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Rimbaud the African (part 2)

“Trafficking in the Unknown”

By Heiko P. Wimmen

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Comment

In late 1885, Rimbaud himself disembarks in the “dreadful colony“ – on the Gulf of Tadjourah, fifty kilometers south of the French garrison of Obock on the African coast of the Red Sea. Now he himself takes the path of the filibuster, hoping for a quick fortune in the arms trade. Gunrunning for the King of Shoa and future Ethiopian emperor Menelik II, who was then locked in endless warfare with rival leaders, should earn him five times his former salary in just one year.

It’s the last round of the colonial “Scramble for Africa”. England, Italy and France are jockeying for influence and the last remaining big slice of the black continent: Somalia, Eritrea, and, the coveted biggest price of all, the fertile highlands of Abyssinia – according to Rimbaud the “most suitable region for European colonization in all of Africa”.

Soon, France will establish a new maritime metropolis on the southern bank of the Gulf of Tadjourah: Djibouti, port town and capital of the colony of French Somaliland. A free port and a railway link to Addis Abeba are designed to break the British trade monopoly over the East African coast and exploit the trading links set up by pioneers like Rimbaud. The father of André Marril, trader between Djibouti and Ethiopia, settled here at the beginning of the 20^th century.

Tadjourah on the Golf of Djibouti

(Photo : Francis Lindzee Gordon)

André Marril (French)

Back then, there were mainly Arabs here who brought tea and sugar, and Somalis coming down from Somalia with incense and skins, mainly goatskins. My father would trade these in for arms, and I say Trade with a big T, because it was a trade authorized and, even more, encouraged by the French government. He sold surplus rifles, replaced for better ones by the French army, from the 1870 war.

Most of this was concluded as barter deals because there was no money here, so they would bring some stacks of skins and in return one would trade them in for certain quantities of rifles and ammunition. Those trading houses had relationships with motherhouses located in Marseilles, who would buy up and market these products, and process them in to raw material, such as leather.

Rimbaud – Article in “Le Bosphore Egyptien”

20^th August 1887

Thus we would have an outlet on the road to Harar and Abyssinia. To sum up, caravans could be set up in Djibouti once there are some establishments to supply local products, and some armed troops. Right now, the area is a complete desert. It goes without saying that it would have to be a free port if it was to compete with (the nearby English controlled port of) Zeilah.

Comment

The model is Aden: Trading hub, military port and base for the expansion to East Asia, where France has began the colonization of Indochina. The two-story buildings of downtown Djibouti with their Indian colonial architecture, are spitting images of the streetfronts of Aden. In some of the crumbling facades, bearded faces and turbans cast in gypsum indicate former proprietors from the Indian Sikh community. But where the rigid street grid of Aden still betrays the spirit of the former military camp, in Djibouti, small squares lined with trees and arcades evoke the atmosphere of a small-town in the South of France. Paul Nizan on Djibouti during its golden age in the 1920ies, after the inauguration of the railway link to Ethiopia.

Paul Nizan – Aden Arabie

Djibouti has no past. It’s a sub-region of the Midi that came into existence some forty years ago. What a surprise for a Frenchmen to find here all the details that make France what it is, and gives it an outlook different from England. I am at home on Menelik Square, sitting on the terrace of a café in the same style as the Montelimar in Avignon. At home seeing a commissioner at the entry of the police station insulting a native in his voice of the old colonial administrate. At home on the Plateau of the Serpent, watching young girls promenading with their hair bands just like in Quiberon.

Comment

Today, Frenchmen are rarely spotted in Djibouti. The majority of settlers have left since the tiny country gained its independence 25 years ago. Only French legionnaires, still posted here at a number of 2,500 troops, generate business for cafés, nightclubs and the countless Ethiopian prostitutes.

Ambient Sound

Boule players

Comment

On Friday afternoon, Djibouti’s weekend, immigrants from Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and the Sudan congregate on the wide boulevard facing the main hospital of Djibouti. Chatting away in a Tower of Babel language mixture of Amharic, Oromo, Afar und Arabic, they spend their holiday playing Boule, the game of the Marseillian colonists.

Ambient Sound up

Daoud Alwan (French)

It’s true that the origin (of Djibouti) is strictly colonial, but that didn’t prevent the arrival of a number of local communities, or migrants from the region. Djibouti becomes a cosmopolitan point where you would meet sailors, Yemeni migrants, Arabs, nomads of Somali or Afar descent, also Sudanese… it’s a neighborhood of different societies, different diasporas, who are searching for new opportunities in the colony. And soon, you may say that what the Djiboutians share since about almost one and a half centuries, is a culture of tolerating the Other – because his presence creates an opportunity.

Comment

Daoud Alwan, historian and political scientist in Djibouti. His family unites tribes, states and histories of East Africa: the great-grandfather a trader between the Yemen and the African Hinterland, the father an employee of the Ethiopian railway, the mother Somali from Mogadishu, relatives in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia. Today, the graduate from Lyon University works for the Development Agency of the United Nations UNDP. Every morning, he commutes between his family home in the southern, African suburbs of Djibouti to his job in the European downtown.

Ambient Sound

Place Rimbaud: Sewing machines, microbuses, BBC in Somali

Comment

On the southern edge of downtown, a large square once named and still mostly referred to as Place Arthur Rimbaud, marks the boundary between the colonial nucleus of Djibouti and the sprawling African quarters. At night, BBC world service in Somali fills the air. Cloth in gay colors is on display, improvised open-air tailorshops process the purchase into wide African garments on the spot. The French legionnaires are banned from entering these quarters; white tourists are cautioned against doing so by police officers: beyond Place Rimbaud the bush starts, after dark your safety is not guaranteed. But in the evening, nobody pays attention to strangers roaming the African market. What tribe do your friends belong to, Daoud is asked by a trader.

Daoud Alwan (French)

Very soon you have this opposition between the zone of the plateau, that will accommodate the entire colonial infrastructure, and this fleeting, ephemeral space of the nomads from the hinterland. Five kilometers from here, there is the plain, the zone of the quarters, which are at first big camps of nomads who are coming, approaching this curious phenomena, the colonial city. It’s a bit like imagining the first men to land on the moon, and there is already a human presence there. As if they step out in their spacesuits, with their flag, and there are already people who observe them.

And then there are the workers, who got used to the discipline of capitalist work in Aden. They work in the docks, in the port, but once the working day is finished, they leave the plateau and go down to the zone of the plain. And they will form the social link between the nomads from the hinterland and this extraterrestrial cabin that is created, the colonial city. These menial workers of colonial type, who come from Aden and port towns like Mokha, they will create the nucleus of urbanity in Djibouti.

Rimbaud : Illuminations - Villes

Ce sont des villes ! C'est un peuple pour qui se sont montés ces Alleghanys et ces Libans de rêve ! Des chalets de cristal et de bois qui se meuvent sur des rails et des poulies invisibles. Les vieux cratères ceints de colosses et de palmiers de cuivre rugissent mélodieusement dans les feux.

Les sauvages dansent sans cesse la fête de la nuit. Et une heure je suis descendu dans le mouvement d'un boulevard de Bagdad où des compagnies ont chanté la joie du travail nouveau, sous une brise épaisse, circulant sans pouvoir éluder les fabuleux fantômes des monts où l'on a dû se retrouver.

Comment

Rimbaud's efforts to earn a quick fortune take a disastrous turn. Business partners die on him, and his caravan gets stuck on the Djiboutian coast for over a year. Finally arriving at the court of the notoriously bankrupt Ethiopian king Menelik, he gets entangled in a spider web of palace intrigue, done in by the king, and hardly saves his venture capital. Likewise, his own trading house, established in the Highlands of Ethiopia as of 1888, will have to struggle with extreme climates, the erratic convulsions of regional politics, and an arbitrary local bureaucracy.

André Marril (French)

Those who stayed here during this period did so because they really loved his country. Some say that they only came to make a fast fortune, but at that time there were no fortunes to be made. Because there is nothing here, the country doesn’t produce anything, there is simply and plainly nothing.

I have seen many flops here, and very little fortunes made. You know…we had a casino and it went bust, six banks three of which failed, we had insurance companies, most of which closed, the airline is broke… You know, it’s a very complex country.

Comment

Members of the opposition in Djibouti, but mainly in exile, call what is described politely as “complexity” simply and plainly corruption. Since independence, the regimes of president Hassan Gouled, and since 1999, his nephew Hassan Gouled, both protected and funded by the former colonial power, are said to have put aside large funds. In 1994, the French judge Borel, flown in to investigate a terrorist attack against a café frequented mostly by French locals, was found dead after a couple of weeks – suicide according to the official version. Suspicions still loom that Borel got too close to high officials involved in big-style money laundering schemes.

Daoud Alwan (French)

Like most of sub-Saharan African countries, we were plunged into a delirium of palaver, by a neo-colonial class with no vision for the future. The power was inherited by those in direct proximity to the colonists : the translators, the small functionaries, the administrators, and their descendents. Those people didn’t adjust to the new realities, and they are probably unable to adjust.

Comment

For all practical purpose, Djibouti today is on the brink of bankruptcy. Corruption and misrule have undermined public institutions and infrastructure. Two decades of communist rule and debilitating civil war in neighboring Ethiopia and regional conflicts have crippled the country’s role as a transit point. The once lavish support by Western donors and in particular France has dwindled away since the end of the cold war, and the collapse of socialist experiments in neighboring Ethiopia and South Yemen. Public servants have to wait for more than six months for salaries that have lost three quarters of their purchase power over the past ten years. Today, Djibouti‘s hopes for survival are once again tied to the two facilities that prompted its foundation in the times of Rimbaud: A strategically positioned harbor, and the trade routes to the African interior. The director of the Djibouti port authority Aden Doualeh:

Aden Doualeh (French)

The position of Djibouti on the crossroads of three continents makes it an ideal place for the dispatching of merchandise. Large freighters coming in on their way from the US to Asia can carry goods for East Africa, and discharge them here. The freighter then travels on to Asia and another smaller ship of the same enterprise picks up the merchandise and takes care of the regional delivery.

The port of Mombasa in Kenya for example, is not very efficient, and land-locked Uganda has a lot of problems with that. As a result, Durban in South Africa is now more competitive for the delivery of goods to Uganda than Mombasa, and containers discharged in Durban will arrive faster over the railway network. That shows you how efficient a combination of maritime and train services can be, and that’s why the Djiboutian and the Ethiopian governments should step up efforts to develop the train link.

Ambient Sound

Doralé Beach

Comment

Doralé, today a popular beach for families from the overcrowded African suburbs, is earmarked to accommodate a new harbor constructed from scratch, including a free-trade zone, shopping malls and leisure facilities. In this vision, Djibouti will join the chain of local service centers, islets of globalization linking the African, Arabian and Central Asian subregions to the industrial centers in North America, Europe and East Asia. On board as senior partner: Dubai, out to defend its position by exporting its own successful model.

Ambient Sound

Dubai – Promotion Song

Aden Doualeh (French)

New ports have appeared in the region, such as Salala in Oman, which is controlled by the company Maersk – Sealand, and the new container terminal in Aden, built by Yemen Invest and controlled by the port of Singapore. And this is how we came to a strategic partnership with the port of Dubai, because Dubai feels threatened by the competition of these two ports.

So what happens on the ground is that all these countries and their ports are in competition, so they go out and export their know-how. Singapore will take over other ports in the world, Hongkong is looking for partners in England. All these service networks go global, are no longer attached to a certain place, and those who profit from this development are the countries who sign up to these partnership schemes.

Rimbaud - Illuminations - Départ

Assez vu. La vision s'est rencontrée à tous les airs.

Assez eu. Rumeurs des villes, le soir, et au soleil, et toujours.
Assez connu. Les arrêts de la vie. - ô Rumeurs et Visions !
Départ dans l'affection et le bruit neufs!

Strategic partners in globalized maritime services: Djibouti and Dubai (Photo Courtesy of Port de Djibouti)

Ambient Sound

Train Djibouti – Addis Ababa

Comment

Slowly, the train climbs up the snail trail build by the French some 100 years ago, from sea level in Djibouti to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa at an altitude of 2500 meters. Passengers sleep on large sacks filled with onions, rice and the local staple Indjera. After fifteen hours of lifeless desert, savannah and termite mounds, the blue silhouette of the Ethiopian highlands emerges on the horizon.

Ambient Sound

Passenger chants recitation for local saint

Comment

At an altitude of 2000 meters softly rounded hills extend to the horizon like a mildly rippled sea of lush green. Abundant summer and autumn rain feeds plantations with Ethiopia’s most important cash crops: coffee and the natural ampetamine Qat, ubiquitous in most of East Africa and the Yemen. Half way to Addis Ababa, the walled Muslim city of Harar, founded by Arab merchants at the westernmost tip of the highlands some 1200 years ago, was Rimbaud’s residence and commercial headquarter throughout the last three years of his life. Until today, the nights of Harar belong to the laughter of hyenas and the mildly euphoric spirits of Qat.

Ambient Sound

Hyena of Harar

Comment

“A nice house, but no furniture”, a visitor of Rimbaud’s recalled, “the whole month I never found out where he slept. I only saw him sitting on a makeshift table, writing day and night.

Letters to his family in France, business correspondence, inventories and some rare travel accounts are the only remnants of his ten years between Southern Arabia and East Africa. No traces of poetry, or any kind of literary texts.

Rimbaud’s silence since the age of eighteen remains a puzzle for biographers and fans up to today, his trivial turn to trading and gunrunning an annoyance to many. Safeguarding the myth of Rimbaud requires, according to Albert Camus, to ignore his letters from Aden and Africa. For Paul Nizan, the silence of the trader is all but surprising.

Trader in Harar. Photo by Arthur Rimbaud, 1883

Paul Nizan – Aden Arabie

(In Aden), the life of men is reduced to the essential, the economic state. You never run the risk of being cheated by the deforming mirrors that reflect life in Europe: art, philosophy and politics are absent because there is no need for them, no correction to be made. You see the foundations of life in the West, stripped naked like an anatomic model. For the first time I see people who don’t request, who don’t justify a philosophy of clothing. No concessions to the love of art, nothing to sing, nothing to risk, nothing to paint, no poems to read or write.

Ambient Sound

Alberto Crespo - L’été du diable

L’une est rousse

Elle dénude ses épaules lentement

Et entre ses seins s’écoule

Le sang du soleil satané.

L’autre est noire.

Elle coud les lèvres de l’Océan

Vers qui tonds-tu tes tentaculaires laves

Qui plongent jusqu’aux profondeurs intimes ?

Comment

Alberto Crespo, Spanish instructor and poet, has spent seven years in East Africa. The lunar landscapes formed by the lava of the Rift Valley, the gleaming white crusts of salt at Lake Assal, and the joyful colors of African markets have overwhelmed him with images and impressions.

Alberto Crespo (French)

If we think of Rimbaud, didn’t he already say so many things he saw here, and long before? You find the manifestation of so many emotions and sensations in the landscapes, the atmospheres, in this kind of mineral immobility that characterizes this part of the world. Or maybe he felt that what he expressed so far in his poetry was nothing compared to what he discovered here.

For me, it’s exactly the opposite, it’s maybe the necessity to re-transcribe in order to understand more of the ambience that I lived here, these atmospheres and sensations that invade you, and that may just take you away. It’s the first time in my life that I feel myself completely invaded by so many different sensations, so many different emotions, so many colors.

Rimbaud - Voyelles

(Read by Rémi Duhart)

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu : voyelles,
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes :
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,

Golfes d'ombre ; E, candeur des vapeurs et des tentes,
Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombrelles ;
I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes ;

U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
Paix des pâtis semés d'animaux, paix des rides
Que l'alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux ;

O, suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges,
Silence traversés des Mondes et des Anges :
- O l'Oméga, rayon violet de Ses yeux !

L'étoile a pleuré rose au coeur de tes oreilles,
L'infini roulé blanc de ta nuque à tes reins
La mer a perlé rousse à tes mammes vermeilles
Et l'Homme saigné noir à ton flanc souverain.

Comment

Since the middle of the 19^th century, scores of western writers and artists traveled to Africa, the Middle or the Far East on a quest for imagination, impressions and inspirations for forms of expression beyond occidental tradition. Few severed their ties to home, or exposed themselves as rigorously as Arthur Rimbaud. Ali Moussa Iye, writer from Djibouti, about the effect of his home country on strangers:

“Water, fire, air and minerals, nothing but pure elements under a starry sky, cleansed of all human pollution”

(Ali Moussa Iye) – East African landscape, photo by Francis Lindzee Gordon

Ali Moussa Iye (quote)

«It’s no coincidence that these dry and eroded territories always attract tormented poets, mystic visionaries, ascetic shepherds and… cats. Here, you are in the bowels of the earth, in such a proximity to the core magma, to all kinds of waves and vibrations. Each stone, each bush is charged with this magnetism emanating from every volcanic fissure. Here, nothing obstructs the vision of the soul, nothing distracts imagination for those searching for the essential. Water, fire, air and minerals, nothing but pure elements under a starry sky, cleansed of all human pollution. Even the people who have chosen this universe as their home were forced to respect this immobility.

Thus, it’s easy to grasp why it might be useful to discourage those who only look for a place to stay, from coming to Djibouti. They run the risk of encountering the unbearable lightness of their being. »

Arthur Rimbaud, Autoportrait - Harar 1883

Rimbaud – Letters to his family

Harar, 6^th of May 1883

At present, I’m condemned to roam about, attached to a distant company, and every day I lose more the taste for the climate, the way of life, even the language of Europe. But who knows how long my days in these mountains can last? And then I just disappear, in the middle of these people, without the news ever emerging.

Harar, 18^th of May 1889

I regret that I won’t be able to visit the world exhibition this year. Maybe next time I could exhibit some of the products of this country, and maybe even exhibit myself, because I’d guess one assumes an excessively baroque appearance after so many years in a country like this.

Alberto Crespo (French)

One gets the impression that, little by little, this part of the world started to swallow him up, little by little it drags him down. He falls ill and never really cures himself, he doesn’t pay enough attention to his body. Maybe it’s also a way to detach oneself from the body, to dedicate yourself completely to some sort of spirituality. A spirituality that will end with him, with his physical existence. As if his body meant to alert him to the ephemeral aspect of things.

Comment

At the age of 36, the weight of his physical existence finally catches up with Rimbaud. Physical exhaustion in extreme climates, endless expeditions on foot, diseases never properly cured take their toll. A tumor in his right knee joint grows rapidly, impeding his movements to the point of paralysis. Sixteen employees have to carry him down to the coast on a stretcher, a torturous march over two weeks. Tied to the bed he sails for Aden and Marseilles, where the right leg is amputated.

Rimbaud - Une saison en enfer – Mauvais Sang

(Read by Bruno Sermonne)

Je reviendrai, avec des membres de fer, la peau sombre, l’œil furieux: sur mon masque, on me jugera d'une race forte. J'aurai de l'or: je serai oisif et brutal. Les femmes soignent ces féroces infirmes retour des pays chauds. e serai mêlé aux affaires politiques. Sauvé !

Comment

On the 9^th of November 1891, at the age of 37, Arthur Rimbaud dies in the arms of his sister Isabelle. Only a few hours before his death, he still plans for a quick return to Arabia.

Rimbaud – Letter to the director of the shipping line Messageries maritimes

Marseille,9^th of November 1891

Monsieur le Directeur,

Please communicate to me the price on the Aphinar to Suez. I am completely paralyzed, so I’d like to get on board early. Please tell me at what time I should be transported on board.

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First broadcast 16/10/2001 in “Politisches Feature”, Deutschlandfunk Köln

Original German version 45:00 minutes.

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