Africa Askew

by Peter Boehm

  “I’m hurt that you say that”, he defended himself. “I know that white people are honest, not like black people who say one thing and mean another.”

  He placed a hand on my knee to pacify me. The word “patron” slipped out of him – the French word for boss. After that, he often called me this. He, who was approaching sixty. Me, more than twenty years his junior!

  And then, in the course of our conversation, episodes from his childhood seemed to occur to Aguissa out of the blue, as though he’d never thought about them before, as though he’d only just remembered them. They fitted the Bellas’ situation at the time.

  The first event, he said, must have happened when he was fifteen years old – so probably in the 1950s. A Bella from another camp had fled to them during the night. “The following morning, the owners came and demanded him back, but my grandfather made him an offer. He offered him forty sheep, if the Bella was allowed to stay with us. And they accepted.”

  And, shortly after, “My mother wasn’t captive, but my father was never freed. The Tuareg in Tillamedess never released their Bellas.”

  His father died in the 1980s, and had lived in Tillamedess until the very end. The indignation with which Aguissa suddenly told me this seemed genuine. As though anger, bottled up inside him for years, was now suddenly bursting out. As though, at this moment, he became fully aware of the humiliation to which his father had been subjected for his entire life. His expression spelled determination and the desire to fight.

  And so I suggested we ask Abdullatif, the following day, why the Bellas in Tillamedess had never been freed. Once again, Aguissa said he thought that wouldn’t be a problem. But when we were sitting with Abdullatif in his tent the following day he said, as though it were self-explanatory, “But that wasn’t necessary.” And Aguissa sat beside him, still and with an emotionless expression. The reason for the question had long disappeared beneath far deeper layers.

  We then came to the next topic in the interview. We’d talked about Aguissa’s time in Tillamedess. After that, a new period had begun, which Aguissa introduced with the words, “Yes, and then I started to work for the white people.”

  The sentence sounded programmatic, as though it summarised the whole of the new chapter in his life. And so, of course, I was immediately made to think that Aguissa had left his masters in Tillamedess behind him, and had replaced them with new ones – the whites.

  Aguissa also said that he worked only for white people, but he claimed that, in his case, this was for purely pragmatic reasons. They were able to pay good wages. “Have you ever seen an African firm where you can earn something? In Africa, you wear yourself out for absolutely nothing. It’s just not worth it”, he said.

  Aguissa had worked primarily in the building trade, and he’d worked in oil exploration for an American company in the Malian part of the Sahara. He’d also worked as the head of the security guards at the main market in Abidjan, the wealthy Ivory Coast city which is overwhelmed by streams of casual labourers from the poverty-stricken Sahel countries.

  And, a few years ago, he’d worked for the first time for a Belgian who was prospecting for gold near Timbuktu. “We dug holes twenty feet deep, and they weren’t the first holes I’d ever dug in my life”, he recounted, proudly. “The white man” – he later told me his first name – “had called the other labourers, showed them my hole, and had said, ‘Just look over here. That’s how it’s done!’ And he increased my pay immediately.”

  By now, Aguissa’s children had come home from school. Aguissa had married a second time. He’d already separated from his first wife in Tillamedess over twenty years ago. His second wife is a Songhai, and runs a kindergarten in Timbuktu.

  This means that Aguissa no longer has to work the whole time. If he didn’t have a job on the go, he would now tend his vegetable garden on the outskirts of the city. But both his eldest sons were at secondary school.

  That was the one thing about which he felt superior to the Tuaregs in Tillamedess. “Yes, my children will do well in public service jobs one day”, he said, happily.

  His eldest son was now nineteen. He’d recently been to France with his football team. He seemed to me to be just like one of the students who each morning stood around in small groups outside the secondary school in Timbuktu – the girls in long, narrow skirts and short t-shirts, the boys in jeans. He appeared confident, his thoughts filled with football, girls and French pop groups. And, when Aguissa briefly went out, his younger son said, “My father worked in oil exploration in the Sahara for a long time. How cool is that?”

  Aguissa’s children knew nothing of his first life. He’d never taken them to Tillamedess I, and only once to visit his sisters in Tillamedess II. He hadn’t even told them that he’d been married to another woman before their mother. His children knew a different Aguissa from the one I knew.

  The following morning, Aguissa and I went back to Tillamedess, but this time I also took a Tuareg translator with us. For support – so that, this time, Aguissa couldn’t hide behind his poor French – and because I feared there could be difficulties when I started asking in Tillamedess about the Ikelan.

  I couldn’t dismiss from my mind the fear that we’d be hounded out of the camp, cursed and disgraced. So it was important not to ask the controversial questions until late in the day.

  After our first visit, we had walked back to Toya in the midday heat. And despite a full water bottle and the strong wind, I’d had to have a long rest in the village before we could set off again.

  We first looked at the primary school in Toya, which the traditional Tuareg Chief had told us about on our first visit. It looked like an enlarged transformer cabin – a low building of bare concrete, with three classrooms.

  We asked a teacher which one was for the Tuareg children. He took us to the room for Class 1, and indicated an empty seat in the front row. “That’s where a Tuareg child sits – or, rather, sat until three months ago”, he said. “I’ve heard that the boy became ill. He hasn’t come back since then.”

  And where were the children from Tillamedess?

  With a look of astonishment, the teacher asked, “What makes you think that they’re here? They don’t come to us.”

  When we were back in the Chief’s tent in Tillamedess, his three sons were walking around the tent. The two elder ones – aged 11 and 13 – were smoking tobacco in a long metal pipe, or preparing green tea imported from China.

  I asked Aliasid Ag Ahmed why they weren’t at school. He represented Tillamedess I on the local council in Toya. He was in his mid-thirties, and had a large moustache. He wasn’t wearing a turban, but had a very clean djellaba robe on, and from his appearance he could have been Moroccan.

  This time, Ahmed answered my question. He spoke French well, but the Chief didn’t. About the children from Tillamedess he said, “Well, next year they’ll go to school. Probably.”

  And there was one other point about which the Chief hadn’t been entirely honest on our first visit. Abdullatif freely told me later that he had seven cows, and the Chief didn’t have “one, two or three” as he’d claimed, but ten.

  The puzzle was solved once Bruce’s Songhai teacher told me about his work in Tillamedess. At the beginning of the study, the Tuareg had had only very few cows. But when they discovered that the animals were being vaccinated free of charge, their numbers suddenly increased dramatically.

  And so it went on. Following the rainy season, the Tuareg people apparently moved, with their herds, to the north of Timbuktu, so that the animals could graze on the fresh grass there.

  “A nomad’s life is very hard and full of privation”, Ahmed said. But I was becoming increasingly doubtful about whether this was true, since no-one I asked in the camp had gone with them the previous year.

  Abdullatif was too old, the Chief and Ahmed had important things to attend to in Tillamedess, Tilhouad was ill. And his sons? “Oh, they have to work in the rice fields.”

  Over the day and a half
I spent in Tillamedess, the Tuaregs spent the whole time lying around in their tents. Tilhouad’s eldest son took Abdullatif’s cows and sheep to the pastures. Tilhouad’s wives and daughters did the housework for Abdullatif’s family. Another dark-skinned family did the housework for the Chief’s family.

  Now we were again lying around in the Chief’s tent, and drinking green tea. It would still be a long while before I’d ask about the Ikelan. Ahmed was philosophising about the “free life” which the Tillamedess Tuaregs led, “with our camp, our land and our cows.”

  He admitted that the Tuareg had “fallen behind” the other ethnic groups in Mali, and that they would have to change “with time”. He talked with the ambivalence which Africans are keen to exhibit when talking to a white person. He knew that, when they see Africans, white people always want to change their lot, to improve it. But what was he to say? His people didn’t want to give up this free life.

  There were other young Tuareg men lying around in the tent with us. It was now their turn to ask me questions. They had a visitor from the outside world. This was a rare enough occurrence. They wanted to make the most of it.

  They asked me where Germany was. In the Middle East? In Europe? Really? And England, was that in Europe too? What language did we speak in Germany – French? Was it true that there were a lot of cars in Germany, and did I really believe that the Americans had landed on the moon?

  They asked me all these questions without a hint of shame. They meant these questions to sound naive. They thought that their cluelessness was endearing. What did they need with geography and news from the real world? They were above such things. After all, they were leading a free life. Things like this didn’t belong there.

  After that, we went to see Aguissa’s brother, Tilhouad. Again, two young men came with us, unbidden, and settled themselves awkwardly in Tilhouad’s tent. Once we’d got rid of them, Abdullatif joined us. I told him that we would first talk to Tilhouad and then to him. I put my notebook to one side, interrupted the interview, and hoped he would notice that he was disturbing us. But to no avail. After a couple of moments’ awkward silence, the translator screwed up his courage and asked Abdullatif to wait for us in his tent. We told him we’d be with him in half an hour.

  This time, Tilhouad was able to talk rather more freely, but he remained grumpy and monosyllabic. His motto was, “If I work for someone, he has to give me something for it.” He said this three times during the interview.

  His two wives, and his two teenage daughters, did the housework for Abdullatif’s family – they washed, cooked and collected water for them – and his eldest son took their animals and Tilhouad’s own ten sheep to the pastures during the day.

  During the rainy season, his children worked in Abdullatif’s rice fields, and in return Abdullatif shared his milk and rice harvest with him. Why wouldn’t Tilhouad rather send his children to school? “That isn’t our tradition”, he said, with a dismissive wave of the hand. “That’s of absolutely no value to us.”

  Tilhouad seemed contented with his life. I didn’t think that this chiselled, awkward-looking man had any say at all in shaping his life.

  But he had consciously chosen the “free life”. He owed Abdullatif no debts. He, too, was always lying around in his tent when we visited. He said he was responsible for ensuring that his family carried out their work correctly. And he said that he couldn’t live in Timbuktu. “I’m a nomad. Here, I work for myself, and I get something for it. Look, I’d even do your work too, if you asked me to.”

  Of course, Tilhouad wasn’t an Ikelan. His mother was a Fula. And when he had to say the word “Ikelan”, he grimaced, as though he’d just swallowed an extremely bitter pill.

  So were there any Ikelan at all in Tillamedess? “Yes, of course”, he said.

  Where?

  “I don’t know. They’re nomads. They’re somewhere different every day.”

  So I asked Aguissa to introduce me to some of these nomads sometime. Later that afternoon, we visited a tent on the edge of the camp. We spoke to an elderly, dark-skinned man.

  I saw an earthenware jug in his tent, containing water, and asked about it. The man said, “Yes, we get our drinking water from the Niger River.”

  What else did he do? He said that he guarded the Tillamedess rice paddies. So he worked for the Tuaregs? No, he didn’t to that, he said decisively.

  I didn’t entirely understand why we were talking to the man at all. “He’s one of the Ikelan”, Aguissa said, conspiratorially, once we’d left again.

  And Aguissa’s brother, Tilhouad, was really very proud. When he told me that he hadn’t moved north with the animals after the last rainy season, I was already rather tired of this answer. I’d heard it too often already. I said, “Ok, if that’s the case, we’ll just ask your wife who went.”

  She was sitting beside us in the tent, braiding grass to make lids for pots - she sold these lids in Toya to earn a little money. At this, however, Tilhouad became angry. If he’d had a table, he’d have banged on it. “No!” he said, angrily, “Journalism, that’s not something for women!” His wife continued with her work, unmoved.

  And I had thought that this man was at the very bottom of the hierarchy in Tillamedess! I was wrong. He still had slaves under him – his wives and his children.

  When we visited Abdullatif after the interview, I apologised for our having spoken to Tilhouad first. He was sitting cross-legged in his tent, alone.

  Abdullatif managed a “That doesn’t matter”. But it did matter. We’d made a faux pas. The serious insult we had caused him was clearly written all over his face.

  Neither did Abdullatif mince his words during the interview. He said that he didn’t consider it outmoded to still talk of slaves today. He spoke French, and used the French word. “What other word should I use?” he asked, sincerely. “That’s what we’ve always called them. That’s their name.”

  He was sorry that he only had Tilhouad left. “I no longer have enough animals to feed more of them. After the drought of 1973, they all ran away. Even Tilhouad left me for a while.”

  In the end, my misgivings about asking the Tillamedess Tuaregs about the Ikelan were entirely unfounded. When we went back to Ahmed, the local councillor, he, too, talked about “slaves” without any concern. “Why shouldn’t I?” he asked. “That’s their name. It’s their origins. If you carry out a slave’s work, then you’re a slave yourself. Then you have no standing.”

  The dichotomy of nobles and slaves was central to his way of thinking. It also applied within the bigger picture. In the morning, he had already said, in a jocular tone but demanding my agreement, that France and Germany were noble countries. “But the USA is a nation of slaves.” I imagine that this was somehow related to the approach of these countries in the conflict in the Middle East. I didn’t ask any further.

  During the interviews with Abdullatif and Ahmed, Aguissa sat by quietly, and didn’t display any emotions. That morning, on our way along the Niger, I’d already talked to him about nobles and slaves. He tried again to paint a rose-tinted picture of his youth in Tillamedess. It was the same old story. Aguissa insisted that Abdullatif’s family was different from the other families.

  I found such suppression incredible. Even the translator, to whom I’d said nothing about Aguissa, shook his head incredulously.

  But the women in your family worked, I pointed out to him, whereas in Abdullatif’s family they didn’t. You went out to the pastures, they didn’t. You were black, they weren’t. Didn’t you ever think like that back then?

  The translator nodded in agreement. Aguissa was cornered. He stammered meekly, like a child, “No, I never thought like that at the time.”

  At this point, Aguissa’s confession felt like a small triumph for me. We’d talked heatedly for a few minutes, and this answer had been hard for Aguissa. But in the end, he had to give it. This time, I’d remained firm, and I’d learned something, I thought. But what did Aguissa’s answer actually pr
ove? He still thought like that, even today.

  So after we’d now left Tillamedess, I said to him, “You’ve heard now how they talk about you. And that doesn’t bother you?”

  “No, it doesn’t bother me”, he said, tersely. And the translator, who was from an area to the north east of Timbuktu, took me to the side and said, “Calling someone an Ikelan is really like comparing them to excrement.”

  But of course, Aguissa was right too. In the legal sense, Tilhouad and the Ikelan in Tillamedess certainly weren’t slaves. They weren’t the Tuaregs’ property. They were their employees, their servants. It was just that the memory of their earlier situation, and the Tuaregs’ racial arrogance which led to pale-skinned people ordering around dark-skinned people, gave the relationship a rather repulsive imprint.

  Without this, it would have been a typical work relationship, of which there are hundreds of thousands in Africa. Those voiceless odd-jobbers without rights, working for a bit of food, could be seen everywhere.

  But there was something else – for me, very important – which I couldn’t get out of my mind following the days I’d spent with Aguissa. There was no doubt that Aguissa had never emancipated himself from his former masters, the Tuaregs.

  But at the same time he was, by African standards, very successful. All his children went to school. He could choose to do only well-paid jobs. He was even the President of the Timbuktu Workers’ Association.

  The driver who took us to Toya knew him well. Aguissa was very popular, he was a highly-regarded citizen of Timbuktu. When we walked around the city together, not even five minutes could pass without his greeting or being greeted by someone. He obviously felt extremely comfortable in his life.

  If I hadn’t known anything about his previous life in Tillamedess, he’d have struck me as a perfectly normal African. There were enough people there who persisted in calling me “patron”, “boss” or “sir”. Didn’t this just mean that many Africans had a character very similar to Aguissa’s?