I decided to catch the boat to Timbuktu in Mopti, a major trading center about 200 miles southwest of the legendary port. On my way to Mopti, I stopped for a few days in the city of Ségou, where I saw the river for the first time.
It was after dark when I made my way through the dusty streets to the banks of the Niger. I’d arrived from Ghana in the late afternoon, found a guesthouse, eaten, and showered. The day had been overcast, and the night was now very dark, with neither stars nor moon showing through the thick cover of clouds. A few streetlights and glimmers from windows illuminated my way. When I reached the river I saw a vast stripe of darkness that was more like an absence than a presence. On the bank a group of men huddled around a fire. Coming closer, I saw the fire’s light reflected in the water. Then I saw pirogues— the long, slender canoes of Mali—floating in darkness, their silhouettes supple bows against the reflected light.
It’s hard to explain what I felt then, or why. The water’s fathomless darkness seemed to beckon, as though it would draw me in. I’d never thought of myself as a spiritual person, and yet I’d spent my adult life seeking something. In that moment I felt that the river would change me, though I had no idea how.
The city of Ségou was a charming blend of old and new. Donkey carts, bicycles, mopeds, and taxis rattled side by side down the wide colonial avenues. Decaying mansions lined the boulevard, laundry hanging from their wrought-iron trellises, their yards full of banana trees. Alongside the great river, the earth had regained its color again, and red dirt like the kind I’d seen in Ghana replaced the pale desert dust.
Mali felt like another world. Here, the turbans of the desert began to appear. Old men walked the streets, their light-colored bou-bous reaching almost to the ground. The walled alleys made me feel as if I were in Morocco again. Hidden houses, hidden lives.
The Niger by day was a green expanse, striped with dark currents. The rocky beach was littered with bleached bits of paper and plastic. On my second day in Ségou I sat on a cement promontory overlooking the beach for much of the afternoon, observing the goings-on. Below me, women washed clothes, dishes, and their own bodies in the river. Some beat the clothes on the rocks, slapping, twisting, and wringing, while others scrubbed pots and pans with sponges made from the dry brown fiber of weeds. One woman sang a lyrical, slightly plaintive song in a high, nasal voice. The tone was pure and unadorned, beautiful in its openness—a bright free sound offering itself to the world.
Later, a group of teenage girls gathered on the beach, singing upbeat songs in brassy voices. They were playing a game. They stood in a three-quarter circle, holding hands, as one girl at a time separated from the chain, stepped back, then ran and hurled her body forward against the linked arms of the others. Red Rover, we used to call it, except these girls didn’t form teams. For them it wasn’t about competition, apparently, but about the exhilaration of hurtling your body into space and being caught and held.
Throughout the day, as I perched on my cement outpost, skinny children approached me, their faces smeared with dried snot and pale with dust. They wore oversized torn clothes and held tin cans or calabashes in their outstretched hands. They mumbled unintelligible strings of words in sugary voices, smiling vacant, ingratiating smiles.
From what I could see, these begging children were the poorest people I’d encountered on this trip. In Ghana I’d seen poverty, malnutrition even, but never such forlorn, naked hunger. The expressions on the children’s faces chilled me, and I remembered that Mali, once a wealthy empire, was now one of the poorest countries in the world. I distributed what money I had on me, then shook my head apologetically and turned out my empty pockets until they wandered away.
Halfway between the capital city of Bamako and the desert gateway of Timbuktu lies Mopti. The city of Mopti was originally built over several islands, which were later connected with dykes and landfill. In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, when Timbuktu was a great commercial center and seat of higher learning, Mopti was little more than a village. Now Timbuktu has fallen into decay, and Mopti houses the Niger River’s most vibrant port.
The port of Mopti is a sweeping expanse of pebble beach bustling with trade. In the packed riverside market, people hawk boat tickets, mats, cloth, blankets, and food for the journey. Others sell jewelry, leather goods, amber, and masks. Tablets of salt, also for sale, glow like enormous ice cubes in the afternoon sun. Women in bright cloth wraps with babies on their backs and men in bou-bous and turbans mill about, buying and bartering at top volume. Fabrics dyed in indigo, made in Guinea or by the Dogon people of southern Mali, are popular in Mopti. Standing at the top of a sandy slope, I looked down on a full range of blue and purple garments, from pale lavender to deepest navy, interspersed with splashes of other vivid fabrics, including decoratively painted rust-colored mudcloth.
I finally located Mohammed Hammed, an elderly gentleman in an electric blue turban who sold boat tickets to Timbuktu. He was standing on a wooden crate, next to a stand overflowing with oranges.
“You must go to the airport!” he shouted in French when he saw me.
“I don’t want the plane; I want the boat!” I shouted back. I’d been warned by other vendors that Mohammed Hammed was hard of hearing.
“The steamboat, it is not in season!”
“I don’t want the steamboat. I want the pinasse!”
In the wet season, tourists rode large steamboats to Timbuktu, but in the dry season you had only two options for river travel: the pirogue (canoe), or the pinasse (motorized canoe).
He stared. “You want to ride the pinasse? With all the African traders—black people—with their goods? No private cabin. No ‘comfort-of-home.’ ”
“Yes, that’s it. The ancient trade route,” I nodded vigorously. “No comfort! Crowded, smelly, difficult. That’s what I want.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “Well . . . Let me see if I have a ticket . . .” He made a show of shuffling through a small stack of papers. “Hup! One left. Six mille CFA. Six thousand francs.”
“Oh, come on! I saw you selling that guy a ticket for half that!” I indicated a portly African man who’d just walked away with a ticket and a bag of grain.
“You people take up space for two. You are not used to travel like we do. Will you be able to sleep like this?” He crouched, hugging his knees to his chest.
“Forty-five hundred?”
“Five thousand.”
“Including food?”
“Oh all right,” he said, with a you-drive-a-hard-bargain sigh.
I did the conversion in my head—a comforting trick when you know you’ve haggled terribly. After all, it’s only twenty bucks.
“The trip will take two days,” said Mohammed as he handed me my ticket. “Maximum three.”
“I heard it could take a week.”
He looked offended. “A week, never!” he scoffed. “Four days if you have very bad luck. But no. Not even four. Three days. Not more than three.”
I was just getting settled on the boat, arranging my backpacks, oranges, and burlap-covered jerricans of water around me, when a burly African man appeared above me, blocking the sun.
“All these people are savages!” he boomed. With a grand sweep of his arm he took in all the other passengers on the boat. “They have never been to school. They live like animals. Me, I don’t like savages.”
“Hello?”
“Bonjour, I am Touré. Comment ça va? What is your name?”
“Tanya.”
“Excellent! I’d like to sit here with you, Tanya, to profit from your company.” He plunked his canvas satchel onto my grass mat. His French was rapid and murky—I strained to understand him.
“You are not sleeping here,” I said, alarmed.
“I don’t sleep,” he said impatiently, making himself comfortable beside his satchel. “I go days without sleeping. Where are you from?” He glanced at my bag. “America?”
I nodded, and his eyes lit up with a familiar
gleam.
“I want to go there with you, Tanya, to your country. Can you help me to get a visa?”
“I don’t work for immigration.”
“You can sponsor me. Vouch for my character.”
“I—”
“I would like to go there and open a store for women’s shoes. They say that women in America will pay $200 for a pair of shoes. One can easily get rich with shoes.”
I sighed. “It’s actually not—”
“Very rich.”
“There are a lot of poor—”
“Ha!” He stretched out his legs, propped his head against his bag and said firmly, his tone brooking no argument, “The poor in your country would be rich here.”
The floor of the boat was piled high with sacks of grain, creating a treacherous, uneven surface. We spread our grass mats across it to stake out territory.
The pinasse was an oversized, pregnant canoe, with a roof over the middle and a motor in the back. Sitting in its covered center, I felt like Jonah in the belly of the whale, looking up at a sturdy rib cage of bamboo poles with woven raffia stretched across the top. Sheets of raffia rolled down over the sides at night to keep out the cold.
The boat was about thirty feet long and nine feet wide. The roof—which covered about two-thirds of the surface area of the boat, leaving the front and back open—was so low that a fivefoot-five-inch person such as myself had to bend over to walk in the covered area. In the center of the boat, there was a sharp drop in the floor where the sacks were cleared to create a kitchen. Down there, a stocky adolescent girl was busily arranging pots, coal ports, charcoal, and a collection of stubby logs. There, too, was where the water-bailer stood, already performing his endless task.
All around me, men, women, and children ran on and off the boat, carrying tied-up bundles and wedging them in between the sacks. They’d see me, do a kind of startled double take, then launch into what I call “the ça va dance,” a murmured stream of dialogue accompanied by hand gestures: “Ça va? Ça va bien? Ça va la santé? Ça va la famille? Ça va le déjeuner? Ça va le Mali? Ça va le voyage?” This continued on and on, with slight variations: “How are you? How’s your health? How’s your family? How was your lunch?” And you responded: “Ça va. Ça va. Ça va . . .” It took me several days in the country before I learned that you end the exchange by saying, “Ça va tout.” Everything’s fine.
At first people left a wide margin around my mat, but eventually the boat got too full, and they had to move in closer. In the end, about thirty adults and fourteen children fit tightly atop the sacks, with about a foot of space between us.
“You people are educated,” Touré said to me. He was spreading out his things now, making himself ever more comfortable on my mat. “You know how to make things: telephones, computers, cars . . . And you all read. Not like these animals here. Me, I like to read.” He produced a dog-eared French novel from his bag.
“You know, not all whites read—”
“Well, I never met one who couldn’t. You and me, we are alike, Tanya. Toi et moi.”
I couldn’t shake Touré. Whenever I attempted to converse with another person on the boat, he placed himself in the middle, translating. When I misplaced things, which happened at least every half hour, Touré asked, “What are you looking for?” When I grudgingly named the item of the moment (water bottle, socks, sunscreen, etc.), he performed a vacuumlike search of the surrounding sacks, never hesitating to push other passengers out of the way or reach beneath the men’s legs. Within minutes he would hold the missing item aloft, proclaiming proudly, “It is here!”
He was a muscular man, with a sly, wise face that seemed to smirk in repose. He had a strong jaw and cheekbones, and his golden-brown eyes had an Asian slant. His movements were abrupt and impatient; he seemed combustible. He ranted incessantly about the ignorance and stupidity of the other passengers, but at the end of these tirades he always burst out laughing. His laugh was infectious. For all his abrasiveness, he could win a crowd.
“Your French is not so good, Tanya!” he crowed, as I strained to interpret his marble-mouthed dialect. He had a huge vocabulary, and seemed to enjoy employing a range of words I’d never heard.
“You don’t know the meaning of that?” he shouted with glee. “This is a word every schoolchild knows! It is too bad I don’t speak English. The rest of these animals speak no language at all,” he waved his hand in disdain at the other passengers, “no French, no English—only African dialects: Bambara, Songhaï . . . How is your Bambara, Tanya?” He barked with laughter.
The morning wore into afternoon. The announced departure time of the boat was 9 A.M., but by 3 P.M. it showed no sign of going anywhere. Some people got off the boat and browsed the market. Children ran up and down the shore. Ice water, peanut, and banana vendors came onto the boat, hawking their wares to those who’d stayed on board to guard their spaces. A dry breeze moved through the boat. Touré lay back against my backpack, gazing ahead in a zombielike trance.
“These people are all thieves,” he announced abruptly.
“Stop that,” I said, trying to shush him.
“I know them,” he insisted. “I have been in prison.”
“Really?” I paused to digest this new piece of information. “What for?”
“Commerce.”
“Commerce?”
“You know, commerce,” he shrugged impatiently, then made a series of illustrative gestures, pointing to his nose and sniffing, putting his thumb and forefinger to his lips and sucking in air, then tapping out a vein in his arm.
“I get the picture,” I said dryly.
“So you see,” he continued, “I know what it is like. There are thieves who ride these pinasses waiting for their chance. Sometimes the owners and their families are in on it.” He looked suspiciously at the chunky adolescent girl de-stoning a pot of rice in the sunken kitchen. “I will help you to keep an eye on your things.”
The irony that I should trust an ex-convict to guard my belongings seemed lost on him.
“Thanks,” I said. Shifting impatiently, I asked him when he thought the boat would leave.
“The boat will leave when it is completely full,” he said.
Buses operated under the same principle, but somehow I had never gotten used to it. I glanced around at the packed boat. “So you think about fifteen minutes?”
He laughed appreciatively. “You people,” he said, shaking his head and wiping his eyes. “You live by the clock.”
Where had I heard that before?
At four o’clock that afternoon, we left Mopti for Timbuktu.
Going to the bathroom was a problem. I watched the other passengers for clues. A little boy was given a plastic bowl, which his mother then emptied over the side of the boat. Later, under cover of darkness, I noticed a woman sitting on the side wall, placing her body outside the rolled-down raffia shade, her hands clinging to one of the bamboo poles for support. For once I was grateful for dehydration.
When I finally had to go, I was in the uncovered front of the boat, huddled under a scratchy handwoven blanket. I’d come out to watch the stars. Men were stretched out all around me, but it was dark and half of them were asleep. I made my way to the side of the boat and then discovered the problem. Out here, there were no poles to hang on to. I giggled nervously.
“What’s the matter?”
I was surprised by a nearby voice speaking precise, European-accented French. I couldn’t make out the man’s face—just the pale outline of a slim body topped off by a turban, like a dandelion with an enormous, puffed head.
I giggled, put a hand to my bladder, indicated the edge of the boat.
“I see,” he said. “Here, hold my hand.”
His hand was slender, delicate almost, and unusually smooth. His voice, too, was gentle and soothing. There was something very comforting about him.
I started to climb onto the low wall, then balked. “Ooooh . . . I don’t know.”
“Everyo
ne does it,” he said easily. “I will turn my head the other way.”
So it has come to this, I thought as I leaned back, holding this stranger’s hand. I’d done holes in the ground, seething pits, rooms full of sand, buckets, even the group toilet in Apam, but here was something new. For the longest time nothing would come out. Come on. I wanted to kick my body like a horse. The stranger would wait silently, it seemed, for as long as it took. Eventually it came, and with the sound of the water all around me, I could barely tell when my own flow began and ended. When I pulled myself up, the end of my skirt was soaked from dangling in the river.
“Thank you.”
“Everyone does it,” he repeated cheerfully, and returned to his contemplation of the stars.
I headed back into the covered section, ready for sleep. In the warm glow of the kerosene lanterns, I found it transformed into a cozy house. I picked my way through a carpet of bodies sleeping sardine-style, head to toe. I was glad, now, that I’d paid for extra space. But where was my mat? I scanned the boat, disoriented, trying to locate a vacant spot.
Oh, no.
Touré was sprawled diagonally across my mat, snoring. Only a tiny triangle of space remained between his body and a bamboo pole. I looked around for another spot, but every inch of space was taken. Sighing, I tried to squeeze myself into the available space, pulling my knees to my chest and resting my head against the pole. I tried to sleep.
I couldn’t sleep.
“Touré!” I whispered, shaking him lightly, then harder. “Touré!”
I pushed him; I tickled him; I pulled him. No response. An old man just past Touré’s head sat up and glared at me like an angry ghost.
“Je m’excuse,” I mouthed.
The water-bailer temporarily abandoned his task and came over to help, shaking Touré’s foot and calling to him in Bambara. I tried to move one of Touré’s arms, and that’s when I discovered something peculiar. At first the arm moved floppily, the way a sleeping arm should. Then it tensed and became steel. With all my strength I couldn’t budge it. Either he was faking, or his guard never came down, even in sleep.
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