I must give you today
It only lives when you
Give it away
Trouble with the nations, trouble with relations
Where you going to go for some illumination?
Too much to carry, too much to let go
Time goes fast—learning goes slow
But I’ve got this thing in my heart
I must give you today
It only lives when you
Give it away
“WHEN YOU GIVE IT AWAY,” 1997
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/88.
The “Dinner” part of the album appeared without warning in the form of a phone call from filmmaker Robert Lang. Was I interested in going to Mali? Bob dangled this land of adventure and music in front of me like a carrot on a walking stick. Music alone was a significant carrot, as Mali is justly famous for its musical heritage, and part of the trip would involve collaborating with the country’s fantastic musicians.
Bob had directed the many promotional TV spots I had made over the years for the Unitarian Service Committee, or USC Canada. In cahoots with that organization, he was leading a crew to Mali to survey the effects of desertification and investigate the measures that farmers were employing to live with it. We would make a documentary about the issue, with me as the curious Canadian asking questions on camera.
USC could provide access, as they had been running food security-related projects with area farmers for some years. By the late nineties they were working with Malian farmers to identify crop strains that could withstand the increasingly severe conditions wrought by global climate change, and to develop new strategies for growing and storing grains. Along the way we would visit the fabled city of Timbuktu, on the southern verge of the Sahara desert. I had never seen the Sahara, except as a distant shore across a fifty-mile stretch of sea from the Canaries.
In addition to accessing Mali’s music, the African journey appealed to my curiosity about what we can expect when things dry up, which it seems they likely will. The world was already embroiled in wars over oil (with the biggest such conflicts hovering just a few years out), but it seemed clear to me that these conflicts would soon be accompanied, if not overshadowed, by wars over water. The coming scarcity of such a vital necessity is not only potentially devastating but increasingly lucrative. According to a 2013 article in Harper’s, the amount of money controlled by “water-focused mutual funds . . . ballooned from $1.2 billion in 2005 to $13 billion in 2007,” owing in large part to Al Gore’s climate change film An Inconvenient Truth, released in 2006. Around the same time a Goldman Sachs report called water “the petroleum for the next century,” and noted the investment opportunities inherent in the “major multi-year droughts” occurring in Australia and the western United States. Wars over the economy of water will be horrific enough. What happens when there simply isn’t enough of it to go around? You can live without oil for quite a while—forever if you’re able to give up all the crap it affords—but you can forgo water for only a couple of days before you start to die. When the taps run dry in Phoenix and Riyadh, watch out.
Our small group (Bob Lang and his two-person crew—Friederike Knabe, director of programs for USC Canada, and me) was in Mali for a month. In the process we produced a pretty good film called River of Sand, which I narrated, for Canada’s Vision TV. I co-wrote the narration with writer/filmmaker Heather MacAndrew, with whom both Bob and I had worked on other projects. I was assigned the role of the dopey, wide-eyed Canadian going around saying, “What’s that? What’s that?” What emerged was an intelligently produced documentary that blends the imagery, causes, and sociopolitical effects of desertification with the suggestion of an antidote and a look at the vibrant culture of the Dogon people with whom we worked. The country’s accomplished and soulful musicians figure prominently in the film.
In Mali as elsewhere, desertification and drought have led to crop failure, causing economic difficulties and an associated exodus of traditional villagers, especially young people, from the countryside to urban centres or even other countries. USC Canada has a program called Seeds of Survival that helps rural people develop and preserve crop strains, farming methods, and irrigation systems that can turn back the devastating impacts of desertification, ideally stemming the flow of environmental refugees that rips apart communities and overburdens cities. These efforts are obviously critical for local people, but they are also important on an international scale. All over the planet, in thinly as well as densely populated areas, the soil that grows the world’s food is wearing out from overuse, deforestation, and drought. The earth has long been losing its ability to support life, and now climate change is accelerating the process. Unless this trend is reversed, widespread and devastating famines will occur increasingly in many parts of the world.
Our journey began in Bamako, Mali’s capital, a city that seemed gentler than many of its Third World counterparts. It sits on the banks of the Niger River, a huge and critical artery that extends through five West African nations. The Niger is Africa’s third-largest river, behind the Nile and the Congo, and it follows an odd path, beginning in the western highlands of Guinea just 150 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. From its headwaters the Niger flows northeast straight inland, making a boomerang shape through landlocked Mali, past Timbuktu, where it turns southeast through Niger, Benin, and Nigeria toward the South Atlantic Ocean and the Niger Delta, an area ravaged by oil companies.
In Bamako we hooked up with Toumani Diabaté, a master of the kora, the twenty-one-string classical harp of West Africa. It’s a gorgeous-sounding instrument that I first encountered in the 1970s and have loved ever since. Toumani is an inspired player, lithe and intuitive. It was stimulating to cross such great physical and cultural distances to find that, at his modest family compound, we were able to connect musically without any rehearsing. Like many Malian musicians, Toumani had traversed similar terrain from his side. I was so smitten by the sonority between the kora and the guitar that, after returning to Canada, I wrote some songs designed to include it. I was hoping for Toumani as well. His playing is rooted in Malian tradition but progressive, and his ear is very keen. When asked, he agreed to record with us. We arranged for his flight to Canada and a visa that would allow him to work, but when we went to the airport in Toronto to pick him up, he wasn’t there. He simply didn’t show. No call, nothing. Someone on his end claimed that he’d gone to the Canadian embassy, but they wouldn’t issue him the visa. The embassy told us he never showed up. Shortly after that, he was on tour in the United States with Taj Mahal. We speculated that Taj wanted an exclusive arrangement with him. But who knows?
Once again we found opportunity in adversity, because Jon Goldsmith knew another fine kora player, Daniel Janke, a Canadian who had been playing the kora since 1976, when he studied for five months with Jali Nyama Suso of Gambia. Though he appears on only three songs on Breakfast in New Orleans, the kora was my intended foil for that album. The songs “Mango” and “Let the Bad Air Out” were constructed to accommodate the kora, and they turned out as I had hoped. The latter was a second stab at finding music to carry those lyrics, which had been around for a few years. “Mango,” lyrically speaking, flew in straight from Vermont. It’s a paean to female sexuality, a small attempt to offset, with something respectful, some of the garbage that’s sung by men about sex.
I have no problem with people singing about sex. It is about as central to the human experience as things get. Without it, said experience would have been very short-lived. Sex is wired into our souls, beautifully, powerfully, and inextricably intertwined with spirituality. When coupled in sexual bliss, or even angst, we can make ourselves utterly vulnerable to each other, more than in any other exchange, and in this space pursue the most elusive depths of human promise. Or, as the saying goes, “Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.” (Though I’m not clear on why laughter should be excluded.) Like any other element of life as a human, sex warrants being sung
about, but I needed to ease the subject out of the sweaty grip of vulgarity.
She’s got a mango in the garden—sweet as can be
She’s got a mango in the garden—full of mystery
She’s got a mango in the garden—from the original tree
She’s got a mango in the garden—shares it with me
Humid gleaming precious well
Love to drink that water
Parallel worlds when the sun goes down
The atmosphere grows hotter
I slid through the glistening gate
Tide began to pound
Tears of light poured over me
And ricocheted all around
She’s got a mango in the garden—sweet as can be
She’s got a mango in the garden—full of mystery
She’s got a mango in the garden—from the original tree
She’s got a mango in the garden—shares it with me
“MANGO,” 1998
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/89.
We piled ourselves, our gear, eighteen cases of bottled water (two cases of which broke atop the vehicle on Mali’s treacherously bumpy roads), and a satellite phone into two Land Cruisers and headed east out of town. For two days we bounced and swayed across four hundred miles of dust-blown roads that were sometimes no more than barely visible tire tracks in the sand. Without the skill and experience of our local drivers, we’d have been stuck or lost or both. I watched a curtain open on a new world. Nomadic Peul herders coaxed herds of cattle and gangly, goatlike sheep from well to precious well across thorn-strewn gravel plains dotted with acacias and baobabs and odd-looking forked palms. Every day brought blasts of heat that reached well over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, the air so dry you never felt a drop of sweat. As we passed through this surreal landscape, blurred with blowing sands and the ghosts of salt caravans, gold traders, and fallen empires, the mythic, once-great city of Timbuktu waited somewhere over the next low rise. I could feel it.
Like Mali’s farms, Timbuktu itself has, over the past half-century, been filling with sand from an ever-encroaching desert. Veteran North Africa reporter Serge Daniel, writing for Agence France-Presse, provides a neat synopsis of Timbuktu’s history that illustrates how the ancient but now crumbling city was able to embed itself in humanity’s collective consciousness: “Founded between the 5th and 11th Centuries by Tuareg desert nomads, Timbuktu became a meeting point between north, south and west Africa and a melting pot of black Africans, Berbers, Arabs and Tuareg desert nomads. The trade of gold, salt, ivory and books made it the richest region in West Africa and it attracted scholars, engineers and architects from around Africa, growing into a major centre of Islamic culture by the 14th Century. Some 25,000 students were said to attend the University of Sankore at the time. The legend of Timbuktu began in 1324, when the Malian emperor Mansa Mussa (1307–1332) made a pilgrimage to Mecca via Cairo with [a retinue of] 60,000” people, including some 12,000 slaves, each of whom carried three kilogrammes of pure gold, which Mussa said came from Timbuktu. “This amount of gold caused the Egyptian currency to lose its value, according to the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO, and put Timbuktu on the map as a mysterious African city of gold.” I had first heard of the Tuaregs from reading Tarzan comics when I was a kid.
Timbuktu is in the Sahel, a semiarid region that forms a band across Africa immediately south of the Sahara. When we arrived, there was no gold in sight; in fact, the great city barely existed. Many of Timbuktu’s ancient sandstone buildings were inundated with the sands of the expanding desert. We met Mohammed Ali—not the famous boxer, but a local Tuareg elder. Standing near a twelfth-century mosque, Ali explained that until 1972 a twelve-mile canal ran from the Niger River to Timbuktu, but since then it had fallen into disrepair and filled in with sand. Ali remembered a time when large trees grew from the outskirts of town one hundred miles toward the open Sahara. By the time we came along, the trees were virtually nonexistent and the desert was taking over the city.
Timbuktu remains a destination for the more adventuresome type of tourist. Soon after our arrival a small caravan of Americans showed up, flown in from Bamako. The great Malian bluesman Ali Farka Touré was scheduled to play for them that night in the hotel where we were all staying. We were hoping to meet him, and did, in a chance encounter in the courtyard, where he informed us that Mali is “the roots of what we call the blues.” He was tall and fit, good-looking, and dressed just like John Lee Hooker. That night I sat in with him, and he put on a powerful performance, his haunting guitar sound evocatively standing in for the ancient aura of gold and learning.
In Timbuktu and larger towns the sounds of people were incessant, and I found myself with little solitary space. Someone’s radio or motorbike, the pounding of grains and clank of pots, the gull-cries of playing children, pulleys creaking as villagers drew well water: that’s town. In the desert I found solitude, insects and wind, sand and rocks, baobab exoskeletons. It was a beautiful and imposing landscape, and it offered space for the imagination to fly free.
Our first adventure after leaving Timbuktu was a slow boat ride across the wide Niger, with both Land Cruisers rolled onto a decrepit old car ferry: rails bent and twisted, engine exposed and dead for years. The ferry was moved along by a pirogue, one of the long dugout canoes used up and down the Niger for centuries, powered by a single Yamaha thirty-five-horsepower outboard motor. Fifty feet off the dock we got stuck on the first sandbar, forcing the ferry crew into the waist-deep river to rock the boat back and forth until freed. Farther into the river a clutch of hippopotami eyed us skeptically, and I was reminded that they are the most dangerous of Africa’s large mammals, each year reportedly killing more humans than does any other animal on the continent.
We putted along for three hours, eventually landing precariously where there was no dock. While the boatmen held the rusted vessel in place, the vehicles rolled down a short ramp into the shallows by the shore. Then, kicking up loose sand from spinning tires, the cars scrambled up the sloping bank to a purported road on the flat above.
From the river we headed south, eventually hitting the highway to Douentza, the town where USC had its base of operations and a house, out of which we would be working. This was one of the poorest areas in a very poor nation. Friederike’s colleagues from USC Mali arranged introductions to Dogon farmers.
The Dogon are traditionally secretive and disinclined to welcome strangers. Roughly analogous to the Hopi of the American Southwest, Dogon people are hunters and gatherers as well as farmers. They once lived almost exclusively in cliff dwellings along the Bandiagara Escarpment, a stunning sixteen-hundred-foot cliff that rises like a monolith out of the flat desert and runs for a hundred miles. Villages hidden in the high rocks look out over broad plains that spread to the horizon as if to the edge of the world. Before the French took over the region in the late nineteenth century, the Dogon would kill anyone who happened to discover one of their towns because they felt that their survival hung on their invisibility.
The Dogon culture embraces a complex cosmology. Some Dogon believe that they came from the star Arcturus and that Earth was twice colonized by extraterrestrials. The first time they created a whole society, but God became displeased with it thanks to Jackal, the trickster, who adulterated it by creating his own people. One striking feature of the African landscape is its very large, somewhat clitoral-looking anthills, often six feet or more in height. In the myth, Jackal has sex with one of these and impregnates the Earth, and a race of demonic hybrids is born. God decides he’s going to wipe them out and start over, and he sends a flood. The next humans arrive as twelve sets of twins, each pair male and female. The twins breed and create the twelve tribes of the Dogon. Later, yet another visitation occurs when a figure from Sirius, the Dog Star, shows up to teach the art of metalsmithing.
We found our focus in a community about an hour and a half from Douentza, called Ibissa. It was built a century ago in its current locati
on—a small indentation, perhaps a mile and a half deep, in a hidden setting high on the frowning escarpment. At that time the French colonial government ordered it moved, under threat of artillery assault, like all similar Dogon towns. France was seeking to exercise greater control over the population. They succeeded.
Part of the outcome was positive, though. The settled Dogon and the nomadic Peul, longstanding enemies acting out the seemingly eternal conflict between farmer and herder, were forced to stop warring and learn to share the meager resources peacefully.
The villagers allowed us to film them only because the eighty-nine-year-old chief, whose surname was Coulibaly, gave us permission. In granting it, he said, “May God help you to realize your wishes, and may he accompany you in all you do.”
During our daily “commutes” from Douentza to Ibissa, the winds flared continually out of the northeast. Things and people appeared and disappeared in the layers of fine airborne dust particles. In this foglike atmosphere a turbaned, indigo-clad rider on a white camel materialized, as if by magic. He carried a sword and a rifle and looked like Time Immemorial, except for the transistor radio that bounced against his chest, tuned to the pan-African soccer championships then in progress in Nigeria. Just as quickly as he appeared, he was gone.
Not much of Ibissa is visible from the road. The highway, at this point, paralleled the escarpment a mile out on the plain. Turning onto the short road that leads to the village, we passed the “women’s garden,” an interface between the horizontal sand and the vertical rock. Until recently, cultivating the soil was the province of men. Women had a critical role as haulers of water and wood and bearers of babies, but in recent years the understanding had grown that survival might depend on expanding cultural roles. Prompted by an interestingly atypical young Dogon woman working with USC, who had learned agronomy in France, the women of Ibissa campaigned to have their own patch of land to work. After much discussion, the men in charge relented and designated an area where the women could farm. From the point of view of history, this was an experiment, one that proved successful both in increasing the food supply and, since the surplus could be sold for cash, in empowering the women by giving them a significant financial boost.
Rumours of Glory Page 43