A Single Swallow (26 page)

She hugs me again and her driver takes me away. I think of her, working, with the laptop under one hand and the plate of food under another, the lights on, the television on, the telephones on, doing three things at once and in the back of her mind always counting, counting the days until her girls come back from England for the school holidays. She fills every week, every night and every weekend with work. The Nigerian media have already identified her as an inspirational figure: perhaps some day the world will know her name.

Abuja has two significant seasons, but this is the third, between the wet and the dry: this is the season of the harmattan, the wind from the north-east, which fills the air with a yellow haze of sand.
Nothing much moves; one or two kestrels, and straggled flights of swallows – the first time I have seen them in a city. They are not pausing, but going north. I am hurried too: according to my Algerian visa I should be entering that country in four days, and I still have to cross Niger.

Today I will cross the fault-line that runs across Nigeria, dividing the Muslim north from the Christian south. Beyond that line Niger, Algeria, Mali, Mauritania and Morocco are all Muslim. Below it, behind me, is Christian and Animist Africa. A frontier in many ways far more mighty and significant than all the borders I have crossed will pass, unmarked and invisible. God is about to change His name, the demands he places on His followers and the list of His prohibitions. As symbols, the swallows are about to change too. Associated with the resurrection in Christian Europe (because they arrive at Easter), with household gods in pre-Christian Rome and with good fortune in ancient Greece, in the Islamic world they are also seen as a holy bird. The Koran tells of Allah's sending swallows to defend the faithful, when an army of Abyssinian Christians is besieging Mecca:

‘And he sent against them swallows in flocks; claystones did he hurl down at them.'

Some writers have speculated that the idea of the swallows hurling stones may have arisen from a mistranslation: rather than ‘stone' the original sense may have been ‘smallpox scab', implying that the swallows spread disease among the Christian army. Although there is no biological record of swallows carrying disease to people, in our own time there have been numerous scares about bird-borne diseases. West Nile Virus and Avian Flu both summon images of birds dropping from the sky, dead, bringing plagues against which our frontiers, our lines of control and all the demarcations with which we divide the world, are powerless.

White Peugeot taxis are the way to go north to Sokoto. We are cramped again, but not nearly as badly as I have been. We are driven too fast again, but yesterday has raised my terror threshold. The road
sweeps out of Abuja and the scenery rapidly changes: first the greens become duller and more tired, then the petrol tankers are replaced on the roads by lorries carrying tottering stacks of firewood, all heading north. As the Sahel becomes denuded and the Sahara spreads south this most ancient form of fuel is trucked up to the pasturalists of the north.

The ground is yellower and hotter and the towns become whiter. Now instead of churches we pass mosques. Changing taxis at Kaduna, where riots over a Miss World competition killed 150 in 2002,a woman begs for food or money – the first time I have been asked for either since Congo. We travel all day. Strangely, though the sun sinks in the afternoon the temperature does not abate. The truck-stops and taxi parks are chaotic, crammed and deafening, but away from the towns the country seems to stretch out and empty. We come to Sokoto in the dark. The hotel is hot and stuffy; in the room next door a large party of Muslims ignore the Prophet's injunctions against alcohol and play loud warbling music. I have a hotel routine, now. Check for hot water. Seal all cockroaches in the bathroom. Strip bed and check for insects. Run through all the television channels, right to the end of the sixty-ninth screen of fuzz. Watch one cycle of TV5 Monde, the French rolling news channel. Write diary, if not too tired (in which case do it over breakfast), otherwise watch a film. Lying on a bed on the Nigeria–Niger border I watch Mark Wahlberg in the true story of an out-of-work, divorced man who becomes the star of an American Football team. The film makes great play of the hardship of living in a depressed, post-industrial American city, but it fails to make it unattractive: people stick together; men play football; there is a pretty barmaid interested in Mark Wahlberg, who gets a job in the same bar. Philadelphia looks fantastically advanced compared to Sokoto or even Abuja. The camera's polarising filter makes colours richer than they are; the casting director has chosen an attractive supporting cast. The hardship of western life is made to seem seductive, like the first part of a fairy tale destined to end happily. The films which come closest to showing our lives as they really are are never worldwide blockbusters. It is as though we cannot help but flaunt our fortune in the
face of the rest of the world, or, alternatively, that we cannot quite bring ourselves to be honest about it.

The next morning another crammed truck-stop yielded a comically cool driver and a battered Nissan.

‘Where are you going?'

‘Niger.'

‘Right let's go!'

‘But I want to share with other travellers.'

‘Ha! No one else is going to Niger – what's there, after all?'

‘Oh OK then . . .'

A dusty landscape turned into a sandy one, with thorn scrub, acacia trees, and camels. If there was still a distinction between the Sahel and the Sahara I could no longer see it.

We stopped a little way short of the frontier at a roadblock. The driver performed a U-turn.

‘Goodbye,' he said.

‘Any ideas?'

‘Look for a boy with a motorbike.'

The boy appeared. We rode for a while, then turned off the road at the border, a collection of huts scattered like litter around some thorn trees. My motorcyclist whirred me from one to another. Neither he nor any of the other locals crossing the frontier was asked for anything by the border guards, which gave the disorienting and peculiar impression that a frontier invented by Europeans was still manned and maintained primarily for their use. A young man who said he was a member of Niger's security police beckoned me into a hut where the fan had died and the table was not safe to put weight on. We were about the same age, equally bemused, and addressed ourselves to the task of completing various documents as though it was a joint test, which we passed, to mutual satisfaction, in record time.

The pale grey heat of the morning deepened and the sky became a hot, naked blue. The roads of the little town of Birni n'Konni were soft sand and the atmosphere was entirely changed and yet familiar, suddenly, as if the breath-held tension of Nigeria was released, in crossing the border, into an endless sigh. People moved slowly,
keeping to the shade, drank coffee and spoke French again. I sat at the perfumed feet of a money-changer who explained that all the Central African CFA francs I had brought with me from Cameroon were useless: here in Niger they use the West African CFA, and no one would change one to the other. The bus station was a quiet sandy compound, a shaded waiting area and one or two other passengers, including a young jewellery trader who showed me silver from the desert and talked about rebellion.

‘The Touareg are at war,' he said.

The boys selling fizzy drinks and boiled eggs waited in the shade, emerging reluctantly into the flaying sun when someone approached their stall. The bus appeared, on time, and we boarded. Most of the passengers huddled in their seats, holding ragged curtains across the windows against the light. My neighbour was a Touareg, an elderly man whose dark brown face was beautifully framed by his blue robes and turban. We compensated for having no common language with elaborate politeness. We never took a sip of anything without offering it to the other; he stood aside for me with great show; I thanked him with bows and smiles.

Beyond the window the desert was made of light overlapping in unfinished rectangles: silver-yellow sand ran to a sky which leached into a sun too hot, too bright, too vast to look at. Shadows were small, dark living things; everything else was still. The thorn trees, the scattered dark stones and the emptiness around them were motionless. Road-workers and swaddled men hanging on to passing trucks waved, moved and made noise, but under the rule of the heat and the intense light the midday seemed indifferent to life, if not hostile.

We stopped every couple of hours in little villages of colour and shadow, where clay walls made dwellings and yards conjoin, simplicity multiplying into intricacy: a hut was linked to another via a compound wall which in turn was connected by a passage to a mosque. It was as if the villages were seed-beds for growing and propagating shade. As we pulled in, people rushed forward: women half-sold, half-begged; boys waved bottles; men had furls of mutton skin and fat, frying on hot plates, and long knives with which they
pared pieces off. Many of our passengers disappeared, at a sundown stop, to pray.

At one stop we all disembarked to eat and relieve ourselves. The lavatories were a row of low huts at the far end of the compound where the coach had halted. Those in need hurried towards them, then, as they approached, veered sideways away from the doors. The stench was stomach-turning. I followed the stream of passengers around to the back of the building, where a narrow strip of ground between the shed and the fence was strewn with faeces, with people squatting among huge lizards which seemed to be feeding off the waste. It was the most revolting latrine I had ever seen. I'll hold it for as long as it takes, I resolved.

As the sun sank and the sky trembled with carmine and purple streaks, the driver turned on his radio and a high, racing song came from the speakers: a keening sound, fiercer than a lament and more urgent, driven by drums. My neighbour saw me lift my head to it and he smiled and said the only words of his I understood: ‘Rai!' he said. ‘Algerie . . .'

Rai is a form of protest music from Algeria, as culturally powerful and pervasive as hip-hop is in the West. The drums race, the melody is fast and breathless and vocals are a kind of bitter, longing wail. I could not make out many of the words of this song except the chorus line: ‘
C'est payant, Monsieur, c'est payant
. . .'

‘It costs, sir, it costs . . .'

While hip-hop has spawned a global industry in which enormous profits are made from ever-higher production values, rai is composed of the caustic, sometimes scornful, anthems of an entire generation of young Algerian men who grew up squeezed between violence, corruption and poverty. Rai does not sell perfumes, jeans or trainers.

As the desert darkened, the sound seemed to swell. It was like a secular mirror of the summons of the muezzin, but it was neither a call to prayer, nor to arms or celebration; it was more like a sardonic lament. While hip-hop's central motif is machismo, the aggression of young men, their totemic evocation of guns, gangs and girls and their rage against the ghetto, rai sounds like the product of a sadder, wiser
culture. It is not the sound of an oppressed section of society, but of entire societies, entire countries, ghettoised; it evokes archipelagos of the dispossessed.

 

THE CANOE LEAKS
steadily: we pass around the cotton and the knife, taking turns at tearing off strands from the grey-white lump and packing them into the cracked wood with the blade. While one of us does this the other two paddle. Niamey soon fades back from the banks and the town becomes the country: low sandy shores crumble into the ruddy river. In some places the edges of the water are alive with people washing, swimming, splashing or fishing; between them are peaceful stretches peopled with kingfishers, geese, ducks, herons and ibis. Sundown on the Niger is a busy time. Our captain knows many of those we pass: fishermen coming downstream on their canoes wave or nod gravely. Our captain is a person of some importance.

‘Giri-giri,' he says, with a wink, as if this explains it.

‘I'm sorry?'

‘Giri-giri – witchcraft!'

‘Are you a witch doctor?'

‘Not any more. I was.'

‘What happened? I mean, what changed?'

‘Ah, well, people became frightened, so I had to stop.'

‘Frightened?'

‘Yes! Imagine, if a man comes to attack you and he comes running at you and just before he hits you he raises his stick, his club, and Paff! The stick in his hand turns into powder! That happened to me, and people began to say I was giri-giri, so I stopped.'

‘Do you miss it?'

‘No. And my wife is happy that I stopped – ha ha!'

‘Is there much giri-giri in Niger?'

‘Oh yes, a great deal. Your swallows, for example.'

‘What about them?'

‘You can use swallows for witchcraft.'

‘How?'

‘Well first you must catch a swallow. That is very hard to do. But you must catch one and kill it – with a sling, or with gum on the reeds where they roost. But it is very hard.'