Sahara

338 Pages·2003·9.16 MB·English

by  Michael Palin

MICHAEL PALIN is a scriptwriter, comedian, novelist, television presenter,
actor and playwright. He established his reputation with Monty Python’s Flying
Circus and Ripping Yarns. His work also includes several films with Monty
Python, as well as The Missionary, A Private Function, A Fish Called Wanda,
American Friends and Fierce Creatures. His television credits include two films
for the BBC’s Great Railway Journeys, the plays East of Ipswich and Number
27, and Alan Bleasdale’s GBH.
In 2006 the first volume of his diaries, 1969-1979: The Python Years, spent
several weeks on the bestseller lists. He has also written books to accompany his
seven very successful travel series: Around the World in 80 Days (an updated
edition of which was published in 2008, twenty years later), Pole to Pole, Full
Circle, Hemingway Adventure, Sahara, Himalaya and New Europe. Most have
been No 1 bestsellers and Himalaya was No 1 for 11 weeks. He is the author of a
number of children’s stories, the play The Weekend and the novel Hemingway’s
Chair. Visit his website at www.palinstravels.co.uk.
Basil Pao began his photographic career in 1980 on his return to Hong Kong
after ten years in the United States, where he was an art director for Atlantic,
Polygram and Warner Bros. He first worked with Michael Palin on the design
for the book accompanying Monty Python’s Life of Brian. They have since
collaborated on the books based on his seven travel series. In 2007 he wrote and
photographed China Revealed: A Portrait of the Rising Dragon.
SAHARA
MICHAEL PALIN
Photographs by Basil Pao
A WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books
Copyright (c) Michael Palin, 2002
Photographs copyright (c) Basil Pao, 2002
Original map on pp.vii-ix by Stephen Conlin
The moral right of Michael Palin to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form
of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar
condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Quotation from p. 4 from Their Heads are Green by Paul Bowles, published by
Peter Owen Ltd; on p. 111 from Travels into the Interior of Africa by Mungo
Park, published by Eland Editions; on pp. 139-40 from The Strong Brown God
by Sanche de Gramont, published by Houghton Mifflin Co.; on p. 209 from ‘For
the Fallen’ (September 1914) by Laurence Binyon, by permission of The Society
of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Laurence Binyon.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 0 2978 6359 5
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
This ebook produced by Jouve, France
An Hachette UK Company
www.orionbooks.co.uk
For Helen, Tom, Will and Rachel
CONTENTS
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
About the Author
Introduction
Map
GIBRALTAR
MOROCCO
ALGERIA
WESTERN SAHARA
MAURITANIA
SENEGAL
Plates
MALI
NIGER
ALGERIA
LIBYA
TUNISIA
ALGERIA
Afterword
Background Reading
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
My father was in charge of the Export Department of a steelworks and every
Christmas he received an enormous box of dates from their agent in Algeria,
addressed to a Mr E. M. Palm. I remember wondering if he should tell them, but
he never bothered. Perhaps he thought the supply of dates might dry up if they
discovered his name wasn’t Palm.
I didn’t want them to stop coming either, not because of the dates, but
because of the box they came in. The illustration on the packet fuelled
powerfully romantic fantasies of somewhere hotter, drier and even more exotic
than south Yorkshire; a place where men with turbans, baggy velvet pants and
wicked moustaches reclined under palm trees with veiled and sequinned ladies,
whilst their faithful camels stood in picturesque silhouette against the setting
sun.
The first ‘proper’ book I was ever given was Tales from the Arabian Nights.
Its seductive illustrations, by A. E. Jackson, combined with the date boxes to fan
a precocious fascination for things of the desert. Curved swords, soft silks,
tassels and see-through skirts. Mirages and genies, huge jellies and lubricious
oils and unguents. The desert world seemed, apart from the odd beheading, to be
a place of complete sensual fulfilment. Even delight itself was Turkish.
Almost fifty years later there came a chance to expose my childhood
fantasies to the harsh glare of reality.
In the first spring of the new millennium I met up with Roger Mills,
director of many of the travel programmes I’ve done, at a pub opposite Notting
Hill police station. Over a pint or two he suggested a journey through
Francophone Africa, those huge and empty countries from Cameroon
northwards, once loosely federated as part of the French empire. Rarely visited
by British television, they might provide fresh pickings and new discoveries.
I got home, unfolded a map, and saw one word spread across most of these
countries. Sahara.
The French empire was interesting, but it had come and gone. The Sahara is
a potent, evocative reality. It is one of the world’s great brands. No one name so
completely epitomises an environment. Oceans can be Atlantic or Pacific or
Indian, mountains can be Himalayas or Andes or Alps, but if you want to convey
desert, you only have to say ‘Sahara’.
It embodies scale and mystery, the thin line between survival and
destruction, the power to take life or to transform it. A self-contained,
homogenous, identifiable world, uncompromising and irreducible.
In other words, a challenge. And by no means an easy one.
As big as the United States, with a population the size of Norfolk, the
Sahara is only 15 per cent sand, and though the great ergs, the sand seas, are
among the most exquisitely beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen, there is a dark
side. The Sahara is also a killer, scorching the life out of crops, people, and all
but the most tenacious living creatures. It’s growing larger every year as drought
turns pasture back into sand, which the remorseless desert wind carries into
towns and villages until they die of suffocation. It has its share of war and
conflict. Many areas we wanted to see were inaccessible because of minefields
and military activity.
Yet how close it is to us. The Sahara lies just beyond the borders of Europe.
The heart of the desert is three hours’ flying time from Paris, four hours from
London. This proximity is not lost on the many thousands of sub-Saharan
Africans who cross the desert to escape what they see as poor, unstable and
oppressive regimes back home.
Today, the Sahara, far from being a cosy date-box illusion, has become a
bridge from Africa into Europe, and a bridge that is increasingly well used by
those prepared to risk their lives for a better life on the other side of the
Mediterranean. If the Sahara was my fantasy, Europe is theirs. Perhaps they will
learn from their journey, as I did from mine, that fantasy and experience never
quite match up.
Michael Palin, London, 2002
www.palinstravels.co.uk