The barred cells and the “Door of No Return,” through which the slaves exited the prison to board the ships for the Middle Passage, were ineffably sad, but I found Elmina’s most monstrous feature to be the Governor’s Balcony, from which the fort’s commander looked down on the assembled female slaves and chose the most desirable to be brought, through a secret passage, to his bedroom. Anyone who refused his advances was shackled to one of the large black cannon balls we saw, and left in the open sun of the courtyard without food or water until she died, a warning to other reluctant women. (Rebellious male slaves and captured pirates were also starved to death, but confined in a small room.)
If the chosen female acquiesced to the governor’s amorous embraces, she entered a deadly game of reproductive roulette. If she did not become pregnant before the governor tired of her, she was shipped out as a slave. If she became obviously pregnant before the next slaver sailed, she was saved and thereafter treated as a wife of the governor, and her child was raised as his, with a full education in a special schoolroom. But if her pregnancy did not become apparent until she was at sea, then, to conceal the governor’s tampering with the merchandise, she was tossed overboard.
* * *
God’s brochure had promised human funerals, and he provided three. I was tempted to ask how he arranged them to coincide with our schedule but, after having seen what he’d done to the roosters, thought better of it.
The first funeral was for a poor rural fellow, the second for a wealthy family leader. God noted that those attending the first were all from the decedent’s tribe, whereas mourners of many tribes came to pay respect at the funeral of the big shot.
I asked how he knew that.
“By the scarification on their faces. In most of Africa, members of the different tribes are scarred in their faces as children in different designs. Their faces are cut with a knife and salt is rubbed into the cuts to prevent smooth healing. The Yoruba have three horizontal scars on each side of the cheek. The Bariba have four long scars on the women and three on the men, all running from their temples to the bottom of their faces. Fulani women have blue tattoos around the mouth, and so on.” (I had previously wondered how, when African countries were torn by their frequent civil wars, postelection riots, genocides, ethnic cleansings, or tribal conflicts, the participants could identify those they sought to kill. Now I understood.)
“Before the white man came here we had no coffins or tombstones,” God continued. “We were burying our dead in straw mats, beaten cloth, or bark of trees, in sacred forests. But we have adapted to some of your ways, so most of us now use coffins and cemeteries. But we do not accept your speed. Your funerals are maybe one hour long. That is no time to respect the dead. On voodoo ground we spend at least three days for our funerals to help the dead enter into the world of their ancestors.”
Our third funeral, a festive affair on Ghana’s Atlantic coast, was for a member of the Ga tribe and featured the corpse in a coffin shaped and painted like a lit cigarette. The deceased loved to smoke, and a Ga coffin is designed to represent a principal aspect of the life of its occupant and serve as his or her happy home in the afterlife.
God explained that this custom originated a century ago when the fishermen who lived in Teshi village had themselves buried in caskets shaped like the hulls of their boats, and brightly painted like tropical fish. Teshi now had five workshops trying to keep up with the demand.
I visited one workshop and observed that the caskets were not crude affairs, but carefully carved and meticulously painted in flamboyant colors—a shoe for a cobbler (complete with a high shine and laces), a beer bottle for a barfly (polished to look like glass, with a Heineken label), a Mercedes-Benz for a corrupt official; for others a Coca-Cola bottle, a pineapple, bible, camera, bird, lobster, hammer, a favorite pet. I watched the carpenters and painters finishing one for a 90-year-old grandmother who had never left her village but had long enjoyed the fantasy she would fly one day. Her many sons and grandsons had ordered built for her this remarkable coffin, a miniature jumbo jet with bright lettering proclaiming GHANA AIRWAYS.
“My choice,” God said, “is a coffin shaped like my Land Cruiser. You would probably want a naked young lady with blonde hair and blue eyes and big boobies to keep you company in the next world.”
These coffins cost $600, a full year’s wages for most of these people, but they prefer to go into debt rather than send their ancestors to the next world in a cheap casket. As God explained, “That is what you never forget about these funerals—the coffin of the deceased. So it must be right. And it must be what the dead person would want.
“It takes three weeks to make a coffin like this,” God continued, “so the body is put in the morgue for that time and kept cold. But some people select their coffin when alive, so it will be ready for them when they die. It must be kept with the carpenter until the funeral; it is bad luck to bring it home if you are alive.” he told me.
I’m willing to take that risk, buddy. I’ve got a perfect place in my apartment for mine.
* * *
We completed our rectangular three-country tour with a visit to Lomé, the sweltering capital of Togo, where God took me to the Goro voodoo shrine to see a two-hour “happening” that combined elements of a fundamentalist tent revival meeting, a magic show, a séance, and a hot 70s night at Studio 54. Then a visit to the Lomé Fetish Market, the first, and the largest, anywhere. It was located on an out-of-the-way street lined with a hundred long tables loaded with thousands of dead animals and hundreds of thousands of animal parts: hair, paws, ears, horns, heads, skulls, tails, claws, gizzards, gonads, pickled tongues, plus tens of thousands of man-made fetish objects.
God noted: “This used to be a very small market where animal parts were sold. In the voodoo religion we need animal parts as our sacrifices. People bring dead animal parts to this place. They also bring live animals. Until 15 years ago, this was the only voodoo market in the whole of West Africa. But today you can find small ones in villages and other neighboring countries. But that of Lomé became so very known and popular to African voodoo worshipers that they travel here to buy stuff for the realization of their religion.”
I purchased a matched pair of male/female voodoo dolls festooned with pins, a dark-brown sacrificial dish adorned with two raised white lizards, and a small monkey skull, all of which, I confess, I shamelessly pressed into service to gain support from the literary spirits during my writing of this book to guide it to an enthusiastic and well-regarded publisher.
But, let it be clear, that even when sorely tempted, I never pulled out a chicken’s tongue.
CHAPTER 9
So, When Is a Country Not a Country?
After visiting the Golden Kingdoms I was up to 112 countries, but still not sure what officially constituted a country or precisely how many existed. I needed to know exactly what makes a country a country and understand when and why a patch of land was recognized as an independent state.
Although I’d studied international relations in both college and grad school, I’d never had any personal reason to focus on what constituted a country. I just thought that a country is, well, you know, a country. If you’re an ordinary tourist you don’t usually care if you’re about to visit a country, a colony, a state, a dependency, territory, condominium, tridominium, collectivity, protectorate, principality, mandate, an autonomous self-governing region, a non-self-governing territory, a trusteeship, or an amusement park. All you usually care about is whether you’ll need a visa and will the place accept credit cards.
But if you’ve set yourself the goal of going to every country, you need to ascertain the accepted criteria for what qualifies as a country. And that wasn’t easy. Even as reliable a source as The Economist concluded, in an article titled “In Quite a State,” that “Any attempt to find a clear definition of a country soon runs into a thicket of exceptions and anomalies.” Yet I needed to know where the goalposts were. It wasn’t sufficient to accept Frank Za
ppa’s delightful criteria: “You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline—it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.”
A sense of proper protocol dictated that for a place to get on, and stay on, my list of countries visited, it had to be a country when I visited it, and remain a country, which was far easier decided than done. This self-imposed rule meant, for example, that although I’d visited Czechoslovakia in 1969, I had to return, because it had split apart in 1993, and visit both the new Czech Republic and the new state of Slovakia. It meant that since Marshal Josip Broz Tito died a year after my 1979 visit to the fractious conglomerate called Yugoslavia—which he had held together by his force of will and arms—I had to visit each of the seven independent countries into which it broke apart. And it meant that despite my dreary visit in 1985 to the USSR (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), after the Berlin Wall fell in 1990 and Communism collapsed, and those republics were no longer united or Soviet, I had to go back and visit all 15 of the newly separated suckers.
It also meant—and you thought this job was easy?—I had to strike seven states, including the USSR, South Vietnam, East Germany, and the United Arab Republic, off my checklist after they ceased to exist as political entities.
I also had to hasten to complete my quest before being inundated by a tsunami of new nations riding the waves of self-determination, ethnic nationalism, and independence lately breaking around the globe. This encompasses the potential breakup (or breakdown) of Belgium into two separate countries, of Great Britain losing Scotland and maybe Wales, and a host of wannabes waiting in the wings: Abkhazia, Apiya, Aruba, Basque Country, Bohemia, Bougainville, Catalonia, Cook Islands, Curaçao, Greenland, Guadeloupe, Kurdistan, Martinique, Northern Cyprus, North Mali, North Nigeria, East Libya, East Congo, South Ossetia, South Yemen (aka Aden), Nagorno-Karabakh, Palestine, Padania, Pitcairn Islands, Quebec, Dagestan, Chechnya, Sardinia, Assam, Sikkim, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur, Metoram, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (aka Spanish Sahara), Somaliland, Ruritania, Tibet, Transnistria, Upper Yafa, and perhaps parts of Syria and Iraq.
But I could probably ignore Kugelmugel, Snake Hill, Hutt River, and other offspring of the micro-secessionist movement, as well as Tannu Tuva and Texas (the only state to enter the U.S. by treaty, a treaty that its politicians periodically claim recognized its right to secede, despite an 1868 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court construing it otherwise).
Anyway, here we are, some 600 words later, and we still don’t know what is a country. But what can you expect when more than half of them have been created since 1960?
First, let’s get rid of the glib and easy answers.
No specified geographical mass makes a piece of land a country. Nauru, half the size of Staten Island, is an acknowledged country, as is San Marino, the world’s oldest surviving sovereign state and constitutional republic, weighing in at a mere 24 square miles. Nor does statehood require millions of inhabitants: The world recognizes Vatican City as a country, yet it has a population of less than a thousand, and Monaco has only 36,000.
A place is not a country just because you live there and it has a name. Hotmail lets you register your e-mail account from its list of 242 “countries/territories,” the U.S. Department of Homeland Security visa rules contain 251 choices for “country where you live,” and our Census Bureau International Data Base predicts the future population of 228 “countries.” These organizations are not using the term “country” precisely; for them it’s shorthand for domicile, the place you hang your hat, and includes such non-countries as Guam, Gibraltar, Greenland, and the Gaza Strip.
A place is not a country just because it issues its own currency; Aruba, the Netherlands Antilles, the Falkland Islands, and the Isle of Jersey all mint their own money, but are not countries. Nor is a place disqualified from being a state just because its national currency is that of another nation: The countries of Ecuador, El Salvador, East Timor, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, and Panama all use the U.S. dollar as the coin of their realms, just as the nations of Nauru, Kiribati and Tuvalu use the Australian dollar.
Nor do postage stamps prove statehood: Some of the most artistic stamps in my collection are issued by non-nations like Anguilla, Bermuda, Curaçao, Guadalupe, Martinique, the Tokelau Islands, St. Helena, Sarawak, Wallis and Futuna, South Georgia, Cocos Islands, Pitcairn Islands, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the French Antarctic Territory. One country, Andorra, does not issue any postage stamps; it delivers the local mail for free, while relying on neighboring Spain and France to forward its foreign mail.
Diplomatic relations alone do not confer statehood, as these actions serve as recognition of the government, not the nation. Russia, for example, has diplomatic relations with the Georgian breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but those are far from being countries. The U.S. has refused to have diplomatic relations with the governments of North Korea, Iran, and Cuba, but that does not contradict America’s acceptance of them as countries.
Membership in the UN is almost a reliable guide, because an entity can only be a member if it’s a true country. But, not every true country is a UN member. Both Taiwan and Vatican City are regarded as countries, but they’re not UN members, the former because the People’s Republic of China challenged its status, the latter because it never applied, believing it can conduct its diplomacy more effectively by having the Holy See admitted as an “observer” at the General Assembly. Then there’s Kosovo, which, as we went to print, 109 states had formally recognized as an independent country, but which hasn’t been admitted to UN membership because of opposition from Serbia, which lays claim to it, and Russia, which supports Serbia and wields veto power.
For more than 80 years, the guiding document has been the 1933 Montevideo Convention, which sets forth the four criteria for statehood: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and capacity to enter into relations with the other states. (A fifth, implicit, requirement is that the entity must seek to be regarded and treated as a state.) These criteria would allow an entity like Taiwan to be accepted as a state, but it has been thwarted in its attempts to do so.
The Convention forbids the use of military force to obtain sovereignty, yet at least 40 now-recognized nations have resorted to military force to overthrow their colonial masters. The Convention also excludes puppet states, yet this ban proved ineffective when the Iron Curtain descended across Eastern Europe after WW II and all the puppets of the Soviet Union were treated as countries.
If we look to political philosophy, we are confronted by two contradictory systems. The declarative theory of statehood holds that the political existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other states, but the constitutive theory maintains that a state exists only insofar as it is recognized by other states. Everybody clear?
So where are we? Well, I’m counting, as true countries, the 193 members of the UN, plus Taiwan, Vatican City, and Kosovo: thus, 196. (The question of whether Kosovo is legally a country recently came before the International Court of Justice, which had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to clarify the broad question of statehood. But the Court punted and never responded to the basic issue, instead holding, on July 22, 2010, that “international law has no prohibition on a territory issuing a declaration of independence,” which is nice to know, but hardly a responsive answer.)
* * *
Now that I’ve defined two of the three words in my plan to “visit every country,” my lawyerly inclinations lead me to elucidate on the third: visit. Since there are no rules in this sport, no international body promulgating standards, a visit could theoretically range from a minute to a lifetime. I have spent from one day to one week in every nation’s capital, except for Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, and traveled across the country in at least one direction in about 90 percent of the nations, the notable exceptions being Argentina, Brazil, China, and Russia, which are ju
st too big to completely cross in enough time to still have a legal practice and a rent-stabilized apartment to come home to. I only dipped a toe in the DRC where a band of child soldiers was killing anyone who entered the contested zone in the east; Nigeria, when Boko Haram was not welcoming Westerners; Sudan, where the government strictly confined me to the area around Khartoum; and Tajikistan, where I was trapped on a tour that only spent one day there, out in the boonies.
Furthest short of my goal had been Equatorial Guinea (EG), a rich but nasty little dictatorship with one of the worst human rights records. When I was ready for it, in 2003, it was not ready for me. Its government was not allowing visitors because it was heated up and worried about the trial of 13 mercenaries who allegedly plotted to overthrow the government. Not to be thwarted by a little formality like the lack of a visa, I flew south over EG to Libreville in Gabon, then endured a jolting eight-hour ride back north on a terribly rutted dirt road to a part of Gabon that shared a watery border with EG. I prevailed upon an unsuspecting fisherman who had a little dinghy with a 5 hp outboard to take me across to the opposite shore, where I quickly hopped out, ran around, kissed the Guinean ground, smeared a bit of it in my passport, leaped back in the dinghy, and got the hell out of there. That was the best I could do, but I vowed to return legally once it permitted visits. (And did so in 2014, from July 9 to 13.)
A Ugandan gracefully carries a pile of tree bark on her head. African women expertly transport loads approaching 90 pounds in this manner, from oranges to buckets of water. In my 15 trips to Africa, I never saw any one of them drop or spill anything. Gorilla Highlands
Since I am not one of those rich yacht-owning guys who compete with each other for their self-created title of “The World’s Most Traveled Man,” I confess that I have not visited every one of the 7,107 islands in the Philippine Archipelago, or all the 17,508 islands and islets constituting Indonesia, but I’ve made my share of risky voyages on their rickety interisland ferries you read about in the back pages of the Times: “Ship Sinks in Suva Sea, 400 Presumed Lost.”
Around the World in 50 Years Page 12
