Angry Wind: Through Muslim Black Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat, and Camel

By Jeffrey Tayler

Hailed by Bill Bryson and the New York Times Book Review as a rising star among travel writers, Jeffrey Tayler penetrates one of the most isolated, forbidding regions on earth--the Sahel. This lower expanse of the Sahara, which marks the southern limit of Islam’s reach in West and Central Africa, boasts such mythologized places as Mopti and Timbuktu, as well as Africa’s poorest countries, Chad and Niger. In parts of the Sahel, hard-line Sharia law rules and slaves are still traded. Racked by lethal harmattan winds, chronic civil wars, and grim Islamic fundamentalism, it is not the ideal place for a traveler with a U.S. passport. Tayler finds genuine danger in many guises, from drunken soldiers to a thieving teenage mob. But he also encounters patience and generosity of a sort found only in Africa.
Traveling overland by the same rickety means used by the local people--tottering, overfilled buses, bush taxis with holes in the floor, disgruntled camels--he uses his fluency in French and Arabic (the region’s lingua francas) to connect with them. Tayler is able to illuminate the roiling, enigmatic cultures of the Sahel as no other Western writer could.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9780547523798

Jeffrey Tayler

A contributing editor at The Atlantic and the New York Times Notable author of Facing the Congo, Angry Wind, and River of No Reprieve among others, JEFFREY TAYLER has reported on Russia and the former Soviet Union for Foreign Policy, Harper’s Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, National Geographic, and more. He lives in Moscow.

Reviews for Angry Wind

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am always reading about the journeys of foreigners deliberately visiting war zones because, as they say, they've "always wanted to visit the area". Never mind that the country in question is under rebel attack or that the natives hate "you people". With the help of drivers, translators, and fixers, these fearless authors describe how they reluctantly hand over bribes along with precious passports, visas, and other important documents as if they trained a lifetime for such a vulnerable event. I am always reading from the perspective of the cavalier authors who have to wait for permissions to be granted, roadblocks and barriers to be cleared, bribes to be bestowed upon the greedy; all to be allowed safe passage. These people who somehow just know things will work out in their favor. I am never on the other side where the viewpoint is of the bandit, the enemy, or the political bigwig with all the power and hatred to let a traveler pass. However, I thoroughly Tayler's description of getting past these same people. Some of the episodes are funny. As an aside, I loved the white-out people. Dab, dab, dab.Tayler has a keen eye for society, no matter how archaic. The tradition of slavery: the Bellas being captive but not. Female circumcision as a tradition of misconception that cannot be logically argued away. The varying cultures make everyone suspicious of one another. I was relived when Tayler recognized he couldn't change these cultures, but he argued against them just the same. Confessional: an army of people helped Tayler cross five countries. I was pleased when he recognized all the people who had helped him as kind and generous.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hats off to Tayler for even thinking up this crazy idea; a bonus hats off for how he managed it, switching between English, French and Arabic as he travelled through Saharan Africa. Brilliant.

[debnance_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a trip I would only have taken by book. Tayler travels to the sub-Sahara region of Africa, an area I knew little about. During his travels, he meets ignorance and tradition head on. Poverty, disease, and filth abound. And Tayler seems little reason to hope for a better future. All in all, a grim journey. Told compellingly, however…I am now off to find Tayler’s earlier book, a book in which he travels to north Africa.

[four_bears · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a selection for a bookgroup I belong to and I almost skipped it—until the discussion began—then I quickly ordered a copy. The reason was my interest in West Africa. This book chronicles the writer’s trip through the Sahel—that area of West Africa below the Sahara and above the rain forest. His trip took him though Chad, Northern Nigeria, Niger, Mali and eventually Senegal. My interest was my own experience in West Africa—further south in Sierra Leone—over 40 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer. Tayler’s last stop was Dakar—civilization and fresh ocean breezes after months of pounding by the Harmattan, the “angry wind” of the title, which blows red dust off the Sahara. We experienced the Harmattan—minimally in comparison I’m sure—in the winter months in Sierra Leone. My first sight of Africa was Dakar—after a PanAm flight (NY to Boston to the Azores to Lisbon to Rabat to Conakry in a 707) dropped us in Guinea and we boarded a charter (Russian plane, Guinea Air, Czech pilot—of significance because it was the height of the Cold War). We should have been circling Lungi in SL, but even I could see the weather was ghastly—beautiful but weird colors. No landing. Too stormy to go back to Conakry. At midnight, we landed in Dakar. It seemed pretty civilized too—especially to the international playboys and girls we met at breakfast who invited us to “hope over to Rio” that afternoon.So much for my personal interest. Tayler’s first stop was N’Djamena, the capital of Chad. From there he made his way—by taxi, truck, bus, train, boat—and briefly, camel, across the continent from East to West. The book is memorable primarily for his encounters with the people of the Sahel and of his attempts to understand them. He routinely hired guides and drivers—all but the real scoundrels became friends whose families he met and from whom he learned much of the culture, friends he was often sorrowful at leaving, because of his insights into the lives they led. He talked about the tough subjects: religion and nationality (because he recognized that tribal and religious loyalties meant more than nationhood—most West African borders after all were set by British and French colonials). He talked about family and food and traditional beliefs—like female circumcision which he found was followed religiously even though the practice is never mentioned in the Qu’ran.In fact the whole question of what was valuable in traditional culture kept reappearing as a theme until a schoolteacher in Djenné pointed out that since the UN had declared the city and its Great Mosque a World Heritage site, now by law no one can repair a mud house with any other material than mud. The city stagnates because of "historic preservation" restrictions. But Oumar, the schoolteacher who was so liberal and Western in his views of education and urbanization, supported the circumcision of all woman for fear they would “go wild”, though his educated parents had had him circumcised in a hospital. In Bamako, Tayler went to a night club with a friend of a friend who said, in the upper classes (her caste) circumcision for girls was just beginning to die out. Looking at the gorgeous woman, Tayler could not help but wonder if she had been cut—but didn’t ask.Another subject he focused on again and again was the distinction between slaves and master—even in sophisticated youth at the night club he found patrons joking (but only half joking) about their ancestry. It still matters among the Fulani and other tribal groups, whether your ancestors were masters or slaves. In one village Taylor visited, the slaves had their mouths darkened by ashes so as to make status visible. Of course in slave trading days—and Tayler visits an island holding tank for slaves in the harbor of Dakar—Africans sold each other to the traders who plied the coasts.Everywhere he went there was fear of bandits or rebels. Serious rebellions had hampered the development of viable states for centuries. One, by the proud Tuareg nomads, had concluded only recently. (Since I was reading that chapter at the VW dealer waiting for my car, I couldn't help but glance at the Touareg behind me and wonder if those dessert warriors were the source of the name.)I liked Tayler’s political discussions with people he met. Among other things he wanted to know how these Muslims regarded the US in the Post-911 world. (The trip took place during the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003.) Almost to a person his interlocutors hated Bush and thought he had led Americans into hating Muslims. A few expressed their disillusion that in America a President had come to power “by force”—the beacon of democracy had failed them. A few hated all Americans—and showed it to Tayler—but most separated individuals from their nation, possibly because they themselves didn’t identify with their nation.The book’s conclusion was powerful as Tayler muses on the misery of the people he had seen on this trip and the unlikelihood that their lot would improve soon. Let me quote one paragraph. It gives you a sense too of his style, somewhat fanciful, certainly rhetorical, but controlled enough to be effective I thought:“They were born to live poor and die hard, leaving nothing behind; their misery, once the subject of ideologies of liberation and revolt, now inspires no one. The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon called people like them in another time, but he is dead, and his oeuvre, passé. However, in defiance of intellectual fashion, the Wretched remain, orphaned of Western defenders, ever leaner, every hungrier, increasingly angry, serving their sentences, awaiting an emancipator, a commander. For now poverty and despair banish thoughts of revolution among these masses, but later, when a savior appears, he will exploit their suffering to create an army of the enraged that will swamp coalitions of the willing, breach the walls, and storm the West. Or perhaps a few determined fanatics or seekers of martyrdom will take terrorist action on their behalf; after the carnage, it will seem impossible to fathom how such an abyss could have been allowed to widen between the north and south, between the whites and the rest, and how we could have tolerated, in a continent neighboring Europe, the deaths of millions from hunger and disease, and the radicalization of the survivors.”He's talking about the poor of Bamako, but in a sense of all the people he met on the trip through the Sahel. He also wrote in several places about how it's the cities that breed radicalism (that in the rural areas they want to practice their religion and where they say the Quaran doesn't condone killing so there were no terrorist supporters). There are zillions of pundits who will tell you that the urbanization of underdeveloped countries is a top level problem in the world today—with cities growing to 14-15-20 million or more, dwarfing any city most of us know. And the rural traditional people driven by economics to the city often lose their traditional heritage—their children find nothing useful in the rules by which their parents lived and didn't thrive.The last time a book affected me so much on this topic was Robert Kaplan's The Ends of the Earth.