From ‘My Mercedes is not for sale’ by Jeroen van Bergeijk

 

 

Of the more than seven million cars driving around on Dutch roads in 2005, more than a quarter million had been exported by the end of the year. All the wealthy Western European countries export their old automobiles, millions in total. Nowadays most go to Eastern Europe, but a considerable minority, estimated 500,000 per year, wind up in Africa. ……Most of the old automobiles that leave Europe for Africa are shipped by boat, but a small number are driven there. In fact, since the 1970s, driving a used car to West Africa has become a popular pastime among French, Belgian, German, and Dutch adventurers. ……Every winter they flock to West Africa, selling their castoffs at a tidy profit in countries like Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. To get there they have to bribe customs officials, befriend corrupt cops, and – above all – drive straight through the Sahara.

 

….how to drive an ordinary automobile through loose sand……..lets the air escape [from the tire]……a tire deflated……..like that provides greater contact surface between tire and sand. The tire grips better and slips less. A fully inflated tire offers little contact surface. In loose sand, a full tire begins to slip, digs itself in, and – voila – the car is stuck.

 

The ship is packed; there’s not a seat to be found. Moroccan children dance on the tables, tug at their mothers’ skirts, and scream themselves hoarse. White tourists look up, annoyed; the Moroccan parents don’t see anything wrong. We, the whites, want quiet and privacy; they, the Africans, bustle and conviviality.

 

Things in Africa come in two forms: broken or almost broken. Whether it’s the power plant or the water supply, the Internet café’s computers or the city buses, the sewage system or the airport runway – seldom does anything in Africa work like its supposed to work.

 

…..the African state must choose between food for its citizens and investment in the future………..the African state expects free help from the wealthy West ……….

 

On account of the combination of high temperature and dry air, a person loses fluid at an alarming rate in the Sahara. If you sit in the full sun – and remain perfectly motionless – at a temperature of a hundred degrees……….In five hours, you’re seriously dehydrated; in two days, dead. Sahara Overland recommends drinking more than five quarts of water a day in the winter and more than two and a half gallons in the summer…….. [dehydration] begins with innocent symptoms like dry lips, loss of appetite, and headache. But after that, with a fluid loss of about 10 percent, the symptoms rapidly progress to dizziness, trouble breathing, sunken eyes, a lack of saliva, and a tendency to babble. At that point, you can still stem the tide by getting out of the sun and especially by drinking lots of water. Its another matter when serious dehydration sets in. With a loss of 20 percent of body fluid ……….there’s no chance of survival without admission to the hospital; the tongue and throat are so swollen that you can no longer drink on your own. You go deaf, your lips turn blue, your skin shrivels up and loses feeling. The body manufactures large quantities of endorphins, which produce a sense of euphoria. Finally delirium sets in ………..During the terminal phase of dehydration, the body extracts so much fluid from the blood that the blood thickens and the body’s heat can no longer be released through the skin. The body temperature rises dramatically, one or more of the vital organs (the heart, brain, and lungs) fail, and death follows.

 

Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, is a city with no cinemas, department stores, theaters, bookshops, discos, concert halls, or bars. Everything that makes a city fun is missing here. Everything that makes a city unpleasant – people, cars, filth – can be found here in spades. ……….the entrance to the city is a garbage dump. Coming from the north, you drive for miles through an apocalyptic landscape of piles of stinking refuse, smoldering fires, flapping plastic bags, and the rusting hulks of junked cars.

A few highways are paved, but most of the “streets” are sandy trails where your car gets stuck just as bad as in the barren, lifeless desert……….Nouakchott is the Sahara’s largest metropolis. In 1963 it was a sleepy little fishing village. But after the country gained its independence from France, there had to be a capital. Nouakchott was designed for fifteen thousand people; nearly a million live here now.

Still, Nouakchott does try to be a capital. There’s a TV station, a stadium, a presidential palace – and a museum. The Musee National is the only museum in Mauritania. It takes fifteen minutes to find somebody who can sell me a ticket. The building consists of two galleries. One contains a collection of potsherds and arrowheads; the other is devoted to the local costume. I’m the only visitor.

 

Nouakchott is hit by sandstorms two hundred days a year……..If you want to go out in such a storm, you better make sure your whole body is covered. The sand gets in everything: in your bag, in your food, even in your underwear. But a storm like this has more consequences than just physical discomfort. For one thing, you cant drive your car in a sandstorm. Not so much because of the poor visibility, as because your car is literally sandblasted. The finish dulls; the windshield and headlight glass turns matte. The glass in some Mauritanian cars has turned almost milky white.

A country’s traffic is a metaphor for its culture. In the Netherlands, the cars gleam, the roads are well maintained, and rules and warnings……encourage motorists to drive safely and courteously. At the same time, if there are no cops in sight, everyone drives over the speed limit. The Dutchman likes to think of his country that way: clean and orderly but with a touch of antiauthoritarianism.

In Mauritania, the drivers fear neither God nor man. In the week I’m here, I see a collision per day. The traffic in Nouakchott is a disorderly mess, a jumble, a free-for-all in which everyone does whatever he wants. The cars here – the overwhelming majority of which are Benzes, by the way – are like the bicycles Dutch students ride: rusty wrecks with no lights. In the West, these cars couldn’t even be sold for parts: everything of value has already been removed. Brakes, headlights, the upholstery on the seats, let alone chrome mirrors or a working CD player – everything is missing. ………Cars have to share the road with donkey and horse carts. …..so people always pass on the shoulder or over the median strip. No one waits for the stoplight (there are only three stoplights in all of Nouakchott anyhow), and everyone drives into oncoming traffic……. Whoever’s the most aggressive has the right-of-way. …….A city with no culture or diversion, where you cant see any farther than twenty yards during the sandstorms…….

 

“A Moor looks down on physical labor,”….. Mauritania is a segregated society: Moors and blacks live in separate worlds. Slavery was only officially abolished here in 1981……..the Moorish minority still calls the shots, and blacks do the dirty work……..what do the Moors do?

“All a Moor cares about,”………… “is chep-chep”

Chep-chep is something like finagling. Chep-chep means trying to gain an advantage from everything. Chep-chep means doing business with a wink and a nod. Chep-chep means playing a game where dirty tricks are allowed…… Chep-chep is the plumber who comes to fix …..broken toilet but manages to “repair” it in such a way that is breaks again in two weeks and [you] have to call him again.

 

Rosso is known as the most notorious border crossing in West Africa, some say in all of Africa. The border is supposedly occupied not only by a small army of corrupt customs agents but also by dozens of hustlers who try every trick in the book to rob travelers blind………The message: whatever you do, avoid Rosso………Rosso is the most important border crossing between Mauritania and Senegal

 

Until recently, Saint-Louis, Senegal, was the end of the road for Europeans with used cars to sell. Senegal was a great place to sell your car. The prices were good, and ……..you could take a nice vacation here. You never have a problem finding a decent hotel or restaurant in Senegal. ……….Little of that remains.

In 2003 the Senegalese government prohibited the importation of automobiles more than five years old. The official reason for the prohibition was that so many junky old cars were entering the country that they constituted a threat to the environment and traffic safety. The real reason, they think in Saint-Louis, was that the government wanted to stamp out the booming car trade, which was happening almost completely without state supervision and thus taxation. ……..the used-car market here has totally collapsed since then.

 

Downtown Dakar seems trapped in a time warp. Practically all the buildings date to the 1970s – nothing earlier, nothing later. ………Dakar is busy, full of aggressive hustlers. It is, thank God, no Nouakchott. There are sewers here, and cars stop for stoplights. There are patisseries, expensive restaurants, nice hotels…..

 

Gambia is an insignificant little country. It’s the smallest country in Africa, consisting of a strip of land on either side of the Gambia River. With a total area of 4,363 square miles, its about a quarter the size of the Netherlands. Of all the West African countries, Gambia may be the most attuned to traditional tourism. You’ll find dozens of luxury beach hotels there whose clientele is primarily British and Dutch.

 

Dusk doesn’t exist in Africa. Its either light or dark. Night falls in Africa as if God in heaven flipped a light switch.

 

Suame Magazine – Suame for short – is Ghana’s scorched industrial underbelly. It’s the country’s largest automotive repair center – many say the largest in all West Africa. Here, in this suburb of Kumasi, ten thousand mechanics work at keeping the decrepit West African auto fleet on the road………may seem chaotic, but if you walk around a little longer, you notice how efficiently the area is actually organized. There’s a corner for each speciality: here are the sheet metal workers; there, the painters; here, the flat fixers; there, the welders. Mechanics are divided according to make of car. There’s a Daewoo Street, a Toyota District, a Renault Alley……Suame Magazine’s pluses: Ghana’s largest employer, the largest and most efficient automotive repair center in West Africa………..the soil is heavily polluted, and drained oil is being dumped directly in the sewer and stream.

 

….Togo is a small, narrow country – about as big as the Netherlands and Belgium put together. From border to border, its only about thirty-five miles. …….Because the Prussians colonized “Togoland” for a brief period in the nineteenth century, Germany is one of the few European countries with an embassy here. Togo was a favorite vacation destination among Germans in the 1970s and 1980s, and many have stayed.

 

There is also little left of that other pillar of the Togolese economy: the trans-Africa auto trade. When the route through Algeria was still the most popular, Lome was the favourite destination of many a Western European car trader. Once you’d conquered the Sahara of Algeria and Niger, it was but a short distance to the magnificent beaches of Togo. The traders chilled out here and disposed of their cars……..the walls of Chez Alice are lined with European license plates – but only an occasional Western tourist arrives with his own car these days. No one dares drive through Algeria anymore on account of terrorist attacks, and Lebanese traders offer cars at such rockbottom prices in the port of Lome that it no longer pays to sell your car here.

 

Nowhere in West Africa do so many used cars arrive in one place as here, in the port of Cotonou. In the mid-1980s the trade consisted of a few thousand cars per year; by the beginning of the century, that had risen to 200,000. The whole economy of the city revolves around the car trade.

 

The international trade in used cars is constantly in motion. One year, most of the cars go to Africa; the next year, Eastern Europe; the year after that, the Middle East. Hardly any used cars were exported to Iraq under Saddam Hussein, because Iraqis had to pay thousands of dollars in import duties for every car. After America ousted the dictator in 2003, however, the import duties were lifted, and almost all the available Western European used cars disappeared to Iraq that year. In Africa, trade with Liberia and Sierra Leone was interrupted by civil war; now lots of cars go there. The Ivory Coast was always an excellent market but has fallen out of favor since 2003.

 

…..Benin ….Just as in Lome, the trade here is mostly in the hands of the Lebanese, who, like the Indians, have often lived in Africa for generations. In addition to selling used cars, the Lebanese often run supermarkets or restaurants.

 

…..the first car dealers in Africa made enormous profits. Just as in the gold rush, the party ended as soon as thousands of fortune seekers showed up.

 

According to Beuving’s study, the Lebanese actually aren’t so terribly interested in making a profit at all, let alone in the car business. What motivates them instead is the exciting life of the expatriate. Beuving paints a picture of young adults who want nothing more than to escape the oppressive family ties and rigid social conventions of home. The immigrate to West Africa in hopes of a carefree life full of booze and broads. And though there’s little to be made in the car trade, there’s still an ample supply of women and drink. “Its really hard to meet girls in Lebanon,” says John. “A girlfriend just for sex? Forget about it.” In Cotonou, however, that’s not a problem.

 

…..I’m in Ouagadougou, which everyone calls Waga for short. The city makes a bad first impression. Interminable, half-built suburbs ring the outskirts, and the road downtown is a long-drawn-out assemblage of phone centers, food vendors, and secondhand auto parts stores…… There’s more life here, more fun, more enjoyment than elsewhere.

 

In the average African city, three-quarters of the cars are cabs.