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Culture Clash

Julius Caesar may have accidentally burned down Alexandria’s famous library some 2,000 years ago, but some might argue that the two millenia or so that it took to build a new one were worth the wait. Admittedly, the new library complex, opened in 2003, is quite nice, both architecturally and culturally.

What I didn’t expect was the odd juxtaposition of cultures that was about to take place there.

On the cultural program one evening while I was there was a screening of the nine 2008 Cannes Film Festival short film nominees. These are films from various countries under 15 minutes long (and, thankfully, some are considerably shorter).

I had no idea what to expect, and I think it’s fair to say that the Egyptians who filed in to see these, a number of the women fully veiled, were in the same boat.

First up was a French film about a woman in a psychiatrist’s office who’s losing her memory, her mind, or both. Totally meaningless and incomprehensible, it felt far longer than its seven minutes, and at its close I looked around to see if anyone was as bewildered as I was. Indeed. Lots of puzzled looks and scratching of heads.

After this inauspicious beginning came a Portuguese film about a woman manning a mostly deserted toll booth, a Hungarian film about a river ship that runs over some kayakers, a Romanian film (the Cannes winner) about a birthday boy heading into town with his mom to get a toy from McDonald’s, and an Australian film about five rural pre-teens who decide to blow something up.

The Mexican film, about a middle-aged woman reclaiming her sex life after a divorce, made my left eyebrow twitch up in surprise. We’re in Egypt, an Islamic and for the most part a socially conservative country, with fully veiled women in the audience, and here on screen is a fairly lusty Mexican woman making a foray into a sex shop before picking up a total stranger in a bar to get down and dirty in the back alley.

Frankly, I was more fascinated by the audience reaction than by the film itself. Sure enough, I noticed a few people shuffling out, no doubt muttering about the immorality of Western culture.

My favorite film of the evening was next: a 3-minute Australian mockumentary about a boy feeding his pet rabbit, who hilariously turns into the Godzilla of the rabbit world. I think this one should have won, but clearly no one asked my opinion.

Well, if the Mexicans pushed the envelope a bit, the final two films took said envelope and catapulted it into the upper stratosphere.

Iceland’s “coming of age” film featured a pair of teens who get in a little over their heads with alcohol and drugs at a party, and through the boy’s drug-induced stupor we’re treated to the girl getting gang-raped by a bunch of hairy and overweight men while she’s out cold. This was actually a brilliantly well made (and ultimately, a poignant and sweet) film, but it wouldn’t pass the censors on American network television, let alone Egypt. Some of the Egyptians shot out of the theater so fast I suspect that their seats had ejection handles.

You would think that would have been it, but no. Cannes had a nice coup de grace ready and waiting to pounce on our innocent Egyptian crowd. Leave it to the Brits to usher in this one.

The story: two British private school teens in 1978 London meet in a record store, both wanting the only edition of the newly released Buzzcocks single. They agree to listen to it together, and between the magic of Buzzcocks, beer, a bed and a hearty dose of British libido they also discover the joys of sex.

Call it cinema if you will, but if you didn’t know this was a Cannes film selection just about anyone would have labeled this as 15 minutes of soft porn, albeit innocently sweet and artistically talented. The film probably won the Playboy channel’s top award before heading out to Cannes.

Talk about entertainment. The boy pours beer all over the schoolgirl’s white shirt and rips it off, and out pops the patron from seat 12 to make a mad a rush to the exit. The moans, gasps and sighs reach their first crescendo amidst visuals of intertwined flesh and an entire row of beards and veils shuffles out. The boy’s head is eagerly pushed down between the girl’s bare thighs and my young veiled neighbor, who’d been paralyzed into absolute stillness for the last 20 minutes or so, finally unfreezes and flutters out wide-eyed (did her husband pull her out or did she request it? Oh, the curiosity.)

The end. Lights on. The theater has half of its starting audience, and I’m grinning like crazy. Some of the films were bad, some just strange, and others had a touch of brilliance, but it’s the cultural questions that are most entertaining.

Think of it from an Egyptian’s point of view. If they don’t travel to Western countries, their exposure to Western culture is almost entirely through media and foreign visitors. What do they learn about us? Through movies and TV, that we’re a violent, dysfunctional, sex-crazed culture? Is that accurate, or fair? Is it reinforced by the sight of Western tourists wearing far less than is culturally appropriate streaming into their country, by unmarried couples traveling together, or by public displays of affection out of the norms of public Egyptian behavior?

Seeing the impact of media through short films really highlights the questions this raises. All of the shorts provided snapshots of events that do occur in Western countries. But devoid of time, they’re also entirely devoid of context, and therein lies the issue. When we see a movie from our own country, we know how to place it within the proper context: what is normal, what isn’t, what is common, what is on the fringes. But when a foreigner sees a Western movie about a country they’ve never been to, who’s to tell them the difference?

This is not simply an interesting cultural question to ponder over tea and biscuits: it also drives to the heart of much of the current Islamic conflicts with the West. There is no question that our Western culture is having an impact: from music to dress to relationships. One of the juxtapositions that most tickles me, for example, is the sight of blue jeans peeking out from underneath a fully-veiled woman’s black robes, a perfect snapshot of east meets west.

But is the impact positive? One could argue yes, especially, for instance, from the Western perspectives of greater freedom and equality for women. But clearly it is also possible to make the opposite case, from the disintegration of traditional family values on down.

There’s really not much anyone can do about it either way. Cultures grow and evolve and influence each other organically, as they have for thousands of years. You can’t really control or stop it. But the globalisation of media is compressing cultural exposures that normally would take generations, if ever, into close to real-time, and it will only keep accelerating. It is not surprising that this is creating some friction, and from a detached anthropological perspective it will be fascinating to see how the next few decades unfold as each culture is forced to face each other’s differences.

Alex Redux

A continued exploration of Egypt’s city on the Mediterranean…

Alexandria’s Saga

Some cities just exist. Others are a saga of history and high drama. Egypt’s Mediterranean city of Alexandria is hands-down a poster child for one of the latter.

First, there was nothing. Just a few fishermen and pirates. Then the infamous world conqueror Alexander the Great showed up and in 332 BC, decided that there should be a Hellenistic (Greek) city in pharaonic Egypt to provide a trading link to the rich and fertile Nile valley. He was 23 at the time.

So Alexander founded the city, gave it his name, and a few months later departed East to conquer the rest of the world, never to return again (except in death, some 10 years later, his sarcophagus on display for several centuries).

Then things get interesting.

One of Alexander’s top generals, Ptolemy, took over Alexandria and the Egyptian kingdom and installed himself as pharaoh, and for the next 300 years the Ptolemy Dynasty ruled Egypt from Alexandria, its capital.

Under the rule of the Ptolemies, Alexandria quickly became the largest city in the world (or at times second only to Rome). It housed the Library of Alexandria, which at its peak was the largest repository of written knowledge in the world, with hundreds of thousands of ancient scrolls. And its port featured the famous Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the world’s third tallest building after the two Great Pyramids.

Notably, we can thank Alexandria and its ancient library for geometry (Euclid, the Father of Geometry, was a scholar there), the knowledge that the Earth revolves around the Sun (Alexandrian mathematician Aristarchus), and the calculation of the circumference of the Earth (Erastothenes, mathematician and Chief Librarian).

Then things got complicated.

When Ptolemy XII died in 51 BC, his 18-year old daughter Cleopatra and her 12-year old brother Ptolemy XIII became co-rulers. That didn’t work out very well, and 3 years later Cleopatra was forced to flee Egypt, with her brother keeping the throne.

While this was happening, Julius Caesar was embroiled in a Roman civil war for power with the Senator Pompey. When Pompey fled to Alexandria, 15-year old Ptolemy had him beheaded and presented his head to Julius Caesar, thinking this would please him. He was wrong, and Caesar took control of Alexandria, accidentally burning down the Library in the process. Oops.

Cleopatra saw her opening. She had her servants deliver a Persian rug to Caesar, and when they rolled it out in front of him, out rolled 21-year old Cleopatra at his feet. Well, Caesar apparently quite liked that, and despite a 30-year age difference the two became lovers, thanks to which Cleopatra permanently wrestled away rulership of Egypt from her brother.

When Julius Caesar was assassinated several years later, Cleopatra aligned herself with Roman general Marc Antony, with whom she would have three children (twins and a son, on the heels of her son from Caesar). Unfortunately for the both of them, Marc Antony ended up on the losing side of a power struggle for control of Rome, and after losing the battle to rival Octavian in 30 BC, Marc Antony committed suicide by stabbing himself with his sword. He died in Cleopatra’s arms, and at the age of 41 Cleopatra committed suicide some two weeks later herself.

Octavian’s final victory over Marc Antony and Cleopatra in Alexandria led him to take on the name of Augustus Caesar. Interestingly, the month of July was named after Julius Caesar (it was previously called Quintilis), and since Augustus’ victory happened in Alexandria on the 8th month of the year, that month was renamed from Sextilis to August to commemorate Augustus’ victory. So we owe the name of the month of August to the outcome of a battle in Alexandria over 2,000 years ago.

From there, the city of Alexandria suffered various ups and downs and embroiled in several regional conflicts. In 365 AD the city was devastated by a tsunami resulting from an earthquake on the nearby island of Crete, and in 391 the Christian Pope Theophilus ordered all pagan monuments destroyed, further wreaking havoc on the city’s architectural history. Earthquakes in the early 14th century leveled the historic lighthouse.

To add insult to injury, when the Muslim armies conquered Egypt in the 7th century, they opted out of Alexandria and decided to rule the country from a city farther inland on the banks of the Nile, Cairo. Jilted Alexandria entered its period of greatest decline.

In 1798, eager to fight the British but without a navy to do so at sea, French General Napoleon (prior to becoming Emperor) set off to conquer Egypt from the British, although no one is entirely sure what military objective other than a desire to win something this accomplished. Be that as it may, Napoleon’s expedition also included 167 scientists, whose discoveries after landing in Alexandria included the Rosetta Stone–a landmark archeological event which led to the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The British recaptured Alexandria a few years later.

Alexandria’s renaissance then began in earnest, with substantial rebuilding from 1810 to 1850, and it soon reclaimed its historical status as one of the Mediterranean’s busiest ports. By World War 2 Alexandria was a hotbed of international intrigue, with 40% of the city’s 300,000 inhabitants non-Egyptian and the British Secret Service operating out of the famous Cecil Hotel (later immortalized in writer Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet).

Today, the 4 million strong city of Alexandria is sometimes referred to as the “greatest historical city with the least to show for it,” and in certain respects this is largely true. Unlike many other Mediterranean cities, little of ancient times has survived to this day, and there’s not all that much material for postcards.

But that is also underestimating the inherent beauty and appeal of the city. With a pretty bay, scenic corniche, and a wonderful collection of colonial-era coffee shops, the city is a peaceful and captivating delight, especially compared to the congestion and hubbub of downtown Cairo or the oppressive heat of the desert. And with a new state-of-the art library and cultural center to usher in the millenium, Alexandria looks poised to reclaim its presence on the world cultural stage.

Alexandria has seen a lot of history, a lot of which touches our lives to this day. Sitting at a seaside coffee shop overlooking the blue waters of the Mediterranean, one can’t help but feel both intrigued by its rich past and seduced by its promising future.

A Little Alexandria

Alexandria is, in many respects, a modern Mediterranean city. But in the old Turkish neighborhood of Anfushi, the Alex of old still breathes its ancient vibes…

Searching for Moses

The possibility that I might freeze to death in Egypt is not an eventuality that I had considered.

Egypt=desert=hot is the common assumption, and largely backed by my own experience in 2003 during a scorching expedition through the Sahara.

So you can imagine my surprise when the equation at the foot of Mt. Sinai at 2:00am changed to Egypt=desert=bone-chilling wind that will cut right through you, numb your limbs, and set you shivering like a leaf riding a jackhammer.

Despite my woeful unpreparedness for the cold, the idea was sound: climb the 7,500ft. Mt. Sinai by moonlight and contemplate history from the peak by the magical soft light of sunrise.

Well.

The bitter cold wind aside, the climb was not particularly difficult. For me, or any other reasonably normal person. Guided by a local Bedouin named Mohammed, our little climbing group also included a chain-smoking Argentinian couple who, clearly, probably huffed and puffed and found themselves winded by a trek from their bedroom to their bathroom back at home. A burning bush smoking between their lips, this was their Egyptian Everest.

As we waited at one point for them to wheeze up to us, I looked up on a higher ridge and wished, for the millionth time, that my eyes were a camera. Or, more specifically, one that could export in JPG format directly to my laptop.

There, above us on the edge of a craggy cliff, three camels made their procession along the ridge, completely backlit by a resplendently white full moon directly behind them. The stuff of dreams.

The actual view from the top, sunrise or no sunrise, is nothing to write home about. I can see how a geologist might take pleasure in a landscape of dry, barren, old and crumbly looking rocky peaks, but postcard material this is not. The fact that I feared I might freeze into a human stalagti right there on the peak did nothing to improve it.

No matter. The point of the climb is not visual. It is about history, and religious significance.

Most of us are familiar with the story of Moses:

Hidden as a child when the Pharaoh ordered the death of all Hebrew newborns, Moses’ mother cast him adrift around 1390 BC on a basket on the Nile, where he floated down and was found by the Pharaoh’s daughter. Raised into the royal family as a brother to Ramses (the future Pharaoh), Moses got himself into trouble by killing an Egyptian slave master that was beating a fellow Hebrew.

Moses escaped to the Sinai peninsula and raised sheep for the next forty years. One day, as he was leading his flock around Mt. Sinai (yes, this Mt. Sinai), Moses saw a burning bush, through which God talked to him and told him to go free his (Israelite) people from slavery in Egypt.

The Pharaoh was not swayed by Moses’ request to let his people go or by some of his abilitities (turning his staff into a serpent, changing a river to blood, etc.), so God set loose the ten plagues upon Egypt, including blood, frogs, gnats, flies, diseased livestock, boils, hail and fire, locusts, darkness and finally the death of all Egyptian first-born sons, including the Pharaoh’s (but not the Hebrews’ sons, an event now commemorated by Jews as Passover).

The latter plague finally worked, and the Pharaoh released the Israelite slaves from Egypt in what is now known as the Exodus. The Pharaoh later changed his mind and pursued the Jews with chariots, but Moses parted the Red Sea, allowing the Jews to cross but not the Egyptians. As part of their journey through the desert, Moses returned to Mt. Sinai, where God provided him and the Jewish people with the Ten Commandments, and forty years after they had left Egypt the Jews finally returned to their ancestral home in Israel.

So from that perspective, the geographical visuals on Mt. Sinai pale compared to the religious significance of the location. It is, in fact, a fairly important pilgrimage destination, with a monastery at the foot of the mountain and hundreds of pilgrims from a diverse range of congregations making the climb every day.

There is still ongoing academic debate as to whether Moses was a real historical figure, whether Mt. Sinai is actually the same mountain that is referenced in his story, and the exact circumstances surrounding the Jewish exodus from Egypt. But that is almost beside the point.

Regardless of the actual events some 3,000+ years ago, the fact is that Moses is a common, central figure in three of the five major world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. That means he’s a central tenet of belief for some 5 billion people in the world.

Moses is the greatest prophet in Judaism, mentioned more in Christianity’s New Testament than any other Old Testament figure, and likewise mentioned more often in the Koran than any other individual. It is in fact quite an amazing point of shared belief, especially given how violently these three religions have clashed over the centuries. And perhaps, one day, he will form the basis of a rapprochement (or at least a greater mutual respect) between these same religions.

So while I shivered my way up a ridiculously cold mount (did I mention someone found a handful of snow in the shade of a rock?), lost sensation in my limbs during an uneventful sunrise entirely obscured by clouds, and looked out over rather mundane desert mountain landscape, I also pondered over ancient Egyptian and religious history and marveled at the events that may have happened in this same place thousands of years ago that still help define the shape of our world events today.

West Africa Journey Map

An overview of the route I traveled through West Africa, from Dakar in Senegal, east into Mali, then south through Burkina Faso and ending in Accra, Ghana.

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Five Books in Africa

Similar to my goal to read a number of Indian books while on the Indian subcontinent, I also resolved to read some quality books devoted to sub-Saharan Africa.

Here are my top five:

The Power of One – If I had to make a Top 10 list of my all-time favorite novels, this book would without question feature prominently on it. It’s one of the few novels I’ve enjoyed so much that I’ve read it twice, the story of a young English boy growing up and overcoming obstacles in the unstable era of WWII South Africa. A brilliant story (but whatever you do, don’t read the disappointing sequel).

The Poisonwood Bible – What happens when a naive and dangerously idealistic missionary moves from the American south to the remote post-colonial rural Congo in the early 60s with his wife and four daughters? A  tragic clash of cultures. Told through the alternating viewpoints of the four daughters, this fascinating story also provides a remarkable glimpse into daily life in remote African villages.

Half of a Yellow Sun – Told through the viewpoint of five different characters, this story unfolds during the tragic Nigerian-Biafran War of 1967-1970. A compelling story that provides both important historical context to the war (the appalling humanitarian toll in this war would lead to the creation of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders) and to the dramatic way in which each person’s life was altered by the events.

While the above three are novels with a strong historical element, the following two are real, personal accounts:

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier – Swept into Sierra Leone’s civil war at 12, his entire family killed, Ishmael retells his harrowing flight from war, eventual brutal participation in it as a young drug-fueled soldier, and his painful and difficult journey back to “normal” life. A moving and haunting account.

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust – The horrors of the Rwandan genocide are appalling on just about any level, not the least of which because they were largely preventable. This moving personal account by Immaculee, a young woman who savagely lost her entire family to the war, however, provides a dose of inspiration next to the shock and senseless brutality of the mass slaughter, a personal odyssey of discovering and deepening of her faith through the most difficult of times.

Accra, Ghana, Africa

I don’t know how people handle the hot season in Ghana. Even at night, as soon as you finish taking a shower you’re already sweating 30 seconds later. And during the day…the heat is like a relentlessly hot vice squeezing you into the mostly illusory relief of the shade, with barely the will to lie down in a sweaty torpor to distantly pray for an errant breeze.

A Day on the Run

When I woke up this morning, I had no idea that I was embarking on a day of criminal acts.

It all started out innocently enough, as such things usually do. I had made several friends at the guest house where I was staying in Accra, and hired a car to take us out to see some of Ghana’s sights for the day.

At first, the driver refused to seat five of us in his tiny subcompact. With him, that made six, and if you’ve ever tried to squeeze four adults into the narrow backseat of a tiny little car, I’m sure you can appreciate the logistical challenge.

Nevertheless, I laughed it off and insisted. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and after my transportation experiences in Mali, if I had enough space to wiggle just one little finger I considered it a genuine luxury. I talked and reassured and bullied the driver into it.

So, a car full of white sardines, off we went.

It’s a two-hour drive from Accra to the other prominent coastal city, Cape Coast. My first clue that something wasn’t going to go as planned came about 30 minutes in, at a toll on the outskirts of Accra.

The driver stopped the car on the side, and said I should walk across the toll and he would pick me up on the other side. The car was only rated for 5 people, and otherwise he would get arrested. Oops. This little detail was news to me.

Nevertheless, still in the Senegal/Mali/Burkina mindset, where you could also toss in two people in the trunk and hang a few more off the roof with nary a second thought, I didn’t take this particularly seriously.

Until the police officer stopped me on the side of the road, of course.

“You! Stop!!” he commanded. Not in a casual, friendly way. More in the “oh boy am I pissed and wait ’til I get my hands on you” kind of way.

“Why are you walking?” he barked.
“I like to walk,” I responded.
“Why are you walking here?”
“It’s a beautiful day,” I responded. “Nice scenery.”

This did not impress him in the least. He actually got quite worked up.

“I saw you get out of the car!!” he yelled. “Car is too full and you try to walk and lie to police!”

Then he points to the car waiting a couple hundred meters up the road.

“Go get the driver!” he barked. “Bring him for questioning.”

Uh-oh.

One of the passengers was walking back to see what was going on and I quickly waved her off. The less people involved, the better.

Time to change tacks. I grabbed the officer by the arm and gently led him away from his gang of machine-gun wielding foot soldiers. This is entirely my fault, I began. We’re just ignorant tourists so eager to see more of the beautiful country of Ghana…

After the requisite talk and a little gift on my part to support the absolutely outstanding work that he and his officers were doing to secure the roads of this country, I was free to go.

Our driver was quite nervous when I returned to the car, but I explained to him that I had taken care of it and that we could continue. I also told him that if there was another checkpoint to let me do the talking, instead of trying this ridiculous tactic of trying to sneak one person across on foot.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but not fifteen minutes later, we started coming up on a police checkpoint in the middle of the road. Police cars and trucks on either side, and officers with machine guns everywhere.

This is when our driver did one of the stupidest things ever. He floored it. Panicked that he would be arrested for carrying too many passengers, he pressed down on the accelerator and tried to hurtle through the checkpoint. #Q$%#@$!!!

I yelled at him to slow down, to no avail. His mind had switched off.

The sight of police officers springing to attention and waving him down vigorously with their guns snapped him back to reality, and he pulled over.

The officer that came up to the door was furious, and he ordered the driver out of the car immediately. As he exited, he turned to me in a voice cracked by fear and said “Gabriel, help me, I’m in big trouble.” No kidding.

The officer yelled at him. Told him he was sending him to court that very instant, and that the car was impounded. The driver pleaded and wailed and groveled. I tried to reason with the officer as well, but he was having none of it. This guy was very, very pissed off. Frankly, understandably so. Who in God’s name tries to rabbit through a police checkpoint?

We had an impassioned exchange for a good ten minutes, our driver getting more and more desperate, practically babbling. Finally, I grabbed the driver, pushed him around, and yelled at him. Told him that what he’d done was stupid and foolish and what was he thinking and that the officer was right and that he should shut up.

Then, I turned to the officer and apologized for the driver’s terrible behavior and promised him that I would personally see to it that he never did such a thing again. The driver had already tried to bribe the officer, which had only seemed to further inflame him, so I appealed instead to his kindness and simply asked that he find in his heart, as an upstanding religious man, to forgive. That clicked, and a hefty fine later, he let us go.

So you can imagine our joy when we came upon a third police checkpoint.

This time, I got out of the car to talk to the officer first, and warmly shook his hand by way of introduction. He pointed at the car and stated that it was carrying 6 people, when it only had officially had capacity for 5.

Of course, I responded with a big smile. But we’re all very skinny white people.

He burst out laughing at that one, and with a friendly bill in a handshake he let us go with a chuckle.

Which is how, on my last day in Ghana, I bribed three different police officers in less than three hours.

Elmina Castle

A few shots from the Ghanaian slave trading fort of Elmina, originally built by the Portuguese in 1482 and subsequently part of the Dutch slave trade from 1637 on. A depot for slaves captured further inland by coastal tribes, hundreds of thousands of Africans transited through these walls en route to the colonies of the New World.