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For all the fashionable talk about a postcolonial redress of the imbalance between major cultural centers and a neglected “periphery,” the tact remains that current art, and the critical and commercial attention it generates, still tends to coalesce where the money is–in New York, not New Guinea; in Basel, not Bakersfield. It is, therefore, something of a salutary shock to realize that, for a decade now, one of the world’s best gatherings of fine-art photography has occurred biannually in one of the earth’s poorest countries–a nation with an average income of less than $300 per capita. Moreover, the event’s participants are drawn almost exclusively from a continent whose resources have long been expropriated by foreign powers or squandered by homegrown tyrants.

The Rencontres de la Photographic Africaine, now a fixture in Mali, West Africa, was conceived following a confab between French and Malian emissaries charged with seeking ways for the French government to foster cultural production in the former colony. France controlled Mali from 1893 to 1960 and today retains strong ties with the predominantly Muslim country of 11 million, still a source of cheap cotton, that covers an area nearly twice the size of Texas and stretches 1,000 miles from the sub-Saharan region around Timbuktu through the Dogon country of the scrub-growth Sahel to the mid-reaches of the Senegal and Niger rivers. French remains the nation’s official language , and some 100,000 Malians now live in France–roughly 40 percent of them legally. Following independence, Mali passed through decades of state socialism and strongman rule before embarking tentatively, beginning in the 1990s, on its present course of moderate privatization and constitutional multiparty government.

Although other towns in Mali are now being considered as a future site, the country’s capital, Bamako , has hosted all five of the Rencontres photo festivals to date. Centered on the north shore of the Niger, the city features a sprinkling of modern structures knit together by an extensive in-fill of improvised stalls and sheds, where many of the inhabitants live, work and trade amid dusty arid heat or seasonal downpours. Roads are few and often unpaved, but the vibrant street life constantly threatens to upstage any and all formally organized civic activities. Odd sounds arise from the goat markets; vividly patterned garments are washed in the river and left to dry on the grass behind the Maison de la Culture; drivers park their long-distance trucks near the soaks and stretch out to sleep underneath; women with infants slung on their backs and towering loads balanced on their heads stride, with superb grace, through the shantytown jumble; children swirl gleefully across open lots; drumming and dancing invariably follow the speeches that open each segment of the biennial. Even at the French ambassador’s welcoming lawn party last fall, convivial speakers had to compete for attention with a baby gazelle nibbling randomly at the toes of international guests.

On a budget of $1 million, the fifth Rencontres brought together works by about 100 participants from throughout Africa and parts of the diaspora, most notably Cuba and Brazil. In addition, 14 artists from Germany were represented in a guest section. Artistic director Simon Njami, an art critic and independent curator based in Paris, headed a team of 13 curators who mounted shows in seven major venues under the general thematic rubric of “Sacred and Profane Rites.” Along with seminars and workshops for aspiring professionals, other “fringe” programs included outdoor exhibitions in heavy, foot-traffic areas, a lycee-level photography competition, neighborhood studio setups, nightly projections accompanied by live music from popular Malian groups, and a daily festival newspaper and on-line report.

The monthlong biennial was opened officially by Malian president Amadou Toumani Toure at the Musee National du Mali, a campus-style institution that houses permanent installations of Mali’s celebrated textiles, ritual objects and archeological artifacts, as well as a new 7,500-square-foot temporary exhibition hall. Here works from the last half century by five African photographers, each in some way intent on capturing life through the lens, stood in stark contrast to the highly sophisticated–and bloodless–exercises of Germany’s reigning image strategists.

Algerian writer Mohammed Dib’s mid-1940s street scenes from his native Tlemcen are standard between-two-cultures fare that only obliquely presage his 1959 political banishment, but other African works at the Musee displayed considerably more formal inventiveness. To judge by his beefcake self-portraits, Youssef Safieddine, a Lebanese emigre who opened a commercial studio in Dakar, Senegal, in 1956, apparently considered himself a looker. The charm of his blatant narcissism–here I am, dark-eyed and wavy-haired, in bulging swim trunks, in cool resort wear and sunglasses, in sleeveless T-shirt while playing the accordion–found a fortunate diversion in his wife, Fatmeh, whom he fetishized for decades in “real-life” glamour shots, often including himself, derived from the visual vocabulary of the era’s popular photo-romance magazines.

Yet more stylized, and equally rife with pathos, are the consummately artificial studio images engineered by Van Leo, a midcentury Cairo portrait photographer who was born in Turkey of Armenian parents. With costumes, dramatic lighting, firm direction of poses and much darkroom manipulation, he convincingly transformed his sitters into classic-Hollywood versions of their would-be selves: beautiful Italian peasant girl, Dietrich clone, pipe-smoking aristocrat, bomber-jacketed soldier of fortune. Conversely, South African Santu Mofokeng, who began as a Soweto street photographer in the 1970s, focuses on present reality and traces of troubled history throughout the world–a torture cell in an unnamed locale, window mannequins in disarray following an earthquake in Turkey, female survivors of a Nazi concentration camp standing before billboard-size headshots of themselves during their commemorative return to Ravensbruck in 2000.

The Musee National installation–indeed the Rencontres as a whole–culminated in 10 pristine images by Mali’s master of subtle observation, Seydou Keita (1921-2001). In his tiny home studio in Bamako, Keita created sharp-focus individual and group portraits widely esteemed for their sartorial detail and psychological acuity. Promising “the image you want,” he attracted subjects who donned their finery , chose their own poses and displayed proud possessions such as watches, umbrellas, radios and scooters. Tight quarters led to tight framing and a consequent compression of visual information. At his best, as he was in these examples from the 1950s and ’60s, Keita could capture both self-revealing facial expressions and extremely precise renderings of busy fabric pattern against busy fabric pattern or minutely nuanced gradations of white on white. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he had an abundance of uniquely stylish, physically striking individuals to work with.

An old Zen saying holds that when a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it rains in California. While such ancient wisdom or chaos theory may be as good an explanation for the current scooter craze as any, the Zen masters were also correct in the literal sense: China opened the flaps on mass manufacturing of push scooters two years ago, and it’s now raining scooters not only in California, but all over the world.

From a blip on the U.S. radar screen just 12 months ago, scooters have whooshed across the country practically on the heels of their own momentum, unaided by any significant marketing or advertising. After taking off on both coasts and in Chicago, the trendy little transportation devices have made their way into remote outposts like Mansfield, Texas, where a school board member recently rode one down an auditorium isle at a teacher’s orientation meeting. When school started, students jammed the collapsible scooters into their lockers as fast as convenience stores could stock name-brand knockoffs for as little as $79.

According to most estimates, scooter sales should reach anywhere from 2 million to 5 million this year. At $99 a pop for a basic model, that translates into a minimum $200 million business. Officials at Huffy Bicycles, Miamisburg, Ohio, expect sales to reach 4.5 million in the U.S. in 2000. “We think our Micro [scooter] will account for about a third of that total, and we expect to sell 1.5 million,” said Bill Smith, vice president of marketing at Huffy. Last year, the company sold 25,000 of the scooters.

What sets the scooter phenomenon apart from most fads is its ability to reach across demographic barriers, including everyone from back-to-school kids to Wall Street lawyers to dot-coin types in San Francisco. Today’s scooters are far slicker than the child’s toy that lost its luster sometime around the first sidewalk surfboard craze–the precursor to today’s skateboard–in the ’60s. They’re also much sturdier than the homemade scooters of the ’50s, which were constructed from orange crates, old roller skates and leftover bicycle parts. The new versions come with lightweight shiny aluminum folding frames, Rollerblade-style wheels in iMac-like colors, brakes and, in some cases, motors. The names are snappier too: Razor, Zappy, Xootr, Hoverboard, Go-Fed and Know-Fed are the Fords and Chevys of the sidewalk set.

“We watched [the scooter phenomenon] grow,” said Lou Soucie, spokesman for The Sharper Image, which showcases several scooters in its latest catalog and in display windows at urban retail outlets. “We started with them in April, with the Razor priced at $119,” Soucie said. Those sold well, but then the company dropped the price to $99. At that point it just exploded. We had found the price point. It’s now the number-one-selling product in our line,” Soucie said.

On-line toy retailer eToys has had a similar experience with its scooter. “One of our buyers saw one in Hawaii and brought it to us, and we began selling in February,” said eToys marketing manager Jonathan Cutler. “We were pretty shocked when we first put it up, and then we sold out immediately. Now we have got 12 different types from kids’ versions to the versions for adults.”

But affordability only partly explains scooters’ vast inroads into popular culture. Marketers at Zappworld.com, Sabastopol, Calif., began to see a spike in their scooter sales earlier this year when so-square-he’s-hip actor Kevin Spacey rode a Zappy scooter on The David Letterman Show. “The next day we were deluged, and we couldn’t explain it until someone told us about Spacey’s appearance,” said marketing manager Alex Campbell. Spacey was later shown riding a Zappy on 60 Minutes, and he mentioned during an interview on Showtime that he rode the scooter unnoticed through the streets of NewYork. “Each time our phone lines lit up like the fourth of July,” Campbell said.

Celebrity endorsements certainly help, but how and where did the scooter trend begin? Irma Zandl, president of market research firm the Zandl Group in New York, offers an interesting explanation. “Drug dealers on the Lower East Side. That’s where we first saw them last summer. They used them to [expedite] delivery, I suppose,” Zandl said. “Then we saw a few in the Hamptons last year as well.”

Zandl said that groups of teenagers, who are highly influential over other teens’ buying patterns, began using the scooters and begat the trend.

According to the Lreport, which forecasts youth trends worldwide, scooters began booming in popularity in Japan just over a year ago. “In overcrowded Tokyo, commuters used them to get from the subway to work.” said Maria Vrachnos, general manager of the Lreport, Del Mar, Calif. “From Tokyo they migrated to the West Coast among the 19 to 24-year-olds, but then came this year’s rise in gas prices and some older people picked up on it for commuting.”

Vrachnos said that the desire for scooters ties in directly with the desire for an electric car. “Our data shows that the electric car is the invention most kids would like to see, and we view the scooter as sort of a step in that direction,” she said. And there’s another underlying appeal: fashion. Couture versions of the scooter are on display at the Zao gallery in New York, said Vrachnos, adding: “The Troter, a version from France, includes a shoulder strap, elevating the scooters from a novelty item to a stylish fashion accessory.”

And unlike say, the hula-hoop, the scooter trend is not limited to the U.S. In addition to Japan, where enthusiasm is high enough to support magazines devoted to the subject, scooters are a common site on public transport systems throughout Europe. In London, British pop star Robbie Williams has popularized the two-wheeled wonder, while in Holland, according to one U.S. observer, “They’re all over the place. Apparently you have to pay extra if you take your bicycle on the subway so people just take their scooter, fold it up and they save that fare.”

Though scooters have established a wide spectrum of users, some companies had difficulty initially penetrating U.S. markets. At Nova Cruz Products, Lee, N.H., marketers tested the waters for the company’s upmarket $200 plus Xootr (pronounced ZOO-TER) with college students. “We did our initial market research at Stanford University,” said marketing manager Naomi Cromwell. The test didn’t go well, and when the company gave away a scooter as a prize, the winner returned it. But a few months later, thanks to a shortage of Razors in Japan and a Web site that pulled in search engine traffic looking for scooters, the Xootr took off. It has since become the high-end scooter of record–the first scooter with snob appeal.
“Our main demographic is the urban hipster. That’s who we primarily sell to,” said Cromwell.

Thus far, scooter manufacturers have had to do little in the way of marketing to ensure growth. The largest manufacturer, Taiwanese J.D. Corp., began producing scooters about two years ago in a factory in China; by the time its now ubiquitous Razor hit the U.S. market, the company was struggling to keep up with demand. In July J.D. Corp. established a U.S. headquarters to centralize domestic distribution. But marketing? Razor apparently doesn’t need it.

“I’ve hired a PR agency to handle calls from publications, but we don’t really need advertising,” said Carlton Calvin, head of U.S. operations. “This thing advertises itself.”

The company recently received free publicity when Razor was the subject of a question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, including a market research bonus in the form of a poll-the-audience lifeline. “Fifty-four percent said the Razor was a scooter,” Calvin noted. “That’s pretty amazing when you consider we were unknown just a year ago.”

Razor is currently mulling over a variety of licensing offers from fast-food outlets, video game and apparel companies, as well as product placement in movies (look for one in the next Ben Stiller flick). “It’s a good position to be in. We get to choose who we want to partner with,” said Calvin. The scooter appears in a recent issue of Rolling Stone in a giveaway promotion with Interscope Records. “That demographic, the college student and the urban hipster, is a key one for us,” Calvin said. Advertising and marketing, he added, is not part of the mix just yet. “Most of what we’re doing right now is just keeping up with demand.”