by Peter Boehm
It was clear to me that Aguissa had been shaped, in his childhood, in such a way which meant that, as an adult, he wasn’t able to rebel against either his former masters or anyone else. He just couldn’t. He’d have been too afraid. It didn’t seem to have any impact on his job, his family or his life. But deep down, he remained a slave his entire life.
Mother Africa (Ouélessébougou)
Mother Africa, your hands are as rough as sandpaper, and as gnarled as a knotty stick. From all your bare-footed walking, your feet are as flat as a board, and as wide as a duck’s. Your hair is carelessly braided, and you always hide it beneath a pink headscarf, so no-one can see that it’s already slightly grey.
You don’t know how old you are. Perhaps in your late forties. Your legs are as bent as sabres from all the heavy loads you’ve lugged, and your bosom is wrinkled and droopy. It points south, as though this were the only direction in your world. Six children have been suckled at your breasts. And five died just after they were born. That’s life. But your back is still straight, unbowed and strong.
You were wearing a dirty, turquoise tank top when we met, and one of those bright scarves which women in Africa throw around their hips. You were barefoot. You had gold earrings in your ears, and one of your ear piercings was torn. You had a necklace of bright ceramic beads around your neck. But everything was fake. You had no time and no money to make yourself attractive.
After all, you’ve only known one thing your entire life – work. Everyone relied on you. Your village, for representation, but also for mourning. Your children, for their life. And your husband, for his fields, his yard and his possessions. But when you got older, he brought a younger woman into the house, and threatened that you could pack your things if you didn’t like it. That’s life.
Your name is Fanta Samaké. I met you in a village in southern Mali. It’s called Beneko, and is 12 miles south-east of Ouélessébougou. I wanted to write about a perfectly normal peasant woman. Like you see everywhere in Africa – in the streets, at the markets, in the fields. A German aid organisation had conducted a study in your village. They wanted to know what the division of labour between men and women is like here. But what could ever come of this? After all, everyone knows that the majority of the work in Africa falls to the women.
You represent the women in your village. They trust you. You speak well. You’re friendly with everyone. That’s why they elected you, they said.
And, without much preliminary discussion, I decided I wanted to know more about you. After all, isn’t the big picture reflected in the life of every individual, like the clear morning sky in a glassy smooth pond? You simply have to look closely enough, and then you’ll see it.
You had just returned from working in the fields. It was pouring with rain. The first rain. Now the sowing would begin. The most important time of year for the farmers. But also the time with the most work. You said that sometimes, at this time of year, you don’t get time to wash your clothes, you’ve so much work to do.
We are sitting in a narrow house, built of hollow stone blocks, with a corrugated iron roof. The right-hand entrance and room is for you and your two small children. The left-hand part is for your husband’s second, younger wife, and her children.
At the front of the house is a roof of branches and straw mats, which provides a little shade during the day. And the yard, which has a handful of cows in at night, is surrounded by a cracked wall of dried clay.
On the left-hand side of the compound is the second wife’s kitchen. Just like yours, it too is round, built of brick, plastered with clay, and covered with a straw roof.
Then, further round, going clockwise, two cane grain stores are leaning against the wall and, like the kitchens, these too are topped with a pointed straw hat. Then comes your kitchen and then, continuing the circle, three more huts. One is for visitors, the second is another storeroom, and the third is for your husband and the older boys.
Large wooden mortars are lying spread on the ground in front of the yard gate, as though following a fight. But you women have just thrown them around so that the rain doesn’t get in.
You can often be seen pounding the grain there. There’s almost always one of you doing something there. Your muffled thud-thud-thud gives the village its rhythm.
You said that the women had more work in the village than the men did – “ten times more”. Traditionally, the men in your region are responsible for cultivating the grain – so for the side dishes – and the women are responsible for the sauce.
The families have fields for the men, fields for the women, and fields which they till together. You women have the double burden of housework and work in the fields. And many families don’t have an oxcart. So you have to carry the dung to the fields on your head, to use as fertiliser.
If you want to earn something extra to pay for clothes or school fees for your children, you gather karité nuts and sell their shea butter at the market in Ouélessébougou.
You don’t have any mills. You make the shea butter by hand. When your husband heard, Mother Africa, that you paid for your children’s clothes, he was angry. So you said that only very few men share these costs with their wives. But when he’d gone, you then said that it was true – you paid for your children’s clothes, school fees and medicines by yourself.
The following morning, we come back early, at 6 o’clock. You are already up, you’ve shooed the cows out of the yard, shovelled their cowpats away, and swept the yard with a broom made of faggots. And all this wide awake, and with your usual good humour.
As usual, I have to chuckle at how anyone can clean in sand. No matter whether it makes the yard appear cleaner or not, you women in Africa sweep it every morning.
Behind my block of flats in Nairobi, my neighbours’ maids even swept the short path from their huts to our house. True, the dirt usually just ended up on the grass. But what was the dirt anyway? Leaves and twigs which had fallen from the trees, and neither the path nor the lawn seemed to me to be dirtier or cleaner afterwards. But they still swept.
Perhaps someone who expects to see concrete, tarmac or a park in all a city’s open spaces just can’t understand such cleanliness.
The heap you’ve swept up, Mother Africa, also contains branches, twigs, sand and earth. In other words, exactly the things of which the yard is made up. But you’ve also swept a lovely pattern in the yard, for good measure.
Then, you wake your four-year-old son, who trots out of the house, naked, his eyes still half-closed with sleep. You quickly wash your youngest son’s face with a little water, and then clean the jug for the drinking water in the kitchen.
Breakfast is typical of the region – porridge, made from water, sugar and pounded sorghum. I’ve been given this time and time again, ever since Chad. It tastes flavourless – like flour boiled in water. You’ve already pounded the grain for it the evening before. Then everyone sits down and eats the porridge from small spoons made of gourd. The children will eat the leftovers at 10am. Then you quickly clean the cooking pot with some twigs, and sweep your side of the communal house.
You have a very tidy room – in fact the only tidy one I’ve ever seen in an African village. Your few clothes are hanging neatly from a hook on the wall. There is nothing on the bare floor. You have a mirror on the wall, but no pictures or posters. The walls are whitewashed. The mats, on which the children sleep on the floor, have already been put to one side. A plastic sack filled with rice straw serves as the mattress for your bed. And in the corner is a sack of peanuts and, on the floor, a bowl of grain. But otherwise there’s not a speck to be seen.
Then you quickly make three trips from the house to the well to fill your earthenware jug in the kitchen with drinking water, and the karité nuts you want to process in the afternoon, you lay out to dry in the sun. Then you collar your four-year-old, dress him in a pair of trousers, and take him by the hand and go out to your field.
Your village, Beneko, is pretty. From here, it takes f
our hours to walk to the tarmac road to Ouélessébougou. It has a small primary school, and a very simple infirmary. Each compound is a couple of hundred yards from the next. It doesn’t feel cramped, there’s enough space. And there are a lot of green trees, providing shade. When we were there, the mangos were ripe. But there are also the Doum palm trees, with their large, fan-shaped leaves, the stubby baobab trees, their stems tapering out at the top and, of course, the karité trees, which grow wild here.
You have five fields of your own. It takes you an hour and a half to walk to one of them. But we go to one which is just ten minutes away. You want to grow more sorghum here, because you had a good crop last year. You’ve got rid of the old sorghum stalks and the weeds with an axe and a hoe.
Your husband and three of his sons have now planted sorghum in a communal field next door. He dug a hole with a hoe along a taught string, one son placed a seed in the hole, and the next covered the hole again, using his foot. They did it as quickly and as mechanically as a machine.
Only one of your sons in the village goes to school at the moment. Some of the older boys and girls have already married and moved away. But on the way to the field, you tell me that you’ll do all you can to ensure that your youngest can go to school. Then your 12-year-old daughter comes to help you with the work in the field.
You married at thirteen. “That’s our tradition. I developed very rapidly”, you told me. Although girls in Africa don’t develop any more quickly than they do elsewhere. And why should they? Are they better fed?
And you hadn’t met your husband before your wedding. At the start, you didn’t even know you were going to marry. Your future husband’s family had engaged a griot – a traditional singer. And he’d negotiated with your father over the bride price. Only once they had reached an agreement were you taken to Beneko, your husband’s village.
But you were happy to marry. “All the girls of my age were”, you said. And your marriage is good, you told me. You said you’ve never had any problems with your husband. “He respects me.”
But you suddenly say something very different during the interview we conduct alone in the evening. So the translator tells me, “Well, it’s obvious isn’t it. She couldn’t talk about something like that in front of her 12-year-old daughter.”
But perhaps that’s just a mistake, Mother Africa. The following morning, I see your daughter washing clothes at the well. She’s pretty, and already has strong legs. She’s moved her blouse to the side, in a carefree way, so that you can see her pert, childlike breasts. In the afternoon, she flirts with Moussa, the aid organisation’s contact for your village. Banter like this can quickly turn serious. Sometimes older men even reserve girls while they’re still children, and promise to marry them as soon as they’re old enough. Wouldn’t it be better if the 12-year-old knew what was awaiting her?
Soon, her clitoris will be removed, just like yours was. “There are no girls in the village who won’t be circumcised”, you say. “That’s our tradition. So girls have to undergo the same treatment their mothers did.”
The translator first had to apologise before she asked you, an older woman, about such an intimate matter. You found the subject embarrassing. But, so that there couldn’t be any doubt, you said of your circumcision as a small child, “I didn’t feel any pain. After the operation, I got up immediately, and didn’t feel a thing.” And you fiddled nervously at your skirt. You weren’t used to talking about such things.
In the early afternoon, once you’ve weeded your field, you return to your yard to make shea butter. The nuts have turned black from their time spent drying in an earthen oven. You and your daughter pound them together in a mortar.
It’s hard work. Your husband’s second wife, and your daughter-in-law help you. They take turns with you at the mortar. As you pound, you sing satirical songs about the second wife. She is known throughout the village as being lazy, everyone knows that – that’s what you improvised in a duet with your daughter. The second wife doesn’t show any reaction. Your resentment of her hasn’t entirely disappeared.
It’s not until our evening interview that you tell the complete story of your husband’s second marriage. That’s almost fifteen years ago now. Now you get on better, you and the wife, you say, but it’s never been the same as it used to be with your husband. For a while he didn’t sleep in your room, and you felt like a stranger in your own house.
Before your husband made his second marriage public, he asked you if you agreed. What could you say? “No problem. Just do it!” you said, in order to be left in peace.
But the second wife was someone it was difficult to get along with. She’d already been married once before, and had separated from her husband. She blackened your name in your husband’s eyes. Whenever anything happened, you were always to blame.
Your husband believed her. And when you complained, he hit you and said, “If you don’t like it, you can pack your things and go.” And you said, “I’m not going anywhere.”
It wasn’t easy with the children. You couldn’t just leave. “The second marriage was just for his pleasure”, you said, resignedly, “because he wanted to have a younger wife.”
And the translator got angry, and felt justified in her perception of men, “Oh yes, I know about that. That’s how African men are.” She was in her early thirties, had been born in the capital, Bamako, had married in Ouélessébougou and had a small hairdressing salon there.
Mother Africa, you’ve made more work for yourself than you really needed to. Of course, you wanted give the white journalist an impression of how much you work. And of course, you don’t want to be sidelined. But your clan’s elder said, a couple of months ago, that you shouldn’t cook anymore. Your daughter-in-law and the younger women in your clan will do that for you in future. You said that this was a great honour for you, a sign of respect. It’s how older people are honoured.
But you still have to produce the shea butter yourself if you want to earn a little money at the market in Ouélessébougou. By now, your husband has returned home from the fields. He is shelling peanuts to sow tomorrow morning. And you are pounding the karité nuts, cooking the crushed mass over the fire, and mixing and beating it all with your hands, until drops of your sweat are falling into the bowl, and the liquid butter settles on the surface.
In the interview, you also say that you’ve danced for the President of Mali. When an African dignitary visits a village or speaks at an event, it’s rare that there won’t be a group of women, in traditional dress, dancing and singing in his honour.
I once asked a dancer in Kenya why this is so, and she replied, irritated, “We women just like dancing and singing. It’s bound to be the same for European women.”
I can’t have been listening properly during the interview. Because I didn’t ask you more questions about the dancing. It wasn’t until I was back in Germany that I realised I’d have liked to find out more about it. So I wrote you a letter, and asked when you had danced, and what the circumstances were. You wrote back, saying that you’ve been an active member of the women’s group in your village for thirty years. You dance and sing primarily at baptisms, weddings, burials or cultural events with other villages. In 1982 you sang for the former President of Mali, Moussa Traoré, in the provincial capital, Kati.
You wrote that you sang songs on the topic “You can never exercise power without the related worries.” And “If you’re a politician, you have to remain tolerant and honest.”
Two years later, your group sang for his wife, Mariam Traoré, in Ouélessébougou. Traoré and his wife were prosecuted, in the democratic Mali, for corruption.
I also read in your letter that you’ve got “financial problems”. You didn’t write the letter yourself. You never went to school, and you can’t read or write. It’s written in an even, steady hand, without any corrections. I hope you didn’t have to pay too much for it.
You write that the most important thing for you would be to have a radio, a smal
l TV and an electricity generator – there’s no electricity in Beneko – to keep you up-to-date with world affairs. You could also do with a microphone and a loudspeaker. For singing, I assume. Although not for a president, I hope. And the generator could be useful for that too.
I then learn from your letter that you seem to be suffering from a particular lack of nice clothes “which you can wear for going out”, as well as those “which you can wear for meeting distinguished visitors”. And you are sad about your lack of education. Otherwise you’d be prepared, you write, to set up a lot of aid projects with me, or to visit me in Germany.
“Another of your great worries”, you continue, is your daughter. She’s at secondary school in the capital, Bamako. “She is the great hope in my life.” It’s just that “she’s facing rising transport costs to get from home to school”. In a word, she’d like a moped. You enclose your postal address. And finally, you also can’t forget that your four-year-old son should also go to school. “But I don’t have the money to register him.”
What a great gulf there is in Africa between people's dreams and their realisation! I bet that the long list of things still missing in your pursuit of a little happiness is far from complete. But did the letter-writer also add his own contribution to the list?
I’ve already received a lot of letters like this. They contain huge demands. And they’ve quite often come from people I didn’t know, and who have somehow – for reasons unknown to me – got hold of my visiting card.
I thought it was nice that you didn’t want to negotiate right at the start about how much you’d earn from my article about you. It was the translator who suggested that we should recompense you with a little money for the embarrassment we’d caused you with our personal questions about your circumcision and your marriage.
And Mother Africa, from the perspective of your village, white people appear very powerful, but in the end they can’t help you. Only you can do that. Take the situation of the women in your village, for instance. You say that it’s good that they’re not represented in the elders’ village assembly. “It’s always been this way. If a woman went there, she’d be making a grave mistake. And the women want it to remain that way too”, you told me, with conviction.