In this classroom dozens of wooden desks were blocked together, with narrow aisles between them. Each desk had at least one student — two, where there was room for their slim bums to share a seat. Against the walls lounged students who wanted to learn but for whom there were no seats. I counted: one hundred and twelve students in the room. One teacher. I felt a Westerner’s shame, while at the same time feeling a great admiration for the teacher.
The students let me look over their shoulders and into the texts they were studying. They were not ten years old, and the books they studied from were heavy on the pictorial. There were two pages on AIDS. It was clear in the visuals how AIDS is contracted and how it is spread and why the students must practise safe sex, when and if. I looked at Zak, then at the teacher and was told: “It is important that we protect our young people.”
A little girl smiled at me and I stopped to pay closer attention. To demonstrate my interest in her work, I flipped the pages of her textbook. It opened at a section on female circumcision. The message there was a clear statement that it was not a tradition the government or doctors wished to see continue. It was not her responsibility, was not an obligation; it need not happen to her. There was an added sticker on her page, the internationally recognized NO symbol: a red circle with a diagonal line applied to everything from NO smoking to NO car parking, and here it encircled the French words for “Female Circumcision.”
And, I was forced to ask myself, what of the vulnerable children who don’t get this education, of the nations that knowingly perpetuate the ignorance and humiliation? They need never learn the term clitoridectomy, but they do need to learn the concept, “my body, myself.”
“Au revoir. Goodbye,” they said as I stepped outside.
Zak, the English teacher, myself, and the headmaster stood outside in the daylight, beneath the lone tree. Nema had caught up to us on the walk, and stood next to me, her hip cocked in a slouch. They moved so that I got the shade; they were more used to squinting. To Zak I said, “I will send money from home if you think that would help with the food.”
“Is my school,” he replied. “Headmaster my biology teacher. Now he boss. If you can, Rick, that be good.”
Getting home with such intentions and actually sending money a month hence was going to be complicated. I knew the gesture might fade in importance. If a traveller is to help, most often one must do so immediately. I slipped off my money belt; there was U.S. currency in the hidden sleeve. The first folded batch came loose as I unzipped the sleeve. They saw the entire roll, and I could not peel away only a portion. I felt some embarrassment for actually having hid it. Or perhaps guilty that I had a Western well of money from which to replenish my stash. I began to straighten the wrinkles in the bills, and quickly realized how much money was there. I flashed a calculation, estimating what amount I’d need to keep for the remainder of my expenses before I left some of it with them.
Nema, ever helpful, took the first layer of bills from my hand and began flattening them, lifting back the curled edges and making them tidy. Then, she handed over the entire pile. To the headmaster.
He, Zak, and the English teacher smiled a broad grin of “Thank you.” Nema, at whom I stared, smirked in her role as Mali’s answer to Robin Hood.
“You will feed many students,” said the headmaster as he pocketed the cash. “They will learn better.”
That night we were in a charmed campement near the village of Ibi. There was a large family to greet our arrival, and they quickly set us up in comfort. A man, who appeared to be the father, shook my hand.
Nema prepared a spaghetti stew unlike anything I’d had before. (Who else but Nema could concoct it?). There were mixed meats (some leftover, some fresh), piment crushed into a sauce with the milk boiled loose from its rice and cooled to jell before being warmed again for serving. It tasted sugary, and while that surprised me, Nema was good at surprising me. I might have written this as Chicken Supreme if there had been a menu to write that on, but Mali is not a menu country. You ate what was there, and it might not be available the next day.
Dinner over, this evening was mine for relaxation, without obligations. It was now quite dark but I had my wind candle out to read. My glasses, now bent from too often shoving them into my pack, must have curled in an odd angle over my nose. I took them off to clean them on my shirt, and they were dirtier to see through when I put them back on. The plastic nose bridge fell off in my hand and the metal poked my skin.
“Rick, they offer you their dance,” said Zak, carrying an African lantern that brightened the spot where I sat.
“They? Dance?”
“Yes.”
It was not enough of an answer, and I prodded for more.
“The family. They have song. The man written them. They tell what you should know.”
“He’s a musician?” I asked.
“Sort of.”
I sensed there was more to this, and Zak confirmed: “Is ten thousand seffe for performance. You pay. Is help with education. For the children. For village.”
“And how long is this show?” I asked, feeling silly in my desire to read when Africa was about to unfold in front of me.
Nema defines close-to-the-earth cooking.
“Rick, is good, you should do. Don’t worry about time. Is dark now.” The family started to appear, never a doubt in their minds about the evening. The father — who had earlier welcomed us to his home, had shown me about the large yard, and had passed my bag up to the rooftop that was my night’s sleeping quarters — came into the open area about five metres from where Zak sat beside me. Zak blew out my candle, trimmed the lantern and handed it to the man. I fell into the night as Zak continued to show me his Africa.
Two long-skirted children came to their father and an older daughter in a halter top and western shorts walked out from the other side of the yard. The man played a three-string guitar that a traveller had left behind. His chords were a cue: four male teenagers entered the courtyard, jostling one another. They appeared from behind an outer wall as though waiting there for my decision, or Zak’s, that we’d watch their performance.
Ten children arched around him, joined by a boy, who held a two-sided drum between his legs. The mother, who had helped Nema cook and wash the dishes, came closer but Nema stayed away. There was no clapping to start the performance, nor any obvious direction. Immediately they were joined in song. Strident. It was a kind of spontaneous combustion.
“Is about first aid,” said Zak.
“Happy topic for a song,” I observed.
“No, not that. If a person has hurt, they can fix. Is important because gives new life.”
It was lesson time for me. The second song flowed with little break from the first, except that two toddlers shook their calabash, the beads inside the gourd rattle setting a rhythm that the man picked up. Then the movement had words and became a chorus. “This about medicine,” Zak instructed, and I thought how unlikely these songs were to hit local folk-music charts. “Is that there is no medicine, so make precautions.” It was for the children he wrote the songs, and it was through these that they would learn.
In the bustle of the dark, using only their low-lit lantern, I could see fifteen performers. Zak leaned toward me, “They will do song on family planning. Is about birth control. You understand birth control?”
“I know the term.”
Their way of adding instruments to the song one at a time was moving, with all of them working together with voices that appeared to relax while also demanding attention.
Zak explained that the fourth song would tell of a feared illness. “If child has headache, maybe is malaria. Is not big. It passes. But medicine and treatment needed. Or won’t pass. They don’t have medicine. So is dangerous sickness.”
When it was over, no one moved for a full minute. I did not look at Zak. No one breathed. Then there was a rattle. Then another. And a third. The song, for the first time, began with the drum’s insistent beat. It lured be
fore it entertained. But this was not about entertaining. The song was about female circumcision. Three young girls walked closer to me, each holding one of the introductory rattles. They waltzed only to keep the beat of their rattles and the drum in sync with their words. The story-song was not from the father this time, but from them, for them. I thought back to my earlier visit to the school. Clearly this was considered an important issue in Mali as well as in the outside world.
Zak spoke only when the instruments played without vocal accompaniment, between the sung lyrics of the three smallest girls. Then there was an interlude set for the listener’s contemplation of the song’s impact. “The girls know their circumcision not need be. Before, felt they must. Was tradition. No more.”
“No more?”
“Yes, often. But not need be,” he repeated. “Is important to no longer be important.”
Female circumcision, deemed unnecessary by today’s government, frowned upon by medical authorities, shunned by Western women’s groups who sponsor highway billboards to communicate this, is nevertheless widely practised in Mali. The genital mutilation disfigures the girls, and the frequent use of a blunt instrument for the procedure is both painful and a disease spreader. While socially and sexually the circumcised women become more acceptable to many African men, the trimming is fraught with individual trauma. Although it is campaigned against, and sung against, it will not abate easily.
What we may say is mythology, the Dogon hold dear. When the God, Ama, finished making the universe, Earth was to be his female mate. Their sexual intercourse — which would complete the world — was symbolic of fertility and Ama’s manhood. This copulation was prevented by an earthly termite hill. The clitoris is seen as the impediment, cast as the termite mound in Dogon history, their myth. The termite hill-clitoris was in the way and must therefore be removed. Female circumcision became the symbol of man’s dominance. It became mandatory to remove the clitoris of young women, both to ensure unimpeded consummation and to further the myth’s perception of truth.
I wondered what world these little girls were dancing into. To end the song, the littlest girl sang, and I asked Zak what the words meant. “She teaching, this is wrong.”
“Isn’t she young to teach?” I said.
“Teach what you want to learn,” he said.
Then the man sang alone, as if directly to me. “They wish health for their family. Welcome you. Wish your family good health,” Zak interpreted the concert’s closing. It moved to a louder, happier tune, as though to end.
The mother and three teenage girls, wrapped in shawls, sprang up and held hands. They swirled as the happy music pumped through the courtyard. Everyone began clapping. The women twirled close to where I sat on the ground with Zak, and their circle broke. Hands reached down and pulled me to my feet and into the dance.
It was not raucous, not fancy, just our moving with the music. I leaned my head back, balanced and held secure by their hands, looked up to the million stars above and watched their faces smile. I felt the sand between my toes, let my body sway in the least selfconscious dance possible, moving only to the beat of the drum, the rhythm of Africa.
When I sat down, sweating, Zak said one must celebrate life, and the best way to do it was to do what I just did. “When dead, you can’t dance.”
A young cock crowed me awake. I was unexpectedly curious about this day. There was a sharp pink flower in sight, a twig reaching from a tree branch at the rooftop, all the more enchanting for the contrast to brown mud. This was another special day. The Dogon is a land of masks, and nowhere more so than where we were to travel.
“Let’s away,” said Zak, handing me a water bottle. Zak and I were to hike alone for a morning to Youga-Dogourou, not far away. Youga-Dogourou was one of three name-related villages in close proximity, the other two being Youga-Piri and Youga-Na. It was already hot when we left. “Ready, Rick?” I was eager for the open fields, so I bolted, leading. After a kilometre, the trail meandered into the rocks, and I picked the path out for half of the escarpment’s heart-beating rise. Our way became unclear. “All yours, Zak.” I bowed, and he flowed through boulders and around giant rocks, up, always up. Steps were in place everywhere; the route had been used forever and always. My knees bent, my calves cursed, my thighs pushed. Up. Up.
Masks dominate the Dogon’s spiritual landscape. They are not ornamental, but spiritual necessities. Each village has an altar around which services and ceremonies are held, performed by males, preferably those directly descended from (often deceased) religious leaders. The face covers are hand-held and represent animals, people of either sex, and various ages and assorted village craftsmen, such as the blacksmith.
“Sigui,” Zak said, as though I should know.
“Sigui, what?”
“Sigui is most important ritual,” he said. “In Dogon, all else will stop for this ceremony.”
“Will I see it?
“You must come back. Next time 2027.”
“Next!” I said, surprised. “And the last was …?”
“Many years ago.” It was in Youga-Dogourou, where we walked.
“Only every sixty years.”
Zak explained that the festival requires the carving of a Great Serpent Mask. “Six times your height, Rick.”
Zak’s explanation of the sixty-year cycle for this ritual oddly fits with science. Sirius is well known to Westerners as the sky’s brightest star, often cited by amateur astronomers and professionals alike, and common in literature. In fact, it is Sirius A that we see. There is a speck of a star, Sirius B, about which the Dogon people have known for centuries and which Westerners “discovered” in 1970. That much is fact. And what is the source of the Dogon’s irrefutable knowledge of this second star, which Europeans and North Americans did not believe existed? Information was provided to them hundreds of years ago by the Nommo, twin masters in the creation myth of the Dogon. The Nommo told them of the star’s existence, citing its periodic (you guessed it: sixty-year) cycling on the horizon — a tiny light, often initially red. This triggered the start of the Sigui ceremony in Dogon. And for those who enjoy intrigue, note that the Nommo come from the system of stars we call Sirius. Their telling of, and the Dogon belief in, a Sirius C star has yet to be corroborated by Western astronomers.
Zak was brushing his teeth with a stick when I found him at our campement the next morning. I was ready for another discovery, perhaps another revelation. We were soon joined by Nema and Oumar.
We left the village of Youga-Na and were almost immediately climbing through narrow passages, scrambling over crevices and slipping between fissures, all done with an exhilarating sense of risk. Far above the plain and onto the flatness of the Dogon plateau, we faced a long day’s heat, trekking to Sanga across seventeen kilometres of barren but beautiful isolation.
Zak looked at the long stretch of hike and time before us, and said: “Tomorrow comes this way.”
There was little to confuse us on the trail, hard stones all the way and as hot as the surface of an oven. Undisturbed rocks marked the path, as no one wished to perish on this plateau. This walk, the longest uninterrupted stretch we’d made in the entire month, reinforced my conviction that the purest form of travel is on foot.
Oumar, Zak, and Nema caught up with me in the last kilometre. I had relished walking alone but was happy for us to share a meal. We shucked our packs and dusted off when we came to a village on the outskirts of Sanga. The four of us took lunch at the Katsor Restaurant. The proprietor brought three servings of beef cuts, three bowls of au jus, and three servings of rice coloured by the water used first to cook the green beans that sided our plates. Oumar followed the custom; his eyes looked at the roof. I asked for the missing fourth plate and was told by the server that Oumar would get whatever Zak didn’t want from his plate. I looked to Zak, as this was not to be. Zak understood immediately and before I could do anything with the food on my plate, Zak took his best pieces of beef and placed them with a cut of fresh
bread on a napkin and passed it to Oumar, whose eyes blinked an appreciation that would not have been more clear in Dogon, Bambara, French, or English.
Sanga was not far along after lunch. The mission, one of several villages that form Sanga, is specific-built: a compound. Everyone knew the game here. Guides gather to hunt clients, travellers come here to be found. It no longer felt right.
A Dogon man walked over to where I sat, sulky at trek’s end, and said, in English: “Masks?” Then, indicating with a flung arm where they were, he said in French, “My place.” Curious, I walked with him around the village hill and over a field to his home, where another man sat in a chair made of woven plastic slats. Unlocking the door of a small shed, the second man said to me in English, “Many old things.”
Fresh wood shavings covered the floor, among freshly carved masks that had not yet been made to look old. Off the wall I chose a mask with a bulbous nose, long cheeks, and scattered baobab bark, which hung from it as hair. Chunks of dirt fell off in my hands.
In a corner, behind more masks and partially hidden by newly carved wooden doors, peeked spearheads. I moved two elaborately designed window shutters to get a closer look and saw more clearly. There lay a quiver of arrows as long as my arm.
“Were for hunting,” said the man who had been waiting when we arrived. “And war. From his family fighting years ago.” Striking metal tips with ridges had torn through the quiver’s pouch, which was hardened by time and dry air. Bundled and sharp, the spears poked out the opening they’d made. The leather was cracked and in danger of falling apart; ripped portions were curled and hard. Unlike the doll-sized carvings rubbed with dirt or stained with roots to fake age, this felt honestly old. Age is a relative concept in an ancient land. My guideline for “old” — forty years — had been suggested by a Malian website, an age after which an object belongs in a local museum.
I asked how old the weapons were.
To Timbuktu for a Haircut Page 26