This patch of the river, however, was no longer the place for a grand haul. ‘The season’s over round here,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Gao’s the best place at this time of year, the water’s higher up there.’
Drips of water spilled off the cord as he reeled in the net. The pile rose, blocking out the view of the river between his legs, but there wasn’t even the glint of a tiny petrocephalus. Ibrahim pulled up the jerry can and tossed it on the bundle, signalling our failure with a shrug, the patient gesture of a gambler who knows the casino will still be open tomorrow.
‘Should we wait a little longer?’ I asked.
‘No. It’s often like this. You can stay out all day and only catch one or two. It used to be much easier.’
Here was the common lament, repeated in every branch of nomadic life on my journey, as constant as tea rituals and plastic slip-ons: the glory days of yesteryear, in bitter contrast to today’s slim pickings.
‘When I was younger,’ said Ibrahim, ‘you could get 20, 30 fish in one haul. You didn’t even have to go very far. You went out for the day and you would catch 25,000 CFA (about £30). Now I go on long trips. I know where they are, because the fish go by a calendar, just like people. I take a small tent, a torch, my brazier, some coal and my net. Sometimes I stop in villages and camps along the way. I give some money to the chief, and he grants me permission to sleep in all the villages in his area.’
He dropped the pole back in the water. We still had several hours to go, so I sat on a thwart, feeling the suck of the paddle, the air on its tips, the pull of the river. The sun was at the zenith, pixellating the current, twinkling the froth at the edge of the sand. Dry, wrinkled banks rolled alongside us, blanched by guano and netting fluff, dappled by the shadow of wing spread. We passed the odd fisherman, sitting patiently above his net; and near the villages we heard the chatter of women washing. Soapy water frothed out of cooking pots and sparkled down bare chests and backs, sunlight jewelling their skin in gem-like suds. Sometimes they covered themselves as we approached, or dropped down to their necks in the water; sometimes they raised a hand and smiled.
‘Go on,’ said Ibrahim, ‘why did you learn the phrases if you aren’t going to use them?’
‘Mayha!’ I called out. ‘Hiya bana? Nyingola? Hello! How are you? How is the fishing?’
I felt awkward addressing them, when most of the women were wearing nothing more than a rag around their hips. It was like wandering into the wrong changing room at a swimming pool. Most of them laughed at my halting phrases and called back ‘Funogulima’ (good fishing). A few turned away or covered their breasts. I was glad when we had passed them.
The banks were spongy where the water lapped, soft blades of grass moistly entwining. But the stalks on their crests were yellow and dry, stiffened to palisades, a sign of how quickly the sun makes its claim. The tips of the bourgou (or hippo-grass) were uneven, chomped away in patches, which was explained by the cattle hovering on the horizon, pricking the sky with their horns.
‘There are many Fulani here,’ said Ibrahim. ‘They come for the bourgou so their cows can eat.’
‘Do you have good relations with them?’ I asked.
Ibrahim tipped his head to the side. ‘They give us milk and we give them fish. We can be useful to each other.’
‘But you don’t live together?’
He looked at his pole, dragging it through the current. ‘It is better to stay with your own people.’
In that respect, the hammering tattoo around another loop of the river was welcome. It tugged us like a siren’s call, chiming our arrival at the island of Kona Daga. Upturned boats hummocked the shore like beached whales, jacked up on barrels so the workers could probe their underparts. We moored between a couple of half-hulled pirogues and clambered off the bow. All around us was the orchestra of work: the thump of hammers on nails, the nasal back-and-forth of saws, the crunch of torn wood. After the gentle sounds of the river, there was something exciting about these staccato poundings: a lively chiaroscuro of sound.
We had arrived at one of the river’s best-known boatyards, which supplies pirogues and pinasses to many of the top traders in Mopti. Peppered with shavings, tangy with sawdust and sweat, the men looked up from their work: sawing along charcoal lines, drawing nails with screwdrivers heated on boxes of coal. A couple of them returned my wave. One of them was Khalil, a friend of Ibrahim’s. He had a tent where we could stay and a chicken for supper. Lines of dirt streaked his face, which was tough-looking and shiny with sweat. His arms were as thick as a boxer’s, bare under his dust-stained vest.
‘I’ve been doing this work for 36 years.’ He lay down his adze and took a glass of tea from his teenage son. ‘I learned it from my father. It’s hard work. You need at least three men to make a big pinasse. Me, I cut the wood. There’s another fellow who does the joining, and another for the metal. Then there’s others to do the painting.’
I noticed a bandage around his thumb. ‘Is it dangerous work?’
‘Oh, we’re always getting injuries.’ A grizzled laugh rumbled over the hammerbeat. ‘Once I had to go to the hospital in Mopti. Another time, I put a saw through my hand and it took a month to stop the pain. The problem is we don’t have any medicine here, so we just have to live with it.’
If you dropped out of the sky and crash landed in the village, it wouldn’t take you long to work out the local trade. You can see it in the damp trousers drying on millet-stalk walls, the bamboo cages hanging off the mango trees, the dewy, stretched-out nets under mop-headed doum palms, the fluffs of torn netting underfoot.
Khalil’s hut was at the back of the village, conveniently located behind a pump well. Ibrahim set down his brazier, while I went inside the rice-stalk tent to hang my mosquito net and lay down the rugs. When I came back out, Ibrahim was drawing his blade across the throat of a chicken. Thick spurts of blood guttered from its throat, turning to dark pebbles of sand. Ibrahim warmed the chicken on the fire, then plucked the feathers, skinned it and stuffed it in a pot. As for me, well, who’s to say peeling the onions with a penknife isn’t a mighty task?
‘I thought we might be eating fish tonight,’ I said.
Ibrahim shrugged. ‘Then we needed to catch some.’
That evening, after we had ripped up the fleshy chicken and scalded our fists in rice, a couple of old river hands came to meet us. One of them, Mohammed, had damaged his wrists, so he was mostly village bound; but the other, Galina, still roamed like Ibrahim. His eyes were gleaming like polished oar hooks and his arms were ropy with muscle, hanging from the broad loom of his shoulders. He sat restlessly, hands clasped at his waist, as if that were the only way to stop himself from charging back to his boat.
‘The best haul I ever caught? Hmmm, I’d say it was about 12 years ago.’ His lips curled a little, winched up by fond memories. ‘I went away for weeks. Oh, I can’t remember, it might have been months. I ended up at the frontier with Burkina Faso and I put out my net one day and after three hours it was too heavy to lift.’
He ended up with a sack load of carp, which earned him 100,000 CFA (about £125) – enough to buy a motorbike.
‘We had a big celebration when I came back,’ he said. ‘People danced, there were blessings from the elders, I bought a couple of sheep and everyone ate really well. It was a wonderful night.’
The fishermen all agreed that to pull in the best hauls, you needed to be versed in the ways of the river from childhood. Nobody but a Bozo could be a truly successful fisherman. It wasn’t just a matter of knowledge, it was something else, something in their bones and blood. And there was another source of fishing success – non-Bozos didn’t really get it, but the fishermen round here swore by it.
‘We have in our river’, said Galina, ‘a powerful genie. We call her Maryama. Whenever I set out, I take aubergines and a ball made from rice or millet mixed with groundnuts. I go to the middle of the river and give my offering.’
‘We all do,’ said Mohammed. ‘I used to fish
a lot in the Bafing area, and round there the genie is called Koria. You have to ask her help and you have to give her something.’
This, Galina explained, was the reason we had failed to net any fish earlier in the day. He turned up his nose at Ibrahim, expressing the elder’s disapproval for the younger generation’s negligence.
Mohammed was less hard on Ibrahim. ‘The problem is,’ he said, ‘the imams keep telling them not to do this. They tell them it is against Islam.’
This is one of many traditions criticised by conservative clerics, along with eating drowned animals and holding exorcisms conducted by gaws or spirit masters. Vituperating in mosques built on shady funds from the Middle East, these puritanical preachers have been netting young Bozos in towns like Mopti, rinsing the culture of its uniqueness.
‘But we don’t agree with all that.’ Galina threw back his head, wagging a finger against orthodoxy. ‘We are Bozo. When we marry, we have pirogue races and carry our brides on our boats, we beat the tam-tam and the women sing the faranga. That’s our culture, it’s what our parents handed down to us, and it’s the same with the genies.’
I would have liked to join Galina on his boat that night. There is no better time for fishing, he told me. When the river is quieter and there is less noise on the banks, the shoals begin to relax. But I needed to be back in Mopti by noon tomorrow, and he was heading in the other direction. So I contented myself with helping to push him out.
As we approached the shore, he touched my shoulder and I looked up. A magnesium flare was glowing in the sky, like a comet. A French fighter jet, I think, lighting a raid. A reminder that even here, on these peaceful islands on a tributary of the Niger, the conflict wasn’t so far away.
‘This life is not easy.’ Galina tipped his head, a gesture of acceptance, while I helped to pile his gear in the hull. ‘There’s a lot to think about. You have to change the nets every couple of months, there’s often problems with the boat and it can be expensive to repair. Then there’s the mosquitoes, and it can be lonely at night, and cold.’
‘And your children?’ I asked. ‘Will they do the same?’
‘My son sold a capitaine last week for 2000 CFA (about £2.50). I am happy my boys are starting to do this.’
He smiled, his eyes moonshine bright, a man at peace with himself.
‘The Fulani herd, the Bozos fish. This is our life, you understand? This is what we are.’
22
Spirits of the Niger
IT WAS JUST AS THE BOATSWAIN PREDICTED. AROUND THE TIME OF THE NOON prayer, more than a hundred people squeezed onto the top deck of the Tikambo, and plenty more tumbled into steerage. Then, for nearly four hours, they all stayed put, waiting for a sign of departure.
The covered part of the deck was taken over by women. They gathered on the floorboards, feeding their children, curling to the diesel-smelling warmth inside. Pirogues and dugouts poled out from the shore to sell them snacks while we waited, skiffs twisting between the dribbling cascades of poured-out potties.
The steering wheel was in the prow, connected to the rudder by chains running outside, so there was plenty of space on the foredeck. It had the atmosphere of an old-fashioned pub or a working men’s club. Men were slouching on packing cases or lying across spaghetti coils of rope, smoking cigarettes, drinking tea and laughing in low, piratical hoots.
We made steady progress, churning the river to a rooster’s tail. Pirogues arrowed beneath us, packed to the gunnels with silver heaps of dogfish, like the swag of some river-king, while fishermen plounced in the shallows with driftnets. Bozo fishing hamlets huddled over dim clusterings of pirogues, until fens of hippo-grass closed them off. Three branches fingered out of Lake Debo, and we followed the most permanently navigable, the Issa Ber. We were gliding into Songhay country – the land of the ethnic group that dominated when Leo Africanus came this way.
I stood over the railing, taking it all in, watching out for the ‘multitudes of … water-birds, which inhabit these marshes, and brood undisturbed by the people of the surrounding countries’, which René Caillié had led me to expect. The birdlife of the Niger has certainly felt the impact of the two tempestuous centuries since René’s visit, but diversity endures: every year, three to four million waterfowl use the Inner Niger Delta as a wintering area.
Raggedy herons parachute to the banks on stiltwalker legs, breast feathers trickling down their necks like beards made out of dishcloths. Kingfishers poke out of tunnels in the banks. Weaverbird nests hang from the bushes, echoes of the spindly thatching on the Dogon granaries. Most of the birds blend into the riverside col-our scheme, but occasionally a more daring tincture – the rump of a golden bishop, a bee-eater’s sulphurous throat – dazzles like a flashing light. It was the lack of reptiles and freshwater mammals that disappointed. This far west hippos are rare, and hunters have stripped the Upper Bend of manatees and caimans. Although this was actually quite reassuring when I found myself receiving urgent signals from my bladder.
‘Um … is there a toilet on the boat?’
I quickly regretted asking. The toilet was a rag-guarded hole near the stern. To reach it you had to climb along the freeboard, holding the grab rail and hoping no one jerked out an ill-timed elbow. I’d seen what the mothers did with their potties, so I was anxious not to misstep. It was the scariest toilet I had ever tried to use.
‘Come on!’ called out a Fulani dairy merchant sitting on the roof. ‘You’re a man, aren’t you?’
It was like stumbling onto a pirate ship and being ordered to walk the plank. The rail grew slippier, a little spray reached my shins, and I dived through the gap, feeling like I was carrying a barrel under my belly.
There was one more level to the boat – the liveliest of all. Up on the roof, raggedy men with flashing gypsy eyes sprawled under mattresses and coverlets. A couple of them were playing dice; one had a hip flask. They said it was cold, but to me the weather was perfect, a balm after the burning heat of day. When my designated sleeping space was swallowed by the families below, I went up and joined the top squatters, using a sack of charcoal as a step and someone’s hand as a guiding rope.
A sugar seller from Niafunké curled around my feet. My hip nudged against the belly of the dairy merchant. It was dark, but everything around me was clear – the stars, the fires in the hamlets, most of all the sounds. Perching birds churred and bullfrogs blasted to a distant thump of tam-tams. Water susurrated at the freeboard. I turned from the sharpness of the sky to the grooved skin of the river, tooled like a book cover by the fractured silver of the moon.
‘You must pray to God the river genies are merciful tonight.’ The sugar seller smiled behind a floret of smoke.
I told him about my conversation with Galina and the other fishermen in Kona Daga.
‘They are wise to make the sacrifices,’ he said.
That night was full of genie lore, embroidered no doubt to deliver its full shock effect on the goggle-eyed toubob. There was the genie who stole a royal horse and hid it in an underground city; the genie who stitched a girl back together after her unforgiving parents cut her to pieces; the genies who stole the eyes of people they had drowned and used them as delicacies in underwater festivities. The men who channeled these spirits were just as remarkable – gaws or ‘knowing ones’, wizards regarded with awe by the riverfolk, brought at great expense to the bedsides of the ailing.
One of the greatest of these wizards was Waada Samba, who cast his spells during the early nineteenth century. He was summoned one day by the Fulani theocrat Sekou Amadou to drive out the demons from his mad daughter’s mind. Samba held a batou – an all-singing, all-dancing exorcism – and the king’s daughter broke down the door to her chamber, throwing herself at his feet in a trance. The demons fled, recognising Samba’s power, and the princess collapsed, exhausted but exorcised. For Sekou Amadou, it was a turning point. He had distrusted the gaw until that time, but now he was forced to acknowledge their value. He loosened his persecution and
sent Samba back to his village loaded with gifts.
What this story expresses, like many of the tales associated with the djinn, is the tricky relationship between Islam and the occult practices that preceded it. No wonder the marabouts had been trying to monopolise magic. Everywhere I travelled in North Africa, there were pre-Islamic beliefs lurking under the surface. They were like the shoals of carp you saw if you squinted long enough when leaning over the railing of the pinasse.
2600 miles in length, the Niger is Africa’s most improbable river. It begins in the rainforests of Guinea, cutting through swampland before it hacks a life-giving loop through the Sahara. Subdued for a few miles, the sands slowly launch their reprisals and the river curls back in retreat, winding south through Niger and Nigeria, scissoring mangrove swamps and jungle until it spends itself in the Atlantic at the Bight of Benin.
Leo Africanus would tell you it runs the other way. ‘This land of Negros’, he writes, ‘hath a mighty river, which taking his name of the region, is called Niger: this river taketh his original from the east out of a certain desert called by the foresaid Negros “Seu”. Others will have this river to spring out of a certain lake, and so to run westward till it exonerateth itself into the Ocean sea.’
Did Leo even travel on the Niger? Was he wearing blinders at the time? His misorientation has provoked some damning criticism. EW Bovill (author of the historical classic The Golden Trade of the Moors) called it ‘a blunder of almost incredible magnitude’. It certainly didn’t do the European explorers any favours, leading them into all kinds of confusion until Mungo Park settled the matter in 1796 (although ancient authors like Pliny and Herodotus had long ago speculated correctly). Still, this does underline how seriously Leo was taken by European geographers for more than two centuries.
For those who traded on the river, there was never any doubt about its direction; and there were a great many who used it for trade. To the Arabs it was Nahr al-Abeed, ‘River of Slaves’. Gold diggers and salt merchants could just as easily have named it for their wares, so abundant were they on the riverways. Together, they underline the chief historical role of this remarkable thoroughfare: a marketplace luring desert tribes and sub-Saharans together.
The Timbuktu School for Nomads Page 27