“Don’t borrow tomorrow’s problem,” Zak said matter-offactly. “She has ride after sleep. Will meet in Dourou for lunch.”
I was to learn that Nema never cooked breakfast. Instead, it was nothing to pick three or four farni from a pot of bubbling oil where women cooked the dough. A sort of Malian breakfast muffin.
Zak had promised to show me the edge of the escarpment, a short hike from our camp. Now we stood near the brink’s twohundred-metre drop. Zak looked beyond it and said, “Le neant.”
“I don’t know that word, Zak.”
“Vast,” he explained. “Maybe empty.” Then muttered, “The vast empty.”
At times the path before me forked, and I needed Zak’s decision regarding which way to turn. True to my request that he “lead from behind,” Zak often dropped back far. In fact, he often dropped out of sight. On the open plain I often saw him appearing very small in the distance. I waited until he was near enough that I could tell which arm he waved, which fork to take. Then I was off, followed by my leader.
In the hillsides, where Zak’s penchant took him and therefore me, I learned to read the trail in the rocks. A series of small boulders at first might seem to block a path, when actually they guided the walker to a lower trail that climbed more suitably. Decades ago, the rocks had been placed to define sections of trail, but rainyseason floods have altered their arrangement and trail repairs were sporadic. This makes them currently of marginal value, and the requirement for an experienced guide more necessary.
I heard Zak’s “Séo,” as we worked our way up a steep path and heard also the name “Abraham.” I listened as the exchange continued for a short while and then stopped.
“Rick, you have medicine.” The man Zak had greeted put forward a stool for me to sit on and then a pail of water for me to wash with. As he did this, he called to another, who was behind a shack. A wounded farmer limped into view. His leg was badly gashed, apparently by rough metal scything rather than fallen rock. “They ask me your help,” Zak said. I had plastic gloves but lacked the inclination to explore the wound. My day pack had proper supplies to ease his pain, if not remedy the gash. Through Zak and sign language I explained the use of anti-bacterial wipes to first clean it, watching as the man began to work on his own leg. It was dirty where he had washed it earlier, before some of the blood had crusted. It would be better to clean and stitch, but that was not a job for today. Once the four-inch cut was semi-clean, I squeezed antibiotic cream onto a small cloth and demonstrated how he should apply it. We did this until the tube was nearly empty, his gash white with medication. I wrapped it with gauze and taped it. Zak translated, “See a doctor,” twice — once for the wounded man and once for my own reassurance.
Abraham brought more water for me and I washed my sweating head. When we walked on, he carried our bags to the end of his area, as was the custom.
We met Nema at Dourou. She’d hitched a moped ride there and, while recovering from her illness, seemed to have busied herself with the chore of cooking. She greeted us with lunch.
I hate onions. Nema knew that. The meal was laced with them. With that meal dawned some understanding. What I’d thought were rice fields as we walked were not rice fields at all. We had entered a zone of onions, an odour that would be my companion for days to come. Here, the sprigs and bulbs were pounded into a pulp, and the pulp was formed by hand into lopsided balls that were set to dry. The sun’s baking did little to diminish the smell.
“Nema, sans onion,” I was unsure whether this would establish or settle a rift. It was only one of many attempts. My immediate task became one of weaning Nema from her love of onions in order to accommodate my aversion. This task took the entire trip.
The longest day was that day, with eighteen kilometres of trekking. Nema packed up after lunch and we started across the desert once more, staying close to the escarpment. Zak said to Nema that I was “quatre quatre”… “four-by-four,” and it was the length of my stride rather than the number of strides that separated us.
We were soon in the hills, and my reading of the trail became uncertain. It was a quick increase in altitude, and Zak picked and pointed our way with assurance. Indiana Jones would be at home here, I thought, among the thick rock roofs and passages. In one narrow place, I pushed my pack ahead of me, eased my body through the pinch of boulders, and took Zak’s pack from him, after which he slipped between the wedged rocks. Once we were over the top, there was a brief levelling, and then a steep descent. We plunged down the gully of rocks that took the escarpment’s sheer pitch as a path, not unlike the course of a waterfall, which in fact it became in the rainy season.
“Zak, is there another route?” I asked. I wondered about those who traversed these difficult paths regularly.
“Yes,” he replied, “but less interest. You’ll enough see plain.” The sun dried our words, and we stopped talking.
I again pushed the pack through a tight spot, followed it with my body pressed to the rock, my face scraping the headway and avoiding a sharp piece that blocked the passage by ducking under it. The troublesome passage was invigorating; I was loving the challenge. Then two Malian women jaunted up the incline toward us, their pace steady and sure. They each carried cloth-covered baskets atop their heads and were heading home from market, where they’d been since dawn. They negotiated the boulders as smoothly as a square dancer would.
By the time we reached bottom, I was exhausted.
Me: “I’m finished.”
Zak: “Yes, spewed.”
Me: “Spewed?”
Zak: “Yes. Spewed. By the rocks. Finished.”
I looked back up the slope, past Zak’s shoulder, to the rock face. “Thanks,” I said, meaning for the safety as well as the experience.
“Now, flat but sandy for you,” Zak said, and there was something playful in the way he said it. I found the slip of sandals on sand less enjoyable than my graceless scampering on the hillside had been.
Trading and selling and buying happens in Dogon with a system that sees transient markets set for certain days each week. It is so reliable that Zak’s uncle can send him a letter from Mopti and, if timed right, can count on it being delivered the considerable distance to his Dogon village within two days on the market circuit.
We came upon that week’s market at Nombori. A hundred stalls flashed their wares to five times as many people. There were bright dabs of colour everywhere, not on the market but on every person. The Malians were in gorgeous dress. Each sash tethering cloth to a woman was a different hue. If one sash was yellow with blue clothing, the next ensemble would be a turquoise garment with purple at the bottom. Pinks, reds, and greens knew no bounds. No two outfits seemed related. It was one of the most colourful sights I had ever seen.
We dropped our packs at the trunk of a giant tree, and I folded myself beside them. To me, “shade” is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. I surrendered to it, and began the ritual of picking krim krim from my clothes: these tiny bush burrs irritate, their prickle hurts, and any cloth or sock is like a magnet for them.
Zak, who had walked away to greet an older man, returned with half a dozen children in tow and a large wooden jug in his hands. I was given a calabash by one of the kids, whose little hands helped me hold the wooden bowl, though it was not heavy. Zak poured millet beer for me. Warm and good, it filled a need not uttered but sensed. I sat beneath the tree, sipped to the gaze of kids and elders, and felt their welcome.
By the time we were ready to leave, Zak and Nema had met two more friends. They carried our packs, and this time I kept my small pack and its flashlight at hand.
Zak and I shared a goat trail. For long stretches of the walk, we were together, and Zak told me what he thought I should know. About the “raisin tree” from which they take oil for their hair and body. He also pointed out the tamarind tree. “Our women pound its new leaves for juice and for millet cream, ” he said, pointing to one I’d leaned against earlier. The bush date tree shel
ters as well as provides food (“Tastes like roasted marshmallow,” Zak said, and I wondered at how he would know), and in Dogon is called the Balanzan tree. Above all, there is no more common tree than the baobab. Its bark is used for making rope, its leaves for a soupy food called to, its large branches for fertilizer when its heart is cut for firewood, its fruit burned to make potassium for medicinal remedies, and “the baobab tree’s root use for malaria.” This reminded me that it was the time of day to take my pills to fend off this illness. When Zak described another children’s sickness that it cured, I deduced it to be like chicken pox because he explained that “it makes buttons on the skin.”
Zak, Dogon guide, teacher, and friend, wears protection against the sun.
At camp, we passed a brew between us. “Zak, are you animist?” I had no clue about his religion. There had been no bending for prayer or obvious blessing before a meal.
“My family is. Mostly. And my village.”
“You?”
“I’m Christian. Is my choice.”
In a country dominated by three religions, one should never be surprised. Every village has at least one distinctive place of worship. Mosques are common, and over 80 percent of Malians practise Islam. But the Dogon people look dimly on external influences, assimilating only what they wish. Animism has been among their beliefs for centuries.
“In my village, does not matter. Every village, is okay what you believe,” Zak told me. “Everywhere you find Muslim. Will find Christian. Too, animism. Is all okay what your neighbour believes.”
“No one wants get to heaven with no name,” Zak told me as though that was what my question was about. Within his family they had all hedged their bets: three were Muslim, some Christian, and some animist. “What if we get heaven and God doesn’t recognize one us?”
During the evening’s lull, Zak mentioned how different it was in the rainy season, from June to October. “Is lush, if that your word. Very green.” I tried to visualize. “And wind strong. Monsoon.”
Through the hiss of the campement radio came the thump of music.
“National anthem, Reek,” Nema said, unable to shake her plaintive way of pronouncing my name.
“Our president is going speak,” Zak announced, talking above the radio.
And then the two of them began to sing their national anthem, Zak in French and Nema in Bambara. Quiet, not boisterous.
“Mali, it is your pride,” Nema said in schoolgirl English, with a hint in her voice that it was a rough translation of one line.
“We will do what is right,” Zak sang in English for me.
In 1960, freed from colonial shackles, the historic name “Mali” was selected for the new democracy. Crippled by debt to foreign lenders, with little in the way of export products, slow in developing foreign revenues from tourism and victimized by encroaching sand, it is understandable that Mali is labeled “poor.” (Westerners do a lousy job of making nation-to-nation comparisons for hardy spirits, the enterprise of happiness, or indigenous joy, wherein Mali would be labelled rich, even thriving.)
“ATT,” said Zak when I asked the leader’s name. “We call him that. Real name Amadou Toumani Touré.” ATT came to power in a 1991 coup, thrust into the role by public pressure for democratic institutions, a reflection on neighbouring countries’ miscues in Africa. He is among the few leaders of a coup who have won not only their country’s ballot, but also international respect. Too much of African diplomacy rests on the patronage of former colonial powers, and Mali accepts help without bowing. It is one of Africa’s fifty-three nation-states and among the few that make sense as a sovereign nation on the world stage. Mali does not attract cynicism. It does not have problems that are beyond the reach of Western help. In a continent of 670 million people and among its fellow members in the African Union, Mali is one of those countries worth the world’s patience.
And now, on the radio, ATT’s voice began a speech, not preachy, yet with an air of precision and pace that betrayed his military background.
“What is he saying?”
“It’s Bambara. Talking about Army Day. Is anniversary. This it. A holiday.”
Initially ATT did not seek to rule, preferring to leave that to political parties. But they sought to bring ATT back into leadership as president in the 2002 election. In the view of my hosts, the expectations of this non-politician, non-partisan leader’s ability for stewardship had largely been met. “Our country gets better,” said Zak. And that was the most politics we talked.
There is peace now. The Tuareg, once lords of the Sahara, no longer fight for autonomy, a struggle that caused bouts of unrest and civil strife for decades. Mali would benefit from a mentor nation, a first-world big sister who would help nourish its potential with dedication rather than sporadic aid. The country shoulders a foreign debt of $900 million U.S., provided by the African Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, donor nations, and the World Bank. As with most of Africa, Mali survives through what Shakespeare would call “the courtesy of nations” and walks more slowly under the weight of this help.
Tourism may be part of the solution, as a source of both foreign revenue and foreign understanding. It need not be “pro-poor tourism” other than that the benefits of visitor spending need to stay local, and traditionally little of what visitors spend trickles through to residents of a developing host country. Perhaps here tourism can contribute to the alleviation of the nation’s poverty, a reduction of crime, a rising literacy rate, and enhanced rights for women. It might reduce global inequities through education (of both traveller and host) and exchanges of more than currency.
The world tries to make Africa right — children helping the mother continent. Africa sits in the world’s margins; noted, commented upon, and somewhat unwillingly included in the family of meaningful land masses. Most North Americans and Europeans never get remotely close to it. Those who do, report to the rest of us and help us think differently, reaffirming that travellers are the world’s synapses. Africa is not yet what it will be at its brightest, but the wait will be long.
Mali’s survival, like travel, is about adapting to the inevitable.
The broadcast ended brusquely, and the radio blared anew, partway through a Pink Floyd song. The incongruity of the moment struck me, but it also distracted Nema. I snatched back my favourite hat, determined it would go home with me.
The next day, we stopped in a village to rest and came upon three men building a house. A newly dried mud wall came to a framed corner where its wooden braces meshed laterally and vertically in a latticework. The wall was being filled to make it stronger.
I offered to help.
The men smiled — in the international way of saying “whatever” — and showed me to the mud-making area. I was given a trowel to move back and forth in order to mix the guck. I swirled and scraped with it. The mud was pliable, yet firmed nicely in the heat.
There were straw-and-mud bricks that had been made days earlier by the water hole, where the floods had moulded a washedout workstation. They’d been blocked and dried and cut into moveable pieces that stacked easily. When my muddy mortar was ready to secure them in place, I was shown how to position these large bricks. Lending my back to a building process that was hundreds of years old, I placed half a dozen bricks on the wall and troweled mud into the gaps.
An older man walked over, pushed a long sleeve up his arm and away from the dirt, and tested the newly laid bricks. Finding them suitably set and firm, he smiled. He laughed. He shook my muddy hand. It was all a ploy to keep me building this Dogon home. One day I’d like to sleep on its roof.
It had been an unusually regular week: darkness came at six-thirty, dinner at eight, and bed at nine-thirty. Another night. Zak and I smoked and picked our teeth. He explained his demons.
“We are often afraid, and stay close to the village at dark.”
“Afraid of animals?” I asked, feeling that reasonable.
“No. Of people with black magic.”
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I was intrigued. “What people?”
“Powerful people who use things we don’t understand.”
“Like?”
“Black magic.”
“And …?” I wanted to hear all about this.
“If on the road now, bad black magic powers could kill. If left my pack in last village, I not go get. Not now. For fear.”
“Only at night?”
“Sometime — once when celebration, bad people put danger in food. To check, we feed to sacred tortoises. If don’t eat, is poisonous. Make your skin sick.”
“But here, we are safe tonight?”
“Very safe in Dogon.” And I looked into the eyes of the man who said this, seeing their truth and serenity. About us, people walked who could not be seen, only heard. There was no moon.
“Do you have a fire?” Zak asked, holding out his cigarette.
The closest I came to personally “connecting” with Mali had occurred when I held the centuries-old manuscripts in Timbuktu. Somewhat similar had been my sensation on a dark night on the dry mud bank of the River Niger under more sky than I knew existed. But Mali had not yet riveted itself to me, not made an indelible impression. Then, it came to me one morning. Not in the sands, as I’d thought it would, but through shy, undemanding children. Not in the sun’s gaze, as I’d expected, but in the easy darkness of Zak’s grandparents’ home.
We trekked past Tireli’s vegetable plots and climbed straight up over two hundred metres of rock to the ridge of the escarpment, clinging to rock holds and pulling ourselves up over the outcroppings. Sweat beaded my brow and stained my hat’s brim as we took on the elevation. I raised my hat a few centimetres to funnel cool air over my forehead. I hiked as though I were moving on scaffolding, nervous of the fissured trail. My stride was tentative, even more so near the chasms.
Then a young woman waltzed around a large rock, on her way down to the village with a pot on her head, its contents covered by the lid. On feet bare and sure, she swayed by me without concern, generations of confidence and balance in her genes.
To Timbuktu for a Haircut Page 24