To Timbuktu for a Haircut

by Rick Antonson

Two three-year-olds graced the village shore. I was well past noticing the children’s runny noses and sores and saw only friendly faces. One little girl swung her blue-skirted hips back and forth and there was a new rhythm in the crowd’s clapping, a hurried pace. She had a rhythmic hip, step, clap that was a wonderful move to watch. Hip, step, clap … parents laughed. Hip, step, clap … kids laughed. Together, she and I danced to her lead. I am at my best on a dance floor with a country and western heel-toe; such moves tend to dig a hole in the sand. But my little partner was a star, pounding the ground with confident swirls as the beat crested. She towed my hand and I followed in a clumsy imitation of her natural gift. Everyone howled with laughter, both on shore and on board.

  As I boarded the pinasse, Robert said, “They say you come to Mali to learn how to laugh.”

  “You could go on tour, Eric,” Jose laughed as we were waved away by people who had done much to earn this bellyful of happiness. “You could do shows on this river.”

  “Big White Guy On Tour,” Ona said, and we all laughed at our good fortune.

  The boat travelled two hours farther on the river and motored on the southern side of a marshy isle, low and consisting mostly of pods of weeds that separated us from another route. Across that route crept a slope that led to the most beautiful mosque tower. Not one person strolled on that distant shore; the town was deserted. We, the passengers, decided to go there. The boat’s captain said no, pointing kilometres down the Niger, and saying in French, “That is where we will go for lunch,” with practised confidence. He worked for Mohammed.

  The captain’s name was Nanaga, which was spelled out for me on paper with a squiggle I did not recognize. “It is a letter you do not have,” I was told. This reminded me of the name of a book publishing company I and some associates once owned, using the Inuit word Nunaga, meaning “my land, my country.” I thought of the captain’s country. He co-owned the boat in heaven knows what type of partnership with Mohammed, which earned my appreciation, if not respect. The longest journey he’d ever made was from his home in Mopti to Niamey, capital of Niger, a twentyone-day voyage on the river. He was thin and smiley, wore leopardpatterned trousers, and was short of hair. He checked on us, his charges, often, in both Bambara and French, knowing that our comfort was for his attention.

  He repeated that we were not going to stop here, that we would go farther downriver.

  “It’s our boat,” Anke said, just this side of mutiny.

  “We wish to go there,” Jose stated, determined to see the village.

  “The other village is better,” Nanaga countered in French. It was unwarranted.

  “We wish to see this one,” Anke injected. Decisive move, that.

  “There is nothing here,” Nanaga replied, looking at me to make a decision his way.

  “Good. Then let’s go,” I said.

  He turned the boat around. It listed to port in a hesitant curve, as though to stall, until Jose repeated: “Let’s go.” The captain retraced half an hour of channel time and navigated around the island to cross the stretch of water.

  As we approached, we saw children hiding near a tree. Nanaga beached the pinasse in a muddy stop. Our first impression of beauty was the shy kids running away. Then they snuck back to shore to watch from behind slender trees with few branches. They did not seek gifts or complicate our arrival. A novelty had landed in their village, and they were skeptical. A solitary man in sun-orange robes trod through the mud with a confident walk, but his green eyes did not reflect the friendliness we had met at our previous stop. An elder. Another skeptic. Not all visitors are good.

  Politely, we tucked our cameras out of sight and extended open hands. Three children retreated into the walled walkways of their village. We followed rather than advanced, aware that they were nervous.

  A bolder boy came to me. “Ça va.”

  “Ça va,” I replied.

  “Bonjour.”

  “Bonjour.”

  He chuckled at my pronunciation and ran away to the giggles of four girls. They now jostled near us, no longer feeling it necessary to flee. Their village took us in through its walks and to the base of its banco mosque, with a tower ten metres high. The children stayed beyond the reach of photographs.

  We walked around a corner of high mud walls that hid any warning of our arrival. Where the path opened to a home’s courtyard, we saw two girls about to leave. They balanced large metal pans on their heads, stuffed with utensils and cups and bowls of all sizes as they headed to the river to wash up after lunch. Their eyes widened in surprise at seeing me, and fright took over. One gasped and fastened her grip on the teetering pile atop her head. The other’s mouth would not open to let her cry escape. Unbalanced, the pots, cutlery, and plastic glasses tumbled from her head as she ran away.

  Parental protection appeared immediately. Seeing the cause of the girls’ fear, the adults laughed. A small, skinny face poked through the group of older villagers. I smiled at the child I’d startled but she stared back, crying.

  A woman standing near me reached for my hand and raised it to show her friends. Another came and tried the clasp, the contrast of black and white hands a wonder to them. The little girl I’d frightened came forward and touched my palm in a dart of her hand, then giddily walked away, her face seeming more weathered than those of the older women, lacking their shine.

  Their village was home to about three hundred people. Its buildings were freshly covered with a new coat of mud. Their walls were sturdy, and the yards had a prosperous expanse. Opened doors let us see a way of life that was slow, unselfish, and contented. Where one path met a larger walkway to bend left, women sat with their gathered wood, a donkey, and their children beside the day’s food. A sweet-looking young mother rose from nursing a baby, her generous breasts swinging gently as she strapped her baby to her back, using her long gown to secure the child to herself.

  Anke and I walked well behind the others, not talking. We both felt that the secluded village was an extraordinary find. I finally said, “This is what my mind wanted Timbuktu to be.”

  “I think that is true,” Anke replied.

  We stopped at an open gate where a toddler cried as he stumbled across the ground, his feet wrapped in plastic green thongs. Watery eyes, beseeching hands, and a tender bellow moved in our direction then turned away. His brother lifted him up and carried the tearrunny face to us in a friendly display. We knelt to the boys’ level.

  “His eyes,” Anke said, seeing their red and mucked corners.

  “And nose,” I replied, not from any need to mention it, because the scabs were as obvious to us as they were welcome to the flies.

  I walked along the wall, away from Anke, to photograph her and the boys. I saw in her the desire to help overwhelmed by reality.

  We walked on. A dozen kids snickered at us and pushed one another about, not touching anything but our sensitivities.

  “They will remember this day,” I said, “and talk about it later.”

  “It will be party talk,” Anke said. “The day the white clowns came to Africa.”

  We found the men of the village constructing a new building. One said to Robert, in French, “Is there news?” There was none we knew of. We’d been away from news.

  I lost my travel companions in the labyrinth of village paths and moved with the tide of children, now loyal to me — the Pied Piper who must soon leave. Fifteen children followed me with shy handshakes and peek-a-boo looks.

  When our path merged with the others, the youngsters stayed close in a jumble of happiness. Each in turn slipped a hand into one of ours, forming the fabric of memories. Near the shore where our boat bobbed, the old man in the long orange robes waited. As we passed, he touched my hand lightly — not to shake, not to greet, but to know.

  Aboard the pinasse, I said to Ona, “They need a doctor to visit once a month with medications.”

  “It is all they seem to require,” she said.

  Back on the shore, the children wa
ved and jumped.

  We drifted alone on “The Nile of the Negroes.” Children rushed to the riverbank as we slipped by the village of Diré. Later, whether passing a large village or small village, the novelty of whites on a boat was enough reason to gather. Boats working on the river were busy enterprises, and the children pulled on their nets with one hand and waved with the other. The more isolated children, the ones who tended cattle or goats, were the most reluctant to wave.

  “His eyes.” Anke told the others of the youngster we’d seen, and the image of an insidious plight haunted me. River blindness crawls from behind the eye. First the parasite strikes old Africans. Eventually it invades the children who lead their blind elders by hand. Fewer villagers are able to work in order to support those without sight. Many infected people sit out their remaining days, which become years. Left with too many blind, too few seeing, the village economy falters. It is unsustainable. The last to see watch the village disappear.

  Everyone knows of AIDS. Who has not heard of malaria? But river blindness, this little-known river-bred pandemic, persists as well, seldom noticed outside Africa. Mali knows the worm all too well. It is oncho, their abbreviated word for the calmly named intruder: onchocerciasis. River blindness.

  It manifests itself in empty villages, abandoned cattle, and lost peoples. The disease is peripatetic. It moves with ease via savannah flies. The flies bite an infected person, get under their skin, pick up larvae, and pass it along. Itching precedes. Scratching proceeds. Children with the scratch, elders with the snowy white eyes in a land that does not know snow, are ashamed. Often their only recourse is begging; anything that can be done while stationary — so they can scratch. Suicide is an option; madness is understandable.

  The scourge of thirty countries as recently as a decade ago, the debilitating disease has now been eradicated in nearly half these nations. But it survives in the other half, and it is feared that, borne by the wind, river blindness will find a new home elsewhere in Africa.

  The outside world has a remarkable tolerance for the plight of Africa. Its “problems” often meet with indifference. But we’re not ignorant. The stories are known.

  In the past, prospective travellers would read of river blindness as an occasional health hazard. Older books pointed to it as a reason for avoiding certain territories. But seldom is the tale of its eradication told. The story of the fight against this pan-African epidemic came my way through the research of journalist Don Cayo.

  In 1972, a development-minded Robert MacNamara, head of the World Bank after years as Richard Nixon’s much-derided secretary of defence, identified a social hurdle to economic progress and to meeting the Bank’s mandate to reduce poverty in parts of Africa. “We’d be wasting our time unless we were prepared to deal with onchocerciasis first,” MacNamara told Cayo.

  With scientific determination, a long-term commitment, the backing of the World Health Organization (WHO) and several supportive countries, a program of spraying marshes was begun. A decade after MacNamara’s first visit to blinded villagers and deserted villages, his efforts were catapulted by Merck Pharmaceuticals’ drug Mectizan, which impedes the spread of the larvae in the host body. It could prevent oncho’s start in others.

  The story revolves around a business decision that makes cynics swallow a little less sharply. No one could afford the drug. Not donor countries, not local governments, nor the WHO or the World Bank. So, “Merck decided to give it away,” said Cayo. Let me repeat that: Merck decided to give it away, “for as long as it takes.”

  The company receives a U.S. tax deduction for its donation, but this means squat to the villager whose body harbours adult worms. It is nothing. The drug is everything. Try to measure this gift to a child whose eyes will see her through parenthood, who captures the daily setting of the sun’s glow, who loves her grandmother’s smile.

  On a continent where a man’s cruelest predator is often his fellow man, a network of volunteers in thirty countries distributes this hope, this solution. Trained with little more than the ability to calculate doses based on age and weight, these people are saving villages, restoring nations, and winning the war against one of Africa’s smallest and mightiest enemies.

  Motoring against the Niger’s current, our pinasse approached another village. We were thirty metres from shore. Fifty people clustered; children ran into the water, mothers carried babies, old men pointed. They waved. All of them could see us.

  We pulled into a village with no dock, drifting close to where a young woman in a yellow dress stood on shore with a basket full of bread on her head. I motioned her over, and she held out a warm loaf to me. I leaned over and took it. Several more women came forward to sell other wares as I passed the loaves to Robert, and he to the others. We bargained happily.

  A spirit slipped to the water’s edge nearby, her white undergarment showing through a pale orange dress. She and the dress flowed as one, and silver jewellery hung effortlessly from her ears. Her hair was tied back tight with a dark orange cloth that had the effect of emphasizing her long forehead, which slipped in a long shine all the way to her eyes. Below that, her face was angular and spectacular, the pot she carried unnoticed until she lifted it full from the river and placed it on her head in a graceful arc that bent my eye. She slipped from the water’s shallows and moved into her village. Robert looked at me and nodded.

  Our boat travelled on. Cool air breezed over the stowed baggage. The river’s surface spread like green gauze around islands with grassy edges.

  Sugary stars eased the darkness while I considered my circumstances. Lying prone on the boat’s roof, “considered” might be better understood as “took the stars into account.”

  Robert, Jose, and Anke climbed on top of the boat’s thatch cover, as though we drifted in one large wicker chair. The Niger’s shore, far from us, was invisible. Venus was reflected in the water and traced a line to our pinasse.

  “I have not seen a plane in the sky, not for over a week,” said Anke.

  “It is good that way,” said Jose, “We travel, and I’m happy at that, but travellers have a lot to answer for.”

  We did not at first follow her thinking. “Planes,” she continued, “they spoil the air, if my English is right.”

  Right it was.

  Anke told us. “There is a proposal to allot each of us on earth one plane ride of a set distance, perhaps equal to once around the world. One per lifetime.”

  “Impossible,” said Jose. “Good, but impossible.”

  “Westerners would use that distance quickly and need a larger allotment,” said Anke, not hearing Jose’s response. “Others, like millions in Mali, would never use a mile, not one airstep. Their stipend would be for sale, to their benefit and our cost.”

  Robert sketched details. “The EU proposes to tax airfares and to use the revenues to offset developing country debts. Is that what you mean?”

  “No,” Anke told us. “It is about people repairing the carbon dioxide damage they generate by flying. You pay, and it is not much. The money goes to replenish your part.” It sounds simple. Perhaps it is. “Otherwise,” she determined, “there are limits to the travel.”

  “They call it ‘carbon neutral,’” I said. “It is not about poverty reduction, or foreign aid. This is to plant trees, through paying CO2 credits. It’s an offset.” Travel causes a wobble in the ecosystem. The world has less and less patience for any industry’s misbehaviours. People matter. The travel industry stands shoulder to shoulder with other icons of commerce, such as the oil industry, forestry, mining, and fishing in their responsibility. But corporate amnesia and individual denial cannot withstand public calls for accountability forever.

  Anke closed our midnight conversation atop the pinasse by summarizing our guilt. “Why should travellers from rich countries have all the fun?”

  Our morning began when Captain Nanaga was ready to sail. The moon was still shining as the sky lightened to various shades of blue. Acres of treeless cracked mud ro
lled away from the shore that had been our camp. The beauty of the morning grasped my heart. Nanaga lit a fire in the hull’s pit to heat water. Sitting astride the pinasse’s starboard frame, I removed my shaving gear from the pack and prepared to shave. I squeezed lather into my palm and was about to apply it.

  “May I do that, Eric?” asked Jose from her perch on a bench. “I’d like to.”

  “Sure,” I said, handing over the utensils as she settled in across from me. “Here’s my kit, take your time.” And I moved away.

  “No. On you,” she said.

  “On me what?” I asked.

  “I’ll do this on you,” she repeated.

  “You shave me?”

  “Yes, I’d like to,” she offered.

  “Hmmm.”

  She lured me to her parlour farther down the boat’s rim where it abutted the wooden plank she shared with Ono. I reached over the side of the boat, scooped a handful of river water and wet my face. Before I could do anything more, Jose took over.

  She moved the lather around my chin and cheeks with her hand. She talked to my face, as though I was not present. “I have an entire shaving kit at home,” she told my nose. “I bought it when I saw how beautiful one is. Often I look at it but it has never been used.” Her hand glided east across the stubble and crossed back over, pressing against the whiskers. She smoothed the lather, slapped hard in a couple of places to tauten the skin, and then placed the sharp razor against my jaw. She carved away as the boat rocked to and fro. A wind brought waves to the bow, jostling her hand and the blade into a stroke one might use to peel an orange.

  Jose, aboard the pinasse, takes command of the author’s shaving kit.

  “There. Nice,” she said, practising her approach. She took her coffee cup to scoop up river water and splashed it on my cheek to clear the remaining lather, soaking my shirt in the process.

  Now Jose became serious. She fully lathered my face, picked up the blade again, and then launched into a concert of strokes. Whip, slice, whip.

  She leaned over the side of the boat to rinse the razor in the river and to freshen its sharpness. Quickly, the razor was at my face in a sideways stroke over the upper lip. Whiskers fell. I squinted and pursed my lips to tense the skin she was shaving. She slashed the razor into the river again to rid it of foam. Her eyes narrowed in concentration. Stroke, slice, side stroke, slice, upstroke, slice. Soon enough she was through.