Adjusting Our View

Three pictures of places in the world—but where are they? Take a moment to ponder them before you read on—and clicking on the images will enlarge them and possibly give you a clue. But most likely not.

In order from the left, therefore: Beijing’s Business District, Lhasa in Tibet, the setting for Shangri La, and at the bottom Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. The populations of these places are 19.6 million, 373,000, and 1.2 million. The images we’re accustomed to seeing are, respectively, the entrance of the Forbidden City (construction there began in 1406) with Mao’s image prominently visible; the Deprung Monastery and once the home of the Dalai Lama some miles from Lhasa; and for Mongolia, simple yurts with snowy mountains in the distance. Well, some Mongolians use elevators to get to bed.

This excursion was motivated by our seeing a Chinese film (too gross in content to record its title here) in which the earliest scenes showed us Beijing. Now these images shouldn’t have, but they did rather startle us, and afterwards, comparing impressions, we had to laugh: we are so influenced by stereotypes. And this came a day or so after a newspaper image from Mongolia had also startled us.

The world is changing. To be sure, there are still areas more or less untouched by modernity. Herewith I show a partial map of a city of 54,000 somewhere, along with an enlargement to prove that it is “modern.” The enlargement shows pictures of cars and trucks. 

This happens to be Timbuktu, in Mali, in Africa. And another image, closer to earth-level, reveals that Timbuktu looks pretty much like it might have looked when the Western world, in the person of France, proceeded to embrace it in 1883:

From Here to Timbuktu

In the context of ancient empires overrun by colonial conquest—and in context of breaking news, as it were—it may be instructive to contemplate the history of Mali, a landlocked country in north-western Africa. It was once an empire too (1230-1600) and once reached the Atlantic; back then what is now Senegal and part of Mauritania were part of it. It was, of course, also created by conquest—but lived by the Trans-Sahara trade (to and from Ethiopia, Egypt, Tunis, Europe, and Morocco). The empire’s main centers, among them Timbuktu, now a regional Mali capital, were terminal or starting points of this trade.

I note that Mali’s coat of arms bears the words Un peuple, un but, une foi. Those words point back to the early days of the nineteenth century when France began to conquer Senegal and eventually what is Mali now. One people? You wish, one might say. One goal? The answer there is domination over the mineral wealth, gold. One faith? Well, the faith is Islam. Ninety percent of the people are Muslims, 5 percent Christian; and 5 percent still tenaciously cling to the really old-time religions of still undiscovered and unconquered Africa.

What is now proceeding in that region is, in fact, a conflict within the Muslim community, on the one hand. On the other it is a return to traditional ways and the shedding of the alien garments of democratic government imposed by France. Our own still active genius is to form good advertising slogans. Therefore, our elites speak of islamofascism to infuse us with shivering dread.

It’s a long ways from here to Timbuktu—as a trader, staring at his lines of camels setting forth from Egypt, might have said. But here we also see a latter-day parallel to the conquest of Aztec and Inca empires by the first colonists. I noted, a while back, that the one thing always on Columbus’ mind, after making landfall, was gold (link).