Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  I ask how they survive in Ceuta. Most of them, it turns out, are in a holding centre run by the Spanish authorities on behalf of the European Union, where they are given food and accommodation until they can be found work in Europe.

  Later in the day we visit the centre, a bright, freshly painted, concrete encampment up in the hills, surrounded by a grove of mournfully swaying eucalyptus trees. Here in the Centro de Estancia Temporal de Imigrantes are gathered 335 men, 42 women and 13 children, waiting for permits and, in some cases, asylum papers to enable them to get work ‘up in the Peninsula’, as they call Spain and Portugal.

  The place is newly opened and is clean, orderly and antiseptic; an institution in which no-one has anything wrong with them, like a hospital in which all the patients are well or a jail in which everyone is free. It’s full of Africans but unlike any African village I’ve ever seen.

  Despite an educational programme, offering language tuition and some job training, most of the inmates stand around or pace the compound with an air of displaced restlessness.

  The director is a decent man, who takes some pride in the fact that fifty-nine of them have been found work in the previous six months, but most of those I talk to dispute that. A Nigerian in a Cardinals baseball shirt has been here five months. His journey sounds like ours in reverse. Up through Mali and Senegal and Western Sahara to Morocco. As Moroccan government policy is to send all immigrants back, I ask him how he got through.

  ‘On a Zodiac (a small rubber dinghy) across the sea.’ He adds bitterly, ‘I thought they were taking me to Europe.’

  Another Nigerian has come across the desert, 1000 miles or more. He nods bleakly and repeats the word ‘desert’ as if at some infinitely painful memory.

  He made it to Ceuta as a stowaway on a ship from Morocco. It cost money, though not as much as the $1500 a Mauritanian paid to make the same journey. The stories tumble out, and the resentment too.

  ‘Ten months! Ten months we have been here!’ shouts a woman with hair in braids. She has left her children behind in Sierra Leone.

  ‘Help us! Tell the world!’ shouts a young man as we leave.

  On a clear day the hopeful immigrants in Ceuta could see the green hills of Spain with the naked eye. They could certainly see the man-made forest of wind turbines running over the crest of the hills, propellers spinning on top of giant white stalks. If they had a strong enough telescope they could see telescopes looking back at them from the hills above the town of Tarifa. Tourists come here to be thrilled by the prospect of the sheer rock walls of Morocco, and the sight of the Strait of Gibraltar, no wider than a Swiss lake. They buy postcards and take photographs of the 9-mile distance between them and Africa.

  For some it might jog memories of unsettling newspaper photographs of couples sunbathing on a Spanish beach beside the huddled body of someone who drowned trying to get to Europe. What the tourists will not know is that some evenings, hundreds of Africans will set out to cross the Strait and land a half-mile away from where they’re standing. They will have paid a lot of money to risk their lives, travelling in unlit boats, without lifejackets or maps of any kind, across one of the busiest and most unpredictable stretches of water in the world. Some will never make it. Over 3000 have died attempting the crossing in the last three years.

  There is heat still left in the afternoon as I reach the Spanish mainland and walk along the beach at Tarifa with Belinda Whaley-Braithwaite, a traveller herself, who rode from here to Paris on a horse called Dragon and wrote a book about it. Now she and her husband live most of the year in a pretty house with six guest rooms a mile or so across the fields.

  The beaches are long and full of fine white sand, and in the creamy blue-black breakers kite-flyers, surfers, swimmers and fishermen try to stay out of each other’s way.

  Then we come across a red and blue striped fishing boat, no more than 20 feet long, broken and embedded in the sand. It looks quite picturesque, until you realise why it is here and who it has brought.

  ‘Sometimes they can be up to 700 in a night, and the police may only catch 200, so the rest are in the countryside. If they’re Moroccan there’s an agreement, so they’ll be sent back, but the people who’ve come from Chad or Senegal …’

  ‘From Black Africa?’

  ‘Black Africa, yes, there isn’t the same agreement, so they’re quite happy to be caught.’

  Belinda, perhaps being something of an adventurer herself, talks with a sort of shocked admiration for what they go through. Boats the size of the one we’re looking at may have forty bodies in them, including pregnant women who want their children to be born in Europe. Other boats never make it to the shore, leaving their charges to swim in over the reef. Unscrupulous skippers lie to them, telling them they’re a hundred yards from land when in fact they’re still half a mile out.

  The lucky ones who do get ashore bring waterproof bags with a change of clothes.

  Some speak only Arabic and clutch pieces of paper with contact names and numbers. One came to Belinda’s door and asked her if she might help her contact a Spanish Internet address. The name she had been given, but didn’t understand, was a very sick joke. It was two Spanish words, ‘puerto muertos’, literally ‘the port of the dead’.

  As we walk back to her house, through dunes littered with castoff clothes that may well have protected people on mighty journeys across the Sahara, Belinda explains why she thinks the best way to deal with the immigrants is to allow them a short-term visa.

  ‘Then at least they could come and try it out. I think a lot of them actually come over here and don’t like what they see. It’s more expensive to live here, they can’t get a job, so they’re actually happy to go back to their families.’

  She pauses and looks out the way we’ve come.

  ‘But you know, when all your family and friends have clubbed together to get this ticket for you to Paradise … How do you go back?’

  It’s dark by the time we reach Gibraltar. There’s a queue to get in. Our driver grumbles about the usual Spanish prevarication. But there’s a lot more for him to grumble about since we left here all those months ago. The British and Spanish governments have been doing the unthinkable - talking joint sovereignty. Though they’ve been assured that nothing will be decided without a referendum, the folks who live on the Rock are very angry. Joint sovereignty may mean the end of this bickering at the border, but the very suggestion of a Spanish flag flying on Gibraltar, even alongside the Union Jack, is seen by some here as the first rumbling of betrayal, the beginning of the end.

  For me, for all of us, this is the end. After nine countries and some 10,000 miles of travel we’ve made it back to the reassuring armchairs of the Rock Hotel. By tomorrow we’ll all be back home, worrying about the price of car insurance and why the plumber hasn’t called.

  I’ve had a few beers of celebration and I’m a little light-headed as I stumble out onto my balcony at midnight. I look out over the starlit Strait towards Africa and try to think big thoughts about what I’ve learnt from all this, other than that nowhere is Paradise.

  AFTERWORD

  I’m glad to be home, but in the all-moving, all-talking mayhem of modern life, my restless thoughts go back to that great place of silence and apparently infinite space. I need to be reminded of its special qualities, but, like keeping up with an old friend, that can be hard work.

  Even checking the weather (sad person that I am) isn’t easy. The likes of Nouakchott and Bamako rarely show up on a list of world cities.

  A few scraps of news have come out of the desert since we finished our journey. A United Nations report blames high-tech foreign fleets for destroying Mauritania’s fishing industry. The Polisario has released 115 Moroccan soldiers, held in their desert jails for twenty-five years (they never told me about them), but Saharawi independence looks as far away as ever as the UN discusses an American-backed compromise proposal for Western Sahara. Nancy Abeiderrahmane has had her attempt to sell camel cheese in Europe tur
ned down, because the camels are not mechanically milked, and the drought in Algeria ended savagely and dramatically soon after we left, with hundreds drowned by floodwater in the capital. Dave Hammond, the British motorcycling hope in the Dakar Rally, was in twentieth place with only two stages left when he fell into a hidden chasm on the blind side of a sand dune. He spent many weeks in a Paris hospital but is now back home and recovering. As I write, the British and Spanish prime ministers are meeting to discuss plans for the Rock, whilst the government of Gibraltar is putting ads in British newspapers to ask for support.

  Otherwise, the mystery of the Sahara remains largely intact. Except in my dreams, where it still springs vividly to life.

  Michael Palin, May 2002

  BACKGROUND READING

  I gratefully acknowledge a number of other people’s efforts, including the Rough Guide to West Africa, Lonely Planet’s Africa on a Shoestring, the Footprint guides to Morocco, Libya and Tunisia, Barnaby Rogerson’s Cadogan Guide to Morocco and A Traveller’s History of North Africa, Ross Velton’s Bradt Guide to Mali, Kim Naylor’s Discovery Guide to West Africa and James Wellard’s The Great Sahara. Hollyman and Van Beek’s beautiful book on the Dogon is one of the best on a difficult subject. Sanche de Gramont’s The Strong Brown God and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s Water Music were essential River Niger reading. I found the Eland edition of Mungo Park’s Travels into the Interior of Africa indispensable and Quentin Crewe’s In Search of the Sahara, Jeremy Keenan’s Sahara Man, Richard Trench’s Forbidden Sands and Martin Buckley’s Grains of Sand informative and inspiring. Hachette’s Guide de Sahara, Chris Scott’s Sahara Overland and Simon Glen’s Sahara Handbook are all good chunky guides that get right to the heart of desert travel.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The filming of Sahara lasted a little over four months and covered nearly 10,000 miles. The preparation for the journey and the process of welding it into a series took the best part of a year. No-one had an easy job.

  At our home base in London, Anne James steered the boat through choppy waters, from launch to final anchorage, with diligence, energy and enthusiasm. Natalia Fernandez dealt with every detail of our travel plans, which, considering the bureaucratic complications in this part of the world, deserves more than your average respect. Janina Stamps, who set us on the road, and Gina Hobson, who brought us back and saw the programmes to their conclusion, applied skill and experience to some nightmare situations, and Lyn Dougherty rode expertly through the minefields of cash flow.

  Paul Bird and Alison Davies at the office helped preserve my sanity, without apparently losing their own, and Alison tucked and tidied the manuscript.

  Elizabeth Parker wrote music for the series and Bernard Heyes designed our maps and titles. George Foulgham and all the team at VideoLondon made it sound wonderful and the amazing Alex Richardson took on the task of editing all four hours. Though he and his family may be regretting it, I, quite selfishly, am delighted. Nicola Moody at the BBC gave us generous encouragement and great support.

  It’s impossible to thank everyone who helped us out on the road.

  Many of those to whom I owe my thanks are mentioned in the text. Of those who are not, but without whom we could never have made such a journey, I must not forget Marie Gloria Macedo, Richard Stanforth, Alan Keohane, Bob Watt, Djadje Ba, Violet Diallo, Barry Halton, Mike Lord and Stirling Security Services, Mr Ahmed Faci, Kahlifa Airways, Simon Khoury at Arab Tours, Judith and Fanta and Tidene Expeditions in Niger.

  Our core filming team, whose average age, we were shocked to find, is well into the mid-fifties, were nevertheless a credit to Saga Filming. Nigel Meakin on camera and John Pritchard on sound (and putting anything back together again within five minutes) took to the desert with cool authority. Peter Meakin, apart from bringing the average age of the crew down by a good ten years, loaded, unloaded and shot film in quite horrendous conditions, without ever once complaining. Except when his father wasn’t looking.

  John Paul Davidson (‘J-P’) led our motley group through Senegal, Mali and Niger and always had a bit of goat ready for us at the end of a long day, and, even more miraculously, a bottle of very warm red wine to wash it down. His enthusiasm was wonderful to behold and his investments in the local economy were much appreciated.

  Roger Mills directed my first steps out of the Reform Club fourteen years ago, when Around the World in 80 Days was a new and nervous departure for me. The fact that we still travel together shows not only how unadventurous we are, but how much we trust each other and how much we still enjoy it. The fact that Roger took on the extra responsibility of Series Producer this time shows a fine streak of masochism.

  Vanessa Courtney, another veteran of previous travels, scoured remote parts of Africa on a gruelling recce with Roger and saw us safely through Morocco. Dudu Douglas-Hamilton in Mali, Jane Chablani in Niger and Claire Houdret in Tunisia buttered up the locals and generally made wheels run smoothly in often difficult situations. Simon Neatham provided me with a tent.

  My thanks to Bobby Birchall at DW Design for all the time he put in to make the hardback edition of the book look so good. At Weidenfeld & Nicolson Claire Marsden has been the most sympathetic and conscientious of copy editors, and Michael Dover the most generous, supportive and hospitable of editors. Thanks too to David Rowley and to Angela Martin for all her work in ensuring that someone actually read the book.

  Finally, thanks to my good friend, gastronomic adviser and stills photographer Basil Pao for bringing back as fine a set of holiday snaps as you could wish for. What the world doesn’t know is that the secret of his success is a constant supply of certain throat sweets to which the whole crew became addicted. These Valda Pastilles, or Green Jobs, as he called them, became essential morale boosters on an adventure low on luxuries.

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