the human province

I've been really, really terrible about keeping the site updated. And for that I apologize. Before, I could blame the state of African telecommunications, but since I'm back home where I have the internet at home and work, I've got no such excuses.

While I was away, I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It was really wonderful, a mixture of Rushdie and Gunther Grass, but à l'africaine. Then, to keep with the theme of African dictatorships and as suggested by another friend, I read Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, which is also a great read. There are so many passages that stood out on the page, but this is one of my favorites:

[A] genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion.

My trip was incredibly interesting. I traveled from Kenya to Zanzibar to Tanzania proper to Rwanda and Congo then through Uganda back to Kenya before leaving. It was tiresome to be on the move so much, so I was happy to come home to Beirut.

That being said, given our excruciatingly humid heat here, I miss the cool evenings of East and Central Africa. I also miss the smell of smoke that always seemed to fill the night sky. The latter, by the way, is completely different in the southern hemisphere. The stars are much more numerous and fill constellations that I'd never before seen. It's amazing to think that something so fundamental to our lives as the sky can change upon crossing an imaginary line in the African dirt.

I was expecting a leisurely train ride through the inland to Lake Victoria from Dar-es-Salaam. That's not at all what I got. The train was scheduled to leave Dar-es-Salaam at 5 on Tuesday evening, and I was pleasantly surprised when we left on time. The Tanzanian scenery was beautiful and the couchette not that uncomfortable.

I awoke to a couple of sudden jolts, and then we stopped for a while. Finally, we started back up again and I fell asleep. The only thing that woke me up was a Tanzanian cabin mate who decided that 1 am would be the perfect time to listen to his telephone's radio at full blast, despite the fact that there were five people trying to sleep in the same tiny cabin.

I finally fell back asleep and then woke up in the early light of the morning to see a train platform. We must be in Dodoma, I thought, and then went back to sleep. I woke up a couple of hours later to see that we hadn't moved, so I decided to get out and see what the problem was. I asked where we were, to which someone responded: Dar-es-Salaam. Thinking that he’d misunderstood my question, I mimed that yes, of course, we'd left Dar-es-Salaam, but where were we now? He shrugged and repeated: Dar-es-Salaam.

It was only then that I recognized the buildings around us. I'd just spent 14 hours to end up in the exact same place I'd left. After some investigation, it seems that the jolts had been two of the train cars being derailed, but fortunately no one was hurt. We were told that the tracks would be repaired and that we were expected to leave again at 5 in the evening, but that we should stay close to the train anyway, just in case. So I spent the day lounging in the sun watching as an African village sprung up on the train platform.

Men lounged and ate oranges, while women washed clothes and children. Wet laundry soon adorned the rusty tracks and open train windows. This, I assume, is how shantytowns are born. To my surprise, mothers led their children to defecate mere feet away from the water spigots, which left human shit in disconcerting proximity to drying laundry and dishes. It also made the whole place smell like a public toilet. All in all, I was surprised by the fact that no one seemed particularly upset about the inconvenience of the situation. Everyone was taking it in stride.

After being told that I couldn't get my money back for the train ticket, I left our new village for some fresh air and Indian food, passing an enormous line of people waiting to get a two-dollar food allowance from the rail company. By the time I got back, it was nearly time to leave. Or so I thought. The departure time of 5 pm came and went without so much as a train whistle. We were then told that we’d be leaving at 9, so I settled in to read with the last of the sunlight. I fell asleep in my couchette and only woke up at around 9:30 to loud music and a crowd of people obviously upset about something.

It seems that they were mad, and understandably so, about not getting a refund for their ticket. Every once in a while, the crowd's singing and chanting would take on a nasty edge, and rocks and Swahili curses would be hurled. After a bit of this and three pops that sounded like firecrackers and which were explained to me to be local bombs (made by the police or the crowd, I couldn't tell), I decided that it is decidedly unwise to be different in a crowd of angry people who want their money back. And especially unwise when that difference, in my case that of skin color, is seen mainly as a financial difference. I was worried that the leap from "give us our money back" to let's take the mzungu's money" could be quick and unforgiving. So I left. And now I'm stuck trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to make it to Kigali by tomorrow.

Apparently the local press has written up the story, but with no mention of the rioting.

Here are a couple of pictures I've taken so far:


Giraffe on the road between Nairobi and Masai Mara


Great Rift Valley


Zebras in Masai Mara


Sunset in Masai Mara


Lioness feeding on zebra


Lions lounging in Masai Mara


Somali Camel on beach in Mombasa


Masai kids at school


Zanzibar beach


Market in Zanzibar


Homemade lipstick in Zanzibar

I left Dar-es-Salaam last night and thought I was well on my way to Lake Victoria, but then I fell asleep and woke up this morning to find myself in.... Dar-es-Salaam. It seems that part of our train derailed last night (which must have been the couple of jolts I felt), so we turned around and came back. Shortly after arriving, the passengers set-up a makeshift village on tracks, with women washing clothes and children while the men mostly sat around chatting and eating oranges.

I looked into a plane ticket to Kigali from Dar, but it is an astounding $440, so it looks like I will be giving the train another try this evening. They said that the tracks are being repaired, but I don't know how much I trust that. In either case, by the time I'd figured out what was going on, it was too late to catch a bus to Mwanza, and I still haven't heard back from Rwandair, so it looks like I'll be on the train.

Otherwise, Mwanza was the film featured in the documentary film Darwin's Nightmare about the Perch Nile in Lake Victoria. It was poorly received here, and even non-Tanzanian friend who live here can't stand it. Personally, I really liked the film when I saw it, but I'd never been to Tanzania before, so if I finally make it to Mwanza, I suppose I'll be able to see if the film was fair or not.

This is just a quick note to let my few but faithful readers know that I've not been killed in a matatu accidend on the roads of East Africa. I'm alive and well in Zanzibar, after having been through Nairobi, Masai Mara, Mombasa, Tanga and Pemba. I'll be heading to Dar-es-Salaam next and then taking a train crosscountry to Lake Victoria from where I'll launch into Rwanda.

I've got a fair amount to write about, but little time in which to do so.

More later, insh'allah.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

Zimbabwe's opposition party, MDC (Movement for Democracy and Change) announced yesterday that it will not be contesting the election on Friday, since it was nothing but a violent illegitimate sham anyway. Dozens of opposition partisans (and their families) have been killed in the last few months. PBS's Frontline has an excellent piece on Mugabe's "do or die" campaign to hold on to power in Harare:

I pose as a member of a Roman Catholic church from Harare in order to visit the local hospital. There I meet Thabita Chingaya*, a 42-year-old widow and leader of the local MDC women's league. Thabita is being treated for massive injuries to her vagina, uterus and womb. A discharge constantly oozes from between her legs. Tabitha says that she was coming home from drawing water from the river the week before when she came upon seven young men she knew who happened to be Zanu-PF party members. They blocked her path saying she would learn a lesson for being "Morgan Tsvangirai's prostitute."

She was knocked down by blows to her face and kicked with booted feet. But then suddenly the beatings stopped, she says. One man called "Max," who seemed to be the gang leader, ordered the others to stop. He removed his trousers and raped her. All the others followed suit, taking turns to hold her down. When they were done, Max took a log and began poking her vagina until she bled. She says the other six laughed and left her for dead.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

Sometimes when I'm bored (or should be grading papers), I take a look at my stats to see how the few people who read this blog got here. I often feel a mixture of fear and pride when I see that people from the State Department or the Senate or the Pentagon have made their way here. Other times, I wonder what someone was doing googling Hezbollah and skinnydipping.

Every once in a while, I come across someone who's seemingly been caught googling himself. In this case, it looks like UCSD's Bill Decker came across a post about Guantánamo Bay after doing a Google search to see if anyone was talking about a letter to the editor he wrote three years ago.

It must not be very often that this physics professor finds talk about him online that's unrelated to bifurcations in natural convection, much less remarks that compare him with a Soviet Chief State Prosecutor. If you've come back, Bill, welcome. Please feel free to continue patting the US on the back for only imprisoning people at Guantánamo Bay instead of having them summarily executed.

In Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil one of the characters (Tuttle played by De Niro) is walking when a newspaper is blown against him just to cling to him while another does the same. More and more papers are thrust against him until he's a walking mass of paper. Finally, all the papers are blown away to reveal that the man is no longer there.

That's pretty much how I feel at this time of the year, when the semester is over, and I'm flooded with a mass of papers to grade. When the wind blows hard enough, and grades are turned in, I'll be back.

I've been really, really terrible about keeping the site updated. And for that I apologize. Before, I could blame the state of African telecommunications, but since I'm back home where I have the internet at home and work, I've got no such excuses.

While I was away, I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It was really wonderful, a mixture of Rushdie and Gunther Grass, but à l'africaine. Then, to keep with the theme of African dictatorships and as suggested by another friend, I read Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, which is also a great read. There are so many passages that stood out on the page, but this is one of my favorites:

[A] genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion.

My trip was incredibly interesting. I traveled from Kenya to Zanzibar to Tanzania proper to Rwanda and Congo then through Uganda back to Kenya before leaving. It was tiresome to be on the move so much, so I was happy to come home to Beirut.

That being said, given our excruciatingly humid heat here, I miss the cool evenings of East and Central Africa. I also miss the smell of smoke that always seemed to fill the night sky. The latter, by the way, is completely different in the southern hemisphere. The stars are much more numerous and fill constellations that I'd never before seen. It's amazing to think that something so fundamental to our lives as the sky can change upon crossing an imaginary line in the African dirt.

I was expecting a leisurely train ride through the inland to Lake Victoria from Dar-es-Salaam. That's not at all what I got. The train was scheduled to leave Dar-es-Salaam at 5 on Tuesday evening, and I was pleasantly surprised when we left on time. The Tanzanian scenery was beautiful and the couchette not that uncomfortable.

I awoke to a couple of sudden jolts, and then we stopped for a while. Finally, we started back up again and I fell asleep. The only thing that woke me up was a Tanzanian cabin mate who decided that 1 am would be the perfect time to listen to his telephone's radio at full blast, despite the fact that there were five people trying to sleep in the same tiny cabin.

I finally fell back asleep and then woke up in the early light of the morning to see a train platform. We must be in Dodoma, I thought, and then went back to sleep. I woke up a couple of hours later to see that we hadn't moved, so I decided to get out and see what the problem was. I asked where we were, to which someone responded: Dar-es-Salaam. Thinking that he’d misunderstood my question, I mimed that yes, of course, we'd left Dar-es-Salaam, but where were we now? He shrugged and repeated: Dar-es-Salaam.

It was only then that I recognized the buildings around us. I'd just spent 14 hours to end up in the exact same place I'd left. After some investigation, it seems that the jolts had been two of the train cars being derailed, but fortunately no one was hurt. We were told that the tracks would be repaired and that we were expected to leave again at 5 in the evening, but that we should stay close to the train anyway, just in case. So I spent the day lounging in the sun watching as an African village sprung up on the train platform.

Men lounged and ate oranges, while women washed clothes and children. Wet laundry soon adorned the rusty tracks and open train windows. This, I assume, is how shantytowns are born. To my surprise, mothers led their children to defecate mere feet away from the water spigots, which left human shit in disconcerting proximity to drying laundry and dishes. It also made the whole place smell like a public toilet. All in all, I was surprised by the fact that no one seemed particularly upset about the inconvenience of the situation. Everyone was taking it in stride.

After being told that I couldn't get my money back for the train ticket, I left our new village for some fresh air and Indian food, passing an enormous line of people waiting to get a two-dollar food allowance from the rail company. By the time I got back, it was nearly time to leave. Or so I thought. The departure time of 5 pm came and went without so much as a train whistle. We were then told that we’d be leaving at 9, so I settled in to read with the last of the sunlight. I fell asleep in my couchette and only woke up at around 9:30 to loud music and a crowd of people obviously upset about something.

It seems that they were mad, and understandably so, about not getting a refund for their ticket. Every once in a while, the crowd's singing and chanting would take on a nasty edge, and rocks and Swahili curses would be hurled. After a bit of this and three pops that sounded like firecrackers and which were explained to me to be local bombs (made by the police or the crowd, I couldn't tell), I decided that it is decidedly unwise to be different in a crowd of angry people who want their money back. And especially unwise when that difference, in my case that of skin color, is seen mainly as a financial difference. I was worried that the leap from "give us our money back" to let's take the mzungu's money" could be quick and unforgiving. So I left. And now I'm stuck trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to make it to Kigali by tomorrow.

Apparently the local press has written up the story, but with no mention of the rioting.

Here are a couple of pictures I've taken so far:


Giraffe on the road between Nairobi and Masai Mara


Great Rift Valley


Zebras in Masai Mara


Sunset in Masai Mara


Lioness feeding on zebra


Lions lounging in Masai Mara


Somali Camel on beach in Mombasa


Masai kids at school


Zanzibar beach


Market in Zanzibar


Homemade lipstick in Zanzibar

I left Dar-es-Salaam last night and thought I was well on my way to Lake Victoria, but then I fell asleep and woke up this morning to find myself in.... Dar-es-Salaam. It seems that part of our train derailed last night (which must have been the couple of jolts I felt), so we turned around and came back. Shortly after arriving, the passengers set-up a makeshift village on tracks, with women washing clothes and children while the men mostly sat around chatting and eating oranges.

I looked into a plane ticket to Kigali from Dar, but it is an astounding $440, so it looks like I will be giving the train another try this evening. They said that the tracks are being repaired, but I don't know how much I trust that. In either case, by the time I'd figured out what was going on, it was too late to catch a bus to Mwanza, and I still haven't heard back from Rwandair, so it looks like I'll be on the train.

Otherwise, Mwanza was the film featured in the documentary film Darwin's Nightmare about the Perch Nile in Lake Victoria. It was poorly received here, and even non-Tanzanian friend who live here can't stand it. Personally, I really liked the film when I saw it, but I'd never been to Tanzania before, so if I finally make it to Mwanza, I suppose I'll be able to see if the film was fair or not.

This is just a quick note to let my few but faithful readers know that I've not been killed in a matatu accidend on the roads of East Africa. I'm alive and well in Zanzibar, after having been through Nairobi, Masai Mara, Mombasa, Tanga and Pemba. I'll be heading to Dar-es-Salaam next and then taking a train crosscountry to Lake Victoria from where I'll launch into Rwanda.

I've got a fair amount to write about, but little time in which to do so.

More later, insh'allah.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

Zimbabwe's opposition party, MDC (Movement for Democracy and Change) announced yesterday that it will not be contesting the election on Friday, since it was nothing but a violent illegitimate sham anyway. Dozens of opposition partisans (and their families) have been killed in the last few months. PBS's Frontline has an excellent piece on Mugabe's "do or die" campaign to hold on to power in Harare:

I pose as a member of a Roman Catholic church from Harare in order to visit the local hospital. There I meet Thabita Chingaya*, a 42-year-old widow and leader of the local MDC women's league. Thabita is being treated for massive injuries to her vagina, uterus and womb. A discharge constantly oozes from between her legs. Tabitha says that she was coming home from drawing water from the river the week before when she came upon seven young men she knew who happened to be Zanu-PF party members. They blocked her path saying she would learn a lesson for being "Morgan Tsvangirai's prostitute."

She was knocked down by blows to her face and kicked with booted feet. But then suddenly the beatings stopped, she says. One man called "Max," who seemed to be the gang leader, ordered the others to stop. He removed his trousers and raped her. All the others followed suit, taking turns to hold her down. When they were done, Max took a log and began poking her vagina until she bled. She says the other six laughed and left her for dead.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

Sometimes when I'm bored (or should be grading papers), I take a look at my stats to see how the few people who read this blog got here. I often feel a mixture of fear and pride when I see that people from the State Department or the Senate or the Pentagon have made their way here. Other times, I wonder what someone was doing googling Hezbollah and skinnydipping.

Every once in a while, I come across someone who's seemingly been caught googling himself. In this case, it looks like UCSD's Bill Decker came across a post about Guantánamo Bay after doing a Google search to see if anyone was talking about a letter to the editor he wrote three years ago.

It must not be very often that this physics professor finds talk about him online that's unrelated to bifurcations in natural convection, much less remarks that compare him with a Soviet Chief State Prosecutor. If you've come back, Bill, welcome. Please feel free to continue patting the US on the back for only imprisoning people at Guantánamo Bay instead of having them summarily executed.

In Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil one of the characters (Tuttle played by De Niro) is walking when a newspaper is blown against him just to cling to him while another does the same. More and more papers are thrust against him until he's a walking mass of paper. Finally, all the papers are blown away to reveal that the man is no longer there.

That's pretty much how I feel at this time of the year, when the semester is over, and I'm flooded with a mass of papers to grade. When the wind blows hard enough, and grades are turned in, I'll be back.

I've been really, really terrible about keeping the site updated. And for that I apologize. Before, I could blame the state of African telecommunications, but since I'm back home where I have the internet at home and work, I've got no such excuses.

While I was away, I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It was really wonderful, a mixture of Rushdie and Gunther Grass, but à l'africaine. Then, to keep with the theme of African dictatorships and as suggested by another friend, I read Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, which is also a great read. There are so many passages that stood out on the page, but this is one of my favorites:

[A] genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion.

My trip was incredibly interesting. I traveled from Kenya to Zanzibar to Tanzania proper to Rwanda and Congo then through Uganda back to Kenya before leaving. It was tiresome to be on the move so much, so I was happy to come home to Beirut.

That being said, given our excruciatingly humid heat here, I miss the cool evenings of East and Central Africa. I also miss the smell of smoke that always seemed to fill the night sky. The latter, by the way, is completely different in the southern hemisphere. The stars are much more numerous and fill constellations that I'd never before seen. It's amazing to think that something so fundamental to our lives as the sky can change upon crossing an imaginary line in the African dirt.

I was expecting a leisurely train ride through the inland to Lake Victoria from Dar-es-Salaam. That's not at all what I got. The train was scheduled to leave Dar-es-Salaam at 5 on Tuesday evening, and I was pleasantly surprised when we left on time. The Tanzanian scenery was beautiful and the couchette not that uncomfortable.

I awoke to a couple of sudden jolts, and then we stopped for a while. Finally, we started back up again and I fell asleep. The only thing that woke me up was a Tanzanian cabin mate who decided that 1 am would be the perfect time to listen to his telephone's radio at full blast, despite the fact that there were five people trying to sleep in the same tiny cabin.

I finally fell back asleep and then woke up in the early light of the morning to see a train platform. We must be in Dodoma, I thought, and then went back to sleep. I woke up a couple of hours later to see that we hadn't moved, so I decided to get out and see what the problem was. I asked where we were, to which someone responded: Dar-es-Salaam. Thinking that he’d misunderstood my question, I mimed that yes, of course, we'd left Dar-es-Salaam, but where were we now? He shrugged and repeated: Dar-es-Salaam.

It was only then that I recognized the buildings around us. I'd just spent 14 hours to end up in the exact same place I'd left. After some investigation, it seems that the jolts had been two of the train cars being derailed, but fortunately no one was hurt. We were told that the tracks would be repaired and that we were expected to leave again at 5 in the evening, but that we should stay close to the train anyway, just in case. So I spent the day lounging in the sun watching as an African village sprung up on the train platform.

Men lounged and ate oranges, while women washed clothes and children. Wet laundry soon adorned the rusty tracks and open train windows. This, I assume, is how shantytowns are born. To my surprise, mothers led their children to defecate mere feet away from the water spigots, which left human shit in disconcerting proximity to drying laundry and dishes. It also made the whole place smell like a public toilet. All in all, I was surprised by the fact that no one seemed particularly upset about the inconvenience of the situation. Everyone was taking it in stride.

After being told that I couldn't get my money back for the train ticket, I left our new village for some fresh air and Indian food, passing an enormous line of people waiting to get a two-dollar food allowance from the rail company. By the time I got back, it was nearly time to leave. Or so I thought. The departure time of 5 pm came and went without so much as a train whistle. We were then told that we’d be leaving at 9, so I settled in to read with the last of the sunlight. I fell asleep in my couchette and only woke up at around 9:30 to loud music and a crowd of people obviously upset about something.

It seems that they were mad, and understandably so, about not getting a refund for their ticket. Every once in a while, the crowd's singing and chanting would take on a nasty edge, and rocks and Swahili curses would be hurled. After a bit of this and three pops that sounded like firecrackers and which were explained to me to be local bombs (made by the police or the crowd, I couldn't tell), I decided that it is decidedly unwise to be different in a crowd of angry people who want their money back. And especially unwise when that difference, in my case that of skin color, is seen mainly as a financial difference. I was worried that the leap from "give us our money back" to let's take the mzungu's money" could be quick and unforgiving. So I left. And now I'm stuck trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to make it to Kigali by tomorrow.

Apparently the local press has written up the story, but with no mention of the rioting.

Here are a couple of pictures I've taken so far:


Giraffe on the road between Nairobi and Masai Mara


Great Rift Valley


Zebras in Masai Mara


Sunset in Masai Mara


Lioness feeding on zebra


Lions lounging in Masai Mara


Somali Camel on beach in Mombasa


Masai kids at school


Zanzibar beach


Market in Zanzibar


Homemade lipstick in Zanzibar

I left Dar-es-Salaam last night and thought I was well on my way to Lake Victoria, but then I fell asleep and woke up this morning to find myself in.... Dar-es-Salaam. It seems that part of our train derailed last night (which must have been the couple of jolts I felt), so we turned around and came back. Shortly after arriving, the passengers set-up a makeshift village on tracks, with women washing clothes and children while the men mostly sat around chatting and eating oranges.

I looked into a plane ticket to Kigali from Dar, but it is an astounding $440, so it looks like I will be giving the train another try this evening. They said that the tracks are being repaired, but I don't know how much I trust that. In either case, by the time I'd figured out what was going on, it was too late to catch a bus to Mwanza, and I still haven't heard back from Rwandair, so it looks like I'll be on the train.

Otherwise, Mwanza was the film featured in the documentary film Darwin's Nightmare about the Perch Nile in Lake Victoria. It was poorly received here, and even non-Tanzanian friend who live here can't stand it. Personally, I really liked the film when I saw it, but I'd never been to Tanzania before, so if I finally make it to Mwanza, I suppose I'll be able to see if the film was fair or not.

This is just a quick note to let my few but faithful readers know that I've not been killed in a matatu accidend on the roads of East Africa. I'm alive and well in Zanzibar, after having been through Nairobi, Masai Mara, Mombasa, Tanga and Pemba. I'll be heading to Dar-es-Salaam next and then taking a train crosscountry to Lake Victoria from where I'll launch into Rwanda.

I've got a fair amount to write about, but little time in which to do so.

More later, insh'allah.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

Zimbabwe's opposition party, MDC (Movement for Democracy and Change) announced yesterday that it will not be contesting the election on Friday, since it was nothing but a violent illegitimate sham anyway. Dozens of opposition partisans (and their families) have been killed in the last few months. PBS's Frontline has an excellent piece on Mugabe's "do or die" campaign to hold on to power in Harare:

I pose as a member of a Roman Catholic church from Harare in order to visit the local hospital. There I meet Thabita Chingaya*, a 42-year-old widow and leader of the local MDC women's league. Thabita is being treated for massive injuries to her vagina, uterus and womb. A discharge constantly oozes from between her legs. Tabitha says that she was coming home from drawing water from the river the week before when she came upon seven young men she knew who happened to be Zanu-PF party members. They blocked her path saying she would learn a lesson for being "Morgan Tsvangirai's prostitute."

She was knocked down by blows to her face and kicked with booted feet. But then suddenly the beatings stopped, she says. One man called "Max," who seemed to be the gang leader, ordered the others to stop. He removed his trousers and raped her. All the others followed suit, taking turns to hold her down. When they were done, Max took a log and began poking her vagina until she bled. She says the other six laughed and left her for dead.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

Sometimes when I'm bored (or should be grading papers), I take a look at my stats to see how the few people who read this blog got here. I often feel a mixture of fear and pride when I see that people from the State Department or the Senate or the Pentagon have made their way here. Other times, I wonder what someone was doing googling Hezbollah and skinnydipping.

Every once in a while, I come across someone who's seemingly been caught googling himself. In this case, it looks like UCSD's Bill Decker came across a post about Guantánamo Bay after doing a Google search to see if anyone was talking about a letter to the editor he wrote three years ago.

It must not be very often that this physics professor finds talk about him online that's unrelated to bifurcations in natural convection, much less remarks that compare him with a Soviet Chief State Prosecutor. If you've come back, Bill, welcome. Please feel free to continue patting the US on the back for only imprisoning people at Guantánamo Bay instead of having them summarily executed.

In Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil one of the characters (Tuttle played by De Niro) is walking when a newspaper is blown against him just to cling to him while another does the same. More and more papers are thrust against him until he's a walking mass of paper. Finally, all the papers are blown away to reveal that the man is no longer there.

That's pretty much how I feel at this time of the year, when the semester is over, and I'm flooded with a mass of papers to grade. When the wind blows hard enough, and grades are turned in, I'll be back.

I've been really, really terrible about keeping the site updated. And for that I apologize. Before, I could blame the state of African telecommunications, but since I'm back home where I have the internet at home and work, I've got no such excuses.

While I was away, I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It was really wonderful, a mixture of Rushdie and Gunther Grass, but à l'africaine. Then, to keep with the theme of African dictatorships and as suggested by another friend, I read Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, which is also a great read. There are so many passages that stood out on the page, but this is one of my favorites:

[A] genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion.

My trip was incredibly interesting. I traveled from Kenya to Zanzibar to Tanzania proper to Rwanda and Congo then through Uganda back to Kenya before leaving. It was tiresome to be on the move so much, so I was happy to come home to Beirut.

That being said, given our excruciatingly humid heat here, I miss the cool evenings of East and Central Africa. I also miss the smell of smoke that always seemed to fill the night sky. The latter, by the way, is completely different in the southern hemisphere. The stars are much more numerous and fill constellations that I'd never before seen. It's amazing to think that something so fundamental to our lives as the sky can change upon crossing an imaginary line in the African dirt.

I was expecting a leisurely train ride through the inland to Lake Victoria from Dar-es-Salaam. That's not at all what I got. The train was scheduled to leave Dar-es-Salaam at 5 on Tuesday evening, and I was pleasantly surprised when we left on time. The Tanzanian scenery was beautiful and the couchette not that uncomfortable.

I awoke to a couple of sudden jolts, and then we stopped for a while. Finally, we started back up again and I fell asleep. The only thing that woke me up was a Tanzanian cabin mate who decided that 1 am would be the perfect time to listen to his telephone's radio at full blast, despite the fact that there were five people trying to sleep in the same tiny cabin.

I finally fell back asleep and then woke up in the early light of the morning to see a train platform. We must be in Dodoma, I thought, and then went back to sleep. I woke up a couple of hours later to see that we hadn't moved, so I decided to get out and see what the problem was. I asked where we were, to which someone responded: Dar-es-Salaam. Thinking that he’d misunderstood my question, I mimed that yes, of course, we'd left Dar-es-Salaam, but where were we now? He shrugged and repeated: Dar-es-Salaam.

It was only then that I recognized the buildings around us. I'd just spent 14 hours to end up in the exact same place I'd left. After some investigation, it seems that the jolts had been two of the train cars being derailed, but fortunately no one was hurt. We were told that the tracks would be repaired and that we were expected to leave again at 5 in the evening, but that we should stay close to the train anyway, just in case. So I spent the day lounging in the sun watching as an African village sprung up on the train platform.

Men lounged and ate oranges, while women washed clothes and children. Wet laundry soon adorned the rusty tracks and open train windows. This, I assume, is how shantytowns are born. To my surprise, mothers led their children to defecate mere feet away from the water spigots, which left human shit in disconcerting proximity to drying laundry and dishes. It also made the whole place smell like a public toilet. All in all, I was surprised by the fact that no one seemed particularly upset about the inconvenience of the situation. Everyone was taking it in stride.

After being told that I couldn't get my money back for the train ticket, I left our new village for some fresh air and Indian food, passing an enormous line of people waiting to get a two-dollar food allowance from the rail company. By the time I got back, it was nearly time to leave. Or so I thought. The departure time of 5 pm came and went without so much as a train whistle. We were then told that we’d be leaving at 9, so I settled in to read with the last of the sunlight. I fell asleep in my couchette and only woke up at around 9:30 to loud music and a crowd of people obviously upset about something.

It seems that they were mad, and understandably so, about not getting a refund for their ticket. Every once in a while, the crowd's singing and chanting would take on a nasty edge, and rocks and Swahili curses would be hurled. After a bit of this and three pops that sounded like firecrackers and which were explained to me to be local bombs (made by the police or the crowd, I couldn't tell), I decided that it is decidedly unwise to be different in a crowd of angry people who want their money back. And especially unwise when that difference, in my case that of skin color, is seen mainly as a financial difference. I was worried that the leap from "give us our money back" to let's take the mzungu's money" could be quick and unforgiving. So I left. And now I'm stuck trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to make it to Kigali by tomorrow.

Apparently the local press has written up the story, but with no mention of the rioting.

Here are a couple of pictures I've taken so far:


Giraffe on the road between Nairobi and Masai Mara


Great Rift Valley


Zebras in Masai Mara


Sunset in Masai Mara


Lioness feeding on zebra


Lions lounging in Masai Mara


Somali Camel on beach in Mombasa


Masai kids at school


Zanzibar beach


Market in Zanzibar


Homemade lipstick in Zanzibar

I left Dar-es-Salaam last night and thought I was well on my way to Lake Victoria, but then I fell asleep and woke up this morning to find myself in.... Dar-es-Salaam. It seems that part of our train derailed last night (which must have been the couple of jolts I felt), so we turned around and came back. Shortly after arriving, the passengers set-up a makeshift village on tracks, with women washing clothes and children while the men mostly sat around chatting and eating oranges.

I looked into a plane ticket to Kigali from Dar, but it is an astounding $440, so it looks like I will be giving the train another try this evening. They said that the tracks are being repaired, but I don't know how much I trust that. In either case, by the time I'd figured out what was going on, it was too late to catch a bus to Mwanza, and I still haven't heard back from Rwandair, so it looks like I'll be on the train.

Otherwise, Mwanza was the film featured in the documentary film Darwin's Nightmare about the Perch Nile in Lake Victoria. It was poorly received here, and even non-Tanzanian friend who live here can't stand it. Personally, I really liked the film when I saw it, but I'd never been to Tanzania before, so if I finally make it to Mwanza, I suppose I'll be able to see if the film was fair or not.

This is just a quick note to let my few but faithful readers know that I've not been killed in a matatu accidend on the roads of East Africa. I'm alive and well in Zanzibar, after having been through Nairobi, Masai Mara, Mombasa, Tanga and Pemba. I'll be heading to Dar-es-Salaam next and then taking a train crosscountry to Lake Victoria from where I'll launch into Rwanda.

I've got a fair amount to write about, but little time in which to do so.

More later, insh'allah.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

Zimbabwe's opposition party, MDC (Movement for Democracy and Change) announced yesterday that it will not be contesting the election on Friday, since it was nothing but a violent illegitimate sham anyway. Dozens of opposition partisans (and their families) have been killed in the last few months. PBS's Frontline has an excellent piece on Mugabe's "do or die" campaign to hold on to power in Harare:

I pose as a member of a Roman Catholic church from Harare in order to visit the local hospital. There I meet Thabita Chingaya*, a 42-year-old widow and leader of the local MDC women's league. Thabita is being treated for massive injuries to her vagina, uterus and womb. A discharge constantly oozes from between her legs. Tabitha says that she was coming home from drawing water from the river the week before when she came upon seven young men she knew who happened to be Zanu-PF party members. They blocked her path saying she would learn a lesson for being "Morgan Tsvangirai's prostitute."

She was knocked down by blows to her face and kicked with booted feet. But then suddenly the beatings stopped, she says. One man called "Max," who seemed to be the gang leader, ordered the others to stop. He removed his trousers and raped her. All the others followed suit, taking turns to hold her down. When they were done, Max took a log and began poking her vagina until she bled. She says the other six laughed and left her for dead.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

Sometimes when I'm bored (or should be grading papers), I take a look at my stats to see how the few people who read this blog got here. I often feel a mixture of fear and pride when I see that people from the State Department or the Senate or the Pentagon have made their way here. Other times, I wonder what someone was doing googling Hezbollah and skinnydipping.

Every once in a while, I come across someone who's seemingly been caught googling himself. In this case, it looks like UCSD's Bill Decker came across a post about Guantánamo Bay after doing a Google search to see if anyone was talking about a letter to the editor he wrote three years ago.

It must not be very often that this physics professor finds talk about him online that's unrelated to bifurcations in natural convection, much less remarks that compare him with a Soviet Chief State Prosecutor. If you've come back, Bill, welcome. Please feel free to continue patting the US on the back for only imprisoning people at Guantánamo Bay instead of having them summarily executed.

In Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil one of the characters (Tuttle played by De Niro) is walking when a newspaper is blown against him just to cling to him while another does the same. More and more papers are thrust against him until he's a walking mass of paper. Finally, all the papers are blown away to reveal that the man is no longer there.

That's pretty much how I feel at this time of the year, when the semester is over, and I'm flooded with a mass of papers to grade. When the wind blows hard enough, and grades are turned in, I'll be back.

I've been really, really terrible about keeping the site updated. And for that I apologize. Before, I could blame the state of African telecommunications, but since I'm back home where I have the internet at home and work, I've got no such excuses.

While I was away, I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It was really wonderful, a mixture of Rushdie and Gunther Grass, but à l'africaine. Then, to keep with the theme of African dictatorships and as suggested by another friend, I read Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, which is also a great read. There are so many passages that stood out on the page, but this is one of my favorites:

[A] genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion.

My trip was incredibly interesting. I traveled from Kenya to Zanzibar to Tanzania proper to Rwanda and Congo then through Uganda back to Kenya before leaving. It was tiresome to be on the move so much, so I was happy to come home to Beirut.

That being said, given our excruciatingly humid heat here, I miss the cool evenings of East and Central Africa. I also miss the smell of smoke that always seemed to fill the night sky. The latter, by the way, is completely different in the southern hemisphere. The stars are much more numerous and fill constellations that I'd never before seen. It's amazing to think that something so fundamental to our lives as the sky can change upon crossing an imaginary line in the African dirt.

I was expecting a leisurely train ride through the inland to Lake Victoria from Dar-es-Salaam. That's not at all what I got. The train was scheduled to leave Dar-es-Salaam at 5 on Tuesday evening, and I was pleasantly surprised when we left on time. The Tanzanian scenery was beautiful and the couchette not that uncomfortable.

I awoke to a couple of sudden jolts, and then we stopped for a while. Finally, we started back up again and I fell asleep. The only thing that woke me up was a Tanzanian cabin mate who decided that 1 am would be the perfect time to listen to his telephone's radio at full blast, despite the fact that there were five people trying to sleep in the same tiny cabin.

I finally fell back asleep and then woke up in the early light of the morning to see a train platform. We must be in Dodoma, I thought, and then went back to sleep. I woke up a couple of hours later to see that we hadn't moved, so I decided to get out and see what the problem was. I asked where we were, to which someone responded: Dar-es-Salaam. Thinking that he’d misunderstood my question, I mimed that yes, of course, we'd left Dar-es-Salaam, but where were we now? He shrugged and repeated: Dar-es-Salaam.

It was only then that I recognized the buildings around us. I'd just spent 14 hours to end up in the exact same place I'd left. After some investigation, it seems that the jolts had been two of the train cars being derailed, but fortunately no one was hurt. We were told that the tracks would be repaired and that we were expected to leave again at 5 in the evening, but that we should stay close to the train anyway, just in case. So I spent the day lounging in the sun watching as an African village sprung up on the train platform.

Men lounged and ate oranges, while women washed clothes and children. Wet laundry soon adorned the rusty tracks and open train windows. This, I assume, is how shantytowns are born. To my surprise, mothers led their children to defecate mere feet away from the water spigots, which left human shit in disconcerting proximity to drying laundry and dishes. It also made the whole place smell like a public toilet. All in all, I was surprised by the fact that no one seemed particularly upset about the inconvenience of the situation. Everyone was taking it in stride.

After being told that I couldn't get my money back for the train ticket, I left our new village for some fresh air and Indian food, passing an enormous line of people waiting to get a two-dollar food allowance from the rail company. By the time I got back, it was nearly time to leave. Or so I thought. The departure time of 5 pm came and went without so much as a train whistle. We were then told that we’d be leaving at 9, so I settled in to read with the last of the sunlight. I fell asleep in my couchette and only woke up at around 9:30 to loud music and a crowd of people obviously upset about something.

It seems that they were mad, and understandably so, about not getting a refund for their ticket. Every once in a while, the crowd's singing and chanting would take on a nasty edge, and rocks and Swahili curses would be hurled. After a bit of this and three pops that sounded like firecrackers and which were explained to me to be local bombs (made by the police or the crowd, I couldn't tell), I decided that it is decidedly unwise to be different in a crowd of angry people who want their money back. And especially unwise when that difference, in my case that of skin color, is seen mainly as a financial difference. I was worried that the leap from "give us our money back" to let's take the mzungu's money" could be quick and unforgiving. So I left. And now I'm stuck trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to make it to Kigali by tomorrow.

Apparently the local press has written up the story, but with no mention of the rioting.

Here are a couple of pictures I've taken so far:


Giraffe on the road between Nairobi and Masai Mara


Great Rift Valley


Zebras in Masai Mara


Sunset in Masai Mara


Lioness feeding on zebra


Lions lounging in Masai Mara


Somali Camel on beach in Mombasa


Masai kids at school


Zanzibar beach


Market in Zanzibar


Homemade lipstick in Zanzibar

I left Dar-es-Salaam last night and thought I was well on my way to Lake Victoria, but then I fell asleep and woke up this morning to find myself in.... Dar-es-Salaam. It seems that part of our train derailed last night (which must have been the couple of jolts I felt), so we turned around and came back. Shortly after arriving, the passengers set-up a makeshift village on tracks, with women washing clothes and children while the men mostly sat around chatting and eating oranges.

I looked into a plane ticket to Kigali from Dar, but it is an astounding $440, so it looks like I will be giving the train another try this evening. They said that the tracks are being repaired, but I don't know how much I trust that. In either case, by the time I'd figured out what was going on, it was too late to catch a bus to Mwanza, and I still haven't heard back from Rwandair, so it looks like I'll be on the train.

Otherwise, Mwanza was the film featured in the documentary film Darwin's Nightmare about the Perch Nile in Lake Victoria. It was poorly received here, and even non-Tanzanian friend who live here can't stand it. Personally, I really liked the film when I saw it, but I'd never been to Tanzania before, so if I finally make it to Mwanza, I suppose I'll be able to see if the film was fair or not.

This is just a quick note to let my few but faithful readers know that I've not been killed in a matatu accidend on the roads of East Africa. I'm alive and well in Zanzibar, after having been through Nairobi, Masai Mara, Mombasa, Tanga and Pemba. I'll be heading to Dar-es-Salaam next and then taking a train crosscountry to Lake Victoria from where I'll launch into Rwanda.

I've got a fair amount to write about, but little time in which to do so.

More later, insh'allah.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

Zimbabwe's opposition party, MDC (Movement for Democracy and Change) announced yesterday that it will not be contesting the election on Friday, since it was nothing but a violent illegitimate sham anyway. Dozens of opposition partisans (and their families) have been killed in the last few months. PBS's Frontline has an excellent piece on Mugabe's "do or die" campaign to hold on to power in Harare:

I pose as a member of a Roman Catholic church from Harare in order to visit the local hospital. There I meet Thabita Chingaya*, a 42-year-old widow and leader of the local MDC women's league. Thabita is being treated for massive injuries to her vagina, uterus and womb. A discharge constantly oozes from between her legs. Tabitha says that she was coming home from drawing water from the river the week before when she came upon seven young men she knew who happened to be Zanu-PF party members. They blocked her path saying she would learn a lesson for being "Morgan Tsvangirai's prostitute."

She was knocked down by blows to her face and kicked with booted feet. But then suddenly the beatings stopped, she says. One man called "Max," who seemed to be the gang leader, ordered the others to stop. He removed his trousers and raped her. All the others followed suit, taking turns to hold her down. When they were done, Max took a log and began poking her vagina until she bled. She says the other six laughed and left her for dead.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

Sometimes when I'm bored (or should be grading papers), I take a look at my stats to see how the few people who read this blog got here. I often feel a mixture of fear and pride when I see that people from the State Department or the Senate or the Pentagon have made their way here. Other times, I wonder what someone was doing googling Hezbollah and skinnydipping.

Every once in a while, I come across someone who's seemingly been caught googling himself. In this case, it looks like UCSD's Bill Decker came across a post about Guantánamo Bay after doing a Google search to see if anyone was talking about a letter to the editor he wrote three years ago.

It must not be very often that this physics professor finds talk about him online that's unrelated to bifurcations in natural convection, much less remarks that compare him with a Soviet Chief State Prosecutor. If you've come back, Bill, welcome. Please feel free to continue patting the US on the back for only imprisoning people at Guantánamo Bay instead of having them summarily executed.

In Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil one of the characters (Tuttle played by De Niro) is walking when a newspaper is blown against him just to cling to him while another does the same. More and more papers are thrust against him until he's a walking mass of paper. Finally, all the papers are blown away to reveal that the man is no longer there.

That's pretty much how I feel at this time of the year, when the semester is over, and I'm flooded with a mass of papers to grade. When the wind blows hard enough, and grades are turned in, I'll be back.

I've been really, really terrible about keeping the site updated. And for that I apologize. Before, I could blame the state of African telecommunications, but since I'm back home where I have the internet at home and work, I've got no such excuses.

While I was away, I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It was really wonderful, a mixture of Rushdie and Gunther Grass, but à l'africaine. Then, to keep with the theme of African dictatorships and as suggested by another friend, I read Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, which is also a great read. There are so many passages that stood out on the page, but this is one of my favorites:

[A] genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion.

My trip was incredibly interesting. I traveled from Kenya to Zanzibar to Tanzania proper to Rwanda and Congo then through Uganda back to Kenya before leaving. It was tiresome to be on the move so much, so I was happy to come home to Beirut.

That being said, given our excruciatingly humid heat here, I miss the cool evenings of East and Central Africa. I also miss the smell of smoke that always seemed to fill the night sky. The latter, by the way, is completely different in the southern hemisphere. The stars are much more numerous and fill constellations that I'd never before seen. It's amazing to think that something so fundamental to our lives as the sky can change upon crossing an imaginary line in the African dirt.

I was expecting a leisurely train ride through the inland to Lake Victoria from Dar-es-Salaam. That's not at all what I got. The train was scheduled to leave Dar-es-Salaam at 5 on Tuesday evening, and I was pleasantly surprised when we left on time. The Tanzanian scenery was beautiful and the couchette not that uncomfortable.

I awoke to a couple of sudden jolts, and then we stopped for a while. Finally, we started back up again and I fell asleep. The only thing that woke me up was a Tanzanian cabin mate who decided that 1 am would be the perfect time to listen to his telephone's radio at full blast, despite the fact that there were five people trying to sleep in the same tiny cabin.

I finally fell back asleep and then woke up in the early light of the morning to see a train platform. We must be in Dodoma, I thought, and then went back to sleep. I woke up a couple of hours later to see that we hadn't moved, so I decided to get out and see what the problem was. I asked where we were, to which someone responded: Dar-es-Salaam. Thinking that he’d misunderstood my question, I mimed that yes, of course, we'd left Dar-es-Salaam, but where were we now? He shrugged and repeated: Dar-es-Salaam.

It was only then that I recognized the buildings around us. I'd just spent 14 hours to end up in the exact same place I'd left. After some investigation, it seems that the jolts had been two of the train cars being derailed, but fortunately no one was hurt. We were told that the tracks would be repaired and that we were expected to leave again at 5 in the evening, but that we should stay close to the train anyway, just in case. So I spent the day lounging in the sun watching as an African village sprung up on the train platform.

Men lounged and ate oranges, while women washed clothes and children. Wet laundry soon adorned the rusty tracks and open train windows. This, I assume, is how shantytowns are born. To my surprise, mothers led their children to defecate mere feet away from the water spigots, which left human shit in disconcerting proximity to drying laundry and dishes. It also made the whole place smell like a public toilet. All in all, I was surprised by the fact that no one seemed particularly upset about the inconvenience of the situation. Everyone was taking it in stride.

After being told that I couldn't get my money back for the train ticket, I left our new village for some fresh air and Indian food, passing an enormous line of people waiting to get a two-dollar food allowance from the rail company. By the time I got back, it was nearly time to leave. Or so I thought. The departure time of 5 pm came and went without so much as a train whistle. We were then told that we’d be leaving at 9, so I settled in to read with the last of the sunlight. I fell asleep in my couchette and only woke up at around 9:30 to loud music and a crowd of people obviously upset about something.

It seems that they were mad, and understandably so, about not getting a refund for their ticket. Every once in a while, the crowd's singing and chanting would take on a nasty edge, and rocks and Swahili curses would be hurled. After a bit of this and three pops that sounded like firecrackers and which were explained to me to be local bombs (made by the police or the crowd, I couldn't tell), I decided that it is decidedly unwise to be different in a crowd of angry people who want their money back. And especially unwise when that difference, in my case that of skin color, is seen mainly as a financial difference. I was worried that the leap from "give us our money back" to let's take the mzungu's money" could be quick and unforgiving. So I left. And now I'm stuck trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to make it to Kigali by tomorrow.

Apparently the local press has written up the story, but with no mention of the rioting.

Here are a couple of pictures I've taken so far:


Giraffe on the road between Nairobi and Masai Mara


Great Rift Valley


Zebras in Masai Mara


Sunset in Masai Mara


Lioness feeding on zebra


Lions lounging in Masai Mara


Somali Camel on beach in Mombasa


Masai kids at school


Zanzibar beach


Market in Zanzibar


Homemade lipstick in Zanzibar

I left Dar-es-Salaam last night and thought I was well on my way to Lake Victoria, but then I fell asleep and woke up this morning to find myself in.... Dar-es-Salaam. It seems that part of our train derailed last night (which must have been the couple of jolts I felt), so we turned around and came back. Shortly after arriving, the passengers set-up a makeshift village on tracks, with women washing clothes and children while the men mostly sat around chatting and eating oranges.

I looked into a plane ticket to Kigali from Dar, but it is an astounding $440, so it looks like I will be giving the train another try this evening. They said that the tracks are being repaired, but I don't know how much I trust that. In either case, by the time I'd figured out what was going on, it was too late to catch a bus to Mwanza, and I still haven't heard back from Rwandair, so it looks like I'll be on the train.

Otherwise, Mwanza was the film featured in the documentary film Darwin's Nightmare about the Perch Nile in Lake Victoria. It was poorly received here, and even non-Tanzanian friend who live here can't stand it. Personally, I really liked the film when I saw it, but I'd never been to Tanzania before, so if I finally make it to Mwanza, I suppose I'll be able to see if the film was fair or not.

This is just a quick note to let my few but faithful readers know that I've not been killed in a matatu accidend on the roads of East Africa. I'm alive and well in Zanzibar, after having been through Nairobi, Masai Mara, Mombasa, Tanga and Pemba. I'll be heading to Dar-es-Salaam next and then taking a train crosscountry to Lake Victoria from where I'll launch into Rwanda.

I've got a fair amount to write about, but little time in which to do so.

More later, insh'allah.

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

Zimbabwe's opposition party, MDC (Movement for Democracy and Change) announced yesterday that it will not be contesting the election on Friday, since it was nothing but a violent illegitimate sham anyway. Dozens of opposition partisans (and their families) have been killed in the last few months. PBS's Frontline has an excellent piece on Mugabe's "do or die" campaign to hold on to power in Harare:

I pose as a member of a Roman Catholic church from Harare in order to visit the local hospital. There I meet Thabita Chingaya*, a 42-year-old widow and leader of the local MDC women's league. Thabita is being treated for massive injuries to her vagina, uterus and womb. A discharge constantly oozes from between her legs. Tabitha says that she was coming home from drawing water from the river the week before when she came upon seven young men she knew who happened to be Zanu-PF party members. They blocked her path saying she would learn a lesson for being "Morgan Tsvangirai's prostitute."

She was knocked down by blows to her face and kicked with booted feet. But then suddenly the beatings stopped, she says. One man called "Max," who seemed to be the gang leader, ordered the others to stop. He removed his trousers and raped her. All the others followed suit, taking turns to hold her down. When they were done, Max took a log and began poking her vagina until she bled. She says the other six laughed and left her for dead.

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

Sometimes when I'm bored (or should be grading papers), I take a look at my stats to see how the few people who read this blog got here. I often feel a mixture of fear and pride when I see that people from the State Department or the Senate or the Pentagon have made their way here. Other times, I wonder what someone was doing googling Hezbollah and skinnydipping.

Every once in a while, I come across someone who's seemingly been caught googling himself. In this case, it looks like UCSD's Bill Decker came across a post about Guantánamo Bay after doing a Google search to see if anyone was talking about a letter to the editor he wrote three years ago.

It must not be very often that this physics professor finds talk about him online that's unrelated to bifurcations in natural convection, much less remarks that compare him with a Soviet Chief State Prosecutor. If you've come back, Bill, welcome. Please feel free to continue patting the US on the back for only imprisoning people at Guantánamo Bay instead of having them summarily executed.

In Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil one of the characters (Tuttle played by De Niro) is walking when a newspaper is blown against him just to cling to him while another does the same. More and more papers are thrust against him until he's a walking mass of paper. Finally, all the papers are blown away to reveal that the man is no longer there.

That's pretty much how I feel at this time of the year, when the semester is over, and I'm flooded with a mass of papers to grade. When the wind blows hard enough, and grades are turned in, I'll be back.