Makoko Stilt Village Pt 2 of 2

The first part of this blog on the Makoko Slum covered the building of the school there. This place was just so interesteing, and for six months I was there two days out of the week, so it would be remiss of me not to add a few more photos that I took in the many hours I spent there enjoying my time with the locals...


In the early days, once we'd established contact with the Bale and made a few friends in the area we looked around the swampy slum at the two other schools that try with limited sucess to educate the thousands of children in this particular part of the slum.

This school was a single story, open walled place built on a fill platform.
During the We season the floor would be mud and it was difficult to hold classes (in french)

The second school was a tiny attempt at a two storey building that was dark and cramped
Far from ideal conditions for kids to attempt to learn

They had to stop using this classroom on the top floor as one corner had sunk in the mud about a foot or so and so all the desks kept sliding back into the corner everytime the kids sat down.

Most to the houses are made from timber offcuts from the sawmills adjacetn to the slum. The locals cut timber on the far side of th lagoons (30-40km away) and float them over the be cut. The roofs are thatched palm leaves. The open-walled "rooms" are where the women smoke large quantities of fish for sale around the city. The result being that after a few hours in the slum your eyes hurt and you smell like you've been rooling around in fish barbeque and burnt plastic...

As there's no infrascture, the water is your road and your sewer and your play area. A few bores have been drilled so there's a couple of central water areas where larger canoes can be filled and the drinking water sold throughout the slum. Impromptu wiring is hung from hut to hut for when someone has a generator everyone else can join in.

If you're not in a canoe, you risk your life on the few walkways about the place.
They take up valuable space and materials and it's easier to use canoes so there's not many of these. I always used to be pertrifed of falling into the water.

The women get around in these small flat canoes seliing everything from hairspray and rat bait to fish curry and pencils

I couldn't do it, but the local kids never seemed to mind the water.

They often pop up next to your canoe and say hello - getting as big a shock as you when they saw you were white...

Otherwise there were very few areas that had been filled where the kids could play
(this is an empty shipyard where that make canoes)

The women of these tribes often wear these huge hand woven hats that cover their whole canoe.
This lady has come across some polystyreme floating in the bay and collected it for sale in th slum. It often helps to have things that can float when your house is made of sticks over water.

Rather than going to school (not that any shcools really exist) Most kids work. Boys fish and girls sell around the place

This is the lunch lady serving up fish steam and cassava to the workers at the school site.
Though I did eat village food on occaision, everyone said I'd get really sick if I ate her food (even though it smelt so good)

The men of Makoko would set up in the old shipping channels as the tides changed and catch fish with and lines.

Australia Day 2008

As usual the Lagos Honorary Consul - Pam - managed to wrangle all the stray aussies (and plenty of folk who were just pretending for the day to get a free steak...) from around Lagos for a day a the beach to celebrate Australia Day.

Cheers!

Pam's beach hut was a bit of a hike - a good hour from lagos through the lagoons. But it was worth it!! It was beautiful. Unfortunately they'd lost at least 50m of beach during the wet season (making the narrow peninsula only brely 100m wide where the hut is...) But as it was harmattan you could still swim.

THANKS PAM

Mali

Since the great rush by Europeans to take anything that wasn't bolted down from Africa to make a profit (including people) began, back when the vast majority of West Africa was clumped under the rather uninspired name of "Negroland" (the more lucrative areas along the Ghana - Cote d'Ivoire coasts getting the flashier name of "The Gold Coast"), the area along the Niger River controlled by the Bambarra and Songhai - now known as Mali - has been held in almost mystical regard by European explorers.

I found this rather interesting "new and accurate map of Negroland" (1747) showing the European colonies along the coast and the main tribal regions (and, of course, what resources the Europeans could get [read: take] out of them).

(click on the map for a larger version)

Of note is the question that plagued explorers for over a century, as described in the 1840 book The Life and Times of Mungo Park :

"Few subjects have excited a more lively interest among the curious and the learned, than the geographical problem with regard to the termination of the Niger... This question was eventually put at rest, but not until more than half a century of fruitless effort and speculation, during which many valuable lives had been sacrificed in attempting to trace to it's outlet the course of the mysterious river."

The map depicts the theory of the day that had the gamibia river orginating in Mali and another river flowing from Lybia to a great desert lake near timbuktu. The actual outlet of the Niger in Nigeria's oil rich delta came from a diferent river all together. It seemed impossible that a river would flow out of the foothills and lush lanscape of what is now The Gambia and eastern Senegal, through Mali towards the Sahara before heading south though Niger and Nigeria to empty into the Bight of Benin. In fact, when Mungo park first set out to Mali, he had no idea which way the niger flowed despite his claim to sail down river to it's terminus...

It is this rather perculiar course that lead the river to be a major highway between Mali and downstream countries such as Niger and Nigeria. Thus trading ports such as timbuktu could flourish, bring salt from the mines tio the north in exchange for gold and the like from the south.

This is shown in the description of the kingdom of Tombut [Timbuktu]"from whence are brought gold, ivory and good tin."

Timbuctoo, Tumbuto, Tombouctou, Tumbyktu, Timbuktu or Tembuch (It doesn't seem to matter how you spell it) has been claiming European victims, and luring many to their deaths, since it first appeared (as Tembuch) on a Catalan map of the fourteenth century.

Rumour had been spreading of a mystical almost "el doardo"-like city in the Sahara that was abundant with gold and other such wealth that could be plundered by Europe... if only they could find it.

Timbuktu was first visited by a modern European in 1826, when the Scottish explorer Maj. Gordon Laing made it across the desert, only to be murdered soon after by the locals for refusing to convert to Islam... The African Association had been founded in Britain with the determination that a Brit should be the first European to set foot in Timbuctoo. And so he did. of course, he did not return...

The fervor was fanned by the likes of Chapman who wrote:

Deep in that lion-haunted inland lies
A mystic city, goal of high enterprise

..and a young Tennyson (before he was a lord) got very wordy with his poem "Timbuctoo". Rightly, as it would later be revealed, he wrote:

Or is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo
A dream as frail as those of ancient time?

A few years later the French announced that a Monsieur René Caillié had reached the lost city, dressed as a poor Arab, and returned alive. His description of the city somewhat deflated the myth:

"I had formed a totally different idea of the grandeur and wealth of Timbuctoo... The city presented, at first sight, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth. Nothing was to be seen in all directions, but immense quicksands of a yellowish white colour ... the most profound silence prevailed."

This is the Timbuktu that one meets today after long voyage up the river Niger.

The air of mystery may have evaporated from Timbuktu under the sun and shifting sands of the Sahara, but the Country of Mali still has a lot to offer.

A former French colony, Mali still receives daily flights Paris and Marseilles, french is spoken widely and although there has been much western influence since independence and tourism is starting to flourish, the country offers a fresh, almost naive, face of west Africa - Africa for Beginners, as it were...

Unlike the hustle and bustle of coastal West Africa or the stricter, often conflict ridden areas ruled by Sharia Law, Mali is a laid-back, more relaxed, "Muslim-lite" (as one local described it) part of the world. One which George, Todd and I grew to love over two weeks travelling around...

Mali Day 2 - Bamako to Djenne

We had two weeks to play with in Mali as there's only one flight a week from Lagos - a milk run through west Africa stopping at Accra and Abidjan (turning a 1 hr flight into closer to 4 hrs of takeoffs and landings...)

Anyway, our plan was to make it up to Essakane a couple of hours north of Timbuktu on the edge of the Sahara where a three day music festival has been held for the last 8 years. We hired a guide and a car (with a driver) through a local tour company and had agreed on a route that covered pretty much all of the country that you could see in only two weeks...

I managed to take just over 1,000 photos and a few videos - so it's taken a little while to sort through them all and get something up on the blog (I also managed to turn them into a slide show that runs in just under an hour - maybe a little too long...)

So, here, for your viewing pleasure is a selection of Mali's finest...

[SO I DON'T KILL ANYONE'S BROWSER I'VE LIMITED THE AMOUNT THAT WILL COME UP ON THE FIRST PAGE - YOU'LL HAVE TO GO TO ARCHIVES ON THE LEFT TO LOAD UP THE LAST WEEK OF THE TRIP]

It was apparently watermelon season
(seems like a strange choice for a country that's mostly desert)

There's always a big trade in firewood
The roads were busy with donkey-pulled carts of wood, bagged rice and millet

Family on the move for lunch

This bloke hitched a ride to somewhere
(I'm not sure if the driver knows he's up there)

Walking to evening prayers

Sunset on the river waiting for the ferry to Djenne

Mali Day 3 - Djenne to Mopti

The town of Djenne (pron: Jenny) has been around for quite a while, and from walking around the place, it looks as if little has changed. Set on an island in a flat swampy inland delta of a tributary of the Niger, Djenne is one of the major draw cards for Mali - the UNESCO listed Djenne Mosque (info here and here) is apparently the largest mud brick structure in existence. It certainly looks impressive.

Some of the locals making mud bricks on the dry swamps outside Djenne with the Mosque dominating the skyline. In the wet season most of this low land is inundated.

Children play in the sandy square out the front of the Mosque - once a week there's a large market here where traders can bring much needed supplies from out of town. Each stall is defined by four rocks where they'll set up their make-shift stalls (you can see a couple in the foreground) same family at the same place every week - nice and easy to remember

Almost all the buildings in Djenne are built in the traditional mud brick style of the Sahel-Sudan. These fancy windows are one of the interesting influences received from thousands of years trading with Moroccans

on the streets of Djenne....
Despite having no sewers or any drainage system, this place was amazingly clean
(much better than anything similar in our neck of the woods)

Most of the kids are usually in Koranic school during the day (like Timbuktu, Djenne is considered a centre of Islamic learning in Mali) - some kids just like to play.

If you're going to market to sell your wares, you'll need to bring your own chair as well...

or you could get your kids to do it for you....

Millet is one of the staples around here and, unfortunately like most things in this part of the world, seems to take an inordinate amount of time and manpower to make it useful to people. In every town on the outskirts you'll see women pounding millet and using the breeze to filter the cracked husks from the goodness inside. The they have to grind it down to make flour.

Just to make things a little more difficult. Pretty much all the vegetation surrounding these villages has been cut down for firewood - leaving nothing but arid land. Thus dung is dried and used as firewood by the villagers

After walking around Djenne and some surrounding villages, we jumped back in the car and drove up to Mopti to begin the exciting part of our trip - a three day boat journey up the Niger River to Timbuktu !!

Mopti (info here) is a major trading post on The Niger (where the Bani - which goes down to Djenne - branches off) Here people board pinasses (small river boats) and pirogues (canoes), for either transportation or fishing.

Banks of the Niger - Mopti

The bigger boats are so full of people and stuff that the driver has to sit at the front and steer via a fairly flimsy looking cable system to the rudder at the back (where another guy tinkers with an old diesel engine)

The busy market-port of Mopti (mosque in the background) was quite amazing with the amount of stuff being moved. Salt from the mines north of Timbuktu is boated down and traded for various things. Fish are sold everywhere as are all manner of bits a pieces as usual...

A lazy day in the pirouge