we finally reached Shuar territory late in the evening, a man ran down to greet our boat and present me with a gift of a roasted monkey. In the background we could hear singing, which I was sure was the ancient ballads of the Shuar. Shrunken heads would be nearby.
In the dawn light we climbed the steep bank up to the village, where the chief was waiting. He plied us with a strange white creamy beverage, called masato.
Only later did I realize how it is made.
Manioc roots are boiled up and mashed with a stick. As they mash, the makers grab handfuls of the goo, chew it, and spit it back into the bowl. The enzymes in their saliva start off the fermenting process.
After downing a third bowl of masato, I asked the chief if he had problems with the neighbouring villages. I motioned the shape of a small head with my hands.
‘We love our neighbours,’ said the chief, ‘they are our friends. We all pray together when the people in the flying boats come.’
‘Flying boats?’
The chief nodded.
‘The friendly people from Alabama. They bring us tambourines and little pink pills – but best of all, they brought us Jesus.’
‘What about war? What about heads?’ I asked.
‘Why do we need to kill or shrink heads when we have the son of God?’ he replied.
In little more than a generation the ancient ways of the Shuar have been changed forever. Small-scale petroleum projects in the deep jungle are one reason for this. But the overbearing responsibility must be assumed by a variety of missionary groups who have sought to cast the Shuar into the modern world, and to save their souls.
Landing in remote jungle enclaves in ‘flying boats’, the white man has wrought change on an unprecedented scale. The Shuar peoples have also been devastated by the measles, tuberculosis, venereal diseases and the common cold. The cures no longer come from traditional plant-based medicines but by handfuls of ‘little pink pills’. The only positive factor in terms of population is that the cessation of tsantsa raids has led to a reduction of death through warfare.
After a tour of the village, the chief invited us to the makeshift church, built by the missionaries from Alabama. The proud former head-shrinkers stood in neat rows. As the noises of the jungle night echoed around us, the villagers sang Onward Christian Soldiers, translated into Shuar.
But although most of the villagers were keen to sing hymns and show off their Shuar Bibles, one man – the village shaman – was less happy.
‘The missionaries don’t understand what their religion has done,’ he explained. ‘Head-hunting was a brutal practice, but it was our culture. It developed over a very long time, and had meant much more to us than Jesus and the Bible.’
The shaman lit a home-made cigar of mapacho, black jungle tobacco, as thick as his wrist. His eyes seemed to glaze over.
‘Head shrinking gave reason to our existence,’ he went on, exhaling a plume of pungent smoke. ‘Without the head-raiding parties our lives have changed, we are not the same people as we were in our fathers’ time. We are weaker. We are timid now. But worst of all, we have lost our honour.’
FIVE
Brazil’s Sanctuaries From Abuse
IT’S LIKE ANY OTHER Saturday night in São Paulo’s infamous Pedreira slums.
Music blares out from a line of makeshift bars. Dark brown bottles clang together as neighbours celebrate the end of another week. The air is filled with cheap cigar smoke and with laughter. A young couple is samba dancing in the muddy main street. Everyone, it seems, is in a jubilant mood. But away from the revelling drinkers the atmosphere is far less cheerful.
Martina Alberto, a young mother of two, sits on her bed waiting for her husband’s return. For Martina, surviving unscathed until Sunday morning is always an achievement. Her husband, Rogerio, an unemployed labourer, bursts in soon after midnight. In one hand is a bottle of home-brewed cane liquor, and in the other there’s a carving knife.
In a fit of drunken rage Rogerio swears that he’ll chop up their two small daughters. Weeping hysterically, Martina pleads with him to take his fury out on her rather than the children. Eagerly, he agrees. An hour later and Martina has been kicked, beaten, stabbed with the knife, and raped.
With her eyes swollen, her body bruised from the kicks, and her face badly cut, Martina runs from the house. It’s three a.m. Clutching her daughters, Andresa, six months, and Paola, three years, she staggers through São Paulo’s dark streets. The sound of singing from the backstreet bars has now been replaced by high-pitched police sirens and sporadic exchanges of gunfire. The only men still out are drunks, and the only women, prostitutes. Calming her daughters as best she can, Martina heads for a large, modern building at Campo Grande, a sprawling suburb in São Paulo’s south zone. This, the 9th Police Precinct, is located at the violent heart of Brazil’s largest city.
With determined strides, Martina hurries her daughters inside. She heads straight for a stark waiting-room. She knows the way well. Since her marriage to Rogerio, she’s been a regular visitor there.
It looks like any other precinct, but this is a police station with a difference. Named Delegacia de Policia de Defesa da Mulher, the station is run by women officers, for women in trouble. The imposing size of the building hints at the number of women in the community who need police help. There are more than a hundred and twenty similar stations in São Paulo alone. Delegacia, which were first established in Brazil in the ’eighties, play an important role in the war against household violence.
From the outset, the stations were an instant success, taking seriously battered women’s pleas for help. Like much of Latin America, Brazilian society suffers from machismo syndrome, a society that closes ranks to protect abusive men.
Before there were Delegacia, women reporting domestic violence, even rape, were usually chased away from regular police stations. For the few sympathetic male officers, domestic violence was a matter beyond their jurisdiction.
More than three hundred thousand women take refuge at Delegacia across Brazil each year. Most of them, like Martina, are too terrified at first to report their spouses’ crimes. But genuinely fearing for their lives, and those of their children, Martina and thousands like her have no other choice.
Waiting for her name to be called, Martina glances around the room. About two dozen other women sit about on red plastic chairs. Some are weeping. Others nurse fresh wounds, or comfort their children. A teenage mother sitting beside Martina holds a bloodied bandage to her thigh. The early hours of Sunday morning are always the most eventful at São Paulo’s Delegacias.
At six a.m., Martina is still waiting.
Her baby daughter is crying for food. The officer, a tall middle aged woman wearing a dark blue uniform, leads her to an interview room. Staring at her across the desk, Martina says simply: ‘I want him put in jail. You must do it. Please help me.’
In charge of the 9th Women’s Division, Detective Katia Marinelli notes down the complaint and sighs deeply. ‘We will do all we can to help you,’ she replies, ‘but will you assist us this time, by taking him to court?’ Staring bla
nkly into space, Martina nods her head, and is taken away by a clerk for an examination.
Detective Marinelli rubs her eyes and looks at her watch. It’s almost six-thirty. ‘Tonight we’ve had about seventy women here,’ she explains. ‘We often get many more than that. The worst is when “Corinthians” – one of the most popular soccer teams in São Paulo – have lost their game. I’m not a follower of football, but I always pray that the Corinthians win.’
The detective pauses to sign an official document, ‘Most of the women we get here are in their twenties,’ she continues, ‘but an increasing number are teenage wives. Those are the saddest cases. They’ve usually been made pregnant and have got married to abusive, alcoholic men. Most don’t have a clue what they’ve got themselves into. For them, this is an escape from Hell.’
Next door, Martina is being examined by Roseli, a clerk of about the same age. Roseli lifts up the blood-splattered blouse to examine the mass of plum-coloured bruises. The cut on Martina’s face and another on her forearm are scrutinized. Then Roseli types in the statement at a computer terminal. With its details of drunken debauchery, rape and stabbing, the report is so usual that Roseli feels as if she knows it by heart.
‘When I first met Rogerio,’ Martina says softly, ‘I knew he was an ex-convict. But I was in love with him and he seemed intent on bettering his life. Soon after our marriage he lost his job. Then he started drinking heavily. Now I want him in jail, otherwise he will kill me and the kids. He’s already sworn to cut off their fingers when I bring them home.’
Martina puts her signature beneath the printout of her statement, and wonders what to do next. She is too afraid to return to their home. ‘I think I will go and stay with a cousin in Belo Horizonte,’ she says. ‘I’ll have to find a job. I never want to see Rogerio again.’
