Walking with Abel (13 page)

The prefect’s office was closed for market day and Ousman’s effort to obtain an identity card went no further than the photo session. He and Boucary walked back to the bush and returned to camp in time for the evening milking. I stayed in town and walked to the house of Pygmée the bar owner and sat by myself on the steps that led from the second-floor galleries to the flat clay roof. Night belted forth the grinding of streetcorner diesel rice mills, the monotonous recitations of adult madrassa students two alleys away, Malian pop tunes, laughter. The city smelled like the fish and millet and rice Djenné’s ten thousand women and girls were preparing inside their walled patios. Around their cooking fires the town’s adobe homes swayed together and fell apart like a mismatched collection of beads on an endlessly coiled string. Above, the low sponge of the sky dripped a billion stars.

Courtyard by courtyard the town cut the black into lopsided rectangles. I walked up to the roof and looked down. An irregular honeycomb unevenly lit by incandescent bulbs, each cell its own iridescence and brightness and shade, and in the center of each tiny human figures reached into the common bowl of their poor-man’s evening meal.

—

That winter astronomers at the European Space Agency released a heat map of the universe as it had appeared three hundred and eighty thousand years after the Big Bang. Nascent buds of future galaxies hurtling into becoming. Around them nothingness, the Beginning. It was hard to create the space within myself to accommodate that kind of infinite life-giving void. I wondered whether the scientists who did also could create some inner space to be more accepting, more curious, more forgiving.

M
arch. The squalls of harmattan were over and dry spring heat was building in the bourgou. The water in the fens fell day by day and in its sunwarmed slug lay the uneaten rhizomes of hippo grass, catfish burrows, cowries blown or dropped here who knew when, strange benthic life. Day and night tipped equal. Gamma Aquarii—Sadalachbia, the Lucky Star of the Tents—had faded from the sky and gave way to Alpha Piscium: Alrescha, the Rope. It was roundup time.

Oumarou’s nephew Sita had the family brand. He had tethered seven yearlings to the calf rope he kept staked under the acacia nearest his hut: two tawnies, three fawn heifers, a red bull, a black bull with white flecks on its rump like a map of the sky. On a hot and low fire built with a bucketful of dry manure he heated the iron until he could see the metal’s glow even in the bright sun. Then he pulled his broadbrimmed hat of faded red leather and canvas deeper onto his brow and walked up to the reata.

He was in his fifties and taciturn and he had a handsome goatee that was just starting to gray. His full name was Sita Diakayaté but that was also the name of his cousin, Oumarou’s other nephew, Salimata’s husband, who was almost as old as Oumarou and had no front teeth and whose hair, what was left of it, was completely white. The two Sitas set up their dry-season huts fifty paces apart, to the north of Oumarou’s. To differentiate between the Sitas, people at the camp called Oumarou’s older nephew Sita Dangéré, Sita of the Crossing, because he was born during transhumance just as his family was preparing to cross a river—though no one knew which river that had been. Because of Sita’s age it was impolite to ask. The younger Sita they sometimes called Sita Louchéré, after the village near which he was born, but usually they simply called him Sita because that was easier.

The fourth old man at the camp was Oumarou’s uncle Isiaka, a tiny and starveling cowboy who favored acid-green boubous and spoke in falsetto babble. Isiaka was a year or two younger than Oumarou, camped two hundred paces to the south, and had the most cattle of the four men. Although he had grown sons, most of the time he herded his cows himself. He was even more obsessed with the healing properties of milk than Oumarou and steered most conversations toward lectures on the subject, and everyone in the camp made fun of him for his shrill rants. But all of them loved him and, in secret, worried awfully about his health.

Sita untied a tawny bull, placed a hand on its rump, talked it nearer the fire. His son Moussa, who had shaved his head to shed his fever and speed his passage from the state of illness to the state of health, pushed the bull down on its left side and squatted next to it and put his weight on its neck. He had changed out of his Obama t-shirt into a blue boubou and was shod in someone else’s maroon flipflops with faded plastic daisies on the thongs, and squatting there he quietly told the animal things. Maybe soothing whispered promises of health and a fat hump and a grassy abundance. Maybe threats. Hassan, Oumarou’s youngest boy, pinned down the bull by kneeling on its hind legs. Sita picked up the branding iron and leaned over the bull and drew a long stripe from the flank and up the right side to the rump, then retraced it again and once more. Then he seared one small cross into the bull’s right shoulder. The animal trembled the first few times the brand touched it, then quieted, breathed shallow breaths. When the boys released the bull it sprang to its legs and ran off to rejoin the herd.

“A Fulani’s ID and his passport are the brand on his cow,” Afo Bocoum once told me. Sita’s brand was a long straight line up the flank and a small cross on the shoulder. Oumarou’s a long-stemmed T with short arms, singed from the stomach up to the right thurl, and a small cross on the shoulder. Afo’s, three strokes on the thurl. The Petrie Museum and the British Museum in London carried elaborate bronze branding irons from ancient Egypt that dated back to the second millennia
BC
, the brands themselves cartouches bearing human and animal shapes and the names of pharaohs, but the Diakayatés’ simple footlong piece of hooked metal etched into the skin of their cows stories that may have been older even than that. Each line spelled a lineage. A brother who cut his cows out of a family herd added a symbol to the existing family brand—a stroke, a crossbar, a serif. If you could unravel the ideograms, decode the stems and the necks, you could trace the genealogy of a herd to the owner’s ancestors, to some of the first branding irons ever to sear a zebu hide. When you placed your hand on a cow’s flank the whole history of pastoralist Africa pulsed under your palm.

The iron was graying. Sita dropped it on the fire again and waited till it regained its glow. The boys brought up the other tawny. Then the black. The three fawns one after the other. When Hassan untied the last animal, the red bull, it darted to the side and whammed its flank against the boy’s light body—“Hey, what? Stop!”—and galloped off toward the shrinking fen, toward Doundéré—
“Ya Allah!”
—and Hassan started to laugh and Moussa gave chase, laughing also. Soon the entire camp stood outside their huts and laughed as Moussa grabbed and grabbed for the jinking bull, the boy bald and too skinny after his illness and tripping in the borrowed flipflops like a desperate rodeo clown and the frightened animal bucking and dancing in circles and kicking up clumps of red clay with its hind legs and the boy cavorting around it—

“Go get him, Moussa!”

“Left left left—
left,
from the left!
”

“Go go go, Moussa—no, the other way!”

“Eh, Moussa, save the dancing for a wedding!”

—and Moussa in his distance-darkened blue kaftan like a giant glossy starling afloat in the field of crushed straw, until at last he grabbed the bull’s tail and then caught its hind leg and by that leg and tail he dragged the animal back to his father’s branding fire. The bull tossed its head and its three other hooves grooved long lines into the bourgou. The boy threw the animal on the ground downwind of the fire and so close to the heat its eyes went white and wild. Sita retrieved the redhot iron. The bull groaned once, twice, and then was quiet.

“Beautiful bull,” said Sita.

Oumarou had branded his cattle the day before. His yearlings had already forgotten the pain. At the dying breakfast fire young Kajita, Oumarou’s seven-year-old granddaughter, squatted in handstitched blue underpants with crude white basting showing and watched one of them lick rice crusts from a pot.

B
y the sixth millennium
BC
the relationship between man and cattle along the Nile was sacrosanct. The earliest ritualistic burial of cattle, at Nabta Playa in the Nubian Desert, has been carbon-dated to 5400
BC
and contains a complete skeleton of a female cow. Around that time, a prehistoric artist painted on the granite and sandstone slopes of Jebel Ouenat, a mountain on the crossroads of present-day Libya, Sudan, and Egypt, an image of two children suckling from a cow’s udder. Two adults—the children’s parents?—are standing by, content. In another painting archers are fighting for a cow. Arrows are flying everywhere. Some men look dead. The cow is just standing there, as cows are wont to do. Probably chewing cud.

In his 1902 book
Affairs of West Africa
, the British journalist Edmund Dene Morel recounted a story about a French officer in the Sahel who had commandeered some Fulani cattle, penned them, and posted sentry a light cavalry recruit from North Africa. Around midnight the sentry woke the officer,

informing him with much solemnity that it would be necessary to slaughter the black bull at once. “Are you mad?” cried the astonished Frenchman. “Not at all, Lieutenant,” replied the soldier imperturbably; “it is the cattle that are mad, for the Fulani are calling the bull—listen.” Stepping out into the moonlight the officer listened. Presently from a neighbouring hill came the sound of a plaintive chant. At the same moment a violent disturbance took place among the cattle. The officer hurried toward the pen followed by the sentry, the chant meanwhile continuing in a cadence of inexpressible melancholy. The commotion in the pen increased, and before the Frenchman could reach it, one of the beasts was seen to clear the enclosure at a bound and crash through the bush, following the direction of the sound and bellowing loudly the while. It was the black bull. He had broken the halter which bound him and leapt a palisade five feet high! With the disappearance of the bull the chant abruptly ceased. Next morning the Fulani were nowhere to be found.

Poor French lieutenant. He should have known: Africa’s nomads have been retrieving their livestock from cattle rustlers forever.

Cows have changed little since Nabta Playa. Nor has the mystical connection between cowboy and cow faded. In the early twenty-first century, pastoralists across Africa decorated their cattle and sang their praise songs as they had done for thousands of years. Ousman and his friends stored dozens of such serenades on their cellphones. “My bull is the fattest bull to cross the river,” they went, and “my cows and I climbed a mountain before it even began to rain / and my tawny bull carried all the ropes,” and “I’m the Fulani cowboy who herds the red bull, / so all the other cowboys should just shut up.” At the beginning of each rainy season, Hassan paid a marabout to make gris-gris that would help his father’s cows get very fat and protect them from evil spirits, from cattle thieves, from breaking into farmer’s fields, from getting lost during transhumance. Hassan kept secret the name of the marabout and where the marabout lived, because giving away such information would have lessened the power of the spells. Of a good cowherd, the Fulani said: “He will be buried with his cows.”