by Peter Boehm
But I told you that it’s possible to change anything. You simply have to try. And if you fight, and if the usual accusation of witchcraft is made against you, then you’re wearing your amulets, aren’t you? So you’ve got to remain firm, and get all the women behind you too.
And there have already been small changes in Beneko. You told me that you’ve elected two men to represent women’s interests at the village assembly. But the traditional Chief of the village viewed these two men’s tasks rather differently. He said that they were there to help the women with the heavy physical work in the village, which they couldn’t carry out themselves. Do you see the difference?
The Chief was an elderly, bent man, already well over seventy. He was wearing dirty, ragged clothes. But he sat on a cane podium in his yard, and watched over his many wives, children and grandchildren, as they busily produced shea butter.
The podium was shabby, but it was an ancestral seat, a kind of throne. The Chief’s response to all my questions about why the women aren’t represented in the village assembly, and about why you shouldn’t simply change this, was “This is how it was at the time of our ancestors.” You see, you see! There’s still an awful lot to do here. And only you can do it, Mother Africa!
The Prophet’s birthday (Bamako – border)
I could have carried on travelling in this train for a very long time. I had “L’Express” and “Paris Match” on my lap. You could buy editions of French magazines (not too long out of date) and large chunks of grilled mutton, from traders who always travelled a couple of stations with us.
At the stations, tall, slender women thronged around our train, like planets around the sun. On their heads they carried bundles of fresh bananas, mangoes and carrots, or buckets of peanuts and eggs, and bags of drinking water. They seemed to take no notice of the train and its passengers – as though this were below their dignity. They went about their business, undisturbed. And if you wanted to buy anything, you had to shout pretty loudly.
And besides, I had a whole row of seats to myself. And I wasn’t bothered that the train swayed violently. (It was just that, when you went to the loo, you had to watch out like mad that you didn’t pee on your trousers. I’d have liked to meet anyone who would dare sit on this toilet.)
Outside the window, we were passing scenic landscape for the first time for a long while. Someone in Bamako had called the region “Mali’s Monument Valley”. Well, that person must have experienced a similar journey to mine. But I was really enthralled by the precipitous rocks, standing neatly around the area, like icing on a cake.
Compared with my journeys in the rickety SUVs, this train journey seemed an exquisite pleasure. The landscape was wilder, the villages, where we stopped, were more primordial, and you also didn’t see the stitched-up settlements which you would constantly encounter at the roadside, during a car journey.
The huts here had straw roofs with tops as sharp as pointed hats, and the building of the railway didn’t seem to have changed anything in these villages. There were no advertising billboards. Just people who would stream to the platforms once a day to sell their wares.
So in order to reach such an isolated region you would have had to struggle by car for hours over difficult tracks. By train, on the other hand, it was comfortable. And I felt safe. After all, what could have happened to me? The train couldn’t get a flat tyre. The worst that could have happened would have been to be forced to sit around and read for a couple of hours.
Seeing the dangerous, untouched bush passing me by, while at the same time being safely separated from it, gave me that pleasant tingle of slight fear and cosy security you get when watching an exciting film in a comfortable armchair. This was what made travelling fun. So, as I say, I could have carried on for a long time on this train.
But it was unfortunately only going from Bamako to Kayes, 60 miles from the Senegalese border. On Wednesdays and Saturdays there were also trains which went as far as Dakar. But this one didn’t.
Once again, a public holiday had got in my way. The Prophet Mohammed’s birthday was on Tuesday. Not that this would actually have been a reason not to send a train to Dakar. It would have set off on Saturday, and would have arrived on Sunday. But then the railway workers wouldn’t have benefitted from the public holiday. And that would be taking things a little too far. So they just cancelled the train on Saturday.
Initially, when I finally had reached Bamako, I felt really relieved. Now the trials of my crossing were finally over, I thought. Now I could travel comfortably by train to Dakar – to the westernmost point, and thus the end of my journey.
But then I went to the station. My West Africa guidebook – published in 1995 – stated, “The ticket office is officially open from 6.30 to 11am and from 3 to 6pm. But the officials don’t know this.”
And it seems that no-one has yet told them, even today. I went there a couple of times in the morning, but the office was never open. Then someone pointed out to me that I had to go into an adjoining room. The stationmaster was sitting there, writing out slips of paper which looked like tickets.
One of the stationmaster’s deputies said, in response to my question about when the office was open, “Listen! If you’re in such a hurry, come back later.”
And so, as I’ve said, this is how it came about that I could only travel by train as far as Kayes, and from there had to get another joke of a vehicle which must once have been some kind of minibus. It took almost the whole night to travel the 60 miles to the Senegalese border.
At the roadblock immediately after Kayes, the policeman asked for our vaccination cards, collected our passports, and disappeared with them into his wooden shed. We passengers followed him. If you make a law, you’re bound to find someone in Africa who’ll enforce it. And if need be, even a bit more.
Once upon a time, yellow fever must have been rampant in Africa. There’s a regulation, dating from this period, which stipulates that travellers must be vaccinated against the fever, and that they must prove this with a vaccination card when entering the country.
It was irrelevant that the policeman was mistaken about the direction here – we were leaving, not entering! – nor that he used the money simply to finance his nightcap drink.
Africans usually bribe with the serenity of someone who has already experienced worse things. What were they to do? Anyone without a vaccination card – and that was most of us – had to pay 1,000 CFA Francs (about £1.20) to release their passport again.
Then, at the border, the Malian official responsible, carried out the vaccination card profiteering plan again. I thought that was rather unimaginative. It was already 4.30am.
He took our passports again, sat down at his desk, and bawled at each of us, one after the other, “No vaccination card. You pay.”
Then he carefully added his 1,000 CFA Francs to the bundle already lying in his drawer. When it was my turn, I said, “Boss, I have a vaccination card.”
To which he replied, “Then you pay for the service!”
I just heard a smacking noise – that noise produced by the tongue and incisors – which means the same thing throughout Africa – utter displeasure. That must have been me. Didn’t the official know that white people don’t bribe?
He put my passport to one side without saying a word, and took the money from the next person in the line. When all the passengers had passed through, our driver took my passport from the table and gave it back to me. Ha!
SENEGAL
The pizza delivery service (Border – Dakar)
Entering Senegal was very easy. It was five in the morning, and no border guards were anywhere to be seen, so I knocked on the door of a hut by the road.
A man, wearing only a small towel around his waist, came out and advised me to go to the police station in the city to get the necessary stamp in my passport. Then I was in.
I’d noticed already that Senegal places less importance than other countries on formalities. It was the first country on my ent
ire trip which didn’t require a visa. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have dared set foot on the soil of an African country without going through passport control.
In the capital city, however, I noticed that not all was rosy in Senegal. Dakar was certainly the most modern and richest of the Sahel cities. The French influence was obvious everywhere. There were expensive shops, street cafés, and maids taking Madame’s pooch – sporting a bow and an expensive collar – for a walk.
But when, one evening, I was returning to my hotel from a café near the university, where I’d attended a reading, I noticed that that was only the glittering surface. Underneath, however, Africa still rumbled.
At the central Place de l’Indépendance (often referred to simply as “the square”) three policemen had positioned themselves and were making checks on all passing cars. Once they’d finished with my taxi driver, they wanted to see my papers too. I’d been travelling very light – just with shoes, trousers, t-shirt, and a few CFA Francs in my wallet. After all, who would imagine they’d be arrested from a taxi in Dakar? I didn’t have my passport with me.
So the custodians of the law promptly bundled me into their van and drove off after a few minutes, weaving their way through the city to find some more cargo.
After half an hour, they’d evidently had enough. The car had been filled with three young girls, a perfectly normal-looking woman, and two men. None of them had any ID.
I was furious that the three hungry policemen had loaded me up like a parcel, and were now dragging me around the damned night. I was tired. I wanted to sleep.
Besides, by now I knew what I was up against. I’d long debated whether I should just tell them that they wouldn’t get a single franc out of me. For now I held my tongue and waited. But I promised myself that, no matter what happened, I would on no account give them any money.
The police station was in a small street behind the national museum, right in the centre of the city. We’d arrived just in time for our three policemen to get a slice of pizza each. The pizza delivery man was just leaving the police station. Since when have the African police been able to afford take-away pizza?
The other captives were locked in a room, and I had to give my personal details to an officer. Then the police chief took my belt and shoelaces, and wanted to lock me in a cell.
I’d already noticed, with some trepidation, that a man was pressing himself against the barred window there. Was he just nosy, or were the prisoners so crammed in that he was gasping for air?
I didn’t want to find out. I said to the police chief – “But, Officer, I really think you’re over-reacting now!”
I must have sounded rather upset, because he said, in a conciliatory tone, “Ok, well just follow me then”, and took me to an empty corridor. There, he amicably advised me that, from now on, it would be best if I took my passport with me whenever I left the hotel, but that he would turn a blind eye to it this time. He would, however, have to demand that I pay a fine of 3,000 CFA Francs – around £4. Then we went back to the office, and the policeman who had noted down my details picked up my commandeered wallet, took all the money out and counted it. After a discussion with the police chief, he took 3,000 CFA Francs, put this in his trouser pocket, put the remaining money back in my wallet, and returned it to me.
Can you guess whether I got a receipt for the 3,000 CFA Franc fine? It’s more likely I’d become a policeman, than discover that the custodians of the law haven’t used the money already to pay for their next pizza delivery.
That was annoying, but at least Dakar was the end of my journey. And I’d come full circle. Just like Abdullahi had done on our drive to the easternmost point, our driver on the stretch from the border to Dakar indicated whenever there was a bend in the rural road. And I’d learned my lesson – I refrained from asking him why he did so.
The African consciousness?! (Dakar)
I really didn’t need this discussion again. The person sitting opposite me said, indignantly, that the so-called family planning measures were really just a front for birth control. He really got into his stride on this topic. “How can Europe demand that of the Africans? It’s just unbelievable!”
The old continent had its own huge problems, after all. “How can the societies there be maintained if there aren’t enough births to keep the population numbers stable? And it’ll soon be exactly the same in Africa.”
I said nothing. And neither had I said anything which could have caused the conversation to take this turn. I hadn’t come to Professor Aboubacry Moussa Lam to debate with him, but to conduct a preliminary interview for an article about him.
He’d already said he was happy to be interviewed in the next few days, and we’d arranged a time for it. But he hadn’t finished yet. I was white. I was recognised as Europe’s representative and so, of course, I had to share the perceived European ideals and goals. He now told me everything that was, in his view, wrong with Europe, and that he’d always wanted to be able to tell a European.
It made him angry, he continued, that Europe took the liberty of meddling in Africa and opposing the circumcision of women. I didn’t understand why this was good or important. It seemed to be more a question of principle for him. “How can they tell us what we can and can’t do?!” he spluttered.
In Africa, he continued, it was simply that the community came above the individual, but in Europe it was the reverse. For an African, it was terrible to have to watch the way elderly people in Europe were shut away in old people’s homes in droves.
And there was more. “The women there sleep with anyone and everyone, and their husbands sleep with someone else. It used to be different. Morals used to be what differentiated us from animals. But I sometimes feel that people in Europe are increasingly resembling animals.”
I don’t know how many times I’d already had this debate. A few too many times for my liking, in any case. This was often the course that conversations with Africans took when you pointed out their country’s most obvious problems – you ended up being confronted with theories about Europe’s having gone to the dogs to such an extent that it was on the verge of certain collapse.
In Addis Ababa, Emrakeb, too, had found it scandalous – if not a crime against humanity – that anyone could put their parents in an old people’s home. And the ex-officer and Hisba Chief Adam Umar Usman, at the High Sharia Court in Kano, had used almost exactly the same words as the professor. He, too, considered people in Europe to be “animals” because they “walk around half-naked”.
All that the professor forgot this time was the incredible number of drug addicts in Europe. That was why I usually tried not to even let this discussion begin in the first place.
But, as I say, I hadn’t come here to debate with the professor, but because he had been recommended to me as the most important successor of Cheikh Anta Diop. Diop is an icon for Afrocentrists. The university in Dakar is named after him, he has a lot of followers in the black community in the United States, and in Africa there are regular conferences on his theories.
In his homeland of Senegal, however, Diop was banned from teaching in the 1960s and 1970s because he was a political opponent of President Léopold Sédar Senghor. He was even briefly imprisoned because of this.
He worked in a sparsely equipped laboratory in an ancillary building at the University of Dakar, but over the years he published more than half a dozen books on his great theories, which he spent his entire life trying, full of verve and vehemence, to prove. Cheikh Anta Diop assumed that the Ancient Egyptians had been “Negroes”, and that the pharaohs’ country had been the cradle of “Negro culture”.
For him, the fact that Western Egyptologists viewed his area of research as part of the Middle East, was simply the expression of the colonial way of thinking. The conquerors dictated to the conquered how they should view their history, and wouldn’t admit them any kind of creative ability.
Diop believed that, by giving Africans back their history, he had closed a wound which
had been opened by the colonial viewpoint. Despite Ancient Egypt’s colonisation by the “white” Persians, Greeks and Romans, you could now trace a continuous line from there, via the Nubian kingdom in today’s Sudan, to the kingdom of Ghana of the first millennium AD, located where Mali is today, and to the kingdoms which followed them.
Diop supported his theory primarily with quotes from the writings of ancient authors, as well as on the “negroid” facial features of some Egyptian sculptures and reliefs, with evidence of the African languages of today and their relation to Ancient Egyptian – especially Diop’s mother tongue of Wolof – as well as with melanin tests on the skin of a few mummies.
There is certainly a kernel of truth in Diop’s theories. It’s well-known, for instance, that Egypt was ruled by a Nubian dynasty during the Late Dynastic Period, in the first millennium BC. And for many Egyptologists today it goes without saying that the Nile Valley cannot be viewed in isolation from the rest of Africa.
However, Diop’s theories remain controversial to this day – and this certainly hasn’t been helped by his impenetrable character and his way of working which led, not infrequently, to questions over his theories’ scientific standards.
Diop’s work was also constantly based on his thinking in racial categories, and he sometimes also overstepped the mark with his theories.
“The specific conditions of the Nile Valley, the abundance of vital resources, its sedentary, agricultural character”, he wrote in 1954 in his first book, “Nations Nègres et Culture” (“Negro Nations and Culture”), “will engender in man, that is, in the Negro, a gentle, idealistic, peaceful nature, endowed with a spirit of justice and gaiety. [...] By contrast, the ferocity of nature in the Eurasian steppes, the barrenness of those regions, the overall circumstances of material conditions, were to create instincts necessary for survival in such an environment. [...] All the peoples of the area, whether white or yellow, were instinctively to love conquest, because of a desire to escape from those hostile surroundings. The milieu chased them away; they had to leave it or succumb, try to conquer a place in the sun in a more clement nature. Invasions would not cease, once an initial contact with the Black world to the south had taught them the existence of a land where the living was easy, riches abundant, technique flourishing. Thus, from 1450 B.C. until Hitler, from the Barbarians of the fourth and fifth centuries to Genghis Khan and the Turks, those invasions from east to west or from north to south continued uninterrupted. Man in those regions long remained a nomad. He was cruel.”[6]