Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  If the returns are so low, why spend all these hours in such backbreaking work? I asked, stupidly. An older woman responded, not troubling to hide her scorn: Because we’re hungry. Because we have no money. Because we have to buy food. Because we have to buy clothes. Because we have to stay alive. Because in one month we won’t have even these few insects. Because there’s nothing else we can do to make money at this time. Because it’s something, and doing something is better than sitting at home doing nothing.

  She continued: Sometimes there are years when the houara don’t arrive at all. But when they do, they help us build capital. With the proceeds from collecting, we can buy cooking oil, plastic bags, and everything else we need to sell masa, deep-fried millet cakes. With the proceeds from that, we can save a little more, buy our children things they need, create a little security. There are years when so many houara come to the village, she added, that we can even buy a cow. But what we can’t do is store the surplus against the times of hunger. They keep—that’s not the problem—but we can’t do without the cash.

  She turns back to catching insects under the shadeless sun. The rest of us follow suit and are soon scrambling around chasing houara in the dust. And what I remember best about this is that Boubé was really good at it, that he kept going long after Karim and I had given up, that he really didn’t want to leave, and that in no time at all the rest of us were standing out there under that everlasting blue sky watching him digging in the bushes and laughing at his success.

  A few days later, there were again four of us passing through the police roadblocks and bouncing along the red road north from Maradi. This time, Hamissou was busy elsewhere, and we were accompanied by Zabeirou, an energetic presence in the front seat next to Boubé, explaining in a stream of Hausa, French, and English how he had become the largest criquet merchant in Maradi, if not in the entire country.

  From 1968 to 1974, a savage drought and famine, compounded by outbreaks of Schistocerca gregaria, destroyed Niger’s groundnut economy. Hunger forced farmers to abandon export cropping and return land to subsistence foods, the displacement of which had so undermined their security. Across the Sahel, between 50,000 and 100,000 people died. In Niger, groundnut production plummeted from 210,541 tons in 1966 to 16,535 tons in 1975.21

  But by the mid-1970s, some of the world’s largest deposits of uranium, discovered by the French atomic energy commission in the Aïr region, were filling the fiscal void. At its height, uranium provided well over 80 percent of the country’s export revenues and stimulated a national economic boom. But by the early 1980s, following the meltdown at Three Mile Island and the success of the anti-nuclear movement in Europe and the United States, the price of uranium began its long fall, a slump from which it is only now emerging.22 Production of uranium in Niger collapsed along with the price, once more throwing the economy into a revenue crisis and even further on the mercies of the multilateral donor agencies and their punishing financial prescriptions.

  At the beginning of this cycle, the uranium enterprise SOMAIR—a subsidiary of the French nuclear conglomerate COGEMA—built a new mining town out in the desert 150 miles north of Agadez. This was Arlit, called Petit Paris for its expat-focused amenities, such as supermarkets stocked directly from France. It was here that Zabeirou had worked as a laborer until 1990, when he left with a payment of 150,000 CFA (something like $550 in those days). He moved back to Maradi and, once there, started to study the markets. He quickly saw that there was a high demand from women for criquets and that—unlike other popular goods—there were no big operators working the trade. The alhazai of Maradi had failed to step in, and business was dominated by petty entrepreneurs.

  As he tells it, Zabeirou moved decisively to become Niger’s first serious criquet merchant. Armed with his Arlit capital, he built up his stock by buying all the animals he could from rural collectors. Once he’d cornered the market, he slashed his price deep enough to force out the competition. With his monopoly in place, he raised his prices again and soon recovered his losses.

  Nowadays, the competition is more serious and Zabeirou’s business more elaborate. He has a network of informants scattered in towns and villages around Niamey, Tahoua, and Maradi and across the border in northern Nigeria whose job is to seek out houara in times of scarcity. He also has buyers, each with a budget of 300,000 CFA, whom he sends out from Maradi and Niamey to procure in villages and markets. It’s a wary world. Zabeirou keeps his sources secret. Often, he keeps his own location hidden too, moving around clandestinely, letting people think he’s in Maradi checking on supply when he’s actually doing business in Niamey. It’s a wary world, but it pays off: there have been times when he has made 1 million CFA in a week.

  When he is in Maradi, Zabeirou is most likely to be at Kasuwa Mata, the Women’s Market, a mostly wholesale market on the northern edge of the city dominated by women traders. Kasuwa Mata is a staging area for goods arrived from the countryside. From here, they go to the Grand Marché and other outlets in town, to markets elsewhere in Niger, and to buyers in Nigeria. Zabeirou has a well-stocked stall here, a destination for middlemen like Hamissou and for women collectors arriving from their villages with houara for sale.

  He has four resale options: he can retail directly from his stall; he can wholesale to traders in Kasuwa Mata and elsewhere in Maradi who then resell in the local markets; he can send sacks by truck for his employees to sell in Zinder, Tahoua, or Niamey; or he can take the houara to Nigeria. At this time of year, a time of high prices and scarce supply, many of his customers are women who prepare the animals for their preteen children to sell from metal trays balanced confidently on their heads. It’s a popular spicy snack, tiny packs of five or six insects for 25 CFA that other children buy outside their elementary schools or bigger packs for 50 CFA that the drivers of kabu-kabu, motorbike taxis, stand crunching as they wait for their next fare.

  Zabeirou led us to a storage facility behind his stall and showed us some of his stock. Sacks and sacks of criquets, several months’ supply, 2 million CFA worth, he said. He would add to them over the next few weeks—until there were no more in the countryside and the price started to rise. Then he’d release them to the market. Good business, we all agreed.

  Three wives and ten children. A large house with a walled yard close to Kasuwa Mata. Zabeirou’s prosperity was matched by his expansive manner. Karim and I were cautiously pleased that he’d decided to adopt us. After a couple of hours on the road, we stopped in the market town of Sabon Machi, where he insisted on buying us a breakfast of masa and sweet tea. Another couple of hours and we arrived in the village of Dandasay.

  Zabeirou’s brother Ibrahim is one of the three schoolteachers here. He has a quiet and gentle manner quite different from that of his older sibling. As we talk, I’m thinking what a sympathetic teacher he must be. He is telling me that parents in the village have so little cash that he is scared when he sometimes has to ask them for 10 CFA for supplies. He introduces me to his colleague Kommando, a strikingly tall, thin man with a similarly kind demeanor. Karim figures out that Zabeirou hasn’t been here before. Off-road on the last stretch of the journey to Dandasay, we’d been forced to stop for directions more than once. As we pulled into the village, he’d ordered the children who raced to greet us to run and tell their mothers that he’s here to buy houara.

  It turns out to be a complicated day. Assuming the twin roles of tour guide and impresario, Zabeirou has decided we need to see houara being prepared for sale. He begins to organize the performance but has barely started rounding up likely women when he discovers that the collectors have yet to come back from the bush and no one here has any fresh criquets. In the meantime, women alerted by their children have emerged from their houses with small bags of insects. Normally, they take these to the nearby market in Komaka or to Sabon Machi, bigger and further away, or, on a Friday, to Maradi, much bigger and further still. Normally, Zabeirou would have buyers waiting for him in those markets. But today is a
special day, and he sets up shop behind our truck and starts to deal.

  He hasn’t got very far when a group of men arrives to invite us to a cebe, a baby’s naming ceremony. It’s on the far side of the village, so Zabeirou suspends operations, and we make our way through the narrow sandy lanes to where the first row of chairs has been vacated in front of a thatched patio beside a small house. The imam takes his place on a mat among a group of senior men, and the audience watches, periodically joining in to recite the blessings, as the dignitaries move through the solemn ceremony. It’s calmly meditative, and everyone is focused on the chants with a quiet intensity. But as the service proceeds, I gradually become aware of what sounds like a spirited debate going on behind us. I turn around, and there’s Zabeirou in position again at the back of the truck, bargaining with a line of women waiting to sell their houara.

  We’re treated too well here. After the ceremony, the father of the child invites us all to eat first, before his other guests. Karim, Boubé, Zabeirou, Ibrahim, and I enter a small round building and are served an elaborate meal of millet and meat. We reemerge to hear that the collectors have returned from the bush. A fire is hastily lit outside a nearby house, and a young woman (decidedly unimpressed) begins heating a large pot of water under the gaze of what is by now a sizable crowd. As the scene develops, Zabeirou offers detailed National Geographic–style commentary for our benefit and repeatedly cautions me not to miss the opportunity to take photos. When the houara arrive, he dumps them in the boiling water, takes the young woman’s stick, and not letting up his patter, shoves the flailing animals deep into the pot. The women who perform this mundane operation on a daily basis are shut out of the circle and wander off to more compelling things. The men take turns poking at the pot, closely watching something that they, too, must have seen untold times but takes me entirely by surprise: as they churn in the roiling water, the tan-colored insects rapidly turn pink, resembling nothing so much as cooked shrimp and, in that moment, opening an unlucky door into other universes of possible fates.

  The insects boil for thirty minutes. Meanwhile, Ibrahim and I chat with the maigari, the headman of this large village, and with a few other men. They tell us that the criquet pèlerin was here sixty years ago but has not been back since. These older men remember the destruction but—like the men in Rijio Oubandawaki—it’s not something they dwell on. Rather than this once-in-a-lifetime apocalypse, it’s the less exotic houara like the birdé, with their grinding away at everyday food security, that preoccupy them.

  Kommando is part of this conversation, too. As it ends, he tells me that he used to work in a village about sixty miles north of here called Dan mata Sohoua. We should visit, he says. The chief there can tell us about the locust invasion of 2005. It’s quite a story. Just then I spot Zabeirou across the crowd. He has a tia and is using it to measure out the women’s insects. To the sellers’ dismay, he piles the animals high, mounding more and more until there must be as much as 40 percent extra heaped on the basin, which he then tips into his sack. As I watch, I recall how he always gives an additional “social payment” when he sells in Kasuwa Mata, how he piles on varying amounts depending on the status of the buyer (a widow, for instance, may get more), so that the houara spill over the lip of his tia in a gesture of generosity that is, however, somewhat more modest than the one he’s managing today.

  The drive back to Maradi is uneventful. Before we leave, the woman who had begun boiling the houara is called back to spread them on a blue tarpaulin so we can watch them dry in the sun. Zabeirou declares himself satisfied with the day’s program. As we approach the city, he asks if I’ll be back soon. I can’t offer a date, and we all slip into our own thoughts. When we reach Zabeirou’s house, his demeanor changes abruptly. Eschewing conventional sentimentalities, he demands payment for his services, apparently forgetting that our outing was conceived under the banner of international friendship and that he has already done rather well from the women of Dandasay. Karim is infuriated, and we enter into testy negotiations, Zabeirou refusing to let us leave until an unhappy compromise is reached.

  The three of us drive back across town feeling irritable. But the mood doesn’t last long. Our sense of purpose returns when we decide to follow Kommando’s advice and head out early the next morning for Dan mata Sohoua.

  7.

  According to the World Bank, the invasion area of the criquet pèlerin extends over 20 percent of the earth’s farm- and pastureland, a total of 11 million square miles in sixty-five countries. Control measures, primarily surveillance and chemical spraying, focus on outbreak prevention and elimination in the recession area, the drier central zone of this region, the 6 million square miles within which the animals mass. The reasoning is simple: once the hopper bands have undergone their final molt to become winged adults and the swarm has taken to the air, the only option is crop protection through upsurge elimination on-site, an option with very low rates of success. Crop protection in the village, Professor Mahamane Saadou had told us, is a mark of the failure of prevention in the recession area. It means villages are saturated with pesticides—some that are banned in Europe and the United States—placing in jeopardy both the members of the village brigades who apply the chemicals (often without protective clothing or adequate training) and the community’s food chain and water supply.

  As Kommando had promised, the chief of Dan mata Sohoua was keen to tell the story. The locusts arrived from the west, he said. It was October, just after the rainy season. The millet was fully ripened, but the harvest had not yet begun, and the grain was still on the plants. The timing could not have been worse.

  At first there were only a few, the harbingers—as Chinua Achebe has it—sent to survey the land. They appeared around midday. The children came running from the fields to raise the alarm. But none of the adults went to look. They knew it was already too late. By the time darkness fell, the swarm had arrived.

  The next morning the village was overrun. The houara covered the ground. They covered the bush. You couldn’t see the ground. You couldn’t see the millet. People tried to chase them away. They used tools, they used their hands, they set fires. They tried to save the millet by picking it from the plant. What could they do but heap the seed heads on the ground? By the time they turned back, the insects were all over them.

  On the morning of the second day, the maigari and a group of senior men went to Dakoro, the nearest town, to alert the Agricultural Service. Normally, the maigari told us, the Agricultural Service paid no attention to the problems here. But that day they came. After inspecting the fields, they advised people to pray. There was nothing else for it, they said.

  Nonetheless, later that day a plane arrived to spray the area with pesticides. As it flew overhead, the houara took off. At first it seemed as if they were leaving the village, but instead they took aim at the plane. They flew straight for it, enveloping the cockpit, swarming over the wings, trying to force it up and away from the village. The pilot changed tactics. He couldn’t come in low. Instead, he tried to spray alongside the insects, but they scattered and the chemicals had little effect. The animals were disciplined and organized. It was as if they had a commander and were following orders.

  As if they had a commander. Every day, they started work at exactly 8 a.m. No, not because it was cold before then. That’s what everyone thinks, that they were waiting for the heat to warm their wings. But, no, it was because they had their workday. Like white people. They started at 8 a.m., never earlier. As it got close to 8, they became restless and ready to fly. The commander gave the order, and they began. When they took off, they flew low, scouring the ground for food, always ready to land. At 6 p.m., they stopped. Like an army with a commander. These animals were intelligent. It was as if they had binoculars. If they left anything, they turned around and came back for it. If one of them was injured, they turned around, came back, and ate their fallen comrade rather than leave it on the road.

  There were people who set fir
e to them in the mornings as the houara massed there waiting for the order. It was a mistake. It was just a provocation. If they managed to kill a sackful like that, they could be sure that double that number would soon arrive to take their place. Everyone stopped going to the fields. When they went outside, they had to cover their faces. Adults stopped children from going into the bush.

  On the third day, the locusts left. There was no more millet. They’d taken it all. But they’d left something of their own. Two weeks later, the eggs hatched, and the hoppers emerged from the ground. This time was far worse than before.

  A small girl walked across the sand to where we were seated under a generous shade tree. The afternoon air was hot and still. In the distance, we could hear the rhythmic thuds of women pounding millet. The maigari sold the girl a few bouillon cubes. A thin-faced man seated behind a tabletop sewing machine picked up the story as the rest of us, six men and two women, listened.

  We’d never seen these houara before, he said. Even people 100 years old had never seen them. We called them houara dango, destroyer crickets. They were bright yellow on the outside, black inside. The yellow came off like paint if you touched them. They were so strange that at first we thought they’d been invented by white people. The old people told the children not to touch them. The goats that ate them aborted, the chickens died. Not from the pesticides, as you might think, but from some tiny insects that lived inside the houara. The chickens and goats weren’t safe to eat. We had to destroy them. The houara entered the wells. They poisoned the water. Not even the cattle could drink from that water. Someone in another village ate them, and he was sick, vomiting for days. We couldn’t eat them. If we could, there were so many we’d be eating them still.