I tucked it into the bag I traveled with. I was afraid even to unwrap it and watch its power diffuse in the air as the powder dropped away. It was costly, nearly $80 for the simplest cloth, which was prohibitive for most Nigeriens. A taglemust of one hundred bands was considered the most elegant and expensive; this cloth was not half of this.
Men donned the taglemust at adulthood, after undergoing family and clan ritual and then seclusion, and then they wear the veil always. Tied to it are notions of vernacular, self-worth and respect, masks for vulnerability and shame. Donning it is an act of social distancing, a reminder of the need for caution and self-control with others. It hides emotion and allows men to maintain a restraint and highly constructed self-image. For women, it is a veil that does not hide the face but, for ceremonies, cascades from the head, weighted by beautifully embellished silver weights. That morning we had walked past the grand mosque at the call to prayers and watched a sea of men, most heads wrapped in indigo, filing in from the side streets, kneeling to the ground, resplendent. My body welled with longing to enter the depths of that collision of faith, feeling, history, and divine beauty.
At dawn the next day we were at the outskirts of Agadez. The camels were fitted with neon orange and green and pink factory-made blankets from China and then loaded with saddles hand made of turquoise and red and yellow leather, elaborately tooled. The camels protested and cursed, some eyed us with wariness, and finally they accepted our weight atop them. From a distance two Fulani men, tall and slender, watched us, their heads swathed in blue-black taglemusts that fell across their chests. One wore a dramatic, cone-shaped herdsman’s hat atop it all, with three clusters of indigo-dyed ostrich feathers attached near the brim. Indigo and ostrich feathers—they had transversed the desert for centuries, traded all the way to northern Europe. The men carried proper European women’s purses, the long straps wrapped around their wrists. Their mouths were stained blue, and their eyes looked piercingly at us, unmoving, and we stared back. They could not have been more beautiful, and they seemed aware of it, seemed to have made a pact to move in a pair, each complementing what the other had achieved. We gazed at each other, unembarrassed. “They think you and Afi are Tuareg,” Sidi said, but they were not sure if Afi is a woman because she is so tall. Afi and I laughed; she was as tall and boyish as they were effete.
Just two weeks from now the Cure Salee, or Guérewol, would take place, the annual festival marking the beginning of the rainy season, when the ground is rich with salt for cattle to consume, and Tuareg and Wodaabe Fulani clans—both the camel and the Land Rover sets—travel from the Sahara to meet for a beauty pageant of Wodaabe men, a subgroup of the Fulani. Adorned with richly embroidered indigo and ostrich feathers, their faces made up with cosmetics derived from indigo and henna imported from Hausaland, and from sacred clays mined from deep in the desert, they perform a ball, competing for beauty and refinement, and for strength of body and countenance. The Guérewol, called just a few days after we arrived, would be held in In-Gall, three hours west of Agadez. The town of less than five hundred people would swell to tens of thousands for the weeks surrounding the festival. I could not stay so long, but these men were giving us a look into its pageantry.
The men finally met our smiles as the camels began to walk, slowly, toward the rising sun, into a landscape of depletion that became more haunting, more of a stunning moonscape the farther we ventured.
For five days we traveled from Agadez to Azzel, Issekah Seghan, Tassolam-Salant, Boughla, and then back to Agadez, in the overwhelming heat. Every part of us that touched the saddle was rubbed raw until it bled. The camels loped and lurched, spitting, kicking at times, protesting and humming. They are gormless creatures, these Ships of the Desert, but you trust in them completely and they become incredible to behold.
We would wake each morning with the first glint of sun and dig into the sand until we hit water. It would fill the hole, six inches, a foot, for bathing. Then we would travel in the early morning hours. The two men who served as chameliers for our guide would run beside us in the 110-degree heat, then suddenly drop back, disappearing sometimes for hours, then lope from behind a dip in a plateau and join us again.
We passed salt pits, where men with faces and clothes tattered by the harsh sun and wind labored to harvest the dirty cakes. We encountered occasional small caravans not much larger than our own, or single travelers, herders, all men with heads swathed and enormous swords crossed at the waist. The caravans passing the salt pits were but a faint memory of the ancient trade—once as far as the Roman Empire—in natron, a rare, naturally occurring mix of soda ash; bicarbonate, or baking soda; and salt, prized for its healing, cooking, cleaning, and medicinal uses, for nourishing livestock, and for its power as an agent in indigo dyeing. Natron was abundant in Egypt, in places in Niger, and on the shores of Lake Chad. Kano dyers, especially, coveted it; and the dye pits, the salt mines, and the caravans had each—to an extent—survived on their mutual dependency.
By the late morning, we would look for a shady spot to rest—often only low brush. We would lay blankets in it and keep our bodies still, amazed at how even dappled shade offered a decadent cool. The breeze seemed to pick up, as we slept and listened to the men tell stories in Tamashek. At nightfall, as if by a miracle, we would arrive at an oasis, a palm-covered grove where fresh dates grew and well water flowed, and we would drink downstream from our foul-mouthed steeds. We were supplicants to their strength, their intuition, their instinct always to survive, and their patience carrying us along. At night we slept beside them until they wandered off near morning.
On the third day, behind a caravan of four-wheel drives, we arrived at a settled area in an oasis, with concrete houses and small stores. We surprised a desert wedding, with throngs of Tuareg women clad in indigo veils over indigo dresses embroidered deep red, or in white blouses adorned with sequins, each displaying their heavy dowry gold over hands and faces patterned with blue-black lines. The bride was hidden in the center of them, and the men stood on the perimeter, leaning against the cars. They sang and clapped, and their feet beat the ground like the wings of birds. They seemed to have a shifting quality, first like fire, the blue brilliance of flames, then like smoke, ephemeral. I felt their substance, and yet they were substance-less, because they were only a glimmer in my eye, and then we were gone, as swiftly and completely as the chameliers, leagues of sand between us and them.
Back in Agadez, we boarded a bush taxi, a small minivan, to In-Gall, the site of the Guérewol, to see what kind of festival preparations had begun in that town built on a remote oasis.
The road seemed utterly deserted except for wandering animals. Then the heat rose, and people appeared seemingly out of the air, and the minivan stopped to admit others to the crush of bodies. I feared we’d be asphyxiated. The man across from me was so close that the indigo of his taglemust stained the shoulder and sleeve of my dress, and our faces collided whenever we hit a pothole. Another man sat and played with Afi’s bracelet, turning it, and pointed out camels as they passed. A third slept against me, staining my other side. He was ivory skinned, bone thin, elegant, with eyes like small pumpkin seeds. Indigo leached into the men’s hands and faces and clothes. I thought of Eurama’s warning: “Take care, or you will run off with one!” I laughed. One of my friends had already made plans to stay on with Sidi Mohamed. I simply wanted the ride to go on long enough that I was bathed in indigo.
In-Gall was a sleepy town, just beginning to wake with preparations. We slept the night there, on mats laid in our host’s yard. Every year for centuries, at the time of the Guérewol, the caravans would come in from points as far as three thousand miles into the desert, to rest, to indulge, and to find human company. For those transporting indigo, it was the moment when a blue wealth was material.
The bus I rode back to Niamey was packed with so much weight that its roof was caving. The luggage racks above our seats had been soldered again and again and seemed on the verge of break
ing for the last time. With every bump, the roof would press down under the weight. People slept, babies stood and played on women’s laps, sometimes knocked down. I sat tense, wondering, did someone worry that this bus of mostly women would be crushed, or did they expect we simply hold the load on our heads?
This time the bus traveled for a while along the southern border and dipped into Nigeria a few times. I decided to forgo Kano. It was not the right time.
The Hausa-controlled Kotar Mafa pits of Kano date back to the late 1400s. They are the oldest still-active dye pits in West Africa, close to the original palace of the emir, who established for his successors centuries of wealth. In Kano there were hundreds of remaining pits, but most were rumored to have fallen into disrepair, clogged with stones and refuse. Not even the Saharan sales could revive their past.
The Hausa kingdom of Kano was established before 1000 A.D., but its popular record conceals a five-hundred-year legacy of concubinage of women raided in acts of war against the west and south. As concubines, these women surprisingly controlled the original dye pits and their profits, and used indigo cloth as currency, circulating it among regional courts and the powerful. They had the power to assess state taxes, the primary one being grain. And they became the territorial representatives of the Emir from the areas in which they were captured, extending their power, which they shared with their children who—under Islamic law—were free and had the agency to become royals.
The concubines’ power was eventually wrested from them under the Kano Emirate, formed in 1805. The emirs overtly pursued commercial dyeing themselves, despite ancient ideas about indigo dyeing and its mimicking of birth and deep-held taboos about male contact with the dye pot. Indigo was effectively turned over to the Malams, the Koranic teachers, and Kura, the district in Kano that is the site of the dye pits, became thereafter a city of men. By the early 1900s there were an estimated twelve thousand dyers overseeing fifty thousand active pits.
I would leave Kano for another time. Senegal was calling.
Eleven
Divine Sky, Senegal and New York City
I went to St. Louis, a peninsular town in northern Senegal that touches the border of Mauritania, in search of a fabled cloth—an indigo of unrivaled luxury and refinement, of stunning handwork. This cloth is a love song to both the turbulence (if not the violence) and the beauty of métissage, the mixing of the races. This cloth has its origins in the Cape Verde Islands, some five hundred miles off the Senegalese coast, on the plantations the Portuguese established in the sixteenth century to feed their renowned cotton textiles to European markets, a trade that flourished through the eighteenth century. Skilled slaves, primarily women but also persons working with contracts, were brought from the mainland to the previously unpopulated islands for the purpose of weaving and dyeing. The Portuguese eventually introduced Japanese patterning to the workshops (the precolonial and colonial history of Asian-African exchange is largely unexplored) and in instances actual artisans from Japan were imported. In needlework so fine that it can be better characterized as embroidery, these women and men stitched signs and symbols that were a collision of Moorish, Iberian-Islamic, Arab, Japanese, Wolof, Soninke, and other African cultures. Photos of the cloths, which I’ve seen in colonial sketches and vintage postcards from the late 1800s and the turn of the century, show midnight-colored indigo, the work of master dyers able to achieve a rare alchemy in the vat. In the photos wealthy women sit wide-legged, adorned with layers of the cloth to accentuate the twins of prestige, cloth and girth. The white resist patterning covers their bodies like a script. These women were of a culture of opulence, the wives and concubines of wealthy traders. Many others were the descendants of signares, bourgeois Franco-American women entrepreneurs. Their merchant community, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, controlled trade in the region, exercising ties with the Catholic Church to protect their interests in colonial administration and the European trade in slaves, gum arabic, and beeswax. St. Louis had been the capital of the French colony of Senegal from 1673, but with the introduction of the steamship, a railroad, and increasing French investments, merchants and government in Dakar slowly wrestled political and economic control from St. Louis. Still the legend of the signares lives on in the cloth.
I fell in love with St. Louis, whose old city is centered on a finger of land—the Langue de Barbarie—between the Atlantic coast and the estuary of the Senegal River. In just a short walk, you can traverse ocean, Langue, and river and cross the wild marshes of the mainland into the Sahel. The searing noon heat gives way to the nighttime cold of the Harmattan that chases you into wool sweaters. You can enjoy ice cream in an Internet café as brilliant painted horse-driven chariots thunder by with modern grandes dames, wearing heavy gold and cloth that mimics the opulence of the past. In the marina, fancy motorboats are moored, and behind them, at the beach, are brilliantly painted fishermen’s canoes. The city’s riotous métissage—of people, of land—pulled sharply at me. The cloth, which contains that same inheritance, with such beauty and sophistication, became a symbol of the riot in me.
At the few antiques shops in town, I inquired about the cloth. Some sold Mauritanian blues—five-meter-long gauzy fabric, some with similar patterning, and deep blue-stained details. But everyone admitted that old indigo cloths were not easily found, and fewer were bought and sold. The families who had them knew their value as heirlooms, as part of the story of the clan and of St. Louis.
I’d accepted that I was on an obsessive search, and that a kind of drunkenness propelled me to the quartier ancien. I began going house to house, entering one yard after another, with no language, really, only a photograph of the cloth. Mostly I was shrugged off by families amused by my searching or unwilling to entertain me.
The Soninke peoples say that when a family went to a dyer to commission a cloth, they were asked to choose a color of the sky above them. That day, I watched dark clouds roll overhead, and I nearly abandoned my search until a man from a house I’d visited called to me and led me back to his yard. Two women stood in the compound with two very old, brilliant shawls, shouting at each other and drawing a crowd of those who would be peacemakers and others taking sides. The matriarch of the house stood in a doorway, looking sadly on, seeming to choose reserve. I sat dumbly by, knowing I should leave, knowing that it was even more vulgar than the incident in Makola with the taglemust for me to sit there, amid the explosion, caring only about this cloth. I didn’t really know what they were fighting over. I wanted to convince myself that what was at stake was mere recreation; you find wild feuds among bored, frustrated family members in many a compound. But I felt a terrible struggle. Could I just walk away? Was having this cloth a gesture at the sublime, as I’d convinced myself, the literal last threads of something handed over for another’s caretaking? Or was it simply my insatiable desire, my drunken need? Each cloth that was folded in my cloth box was a thing of uncommon beauty, but I was aware that I was no closer to spirit or to the human closeness I sought.
When I left the compound, it was with one of the shawls folded in my bag, the fight trailing behind. It was close to a century old, pristine dark beauty with white telegraphed designs. It represented something of me; it was the insistence that I had come to the end of my journeying.
“All the beautiful ones!” Eurama said, holding the cloth across her when I returned to Accra. “What more now? Tell us, Madame Blue!”
“You know Mali,” he said. “You know the one bridge in Bamako that takes you across the Niger River into the center of the city? When we were young, as the rainy season began, we would stand on that bridge and watch the hippos migrate upriver. They would come in herds, and they are very dangerous, but we could safely watch them. As I grew, they became fewer, and when I returned to Bamako from France when I was eighteen, after just seven years, they had nearly disappeared.
“We would go to the river, and women would do their dyeing there. Everyone used the river for their work to save on their
water bills. They would wash the cloths, straight from buckets with caustic soda, an agent to speed the dye process. You would see fish floating dead in the river where they had been.
“Growing up, I would spend my summer vacations in Guinea. My aunts were dyers, and one day my small cousin took a stone of caustic soda and swallowed it. It totally destroyed her stomach. She had to feed with a tube, and the family had to send her to France for more than five surgeries.
“But even before this I became fascinated with natural dyes and with indigo especially. I was fascinated with plants and the idea that you could extract colors from them. I learned a lot about plants in Guinea. Grown-ups would send us kids to collect things in the bush for medicine and for dyes. When I was seven, an old lady told me about indigo; I knew that it was used for medicine, for body aches, and for eye infections. But when I learned that it was used as a dye, I thought it was unbelievable that color could come from that plant.”
I had met Aboubakar Fofana on the floor of ABC Carpet & Home, a famous high-end store in New York City, one winter afternoon after I returned home. A tall, slim man with long dreadlocks and soulful eyes, he had the intense calm of the Sufi devotee and the look of the French bohemian in his tweed jacket and corduroys, antique Dogon jewelry, and indigo scarf he’d embroidered and dyed. We stood talking near a display of his work on the main floor, amid holiday shoppers. I was fascinated both with his beauty and with the $1,000-to-$2,500 scarves and throws that he made from organic cotton, grown on his land in Mali. The fabric was hand-spun and hand-woven, then surrendered to the vat in his Bamako studio. The most costly cloth was a heavy shawl called a Dissa, with long, beautiful fringe; it was dyed the blue-black shade called Lomassa, or “Divine Sky,” the deepest color achieved by the master dyer. In ancient Mali, among the Soninke, the Dissa is extremely valuable, worth the cost of several cows. Aboubakar was interested in the idea of an African luxury market, something that has always existed but that the West has overlooked and that Africans, whose desires turned to Western modernism devalued. At the same time, he wanted to restore the tradition and “lost memory” of the creations of the Soninke masters, his own forebears, the renowned masters of weaving and dyeing in West Africa. Traditionally, at the birth of a male, mothers began the thread-making, the spinning of cotton, and the weaving of the Dissa, which would be given to the son at marriage, the advent of manhood. When the man died, the cloth would become his shroud, and the indigo would help transport his soul to the afterworld.
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