Destination: Africa
Kabylia, Algeria
by Ben Keene | 06.23.06 | 12:37 PM ET
Coordinates: 36 40 N 4 55 E
Number of provinces included: 8
As a descriptive category, world music succeeds in being a particularly vague label for such a wide range of sound. The musical styles and traditions rooted in specific places usually have more meaningful names. Kabylia, for example, a small region along Algeria’s Mediterranean Coast between the cities of Algiers and Skikda, is home to an eclectic type of folk music called yal. The fiercely independent Berber people living in Kabylia developed it by blending rhythms and instrumentation to produce something similar to rai, a more familiar type of Algerian music. This mountainous, rather isolated part of Africa’s second largest country is divided into two sections by the Sahel-Soumman valley.
—.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.
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Yahoo! BuzzNo. 1: “Arabian Sands” by Wilfred Thesiger
by Frank Bures | 05.31.06 | 12:14 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1959
Territory covered: Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Arabian Penninsula (now Yemen, Oman, Saudia Arabia, United Arab Emirates)
No. 4: “The Soccer War” by Ryszard Kapuściński
by Frank Bures | 05.28.06 | 8:34 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1978
Territory covered: Africa, Central America, Cyprus and Israel
No. 5: “No Mercy: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo” by Redmond O’Hanlon
by Michael Shapiro | 05.27.06 | 7:41 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1997
Territory covered: Central Africa
No. 6: ‘North of South’ by Shiva Naipaul
by Frank Bures | 05.26.06 | 9:18 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1978
Territory covered: Kenya and Tanzania
Report: Passenger on Virgin Atlantic Flight Had Ebola Virus
by Michael Yessis | 05.21.06 | 4:41 PM ET
The Mirror reports that a 38-year-old passenger on a flight from Johannesburg to London suffered a “violent fit” and subsequently died from the deadly Ebola virus. “Virgin Atlantic cabin crew who came into contact with the woman have been told to monitor their health,” writes Stephen Moyes. “One said: ‘We are now terrified what we may have caught.’”
Forget Hollywood. How About Nollywood?
by Jim Benning | 05.20.06 | 12:34 PM ET
What’s Nollywood? As World Hum books editor Frank Bures reports in today’s Los Angeles Times, it’s Nigeria’s thriving film industry, “which, in terms of sheer numbers of movies made, has grown bigger than either Hollywood or Bollywood—with estimates of 500 to 1,500 new films being shot each year.” Bures was recently in Nigeria, and his vivid story takes readers inside Lagos video shops and explores how the low-budget films are made.
No. 22: “When the Going was Good” by Evelyn Waugh
by Frank Bures | 05.10.06 | 7:15 AM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1947
Territory covered: Ethiopia, Yemen, East Africa, Guyana and Brazil
In the first part of the 20th century, Evelyn Waugh was one of a handful of bright young writers who headed off into the wild world to propel the genre of travel writing forward. “We turned our backs on civilization,” Waugh wrote of himself, Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, whose early death Waugh mourned. “From 1928 to 1937,” he wrote, “I had no fixed home and no possessions which would not conveniently go on a porter’s barrow. I traveled continuously, in England and abroad.” Armed with trunkloads of wit, an eye for characters and the cocksure attitude of the imperialist he was, Waugh headed to Ethiopia, Yemen, East Africa, Guyana and Brazil. The result was several travel books that went out of print. But the author pulled long excerpts from them, which were reprinted in When the Going was Good. Each is essentially a short travel book itself, including one about the coronation of Haile Selassie and Waugh’s attempt to travel from Guyana to Brazil. It all has a carefree feeling, as Waugh himself admitted. “I never aspired to be a great traveler,” he wrote, “I was simply a young man, typical of my age; we traveled as a matter of course. I rejoice that I went when the going was good.”
No. 26: “Baghdad Without a Map” by Tony Horwitz
by Rolf Potts | 05.06.06 | 1:30 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1991
Territory covered: The Middle East
The Middle East is a region that is constantly in the news, though amidst all the headlines and analysis coming from the area, it is rare that we ever learn about the lives of the people who dwell there. Published shortly after the beginning (and rapid end) of the first Gulf War, Baghdad Without a Map collects Horwitz’s dispatches from places like Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and Sudan to paint a multi-faceted human face on a region that is too often obscured by crisis-driven news stories. Indeed, the reader can’t help but consider the contradictions of the Middle East when Horwitz chats with an Iranian protester who—in-between chants of “Death to America!”—claims that his dream has always been to visit Disneyland and “take my children on the tea-cup ride.” Serious, funny and empathetic at the same time, Horwitz uses simple tales (shopping for a popular stimulant in Yemen, for instance, or attending a belly-dancing gig in Egypt) to introduce us to hospitable people whose lives are being shaped by old social forces (religion, politics, poverty) as well as new ones (modernity, media, globalization).
No. 27: “The Size of the World” by Jeff Greenwald
by Michael Shapiro | 05.05.06 | 1:22 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1997
Territory covered: Latin America, Asia, Africa
In 1994, to commemorate his 40th birthday, Jeff Greenwald decides to travel around the world without getting on an airplane. As the date approaches, he wonders if he should cancel the trip and focus on his magazine writing. But then he realizes that freelancing has become a “dead end” where “once-celebrated word wranglers on dark corners moon about their Precambrian cover stories for Esquire while they suck Night Train from brown paper bags.” So he places a personal ad seeking a female companion for the trip. He meets eight candidates, one at a time, at a Chinese restaurant, “a bow to the old Jewish proverb that you can learn everything you need to know about someone by ordering Chinese food with them.” One candidate looks promising till she blows her nose into the last mu-shu pancake. Then an old flame of Greenwald’s agrees to go. The couple moves by bus, boat and train, and after his companion has to leave, Greenwald completes the nine-month journey on his own. He has riveting encounters with the famous, such as Paul Bowles in Tangier, and with ordinary people, including Tibetans struggling for basic rights. Greenwald’s New York upbringing is evident in his savvy maneuvering at border crossings and in his sharp-edged humor. Included in the book are dispatches he filed for Global Network Navigator, an early online magazine that published Greenwald’s essays just hours after he wrote them. In a 1996 interview, Greenwald told me: “I had this sense of being almost on fire, that the excitement and heat of my journey was something I could broadcast in no time at all. It was a very giddy feeling.” Fortunately for readers, the heat of the journey still resonates on the printed page.
No. 28: “Facing the Congo” by Jeffrey Tayler
by Rolf Potts | 05.04.06 | 12:29 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 2000
Territory covered: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central Africa
Though “adventure” travel writing has come to the point where it often blurs with extreme sports coverage, Tayler’s chronicle of his 1995 pirogue trip down the Congo River proves that the most engrossing adventure tales don’t involve corporate sponsors and television crews. Frustrated with a dead-end life as a Moscow-based expatriate, the author travels to what was then Zaire to re-create British explorer Henry Stanley’s trip down the legendary Central African river in a dugout canoe. Tayler’s underlying impetus for the journey is to find meaning in his life by testing its limits—which proves to be no problem, as the author continually faces smothering heat, corrupt soldiers, lawlessness, hunger, swarms of insects, and a creeping sense of fear. Though Tayler occasionally illuminates moments of natural beauty, he never glosses over the reality of his journey, which is marked by an uncertain relationship with his guide, Desi, and ongoing suspicion from locals who, perhaps understandably, can’t understand why an outsider would want to submit himself to such a dangerous adventure. Drawn into Tayler’s heart of darkness, the reader feels the dread (and slaps at the mosquitoes) as the harrowing journey plays out.
No. 29: “Venture to the Interior” by Laurens van der Post
by Frank Bures | 05.03.06 | 11:40 AM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1952
Territory covered: Malawi
In 1949, while the world was still licking its war wounds, Laurens van der Post set off for the British colony of Nyasaland (now Malawi) to map two mountains still unknown to cartographers. But his account of the trip is no mere expedition tale. Van der Post’s voice is devoid of machismo, even when one of his party members dies. Instead, his venture to the interior is more existential, and he isn’t afraid to muse in the manner of St. Exupery—a refreshing break from much of today’s vapid extreme outdoor culture. “I have always bought as little and made as few arrangements as possible,” he writes. The book has a resonance beyond its clean, quiet prose—a kind of melancholy self-reflection. In one instance, he asks, “Has there been another age that, knowing so clearly the right things to do, has so consistently done the wrong ones?” Reading this book is certainly one of the right ones.
Nicholas Kristof Goes to mtvU
by Michael Yessis | 04.04.06 | 1:20 PM ET
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof continues his quest to have travel play a central role in college education by sitting for an interview with mtvU. In the four-plus minute video, Kristof touches on his own student travels and his Win a Trip with Nick Kristof contest, and is shown in some far-flung locale eating cocktail de fruit directly from a tin, using the bent lid as a taco shell-shaped spoon. The video can be reached by scrolling down mtvU’s home page.
“Translating Genocide”: MTV Goes to Africa
by Michael Yessis | 03.11.06 | 6:19 PM ET
Looks like MTV beat Nicholas Kristof to the punch. Sunday at 11 a.m. ET it debuts Translating Genocide, a documentary featuring three college students who, after being denied entrance to Darfur, travel to Chad to report on regional violence and human rights abuses. In a review in today’s New York Times, Ned Martel writes that the program “can’t be accused of an encyclopedic understanding of the crisis, nor does it instill a this-could-happen-to-you fear. But genuine emotions are captured on tape as respectful visitors empathize with traumatized refugees. ‘The world really is kind of small,’ one of the students says, mid-epiphany about mutual tastes in music.”
Lake Victoria
by Ben Keene | 02.17.06 | 1:05 PM ET
Area: 26,564 sq. mi. (68,800 sq. km)
Coordinates: 1 0 S 33 0 E
The shriveling Aral Sea made the news first, followed soon by Lake Chad, which, in 2001, researchers reported had shrunk to 1/20th of its former size. According to the International Rivers Network (IRN), a nonprofit organization monitoring rivers and their watersheds worldwide, Lake Victoria’s water level has also dropped sharply in recent years, reaching its lowest point since 1951. Lake Victoria is the largest such body of water on the African continent and the source of the Nile, and this finding certainly has seriously implications for some 30 million people in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda who rely on its resource. The study cited by IRN contends that human activity, namely the building of a large dam, and drought conditions have contributed to the receding shoreline.
—.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.