Kaplan, Robert D. - The Ends of the Earth

383 Pages·2016·1.46 MB·English

by  Kaplan Robert D

The Ends
of the Earth

F T T
ROM OGO TO URKMENISTAN,
F I C
ROM RAN TO AMBODIA –
J F A
A OURNEY TO THE RONTIERS OF NARCHY

Robert D. Kaplan
Robert D. Kaplan is a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly and the author
of four previous books on travel and foreign affairs, including Balkan Ghosts: A
Journey Through History, chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one
of the best books of 1993. His articles of the 1980s and early 1990s were the first
by an American writer to warn of the coming cataclysm in the Balkans. His book
The Arabists was chosen by The New York Times as a “notable book” of 1993.
His two previous books were set in war-torn Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa.
He has traveled in nearly seventy countries and now lives in Massachusetts.
To Dick Hoagland, Ernest Latham, Kiki Munsht and Graham Miller:
three diplomats and a relief worker
His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees
one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it
in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got
caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.
This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned,
while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call
progress.

—WALTER BENJAMIN, in Illuminations
writing about the Angel of History

The good geographer is a philosopher.

——CARLETON S. COON, SR.,
Caravan: The Story of the Middle East

Strife is the origin of everything.

——HERACLITUS

We all dwell in one country, O stranger, the world.

——MELEAGER
Preface

JACK LONDON WRITES in Martin Eden that “a reporter’s work is all hack
from morning till night... it is a whirlwind life, the life of the moment, with
neither past nor future...” I have attempted to escape this restriction. In Balkan
Ghosts, an earlier book of mine, completed before the outbreak of the war in
Yugoslavia, I tried to see the present in terms of a difficult and bloody past. In
The Ends of the Earth, I have tried to see the present in terms of the future, on
the whole an ominous one for a significant part of the third world.
This is a travel book. It is concrete to the extent that my ideas arise from
personal experience. It is subjective, given that no two travelers interpret a
people and landscape in the same way. It is idiosyncratic: I spent relatively more
time in Iran than in other places, and the text reflects that. Nor—as a record of
one person’s travels—is it comprehensive: India and China receive less coverage
than they deserve, South America is missing, and so on. From the standpoint of
many backpackers and relief workers, my journey was not arduous. Think of it
as a brief romp through a swath of the globe, in which I try to give personal
meaning to the kinds of issues raised in Paul Kennedy’s Preparing for the
Twenty-first Century.
Though many landscapes are increasingly sullied, that need not spell the
decline of travel writing. It does mean that travel writing must confront the real
world, slums and all, rather than escape into an airbrushed version of a more
rustic past. This book, which folds international studies into a travelogue, is an
attempt at that.
PART I

West Africa:

Back to the Dawn?

Fraudulent identity cards; fake policemen dressed in official uniform; army
troops complicit with gangs of thieves and bandits; forged enrollment for exams;
illegal withdrawal of money orders; fake banknotes; the circulation and sale of
falsified school reports, medical certificates and damaged commodities: all of
this is not only an expression of frenetic trafficking and “arranging.” It is also a
manifestation of the fact that, here, things no longer exist without their parallel.

——ACHILLE MBEMBE AND JANET ROITMAN, writing about ipyos
Cameroon

Africa makes the last circle, navel of the world . . .
——JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
* I *

An Unsentimental Journey

“THE THIEVES ARE very violent here. They will cut you up if you are not
careful,” warned the Liberian woman in fine, lilting English. Night had fallen.
My protectress gripped my arm, then walked me to the hotel. I felt her eyes on
me—two welcoming planets appearing out of the void. The little feet of a baby,
wrapped snugly around her back, bobbed at her sides.
Here, on this road of decayed and oxidized red rock called laterite, was the
earth without subtlety: an oppressively hot, in ways hostile, planet; seething with
fecundity and—it seemed to a Northerner—too much of it. But tropical
abundance is not the blessing many travelers believe: Tropical soils are not that
fertile, and quick growth by no means releases man from labor. At the equator
nature is a terrifying face from which humankind cannot separate itself.
I was in the lower end of that great bulge of Africa that juts out into the
Atlantic, far from anywhere familiar. The closest point in Europe lay two
thousand miles across the Sahara Desert to the north. The closest point in South
America lay almost twenty-five hundred miles across the ocean to the southwest.
North America was five thousand miles to the northwest. The town of Danane,
in the western Ivory Coast, near the borders of Liberia and Guinea, is a good
place from which to begin a tour of the earth at the end of the twentieth century,
a time when politics are increasingly shaped by the physical environment. A
brief moment marked by the Industrial Revolution, which gave humankind a
chance to defend itself somewhat from nature, may be closing. Population
growth, along with migration that is tied to soil degradation, means we won’t
hereafter be able to control the spread of disease as we have been doing for the
past 150 years. Viruses luxuriating in Africa may constitute a basic risk to
humanity. In the twenty-first century, Africa, like Europe in the twentieth, will
have to be confronted. In my rucksack I carried a letter from a friend, a U.S.
diplomat in the region. He writes:
“The greatest threat to our value system comes from Africa. Can we continue
to believe in universal principles as Africa declines to levels better described by
Dante than by development economists? Our domestic attitudes on race and
ethnicity suffer as Africa becomes a continent-wide ‘Wreck of the Medusa.’”

* * *

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of space, where there is no gravity, there is also
no up or down. The maps of the world that show north as up are not necessarily
objective. Scan the map with the South Pole on top and you see the world
entirely differently. The Mediterranean basin is no longer the focal point, lost, as
it is, near the bottom of the globe. North America loses its continental width—
and thus its majesty—as it narrows northward into the atrophied limb of Central
America toward the center of your field of vision. South America and Africa
stand out. But South America keeps narrowing toward the Antarctic nothingness
at the top, insufficiently connected to other continental bodies.
Africa, alas, is the inescapable center: Equidistant between the South and North
poles, lying flat across the equator, with the earth’s warmest climate, hospitable
to the emergence of life in countless forms—three quarters of its surface lies
within the tropics. Africa looms large in the middle of the vision field, connected
to Eurasia through the Middle East. This map, with south at the top, shows why
humankind emerged in Africa, why it was from Africa that our species may have
begun the settlement of the planet. Africa is the mother continent to which we all
ultimately belong, from where human beings acquired their deepest genetic
traits. “We are all Africans under the skin,” says anthropologist Christopher
Stringer. Africa is nature writ large. As Ben Okri, a Nigerian novelist and poet,
writes:

We are the miracles that God made
To taste the bitter fruit of Time.

“This hotel is good,” the Liberian woman told me. “They lock the gate at
night.”

* * *

“CARTOGRAPHY DEPLOYS ITS vocabulary... so that it embodies a
systematic social inequality. The distinctions of class and power are engineered,
reified and legitimated in the map.... The rule seems to be ‘the more powerful,
the more prominent.’ To those who have strength in the world shall be added the
strength of the map,” writes the late University of Chicago geographer J. Brian
Harley. Maps, so seemingly objective, are actually propaganda. They represent
the lowest common denominator of the conventional wisdom.
But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong?
What if the Mediterranean basin is no longer the center of civilization? What if
there are really not fifty-odd nations in Africa as the maps suggest—what if
there are only six, or seven, or eight real nations on that continent? Or, instead of
nations, several hundred tribal entities? What if the distance between the hotel in
Danane to which I had just been directed and a town over the border in Guinea
or Liberia, though only forty miles on the map, was really greater in terms of
time than the distance between New York and St. Louis? What if the
shantytowns and bidonvilles sprouting up around the globe that do not appear on
any maps are far more important to the future of civilization than many of the
downtowns and prosperous suburbs that do appear on maps? What if the
territory held by guerrilla armies and urban mafias—territory that is never shown
on maps—is more significant than the territory claimed by many recognized
states? What if Africa is even farther away from North America and Europe than
the maps indicate, but more important to our past and future than Europe or
North America?
The first act of geography is measurement. I have tried to learn by actual travel
and experience just how far places are from each other, where the borders really
are and where they aren’t, where the real terra incognita is. It was Claudius
Ptolemy, the second century A.D. Greek geographer, who first cautioned against
exaggerating the importance of Europe and the West on the map. Thus, to map
the earth as the twenty-first century approaches, I would begin in Africa, the
birthplace of humankind. I would, more or less, trace our species’ likely
trajectory of planetary settlement from Africa across the Near East into the
Indian subcontinent and, ultimately, Southeast Asia.”
I thought of my wanderings in almost geological terms. As John McPhee set
out to do in Basin and Range—mapping “deep time” in a journey that mocked
the “unnatural subdivision [s] of the globe... framed in straight lines”—I wanted
to map the future, perhaps the “deep future,” by ignoring what was legally and
officially there and, instead, touching, feeling, and smelling what was really
there.
I had many questions in my head, and many plans. The nineteenth-century
French geographer Elisee Reclus writes: “Each period in the life of mankind
corresponds to a change in its environment. It is the inequality of planetary traits
that created the diversity of human history.” My goal was to see humanity in
each locale as literally an outgrowth of the terrain and climate in which it was