BY Paul Salopek TRACING HUMANKIND's JOURNEY FROM
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WALKING WITH MIGRANTS TRACING HUMANKIND’S JOURNEY FROM AFRICA, PAUL SALOPEK IS CHRONICLING A STORY FOR THE AGES: THE MASS MIGRATIONS IN WHICH MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE SEARCHING FOR A BETTER PLACE. BY paul salopek PHOTOGRAPHS BY john stanmeyer WALKING 40 WITH ethiopia 2013 Following our forebears Paul Salopek (at left) and his guide Ahmed Elema begin day two of the author’s global odyssey at the village of Herto Bouri, where the first people con- sidered anatomically modern abandoned their familiar African horizon to explore the unknown world. djibouti 2013 The ultimate risk Migrants are inter- cepted and detained by the Djiboutian Coast Guard after trekking from Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea and pay- ing boat captains to carry them across the Red Sea to seek work in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and beyond. Every year hundreds die during this journey. A World on the move FOR NEARLY SEVEN YEARS I have been walk- ing with migrants. ¶ In the winter of 2013 I set out from an ancient Homo sapiens fossil site calledF Herto Bouri, in the north of Ethio- pia, and began retracing, on foot, the defining journey of humankind: our first colonization of the Earth during the Stone Age. ¶ My long walk is about storytelling. I report what I see djibouti 2013 at boot level along the pathways of our orig- Search for a signal inal discovery of the planet. From the start, Migrants in the Horn I knew my route would be vague. Anthro- of Africa gather in darkness on Djibouti pologists suggest that our species first city’s Khorley Beach. stepped out of Africa 600 centuries ago Using black-market data cards for their and eventually wandered, more or less aim- phones, they hope lessly, to the tip of South America—the last to capture a cell sig- nal from neighbor- unknown edge of the continents and my ing Somalia to keep in own journey’s finish line. We were roving touch with loved ones hunters and foragers. We lacked writing, they’ve left behind. the wheel, domesticated animals, and agri- culture. Advancing along empty beaches, we sampled shellfish. We took our bear- ings off the rippling arrows of migrating cranes. Destinations had yet to be invented. I have trailed these forgotten adventur- ers for more than 10,000 miles so far. 44 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Today I am traversing India. of this colossal new exodus include a globalized Our modern lives, housebound as they are, market system that tears apart social safety have changed almost beyond recognition since nets, a pollutant-warped climate, and human that golden age of footloose exploration. yearnings supercharged by instant media. In Or have they? sheer numbers, this is the largest diaspora in The United Nations estimates that more than the long history of our species. a billion people—one in seven humans alive I pace off the world at 15 miles a day. I mingle today—are voting with their feet, migrating often among the uprooted. within their countries or across international In Djibouti I have sipped chai with migrants borders. Millions are fleeing violence: war, in bleak truck stops. I have slept alongside persecution, criminality, political chaos. Many them in dusty UN refugee tents in Jordan. more, suffocated by poverty, are seeking eco- I have accepted their stories of pain. I have nomic relief beyond their horizons. The roots repaid their laughter. I am not one of them, of course: I am a privileged walker. I carry inside The nonprofit National Geographic Society, working my rucksack an ATM card and a passport. But to conserve Earth’s resources, helped fund this article. I have shared the misery of dysentery with WALKING WITH MIGRANTS 45 jordan 2013 Escaping civil war Refugees who fled their homes in Syria when fighting started in 2011 travel around Jordan to find work wherever they can — here picking tomatoes in Gowera village, just north of Aqaba. them and have been detained many times by How long have we been depositing our bones their nemesis—police. (Eritrea, Sudan, Iran, like this on the desolate trails of the African and Turkmenistan have denied me visas; Horn? For a long time. From the very begin- Pakistan ejected me, then allowed me back in.) ning. After all, this is the same corridor used by What can be said about these exiled brothers the first modern humans to exit Africa during and sisters? About the immense shadowlands the Pleistocene. they inhabit, paradoxically, in plain sight? One day I stumbled across a group of Hunger, ambition, fear, political defiance— scarecrows hiding in the scant shade of some the reasons for movement are not truly the boulders—15 lean Ethiopian men who seemed to pretend that if they didn’t move a muscle, they would be invisible. IN DJIBOUTI Some were manual laborers. Most I HAVE SIPPED CHAI WITH MIGRANTS were farmers from the Ethiopian high- in bleak truck stops. lands. The annual rains, the farmers I HAVE SLEPT said, had become impossibly erratic. ALONGSIDE THEM IN Sticking it out on their sun-cracked dusty UN refugee tents fields meant slow starvation. Better IN JORDAN. I HAVE HEARD to chance the ocean of white light that THEIR STORIES OF PAIN. is the Afar Triangle, even if you never returned. They were pioneers of sorts, new climate change refugees. question. More important is knowing how the A recent World Bank study calculates that journey itself shapes a different class of human by 2050 more than 140 million people in sub- being: people whose ideas of “home” now incor- Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America porate an open road—a vast and risky tangent could be tumbled into motion by the cata- of possibility that begins somewhere far away strophic effects of climate change. Ten million and ends at your doorsill. How you accept this climate refugees could swell the trails of East tiding, with open arms or crouched behind high Africa alone. In Ethiopia the tide may reach walls, isn’t at issue either. Because however you 1.5 million people—more than 15 times the emi- react, with compassion or fear, humankind’s grants now straggling annually through the Afar reawakened mobility has changed you already. Triangle to reach the Middle East. Inching north up the Rift, I was forced to con- THE FIRST MIGRANTS I encountered were dead. sider the urge to leave a familiar world that was They lay under small piles of stones in the Great falling apart, a home where the sky itself was Rift Valley of Africa. against you. All around me snaked the invisible Who were these unfortunates? battle lines of an intensifying range war between It was difficult to know. The world’s poorest the Afar and Issa pastoralists—two competing people travel from many distant lands to perish herder groups whose shallow wells were drying in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia, one of the hot- up, whose pastures were thinning from a relent- test deserts on Earth. They walk into these ter- less cycle of droughts. They shot at each other rible barrens in order to reach the Gulf of Aden. over the ownership of a papery blade of grass, There the sea is the doorway to a new (though not over a cup of sandy water. In other words, over always better) life beyond Africa: slave-wage jobs survival. Here was the source of our oldest travel in the cities and date plantations of the Arabian story. Drastic climate change and murderous Peninsula. Some of the migrants’ graves doubtless famines, experts say, likely helped drive the first contained Somalis: war refugees. Others likely pulses of humans out of Africa. held deserters from Eritrea. Or drought-weakened How strong is the push to leave? To abandon Oromos from Ethiopia. All had hoped to sneak what you love? To walk into the unknown with across the unmarked borders of Djibouti. They all your possessions stuffed into a pocket? It is became lost. They collapsed under a molten sun. more powerful than fear of death. Sometimes they dropped from thirst within sight In the Afar Triangle I stumbled across seven of the sea. The columns of exhausted travelers unburied bodies. They were women and men walking behind hastily buried the bodies. clustered together. (Continued on page 60) 48 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Saudi Arabia 12.2 million 37% AMONG THE UPROOTED Saudi Arabia doesn’t accept refugees, Since starting his trek out of Africa in 2013, Paul Salopek has but migrant workers traversed 16 countries (shown below), all marked by large-scale drawn to domes- movements of people. Millions of them are international migrants, tic service and construction jobs traveling from one country to another, mostly to find work and make up nearly improve their lives. Many others, though, are refugees, forced to 40 percent of the leave homelands ravaged by war or environmental disaster. population. Avoiding catastrophe Number of migrants, 2017 War has driven millions from their homes into neighboring countries. 2 million Syrians have fled to Turkey and Jordan, Afghans to Pakistan and Iran, and South Sudanese and others to Ethiopia. Total migrants 4.9 million % of country’s 6% total population Syrians make 3.6 million up more than 20% Refugees 98 percent Kazakhstan has seen of Turkey’s an influx of migrants refugee to work in its boom- population. ing construction industry. 3.5 million 5.2 million 0.4% 3.2 million 33.3% 188,973 3.4 million 16% 1.2 million 1.7% 9,745 3.6% CYPRUS RUSSIA 2 mil. 259,241 23.6% 2.6% 602 KAZAKHSTAN 25,637 78,200 1,115 2% 200,294 2,069 Manata Pass 20 273,259 3.3% GEORGIA S UZBEKISTAN 3.1% 334 June 2016 alo pek 2,516 AZERBAIJAN TURKMENISTAN ’s ro Caspian ute KYRGYZSTAN TURKEY Sea 133,612 TAJIKISTAN 0.4% Argıl 75,927 CHINA Oct.