Songs of the Baka and Other Discoveries

by Dennis James

  Our trek through Dogon country takes four days and winds through several villages. Sometimes we have to cross courtyards, interrupting people working or relaxing together. Adama exchanges greetings with them in the seo manner, and they respond as a chorus. He tells them who we are and where we come from, and we pass out kola nuts as an apology for the intrusion. Kola nuts, when chewed, have a mild narcotic effect, and, to our lasting regret, we never tried them.

  Later, we meet the district director of the local schools. The district has been hard hit by the drop-off in tourism caused by the skirmishing between the Tuareg and government troops in the north. The director explains that in Mali everything is privatized and expensive—higher education, medicine, health care, electricity. We feel helpless. All we can do is leave boxes of pencils for the students.

  Farther along the Escarpment, the trail leads up the cliff to the remote village of Yougou Dougourou. This is where the real Sigi ceremony takes place, sans tourists. It is also where Dogon adolescent boys go into seclusion with village elder men, learn about Dogon myths and legends, and are circumcised, remaining in seclusion until they heal. The chief shows us the flat ledges on the cliffs where the boys are taught. Pictographs of animals, reptiles, humans, and imaginary creatures cover the walls of the ledges. The figures are stark red and black, outlined against a white background, extending thirty feet along the walls. Many have been restored, but the originals go back hundreds of years.

  We continue our journey, scrambling up narrow gorges and log ladders to the top of the Escarpment. The summit is a moonscape of black rock, splintered and divided by sudden crevices. It affords a sweeping view of the Plain below. While we wander the strange surface, a dapper figure in a bright-blue jacket and yellow pants appears out of the gorge. The sudden and unexpected appearance of a brightly colored human presence in this monochromatic, desolate landscape is startling. He is a French engineer, donating his time and talent to repairing a dam for the village. He is all business and leaves after a few minutes, eager to get on with his work.

  Entrance to the circumcision chamber, Yougou Dougourou, Cameroon

  On the way down, we hear eerie, high-pitched sounds of distress. The cries get louder as we continue on the trail, and we come upon two large dogs, shaking and howling, trussed up in baskets guarded by two men. Adama hustles us past without greeting the men, which is unusual. He is appalled. “These dogs are to be sacrificed,” he says, “but I know of no Dogon rite that calls for such slaughter.” Stunned, we ask his advice as to what to do. Although distraught and angry, he murmurs, “Best not to interfere.” We never learn the reason for this sacrifice. The sounds and images remain with us to this day.

  After hiking out of the Escarpment, we spend the night in a hotel with a real bed, shower, and toilet for the first time in five days.

  Mopti and Djenné

  While we were in Ségou for the music festival, Adama had approached us with a serious expression. “We need to talk,” he said. Karen, his boss at the travel agency, had called to tell him that the fighting in the north threatened to spread to areas near Mopti and Djenné, cities we planned to visit. She thought we should avoid that part of the country. Adama asked what we wanted to do. It didn’t take us long to decide, perhaps naively, that we were willing to take the risk and continue the trip as planned. Even at our age, we think we are indestructible. And so, we travel on.

  Mopti is a bustling harbor on a tributary of the Niger. The most common river craft is the pinnace, a wooden, shallow-draft boat ranging from ten to fifteen meters in length. It is powered by a small outboard motor with a long drive shaft extending from the stern to a tiny propeller. The pilot moves the drive shaft back and forth to steer, allowing the propeller to bounce over the many sandbars in the shallow river. Pilots sometimes put up sails made of stitched-together garbage bags.

  In a boatyard on the riverbank, craftsmen in an enormous shed use hand tools to build the pinnaces. Again, nothing is wasted—scrap wood is carved into paddles, canes, toys, and ornaments. These graceful crafts can carry up to 150 metric tons. On the river, we see pinnaces overloaded with new bedroom sets, chairs, tables, and other furniture—to be delivered to weddings in Mopti so couples can immediately set up housekeeping.

  A trip up the Bani in a pinnace brings us to a Fulani village. On the way, Adama points out a two-meter-long black snake swimming nearby. It’s a cobra—a good swimmer. We take pictures but give it a wide berth.

  The Fulani are principally herders and have close relations with the Dogon. Fulani women wear brightly patterned boubous with matching headscarves. They are friendly and have beautiful smiles, which are accentuated by black tattoos encircling their mouths. When we arrive, most of the women are washing clothes in the shallow water by the riverbank, gossiping and laughing together while their children splash and play happily among them.

  The Fulani are known for their jolly courtship ritual in which young men, wearing conical hats and black makeup to emphasize their white teeth and eyes, do a shuffling, grinning, hand-clapping line dance, while young women stroll in front of the line and pick out the man they are interested in. In contrast to most Western dating rituals, there is no privacy here. The entire community has an interest in making sure matches are made as smoothly as possible.

  Fulani women, Mopti

  Dinner is poisson yassa, a Senegalese dish, made with—what else—capitaine.

  A short distance from Mopti is Djenné, the oldest urban site in West Africa. Ruins of a trading post just outside the city date back to 250 BC. An archeological dig sits at the original site. The dig ran out of money in the 1990s, and the only official evidence of its existence is a small sign. We wander unsupervised over two or three acres, picking up ancient pottery shards marked with crisscross designs. No one else is in sight. We replace the shards and drive off.

  The Hotel Djenné Djenno is a small architectural marvel run by Sophie, a Swede married to a Malian. Separated from the teeming market city by a wide wadi or dry river, the hotel integrates the minimalist mud structure typical of Djenné into a spacious flower garden courtyard seamed with paths and shaded by palm trees.

  At dusk, Sophie serves mimosas on the roof of the hotel. Merchants for Djenné’s Monday market begin to arrive in donkey carts, horse drawn wagons, autos, and trucks, as well as on bicycles, horseback, and foot. They travel the road on the other side of the wadi as far as the eye can see. It is an otherworldly scene: a slow, silent procession silhouetted against the pastel-pink sunset.

  We enjoy a Malian meal of stewed beef and beans, gazpacho, and ginger ice cream, while fourteen Latvians, fellow guests, hold raucous court amid the flower beds.

  By dawn, hundreds of buyers and sellers fill the square in front of the Great Mosque in Djenné. The market is a crazy quilt of tents and shelters—a cacophony of haggling, a hustling and bustling hive of humanity. A political candidate holds a rally on a side street. Grizzled old hunters fire antique muskets into the dusty blue sky, and boys dance in unison to the beat of a single drum. Horses and donkeys are harnessed in a feedlot nearby. We weave in and out of the market’s narrow lanes, importuned on all sides by vendors of everything from parrots to parsnips.

  The Great Mosque looms over the market. It is a huge Afro-Gothic mud structure, the largest mud mosque in the world, its three towers rising eighteen meters above the square. Constructed in 1907, it looks like a cross between the Houses of Parliament and the Alamo. Non-Muslims have been barred from the interior ever since a French photographer used it as background for a fashion shoot.

  As the day winds down, we return to the hotel for dinner and drinks, sitting again on the roof and watching the last of the merchants leave town, the procession a mirror image of the night before.

  Bamako Redux

  We return to Bamako after a seven-hour drive in stifling heat with no air conditioning. That evening, when our cab driver gets lost on our way to dinner, we approach several young men who have congregated near the unlit
thoroughfares, talking and joking, seemingly at loose ends. They are friendly and helpful, but I wonder what they think of us, heirs to opportunities they can only imagine, yet asking them for help.

  On our last day in Mali, we explore the hills outside Bamako, where there is a natural stone arch and cave important to Dogon mythology. Supposedly, an evil king was killed by a hero at the site of the arch, sometime before the Dogon moved off the plateau and onto the Escarpment. Sacrifices are still made in the cave to mollify the spirits.

  On the way back to Bamako, we stop to see an old hunter who had killed a leopard that was a threat to the village’s precious livestock. The villagers are proud of this feat, but he has to be coaxed out of his house to meet us. He wears his headdress adorned with the leopard’s teeth and patiently poses for pictures. He shows us his weapon—a single-shot, hand-made rifle, which is notoriously inaccurate. He must have had to get very close in order to kill the big cat. I come away with admiration for the old man’s courage, but also with sadness at the death of this magnificent creature, which was only trying to survive, just as were the villagers.

  Before we leave the village, we hang out in the square, observing two women in boubous pound millet, driving thick mortar poles deep into a narrow pestle of wood, rhythmically alternating two-handed downstrokes. This is physically demanding work, requiring both strength and precise timing. The women, talking and laughing, one with a baby strapped to her back, keep at it for an hour, We’re impressed by the apparent ease and good humor with which they perform this task. Any personal trainer in the US would be proud to have such clients. The millet pounders are still at it when we leave.

  At seven p.m., we leave for the airport and the trip home.

  “So,” I ask Adama, “do you have another tour lined up?”

  “No,” he says. “There aren’t any, because of the fighting in the north.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I am qualified as a welder, but I need to raise eight hundred dollars for an electrical hookup to my shop.”

  “Can’t your father help? You have a wife and family to support.”

  “No,” Adama says, “My father has three wives and families to support. And I can’t get a loan because I am not a government employee.”

  Eight hundred dollars seems far too much for a mere electrical hookup, even in Brooklyn. Is some of it needed for bribes? We tip Adama generously.

  The rush to board is a mob scene, overwhelming the Malian emigration and customs officials. We elbow our way through and look back at the figure of Adama, who is at the un-ticketed barrier, smiling and waving, shouting something we can’t hear. We wave and mount the rolling stairway into the plane. This is how we say good-bye, and it’s unlikely we will ever see him again.

  Epilogue

  We saw no trace of the fighting in the north during our trip, even in Mopti and Djenné. Three weeks after we left Mali, on March 21, 2012, midlevel Army officers deposed the elected civilian government and seized state power. The reason given was that the Malian Army had not been provided with the weapons, support, or training necessary to fight heavily armed Tuareg rebels and their jihadist allies in the north. The Army suffered heavy casualties as a result. The officers alleged that funds earmarked for the military had found their way into the private accounts of government officials.

  Meanwhile, the jihadists, many of them foreigners affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Mahgreb (AQIM), brushed aside their one-time Tuareg allies and, by April, had seized control of northern Mali, including Timbuktu. They threatened to capture Mopti, Djenné, Ségou, and Bamako, imposed a harsh form of Sharia law, and massacred Tuareg and Malian soldiers and collaborators. They destroyed Sufi shrines and desecrated Dogon animist ritual sites. Atrocities were committed by all armed factions: the Malian military and militias, the Tuareg, and the jihadists. In January 2013, the French, concerned that a jihadist conquest of Mali would create a militant and aggressive Islamic state run by the AQIM, sent troops, armor, attack helicopters, and jet bombers into Mali, pushing the jihadists out of the cities and villages and into the mountains, where they continue to attack Malian military outposts and civilian communities. Over four hundred thousand Malians have been displaced and are refugees within Mali or in neighboring states.

  Tourism in Mali is dead. Karen, Adama’s supervisor from the tour agency, remains in Bamako but arranges tours only to Senegal and Burkina Faso. Sophie, the intrepid owner of the hotel in Djenné, is sitting tight despite the proximity of the fighting. There are no tourists to host, but she designs and sells clothes and puts out a monthly blog showing her wares and commenting on the local political scene. Responding to our inquiry, our American travel agent learns from Karen that Adama has had no work as a guide but has survived by doing welding and tile work. We wonder whether his electricity has been connected.

  Life has not changed much for people in Mali since we left. The government is still corrupt, and most people are still poor. What is new is the ever-present danger from jihadists and the return of the French colonialists.

  The Dogon of the Escarpment have remained in their cliffside villages. They took no part in the fighting and, in fact, gave refuge to Tuareg fighters fleeing the Malian Army and the jihadists. Their heavy dependence on virtually nonexistent tourism threatens their subsistence living. According to Karen, they are now selling their possessions to buy sacks of rice. Their survival is problematic.

  In mid-November 2016, Barbara and I visited an art gallery on the upper East Side to see an exhibit of traditional Dogon artifacts. Twenty or thirty pieces were on display and for sale—masks, human figures, and other ritual objects. The dealer in charge of the exhibit told us that during his last visit to the Escarpment in April, he saw only women and children in the villages. The men had all gone to the big cities to try to find work to make up for the loss of tourist income caused by the fighting in the north. He said that the Dogon have sold off all of their traditional ritual objects. This exhibit may contain the last of these treasures.

  Iran:

  THE ABSENCE OF EVIL

  Note: The names of all the people we met in Iran have been changed.

  It starts with Uzbekistan, a possible destination for October 2008.

  A friend who has been there thinks we might enjoy its culture, history, and natural beauty. When we read through a travel guide for Uzbekistan, however, the most interesting chapter describes a side trip to Iran. We hadn’t seriously thought of traveling to Iran before, figuring it might be unpleasant, if not dangerous, for American tourists to wander around a country our government has treated with such ill will. And then there is the State Department’s Travel Warning: Americans “may be subject to harassment or arrest” and “should carefully consider the risks” of travel to Iran.

  Since the early 1950s, America and its allies have interfered with Iran’s struggle for self-determination. After the fledgling Iranian Republic nationalized the country’s oil production in 1951, the CIA and British M16 engineered a coup that ousted the democratically elected government and reinstalled the monarchy in the person of Shah Reza Pahlavi. The Shah promptly denationalized oil production, and control reverted to American and British corporations.

  The Shah ruled as an autocrat for twenty-five years, propped up militarily by the US and supported by his secret police, the Savak. When a popular revolution in 1979 overthrew the monarchy, the Shah fled the country. President Jimmy Carter allowed him to come to the US for medical treatment, and Iranians were outraged. Demanding the extradition of the Shah, students stormed the American Embassy, taking hostages. In retaliation, the US imposed sanctions that crippled Iran’s economy.

  The American government also supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980, which was repelled at the cost of more than five hundred thousand Iranian lives, many of them civilians killed by Saddam’s use of poison gas.

  In his 2008 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush characterized Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil.�
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  Understandably, these actions could generate hostility toward American tourists. Iran’s revolutionary leadership doesn’t help matters when it refers to the United States as “The Great Satan.” However, the pictures of Persepolis, the bridges of Isfahan, the gardens of Shiraz, and the dazzling calligraphic tiles of the great mosques exert a pull. More than that, we are curious about the people. How do they feel about us? About their country?

  Our travel agents in Seattle assure us that Iranians differentiate between government policy and individual opinions. They will be happy to see two Americans walking their streets.

  During the long flight to Tehran, I read The Ayatollah Begs to Differ by Hooman Majd. An Iranian Canadian sits next to me on the plane, glances at my book, and is eager to discuss it. It describes aspects of Iranian culture that affect Iran’s domestic and international politics. The culture embraces two apparently contradictory concepts: ta’arof (self-effacement) and haq (entitlement). An Iranian who invites you into his home for dinner will say at the end of the evening, “Sorry the meal was so poor,” or “Sorry we couldn’t make things nicer for you.” Or, a cab driver may decline to charge you, saying, “It was not worthy.” However, you are expected to insist until he relents (and maybe overcharges you). This is ta’arof.