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An African Journey

Stephens family photo

For 30 days in January, Wade Stephens III of Tampa, right, and his 20-year-old daughter, Annie, center, traveled in North Africa and the Horn of Africa.

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By WADE STEPHENS III Special to the Tribune

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 17, 2008

For 30 days in January, Wade Stephens III and his 20-year-old daughter, Annie, traveled in North Africa and the Horn of Africa. They shared writing, audio and photography duties as they absorbed the culture conflicts in Egypt, Tunisia, the Sinai, Ethiopia and unfolding events in Gaza, Kenya and Somalia. Annie Stephens also did an independent study project for her college's international studies curriculum.

SOUTHERN SINAI - The whoosh that passed by was either the old man's gasp for air on the craggy goat trail to the top of Mount Sinai; a gust of wind whining across the granite crest of the mountain where the Lord talked to Moses; or the sound of a 7.6 mm round from the assault rifle of a Bedouin hashish smuggler. The January day had been that way.

"What am I going to tell mom?" asked the daughter on an independent study assignment from her Kentucky college.

"Not the truth!" said the old-man father, along to keep things safe.

It was the smugglers. There had been a shootout with Egyptian soldiers on patrol from their post at the roadblock on the new blacktop highway running westward from St. Catherine's monastery 50 miles to the Gulf of Suez.

The two American trekkers had taken the road to St. Catherine's at the base of the mountain where Moses spent 40 days and 40 nights talking with God about how to get his troubled tribe to the "land of milk and honey," as the Book of Exodus put it. Today it's the land of blood and gunpowder:

"Salah?" the old man from Tampa asked his Egyptian driver.

"Are you asking him how unsafe it is?" said the student in her steady voice.

"Salah?" the father asked again.

"They say it is up to us. But if we go, the captain says we must go now, we must not use lights, we must not stop and we must go fast," Salah said. A crescent moon had risen. The Islamic New Year would begin as soon as the sun set - truly, two positive signs from the Prophet.

The father thought about the cautions as his daughter looked at him. Twilight was falling. The progressive colors of yellow to blue to purple to black cast shadows on the hills behind which the Bedouin lived in a no-man's land,

"Ok, Salah, go now!" he decided. The exhaust made a whooshing sound as the student and old man went past the soldiers dressed in black with their black automatic weapons slung at their sides.

None Of The Soldiers Returned

ST. CATHERINE'S MONASTERY, Sinai - This is the land described in the Book of Exodus as "that great and terrible wilderness." It is 24,000 square miles of nothing in which the Israelites wandered a peninsula of red sand wadies, volcanic hills and pyrogenic mountains built by the Great Rift Valley. The tectonic twisting is still opening the bottom of the Red Sea. It continues to push Asia away from Africa, a detachment that makes Egypt the rare nation positioned on two continents. The amount of yearly rain would fill half a coffee cup.

It is a near-perfect isosceles triangle that since the Early Bronze Age Christian extremists, Jewish zealots and Muslim jihadists have invaded but not conquered. Only the Bedouin control things.

Last year 20 Egyptian soldiers went behind the hills that lined our highway. They were in pursuit of smugglers who drove their Toyota trucks with differentials that let Bedouins plow through the deep sand of the wadis as the wheels of Egyptian jeeps grind in up to their axels. Then the ambush began. In this fight, Egyptian searchers found 20 bodies.

It would be that type of trek for a month through Muslim and Christian countries across north and east Africa. There is a proxy war in Somalia where Ethiopian soldiers are backed by the United States to depose an Islamic government. Kenya is burning because a rigged election set amok ethnic cleansing in what was a model, prosperous nation. Palestinians in Gaza blew down a section of the metal wall that is their border with Egypt because Israeli forces had blocked food and energy supplies. Israel did not like the Kassam rockets launched into Israel by Hamas. We would see an antiquated synagogue on a Tunisian resort island where al-Qaida blew up 21 people to scare tourists, and kill infidel Jews. Bread riots began in Cairo streets as the start of world discontent and fear of rising food prices. Bread has tripled in cost in Egypt. Rice is up by 60 per cent. Corn is going to bio-fuels.

As this is read in May in Tampa, the World Bank, the African Union, the United Nations, the European Union, scores of think tanks and world media were warning that the precipitous rise in the cost of basic food threatens 60 countries and 60 million people. Good grief. Good God. Take the even or take the odd. Another big problem.

Contrasts In The Land Of Lotus Eaters

JERBA - On this Tunisian island that Homer's Odyssey called the Land of the Lotus Eaters, the seducers of Ulysses' crew, a small portion of Jerba's Jewish community remains but no longer is a vital part of the island's ethnic makeup. But, for al-Qaida, any Jew is worth killing. Tunisian police were unable to detect Osama bin Laden's crew before it blew up a synagogue in 2002, killing 21. Not far from the house of worship is the village of Ajim, where the house of Obi-Wan Kenobi remains from the set of a Star Wars movie.

Other contrasts startle the trekkers. The trekker's Tunisian driver, Elyes, with black ponytail, sunglasses and Marlon Brando motorcycle jacket, wears a wedding ring to keep at bay the European women who, he says, want to pay his car fee with sex. But these European females are not the indigenous Berber women with saffron skin wrapped in cream-striped textiles topped with broad pale straw hats that walk gracefully through the heat and sparse vegetation past whitewashed domed buildings in town squares.

The student, alone in search of a sunset worthy of van Gogh, became misdirected among a maze of hotel back gates. A young French-speaking Arab handed over two dinars for a taxi, and in return wanted to sleep with her, she told her father. But she said she was Swedish and didn't speak French, so thanks and good-bye came out in English. Oops, but language usage was about to get funnier.

The pasta for dinner was imported from Italy but the shrimp was fresh from Jerba waters, served in a hotel owned by French investors in a liberal Arab country, all eaten while watching an American movie with Arabic subtitles and Pierce Brosnan's and Woody Harrelson's lips moving to English vowels but with Italian coming out.

"Good night," said the student, exhaling from the effort of a day that began 16 hours ago and hundreds of miles away.

The student had been on a tour of the ruins of Carthage, from which Hannibal and his elephants set out for the Swiss Alps and a successful invasion of Italy in 216 B.C. The old man and she had walked under observation but without challenge next to the white wall of the Ben Ali's presidential palace adjacent to the 2,000-year-old ruins of Roman baths. There was the Bardo Museum, where mosaics chart Tunisia's founding in 1100 B.C. by the great seafaring Phoenician explorers.

They were followed by invasions of Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs from the east in the 7th century bringing Islam and today's 98 percent Sunni Muslim population, Spanish Reconquistas, from Andalusia, Ottomans and, finally, a French intrusion in the 1880s to stem Italian influence.

This 3,000-year sequence illustrates the confrontation to indigenous cultures time and again from the expansionist forces of nationalism in pursuit of commerce and geopolitical advantage. (It was called "Manifest Destiny" in 19th-century America.)

They went quickly and easily between the sites traveling on the interconnected Metro Leger rail and bus lines that would make transit-confounded Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio want to invade, too. Then there was a one-hour flight to the place the U.S. Department of State's online travelers' advisory warned had been "recently the location of an al-Qaida bombing."

Road To Awasa

AWASA, Ethiopia - You could play cards on top of the gharpha trees, but they were put to better use casting shade on the hot tan sand where the two American trekkers stood looking at 20 camel legs. A boy urchin had gathered stones from beside the modern highway they had taken in the five-hour, 150-mile drive south from Addis Ababa. He wore a burlap cloth waist to knee. His skin was thick with dust.

"What's that little boy doing?" asked the daughter. The boy was coming toward the father. He was figuring the dynamics of the carnage of the traffic accident that had killed five camels and demolished two Japanese-made freight trucks, the short, stubby, rough and tough warthog trucks that are the backbone of commerce here.

The poverty-stricken economy of Ethiopia is based on agriculture. Half of its Gross Domestic Product, 80 per cent of its exports and 80 per cent of its employment come from agriculture production. The trekkers and their driver, Addis, had driven past an estimated 650 pale green peaked greenhouses cheek-by-jowl filled with growing flowers. In an economic homage to world trade the enterprise is owned by Swiss investors, worked by Ethiopians and its product shipped to India, Italy and Saudi Arabia.

"I think he is throwing pebbles at me," said the old man, watching the child reaching back to deliver a second pitch. This boy descends from people who originated coffee, castor bean and grain sorghum where Man started his migration out of Africa.

"Yes," said Addis. He says "We move?" instead of "Want to leave?" A little circular scar marks his right cheek below his short black hair. He is thin with a happy face and is a Christian. He lives in a country where the CIA World Fact Book assesses the degree of risk of major infectious diseases as "very high".

"We move," Addis said. "He is unhappy you are taking pictures of the camels."

And certainly none of the 11 vaccinations and immunizations would stop what now were rocks bouncing across the blacktop. Of 29 days in four African territories on many a dark walk on dusty roads and through dark alleys, only a banshee hotel worker in Cairo and a throng of Somalis in a tin-roofed refugee camp were as crazed as this small child who the Americans had offended as he sat under the gharpha trees with the dead camels.

Much friendlier was Kebru Omi, owner of the Lake Side Motel that sits a block from Lake Awasa, one in a series of deep cracks that opened and filled with water when the Great Rift Valley gave birth 8 million years ago. He is a Christian, too. He sits in his garden on a black bench atop green grass with a brown cat dragging its broken leg along the ground beneath the morning sun, and a chirping black and red bird on the tall white wall. Nearby a banner hung at a traffic circle next to an Orthodox church. The sign celebrated the New Millennium, an oddity explained that night by a man eating dinner at a nearby table: this country uses a calendar singular in the world: America's December 31, 1999 is Ethiopia's December 31, 2007.

"Oh, I'm a Hillary man," Omi said, prompted by the political talk he had been listening to on CNN just before he and the student walked outside to sit on the black garden bench. "You say you are from South Carolina. I know South Carolina. Yes, yes, there is about to be a quite important primary election there. This is how I know about where you come from."

"What goes on in America is important to us because of U.S. aid," he says. "America is our right hand now so we want to know what goes on there. The U.S. helps with AIDS medicine, which is cheap now, sometimes free. It was very disastrous but now people stay longer."

"Big American companies are good for the country because people get jobs and when American companies invest here other companies feel more comfortable and they will come to Ethiopia," Omi said, looking at his new black SUV parked in the shadows of the trees beside the lake. "Hillary's husband has everything to do with helping her. The economy was good when Clinton was president, so Ethiopians there sent back more money to feed their families."

"What about George Bush?" the student asked. "No more George Bush! No, oh, no, no more. With the Iraq war the economy in the U.S. goes down and Ethiopians working there don't send as much money back," Omi said with a tone.

In early May, the Gallup Poll declared President Bush had the highest disapproval rating of any modern president, even higher than when President Richard Nixon resigned. There was a camel accident on the road to Awasa, but in the garden with a white wall with a purring cat and a chirping bird beside the lake of the Great Rift Valley Omi sees an international train wreck if the upcoming election doesn't change things.

What Exodus Said

The old man sat in the car driving beside the Red Sea back to Cairo reading passages from the Bible. In Exodus 34, Moses had gone to the top of the mountain in the third month after the flight from Egypt with two new tablets to receive the Ten Commandments again. The Lord appeared from his cloud and told Moses: "Take heed to thyself, least thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land goest, least it be for a snare in the midst of thee."

Wade Stephens III is a former newspaperman and is a Tampa mediator. Annie Stephens is a sophomore at Centre College in Kentucky, where she majors in Spanish and International Studies.

For more photos from the Stephens' odyssey, go to TBO.com and click "Opinion" in the dropdown menu under the "News" header in the navigation bar.

Coming Tomorrow

Time in the Muslim quarter of Cairo, Egypt, leads to talks of Jimmy Carter, Osama bin Laden and proper etiquette in a mosque.

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