Eating African

I wrote something once in a story called, “American Food,” about a U.S. diplomat and his eating habits while traveling in the West African bush with an African biologist.

The pair were guests of a village chief who fed them goat meat and rice. “The chief’s wife served the food hot, spread out on a large metal plate. She soaked the rice in a dark tomato sauce with bits of meat.” What my American character didn’t realize and was not prepared for was that village meals are taken by hand, literally. There is a specific rhythm to the eating: The washing of the hands and manipulating the food, rolling the rice and meat in the fingers, tamping it with the thumb to form a fine ball before popping it neatly in the mouth without spilling a single precious grain. My story goes on. “They sat on mats arranged around the plate…The American dug in with all ten fingers, spilling rice and meat in the dirt as he ate, while Keita (the biologist) and the chief ate cleanly with the right hand, neatly sucking the balls of food off their fingertips and into their mouths. The chief smiled at the American and in his own language called for his wife to bring a spoon. When she came, the American politely waved it away. ‘No, no,’ he said in English. ‘I’ll eat like everyone else.’

Keita laughed as the American continued spilling his food. ‘That’s not like everyone else,’ he said. ‘Take the spoon.’”

* * *

I am the American in the scene. Or, at least, I am present in his eating habits. I love African food and the spicy, salty and visceral taste the tongue does not easily forget. I love the way meals are prepared over an open fire, brought straight from the earth and from the herd. Nothing is taken for granted. In the village there are no refrigerated piles of shrink-wrapped meat on little Styrofoam trays, labeled by type of animal or animal part: chicken breasts, lamb chops, or farm-grown Atlantic salmon. You take one and the next day there is always lots more, right there where you found it before.

But food does not present itself that way in Africa, with that kind of uniform consistence. Sometimes despite the Africans’ best efforts, the seeds fail with disease or drought and the food is gone. So people watch over food from the seed. They watch it grow, nurture it, protect it, and gather it by hand. They prepare the food and watch it cook. People live and work with food at all different stages until it is eaten.

And oh the salty taste—I love it. In the heat of Africa, where one never stops sweating, salt is necessary and tastes fine and tart, like life. Still, I after years on the continent never got completely used to eating with my hands. Now, I don’t bother trying. I ask for a spoon first. I cannot afford to lose a morsel and I don’t want people to see me dropping food as if I don’t care.

Collections: Three short case studies that involve collecting and criminal intent

Ten years ago I read a newspaper account of a grisly murder on the Gunnison River, near the town of Delta, Colorado. Two men, homeless drifters who made their home at a river camp, got into a fight one night in a drunken dispute over clothing and money. One man bludgeoned the other to death with a burning log from a campfire. When the dead man’s friends reported him missing, sheriff’s deputies descended on the camp and found the killer still there, though the body was gone. They arrested the man based on evidence collected in the camp.

Here, according to local newspaper reports, is what deputies found: a cold campfire ring; trace drops of blood in the dirt around the fire ring; tree branches and leaves smeared with blood around the camp; a charred piece of human pelvic bone tossed in the bushes; burnt finger bones in the fire ring. The dead man’s head, charred to the skull, was found a few hundred feet downriver, floating along the riverbank. A search of the killer’s backpack turned up the dead man’s clothes. Faced with the evidence, the killer confessed. As far as I know, the tool used to cut up the body was never found.

The murder was sad and cheap and did not interest me, though the evidence list caught my attention. Virtually every critical item of evidence came from the natural world: blood, bone, dirt, plant material, clothing, and the crime scene itself, a clearing among cottonwood trees on a river.

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Eight years ago, Miles Harvey, a writer and former editor at Outside Magazine, published The Island of Lost Maps, a book about a professional thief who specialized in stealing old maps. The thief’s method involved a simple straight razor and an envelope or large book to hide the purloined map as he made his escape. Harvey’s book works as a detective story and exploration of the world of a compulsive collector.

A key scene in the last third of the book is Harvey’s description of the island of lost maps: “Just a mound of plastic bags, file folders, a zip-up art portfolio, and a U-Haul moving box, sitting in the middle of a vast conference table at the FBI office in Richmond, Virginia.” This was the loot agents had so far recovered in while tracking the thief across the country, in and out of museums, government archives and university libraries.

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Last week, on January 29, I picked up The New York Times and read about another thief, Daniel D. Lorello, an employee of the New York State Archives in the state capital, Albany, who collected and organized rare books and papers of historic value. Lorello’s crime was that he got caught selling archival documents on EBay. In fact, he confessed he’d been doing it for years, de-collecting if you will, the contents of the archives he helped manage over a 29-year career.

The document that brought him down was a letter by John C. Calhoun, a pro-slavery politician who in 1823 wrote a letter to the governor of New York State asking him to support Calhoun’s run for president against John Quincy Adams. Someone spotted the letter for sale on EBay and recognized it as the property of the state archives. State authorities successfully bid on the letter on EBay for $1,802.77 before police arrested Lorello. In his written confession, he wrote, “I estimate that I’ve taken more than 300 or 400 items in 2007 alone.”

John Quincy Adams went on to become the sixth president of the United States. Calhoun became vice president. Daniel Lorello, we assume, will spend a long time in jail.

Romancing the Archivist: A Dispatch from Africa

Here’s a cautionary story for the researcher in Africa.

You walk into the national archives of a certain country with research authorization in hand—a document signed by a government minister, with your photo and signature, a short paragraph in French explaining your project in the blandest most unthreatening terms, and a stamp fixed to the top right hand corner to show you’ve paid the “official documents tax.” You spent an entire day across the capital city, in and out of a dozen government buildings in search of the office that issues that stamp, and ten days in all getting together the necessary elements for this piece of paper, which is a license to gather information, carefully laminated to preserve it in the heat, the dust, and the touch of many hands. Finally, everything is set and one afternoon you enter the archives, a gleaming six-story marble and concrete building just finished thanks to the “benevolent generosity” of Colonel Gaddafi, Africa’s self-proclaimed “Guide.” You are sweating in 105 degrees, grit eating at the folds of skin in your neck, suffering maybe from a stomach parasite, and walk up three flights of stairs to the office of le Directeur, where the air-conditioning is aggressively cold. He greets you amiably from behind a large wooden desk, offers you a seat, a glass of strong sweet tea, asks about your family and your health. He takes your authorization and sits back in his chair, reading, grunting softly, and frowning. Finally, he looks up at you and smiles broadly as he reaches across his desk to hand you back your paper. You lean forward to shake his hand and thank him. Then he speaks.

“Obviously, you’re a spy,” he says, folding his hands on the desk. “This is very sensitive information you are seeking. I cannot possibly offer you access to the archives.”

You sputter. “But, but, I have an authorization, approved by the minister—“

He interrupts, persistent with his smile and accusation. “Yes, but I am director here, not the minister, and you may very well be a spy. I think you are working for the Senegalese.”

You stare at him, you utter one word—“Senegal?"—and you begin to laugh.

The director’s smile vanishes, replaced by a frown and a question. “What are you laughing at?”

You begin apologizing profusely. You have no choice. You and your research project are in serious trouble.

* * *

This was my first meeting with Ali Ongoiba, director of the national archives in Mali, West Africa. Our conversation began what has become—thanks to an accusation, an unfortunate laugh, and an apology—a long collaboration on my research subject, the 177 arbitrary lines that make up Africa’s political borderlands. That meeting, before I ever touched an archival document, is a useful scene because it works as a metaphor for the borderland, where every inch of land and every morsel of information is guarded and challenged, open to reinterpretation and, therefore, endless suspicion.

So, gingerly, after apologizing to him for my rude behavior and disrespect, I asked him a question he had given me: “So, why would Senegal send spies to your archives?”

A Bit of Africa in the Rocky Mountains

One morning in 2002, in the last days of winter, I was poling through a bony forest of aspen and fir on a cross-country ski track I knew would break from the trees and circle miles of meadow. I’d trained and raced here in the 1970s at the base of a mountain outside Aspen, Colorado where I grew up, and across the road from the high school where I was a student. Now, after many years away, I followed the track across terrain reshaped by dozens of huge new homes. This is a ski town, after all, and it’s logical someone would preserve the course. The houses had great picture windows, wraparound decks, outdoor swimming pools, hot tubs, high stone walls and chimneys and they stood on land I always imagined as hunting and camping grounds for the Ute Indians who roamed the valley until miners, ranchers and soldiers began pushing them out 160 years ago. The land had been for me a vaguely wild place, the domain of bear, deer, coyotes, and, in winter, of skiers like myself. Sunlight still tumbled through branches, casting bright, fractured stains on snow just as I remembered.

Around a corner, a few hundred feet through the trees from one home, I heard voices whose intonations sounded like Bambara, a language of West Africa, where I’ve traveled and worked over three decades. I skidded to a stop and listened, peering through the trees at three coal-skinned African men on a deck in parkas and ski caps. One shoveled snow, carefully dumping rather than tossing each load off the deck, while the second man stood beside a blue plastic tub of cleaning liquids and rags set on the deck railing. The third, hands thrust in his jean pockets, sat on a bench, talking. I realized they were the help—“house boys” in resort town parlance—and I listened a few minutes, understanding nothing. I don’t know Bambara, but I speak French, the language of one of West Africa’s former colonial masters. I shouted, “Bonjour.” The men stopped talking and gathered at the edge of the deck to peer back through the woods at me, a tall figure in a blue Windbreaker and ski pants. They said nothing. I waved and shouted, “Assalamu Alaykum,” an Arabic peace greeting common in the Muslim world, which is to say, throughout West Africa. I hoped they’d invite me over but the men looked at one another, exchanged words and hurried inside the house. They left the plastic tub on the railing and the shovel lying in the snow. I stared after them, feeling foolish. The men were far from home in a place so different from their dry, impoverished homeland that my greetings must have made them suspicious. Maybe they thought I was an immigration officer. I skied on, touring the meadow and wondering how these men, in search of a better life and means to support families, had managed to leave their desert villages for a country so increasingly paranoid about its borders. I was curious about the risks they’d taken and how they’d survived. Two hours later I returned to that house, hoping to explain myself and welcome the Africans to the Rocky Mountains, where the sun is as dangerous as in the Sahara. But the deck was empty. Fearing trouble with their employer, I didn’t knock on the door.

Joining In

Along for the ride!