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National Geographic : 1951 Aug
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The National Geographic Magazine With a silent apology for the intrusion, we set up our cots and spent a pleasant night under a luxurious tin roof. The morning sun of Africa has a way of solving many problems. After a good break fast, we returned to the garage. The mechanic was smiling now, two African boys were busy with wrenches, and the jeep no longer drooped. No, we would not need to send to Abidjan for parts. Our French friend had cannibal ized his own pickup truck, taking leaves from his springs to replace our broken ones. It was a high point in Gallic hospitality, and our jeep was fit for active duty again. The potentially rich Ivory Coast, long a neglected area in the French African empire, is beginning a policy of postwar development. Cotton Mill in the Bush Deep in the savanna bush, north of Bouake, this change shows itself in the form of a modern cotton processing and weaving mill, employing local labor under French management. Its massive, tin-roofed factory buildings are an anomaly on the tropical land scape. The mill winds native-grown cotton into thread, and dyes and weaves it into brightly patterned cloth for distribution throughout French Africa. The mill draws its all-male labor supply from a near-by aboriginal Moslem village. Here a M\oslem elder and his lone assistant were putting the finishing touches to a brand new mosque which, for form and ingenuity in construction, has few equals in West Africa. We came blinking out of the dense forest belt. The Ivory Coast lay behind; this was the Upper Volta, a colony embracing the broad area north of the Gold Coast and south of the big bend of the river Niger. The bush, no longer green and compara tively cool, now shimmered white with dry furnace heat from which there was little escape. Dwindling trees offered occasional shade. Villages were few. This, the game charts said, was elephant* and lion country. But after several days of searching the empty scenery, it seemed to us that most of West Africa's big game had been taken off to the zoos. "The only animals here are on the map," said my wife, with some justification. At that point we almost ran down a baboon. Jaywalking in front of the jeep, a bunch of bananas in its doglike mouth, it vanished into the tall grass. Other baboons came up to race the jeep, diving into the bush and return ing to the open roadside. Antelope walked carelessly through the grass. We saw no lions, but were satisfied.' A few miles south of Bobo Dioulasso, cross- roads of the Upper Volta, the Falaise de Banfora, a broad, rocky escarpment, rises high above the savanna. Here, almost without transition, was a different Africa, a transition in itself to the barren wastes of the Sahara to the north. Almost treeless, supporting little more than scrub grass across its infinite flat lands, this is the subdesert area of blinding heat and minimum humidity. Bobo Dioulasso is the heterogeneous me tropolis of Upper Volta Territory, a city of brown mud and dazzling white stucco which sits on the end of the single-track, narrow gauge, wood-burning railroad from Abidjan. The bulk of its white population is comprised of shopkeepers, traders, truck drivers, restau rateurs, mechanics, and professional men, in addition to a liberal scattering of civil serv ants. As in Abidjan, we saw that a commu nity of French colonials, unlike the British, closely represents a cross section of a like community in metropolitan France. The tall, long-headed, long-gowned natives are Moslem and pagan, with a small number of Christian converts. Their desert-style mud quarters adjoining the "white" city have changed as little in the past hundreds of years as has their manner of dress. Their women set a high standard of dark beauty, their stiff, upcurving braids topped by squares of gaily printed cotton tied in back and draped to give an almost Parisian effect. The immaculate, intricately embroidered gowns of Moslem traders stand out among the grubby loincloths of laborers. The children, as usual, appear in various stages of nakedness. Bobo Dioulasso is, most of all, the city of a thousand balaphons, the ancient percussion instrument from which our xylophone and marimba are derived. Combining sophisticated elements of Afri can rhythm and melody, the balaphon has long been a favorite native instrument throughout the Niger belt. African Jam Session Twenty-four hours a day, with a partial di minuendo during the extreme midday heat, its sometimes tinkling, sometimes clanging tones, often accompanied by the nasal voices of the area, fill the air of Bobo Dioulasso. Cruising the lumpy paths of the native city, we made friends in the hot-box adobe native dance houses, and made our recordings in the less stifling night air outside. This kind of music was a free-for-all African jam session, with each balaphon * See "Africa's Uncaged Elephants," 14 ills., by Quentin Keynes, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE, March, 1951. t See "Roaming Africa's Unfenced Zoos," by W. Robert Moore, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE, March, 1950. 280
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