To Timbuktu for a Haircut

by Rick Antonson

  “What time is the massage?” I asked.

  Within the hour, we docked near a village where selling and buying made an attractive song. People thronged to market as birds flock to a carcass. They were through it and of it and with it, and then left only sheltered stalls as bones. Early morning was the busiest time of day, packed with both river transients and land-based sellers. I found a bag of peanuts and shelled and ate them as I walked past a Singer sewing machine that would be a valuable antique back home. The original paint gleamed and the black gloss on the housing evoked a memory of my grandmother. I saw her face and missed her. Pantaloons were being made by a man who twirled the handle wheel and guided material through the stitching. He pumped his feet to bob the needle. The tailor called out a promise that anything in my size could be done quickly.

  Narrow stores stocked whatever the market did not. A store owner tried to charge a child fifty seffe more for a cigarette because he thought the youngster’s purchase was for me — a foreigner’s surcharge.

  The town looked prosperous, as trees sparkled green hope through the dust. Clothes dried in the breeze, and wide roads divided uneven rows of homes and stores. Everywhere children laughed. Men cast sand blocks into cement. One woman swept the dirt street, which struck me as odd.

  Chairs with plastic seats woven of rainbow strips danced against the ground’s brown. Beside them were mattresses of uncommon colour combinations. I felt the lure of this brilliant setting and hoisted my camera.

  “Photograph?” I asked the men sitting in the dirt across from the mattresses.

  “Euro,” one demanded. I put the camera away. He retracted in French and I sloughed off his words. As I passed, ignoring him, he retracted with, “Apology. Apology.” His words trailed my disappointment.

  Guitar music drifted from behind a wall, and I went in search of its source. Five young men, the youngest of whom strummed, picked up the beat. The strummer’s friend leaned over and tapped the dome of the guitar with both hands to add rhythm. They were off with delightful music that I recognized from the festival sessions.

  “I see I have a visitor,” said a lady’s voice in English behind me. She introduced herself and I missed the name, but I caught “from Ireland.” She was a seasoned traveller and had been lounging in the mud-walled room behind her, where it was dark. “Eric,” I said by way of self-introduction to the shabby lady.

  Her right hand and its cigarette pointed toward the musicians. “I had to kick them out of my room so I could get dressed.”

  Not sure exactly where that was headed, I said, “They’re very good.”

  “They have their own group with Afel Bocoum. That one,” she pointed to the guitarist, “is his brother. They played at Essakane.”

  “Apparently Ali Farka Toure lives here,” I said.

  “He owns the town,” she asserted. The music continued. “This is Niafounké.”

  I asked, “Do you live here?”

  “My fourth trip. They say of Mali, ‘First you open your heart, then you open your wallet.’”

  “I can see that.”

  “Now I spend my time trying to get other people to open their wallets.” She asked where we had stayed the previous night, and I described our shore camp. “In a campement?”

  “No, on the dry mud shore,” I said.

  “In the open?” she asked in awe.

  “Very,” I said.

  She was surprised. “No scorpions?”

  “I didn’t notice any.”

  “And no crocodiles?”

  I began to reconsider my plans for the coming night’s camp.

  The musicians’ singing was strong and moving. The Irish woman said, “Of course, they’d be thrilled if you left them something, but I didn’t say that.”

  I pointed to seffe left pinned below my water bottle, which was lying on the ground.

  “Very nice,” she said. And then she asked where I was going next, to which I replied the Dogon. She warned, “There was a young Dogon girl who I watched boil water for a European trekker. Then she thought it too hot so she added fresh cold water from her well as she served it. He got sick. Be careful.”

  A shopfront ten minutes farther on displayed a Coca-Cola sign and had a fridge just inside the shade. I was prepared to pay whatever it cost, but the price was hardly anything. I’d found that when I bought something, this was also the best time to take a picture without creating resentment. While I waited for the Coke and took a picture, the store owner offered me sweet tea. I noticed there was no clean side to the small glass. I sipped.

  Returning to the boat, Jose saw me and held high a wrapped prize from the market: “Peanut butter. For breakfast.” It was a hand-packed ball, the colour of river mud.

  “And this,” said Ona, holding three loaves of still-warm bread. I split them open and used the knife to spread the peanut butter, wanting only for a garnish. And then Robert brandished a clutch of bananas.

  We drifted. Villages that at first conveyed a sense of orderliness mocked it on closer scrutiny. The river also masked realities. We saw a hippo, its eyes floating on the surface of the water. The most feared of African animals, it is the killer of more people in Africa than any other creature except man.

  Caillié on the Niger wrote, “The immense monotonous plains on all sides fatigue the eye of the traveller.” I found the vistas more satisfying then he had; such may be the least of the differences between my four weeks and his two years in West Africa. Some newly appearing structures on the riverbank, back of the highwater marks, began to look like earthen sculptures, metres high, phallic-like, and oddly bent. We hypothesized religious icons, star guides, or sexual barometers. Later we discovered they were anthills.

  Fishers lay their nets close to grassy shallows of this inland delta. Herons watched and benefited. A passing transport, fifty metres long, motored along the river with people wedged over and under goods of all sorts: baobab ropes, cans of grain, firewood. Our boat nudged toward a pirogue, its poles still and the hull stable in the eddies. Fish flipped around inside the boat; carp, capitaine, catfish. Our captain wanted a larger fish than anything on offer. Another pirogue hauled its nets aboard for our inspection.

  “Poulet yassa,” the cook offered, watching a few fish gulp for water.

  Robert explained, “Nile perch.”

  The captain spied dinner in the net, and coins changed hands.

  Boats are generally poled from place to place, yet with the wind up, laundry or old packing cloths provide sails for speedier transport.

  Across the water, the shores rose on both sides toward sandy hills. North was flat land, as far as I could see. South, in the distance, was a village. Gripping the rudder of a passing pirogue was a boy with a man’s job, a yellow cloth draped over his head and neck. His family trusted him. Amid the sacks and household wares one young woman cooked, another nursed. At the bow, against the comfort of a rolled pad, rested the father, his bushy hair the colour of steel wool, with a patron’s calm.

  We pulled beside a broken vessel, its motor mute. We gained two new mates. A man joined us, holding a piece of iron and determined to get a mechanical fix at the next village. The other new passenger, a woman draped with a black blanket with red squares sewn on, was heading to Mopti to look for work. Before we left the captain said in French, “They want us to take him to the next village and her to Mopti. Is that okay?” We glanced at each other, puzzled at the oddness of the question. Robert replied, “It is not our decision. This is the river. Of course.”

  Four pirogue aligned near the riverbank, two boatmen in each, all young. This was the village’s evening crew. They poled to position and, in a symphony of movement, cast four nets in sequence, bowed to the wind and lowered them onto the water with billows that would sink and capture surprised fish.

  Our curious group flowed by; the fishermen and their families watched the oddity that was us. One slim girl, perhaps sixteen, stood at the end of a village, a blue-green skirt wrapped around her hips and a t
iny string laced between her breasts, revealing a silver necklace, reminiscent of a page from National Geographic of fifty years ago.

  My thoughts bore backward as I considered how best to go forward. My recent speeches to travel industry gatherings around the world had been concerned with tourism’s economic and social impacts. In some places, particularly in developing countries, tourism has gone from good to bad to downright ugly. Changes in the behaviour of travellers as well as businesses are absolutely necessary if tourism is to be respected as an industry. In short: good hosts deserve good guests.

  Tourism, both as an industry and as individual entrepreneurial practices, has not yet fully faced the media scrutiny that will surely come its way — as that scrutiny came to forestry, mining, oil exploration, and the fisheries on the world stage. The travel industry faces an increasingly skeptical public demanding to know about its impacts, both visible and hidden, and of benefits true and false. We must all travel more wisely, be more respectful of what we take as well as what we leave.

  Young families would rush to the shore to greet our passing pinasse.

  The critiques of tourism are relatively new. Their intensity and sophistication will increase. Perhaps most notable is concern about environmentally responsible tourism, which seeks to minimize the footprint of mass tourism. Also important are cultural and heritage preservation in the face of a stampede of tourists. And, of course, the demeaning trend toward generic travel destinations. Most people don’t have a compelling reason to be somewhere else. They are where they are for a good reason. What if, one day, people find there is no reason to travel? Access and envy are the twin enemies of local autonomy and indigenous integrity. In these areas, Africa can both teach and learn.

  With difficulty in the darkness, the captain traced shore for a kilometre before finding a grassless opening. The boat grounded. Only then did a flashlight appear. A dried and withered embankment was our camp.

  It was dead quiet. Robert started a fire for warmth and cooking. He blew the flame around twigs and branches deposited by the river, dried by the sun, and collected by Anke and I. The boatman, meanwhile, moved away from us. He knelt facing east toward Mecca, and we heard his prayers.

  There was no strategy or method to setting up camp. Robert and Anke announced that they’d sleep on the boat. I pulled a ground sheet from my pack, took my sleeping bag under my arm, stepped off the boat, and splashed into the river, filling my boots with a swirl of mud and water. The captain tossed mattresses from the boat’s benches to the shore. Ona took one, Jose another. A hexagon of mats formed around the bright fire.

  It soon became cold, and I moved near the fire. I looked in the pot as the captain lifted the lid. A fish head was on a slow boil. Often, say with fish head over rice, I found it easier to eat in the dark.

  The next morning we awoke to the clatter of dishes being washed in the river. The African lady travelling with us had chosen to sleep far away from us, as though we’d mind her being near. Did she eat? I could not tell; she had spent the night without the warmth of fire or companionship. I wondered what she thought about crocodiles.

  That day was the African Queen day. We travelled the Niger Delta, as our river’s great inland lake is known — little coves, wide and narrow channels, and a maze of island-riddled waterways. Here, the Niger was so broad it swallowed perspective.

  “Europeans live for tomorrow,” Robert said as we set off, continuing his river-borne philosophizing. “Africans live for today.” It was too much of a generalization, but struck the right juxtaposition of a possession-needy Western society with one that struggled for sustenance. Cattle and horses stood motionless on the riverbank. Fields stretched against the sun. Irrigation ditches were dry, their foreign-gifted pumps silent.

  Most Malians rely on the River Niger, and live close to it. Thirty kilometres wide here, the river that day was indeed a lake: Lake Débo. Murky channels entered and left it; fish places. We sidled next to a pirogue, its fish held high in promotion. The captain steered our boat away in a bargaining ploy. Offered a lower price, he returned. “Not just the head,” I pleaded, knowing it would be boiled for lunch.

  One village seemed deserted as we approached. Low piles of rubble lay along the riverbank. After the first grouping of foundations, the walls became taller but were still incomplete. They were not being built; they were crumbling. But newer walls were being added on the other side of this small place: it became apparent to us that the village was evolving along the shore. It was shedding its architectural skin, leaving behind the old and starting anew. A spot of fire flickered behind a rubble pile in this ghost village. Then another, stimulated by need and time of day.

  A pirogue sailed by, its jib made from used sackcloths sewn together and tied to the mast with baobab rope. The boat’s cargo of firewood balanced precariously over its sides.

  In the high water of a later season, the River Niger’s Lake Débo would be forty kilometres wide. That day, we crossed thirty, boating for hours in its marshes and in a narrow river channel with banks that quietly left the water, moved upward a metre and grew thick with grass, spindly shoots, and white flowers. Two trees appeared, their branches loaded with nests, more than fifty to a tree, and birds darted in and out of the commune.

  This seemed to be a prosperous and healthy part of Mali, with villages that seemed, from the river, to be cared for and comfortable. It was the first place we saw fishing boxes, which were like lobster traps. The tributaries of the river flowed into the Niger through tidy mesh screens. Fish were ample, and the fishermen tending the work were young; the elders appeared to be contented overseers. Black ducks, herons with arrow-straight bodies, and kingfishers with much to feast on were everywhere.

  The children and grownups teased us for gifts, for welcome, for a chance to chat. I began to see that the more frequently visited a village was, the more aggressive its children. The visitor shifts from guest to prey.

  The African woman on our boat sat idle. She was surprised but almost smiled when Ona offered her a handful of peanuts. Our lunch consisted of fish boiled slowly past the quivering stage, and it was provided to those who had paid. It was not given to this woman until Ona indicated that she must be fed. Although sharing was natural among the Malians, it was not presumed to be a trait of paying Europeans and North Americans. Captain Nanaga shared his oranges, and she too received one.

  We neared Mopti, the river’s major port of call, at dusk. First, a nice village with a tinker-toy mosque appeared on shore. Its prosperity was evident in the mud’s colour, rich and dark. The soil was better here than in the other places we had visited.

  Soon Mopti came into view. Zak and Nema were delighted with our arrival and bounded onto the shore’s boulders in the dark. They shouted commands at one another in rapid Bambara, oblivious to the captain’s directives on where to tie up the pinasse. Their teamwork pulled the boat around the rocks, and, as I admired their skills, I was thankful that the two of them would be with me throughout the coming ten days. They held the pinasse tight and teetering as the six of us prepared to disembark for the last time.

  “Packs,” Zak ordered, and we passed them from one person to the next along the pinasse and eventually over the side of the boat and into his hands. Nema grabbed at them immediately and tossed each into a pile in the mud by the river’s edge. The captain steadied the boat, its engine thumping loudly as he kept it edged into the rocks.

  “Netherlands,” Zak said by way of indicating who should disembark first. He helped each passenger step off the boat onto the jagged boulders and over toward their packs.

  “Welcome, Mopti,” Nema said as Zak shifted my landing her way. She balanced my arrival with arms much stronger than Zak’s and rubbed my back in greeting.

  Zak and Nema were staying in a hotel across town but would first walk Anke, Robert, and me to our hotel a kilometre away. Ona and Jose hugged us and went to find a hotel of low repute. They wished me well: “Have a safe hike, Eric.” Tomorrow, with Zak as my
guide and Nema as cook, I would leave for Le Pays Dogon. Odd to need three people on a solo trip, but I knew I couldn’t do it without them.

  Zak and I walked from the Niger on a path that wanted to be a road, a path that ran through a neighbourhood of homes and stores darkened after bedtime. On an even less walkable street was a light and, when we got beneath it, a sign for the Hôtel Le Fleuve. An entrance yard, behind a high wall, had three tables. Two were empty, and, at the third, a boisterous group listened to a domineering Malian who was buying their beer.

  “Allemagne?” a gruff, friendly voice shouted my way. Why do so many people think I’m German, I wondered.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Ahh, Anglais?”

  “No sir,” I said to the burly man ordering the beer.

  “Ahh, Americaine!”

  “Not!” I said firmly.

  He was puzzled, his face blank. I told him.

  He boasted, “I am the big chief of the ferry boats on the River Niger.”

  “Comanav?” I questioned, giving the company name.

  He was happy to be recognized. “The Kankou Moussa, the Général Soumare, and the Tombouctou.” Sharply he listed the three steamers the company ran, one of which was reliably out of service at any given time, while the other two were known for their unpredictable departure and arrival schedules.

  “I’ve heard good things,” I lied. His company, Comanav, is known for its boats, which attract many stories, most concerning their famous lack of both amenities and predictability.

  I completed my check-in at the twelve-room hotel and was well up the stairs, across a landing, down a sectioned corridor and three metres from the solitude of my room when I heard my name.