Free Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett Page B

they were “probably drunk.” It was also rumored that later that day the two fishermen had been eaten, but when an Indian coast guard helicopter hovered over the beach, a more mundane reality was revealed. The draft from the rotor blades exposed the bodies of the men buried in shallow graves. As this discovery was made, the Sentinelese were shooting arrows up at the helicopter, so no attempt was made to recover the corpses. The Andaman Islands police chief later claimed that “once these tribals move to the island’s other end we will sneak in and bring back the bodies.” But to date they remain on North Sentinel.
    Should the murder of these two innocent men go unpunished? Why is it so obvious, as it was to the two men’s relatives, that prosecuting the tribe members wouldn’t be an act of justice? North Sentinel isn’t part of our modern world and it doesn’t ask anything of us except to leave it alone. An officious-sounding government document, the
Master Plan 1991–2021 for Welfare of Primitive Tribes of Andaman and Nicobar Islands
, published in the Andaman capital, Port Blair, in 1990, turns out to make a lot of sense. It concludes that “the Sentinelese do not require the benevolence of the modern civilization,” adding that “if at all they require anything, it is non-interference.” The
Master Plan
proposes a policy of stay clear. “What right does modern man have to interfere in the totally isolated tribal life of the Sentinelese? What right has he got to decide unilaterally to impose his ‘friendship’ on the Sentinelese who have been vehemently resisting it?”
    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.







Between Border Posts (Guinea and Senegal)
    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