Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  “In my youth,” said a forty-five-year-old man named Issa Ousmane, after they’d knelt in the sand for prayers, “you wouldn’t have been able to see those houses and granaries, because the trees were so thick. You would need someone to lead you by the hand. There was grass as high as a standing man. Rabbits, deer, guinea fowl, antelope. Now all you see are our poor buildings. The sand is nude.”

  The palms, tamarinds, and baobabs were there until more people needed wood than the forest had to give. The few remaining acacia grow poorly, because of the lack of rain and a hotter sun. They were used to drought arriving every ten years. But then it was every five years.

  “Then every three. And now last year’s hasn’t ended. We still have no production. We are surviving on the sale of our cattle.”

  Four of his nine sons have taken his animals south to sell, including his breeding stock. “Soon, cattle herding will disappear. This is like a disease without a medicine. And it will end our lives.”

  “There is no longer enough milk to make porridge,” a mother of eight had added, pounding millet in a wooden churn. “All we want is food so we can produce children.”

  Earlier today, the sultan now tells the men gathered before him, he asked the imams about family planning.

  “We marry to harvest children,” objects a man in a white djalabiya. “What is life’s purpose other than leaving heirs?”

  “My father and grandfather had many wives and many children,” replies the sultan. “I have just seven. My sons have two, three, and four. We are of different generations, and as we become educated, we learn that feeding children is a big burden. We hope for cooperation from the mosques to teach people that it is unhealthy to repeat pregnancies quickly. To leave space between births, for the safety of the mother and the child.”

  The men stare at the floor. No one shouts praise.

  The sultan leans forward, forearms on his knees. “Allah does not want us to have children we cannot feed or care for.”

  “What Allah wants,” says Imam Raidoune Issaka in his study, “is for us to have bigger families, not to bend to any pressure to reduce their size.”

  Imam Issaka is thirty-five and smooth-cheeked, with a scrabble of beard below his chin. His djalabiya is gray with silver stripes, his prayer cap white with black embroidery. He is one of thirteen children. The young man in a tall red cap and gold-stitched caftan he addresses is an aide to the sultan.

  The imam is seated in a green upholstered chair by a sagging bookcase containing leather-bound commentaries on the Qur’an and loose pages of notes for his sermons. He raises his palm toward these. “The teachings of Islam allow us to space deliveries of children only if there is a known health risk to the mother. To reduce or stop producing children on the pretext of difficulties feeding them goes against a pact between Muslims and God. Allah has promised to provide for all the children.”

  He takes a sip of tea from a cup on the leather hassock by his feet. “He will provide for all their needs, provided that they respect all His rules. But if they go astray from the way that God has drawn for them, they will face His punishment. It will not be a happy result.”

  But how have little children sinned? Why should they suffer and die?

  “God’s teaching refers to parents who have committed lewd acts and sinned. It is a call to them to return to the path, if they wish their future to be bright.”

  The sultan’s man, seated by a small black table that holds a portable radio, does not reply. “Of course it pains us all,” continues the imam. “That is why in the mosque we call on the community to assist the needy.”

  He acknowledges that the population is five times what it was when his father before him was the imam of Maradi. The very room in which they sit was once a horse stable outside the town that now surrounds it. “In one sense, this is a symbol of development and advancement. But in another, it is nothing to cheer about. People are not acting to safeguard nature. Our farmlands and pastures are being destroyed.”

  Is there no connection between that and soaring population? What will this come to, if this continues?

  “Our doom,” he says matter-of-factly. The sultan’s man straightens in his chair as the imam settles back in his, nodding.

  “We know the future is alarming. But man cannot hold back doomsday. The Prophet says that God has preordained its time.”

  Several dusty blocks away, another imam, Chafiou Issaka, sits on a straight-backed metal chair in the middle of a small, roofless alcove attached to his home. Except for a low wooden bench where the sultan’s aide awaits, it is otherwise completely bare, its mud-brick walls unplastered. The imam wears sunglasses against the glare reflecting off his crisp white djalabiya.

  “The Holy Qur’an,” he says, “states that your family’s needs are under God’s control. But it also suggests that there should be a space of two years or more between children, because of the health of the mother and of the children. Look at the problems for the family when a child appears on Earth and the last child is not even weaned. There is no conflict over that.”

  Then why do so many families have a mother exhausted and hungry children dying?

  “Because people do not respect what the Qur’an says. Allah does not impose on us anything beyond our capacity to support. But men only hear the part about being allowed four wives. Then they can’t afford it, and they get into trouble.”

  To have properly spaced children, are women allowed artificial contraceptives?

  “We have been campaigning in sermons and on the radio about the need for these methods.”

  Maradi now has many mosques; his, with two short minarets, is just across the unpaved street from this house in which he and Imam Raidoune Issaka, who is his younger brother, were raised. In Islam, there is no central authority, as in the Catholic Church, to dictate dogma. Yet how is it that these two brother imams disagree on something so fundamental?

  “There are many divisions in religion,” says Imam Issaka the elder. “There are now many people, with many values and with scientific knowledge that is constantly expanding. This brings many conflicting visions.”

  Only one-fourth of Niger’s people can read, and just 15 percent of the women. He has seen the NGOs’ studies: less than 1 percent of girls complete primary school, but the few who reach secondary school will usually only have two or three children. Healthy children.

  “With education, Niger need not just depend on crops and cattle. It has uranium and petroleum. There is iron. In Maradi, there is even gold.”

  Yes, but the sultan’s aide knows what is happening to those resources in his illiterate country. The French take all the uranium. The Chinese are coming for the oil. No one has yet bid to exploit the iron. The gold is mined by some Canadians, with the cooperation of a few rich chiefs. It gets loaded onto helicopters that head straight for the airport in the capital. No one knows what Niger’s share is.

  The imam meets with his brother and with other imams to talk about such things, and about what their suffering people need. “And we all seem to understand each other. And yet, after meetings, some decide to not agree with what we all said.”

  The sultan’s aide looks perplexed.

  The imam raises a hand. “Muhammad, peace be unto His soul, foresaw many branches of Islam, but said that only the right one will be the path to paradise. Of course,” he adds, “every branch thinks it is the right path.”

  The east-west road that passes through Maradi is Niger’s main—and nearly only—paved highway. It passes through the comparatively greenest part of the country, home to 85 percent of Niger’s population, but much of it is a bedraggled land of desiccated sticks hung with shreds of black plastic snagged from the wind. Trucks piled twice their height with bundles of corn and rice barrel past camel trains and donkey carts, but most of that food is not destined to stay here. In crowded Nigeria to the south, security has grown so precarious that to avoid bandits and hijackers, grain shippers from Vietnam now use the neighboring port at
Cotonou, Benin, instead of Lagos, the coastal Nigerian megalopolis. Trucking their cargo up through Benin to Niger, they let Nigerian1 buyers meet them here.

  This close to Niger’s southern border, many cars have license plates from Nigeria. The reason is that Niger, while nearly entirely Muslim, is not a theocracy. Its secular constitution is copied from France, the colonial power here until 1960. Therefore, shariah law is not enforced here, as in Muslim northern Nigeria, so Nigerian men stream north for liquor and prostitutes. This reverses a trend of the 1990s, when international NGOs distributed condoms in Niger to counter HIV. Nigerien women would give them to their truck driver husbands heading to Nigeria so they wouldn’t get infected.

  Along the highway, many of the men in ragged linens driving flocks of dromedaries are slaves. Slavery is even more common in Niger’s north, where nomad chieftains live in luxury tents equipped with satellite phones, but it exists throughout the country. According to one of Niger’s most prominent scholars, Dr. Galy Kadir Abdelkader, up to 10 percent of the country is in bondage, even though slavery has been outlawed since 2003.

  “Islam says that no man should be anybody’s slave, and the Prophet encouraged people to free slaves. Our religion is protected with ignorance of itself,” says Dr. Abdelkader. “Slaves are told that they must accept fate, that as God is the supreme owner of Paradise, the master is the owner of the slave. Whoever wants to live in paradise someday must respect the will of God, which is reflected through the master whose purposes they serve.”

  Among those purposes is producing more slaves, an economic driver that helps to maintain Niger’s unrelenting fertility rates. Children of slaves are also slaves, so masters breed them, frequently to their own siblings or even their daughters. Although slave markets have disappeared since the 2003 prohibition, particularly beautiful slave girls command high bride-prices, should a wealthy men desire to marry one. Or if a man can’t afford to buy and free a woman, he can still enjoy her flesh by marrying her for less than full price, but without releasing her from bondage. Under this arrangement, a pre-agreed number of her children are returned to her original master as slaves.

  In every village, women churn out babies, trying to stay ahead of death. The only thing that checks Niger’s world-highest fertility is its fifty-year life expectancy. In the town of Madaoua in Tahoua region, between Maradi and Niger’s capital, Niamey, gray-bearded elders in loose turbans and sweat-stained prayer caps gather under a thatched portico. It is the first meeting with their new mayor, who wears a tall white prayer cap embroidered with a pattern of diamonds. The sultan of Tahoua, resplendent in white and gold, is also present. At a respectful distance behind the men stand women in a rainbow of headscarves.

  They are discussing the drought that now never seems to end.

  “Forty years ago,” says the sultan, “it rained here five months a year. But since 2000, the climate change caused by Western countries has dried our rains. Children, cattle, even goats have died. People are fleeing to Nigeria, refugees from a war against the Sahel with no enemy to strike back at. What can be done?”

  Even in the West, there is no technology to tame the unleashed climate. Have they considered family planning, to reduce the numbers that the lands must sustain?

  The men explode with laughter. “Everyone here has more than one wife,” says the sultan, who has four.

  “You can’t ask a father to stop having children without a solution for who will work on his farm,” protests a white-turbaned elder.

  “If you have children, God answers to their needs,” says the new mayor. “I myself have thirty-three.”

  His potency is well known, and admired. But the meeting falls silent, as if it penetrates that this is no longer the land these men grew up in. In the past, there was room and grass aplenty for all the children a man could have. Then, in just twenty years, the trees are gone and only people are left.

  “We have entered different times,” says the sultan. “Maybe we have to think differently.”

  ii. Post-Colonial Hangover

  The traffic in Niamey is sparse: some transport trucks, taxis, oxcarts stacked with yellow plastic jerry cans, and occasional white SUVs bearing the logos of UNICEF, the Red Cross, the EU, and FAO, bristling with satellite phone antennae. The dust hanging over the capital mixes with haze rising off the Niger River, so thick that the sun here resembles the pallid disk above China’s manufacturing cities. But here, there are no factories.

  On the walls of her ground-floor office in the Niamey building that the UN shares with foreign gold and uranium mining companies, Mme. Martine Camacho has hung posters from projects in all the African countries where she’s worked for UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. “Equilibre Familial,” one reads. “Had I Known, I Would Have Waited to Finish My Education,” says another. Mme. Martine is French; her current assignment began in 2007, when Niger was pressed by the UN to establish a real population policy after being cited for the world’s highest growth rates. The government appealed to the World Bank, which contracted with UNFPA to do something. Previous programs had been conducted by bureaucrats with anatomical flip charts and videos of people having sex, which they showed to rural Nigeriens who had never seen such a thing displayed publicly. When nurses began demonstrating how to roll a condom onto wooden penises, onlookers would flee.

  Until 2007, just 5 percent of Nigerien women used contraceptives, she says. There is still tremendous resistance; women—or their husbands—often believe that birth control and child immunizations are a secret foreign plot to sterilize them and seize their lands when they become too few to defend them. Some women who were interested in spacing births would only use leather talismans containing herbs around their waists, or drink potions pounded from tree roots and drunk from wooden bowls inscribed with Qur’anic verses.

  Here in the capital, Mme. Martine has heard educated men ask why having the highest rate of population growth is a problem. Just 15 million people in 1,267,000 square kilometers—Niger is the world’s twenty-second largest country—leaves a lot of land to host more Nigeriens. One study suggested that most people actually wanted more children, not fewer: eight to nine for women, and twelve to thirteen for their husbands.

  Contraceptive acceptance is now up to 16 percent, pills being most common, followed by Depo injections. “So we’ve gained 10 percent. The easiest 10 percent. I figure another four hundred years, and we’ll have everyone wanting birth control.”

  Unfortunately, the money for this program, called PRODEM, runs out in 2013. Meanwhile, she worries, Muslim extremism here is rising and seems better funded. Yet two of the world’s best family-planning programs, she says, are in Muslim countries, Tunisia and Iran, which are both below replacement rate.

  “Tunisia and Iran don’t force twelve-year-old girls to marry.” Lest a girl be raped or grow ripe with desire, Nigerien parents often betroth daughters before they begin to menstruate. “In Tunisia and Iran, they send them to school. Everyone there reads. Most people here can’t.”

  Yet HIV has declined, and in a country where female circumcision is still practiced, there is an encouraging project to abolish female genital mutilation by paying the mutilators to put down their knives. Instead of earning the equivalent of US$10 in West African francs—or a goat, or some chickens—for removing a girl’s clitoris and, depending on the skill of the mutilator, slicing off vaginal labia, they’re being given a hundred dollars to set up businesses selling peanuts or livestock. Others are being retrained as midwives. But as for family planning, Mme. Camacho is not very optimistic.

  “In all the places I’ve worked—here, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Burundi, Comoros—I’ve never seen a country ask for this. It’s always initiated by the UN or some Bretton Woods lending institution. They’re not conscious of the threat—only the West is. In Niger, they’ve designed a family-planning program, but deep in their hearts, they feel it’s not their problem. They’ve adopted it without owning it.”

  When she arrived, th
e population director in Niger was a man with three wives and twenty children. “I’d talk to him about it. What kind of message was he giving to people? ‘Faites ce que je dis, mais ne faites pas ce que je fais,’2 he’d reply. It would make me furious, but then I’d think of what we Westerners have done in Africa: pollute, pillage, and teach them to consume. We’re hardly an inspiring model.”

  Fifty kilometers southeast of Niamey, the last small herd of a unique subspecies, the West African giraffe, clings to life in a hard yellow desert. As long as the rangers who guard them keep planting the acacia seedlings the giraffes eat in soil they bring from the Niger River’s banks, they may survive, as they have no natural predators left other than humans. In the mid-nineteenth century, Niger still teemed with lions, cape buffalo, monkeys, rhinoceros, and antelope, and all of West Africa was giraffe habitat. When the French colonial period came, so did firearms, and the poaching commenced. Giraffes were killed for meat and leather, and their tongues and genitals were harvested for talismans. Boiled giraffe bones were rendered into a paste to combat fatigue. Girls who reached twenty-five without marrying put giraffe tails in their bathwater to attract lovers.

  Only 120 giraffes were left in Niger in 1993, when an NGO program to sustainably market deadwood from the surrounding savanna backfired, as people cut thousands of live trees and let them die before selling them. With this loss of food, Niger’s giraffe population dwindled to 50. A French ethologist studying the herd began a campaign to save them; wood cutting was banned, and the Niger herd was also replenished by giraffe refugees fleeing Mali and Nigeria. Today, with tigerbush and acacias slowly recovering, there are now about 250 West African giraffes in Niger. They must coexist, however, with the flocks of goats swarming around them. Once giraffes retreated here because this savanna was uninhabited; today, there is nowhere that their eyes, nearly twenty feet above ground, can scan without seeing thatch huts.