Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  So thorough have the security forces been that when Said and I at last cross the road and enter the network of descending alleyways, the casbah is like a ghost town. Five hundred years of human traffic may have worn down the old stone steps and cobbled passageways, but there are no traffic jams today. I catch glimpses of faces at black-grilled windows, set high in the walls above us. Doors scrape into place just before we reach them, and I can hear the hum of voices behind them. I have the feeling that the casbah is only holding its breath until we’ve gone.

  It doesn’t surprise me that UNESCO has named the casbah a World Heritage Site. It is undeniably atmospheric. The buildings crowd in on one another. Some of them, judging by their elaborately detailed stone doorways and patches of decorative tiling embedded in cracked white plaster, must be substantial inside. Many houses have upper storeys cantilevered out over the alley and supported by rows of wooden poles, so they almost touch at the top. They have mains water and electricity now, but some houses still rely on the old system of collecting rainwater on the rooftops. Litter drifts about and there is a pungent smell of wet plaster and drains. Said confirms my suspicion that everything is going on the other side of the walls.

  ‘It’s overpopulated. Sometimes you find six families in the same house. It’s too much people.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Sixty people sometimes.’

  The house where Ali La Pointe and three other resistance heroes chose to be blown apart by the paras rather than surrender (a story powerfully told in the film The Battle of Algiers) has been rebuilt. On the wall an Arabic inscription details the circumstances of their deaths on 8 October 1957.

  I can understand now what made the casbah such a superb defensive position and why the resistance, the ‘freedom fighters’ as Said always calls them, were able to hold out for so long against crack French paratroops. Sophisticated weapons and modern vehicles are useless in streets the width of a loaded donkey, or on roofs which act as another thoroughfare for those who know their way around them.

  As we near the main road at the lower end of the casbah there is a milling throng. Eamonn walks beside me, casting wary looks, but everyone seems to be either friendly or preoccupied.

  I feel that we have barely touched the real world of the casbah, which, as in all Arab communities, is private and inward-looking, so Said takes me round to the shrine of Sidi Abderrahmane, a holy man of great powers who lived here in the sixteenth century. The sound of female voices rises from inside as we approach the domed building surmounted by a tall balconied minaret.

  This is traditionally a place for the women to come and invoke the help of the saint in childbirth or with problems of infertility, but the imam is happy for us to join them. Remove my shoes and enter in reverent silence. I needn’t have bothered. The small chamber is less like an English parish church than a kindergarten at collection time. Small children sit and play as their mothers worship in their own way. Nothing is formal. One woman hugs the side of the tomb, singing plaintively, another bows to Mecca, another has brought her new-born baby to touch the wooden casket that contains the saint’s remains. It’s the first place, she declares proudly, that he’s ever been taken to. Brightly coloured texts run round the walls, heavy cut-glass lamps hang, undusted, from the ceiling, and in one corner is a heavy-duty industrial safe, with a slit for offerings. Said tells me that the poorer women sometimes stuff chewing gum in the slit and come back later to collect money that hasn’t gone down.

  By now I’ve completely forgotten that I might be a target. The cordon sanitaire has been discreet to the point of invisibility and the people of Algiers as cordial and curious as anywhere in the Sahara.

  Day Ninety-Six

  ALGIERS TO ORAN

  A peerless morning. The only cloud in the sky is caused by an enormous flock of small birds, which plunges us into shadow as we wait in the hotel courtyard for transport to the station. More and more birds seem to join all the time, crying and calling, until their numbers reach a critical mass and, as if on a given signal, they execute a dizzyingly precise banking turn and disappear southwards. Our coach driver tells me they’re swallows, migrating from Europe to winter in the Sahara. They regroup here on the mountainous shoreline before starting the final leg of their journey.

  We who are migrating the other way, out of the Sahara and into Europe, are also on the last leg of a journey. Today we catch the train to Oran, second city of Algeria, which is less than 300 miles from where we set out all those months ago.

  Eamonn is anxious. Travelling from Algiers to Oran by train is, in security terms, an out of the frying pan into the fire situation. He has trawled his dictionary of doom this morning. Over the last ten years this has been the most bombed railway line in the world; it passes through an area known as the Triangle of Death (not mentioned in the timetable) and terrorists have been known to board the train and kill people ‘in awful circumstances’.

  It all sounds theatrically exaggerated on this brilliant, lifeenhancing morning, as we drive down through the city for the last time, past the grand arcades, the long straight thoroughfares, the great domed Post Office - built by the French in 1913, but so Moorish in its inspiration that it looks like a mosque - and the long white walls of the apartment blocks, flecked with the bright colours of a thousand sun blinds.

  Our train was once the romantically named Algiers - Casablanca Express, but the land border with Morocco has been closed since 1995, after disagreements over security, and it’s now terminated at Oran, 300 miles and five hours away. The silver-ribbed aluminium shell of our coach is studded with small holes, and I’m just about to bring these to Eamonn’s attention when a group from Algerian Railways arrives to welcome us aboard and generally look after all our filming needs. One of them is a dark-haired lady with long, lustrous hair and a brisk, efficient manner which barely conceals a palpable nervousness.

  She dismisses any current problems on the line.

  ‘It’s all much better now,’ she assures me confidently, rather spoiling the effect by adding, ‘touche bois’. Touch wood. Inshallah would have been more appropriate.

  The train rolls out on time and I push aside the flimsy green curtain to take a last look at Alger La Blanche, which I doubt I shall see again for a long, long time. The morning sun catches the roofs of the casbah and the city finally slips away behind a succession of tunnels and flyovers.

  The railway runs through a poor area consisting of cheap new housing blocks, separated from the line by a corridor of concrete walls and steel fences which rise on either side of the train. This grim barricade continues into open countryside, where fields, apple orchards and vineyards stretch away towards the grey-green foothills of the Atlas Mountains. The fields around Blida were once renowned for their roses; now the town is part of the aforementioned ‘Triangle of Death’, which is marked by Blida in the west, Bouira in the east and Algiers in the north. It was in this deceptively benign landscape that the GIA used to stop trains by putting an accomplice on board to pull the communication cord. As the train came to a halt they would board and either kill their victims there and then or take them away and murder them. There are no communication cords on the trains any more. Even the nice friendly PR team from the railway cannot disguise the problems here. The woman with the lustrous hair lost her voice for three years after seeing some soldiers, who were guarding one of her stations, murdered. Like many other victims of the GIA their throats had been cut.

  Once beyond Blida, the continuous protective wall stops, but heavy security remains in place, with block-houses and pillboxes at strategic points like bridges or tunnel entrances.

  The worst of the attacks peaked around 1995 and recently the government has experimented with an amnesty, which seems to have reduced the levels of violence.

  The damage nowadays is more likely to be inflicted by bored teenagers throwing stones, which happens all the time and explains not only the number of Plexiglas window panes but also the scattering of dents on the
bodywork which caught my eye as I was boarding.

  We’re climbing now, through a long tunnel and into a station called Ain Torki. The only people on the platform are soldiers wearing camouflage, but in the distance, my eye is caught by a procession of women leaving a graveyard, scarves and veils streaming behind them, plumes of colour in a hard brown landscape.

  At Chlef, two and a quarter hours into the journey, our guard is changed and no less than eighteen black-clad members of the Gendarmerie Nationale, wearing body armour, squeeze aboard. Eamonn casts a professional eye over them and notes that one or two have Simonov precision rifles.

  ‘They’re serious.’

  The soldiers settle down behind us, but when Nigel raises the camera they all move away and hide.

  The last few miles into Oran are particularly sad. An arid landscape of stony ploughed fields is covered with blowing rubbish and drifting plastic bags. The stations, once trim symbols of French civic pride, are falling apart, with gaping holes in pantiled roofs, windows smashed, red-brick walls stained and grafittied. It pains me to say so, because our Algerian hosts are charming, cooperative, friendly and above all desperate to please, but this is a vision of callous decay.

  And, perhaps, a perfect metaphor for post-colonial Sahara. The old owners have been thrown out and the new ones still haven’t decided what to do with the property.

  Oran Station emphasises the point. It is a magnificently stylish example of the Mauresque style, full of height and light and space, set off by ornate wood mouldings and iron-work screens. It’s been kept in very good condition, but not so the Hotel Terminus next door. Beneath the layers of dust, the broken lighting and the holes in the ceiling, the grand vision of the French railway builders is unmistakable. Solid Moorish arches rise from the mosaic floor, a fireplace in massive blocks of grey marble is incised with the initials P. L. M., the Paris, Lyon and Marseille Railway. Above it is a mirror 9 feet high. Everything is intended to elevate and inspire, but this purpose has sadly been forgotten. No pastis here now, no freshly opened bottles of wine, no apronned waiters bustling amongst tables buzzing with gossip from Paris and Algiers. Instead, there’s Coke or Fanta and a handwritten sign above a lifeless bar: ‘La maison ne fait pas du credit’.

  We are eating later at the Comet, a plain old-fashioned restaurant, whose wine list and entrecotes go a long way to making up for the Hotel Terminus, when the flow of conversation is interrupted by the chanting of a crowd outside. It sounds like football supporters celebrating, and Said, who goes outside to check, confirms that this is the case, Kabilya JSK having defeated AC Africa from Cote d’Ivoire, to win the African club soccer championship.

  The hooting and shouting grows louder and more vociferous and seems no longer entirely to do with football. I’m sure I hear the word ‘Assassins!‘ repeated over and over. The proprietor pushes his windows shut, which doesn’t do much good, and, if anything, urges the crowd on. There seem to be only two words they’re chanting now.

  ‘Pou-voir! Assa-ssins! Pou-voir! Assa-ssins!’

  Said goes to the door, but peers out a lot more warily. For the first time I begin to wonder where my cordon sanitaire has gone. Probably been given the night off for getting us to Oran safely.

  After a few more minutes, during which the stamping and shouting rises to a frightening intensity, the crowd moves on.

  I ask Said what it was all about.

  Don’t worry, he reassures me, it wasn’t directed at us. Kabilya, where the winning team comes from, is a mountainous region of eastern Algeria, not Arab but Berber. They are a strong-willed, proud and enterprising people (the actress Isabelle Adjani is Kabilyan) and have their own quarrel with the government over suppression of their language and culture. After a recent protest march in Algiers, forty young men disappeared, and the word is that they were taken away on police wagons. The military-backed government is known by its opponents as Le Pouvoir, The Power, hence the shouts of ‘Pouvoir‘ and ‘Assassins‘.

  In Algeria it’s quite common for football teams to be used for political protest.

  ‘Were you as worried as I was?’ I ask Said.

  ‘If this had been in Algiers, yes.’

  Day Ninety-Seven

  ORAN

  The good news is that my hotel overlooks the sea. The less good news is that between me and the sea is a warehouse, a grain silo, two fuel storage tanks, a stack of containers and a chimney. The positively bad news is that at six o’clock this morning I was bent double with stomach cramps. Since my emetic experiences in Western Sahara I’ve kept a bottle of Pepto-Bismol nearby and am gulping the thick chalky fluid every hour on the hour.

  I don’t think I’m the only one with problems. The hotel itself looks distinctly off colour. My bathroom ceiling has been partly removed to provide access to a water pipe, and every now and then strange, animal-like cries issue from the gaping hole. The tap on my basin coughs and splutters in a horrible parody of my own lurchings and strainings, and I can find no taps on the bath tub at all.

  I make my way gingerly to breakfast. I’m on the tenth floor but I haven’t used the lift since I saw the owner banging the control panel to make the light come on, so it’s a long walk down. As I pass the third floor I have to step over a stream of water, which is running down the corridor from beneath the door of Room 306.

  As if things aren’t delicate already, my first walk through Oran reminds me that this is the city immortalised by Camus in his novel La Peste (The Plague).

  In it one of the characters actually keels over and dies of the plague on the stage of the Opera House. This splendidly florid edifice still stands at one side of the Place du 1er Novembre 1954, formerly the Place d’Armes. It makes for an interesting culture clash. Brazenly bare-breasted women loom large at the top of the Opera House, whilst a statue in the middle of the square bears a quotation from the Koran: ‘And Victory is from God and God is merciful.’

  This then is the end of the road. It looks as if the only way from here to Morocco might be by sea, and, given the current state of relations between Morocco and Algeria, even that could be tricky.

  Back to the hotel. Get talking to a tall, rather striking Algerian with a family in Stockholm. He is curious to know what I think of the bombing of Afghanistan. Something in his manner rubs me up the wrong way and instead of expressing my doubts I dither indecisively. He thinks it will only strengthen the hand of the Islamists. I shift the discussion to something that has worried me ever since I came to Algeria. What happened after the glorious armed struggle against the French? How come the freedom fighters of the FLN became the oppressors? How did the anti-colonial legacy of the 1960s become today’s ‘Pouvoir‘, a military state almost wholly dependent on oil and gas exports to the West?

  He looks witheringly at me.

  ‘A hundred and forty years of colonialism cannot be destroyed right away.’

  He shrugs and reaches for his briefcase.

  ‘Mistakes will be made.’

  Day Ninety-Eight

  CEUTA

  There is an alternative to Morocco. Two hundred and sixty miles west of Oran, tucked in at the foot of the mountains at the point where two continents almost meet, is a low-slung town occupying a narrow isthmus between two peaks. Neither part of Morocco nor Algeria, it belongs to one of the less well-known African countries - Spain.

  The heavily fortified town of Ceuta has been Spanish sovereign territory since 1580. It’s one of two Spanish towns barnacled onto the coast of Morocco, ensuring that the transition from Africa to Europe is not as clean as one might romantically like it to be. It’s reachable by a combination of ferries, and I duly find myself spending my last night in the Dark Continent at a Parador hotel drinking Rioja and eating jamon serrano. Very confusing.

  Day Ninety-Nine

  CEUTA TO GIBRALTA

  In my experience, hotel brochures, especially of the aspiringly glossy variety, always feature a room spectacularly better than the one you’re in and a swimming pool you can
never find. In the case of the Hotel La Muralla, Ceuta, I do find the pool, which is similar in every respect to its photo except that the one in the photo has water in it. The brochure is gushingly enthusiastic about Ceuta’s history. In fact, I can’t imagine why I’ve never heard of the place.

  ‘Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Visigoths, Portuguese and Spanish successively took control of the ancient city.’

  Good harbours, like the one I entered last night, so close to the Mediterranean gateway, meant trade, security and wealth. Under its Arab rulers Ceuta had all three, but couldn’t hold onto them against the determined and expansionist Portuguese. In 1415 they conquered Ceuta and took their prize seriously enough to build a powerful fortification, La Muralla (City Wall). It remains in place, solid and imperturbable, and I enjoy a good walk around the sturdy, elegantly angled walls, crenellated and studded with barbican towers, which slide down into the clear green waters of a moat. Felipe II united Portugal and Spain and in 1580 Ceuta became a possession of the Spanish crown, and has remained so ever since. Though it has the look and feel of a European city, the central square is nevertheless called the Plaza de Africa. It contains a small church dedicated to Our Lady of Africa and a monument commemorating the Spanish invasion of Morocco in 1859.

  In the gardens of this quiet square, sitting on the grass or pacing the neat hedge-lined paths that radiate from the monument, are a number of young men. All Africans, they range from tall loose-limbed Blacks to paler Arabs, some in Western dress and others in flowing robes. They look like me; a little awkward, strangers in a foreign land.

  I ask one of them where he’s from. His English is not so good, and he prefers to talk in French. He’s from Mali, on the other side of the Sahara, and has made his way here to try to find work in Spain and once in Spain, any of the European Union countries. He points out an Algerian, a group of Mauritanians. They’re here to pick up scraps of information, about who’s going where and how, about deals, about boats crossing the Strait, about how they can take the final step on their long journeys. They’ve come to the Plaza de Africa because they want to get out of Africa.