Central African Republic: The beginning of the end of the armchair traveller?
Sometimes armchair travels can be tricky. Not tricky like trying to explain to an Indonesian bus driver that you really need the toilet NOW, but difficult none-the less. There were, however, silver linings. For example although Google was utterly unwilling to find me a novel set in the Central African Republic (CAR) it did introduce me to Ann Morgan, a woman who has already read a book for every country in the world. But she read hers in one year…
Putting aside my disappointment that there is always someone out there who can one-up you, I took her advice and looked for Daba’s Travels from Ouadda to Bangui only to find it was £340! So instead I settled for ordering The Scramble for Africa: The White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912. I reasoned with myself that it would teach me about CAR, but also help me with the rest of my journeys. But when the Better World Book package arrived a week or so later it turned out that this is a 700-page book in a tiny font. A book so long and detailed that even Ann Morgan might balk at reading it in a week. Still I like a challenge and so I moved my alarm from 6.15 to 5.30…
… but despite my best efforts, after a week I was still only 350 pages in… and Central African Republic had not been mentioned once! There were brief mention of the Niger river and Lake Chad, but it wasn’t until page 645 that Ubangi-Shari (one of CAR’s previous incarnations) was mentioned, and even then only in passing.
Even though it left me still mostly unaware of CAR’s past, the Scramble for Africa is a book that should be on every school curriculum so that kids can get some perspective of the horrors that Europe forced on Africa in an attempt to stop each other amassing more territory. Or maybe Lin-Manuel Miranda could just turn it into a musical (Hamilton is based on a 800+ page history).
When the Scramble finishes, all we really know is that CAR was that it was one of the last parts of Africa to be colonised. A quick Google reveals that it then became French Equatorial Africa and finally CAR in 1958…
…But CAR’s troubles didn’t end there. In 1976 Colonel/Emperor Bokassa renamed the country the Central African Empire and set about stealing what was left of the Empire’s wealth. This week’s first film, the wonderfully titled: Africa’s Craziest Dictator Who Made Himself Emperor, shows how he took kleptocracy to a new level. I was hoping to follow it up with Wim Wenders film about Bokassa’s reign: Notes of a Sombre Empire. Sadly the only version I could find is almost unwatchably poor quality and so instead I recommend watching Camille, the story of a photographer who lost her life trying to raise awareness of the horrors unfolding as part of the 2013 civil war. At this point in my global travels, the story it tells is depressingly familiar, peaceful happy communities descending into violence, and friends kill friends as ideologies compete and revenge becomes an all-encompassing drive. The people of CAR have suffered now for 100s of years, I just hope that there can be a way forward.
But beyond the horror there were small pockets of joy to be found, such as karkanji tea, a wonderful drink that has antioxidants, lowers blood pressure and fat, boosts liver health, promotes weight loss, and fights cancer and bacteria! You should make some today!
There was also joy in the fact that this week we chose to share dinner with some friends! Off I went to buy palm wine, sorghum beer and melon seeds (egusi). Luckily we warned them that not all of our adventurous meals had been a success, but as one of them had travelled across Africa, and he said he was up for the challenge, as long as we didn’t eat fufu.
The meal started with sour, cloudy and odd palm wine, which we soon swapped for sour, clear and odd sorghum beer. After a few glasses I calmly explained that we would, indeed, be eating fufu. Fufu is a bland starchy ball of cassava or plantain which really only works as a foodstuff if it comes with a delicious sauce. Reader ours did not. Instead we matched it with a stringy spinach stew and a disappointing egusi sauce to which we added slimy okra (known as gumbo in CAR). Gumbo was an essential ingredient simply because in Camille the students kept singing “bring us the gumbo” when they wanted food. The highlight of the meal was almost certainly that fufu seems to have quite a different meaning to families in the Cotswolds.
The food was not my finest hour but you may enjoy the CAR playlist that I found on Spotify. Sadly the children were not so keen and so no sooner had I put it on than it was turned off.
But you should always end with a positive, and so I must say that making coffee and tea with evaporated milk was not absolutely awful.
So that’s it, despite the traumas the travels will continue and this week there is no need to board a plane as next week we are in another ex-French colony that borders CAR — Chad!
