by Peter Boehm
Elias’ uncle wasn’t embarrassed by the story of Elias’ late start in education. He’d offered to show us something of the village. Although it was the dry season, and there wasn’t anything to do there, he’d been out in his field when he heard of our arrival. He seemed pleased to be able to show us a little of the area.
So we waded along sandy tracks, and through equally sandy fields where a few scorched sorghum stalks were still lying around, and past a couple of isolated acacias. The uncle swung his hiking stick enthusiastically, and strode out briskly.
He was in his mid-fifties, was wearing a long black cowl and a white turban, and was carrying an old engine oil can with a wooden cork, containing some warm drinking water.
Then, when we saw the school, the uncle good-naturedly explained that Elias hadn’t been sent there because the council of village elders had permitted children to attend the state-run schools only in the past year. Only from then on, it had decided, would the village children be permitted to attend the modern school rather than just the Quran school. By then, however, Elias was already too old. Only his seven-year-old brother went there now.
When Elias’ father returned home in the evening, his seemingly self-evident comment on the elders’ decision was “That was just total ignorance.” But he hadn’t opposed it, or even defied it either. Elias’ village isn’t big, and all its inhabitants are members of the same tribe.
Fifty years ago, as the Emir of Dutse had told me, many Hausa people had still opposed western education. And if you believe Islamists of the first hour like Aminu Aliyu Gusau, then this was the case even until just ten years ago.
But Elias’ uncle now reported that the elders had finally changed their minds the previous year only because the villagers could no longer eke out a living from their fields.
“The climate has changed”, he said. “We haven’t had a good harvest for ten years now. The grain we import may last for two months or so, but then our stores are empty.” The families could only continue to survive by taking their animals to the market and buying grain from the proceeds.
Then we looked around the small school. It was for the children from a number of surrounding villages. It was perhaps a 20-minute walk to the school from the yard belonging to Elias’ parents.
The school comprised two small huts with corrugated iron roofs and neat, turquoise window shutters. Ten pupils from Classes 3 and 4, and 5 and 6 were lost in each of the rooms. Beside the two huts was a large lean-to made of branches and straw mats for the children in Classes 1 and 2. Of course, there were barely any girls in sight.
When it rained, one of the teachers told me, they couldn’t teach under the large roof for Classes 1 and 2. And besides, you could no longer talk about real lessons now, he complained. Since grain was in short supply in almost all households, he said, his pupils were now so hungry that they are barely able to concentrate.
The school was equipped with only the most necessary items. Each child had a bench, and on each bench was a school book. But the lessons were free. The parents didn’t pay a single franc in school fees – the state paid the teacher’s salary, and the school even provided the books.
By African standards, these were paradisiacal standards. In East Africa you’d have had to search far and wide to find a school like this in such a remote area. Admittedly, it was also very rare for people in East Africa not to send their children to school. Almost everywhere, school fees were just as much part of the fixed and planned expenses, as was grain or clothing.
Elias stood by awkwardly as we spoke to the teacher. When we were back in Niamey, he explained that he’d have preferred to have gone to the “French school” instead of the Quran school. “I don't know”, he said when I asked, rather surprised, “why the elders made this decision only recently.”
Of course, no-one had asked him which school he’d wanted to go to. Ask a child what he wants to do? Where would that lead?! Decisions like these are made by the elders, the custodians of tradition. And they make them for the entire tribe, and no family dares to object.
But after all the shame and sidestepping on account of the state school, I suddenly noticed in the evening that there was nonetheless a success story hidden behind Elias’ story too. The boy who has to fight a little for survival each day in Niamey – for the children in his village, he was a hero!
A dozen boys surrounded him to hear his stories from the big city, looked at him admiringly, and really hung onto his every word. He was someone who had made it. Many of them, too, had tried their luck as Almajiris in the capital. But they’d given up again after just a short time.
Anyone who couldn’t cope with the begging and the hunger had better not try their luck in Niamey at all. So most of them had returned to their mothers, worked in the fields for the three-month rainy season, and otherwise sat around, bored.
Elias was different. He’d hung on.
“My parents know that I’d never return from Niamey without a reason”, he’d said, in order to reassure us when we’d arrived in his village and noticed his mother’s distrust. He was proud about that.
During his three years in Niamey, his father had only once had to come to look after Elias because he was unwell. Otherwise, he’d got through by himself.
I found such willpower very moving. And all the more so because Elias accepted without a single word of protest all the decisions made for him, which irrevocably shaped his life.
Of course he would have deserved more. He had what it took. He was certainly one of the brightest children I’d met in Africa. He knew Niamey better than the taxi drivers. He showed them the shortcuts when we were driving around the city. That was unusual. In Nairobi, even adults often had difficulty finding their way.
And Elias always knew how to look after himself. I gave the translator some money so that he could give the boy some for a taxi. On the day we went to his village, we were going to meet at the translator’s house, but the translator had kept all the money for himself.
That wasn’t a problem for Elias! He simply got up slightly earlier, still prayed, walked on foot to our meeting point, and arrived on time.
At the bus station, he led us to the correct shared taxi. He organised our seats. He knew most of the drivers. He communicated through them with his parents in their village.
Then, as we were driving to his village in the donkey cart, he got all the latest news from the driver, and found out what had happened in his absence. Really, the cobbler had built a new hut? Aha! “Yes, this sack of kola nuts is going to the trader in this yard”, he informed the donkey cart driver.
The fruits, ubiquitous in West Africa, only grow in a humid tropical climate, and he explained to me that the sack had been imported from Ghana.
The translator and driver were impressed. On a continent where adults didn’t know, and more often than not didn’t want to know, what was happening in the next village, such interest was something extremely unusual.
Yes, the magic triangle of the African plagues – war, hunger and AIDS – may be bad. But no-one talks about how many young people’s dreams are destroyed every day in Africa.
That’s the real tragedy. They don’t have the chance to make decisions about their own lives, but they usually deserve better. And when they start to notice that it’s their futures for which the elders have set the wrong course, then it’s almost always already too late.
MALI
47°C and rising (Border - Gao – Mopti)
Gao really knew how to impress with its sand. There were mounds of it – in the streets, in all the open spaces, in gardens and yards. Everywhere, in fact. It was ankle-deep even inside some houses. If you don’t have the money for a carpet, that’s how you decorate your floors in Gao.
And it certainly was hot there. The weather forecasters on Malian TV had recorded 47°C in the shade. My West Africa travel guide even warned of 48°C.
I had told the hairdresser this when I was having my hair cut. He was shocked. “48°C?! That wou
ld make people here dig holes and cower in them”, he said.
I tried to find an SUV going to Timbuktu. The Moors of Gao go there, and on through the desert to Mauritania, to pick up smuggled goods. But the only car I could find had to be repaired first.
So I decided to get the bus to Mopti and from there, if possible, go by boat down the Niger River to Timbuktu.
In the morning, a labourer loading luggage into the hold of the bus wanted 500 CFA francs (around 65 pence) for my bag. I ignored him, and immediately became suspicious, because he loaded my bag anyway. After a while, he returned, and I gave him the money. But I asked the ticket vendor, and he told me that no-one had to pay anything to have luggage loaded. So I demanded my 500 CFA francs back.
That sort of thing happened all the time. I had to be constantly on my guard. People could always add a “white tax” to the price. And, just like the labourer in Gao, they could get difficult if I complained. In such cases, my skin colour was simply a label, with the words “Please bleed me dry. I’m new here.”
After all, Africans who weren’t local and didn’t know the prices would be cheated too. Dishonesty was simply ingrained in successful African businessmen, rather like a marketing strategy for a good master joiner who not only had to make beautiful tables, but also had to advertise them.
That was what made life there so difficult. When my TV in Nairobi broke, I made the mistake of having it repaired. I was no longer new to Africa. I’d brought the TV set with me from Germany, and was clever enough not to risk simply taking it to any old shop. My neighbour, who was of Indian descent, advised me to go to a shop in the city centre. The owner was a member of the same religious community as she was. She was an Ismaili, and he was honest.
The only hitch was that the shop now had a different owner. When I picked up my TV the salesman told me that the electricity had just cut out. So I couldn’t test it in the shop.
When I turned it on at home, the picture which appeared wasn’t really a picture at all. The screen was illuminated, but everything looked the same, whether it was a film or the news.
I phoned the shop and complained. The owner couldn’t understand my anger. “Well, we didn’t have the correct spare part”, he said, as though this were a matter of course. Couldn’t he have told me that before he took £80 from me?!
I then made another serious error. I got even more annoyed. I’d wrestled long and hard with myself before taking the TV to a repair shop. And what had happened was exactly what I’d wanted to avoid.
I made the same mistake again. I got even more annoyed. For weeks, I kept ringing the shop. And I visited it a couple of times. Usually, the owner wasn’t there. Or the phone was answered by an elderly man, probably his father, who said, “Yes, but then anyone could say that. You’ve probably broken the TV yourself.” In the end, the owner gave me the order number for a capacitor, which I had to get for myself from Germany. But the number didn’t mean a thing to anyone there. And so I did what I should have done right at the start. I threw the TV away. And I learned my lesson. Apart from food, I bought only the barest necessities in Nairobi.
Of course, this sort of thing didn’t only happen to me. In Kenya, no-one accepted a credit card from one of the large, renowned firms. In Uganda, cards from the competitor couldn’t be used. In Nigeria, you couldn’t even pay by cheque. And that was the same for white people. Of course, all this didn’t help the African economies.
In Nairobi, I gradually got used to not simply throwing away, but burning, letters from my bank, as well as all my correspondence. And I didn’t feel like a paranoid white man for doing this.
My caution reminded me, rather, of the fact that some Africans used to bury their hair and fingernail clippings, so that no-one could put a curse on them. It was simply better to err on the side of caution.
The man with the leather bag (Mopti)
I met the traditional healer, Sana Tembini, through Mamadou. Mamadou was a tour guide in Mopti. He was 38 years old, and was a Dogon.
This ethnic group is very well-known. This is on account of their sculptures and masks, and the fact that many tourists like to travel to their beautiful region in central Mali to go on hiking tours from village to village. The Dogon people are considered to be very tradition-conscious. In the 1940s, the well-known French ethnologist Marcel Griaule wrote a much-quoted book about the story of their complex genesis, and the Dogon people have retained a great deal of their original culture to this day.
Mamadou worked in an elegantly-furnished tourist agency in the city centre, but a tourist told me that, prior to a boat trip on the Niger River, Mamadou had made an offering of a sacrificed chicken and three kola nuts. This was to ensure that on the trip everything went smoothly.
“That’s true”, Mamadou said. “I do that every time. My personal healer advised me to. Since I’ve had this healer, everything has changed for me.” Before he met the healer, Mamadou explained, he’d often not found any tourists for weeks or even months. And he’d always had problems with them.
For instance, with a Japanese man, whom he had taken to the Dogon people’s territory. Mamadou had agreed on a fixed sum with him for the trip. The Japanese man just had to pay for his drinks in addition. But once there, the tourist suddenly demanded that masks from the art market should be included in the price. Mamadou had to go to the police. He explained the situation, they decided in his favour, and he came through the encounter without any losses.
“But Mamadou”, I interrupted him to ask whether these problems weren’t simply do to with the fact that he’d still been inexperienced as a tour guide at the time.
“No”, he said, “whenever there are problems like this, animists always think that something’s amiss.”
Everything had changed for Mamadou, he explained, after he’d met the healer, Sana, four years earlier. Prior to Sana, Mamadou had already had over a dozen others, but none had had such strong powers as he did. He gave Mamadou a talisman and a powder, which Mamadou now inhaled over a fire each week. Besides this, Mamadou had to also sacrifice a sheep or a chicken in the mosque from time to time, for the poor.
“Since then, everything’s gone like clockwork. I haven’t had any more problems with the tourists, and I get on wonderfully with my boss.”
And as I must have looked rather sceptical, Mamadou added, in that tone – a mixture of shame and defiance – which Africans so often use when talking about such topics, “Here in Africa you have to prepare for every kind of work. You have to get hold of the right medicines beforehand. A good African...”
A good African?
“Well, those who are proud of their religion, I mean. So they just do that. In any case, it’s worked for me.”
I wanted to meet this healer, Sana, of whose powers Mamadou was so convinced. So I found myself a translator – an acquaintance of Mamadou’s, and also a Dogon and tour guide – and visited him.
Sana lived and worked in a crooked, two-storey house in the old part of Mopti – or, more accurately, in a tiny room on the ground floor of this house. That was where he slept, and where he also saw his clients and patients. He never used the room on the first floor of the building.
Sana desperately wanted to show me his ID card. His name was Sana Tembini, and his job was listed as “farmer”. He, however, only ever called himself a healer. And of course, he was a Dogon too.
Sana wore western clothing – khaki trousers, and often no t-shirt as it was so hot and sticky in the small room. If he did wear a shirt, it was one sporting the emblem of a western brand of cigarettes.
He had a wide moustache, and his twinkling eyes and missing canine tooth gave his face a rather youthful and mischievous appearance, despite his forty-one years.
Sana was immediately prepared to talk to us. He wanted payment for this, but it was justifiable. While we were there, he would have fewer clients.
There’s no doubt that, by African standards, Sana earned a lot of money. But despite this, his life appeared strangely un-
African, almost Spartan. He didn’t seem to use his money as most others would have. If anyone becomes prosperous in Africa, they have to make a show of their money. What’s the point of it otherwise?
Sana worked and slept on the raffia mat in his room. It seemed that he only left the house to eat. And for the two decades he’d been living in Mopti he’d always eaten with the same man, at the same stand, at the same market. He never went to the cinema or to a pub, and had no possessions apart from what was hanging on the walls of his room.
And, best of all, it seemed he wasn’t unfaithful to his two wives in the Dogon territory.
“What more do I need?” he said. “I have my religion. That’s my life.”
Sana didn’t get annoyed by any of my questions. Sometimes there were five of us in the cramped room, but he never got impatient, and neither did he ever seem embarrassed or to feel attacked by my questions.
It’s not always easy to face a flood of journalist’s questions. They can appear stupid and unnecessary, sometimes even offensive. Besides, it was a sensitive topic – the Dogon people’s traditional cult, in other words, animism.
And the questions were being asked by a white man. Sana must have assumed that I thought his profession was backward.
But he didn’t get flustered. He was tranquillity itself, remained as balanced as precisely calibrated scales, and at the same time seemed as unconcerned as a child. He didn’t make himself smaller than he was, but neither did he need to show off. I was impressed.
The whole time, Sana sat on the floor at the end of his room, leaning back against the wall. The room measured perhaps six and a half feet by eight, and the only ventilation was from one small hole. The window was sealed up. The walls were bare and dirty, and there was a raffia mat lying on the floor.
Sana had no furniture – just his belongings hanging from nails on the walls. Behind him hung a threadbare leather bag. Whenever Sana travelled – when, two or three times a year he went to the Dogon people’s territory to collect his medicinal plants and to visit his family – he took this bag with him. This showed everyone that he was a healer.