Handy Gold, Ivory and Slaves

Along the West Coast of Africa
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-3-99064-638-0
Verlag: novum pro Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 242 Seiten

Norman Handy vividly describes travelling down the West Coast of Africa. He writes about the misery of Africans, captured and shipped across the Atlantic to be sold into slavery. European manufactured goods were traded in Africa to buy slaves who were then shipped to the Americas, to be traded again for tobacco, sugar and rum. More than twelve million Africans were slaves until they were eventually freed. In the scramble for Africa, colonial powers competed to grab as much African land as they could. It wasn't about slavery, but about despicable economic exploitation. Borders were arbitrarily decided by colonial powers with no regard to local realities. Then came independence and exploitation of the local people by their own people - widely known as 'The African Way'. Is it any better today?

Autoren/Hrsg.

Handy, Norman

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Moroccan Medinas

Whilst en route to Africa, I took the opportunity to revisit Gibraltar. My first visit was at the height of a long hot summer some years before, as a day out, whilst staying at the family holiday home in Marbella. After the drive along the coast road to get there, I parked the car in Spain, and I walked across the border into Gibraltar.

Being such a small area, every bit of land is used, and crossing the border on foot is an experience. The main road crosses the runway. When a plane is about to land, the road is closed with a bit of string slung across the road. I had started walking across but I noticed that there was no one else coming towards me or following behind me. I thought it odd that some people in uniforms were waving at me, until I realised that I was alone in the centre of the runway and an aircraft was coming in to land, seemingly with its lights focused on me. It was an uneven match and I started running to get out of the way.

I found that the place was crowded, sticky, hot, and smelt of sewage. This was the result of an excess of pressure and untreated sewage that shot up out of a manhole cover and ran down the main road. I climbed up to the top of the rocks and the monkeys grabbed at cameras and bags, their sharp finger nails scratching exposed skin. There didn’t seem to be much to do that I was interested in, so all in all, it was a bit of a waste of a day.

In recalling my experience of the place, many people were surprised as their experiences had been much more favourable. Therefore, I was quite surprised to find that after some researching of travel guides, that there is in fact quite a lot to see, and I had planned a couple of days to look around. Despite having a border with Spain and covering just 6.7 kilometres, it has been an enclave on the Spanish Mediterranean coast since it was captured by an Anglo Dutch force in 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession, and ceded in perpetuity to the United Kingdom, as part of the Treaty of Utrecht signed in 1713; in part to ensure that Britain exited from the War of the Spanish Succession. It is an ideal naval base, as it controls the Strait of Gibraltar at the entrance to the Mediterranean, which is just thirteen kilometres wide at this point.

Technically it is a British Overseas Territory and there are thirty thousand who have voted repeatedly to reject unification with Spain. They are self-governing but Britain is responsible for foreign affairs and defence. The economy is based on tourism, financial services, gambling and maritime services.

I was hungry so I headed off to the city centre and I found a nice restaurant in the central square just by the bus station. I had a prawn tikka masala as I was unlikely to get a seafood Indian curry again for a while and I do like a tikka masala. I then walked along the lower coast road, passing the shipyards, the hundred ton gun, a sandy beach and I walked through three tunnels that the road took to get to Europa Point. There is a lighthouse and a mosque, several gun emplacements and a view across the straits to the coast of North Africa. It is not far away and can be seen on a good day but there was a haze, and it was an indistinct smudge on the horizon.

I walked back along the busy main road with a plan to get up to the top of The Rock. When I was last here, it was a long walk to the top but there is now a cable car. It rises to the summit at an elevation of four hundred and sixty-two metres, and the surrounding area is a nature reserve. Here is where the approximately two hundred and thirty Gibraltar apes live, but in reality, they are Barbary macaques, a type of tailless monkey, and these ones here are the only wild Barbary macaques in Europe; but be warned as they still snatch at bags and cameras and they will steal food, especially ice creams, from children.

I visited the Moorish fort and the Second World War tunnels, a mass of man-made caves hollowed out of the rock to be used as storage, barracks, defence, hospitals and passageways. They are on the north side of the rock and cannot be shelled from the sea by enemy boats. The pre-war population was evacuated to England, Morocco and the Caribbean for the duration of the war, whilst The Rock became a vital staging post for convoys to supply Malta and the Eighth Army in Egypt. There is also Gorham’s Cave where excavations have shown extensive evidence of Neanderthal habitation on The Rock.

Then it was time to meet some of the others who would be travelling with me through West Africa. Some of the group I already knew, such as the drivers and the guides; the dual roles undertaken by Kim and Gareth with whom I had spent five months touring South America. They had taken a ferry from England to Santander and then they had driven south through Spain to meet us in Gibraltar. By tradition, all overlanding vehicles have a name and this one had been christened Nala.

We met at the airport in Gibraltar, but we were going to stay at a camp site some distance from Gibraltar on the Spanish mainland. There were some housekeeping jobs to complete. We would be camping and cooking for ourselves. We split ourselves into cook groups whose job it was to decide what to cook, buy the necessary supplies from a kitty, and then cook an evening meal and provide breakfast, plus lunch if we were having a lunch on the truck. Sometimes, we might be stopping in a town and either go off to a restaurant or buy our own choice of food from a supermarket. We had some gas in a canister, but it was reserved for emergencies as we would be unlikely to be able to refill it en route, as every country had different fittings. Therefore, we had a couple of lockers of wood. But cooking over a wood fire twice a day would soon use up our supply of wood, so whenever we stopped, we would scour the area for more fuel, but we needed to have enough wood to get us through the desert where there would be no opportunities to find more.

Not everyone had brought the right number of photos for their visas, the right currencies or inoculation certificates, especially yellow fever certificates, which would be required at several borders. There were also copies of credit cards to be taken, insurance details and a host of other things that needed to be sorted before we could proceed. It was our last chance to get everything in order, before we left Europe and crossed the narrow straits to land in Africa.

We boarded Nala and drove to the large Spanish port of Algeciras on the other side of the bay overlooking Gibraltar. Gareth drove the truck one way to join a queue of lorries, and the rest of us followed Kim towards the main terminal. This was a cavernous terminal building but being the low season, the few passengers that were here were lost in its vastness. We followed the corridors and the walkways and made our way to our ferry. It was a large ship, but it was empty. It had banks and banks of seats but only about ten percent were occupied. Certain areas were roped off and some of the shops on board were closed. It obviously becomes very busy during the high season to warrant such a large passenger terminal and ferries, but for us, we had a choice of places to sit and the opportunity to spread out.

We docked in Ceuta and filed off the boat. Although it is on the north African coast, it is still a part of Spain so there were no customs or passport controls at the port. I had often wondered how Spain came to have some enclaves on the Africa coast. The city was captured by John the First, king of Portugal in 1415 and it remained in Portuguese hands until there was a succession crisis in 1580 when Phillip II of Spain was crowned Phillip The First of Portugal. The Iberian Union continued until 1640, with the end of the Portuguese Restoration War, when Portugal regained its independence. Meanwhile, Ceuta had attracted a lot of colonists from Spain and they had sided with Spain during the conflict. It was only later under the terms of the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668 that Portugal acknowledged Ceuta’s political reality and ceded the territory to Spain.

It covers an area of 18.5 kilometres2, nearly three times the size of Gibraltar. Just as Spain periodically calls for Gibraltar to be returned to Spain, Morocco insists that Ceuta (and Melilla, another enclave on the north African coast covering an area of 12.3 kilometres2 occupied by Spain since 1497), should be restored to Moroccan sovereignty but they refused, and the local populations prefer to be Spanish rather than being forced to be Moroccan citizens.

It was just a short drive along the coast road to get to the border. There were a few cars going into Morocco, but most of the traffic was queuing to get into Ceuta. The border crossing was relatively quick, and we drove on to Fnideq and we stopped to change our money. Finally, I felt as if I was starting my African odyssey to travel from the Mediterranean coast down the West Coast of Africa to the very southernmost point in South Africa.

We drove along the coast and turned inland to pass through Tetouan, a major town with a well renowned medina or old walled city centre. The city had plenty of green grass and trees, tall whitewashed buildings and was seemingly clean, tidy and well maintained. As we left the city and reached more rural areas there was more rubbish in the streets and plastic bags blowing across the fields as we climbed into the Rif Mountains.

We...