Bourdain in Nigeria

“Nigeria is a difficult place to shoot and an even more difficult place to live. But it is also an incredibly inspiring place, with perhaps the hardest-working, most enterprising, most optimistic population I’ve ever encountered.” — Tony Bourdain in Lagos, Nigeria in Parts Unknown, in October 2016.

Tony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode on Lagos, Nigeria — Africa’s largest city, with 15.9 million people (as of 2023) — premiered just one week after his light-hearted sojourn with Eric Ripert in the French Alps, and it’s hard to imagine a sharper, more stark contrast. Lagos was frenzied and frenetic where French Alps was quiet and cheerful, the difference between relaxation in the fresh, rarified air of high mountain scenery and the smog-choked desperation of an overcrowded big city, where side hustles are the only way to make a living for most, and the economic disparity between rich and poor is a conversation talking point in its own right.

The food is different, too — but that didn’t stop Bourdain from crafting a compelling, surprisingly upbeat hour of TV, fuelled by his sheer force of personality whenever the overcrowding and desperation around him threatened to overwhelm.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, with a population of 230 million, and Lagos is practically a country in its own right, the most populated urban region in Africa and one of the fastest-growing megacities in the world.

In keeping with much of Africa — and the emerging world, for that matter — the demographic breakdown leans toward the young side: nearly a third of those people, 32.4 percent by one survey, are under the age of 18. What about their future? What kind of a life awaits them? Lagos may be the financial heartbeat of West Africa, but what does that mean when the financial disparity between rich and poor, old and young, is so great? It’s a question that confronts many of the world’s democracies today, and a question Bourdain wrestled with daily. (Thorny issues like that don’t matter so much in autocratic dictatorships where simply asking that question will get you disappeared.)

It’s hard to watch Lagos and remain in a sunny mood, no matter how much energy Bourdain puts into it — and if you know anything about Bourdain, that’s a hell of a lot. Bourdain is the indigenous film-making capital of the entire African continent, nicknamed Nollywood, and its music scene is the most vibrant in West Africa, which, if you know music, is saying something. The food is more tailored to street food, in keeping with a lifestyle that means eating while on the run, grabbing what one can from sidewalk street stalls, and Bourdain is the ideal companion for that. He’s a connoisseur but no snob when it comes to food.

A quick side note: Lagos was directed and produced by longtime Bourdain cameraman Morgan Fallon in grainy 16mm stock with a deliberately jittery, handheld look and a nervous, almost frantic style, in keeping with Bourdain’s lean toward a more experimental type of filmmaking in his later Parts Unknown episodes: God only knows how it must have appeared to CNN corporate bean counters on first viewing.

Lagos catches Bourdain in neither a soulful, reflective mood nor his angry, testy social commentator mode; things are happening around him too quickly for that. Watching Lagos just the other night, I couldn’t help wondering how Fallon and his camera crew kept up; this is one outing where it’s hard enough to follow Bourdain on the screen, let alone the guys dragging heavy camera equipment behind him; Fallon is the rock star of the piece, if behind the scenes.

This is not one of Bourdainophiles’ favourite episodes — a quick scan of Reddit reviews from the time lean more toward the What the hell? end of the reaction scale than the light-hearted joy and comfort of companionship that fans responded with to the Eric Ripert episodes, keeping in mind — again — that Lagos aired just seven days after French Alps.

One thing one can say about Lagos is, that in Bourdain’s hands, it’s never boring.

“It’s mad, it’s bad, it’s delicious, it’s confusing, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Bourdain said in his voiceover … and he was just getting started. Them’s fightin’ words coming from a dude who, as Eater assistant editor and culture writer Chris Fuhrmeister posted at the time on Eater's webpage, had been around the world, there and back, many times, who made nearly 300 hours of travel television in 15 years.

Lagos is also the only episode, that I’m aware of anyway, where Bourdain says, on-camera: “I’m lazy.” (Context: he was called out at the time for pouring beer without tipping his glass.)

Ah yes, the food. Lagosian cuisine, as it’s known, revolves around fresh fish, beef, spicy soups, and pounded yams. Lots and lots of pounded yams.

The particulars range from traditional Hausa dishes like masa griddlecakes to spicy (aka hot) pepper soups and home-cooked stews (think Jollof rice stewed with goat meat, fish stock, melon seeds and many, many chilis; “It burns,” Bourdain says, “It burns real good!”) with musician activists companions like Femi Kuti and Yeni Kuti, Edoato Agbeniyi and Yomi Messou, food blogger Iquo Ukoh, and journalist Kadaria Ahmed.

The music backbeat is hip, local and authentic — none of this lazy, AI-generated garbage you hear in so many Netflix docuseries. The original soundtrack recording, real music and not regurgitated pop. ranges from Afrobeat to psychedlic rock, in keeping with the episode’s jittery, nervous acid burn, from The Funkees (Point of No Return) and Bio (Chant to Mother Earth) to Fela Kuti (Zombie) and Ofo and the Black Company (Egwu Aja, Allah Wakbarr).

“Nigeria is a difficult place to shoot and an even more difficult place to live,” Bourdain wrote in his Field Notes for CNN. “But it is also an incredibly inspiring place, with perhaps the hardest-working, most enterprising, most optimistic population I’ve ever encountered.”

And there it is — as good a reason as any to revisit Lagos. Or watch for the first time, as the case may be.

Supplementary reading:

https://explorepartsunknown.com/lagos/bourdains-field-notes-lagos/

https://eatlikebourdain.com/?s=Lagos

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/parts-unknown-cinematographer-reflects-exploring-bourdain-1134475/

Supplementary viewing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDWp695LzTU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZSOUX6s3nI

CNN

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Bourdain in Senegal

“A rebuke to those who’d paint a whole continent as a monolith of despair, or Islam as something to be feared.” This was Tony Bourdain in Senegal, in the fall of 2015.o be feared.” This was Tony Bourdain in Senegal, in the fall of 2015.

Senegal.

In Tony Bourdain’s words, “A rebuke to those who’d paint a whole continent as a monolith of despair, or Islam as something to be feared, Senegal turns simple-minded assumptions and prejudice on their heads at every turn.”

More than a few people who followed Bourdain on his travels over the years — including some of those in this group, quite possibly — may have been surprised by how taken Bourdain was with the West African country of Senegal, which he visited just once in his many years on the road, in the fall of 2015.

The essay he penned for the social media platform Medium, the day before Senegal premiered on CNN’s Parts Unknown in May 2016, left little doubt, however.

Bourdain had set foot in Africa before, a vast continent with more than 50 countries, in Congo for Parts Unknown’s debut season, followed in short order by Morocco, South Africa, and Tanzania in 2014, Madagascar in 2015, and Ethiopia a year later.

He would go on to visit Nigeria and—famously, in his final season of Parts Unknown, which aired posthumously in 2018—Kenya with Kamau Bell.

Years earlier, for Travel Channel’s No Reservations, Bourdain wound his way through Ghana, Namibia, and Liberia, ending with Mozambique in No Reservations’ last season, titled — somewhat portentously — The Final Tour.

Senegal, though, was different, as he made clear in his essay for Medium.

“So let this episode in Senegal, an African nation which is over 90% Muslim, serve as both rebuke and example. It is a country that proudly elected as their first president after independence a Christian — because they felt, in their best judgment, that regardless of his faith, he was the best person for the job.

“It is a country that defies stereotypes and expectations at every turn. Emerging from French colonial times as a functioning multi-cultural, multi-lingual, extraordinarily tolerant society, it has managed to avoid coups, tribal wars, dictatorships and most of the ills that afflicted so many of its neighbours. It remains an absolutely enchanting place to visit, with delicious food, absolutely extraordinarily beautiful music, and a relatively free and easy attitude towards intermarriage, mixed race, intertribal relationships and foreign visitors. It has a powerful and proud tradition of hospitality that endures to this day.”

This was in 2015.

Remarkably, the same is still true today, nearly 10 years later, despite everything that’s happened in the outside world in the years since.

And is still happening, as Bourdain himself would have been quick to point out.

The fascinating thing to me, as a frequent visitor of that vast continent, is that all 54 countries are different. That may seem like a trite thing to say, condescending even, but then you must understand that most — virtually all — Africans see themselves that way, as the residents and citizens of strikingly different countries, with separate cultures and separate languages. I have heard it said that while South Africa — possibly the most westernized of African countries, certainly in the big cities of Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town, has 11 official languages, in fact, the country of 64 million people is thought by some to be home to 86 different native languages. To homogenize the entire continent in a single word — Africa — is the height of condescension, but that’s what colonial thinking does to one.

Tony Bourdain got that.

That’s why he was openly welcomed wherever he went on the continent — that, and his love for good music in all its forms. And African cultures have indelibly close ties to music in all its forms. The Sahara Desert and the Sahel hinterlands — possibly a vast, seemingly empty wasteland to you and me — are home to some of the most respected, well-attended music festivals on the planet. And here’s the fun part. Those music festivals are about 95% local and only 5%, if that, touristy.

Bourdain got that, too.

And so, in Senegal, he sits down and breaks bread with Senegal’s native-born Youssou N’Dour, not just sharing quality time with N’Dour but thanks to CNN’s Parts Unknown and Zero Point Zero Production’s cameras allowing us, the viewers, to share quality time not just with a remarkable singer and musician but a poet-philosopher, a political activist, an active humanist, who is Christian, secular and Muslim all rolled into one.

A truly remarkable person. Peter Gabriel is a frequent musical collaborator of N’Dour’s, and he’s not alone among Western musicians of note. Gabriel will tell you he’s the pupil and N’Dour the mentor, not the other way around.

It’s worth noting, too, that N’Dour performed his anthemic 7 Seconds, featured in all its gorgeous fullness in the Senegal episode, in 2005’s Live 8 concert in an extended duet with Dido, who was born in Kensington, London and hails from a background as different from N’Dour’s as is humanly possible.

Think on this: Live 8 — sobering and deeply moving to look back at today, given the fractious state of world affairs today— was performed live, and I’m not making this up, from London, Paris, Rome, Philadelphia, Barrie (Ontario, Canada, my home country), Chiba (Japan), Johannesburg, Moscow, Cornwall and Edinburgh. Think about that: good music brings the world together for a common cause.

Tony Bourdain got that, too.

“So what’s the future?” he asks N’Dour, about midway through what, with the benefit of 10 years’ hindsight, is one of my favourite Bourdain sets.

The two met in Dakar’s Bazoof restaurant over plates of mafe, a Senegalese stew of beef thickened with ground peanuts. To hear Bourdain tell it, “There are similar preparations throughout West Africa, but the Senegalese version is particularly great. Sear the beef; cook the onion, garlic, peppers, and carrots; deglaze with ground peanuts and broth, bringing up all that good stuff from the pan; then simmer until tender and awesome. Serve hot over rice.”

“The future?” N’Dour replies, perhaps surprised by the question.

Bourdain: “Yes, the future. Twenty years from now, where will Senegal be?”

N’Dour: “What I hope is, in 20 years, Senegal is going to be the place for great and big contributions of what we call Islam.”

Bourdain: “Do you think there's any danger of the kind of radical Islam that we see taking hold in many places in Africa?”

N’Dour: “All these people who are using the religion, the Muslim religion, to do bad things — I think Senegal sets (a good) example. This country I love, my country has many different models of the religion. This country, you know — you are here. I'm doing my local bissap “ — a drink made from a hibiscus flower known as the Roselle; the sepals of the hibiscus, when infused in hot water, leave a pink, red, magenta or dark shade of water — “and you are here, with your beer, in a country that is 95 percent Muslim.”

Bourdain: “Right.”

N’Dour: “And I think this example can help all the world.”

Bourdain: “I hope so. Inshallah.”

By the end, Bourdain is profoundly moved by this country of 18 million. Shaken to his core. What better way to close this, then, than with his own words,.

“Senegal is one of the best arguments for travel I can think of. Because the more we see of the world, actually meet who we are talking about — or think we are talking about — the more we take a walk, however briefly, in other people’s shoes, see how other people live, people who are supposedly so different than us, and find ourselves — as so often and so inevitably happens — recipients of random acts of hospitality and kindness from total strangers, then the better we shall be.

“And the happier. Knowledge — exposure — to ‘the other’ is not a contaminant.

“It enriches us. It makes — or should make us — more humble.

“Senegal. It’s someplace that everyone, given the chance, should go.”

Inshallah.

Supplementary reading:

https://explorepartsunknown.com/senegal/senegal-women-equality/

https://explorepartsunknown.com/senegal/senegal-episode-facts/

https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-senegal/

CNN

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Bourdain in Ethiopia

“This stuffing of food in your fellow diners’ face is called gursha, and that’s what you do to show your affection and respect. Try this at the Waffle House some time and prepare for awkwardness.” Tony Bourdain in Ethiopia, in 2015.

“Admit it. You hear the name Ethiopia, and you think of starving children with distended bellies. You just think famine and despair are so awful you frankly do not want to even think about it anymore.

“But take a look, Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia. A cool, high-altitude urban center that will both confirm and confound expectations. Fueled largely by direct foreign investment and a returning Ethiopian Diaspora eager to be part of the new growth, things are changing in Addis. It is one of the fastest growing economies in the world.”

The music. The food. Diaspora. Returning to one’s roots. The value of friendship. The importance of family.

These are the things Tony Bourdain chose to focus on in his Parts Unknown episode Ethiopia, which first aired on CNN in October, 2015. The famous — or perhaps that should be infamous — famine of 1983-’85, Bob Geldof and Live Aid rate just a brief mention, not because Bourdain chose to ignore it but because, he implies, others have done it before him, and better. Geldof, for one.

Instead, there’s the music: Mahmoud Ahmed, performing as Mehamud Ahmed, on Embeba Gora, Bemem Sebeb Litlash and others; Hailu Mergia, with Musicawi Silt, from the album Tche Belew; Thomas Gobena, aka Thomas T. Gobena, with Brothers, from the album The John Prester Sessions; and Abegasu Shiota, with Wonchi Breeze, as performed by Shiota and bandmates Misale Legesse, Girum Mezmur, Yared Tefera, Misale Legesse, and too many othersa to mention here.

If I’ve been overly specific with the song names and tracks — Bourdain and Parts Unknown background composer Mike Ruffino also found room for a Western standard, Sha-la-la, performed by his writer/composer friend Josh Homme and Mark Lanegan of Queens of the Stone Age — it’s because music plays such an important role in Ethiopia, and because, thanks to our modern-day age of technology and global access to world music at the touch of a button, any song, anywhere, is yours for the asking. Bourdain was at his best when combining specificity — attention to cultural detail — with existential bigger-picture questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? It’s one of the reasons Bourdain is still with us, why we’re still watching his shows and talking about him today.

And there’s Africa. The lure and pull of that amazing, enthralling, contradictory and maddeningly complex continent, with its 54 countries and 3,000 tribes and languages with roots that underpin many of the world’s major language families, drew Bourdain in as it has countless others, myself included. Ethiopia finds Bourdain in a relaxed, joyous frame of mind, but also quietly reflective. Africa is the birthplace of humankind — noted anthropologist and paleontologist Mary Leakey more-or-less settled that issue on July 17, 1959, with her discovery of the fossil remains of Zinjanthropus boisei, one of humankind’s earliest known ancestors, later nicknamed “East Africa Man,” aka “Nutcracker Man,” at Olduvai Gorge in the Serengeti plains of Tanzania, a stone’s throw down the Great Rift Valley from southwestern Ethiopia. Bourdain finds himself profoundly moved by Ethiopia, and not for the first time in that part of Africa, and is momentarily caught at a loss for words — which, as any avid viewer of Parts Unknown knows, was rare indeed.

Bourdain’s friend, companion and spirit guide on his Ethiopian expedition is Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised, Harlem NY chef Marcus Samuelsson — birth name Kassahun Tsegie —whose family fled Ethiopia in the turmoil of Ethiopia’s 1974 civil war, a blood-soaked conflagration that saw then-emperor Haile Selassie deposed by a motley crew of Soviet-backed Marxist-Leninist rebels in a coup d’état that vaulted an ambitious young army officer and reluctant bureaucrat Mengistu Haile Mariam to power, a self-righteous dude and diehard Communist who would go down as one of history’s more notable bad guys, if not an out-and-out nut job. Selassie died in 1975 of “natural causes,” according to the official record, though evidence later emerged that he was strangled on orders of Mengistu’s military government; Mengistu’s apparatchiks no doubt irritated by Selassie’s presence and his continuing insistence on staying alive.

Samuelsson, who first became interested in cooking through his maternal grandmother in Sweden, would go on to become the executive chef of Aquavit, the Scandinavian fusion restaurant in midtown Manhattan, at the ripe old age of 24.

He was voted New York’s finest chef in 2003 by the James Beard Foundation and would go on to pen the African-inspired cookbook The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa in 2006.

You might say Samuelsson comes by his culinary roots honestly, as did Bourdain. They both put in the labor and long hours necessary to get where they did in the cooking world.

You might also say that New York as a town was big enough for the two of them: They became fast friends.

Samuelsson’s literary efforts didn’t end with Soul of a New Cuisine: the Wall Street Journal wrote of his 2013 memoir Yes, Chef (co-written with journalist Veronica Chambers): “Plenty of celebrity chefs have a compelling story to tell, but none of them can top [this] one.”

(Bourdain, from somewhere Up There, might lay claim to equal time on that one but, truth is, that wouldn’t be his style.)

A shout-out is due here for Parts Unknown director-producer and cameraman Morgan Fallon, who took on all three duties for Ethiopia. His official bio — not to mention his Instagram and Twitter accounts — note he was nominated ten times over the years for an Emmy but didn’t win as often as he could have — should have. Would it be overcooking things to say that makes him the Stanley Kubrick of cameramen? (Kubrick, let the record note, never won an Oscar for directing, though he did win one for special effects, for 2001: A Space Odyssey — an insult, really, that smacks of condescension more than anything else.)

Ethiopia is about food and family and life itself, but little can top the final few minutes when Samuelsson, trailed by Bourdain, is reunited with his frail, elderly biological father, Tsegie, in the Ethiopian village where Samuelsson was born.

Their reunion is especially poignant because Samuelsson’s mother died in a tuberculosis epidemic when he was just three years old. As recalled in Parts Unknown, Samuelsson and his older sister Fantaye were separated from their family in the tumult and chaos of the 1974 civil war, and were adopted by Swedish geologist Lennart Samuelsson and his wife Anne-Marie and raised in Göteborg, Sweden (Gothenburg to you and me) before Samuelsson’s cooking apprenticeship in Switzerland, Austria and, in 1994, the US.

It’s a remarkable story of sacrifice and success, and refutes this idea of today’s populists that immigration is a scam.

“So, how does it feel to be back?” Bourdain asks Samuelsson at Ethiopia’s end. “I have to tell you, if I can be honest, you seem conflicted.”

“Yes,” Samuelsson says quietly. “There are a thousand thoughts going through my head. I feel a little guilty that I got out.”

Bourdain: “If you stayed, what do you think you would be doing right now?”

“I would have been a farmer or dealt with some type of cattle.”

“I’m pretty sure you would be a shit farmer,” Bourdain says, with a wry smile. “You’d be the best-dressed goddamn farmer, though, that’s for sure. Where is home for you, man? What do you think?”

“That’s the eternal question for me, you know,” Samuelsson replies. “I feel at home in New York. I feel very much at home when I am in Africa. But I also feel out of place, and coming to this very place, Abru Gundana, it gives me a lot of humility, but I can’t say it’s home. I can’t say it’s home.”

As for his happiest moment in Africa, when Bourdain presses him:

“Happiest moment, I think, is … the village. For me, when the whole village comes together — music, food, culture bringing everybody together. Eating together, being together — that is by far the happiest to me.”

That’s a hell of a way to end.

Supplementary reading:

     https://medium.com/@Bourdain/ethiopia-98c2bf948d90

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/ethiopia/on-my-african-mother/

     https://eatlikebourdain.com/?s=ethiopia

CNN

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Bourdain in Madagascar

“He was a poet of life.” Filmmaker Dareen Aronofsky on Anthony Bourdain, after the two visited Madagascar and then Bhutan for CNN’s Parts Unknown.

Over the years, Anthony Bourdain allowed a great many extraordinary landscapes — his words — only to have them fade into a blur outside his windows. “I’ve looked, maybe seen, maybe noticed, then gone,” he intones in his opening voiceover for Madagascar, the fifth-season episode of CNN’s Parts Unknown that first aired in May 2015.

“We all carry different experiences inside us. We see things differently, don’t we?”

Madagascar, the world’s fourth largest island by area, left an indelible impression on Bourdain’s psyche, and the result is plain to see in Parts Unknown. The journey which Bourdain undertook with avant-garde filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and others) caught him in an unusually pensive, reflective mood, even by his standards. The break-up of his first marriage affected him deeply, and Madagascar, an island of almost unparalleled beauty — and scene of almost apocalyptic environmental ruin — will remind long-time Bourdain followers of his 2011 visit to Haiti for No Reservations, which he undertook during a cholera outbreak shortly after an earthquake killed 3,000 people in a single day, and with a hurricane looming on the horizon. A moment toward the end of Madagascar, in which Bourdain and Aronofsky are surrounded by hungry children while sampling a smorgasbord of local food delicacies, has uncomfortable parallels with a similar moment in that No Reservations episode in Haiti, where Bourdain broke bread and talked social injustice with Sean Penn, who was running a local aid project at the time.

“Madagascar,” Bourdain continues in his opening monologue, “exotic, unspoiled paradise, or microcosm for the end of times?”

Real life is no Disney cartoon. This much we knew, of course, but this Madagascar really breaks it down.

Over the years, there have been any number of reasons to watch Parts Unknown, even a decade after its making, but Madagascar is unique in that it provides viewers a glimpse into the process of making one of these episodes — a look, if you will, of how the sausage is made.

That’s in no small part because Bourdain wanted the episode to reflect Aronofsky’s signature style of filmmaking — surrealism, rooted in social consciousness. Visually striking but also emotionally involving. Entertaining and reflective by turns.

In an essay Bourdain penned for CNN’s Field Notes at the time, he shared some of the deepest thoughts of his entire 12-season odyssey with Parts Unknown.

“Travel is not always comfortable,” he wrote, “even when the scenery is at its most beautiful. Look out the window, get too close, and the reality of the situation — the world you will soon be leaving behind — intrudes.

“On Parts Unknown … we make choices all of the time. Choices about what I will show you of what I saw and experienced during my limited time in a destination, and choices about what I won’t. It’s my show. I decide where we go. I decide what we do when we get there. And I decide what we show you when we edit down 60 to 80 hours of footage to 42 minutes.

“That is a manipulative process. And not, inherently anyway, a bad one. I want you, the viewer, to feel the way about a place the way I want you to feel. I want you to look at it and see it from my point of view, if at all possible. Or at least consider other points of view.

“But it is, almost always, one point of view—or one lens through which you see: mine.”

At the time time, people often asked Bourdain what it would be like to accompany him on a film shoot.

“Now you will see. We look at Madagascar, in many ways, through Darren’s fresh set of eyes. It’s a useful reminder, worth having, that what you see on the show is not the only angle. That we are looking at the world out my window, but that there are other windows — that maybe I’ve omitted or shaded something, if only to present myself in a more flattering light.”

Aronofsky approached Bourdain interestingly, not the other way around.

Bourdain was “thrilled, honoured and delighted” — again, his words — to draw the attention of an acclaimed filmmaker whose work he admired, but he had one proviso.

“My only request was that he shoot some footage—with whatever device he wanted to use. And that, at some point, he give us his version of at least a portion of the show for which we have already seen my version.

“So, in Act 6, you will get an example of what may or may not be missing from the shows we make. An ugly, uncomfortable reminder that it’s not just pretty pictures and neat, hopeful sum-ups. It does not, I’m pretty sure, portray me in the best light. Or any of us, for that matter. But there it is. I thought it was important.”

When Bourdain passed on 8 June 2018 — years ago now, though it still feels like yesterday — Aronofsky was among those CNN approached to pen a eulogy of sorts. The two would later travel together to the mountain kingdom of Bhutan for a Parts Unknown episode.

Aronofsky’s words, written just four days after Bourdain’s passing, resonate to this day.

“I was asked to share some thoughts on my time with Tony in Madagascar and Bhutan,” he began. “I’ve been staring at a blank page for days. His death is incomprehensible. I don’t know how to process him being gone.

“I do remember how easily words flowed from him. He made it seem so effortless. He was a poet of life. So I’ll let that inspire whatever flows now.”

And, at the end:

“You turned a light on what it means to be a human right now, right here on planet Earth.

“Thank you for letting me tag along and witness a master storyteller shape the unexpected into the relatable and unforgettable.

“I will never forget how passionate you were about life and this world. You loved love, cinema, food, artists, people, idiosyncrasies, pain, relief, martial arts, chefs, music, the Lower East Side. You loved the whole damn world (even the parts you despised). And the whole world loved you.”

Bourdain was seemingly incapable of producing an underwhelming hour of television, even with the passing of time, but Madagascar, for me, is on a whole other level. Now seems as good a time as any to revisit it.

Supplementary reading:

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/bhutan/anthony-bourdain-darren-aronofsky/

    https://www.foodrepublic.com/2015/05/18/what-its-like-to-film-anthony-bourdains-parts-unknown-in-madagascar/

CNN

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Bourdain in Tanzania

“I went looking for the dream of Africa. I woke up in Tanzania.” This was Anthony Bourdain on East Africa, in 2014. As with so many explorers before him, from David Livingstone to Sir Richard Francis Burton and Henry Morton Stanley, he found what he was looking for.

This one was personal for me.

I have been to Tanzania numerous times as a wildlife photographer, a wanderer curious about the birthplace of humankind, and an admirer of Anthony Bourdain’s work and life outlook.

Palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey’s discovery in July 1959 — the year I was born — of the Laetoli footprints, 3.75 million-year-old fossilized hominid remains at Olduvai Gorge in the Serengeti plains of northern Tanzania, included a jaw bone of one of our earliest recorded ancestors, Zinjanthropus boisei — literally “East Africa man.”

The name was later revised to Australopithecus boisei, the australopithecines being the closest known relatives of modern humans and potentially the missing link between the hominid split from the apes of the mountain forests to Tanzania’s west and who we are today.

If nothing else, this is where humans learned to walk upright, on two legs. That’s a big deal!

It makes perfect sense that the lure of Africa — “I went looking for the dream of Africa. I woke up in Tanzania,” Bourdain said in Tanzania’s opening voiceover in a CNN Parts Unknown episode from 2014 — would prove irresistible to a philosopher traveller who, in four consecutive episodes in what would prove to be Parts Unknown’s arguably strongest season, lifted the veil on Paraguay, Vietnam, Tanzania and Iran over four weeks in October and November 2014.

As an admirer of Tony Bourdain’s work and life outlook — albeit as a latecomer to the Bourdain oeuvre — I was curious how he would approach Tanzania. What, if anything, would he get wrong?

Nothing, as it turned out.

It’s a strong episode, one of his finest, but possibly only someone close to it can truly understand just how much thought went into it, much of that thought not evident on the screen. This is not your typical touristy what’s a good place to stay and eat TV travelogue (“and now a word from our sponsors”). This was deeper. This was Bourdain.

For starters, take another look at the name Zinjanthropus. Zinj is the ancient Arabic word for the East African coast, and it was from here — Zanzibar, to be exact — that many of the early European expeditions were launched. It was from Zanzibar, in January 1866, that David Livingstone, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame and (mis)fortune, ventured into the heart of Africa, tasked by the Royal Geographical Society in London to map the country between Lake Nyasa and Lake Tanganyika to solve once and for all the dispute over the exact location of the source of the Nile. It was from Zanzibar, too, that Henry Morton Stanley ventured into the heart of Africa in March 1871 with no fewer than 192 porters by some accounts, to suss out what the hell had happened to Livingstone after Livingstone was reported missing and presumably lost to history.

This is the first thing that Bourdain and Parts Unknown’s producers got right: He begins his journey to the Serengeti plains and Ngorongoro highlands in Zanzibar, in the winding alleys of Stone Town, an old, stone-walled city redolent with the atmosphere and cultural influences of Islam, India, Asia and mainland Africa, a semi-autonomous island state just 30 miles off the African coast and birthplace of the Swahili language, an amalgamation of Bantu, Arabic, Portuguese, English and German “loanwords” and the unofficial national language of the entirety of East Africa. Little known fact:

Zanzibar is world famous — and rightly so — for its seafood; its fish market is one of the busiest, noisiest, most crowded, most active markets on the entire continent of Africa (54 countries, if anyone’s counting, depending on military coups, civil wars, regional splits and the redrawing of international borders). In Tanzania’s opening section, in the shadow of the actual stone house where Livingstone stayed on numerous occasions and where, as a commemorative plaque notes, “his body rested on its long journey home,” Bourdain goes potty for seafood, perhaps mindful that, as delectable as Zanzibar’s cuisine is, he won’t see anything like it once he ventures into Tanzania’s interior. In the Maasai tribal lands of Ngorongoro and Ol Doinyo Lengai, the Maasai “Mountain of God,” the food is pretty much as it has been since the 15th century, name: basic.

Fun fact: The hardest section by far of those early European explorations of the African interior from Zanzibar was the first 200 miles — basically, snake-infested, insect-ridden, hot-hot-hot, humid, virtually impenetrable swamp, home to virtually every tropical disease known to science and humankind, a stretch of African wilderness so gnarly and nasty and outright unfriendly to human habitation that many 19th-century expeditions simply gave up, turned around and tried to make it back to Zanzibar in one piece. Most weren’t able to manage even that.

So Bourdain, a 21st-century man living in the 21st century, does the prudent thing: He flies.

Another fun fact. The flight, by single-engine bush plane from Zanzibar to the safari outfitting town of Arusha in Tanzania’s northern district, is arguably one of the most stunning scenic flights in the world, because it takes you over the Maasai Steppe — itself no fun to cross in the 19th century as the local tribesmen were only too happy to waylay and shiskebob passing Europeans — and over the shoulder of Mt. Kilimanjaro, a mountain so vast that to fly right over its shoulder is a stunning, and sobering, sight in its own right. Landing in Arusha, Bourdain hops into a 4-by-4 on the long and winding road to Ngorongoro and from there, into the Serengeti plains.

Bourdain is acerbic, cynical, sharp as a tack and rarely at a loss for something to say — we know this. There’s something about the proximity of so many wild animals of so many different species, though — lions, elephants, hippos, giraffes, zebras and 1.5 million wildebeest (this, hard as it may be to believe, is actual fact) — that he’s stunned into a kind of silent reverie.

His host for this section of his expedition is not some cloying, overly chatty tour guide but Ingela Jansson, a Swedish field biologist with the Serengeti Lion Project (lionresearch.org). These are not zoo lions or circus lions but the real thing.

In my own travels through Africa’s wilderness regions, I’ve found that field biologists and conservationists working in the field, in places like the Ngorogorongo Conservation Area Authority (https://www.ncaa.go.tz) and Serengeti National Park make the most reliable and forthcoming hosts, should one be fortunate enough to meet them and convince them you’re not wasting their time — something Bourdain and his producers clearly got.

Bourdain spends time in a Maasai village, breaking bread to speak with the village chief and, in one poignant scene, appearing visibly shaken by being invited to participate in the killing, skinning, dismembering, cleaning, and cooking of a goat for the ceremonial meal provided to village guests of certain repute and status in Maasai society.

Bourdain also touches on the political tensions between the Maasai people and the national government in Tanzania’s capital, Dodoma. Official policy is to favour tourism and regional development over the rights of indigenous people who actually live on the land, a policy that, if anything, has become even more fraught today, in June 2024.

A young Massai moran running over the savanna both begins and ends the program, a kind of moral, philosophical and spiritual bookend.

The effect is pure Bourdain — visual and yet subtle and heartbreaking by turns. No, this is not your typical TV travel documentary.

I’ve penned a number of “look back” reviews of Parts Unknown for the group in recent weeks. If I seem to have been particularly inspired by this one, it’s in no small part because I wrote this while listening to the music of Mali guitarist and singer/songwriter Rokia Traoré — thank you, Spotify — and as anyone with even a passing familiarity with wild lions will tell you, music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

I remember the first time I saw the chain of green, mist-laden volcanoes that, viewed from a distance, form the spine of the Ngorongoro highlands, a chain of sloping green hills that rise from the dusty plains of this part of East Africa, like a vision out of Jurassic Park, if dinosaurs rampaging across a jungle island were actual dinosaurs rampaging across a jungle island. I remember thinking, as Bourdain himself may have thought, in his own words, holy f**k, this is where it all began. It’s impossible to look at the misty hills of Ngorongoro and not think, something happened here.

Bourdain felt it, clearly. It’s one of the reasons why, for me, Tanzania represents some of his finest work.

The green hills of Africa came first in the development of humankind. Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean, ancient Egypt, the Levant, the original civilizations of Babylon and Persia and the violent turmoil that roils the Middle East to this day, all came later.

At the outset of Tanzania, I worried about how Bourdain might screw it up, especially considering the impossibly high standards he set in his other, earlier Parts Unknown programs. I feared it would prove something of a disappointment.

No worries there, as it turned out. Trust me when I say this — Bourdain nailed it bang-on. That’s who he was. That’s why we recognize him and respect him and honour him to this day.

Supplemental reading, in Bourdain’s own words:

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/tanzania/bourdains-field-notes-tanzania/

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/tanzania/bourdain-off-the-cuff-tanzania/

CNN

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