The Seducer

Beyond the EEC

What do you do when you are desperate?

Jonas Wergeland blamed the American cartoonist Carl Barks for his trip to Timbuktu. As a child there were few things Jonas loved more than the final frames of Barks’s inimitable stories, in which Donald Duck, alone or, for instance, with his friend Gyro Gearloose the inventor — usually drawn in silhouette — would be seen hightailing it to Timbuktu, or quite simply find themselves in Timbuktu after the most hair-raising scandals and disasters have become a fact. The whole point is to get as far away as possible, to someplace where no one knows you.

There are times when we all yearn to be far, far away and in the autumn of 1972, Jonas Wergeland yearned to be far, far away. This was due not so much to Carl Barks as the need to get away from the circus surrounding the EEC referendum, which, to Jonas’s mind, not only dulled the wits but also turned the heads of the Norwegian people for several months; suddenly the derogatory term ‘parish-pump politics’ seemed to cover the reality of the situation perfectly. The country was bursting at the seams with loudspeakers and public meetings; there were stands on every street corner, demonstrations at every turn, leaflets through letterboxes, posters on every telegraph pole, bad political ditties on the radio and hysterical debates on television. Ideologies became muddled up, and no one noticed; in the same breath candidates could profess both radical politics and conservative values or vice-versa. As far as Jonas was concerned there was nothing to choose between the ‘Yes’ and the ‘No’ camps for stupidity, so when he made his escape, it was not from yes or no but from dogmatism, or perhaps he was acting on an intuition that, despite all the shouting, the issues which these people were debating were of little consequence, as would later be confirmed. While the full battery of spotlights and microphones was trained on the tackling and hard play that surrounded any standpoint taken on the EEC, the crucial decisions, the ones which would really determine Norway’s immediate future, were made in the shadows and on the quiet, under the direction of people like Sir William. The foundations of Norway the oil nation were being laid without anyone asking the Norwegian people.

It is easy for me, who can indulge in the luxury of being a disinterested party, to say that Norway in the late summer of 1972 was an admirable example of a democracy in full flower. For Jonas Wergeland, however, this was a time when an entire country was stage-managed like a media event and, what was worse, one that wasn’t even entertaining. Where others saw a debate, Jonas saw only a welter of emotions camouflaged as rational argument, where they would have done better to dish out clubs instead of pamphlets. In actual fact, the thought of travelling to Timbuktu had never entered Jonas’s head before, but once it was there it had become almost a compulsion. And thanks to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species he could simply pack his bag and go.

I suppose I ought to mention in parenthesis here that travelling to Timbuktu nowadays is, of course, no big deal: not like it was for the first Europeans who actually paid with their lives, either on the way there or merely because they were unfortunate enough to reach there, travellers who suffered the most appalling hardships and only survived the desert by slitting open their veins and drinking their own blood, eating lizards and chewing on their leather belts. A trip to Timbuktu today, on the other hand, is not that arduous or dramatic and requires little more in terms of organization than taking the underground from Oslo’s Central Station to the suburb of Stovner, the main difference being the need for a visa and a couple of vaccinations. So I do not intend to waste any space on the journey as such but simply let Jonas Wergeland follow David Attenborough’s example and pop up on the scene.

When Jonas Wergeland arrived in Timbuktu, in Mali, a country where people die earlier and earn less than just about anywhere else on Earth, he was, unlike the first Europeans to reach the place, not disappointed. Those explorers had been expecting to find a pulsating city awash with gold and ostrich feathers and leopard skins, with rulers who surrounded themselves with seductive dancers and jesters whose voices emanated from their armpits. Instead, what they found was a tiny huddle of mud huts, about as rich and exciting as the remains of a sand castle once the tide has come in; a town which had nothing left of its legendary past but its name.

But Timbuktu fulfilled all of Jonas’s expectations simply because he had none. Added to which, for some hours, as they were driving out to it from Kabara, the town was enveloped in a cloud of sand because of the wind. Timbuktu was not even there. Jonas was over the moon. He was travelling into a mist, an uncharted nebula. The cloud of sand reinforced his conviction that he was not visiting a town, but a word, a name which marked the limits of the real world.

And he was not disappointed, not even when the wind died down, and the sand settled. Timbuktu gave the impression not only of utter disillusionment with the myths that surrounded it but also of a bleakness and a monotony unlike anything Jonas had ever come across before with its stark light and its homogeneous low, square buildings linked together in a way that put him in mind of a Cubist painting or gave him a feeling of having landed in the middle of an experiment, at some outer limit (or on some far frontier). No doubt about it, he thought, here was a place, a spot, where it must be possible to come up with a new angle. On Norway, on his own life. Because this was of course, for anyone who has not yet figured it out, the subconscious motive for his trip to Timbuktu: the search for enlightenment. If Timbuktu were the hub of the world — how would the world look then?

So what Jonas did in Timbuktu was think, or search. He wandered up and down the sandy streets lost in thought, back and forth between sun-baked mud huts that changed colour in the course of the day, turning from white and beige to brown and ochre; he did not notice the children who gave him funny looks, the chickens and the goats, the donkeys and the camels, the stench of their droppings; he was so thoroughly engrossed in an attempt to push his thoughts as far as he humanly could. Only occasionally did he seem to come to himself, surrounded by flies, outside one of the massive dark-brown wooden doors, intricately carved and studded with nails and hung on heavy iron hinges, running his fingers over a gash left there, although he did not know it, by a Tuareg sword. The door itself seemed to give him some inkling of both the difficulty and the possibility of reaching new domains of perception.

He thought and thought on into the evening and, indeed, into the night, in dreams. For the record I ought to mention that this was before Sofitel opened their hotel in the town, and Jonas was therefore staying at one of those hostels to be found all over this part of Africa, primarily geared towards travelling civil servants.

During the day he would be out walking again, and of all the images I have of Jonas Wergeland, this is possibly the one of which I am most fond; the one which I wish the people of Norway could set alongside his rather more glamorous public image because this, too, is Jonas Wergeland: a young man walking up and down the run-down streets of Timbuktu, utterly absorbed in his own thoughts. Jonas strolls from the main market to the meat market while thinking about Norway, what sort of a country Norway is; he wanders from the old fort to the camels’ watering-hole, wondering what sort of a person he is; he meanders through the Tuareg quarter and down to the town well, wondering what he should do next, after graduating from high school; he walks from the Djinguereber Mosque to the famed Sankoré Mosque, which looks like a gingerbread tower studded with cloves, thinking of Axel and how he wants to study biochemistry; he saunters from a group of ramshackle huts, little more than termite-hills, to the house in which René Caillié, the first European to come out of Timbuktu alive, had stayed, and thinks of Margrete, always Margrete; wondering what has become of her; he wanders from the coffee house where a little group is playing some board game, to the ‘palaver tree’ under which the old men sit, chewing cola nuts and passing the time of day; for one second, just one second, he also thinks of the EEC. At night he lies in the cool hostel room, a bowl of dates next to the divan, and lets his thoughts mingle with his dreams.

One night, when he had woken up and could not get back to sleep, he pulled on his jacket, draped a blanket over his shoulders and went outside. He took the path leading into the desert and soon found himself some way to the north of Timbuktu, out among the sand dunes that rolled in towards the town like ocean waves.

On a whim he plonked himself down in the sand, thoughtfully scooped up a handful of the fine grains and put them down on another spot. Behind him he could make out the low, featureless skyline of Timbuktu. A heap of mud in the middle of a desert. A gingerbread town. Not that it gave one any reason to feel superior. This part of the world had seen governments come and go long before the birth of Christ — while Norway still languished in the obscurity of the Stone Age. And Timbuktu, older than Oslo, had once been the first city of Mali and the Songhai Empire, vast states that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Sudan. At the end of the fifteenth century this bustling metropolis was said to have been ringed by trees and have a population of some 50,000. It was also commonly acknowledged to have been a centre for Muslim scholarship, boasting three universities and several collections of priceless manuscripts. Timbuktu’s story told of greatness one day, a sand-hill the next.

He sat in the desert, wrapped in a blanket, looking up at the stars; he could hardly believe his eyes, there seemed to be so many of them, so close and so bright. He gazed out across the sand dunes, was struck by how quiet it was, how overwhelmingly … empty, how … endless. With his hand he moved sand from one spot to another, thinking to himself that in terms of the big picture he was changing the desert, changing the world.

Then, all of a sudden, as if in answer to a question he had never managed to ask, he was lying flat out on the sand — with a sword at his throat. Terror-stricken though he was, this somewhat absurd concrete manifestation of an existential choice was not lost on him; he even had time to wonder that anyone could move that quietly, make themselves so invisible. He realized that they were Tuaregs, three of them, recognized them by the lengths of cloth wound round their heads, leaving only their eyes visible.

They dragged him to his feet and led him further into the desert, until they came to a camp nestling between two high sand dunes. It is easy to see how Jonas, whose knowledge of deserts had for the most part been gleaned from Carl Bark’s comic strips, could have imagined that these Tuaregs must be attached to one of the caravans that brought in salt from Taoudénit, when in fact they belonged to the Kel Intasar tribe, nomads who had gravitated towards Timbuktu because of a drought of Old Testament proportions which would come to a head over the next two years and which was already taking its toll on their way of life.

Jonas had no idea what his crime might be. He wondered whether he had desecrated one of their holy places. Or worse: that they took him for one of those idealistic aid workers who drilled wells to develop the deserts, thus ruining the ecological balance, or forced them to settle in one place and become farmers instead of nomads. Or worse still: they thought he was French and were out to take their revenge for almost half a century of ruthless oppression.

The man who still had his sword out of its leather sheath and pointed at Jonas motioned to him to stop next to a fire on the outskirts of the camp. Jonas noticed a number of small fires dotted here and there in the sand, also some cattle, some goats and, of course, camels lying here and there, although not very many. People were sitting outside the entrances to their tents. The general impression was one of poverty, of a myth exploded. Where were the dark lords of the desert, riding high on their white camels, rulers of the wind, the very epitome of dignity and pride? Jonas could tell that something was very wrong when such people as these huddled on the fringes of the desert over which they had reigned for thousands of years.

He held out all the banknotes he had on him as if begging some sort of indulgence. Three pairs of eyes merely looked him through the slits in their headdresses, looked, full of contempt. The cloth wound round their heads seemed glossy, metallic. They said something, evidently asking him a question. Jonas had not the foggiest notion what they were jabbering on about, knew only that he was in a tight spot, a very tight spot. Suddenly he remembered that Alexander Gordon Laing, one of the first Europeans to reach Timbuktu in the nineteenth century, was killed by Tuaregs. One of the men was armed with a dagger embossed with silver and brass. It might well be that these three were of noble blood, members of the warrior caste. Again they said something, their tone aggressive. What language were they speaking — Tamashek, Arabic, Hausa? Or just such bad French he could not understand it? Or maybe it was Bambara? Weren’t there any teenagers here who spoke French?

How, he wondered, as two scrawny dogs came over to sniff at him, could he explain to them that he had come to gain a little leeway for himself in terms of time and space; that he wanted to find out what it was like to be Jonas Wergeland stuck in the middle of Timbuktu’s mud heap: that he had left Norway and 1972 because he had suddenly found that country and that time so unutterably claustrophobic, stifling in its imperative insistence on what was important. He was looking for an angle in the sand, a filter of stars. Right then it occurred to him what a fitting view of the EEC this offered — here, in the desert, with a double-edged sword at one’s throat: How much did the EEC matter, really? Or Europe as a whole, come to that?

Jonas tries to say ‘Norway’, that he is Norwegian as if this fact alone would automatically result in the removal of the sword tip from his throat; as if Norway were synonymous with innocence, harmlessness, neutrality. Jonas Wergeland sits in the desert, under the stars, outside the town of Timbuktu in Mali and says ‘Norway … I am Norwegian’ in every language he knows, slowly, distinctly, while the eyes that stare at him through the slits in the indigo headdresses remain impassive; the Tuaregs have never heard of Norway.

Jonas shoots a glance at one of the tents, sees a woman busying herself with a brass pot, sees another woman crushing something in a mortar. At that same instant he has a vision of Norway cut off from the world, as Mali was in the seventeenth century. The previous day in a coffeehouse, his musings had been interrupted by an eager young African who had told him something of Mali’s history, how Timbuktu had hung on to its position of power for as long as it remained a crossroads for the trade in salt and gold, for the caravans and the ships travelling up and down the Niger, and how its decline owed less to open hostility from neighbouring countries than to the shifting of the trade routes. Long-distance trading declined drastically with a drop in the demand for gold on the other side of the Sahara, following the Spanish colonization of South America — added to which, the Portuguese had switched to trading across the Atlantic. Both these factors effectively strangled trade in the Sahara. Once again Mali was closed-off. A backwater. The final blow, delivered by the ever-greater influence of the French in that region, came with the rerouting of the last remnants of trade to Senegal and the towns on the coast. In a coffeehouse in the mud-hut city of Timbuktu, Jonas Wergeland learned something about relativity, about the mighty hand of history and how important it was not to become isolated, not to wind up on the fringes of international trade. Today, he thought, Norway is a wealthy country. Tomorrow, or a few hundred years from now, it could be another Mali, or as poor as Norway itself was just a few hundred years ago.

The camels kneeling in the sand started to growl, signalling, so it seemed, that the situation was coming to a head. A hand fumbled at Jonas’s throat as if searching for an identity tag, still taking him for a French mercenary. One of the other Tuaregs went through his jacket pockets and pulled out a battered paperback, Aku-Aku, Thor Heyerdahl’s book about Easter Island. Jonas’s travel reading. The Tuareg obviously knew the Roman alphabet. He sounded out ‘Hey-er-dahl’.

This one word worked like a charm, like Sinbad’s ‘Open Sesame’. Jonas heard the name spoken and saw a new light come into the eyes surrounding him. The book and the name Heyerdahl were like salt, worth their weight in gold. The sword was slipped back into the leather scabbard.

‘Kon-Tiki,’ said one.

‘Ra,’ said another.

They repeated the names ‘Aku-Aku’, ‘Kon-Tiki’, ‘Ra’ and ‘Heyerdahl’. Again and again the words were murmured like mantras: ‘Ra … Ra … Ra’. To Jonas it sounded like they are giving three cheers: ‘Hip, hip, hur-rah!’

At last they had hit upon a common language. It was as if the name Heyerdahl had also given the nomads back their hope, as if for a moment their dignity, their innate pride had been restored to them.

I know it seems incredible, that Thor Heyerdahl’s name should have been known here, in the heart of the wilderness of the Sahel, by men who had probably never seen the sea, even though the caravans might well have brought kinsmen of theirs to the Moroccan coast, starting-point for the voyage of the Ra. It is true, nonetheless, and says more about Thor Heyerdahl’s exploits and how widely known, how unbelievably well known, he is than about the curiosity of the Tuaregs. To some degree this can, of course, be put down to the fact that Heyerdahl is, like them, a nomad: a man with an instinct and an eye for the great travel routes, for the connections in which no one else believes.

This put a whole new slant on things. All of a sudden Jonas was their guest, and he was led, amid loud proclamations, to a fire in front of one of the goatskin tents where he was served a glass of sweet mint tea from a silver jug. Jonas sat there holding the warm glass, and it came to him: he was a nomad, would always be a nomad. Everything had changed, was suddenly beautiful. Orange flames in an inky landscape silhouetted against a deep-blue sky. Stars right above his head. He still could not understand what they said, but he could tell that they were giving him the VIP treatment and that he ought to return the compliment in some way. He wished he had his mouth organ with him so he could have played something for them: Duke Ellington’s ‘Morning Glory’, for instance. What he did have in his pocket, however, was a crystal prism, a good-luck charm given to him by a friend, a dear childhood friend who had shown him how light turned into something quite different when it struck the facets of the prism. He handed the piece of glass, a symbolic gift, to the Tuareg whom he took to be the leader before being escorted back to the town by two boys.

When Jonas Wergeland returned to Timbuktu on the morning of Tuesday 26 September 1972 the bread ovens were already lit. He stood for some time watching the flames dancing inside the ovens, shivering slightly as he breathed in the smell of the bread. He had always liked the smell of fresh-baked bread. Back home in Norway, the people had pronounced their verdict on the matter of the EEC, quite oblivious to the trials to which Jonas Wergeland had been subjected.