Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (9 page)

So no more gifts are allowed, no more toys and coconuts, only an occasional observation from what the
Plan
calls a “respectable distance, say 50 meters from the shore.” For the past fifteen years or so this approach has been enforced. No one is allowed near. One day almost everything the Sentinelese know and value will disappear, as it has for every other once uncontacted community. But for the time being North Sentinel Island is theirs and theirs alone.

12° 40′ 26″ N, 13° 33′ 32″ W (border point)

“No man’s land” is a term that, to the modern ear, can sound like stepping onto a battlefield. In fact, the phrase refers back to the idea of unclaimed land (recorded as “namesmaneslande” in the Domesday survey of England of 1086) and still carries an echo of perennial hopes for free land, for places beyond the control of others. Ordinary places become extraordinary in no man’s land. Such in-between places remind us how dependent we are on borders—that our sense of order and certainty draws deeply from the knowledge that we are in governed territory. No man’s lands may be vast stretches of unclaimed land or tiny scraps left over from the planning of cities, though the uncertainty of the no man’s land is especially keenly felt in places that the outside world refuses to recognize or that appear to be between borders. The notion that places might slip down between borders led me on a geographical quest. I went looking for the farthest possible distance between the border posts of two contiguous nations, to see how far they could be stretched apart.

Most border posts face each other. A change of signage, a different flag, a line on the road, all combine to signal that no sooner have you stepped out of one country than you have arrived in another. But what happens if you keep on opening up that space? A few years ago, with the help of hours spent blinking at the tiny fonts favored on travelers’ Internet chat forums, I found what I was looking for. Along a road between Senegal and Guinea in West Africa the distance between border posts is 27 kilometers. It is not the world’s only attenuated border area. The Sani Pass, which runs up to the mountainous kingdom of Lesotho from South Africa, is the most famous. It’s a rough road, although much visited by tourists in 4 x 4s seeking out the highest pub in Africa, which sits near the top of the pass. The drama of the trip is heightened by the thrill that comes from learning that this is no man’s land. The South Africa border control, complete with “Welcome to South Africa” signs, is 5.6 kilometers away from the Lesotho border office. Another specimen is to be found in the mountainous zone between border posts on the Torugart Pass that connects China and Kyrgyzstan. Central America also has a nice example in Paso Canoas, a town that can appear to be between Panama and Costa Rica. It is habitually described as no man’s land because, having left through one border post, you can go into the town without passing through immigration to enter the other country. Some visitors relish the impression that the town around them is beyond borders. Partly as a result, Paso Canoas has developed a darkly carnival atmosphere, as if it were some kind of escaped or twilight place.

What these gaps reflect back at us is our own desires, especially the wish to step outside, if only for a short time, the claustrophobic grid of nations. We probably already suspect that it’s an illusion. Shuffling forward in a queue and making it past the passport officer does not mean you are, at that exact moment, leaving or entering a country. Such points of control exist to verify that you are
allowed
to enter or leave. Their proximity to the borderline is a legal irrelevance. Yet this legal interpretation fails to grasp either the symbolic importance of the border point or the pent-up urge to enter ungoverned territory. The fact that Paso Canoas is split by the Panama–Costa Rica border rather than actually being between borders doesn’t stop people from describing it as an “escaped zone.” Similarly, the steep valley up the Sani Pass is nearly all in South Africa, and the road down from Senegal into Guinea is always in one nation or another, but that isn’t how travelers experience it or even what they want.

The attraction of these in-between spaces has a lot to do with the fact that they are on land. Going through passport control at an airport provides no comparable thrill, even though international airspace is far more like a genuine no man’s land than any number of dusty miles on the ground. It seems that escaping the nation-state isn’t all that is going on here. There is a primal attraction to entering somewhere real, a place that can be walked on, gotten lost in, even built on, and that appears to be utterly unclaimed.

Some of the overland tourist trips that occasionally rumble along the Senegal–Guinea highway offer camping in the no man’s land as part of the package. Like other examples, it’s a zone that provokes people to muse on allegiance and belonging. In his essay “Life Between Two Nations,” the American travel writer Matt Brown describes encounters with villagers along the Senegal–Guinea road that provoke speculation on the nature of national identity:

I stopped my bike to chat with the woman pounding leaves. I asked in French (my Pular only goes so far), “Is this Guinea?”

“Yes,” she answered.

Surprised that she even understood French, I posed a follow-up question. “Is this Senegal?” I asked.

“Yes,” came the reply.

A little later Brown sits on “a nationless rock” and imagines these villagers as freed from the “archaic, nonsensical national borders drawn up by greedy European leaders at the Conference of Berlin over 100 years ago.” Stretching out border posts does seem to break the seal on the national unit. The resultant gap may not be of much legal import, but for travelers on the ground it creates a sense of openness and possibility.

Yet while travelers may relish this expansiveness, the consequences for those who have to live and work in such places can be less positive, such as heightened insecurity and a sense of abandonment. This is one of the reasons why African states have been trying to close the gap in such anomalous spaces. The African Development Fund, which supports economic infrastructure projects across the continent, has made “establishing juxtaposed checkpoints at the borders” of its member states a priority, including at the Guinea–Senegal border. What most concerns the fund’s members is the impact that these distant border posts have on the flow of trade. Along the Guinea–Senegal route there are nightmare tales of vehicles being sent back and forth by officials who keep asking for new documentation or demanding new bribes. In-between land can easily turn into a place of bureaucratic limbo where both travelers and locals are uniquely vulnerable to tiresome and corrupt officialdom. Patches of ground “between” nations are places that can be thought of as free, but they are also places where we are reminded why people willingly give up freedoms for the order and security of being behind a border.

21° 52′ N, 33° 41′ E

It seems incredible that anywhere could be so ill thought of that no one wants it. Bir Tawil, a 795-square-mile trapezoid of rocky desert between Sudan and Egypt, is such a place. It is not just a no man’s land; it is actively spurned. It also appears to be the only place on the planet that is both habitable and unclaimed.

The Bir Tawil anomaly opens up a new perspective on world history. It is the history of the struggle
not
to occupy territory, and sounds like history written back to front. Asserting ownership over place is at the root of many of the world’s enmities and identities. It’s no surprise that we tend to assume nations want to continually grow; that the border, much like the fence put up by an inconsiderate neighbor, is always being pushed to the maximum extent. But Bir Tawil reminds us that nations are defined by their limits: that land is not always wanted, and that for every claim on a piece of ground there must be many acts of denial and avoidance.

For Sudan and Egypt the point of not wanting this landlocked region is that it bolsters a claim to an even bigger and more useful parcel, the 8,000 square miles of the Hala’ib Triangle, which faces the Red Sea. Their dispute arises from the existence of two different versions of the border that separates Egypt and what used to be called Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Both were drawn by the area’s British administrators. The first is from 1899 and is a 770-mile-long straight line across the desert, and is the border Egypt is keen to keep. It gives Bir Tawil to Sudan but holds the valuable Hala’ib Triangle on its side. The Sudanese don’t accept this border and point to another, drawn in 1902, which is mostly straight but toward the coast begins to change course, giving a tongue of land along the Nile to Sudan (called the Wadi Halfa Salient) but also the Hala’ib Triangle. The 1902 map gave both places to Sudan because they were considered by the British to be ethnically and geographically linked to the south. The makers of the 1902 map applied the same logic to scoop the border southward and place Bir Tawil in Egypt. They considered Bir Tawil to belong ethnically in the north because it was used for grazing by the Ababda, a nomadic tribe that lives in southern Egypt.

For many decades the 1902 borders were not seriously disputed. In the early 1990s, however, Sudan granted oil exploration permits for the Hala’ib Triangle. Egypt responded by occupying the area and claiming its right to defend the 1899 border. In response, the Sudanese have offered gestures of defiance. In 2010 a government official tried to get into Hala’ib, with the apparent idea of getting the locals to vote in Sudanese elections. If the plan had worked, it might have backed up Sudan’s claim, but the official wasn’t allowed in, and for now the Egyptians seem to have succeeded in claiming the Hala’ib Triangle and disclaiming Bir Tawil.

In the meantime, Bir Tawil has become ever more unwanted. Although the name means “tall well,” a prolonged drought has removed what little agricultural value Bir Tawil ever had. Satellite images appear to show that across its barren miles there is not a single building. Even its desert tracks are now disused, disappearing reminders that this was once Ababda territory. The Ababda took little notice of the region’s national borders and had their own distinctive ethnic heritage. A 1923 issue of the
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain
has photographs of Ababda men with thick, tightly braided hair alongside local myths about them, for they were seen as mysterious and ancient even by other desert tribes. It was said that “when followed up into the desert” an Ababda “vanishes from sight after going 200 or 300 yards.” Moreover that their glance is very dangerous to others and “they can bring moving objects to a standstill, when at a considerable distance from them.”

The Ababda have moved away, but an important part of their story remains rooted in this place. Thus, to say that Bir Tawil is unoccupied is not to say that it has no history or that it’s anyone’s to take. It is a point worth making since the unclaimed space of Bir Tawil has become a favorite fantasy item among the Internet’s would-be nation builders. Indeed, these days real information about the place is obscured by myriad websites and online disputes between fictional kings, emirs, and presidents of Bir Tawil.