Word: harmattan
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...covered Africa for TIME from the mid-1960s to 1971, including the Biafra revolt in Nigeria, was back in that country last week to report on the sudden military coup. He got there, barely, in a small chartered plane from the Ivory Coast. "Over Lagos," says Wilde, "the harmattan, a dust-laden wind blowing from the Sahara, had reduced visibility to 500 yds. On our first try at landing, one wing nearly scraped the runway; we began to stall. But our nerveless Ivorian pilot gunned the motor, and the plane lifted, shuddering. We made it on the second pass...
...aboard, several plunged into the harbor; at least one drowned. "It was crazy," said a Nigerian port official. "Fights broke out, and the police had a hard job controlling the crowd." Those who missed the first ship camped out amid gathering piles of garbage, grateful for the harmattan, a breeze of Saharan dust that blotted out the sun and kept temperatures down from the usual 90° F. Women nursed babies in the shadow of cargo sheds, while vendors of fruit, bread and illegally distilled local spirits set their wares out in the open...
From November until late January, pilots landing at the International Airport near the northern Nigerian city of Kano must worry about a special hazard. Hot winds off the Sahara, known as harmattan, pick up so much dust and sand that the sky becomes hazy and visibility is drastically reduced. Last week a Royal Jordanian Airlines Boeing 707 coming in for a landing at Kano had to make a second attempt because of the blinding harmattan. As the plane landed on the second try, the 707 suddenly burst into flames, and 176 of its 202 passengers were killed. The death toll...
...rough Rif country, and new tourist hotels along the coast. More important, Hassan has pushed his country toward democracy, with free elections and a freewheeling legislature. Is all this really enough? No, suggested the mobs that swept down the labyrinthine alleys of Casablanca with the violence of the harmattan, Morocco's fierce desert wind...
...soap firms. Then comes the undulating grass country, rising in the north to the crusty, arid, mile-high floor and then to the hot Sahara's edge, where by day nomadic cattle herders bow to Mecca and muffle their faces against the sun and grit-filled harmattan winds with robes that keep out the bitter chill when the sun goes down...