Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  Abidjan’s fancy, “developed” veneer, all haughty and self-impressed, peeled away instantly as the train chugged along, propelling us through a thick patch of rain forest, then through verdant plantation land, and northward, with the temperature rising steadily, into the savannah.

  We were traveling as light and unencumbered as possible, out to discover Africa and searching for ourselves a bit, too, along the way, and we must have made a curious sight for our fellow travelers. For luggage we had nothing more than a couple of changes of clothing stuffed into two goatskin sacks, which we wore slung over our shoulders. I had a wire-bound notebook to write in, and an old Olympus 35mm camera. For reading, I had brought along Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis and a hefty paperback travel book, Susan Blumenthal’s Bright Continent, whose brilliant mixture of learned reflection and backpacker’s-eye view made it the best African travel guide I have seen before or since.

  At each stop along the way, in cities with strangely beautiful names like Katiola and Bouaké, the scenery grew more stark and simple, as did the dress and manners of the people we encountered. Before long, young girls were converging on the train at each station, shouting their sales pitches in Dioula, the commercial lingua franca of the northern half of the country, instead of French, and offering cold water to drink in clear little pouches of plastic. Other girls carried small brown smoked fish, exposed and still baking under the powerful sun, or bread borne on large enamel plates they balanced on their heads. These were not the fancy French baguettes of Abidjan, but big, boxy loaves of white bread with which the vendors rushed forward toward our open windows in a sales competition that was desperate yet always cheerful.

  We fell asleep well after dark, at the end of a long and sweaty day, both feeling that the “real” Africa that we were searching for wouldn’t reveal itself in earnest until we got off the train and trod the dusty ground, unmarked by man’s hand, that stretched to the horizon outside. Later I came to distrust this concept of authenticity deeply.

  We were awakened when the train lurched to a stop in the morning to discover that we were in Ferkessédougou, our jumping-off point for Mali, which was still about a hundred miles to the northwest. It had rained overnight and suddenly the air was surprisingly chilly. We took a taxi to the gare routière, where Peugeot 504 station wagons left for Bamako, the capital of Mali, and discovered that it was little more than a puddle-filled lot.

  Around its circumference sat a bunch of buvettes, little tumble-down shacks that passed as restaurants, each with its own hand-painted sign describing the fare. We settled into one, feeling faintly like cowboys moseying around in an old western. But instead of being served whiskey, a characteristically light-skinned young Fulani man poured thick, heavily sweetened condensed milk into our coffee and whipped up our helpings of bread and fried eggs.

  Afterward, we scouted out what looked like the best car, negotiated our fare to Bamako and then waited for a departure we figured was imminent. A two-hour lesson in patience awaited us, as well as a very neat illustration of power. We were in a world of peasants and the poor, and they already understood perfectly well what we were just discovering and could never completely accommodate ourselves to: that there is often little more to do in life than sit around and wait until those who are more powerful are ready to budge.

  In this case, the more powerful meant the drivers, who seemed to live and work according to an internal calendar whose secrets were known only to themselves and to their coxswains—the boys who helped collect their fares. Although there was a nominal fare between any two points, supply and demand was the ultimate arbiter, and the driver was free to negotiate the cost upward whenever the cars were few and passengers many. Departure times were even more elastic, and seemed governed not just by how many would be occupying the vehicle, which counted a great deal, but also by the Muslim obligation to pray five times each day, by the need to eat and, most vexingly of all, by what seemed to my untrained eye to be the reckoning of innumerable omens.

  But finally we took off, and it felt great to be moving again, even if the car was filled almost beyond its capacity. Since I am six foot four, I had luckily taken the precaution of paying a little extra so that I could sit in the front seat, where there was a little more leg room and a prime view of the scenery. We were heading north, supposedly toward the Sahara, but oddly the vegetation was getting steadily greener. By the time we reached the border, several hours later, the cramped space and huge potholes in the road had left me feeling like an invalid.

  When we climbed out of the car at the crossing, we were introduced to a brand-new waiting game, this one run by the poker-faced customs officers. The border crossing was, in reality, little more than a legally sanctioned stickup spot. And in this racket, if it is true that the driver and the customs agents could not be called friends, they were clearly complicit. Our chauffeur had obviously tithed away a portion of the passengers’ fares to pay off the customs agents, and he stood nearby, watching the scene with studied disinterest, as the passengers pleaded poverty so as to surrender as little as possible and the agents gradually escalated their threats to extort whatever they could.

  But the agents’ ultimate leverage was our driver. After an interval of about forty-five minutes or so—long enough for our driver to eat, drink something and relieve himself, and for Jamie and me to eat a few small wooden skewers of grilled mutton deliciously seasoned with a sprinkling of powdered red pepper and spices—he beckoned us back into the Peugeot and began making ready to leave. His departure would have stranded our fellow travelers, with no question of a refund for the fares they had already paid. As the driver and customs men surely knew, this was enough to get the men to take off their shoes or to fish into secret pockets to retrieve some hidden cash, and the portly market women among them to start undoing the elaborately wrapped cloth they wore to find the crumpled bills they had so carefully hidden in their bras or in secret folds.

  The drive from there was our introduction to the savannah. The reddish clay earth stretched infinitely in whichever direction one looked, melding in a blur at the horizon with the low, bright sky. Other than the little circular villages, with their peaked thatch roofs and red walls made of mud and straw, the only relief from the landscape was the incredible termite mounds—huge baroque cathedrals that rose to the height of a tall man.

  When night fell, we may as well have been on the moon as on that unlit highway with its deep craters, the location of which the driver seemed to know almost by heart. He slowed down for some of the holes and slalomed to dodge others. Despite his best efforts, though, every now and again he would hit one—perhaps, I thought, he was too tired to give a damn—but as we plummeted to the bottom and were then jolted back out of even the deepest potholes, the passengers scarcely stirred from their deep slumber. The sky was lit brilliantly with stars, and the savannah mimicked them with the fires of villagers, which could be seen twinkling in the distance. Malian music was playing on the driver’s radio, and the alembic strumming of the kora, a long, eighteen-stringed harp, and the soaring declamations of the singers were carrying me back to the age of the great empires.

  We arrived in Bamako a little before dawn. Trying to be frugal and not knowing the city, we decided to do what so many other travelers at the station had done. We unrolled our little straw mats, clutched our goatskin bags close to us, covered our faces with pieces of clothing and slept right there on the ground. A few hours later, we rose to the sunrise and the sound of heavy traffic to discover Bamako in all of its dusty and smoke-filled glory.

  France and the Soviet Union had each taken halfhearted stabs at turning this capital into a city, and the scars were everywhere. Long ago, the streets had been laid out in a tidy grid, including a formal administrative sector. The Russian-built Hôtel de l’Amitié loomed imposingly over the place like the landmark transplanted from another world that it was.

  At heart, though, Bamako remained little more than a big, sooty village. Tall women in b
lue boubous, the regal robes and matching headdresses worn throughout the Sahel, cleaned their teeth with wooden chew sticks, spitting into the dust-choked gutter. Slender men crouched like baseball catchers, only much lower still, pouring water from tin teapots to rinse their faces and clean out their ears, as they performed their Muslim ablutions at street’s edge. Cobblers repaired carefully preserved shoes with glues and tacks in their ramshackle sidewalk stands.

  People seemed to be sweeping everywhere, kicking up little clouds of dust as they worked at making things neat, but the effort was existential at best, given the milky whiteness of the sky, laden with gritty tidings from the Sahara borne on every breeze. Meanwhile, pubescent girls dressed in tatters raced one another through the cluttered streets hawking their huge mangos and sprays of lettuce to cars that paused in the traffic. Police working from the roadside pulled over taxis for invented infractions in order to take a cut of their receipts. And slender young prostitutes, all with the same tightly plaited hair and dazzling black skin, winked and beckoned at foreigners in every café and restaurant.

  To be sure, this was Africa, I thought, but it was still not the Africa I was searching for. Jamie and I had checked into the Grand Hotel, a misnomer these days with its dumpy furnishings and faded paint, although the cavernous rooms and central location hinted at an impressive past. Every few hours we had to return to the room to take refuge from the dirt and clamor, and to slake a constant thirst brought on by the city’s dry heat and copious sand. And while an old ceiling fan paddled the room’s hot air noisily, in this pre-Walkman era I took solace in tapes of Ornette Coleman and Muddy Waters, which I played on a little cassette machine while we planned our next steps.

  Mariam had urged me to visit her mother, whom she described as a grand Bamako personality; a major figure among the Bambara ethnic group, who dominated the city’s trade. We searched for her in the huge market, molded in clay with blunt, towering spires in the Sudanese style, and after only a couple of queries quickly found her there the next evening, installed amid the huge stacks of imported cloth that she sold, and somehow looking far simpler than I had imagined. She had never imagined me at all, because Mariam had never mentioned me to her. There was no reason to. And after she recovered from my surprise introduction as “Mariam’s friend,” in Bambara she explained my presence to the curious market women who had been spying on the scene from their nearby stalls.

  Jamie and I needed new clothing. The spare load that we had packed was already proving insufficient; moreover, the jeans and Western-style shirts we had brought tended to cling in the heat, adding to our discomfort. We asked Mariam’s mother where we could get some of the lightweight and baggy West African two-piece cotton outfits that so many of the men here wore. “Quickly and cheaply,” I added, causing some raised eyebrows. Americans were well known for being pushy and always in a bit of a hurry, but at least they were supposed to be rich. What kind of Americans were we, with our rumpled dress and billowy Afros? She quickly gave us an address, though, and after offering some elaborate thank-yous we were on our way.

  Newly outfitted the next day in our Malian clothes, we set out for the north. We were thrilled to be moving on, in another Peugeot sedan, but we were quickly given one more painful lesson about distances. It was 480 miles to Mopti, our next stop. On our Michelin map the road was grandiosely labeled as a national highway, but in reality it was a badly patched, unlit two-lane strip, without relief, without rest stops and with almost no turnoffs or exits. We pulled into Mopti exhausted, just as the day was about to give out, and checked into a little French-style relais that had been tastefully designed to blend into its surroundings—or perhaps it had just been built cheaply. The walls were made of banco, a mixture of clay and straw, and though the air conditioner belched and droned furiously, it seemed better suited as a conduit for mosquitoes than a source of cool air.

  As tired as we were, we badly needed to stretch our legs, so we set off for the town. Darkness fell quickly, and as we walked the cramped and crooked streets, the muezzin called loudly from the spindly minaret of a nearby mosque, giving us a start. It had been another one of those blistering days when the white sky hangs heavy and blindingly low and sleeping dogs hug the shaded sides of buildings, keeping as still as they know how in order to keep cool. Just about now, though, the streets around us were suddenly coming alive with people, and though most of them were heading out for prayer, some were just luxuriating in the cooler evening air.

  The language spoken in Mopti had a strange and mellifluous ring to our ears compared to the sharply clipped rhythms of the Bambara spoken in Bamako, a close cousin of Dioula, which we were used to hearing every day in Abidjan. Everything else, too, seemed to exclaim that this was a different world—ancient, exotic, almost biblical—and it was going to our heads. Tourists were few in these parts, and wandering through a neighborhood built of banco and scrap materials, with our huge Afros we were drawing stares from people curious to know where in the world such odd-looking foreigners came from.

  Feeling giddy and playful, Jamie and I decided to have a little fun. Rather than speak English or French and give ourselves away immediately, we invented an ersatz dialect on the spot, suppressing our amusement as best we could as we made our way along the unpaved street talking loudly in our own strange new tongue. Our game was good for a laugh between us, but West Africans are accustomed to living in a linguistic babel, and the gibberish we spoke drew little more than a few double takes.

  We hit the road again the next day in a worse-for-the-wear Renault van, larding our goatskins with tins of sardines and sausages, loaves of bread and extra bottles of mineral water. Our destination was Bandiagara, a town that appeared close on the map, but which we were warned could take the better part of a day to reach. Each time someone gave us their estimate of the road time that lay ahead, it ended with a sigh of “Insh’Allah” (God willing). Out here, everything depended on one’s vehicle and beyond that God’s favor, or simply one’s luck.

  We had chosen Bandiagara because all of the tour books had described the little town as the gateway to the homeland of the Dogon, a people fabled throughout West Africa for their flinty independence and unusual lifestyle. Their lore had spread so deeply into Europe that Bandiagara and the nearby Dogon cliffs were becoming an obligatory pilgrimage for a certain kind of tourist back then: the bearded and braless northern European tribe who wore tie-dyes and sandals, in homage to what they imagined was a genuinely African lifestyle.

  Many Dogon still elected residences on the very face of the steep escarpments that rise from their Sahelian plain. Theirs was an existence in caves. They had deliberately kept their distance from the life-giving Niger River in order to preserve their freedom from slave raids and forcible conversion to Islam, whether at the hands of the Bambara from the south or the Moroccans from the north. Their choice was stark and simple: Life would be harsh, but it would be their life, and it has remained that way up to the present.

  Across the centuries, the Dogon had developed an extraordinarily sophisticated cosmology, one replete with detailed and precise observations of the heavens, and a particular focus on Sirius, which at 8.6 light-years away is the brightest star in the sky. Without the benefit of modern scientific instruments, somehow they had also divined the existence of a dwarf companion star to Sirius, which they named Po Tolo. Long ago they had accurately described its orbit and said it was composed of a metal that they believed was the densest material in the universe. Although telescopes had first noted this companion star a century ago, until 1970 Western astronomers weren’t able to photograph what the Dogon had said was there all along.

  When the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule began writing about their cosmology in the 1950s, the Dogon suddenly became a kind of pre-modern freak show, a people whose cultural achievements, like the building of the pyramids or the construction of the monumental statues on Easter Island, knew no simple explanation. Before our trip, I had read Griaule’s book, a dizzying wor
k full of talk about the dryness of the moon and the architecture of the Milky Way, but the proto-science that was attracting all the tourists was not what had drawn me to visit the Dogon. It was their rugged, hardheaded independence that intrigued me.

  Try as I might, I could not imagine hotter weather as we set out in our lumbering vehicle, which was packed to bursting, like every commercial vehicle in rural Mali, with people, goats and chickens. As Mopti receded in the distance, and finally vanished like an oasis, the town struck me as merely a more rural version of Bamako: less asphalt and concrete, no high-rise buildings and much more of the molasses pace that one associates with tiny, out-of-the-way towns everywhere.

  At last, it seemed we were truly abandoning the beaten path and, by the look of things, even traveling back in time. The appearance of our fellow passengers seemed to confirm this impression. The women’s faces and hands were stenciled with ceremonial dyes. Their gums, too, had been rendered black from treatment with charcoal-laden needles. Some of them wore huge, gold-leafed hoop earrings that tugged at their pierced earlobes under blazing red and gold headdresses.

  Theirs was a way-out concept of beauty, strikingly unaffected by the definitions of attractiveness in the West, whose standards had long ago worked their way into Africa’s big cities, conveyed by movies, television shows and the ever-spreading tentacles of commerce and materialism. We had come a long way, and had peeled back many layers, I thought, congratulating myself that we were perhaps finally arriving in the “authentic” Africa I was seeking.