‘You survived!’
Boureima was hopping in the furrow, clapping his hands together. The beat of millet pounding and the crackle of stalk stripping chimed around us, like a familiar tune on the radio. Torda the new mum bleated in relief, trotting over to lick her newborn. A clatter of pots turned me towards the millet-stalk mat, where Aisha was laying down a worryingly large bowl of toh. A calabash of baobab sauce glistened beside it: a feast was being threatened. She took one look at my expression and flung a hand against her mouth, to shield her laugh.
‘Come on, Nicholas.’ Boureima wrapped an arm around my shoulder and led me towards the food. ‘After a day in the bush, you must be starving. Eat – and God give you strength!’
The School for Nomads
Lesson Seven: Water
‘YUSUF, FOR SHAME!’
Old Ismail pulls back the mirror, grasping it with translucent, waxy fingers. He has ferreted it out of a burlap sack, after I complained of grit in my eye. I am struggling to blink out the dirt, but he won’t give me the mirror until I follow the protocol.
‘Did the Prophet, on him be peace, take things with his left hand?’
Finally, I get it right and the mirror is released, but I still can’t excavate the grit. A handful of black grains is offered – Ismail says I should drop them in my eye, ‘and God will bring an end to your problem’. But I don’t have his faith, so I decide to let time, and lots of blinking, do the healing.
It is another day of lounging: sipping coffee, snacking on peppery dates, listening to Ismail’s chatter and ecstatic declarations of the shahada. I spend the afternoon wandering around the dune, never straying far, while the others take it in turns to pray and Abdul-Hakim frolics with the kittens. One of them is still cutting me, slitting its eyes as if it is the only one who knows the truth about me, waiting for the others to catch up.
Halfway through the morning, Ismail takes me and Abdul-Hakim down to the well at the foot of the dune. Poles of acacia spur a square hole braced by logs of palmwood, surrounded by a cement coping as smooth as cake icing. A rusty winch dangles from the crosspole like a fishing rod, carrying the weight of the guerbas.
‘Do you know how to draw the water?’ asks Ismail.
‘I’ve never tried before. At home we have …’ I don’t know the Arabic word for a tap, so I mime it.
‘Like a pump well?’ Ismail wonders.
‘Yes. But they’re smaller, and we have them inside.’
He mutters something about God’s glorious works, and repeats the word ajib (‘wonder’) several times. I wish I could show him a picture of my kitchen in Borough. I don’t imagine he would be envious, I think he would just say it was ajib.
Abdul-Hakim has brought down Ismail’s donkey, who does the bulk of the work. A flabby goatskin guerba is hooked to a hawser rope dangling from the cross-pole, which rotates and lowers the skin into the aiun – the ‘eye’ of the well. When the guerba has reached the bottom, we hear a slurp and Ismail calls out to Abdul-Hakim, who shouts at the donkey. Sand puffing round its hooves, it shrinks across the sand, its movements growing slower as the waterskin rises. When we pull the swollen, dribbling guerba over the lip, Ismail offers up a satisfied cry of ‘bravo!’ It is an oddly secular word to hear from his mouth, but he makes up for it when we carry the guerbas back to the tent.
‘Oh, Yusuf, give praise to God! God is great! Oh, God is great!’
He is pleased, I think, to show his well to an outsider. As its keeper, he is proud of the quality of his upkeep, and the quality of the water.
‘What reason is there’, he asks, sitting in the shade on the north side of the tent, ‘for a well to fall out of use? As long as someone with good character is nearby, the well remains in good condition and everyone is able to drink from it. Why should anybody thirst in the desert? The water here is pure. By the truth of God, it is better than the dirtwater they force down themselves in the city!’
By late afternoon, we are packing our gear and saddling the camels once again. Time for one last prayer before we go. The sun is already sinking, turning the sky a pale, burnished copper. The distant hills are ashen and opaque, outlines in charcoal. The Islamic calendar may be lunar, but when it comes to prayer, the schedule is solar. These divisions structure the day, as precise as the astral signpostings of night.
Jadullah, Lamina and Abdul-Hakim line up behind Ismail, who leads them in their prostrations. I am sitting only a couple of feet away, and I feel caught up in their prayer. I follow the movements with my eyes, absorbing them, responding to them: standing upright, bending forward with their hands on their knees, kneeling, bowing until their foreheads touch the sand. I have watched them do these movements so many times over the last few days, I feel as if my own body is moving with them. The cats have come out to observe, and one of them settles beside me, fluffing my leg with its tail. The other cat holds back a few feet, still wary of me.
‘May God grant you the wisdom you seek.’ Ismail grasps my shoulder in his hand; it has a vigour that belies his age. ‘May he guide you to the truth.’
I smile back at him. We both know what he means.
‘Say God is great,’ he whispers, one last evangelical push. ‘Say Mohammed is his prophet.’
‘Thank you, Ismail. I promise, I have my Quran and I will read it carefully.’
His pale lips curl at the compromise. I suppose he doesn’t often get the chance to win a new follower to the faith.
I am sad to be leaving Ismail. He has an energy that is entirely his own – garrulous, pious, kindly, good-humoured – and I fear this sketch will capture no more than his shadow. But he saves the best for last:
Allah-humma inna nasaluka fi safarna
hadha al-birra wa at-taqwa
wa min al-amali ma tarda
Oh God, we ask you on our journey
for goodness and piety,
and for works that please you.
We are mounted on our camels now. Jadullah bobs to the front, while Lamina takes the rear. Ismail lingers halfway up the slope, singing the blessing for our journey, his torn rags tugged by the wind. A part of me itches for a camera or a phone to record him; the other part is determined not to spoil the moment. His words cling to us, as if by some paranormal acoustic, amplified far beyond an old man’s natural reach.
Halfway across the plain, crossed by quick eclipses of sunlight, the dune is still visible. Ismail has become a flickering speck, although his antiphonal singing lingers among us: words filled with faith and feeling, with all that is best, all that is purest about the desert. It is a song so warm hearted that I feel my own heart swelling to the sound of it. I think it may be the most beautiful thing I have ever heard:
Oh God, make our journey light
And its distance easy for us.
Oh God, you are our companion on the journey
And the one in whose care we leave our family.
Oh God, we seek refuge in you
from the hardships of this journey
And evil visions, and from finding on our return
Our family and our property in misfortune.
I ‘ooooshhhh’ Naksheh over the dunes, leaning back on the descent, hands tight on the headrope. Scrub bristles around us, acacias teeter and we skim across the bending earth, as night plunges and Ismail’s words are licked away by the air.
Part Eight
River
The land of Negros is extremely hot, having some store of moisture also, by reason of the river of Niger running through the midst thereof.
Leo Africanus, The Description of Africa and the Things Therein Contained
21
Masters of the River
THE MARKET OF MOPTI LACKS THE ROMANCE OF DJENNÉ’S ALL-ROUND SENSE assault – but it’s just as exciting. Dogon women carry wicker baskets on their heads, bubbling with pounded onion. Fulani herders balance water gourds on the tips of their staffs, kid-goats and lambs bundled in their arms. In the heat of the day, light splinters the jagged e
dges of rock salt from the mines of Taoudenni, waxes the peppers and shimmers in buckets of reticulated fish scales. Baskets gleam with silver dogfish, crescents of stingray or 3-foot-long black-eyed capitaines, as the Nile perch is known locally. The smell of brine spices the waterfront, where stevedores leap between the bobbing prows and tiptoe up the gangplanks, bearing saturated rice sacks, drums of petrol, 10-foot-high wardrobes, Super No 1 motorbikes. The din thickens with shouted orders and near misses, the odd splash when a stray papaya tumbles out of a pail, and high above them the spars whistle to the beat of the breeze.
‘Are there any spaces to Timbuktu?’ I asked.
‘Bien sur!’
A hardy veteran in a ribbed beanie as grey as his beard welcomed me onto a 100-foot pinasse (a multidecked longboat). The 20,000 CFA (about £25) he asked for was substantially more than the locals would be paying, but it was a lot more practical than the 1500 cowrie shells Félix Dubois had to stump up for his Niger passage a century earlier.
‘And so … when do we leave?’ I asked.
‘Soon.’
He turned away to deal with a consignment of onions, before spinning back round when I asked if he could be a little more specific. Feet rang on sheet-metal plates. He stepped towards me with flashing eyes, indulging the whim of a pedant.
‘Tomorrow after the noon prayer.’
With time to spare, I decided to seek out one more group of nomads. Timbuktu was a few days away. There, I would meet Tuareg and Arabic-speaking herders – as long as the conflict had left any in town. But on my journey up the Niger, I was sure to pass another branch of roamers. I was keen to meet these ‘masters of the river’ and learn what it is like to be a nomad who floats.
Ten thousand years ago, when the region we know as the Sahara was gushing with rivers and swaled with marsh, a civilisation of foragers flourished, leaving their signatures in small blades and ceramic pots decorated by fish spine. In spite of the region’s desiccation, some vestiges of this culture endure.
‘The Bozo fishing people’, writes ecologist Katherine Homewood, ‘are generally acknowledged as the first inhabitants of the region.’ Distinguished from other nomads by their riparian setting, they still have much in common with them: moving about in a symbiotic relationship with the wildlife around them, often spending weeks away from any village, driven by seasonal change.
It is to the Bozo that the founding of both Djenné and Mopti is credited. Great spirit consulters, they turned to their marabouts when their first efforts to build a town were wracked by collapsing walls. Evil forces were at work, the marabouts decided. There was only one solution – to sacrifice a virgin. So a girl called Tapama was interred and the city flourished. While I was staying in Djenné, I used to pass Tapama’s clay tomb every day on my way to the market.
While some Bozo settled in towns like Djenné, the true river rats were at home in their dugouts, harpooning crocodiles and hunting the plentiful hippopotami. These days, most Bozo live in villages, in huts of mud brick or bamboo (their name derives from the Bambara for ‘bamboo hut’), stilted over the banks to protect them from seasonal floods. But there are some who still wend the riverways, tracking the fish with the stealth of huntsmen following game, their knowledge of fish migration so intricate they can tell where the best haul will be at any time of year.
Introductions in Mali can be complex. My friend Mahmoud, who lived in Timbuktu, had put me in touch with a friendly Dogon in Sevaré (a town near Mopti), who gave me a bed for the night and the name of a Bozo fisherman called Ibrahim. Dogon and Bozo are linked by a code of inter-ethnic kinship (known as sanankuya, which is usually translated into French as cousinage), stretching back to the legend of a Bozo fisherman who fed a starving Dogon family by cutting slices off his own flesh. To find my contact, it was just a matter of asking about on the waterfront.
I was directed to a breakfast shack, a tent of poles under a canvas hood. Eggs were frying in a pan and the steam was so thick it hid the faces of the men sitting behind the cook’s table. They were merchants and fishmongers, munching and smoking, waiting to be summoned to their boats. Among them was Ibrahim.
Tall and thick armed, with long fingers crusty from ropework, he nodded over a beaker of coffee, murmuring softly in French. I explained that I wanted to meet some of the nomadic fishermen working the river, and suggested a price. Eyes narrowed, as if I were an unexpected pool whose murky depths would need to be assessed. He placed his beaker on the table, and made his way soundlessly out of the shack.
‘Let us pick up supplies.’
Ibrahim’s boat was a pirogue, made from fire-curved boards, caulked with old rags soaked in karité butter. Poling across the fuel slicks around the port, we swung across the current to Masa Daga, a narrow islet jagged with prows and fuzzy with bundled nets.
The houses near the shore were barrel-shaped tents, easily dismantled when the river is in spate. Higher up, stones pinned down iron roofs on hilltop huts. It was an unusually windy day: the breeze ruffled the plastic sheets knotted to the roofs, tugged a kite tethered to a hut, unpeeled the clothes laid out to dry. Women were picking through a haul of carp, gutting them with rusty knives. Ibrahim muttered a greeting, which they received with a whispering reply. His wife was waiting outside a small hut on top of the hill, holding out the items we needed: a wire-coil brazier, a sack of charcoal, a rug to sleep on. I pronounced a greeting, and she replied with a silent tilt of the head.
The plan was to follow the Bani, the Niger’s largest tributary, which flows for nearly 700 miles southwest of Mopti. Conditions for river travel were perfect – if you happened to have a wide sail or an outboard motor. A northwesterly had raised a swell, pinching the water like customers in the market picking out cloth. Pirogues punted valiantly, the rowers slumped over their poles with hangdog shoulders, while diesel scent drifted from motorboats whose operators had good reason to look content. One skiff was using the wind to its advantage: a couple of poles had been lashed, a dozen millet sacks stitched together for a sail, with old net cordage for stays. Inflated by the breeze, it was working a treat, scudding the boat along the current.
Ibrahim stood rod straight on the stern, hauling the river behind us like a trench digger with a spade. We rounded Masa Daga and nosed between a pair of tawny cliffs crested by palm-reed huts. To the west uncoiled the Bani, flowing north from the direction of Djenné. There were only a few driftnets out; most of the fishing was being done by the waterfowl. Cattle egrets stood in the shallows, impersonating reeds, lifting off as we approached. A fish-eagle glided on its kill path, the broad planks of its wings kissed by the sun. Less subtle were the kingfishers: pied and hyperactive, with spiked head crests. They used bamboo-net cages as springboards and rattled the air, before diving down to snatch a dragonfly or skewer the carp.
Whether we could replicate the birds’ fishing success for ourselves was another matter. At first, the signs were auspicious – we caught something before we even dropped a net. It was a tiny capitaine, a fingerling. It hopped over the side of the boat, flapping among packets of tea and a bag of sugar. With barely a glance, Ibrahim scooped it up and dropped it back in the water.
‘It can grow to be a big capitaine,’ he said. ‘This is one of the problems these days. Too many people, they catch the small capitaine and eat it, but they should give it back to the river until it is ready.’
Luck (or baraka, at least) was less generous when we tried to fish in earnest. Splashing the bundled net, Ibrahim tossed a jerry can into the water as a marker buoy and fed out the rope. Gouts of water hung to the fibres of the net as he straightened them. Dropping a plastic bottle to mark the other end, we slid to the bank, floating beside the beehive-shaped bamboo cages, which were coned with side funnels to draw the fish.
‘It’s the current that brings them,’ said Ibrahim, ‘so we must wait for them to come, then we can pull up the net.’
He sat, legs apart, the pole between his feet, relaxing with a cigarette. The silence was long
and lavish and strangely relaxing. Rather than digging around in panic for some topic to break the pause, I just let it wash over me. People in cities get used to squawking at each other, but out in the bush or the dunes, or floating up the river, you are alone with your thoughts for long stretches of time. It teaches you to be reflective, but also to listen more broadly.
What I took for silence was nothing of the sort for Ibrahim. What is sound, after all, but the driving of compression waves through billions of molecules of air? And there were plenty of compression waves pulsing that morning. There was the beat of wing-strike, like the rustle of a money changer’s banknotes, the riffle of wind in the boat cover, the creak of the hull in the shallows, the ultrasonic of gliding fish and the occasional splash to remind us of the shoals on the move. ‘When you listen with exactness,’ a Berber cameleer in southern Morocco had told me, ‘you understand the world is full of music.’ If I had learned anything on these travels, it was to listen better, so I was starting to hear some of these sounds for myself.
Even when he spoke, Ibrahim’s voice was carefully modulated, a cat-like purr. Like many of the Bozos I met, he was used to whispering on board, to avoid disturbing the fish below. He had been working the river since boyhood, having honed his skills, in the usual way, by watching his father.
‘I got my own boat when I was 20,’ he said. ‘That’s when I became a fisherman. I’ve caught everything there is to catch in the river: carp, dogfish, capitaine, stingray. It varies year to year. Some years I do well, some not so much, but I’ve got a lot of experience and I usually know where to find something.’
The Timbuktu School for Nomads Page 26