To Timbuktu for a Haircut

by Rick Antonson

  The front desk clerk passed a note to Mohammed, and I admired the Africa-shaped necklace he wore. Mohammed said immediately, “It is very rare. But I could have another made. Three hundred. Euro.” On my trip I wanted to find something special for Janice, who, after all, had prompted this whole escapade to Timbuktu. The clerk lifted the necklace over his head and gave it to me. I looked closely, considering this the perfect gift. Mali was outlined on the continent and the etching showed Bamako.

  “Could it be made with the River Niger carved in? And show Timbuktu?”

  “Yes, of course,” promised Mohammed.

  “I’m interested.”

  “You pay now and it will be ready when you return to Bamako.”

  “Three hundred?” I confirmed.

  “Yes. For the gold.”

  I was thinking this a rather expensive piece for a clerk to be wearing. “Mohammed, why am I not liking this?”

  It was as if I’d addressed the mud wall. “And the craftsman would be extra. For your design.”

  “No, thanks.”

  In the courtyard, Dennis was alone. A cluster of Malians was gathered nearby.

  “How’s my fellow adventurer?” I asked, strutting more comfortably.

  “Ready for home. But I’ll miss Mali,” he said.

  “If I’m lucky, I’ll feel that way at the end of my journey,” I responded.

  “Hey, meet Zakarie,” he said, introducing a twenty-ish man tucked away under a tree. “He was my guide in the Dogon. We were on the whole trip together.”

  Zak was a wisp of a man, light of weight and with powerful legs, from Dogon Country. We leaned into our first handshake. “Hello,” I introduced myself. Zak’s face spread into a disarming smile that made all of him seem bigger. There was something daring in his eyes. I felt immediate comfort with this young guide. Why do some people exude trust?

  “Hi, Rick.” He said my name for the first of a thousand times, and it was soft, somehow italicized, in a way I would hear only from him. We planted a friendship.

  “He’s solid. A fine guide,” continued Dennis. “You’ll not do better. Sure could find worse.”

  The three of us nattered about their trip, Dennis telling me that Zak spoke Dogon, of course, and also French and Bambara. He had decent English as well.

  “We’re all going to dinner. Come along,” Dennis said. I realized that my first day in Mali had nearly passed.

  A hunky black man arrived, boisterous in his greeting. “This is Mamadou. He’s been my driver,” said Dennis. Not twenty-five years old, Mamadou was tall, immediately gregarious, and wore his collared shirt open over his jeans, as a smock. We fumbled our handshake as he dropped a backpack, just our thumbs catching. People laughed. Both of us got serious in our second attempt at a greeting. He intentionally bunted my hand and then grasped around my fingers and slapped them together, completing the mime with a firm shake. He said my name, twisting it with his Bambara tongue, “Wrick.”

  At Zak’s suggestion, Dennis and I agreed to a restaurant neither of us had heard about. Mamadou, grafted onto our group, drove us to our destination. In the back seat of the car, as we bumped along the roadway, Dennis provided a one-line synopsis of his trip: “Everyone knows Africa is hopeless. And everyone is wrong.”

  Along the main road, off on a potholed turnaway, was a lanternlit patio. The open-air restaurant was busy, but a table was cleared in the centre where we could watch and be watched. Chicken and chips and ketchup of a sort seemed a safe order. Thinking that beer should wash away any cooking sins, I hedged my menu choice with that.

  To Dennis I said, “Toss me on a local bus. I don’t want to be organized.”

  “Fine,” he said with a seasoned voice. “I hear that has charm.”

  “Understand me. I’m not wanting to be coddled.” It was not a smart statement, nor informed. It was therapeutic, a wedging out of my reluctance about Mohammed’s influence.

  Dennis was practical and not condescending toward my naiveté. “You’ll see people wasting a day, two days, waiting for local transport. If that’s how you’d like to see Mali, it’s your choice.”

  “From what I’ve seen of the bussé, they’re a rickety ride,” I acknowledged.

  He went further: “And when you get on one, you suck exhaust for the entire trip.”

  “Loses the romance,” I admitted.

  “And that’s before they break down.”

  I appreciated Dennis’s willingness to educate the rookie, even being philosophical. “Never express ingratitude in Mali. Even the most fortunate Malian steps from air conditioning to stifling heat, has poor and envious relatives, and breathes noxious fumes in the cities.”

  I wondered how long his perspectives would stay with him once he returned to his home and job, particularly his shared observation: “Few people here have a complex notion of life. And we must learn from them.”

  Across the table Mamadou was animated, happy that one trip had ended, and eager for his next long drive. The man spoke seriously in Bambara with the genteel Zak, lobbying for the job as my driver. He gobbled his chips, and Zak’s chips, and stared at mine. Zak, when our conversation lagged around him, fiddled with his cell phone. They bought phone time on street corners or doorsteps or from wandering merchants at a traffic light. The cardboard cards carried a code to be scratched as a lottery ticket might be in America. The uncovered numbers were punched in and used for the talking time purchased.

  “Timbuktu takes effort, though less than you might think,” Dennis encouraged. “We all like the lure.”

  I said, “You’ve spent a month exploring Mali. Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “That’s a question for every explorer,” he smiled, as though the personal nature of the question meant it was as much for me to ponder in one month’s time as to ask him now.

  Dennis treated us to dinner, his remaining seffe being impossible to exchange outside of West Africa. As we drove back to the hotel he said to me, “Here, you go back in time, and it will change how you go forward in life.”

  Mohammed had an updated itinerary waiting for me at the hotel’s front desk. He was suspiciously efficient. There was much I wanted to see, and I didn’t have the luxury of having days evaporate in transportation delays. I saw Mohammed’s helpful, if profitable, hand at work.

  Dennis and I relaxed in wicker chairs on the hotel’s covered patio. The area was barely lit. I smoked my pipe. The hotel was in a residential area, and neighbourhood laughter and evening television filtered through the walls. Dennis offered his insight about patience: “In Mali, no traveller has the same plan on Tuesday that he had on Monday.”

  His end-of-trip actual costs reflected what I now knew were likely to be mine, which replenished my self-confidence. Either that meant the charges to each of us were fair or, less charitably, that Mohammed had tagged us both as marks, thus making Dennis a poor precedent to compare myself with. I felt hustled by Mohammed’s brisk talk about costs. Embarrassment fluttered about me like a soft breeze.

  “You must stay ten days in Dogon. Must,” Dennis said over coffee. “And take a cook.”

  “A cook?” I asked.

  “Do you like food?

  “Yes,” I smiled.

  “Are you serious about eating?”

  I wasn’t sure where this was going. The conversation might be long, but none of the sentences were. “Reasonably. I like to know what I’m eating. Where it’s been.”

  “Cheap guide, cheap food,” he said.

  This was among the best advice I got in Mali.

  “Take a cook,” he advised for the second time. “It is not much cost. You should do this especially for the Dogon. I’ve been here a month and have met too many travellers with food sicknesses.”

  A moody Mohammed appeared around a post on the patio and gave me my rebooked air ticket from Bamako to Dakar, several weeks away. “Here. You are set.” It had the tone of cement, not of arrangements.

  At the hotel desk was a hand
-lettered sign with four names. “Dutch,” grunted Mohammed proudly.

  “Let me guess,” I said, “They’re going to the festival.”

  “Yes,” he replied, as though I’d find that special.

  Dennis saw my disappointment and said, “Some Frenchmen jet to Timbuktu for New Year’s Eve.”

  “Vain,” I smirked. I wanted to feel that my travels were different, that they were not travel as others experienced it. But then Mohammed cheerfully gave me his company’s T-shirt. The last thing I wanted was a fucking T-shirt.

  The largest country in West Africa, Mali, like all nations, is a fabrication of history. Ten million people are citizens under that name, dotted over 1.2 million square kilometres — an area twice the size of France, much of it vividly inhospitable. Mali’s variable (if not uncommon) history of wars, invasions, and shifting commands led to nation-state status a little over forty years ago, the namesake of a once-great empire. Mali is an apt name, derived from a thirteenth-century Mandigo root word meaning “free.” To achieve this connotation of a country, various tribes and nationalities endured the ebb and flow of defeats and dictatorships before settling on a common accord of suffering and optimism.

  Trade, rather than knowledge, is the great motivator for exploration; greed and acquisition are more common human traits than altruism and sharing. Exploration first, followed by trade, followed again by travel and its economic moniker, tourism. Today in Mali there is little sign of the once-immense gold trade, and even less of the salt trade. No sign, thank all gods, of the slave trade (though there are rumours of Malian children being taken to other countries as forced labour). Ostrich feathers, once an item of value, along with ivory, have dropped from the export list. Today, countries trading with Mali receive cotton, coffee, gold, grains, and little else. It is joked that the culinary specialty of Mali is rice. Goat or sheep or cow are added to many dishes. Livestock, as a result, are more prominent in trade within the neighbourhood, a subsistence economy, than within or outside of the nation. Tourism, though, earns important foreign currency for Mali. Even a thoughtful government in this part of the world flirts with crippling foreign debts to sustain itself.

  A door slamming in the hallway jerked me awake. I lay there. Midnight, an hour’s sleep behind me. An unfamiliar anxiety undermined my practical side. The trip itinerary, costs and such … the festival and what seemed to have become my own “rush to Timbuktu,” contradicted my trip’s purpose and ruffled my contentment. Somehow, along the way, my trip had morphed from adventure and unpredictability to entertainment and a program.

  “This is serious sit-up stuff,” I thought aloud. And I did sit up, pinning the pillow against the wall. Waking would be understandable if it had been induced by jet lag or resulted from indigestion, but neither was the case. I was addled with buyer’s remorse.

  I’d thought well of myself for travelling to Timbuktu. Had I let the trip become a trophy? In Asia, I’d shared a speakers’ panel with Peter Greenberg, the American television commentator, where he had observed: “We live in a world of experiential one-upmanship.” I’d added, “And, travel is the measure. It’s become a necessary story to say ‘I’ve been to …’ as though travel is an ornament that demonstrates one’s relevance or sophistication.” He’d condensed my thoughts: “Travel name-dropping.” Was I ill with the sickness we had diagnosed?

  In that night, I could not dispel the notion that one route over the next few weeks offered the novelty I sought, while the other, more structured, would not let my sense of accomplishment happen. The destiny I sought was proving elusive.

  I wanted fresh air, and opened my door to find two Americans with their shoulders to the wall, smoking cigarettes. “Everything is expensive here,” a thin one said in greeting.

  “Old news,” I said.

  “Going to the festival?” he asked.

  “Think so,” I replied.

  “Got a ride?” the second fellow asked, standing to make his pudginess less obvious.

  “Think so.”

  “Can we come along?”

  “Think so.”

  “Everyone’s going to the festival,” he said excitedly.

  “Think so?”

  They seemed far from home; raised in American schools. The Festival in the Desert was a side story to me, fit for music enthusiasts who could do it justice. I felt oddly threatened. It had not originally been part of my plan to go to the festival, and try as I did, I could not make it mine. Obstinacy gave way to ambivalence; did I want to understand Malian culture, or did I want to understand myself?

  My random plans were skewered, held together like a brochette; my quest had been eclipsed by a schedule. It had become “going to the festival” rather than going to Timbuktu, a vacance lacking the clarity of a journey. Timbuktu, my purpose, was relegated to gateway status, a place en route. Some journeys, it seemed, are about the destination!

  I wrote Mohammed a respectful note that night, proposing rejigged travel arrangements. Skip the festival. Arrive in Timbuktu after it is over, the commotion passed, the people gone. I attached a freshly reworked itinerary, tallied my cost estimates, and left a column for his estimates. I even showed a “change fee” for his time and expenses.

  My personal goal was to find a quest in travel again. My fear was that a crowded Timbuktu would lose any semblance of remoteness or worthy accomplishment. I envisioned the fabled city awash with more white people visiting it now than at any time in the past two centuries.

  During the night I had awakened the clerk and had him arrange for Mohammed to meet me at 8:30 in the morning. At the appointed time I was in a comfy chair on the patio, tired but enthusiastic about my solution.

  Mohammed arrived at the hotel as promised, and as he walked toward me, I overheard him talking to the Americans. One said, “But I didn’t bring that much money.” Sensing a limit to his ability to extract funds, Mohammed smoothed the situation with, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” He then came to where I sat stirring powdered milk into a mug of Nescafé. I outlined my suggested alternative.

  The author’s travels through Senegal and Mali in West Africa.

  Mohammed pursed his lips, making the skin of his chin firm, which scrunched the stubble of his goatee into a look that was reptilian. “If you change the route, you miss the festival. Then you arrive when the Dakar road race goes through Tombouctou. People. Planes. You’ll not get a room.”

  I flinched. This dislocation was a feeling I’d not anticipated. I did not then realize that his claim was spurious. “You mean it’ll be as crowded after the festival?” I was unhappy.

  “Busier. Honest.” Both were words without meaning to him, but I did not yet know that. It would be a week before the word “gullible” crossed my mind.

  I could get my route changed, lose money, and still be among throngs in Timbuktu. Choice: music lovers or the racing crowd. “Crowd” dramatized the facts: either event would add only a few dozen people to Timbuktu, but that image washed over the one I’d harboured for half a year: only a dozen other visitors, the daily average, in Timbuktu at the same time as me.

  There was a churlish twitch in the corner of Mohammed’s mouth. “Rick, you make it difficult. The boat is difficult. It has gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yes. This morning. The pinasse must be there to come back.” Even though I’d become insensitive, there was a numbness about our dealings. Mohammed, I now learned, owned the pinasse. It had been, if he was to be believed, dispatched to Korioumé, where it would be available for my return.

  My plans sidetracked, I opted for the festival and the necessary routing through Timbuktu, going there by land rather than by river. At least I had the solace of individual travel. Mohammed assured me that no one else would be with me except the driver and guide. A tad disenchanted, yet knowing it would be fun, I overlooked the truism: “The last temptation is the worst treason; to do the right thing for the wrong reason.”

  The time was fixed. On a certain day, I would be
in Timbuktu.

  I had yet to learn that Mohammed would transfer everyone he could along with a paying traveller. That might include a guide who was to meet you later, cooks, equipment, another driver, and other travellers he squeezed in, at their cost, and with no alleviation of yours. It was my fuel bill, the whole way.

  Prearranging a driver/guide between Bamako and Timbuktu was a “must,” I was told during my preparations by the one other person I knew who’d been there. Zak had accepted my invitation to guide, and was happy with the job. When I told Mohammed of my decision, he did not disagree. I pitched Mamadou as driver. We planned to motor 235 kilometres east to Ségou that day. We aimed to then drive northeast, via Mopti, to Douentza for the next evening. All this on a decent road. North from Douentza, by patchy roads and across two rivers, Timbuktu waited.

  We were ready to leave. At least I was. Zak sat cross-legged on the ground nearby. He was speaking Bambara with an attractive young woman. Dennis had pointed her out the evening before and said she’d travelled with them as cook for much of the trip. He had recommended her. Zak called her “Nema.” She eyed me sternly as though she might have to cook for this body, walk with this man in the desert, and put up with Western ways for a week or more in the Dogon. She flounced from one foot to the next and back during her appraisal. A grin slipped free, but not yet a smile.

  “My name is Rick,” I said. “Will you be my cook for the Dogon?”

  Zak said yes on her behalf, and she berated him, claiming the right to state her own acceptance. She stood straight and was taller than him, fuller of form, with strong arms. She wore beige slacks and a cream-coloured smock that was wrapped loosely around her. A single-strand necklace hung around her neck, weighed down with a handful of punched pebbles, all white. Her face gleamed with healthy skin, and when she felt the time was right, her lips parted and big teeth of the whitest possible smile sealed the arrangement. Finally, she did an unexpected thing. She shook my hand. And she twisted my name to confirm, asking, “Reek?” And I said yes to what would become Nema’s term for me.