Around the World in 50 Years (16 page)

He untied the legs of the first bird and held it at shoulder height. “For this bird,” he said, “I will cut its throat and sprinkle its blood on the pile. After three minutes he will be dead. And we will keep him. And Bernard will cook him for our dinner tonight.”

And so it was done.

“But this other one is only for the gods. We will not take it. We will leave it all for them. And I will sacrifice it in a different way. No knife for him. I will pull out his tongue. And the bird will bleed to death. Also in three minutes.”

And so it was done.

*   *   *

In a remote Upper East region of Ghana, I had an unexpectedly provocative experience. We were in the Tongo Hills, ten miles southeast of the regional capital of Bolgatanga, hiking a thousand vertical feet to the Tengzug shrine, a cave at the top of the hill that contained the most revered oracle in the land. After an hour of sweaty scrambling up the bare gray rocks—relieved by the shade from hundreds of thin, twisted trees whose radiant whitish trunks grew from cracks in the boulders—we were about 30 minutes from the top. A guard stopped us, as he did the other pilgrims and tourists, and told them that if they wished to proceed farther, they had to remove all clothing and jewelry above the waist, the disrobing to show purity in the presence of the spirits, the abandonment of adornment so as not to compete with the gods.

I was fascinated by the reaction of the foreign females, teenage to elderly, many of whom, judging from those reactions, had never been to a nudist beach or ever gone skinny-dipping. I sat near the guard and observed the scene for half an hour in the company of several dozen native idlers who had lots of time on their hands and a little lust in their hearts. I watched as each woman wrestled with this Hobson's choice:
Do I, after all my planning, spending, driving, and climbing, abort my visit to the famous cave, or do I, for the first time in my life, strut topless before dozens of strange men?

*   *   *

We drove south from the Tongo Hills and reached the torrid, muggy Ghanaian coast in three days, there to inspect a brutal remnant of man's inhumanity to man: Elmina Castle, the oldest surviving European building south of the Sahara, keystone of the Triangular Slave Trade.

When the Portuguese constructed Elmina in 1482—with the help of a young Italian sailor named Christopher Columbus, whose ship brought some of its building blocks from Lisbon—it served as a trading post, the first in Africa. After gold was discovered nearby, Elmina shipped, during the early 1500s, close to 24,000 ounces a year. As the precious metal petered out, the traders began buying slaves from neighboring African chiefs. Then, reaching farther, they bought slaves from the king of Dahomey (now Benin) on what they called the Slave Coast. Then, farther still, they purchased those captured by Arab slavers in Niger and Mali; and, finally, they bought from victorious warrior tribes all over West Africa those enemy captives that had not been killed.

Thus began the highly lucrative triangular trade, where enormous profits were made by the nation that controlled it—first the Portuguese, then the Dutch, finally the British.

When the slaves arrived in that New World they were bartered for the locally grown sugar, rice, coffee, tobacco, cotton, molasses, and rum. This produce was then shipped to Europe, to be exchanged for copper, textiles, glass, pots, guns, and ammunition that were, in turn, shipped to Elmina and the other forts to pay for yet more slaves, with a profit made on each leg. And on it went, for 300 years, until ten million had been torn from their families and villages.

According to Godfried, up to half of those captured died on their long forced marches—sometimes a thousand miles—to Elmina, to Cape Coast Castle, and to the other holding pens we visited. Another third are estimated to have perished inside those slave fortresses as a result of poor food, unsanitary conditions, and inadequate ventilation, while awaiting shipment to the New World.

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 Zappa'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.