Walking with Abel (14 page)

On the afternoon of the roundup a young heifer calf broke from the herd and planted her two front hooves on top of the mat where Oumarou was sitting with his legs tucked under him. This was not something cows did. Cows stayed within their trampled circle beyond the calf rope.

“What?” Oumarou said. “No.
Shht!
Go away.”

The calf stood. Without rising Oumarou reached with both hands and pushed against her chest and neck. But almost on their own account his hands began to wander and caress the animal’s neck, massage her cheeks, pet her hard ears. Pitying their grandfather’s inability to discipline his cows, Kajita and Amadou came over to help. They hit the calf: Kajita with her small fists, Amadou with an empty plastic water bottle that he had been trying to kick over the roof of Oumarou’s hut. The old man reprimanded his grandson sharply.

You never hit a cow with anything but the clubbed shepherd’s staff. It was best if you did not hit her at all. You massaged the folds of loose skin under her chin, here, you see, where it was the silkiest, and you pushed her away with both hands against her neck, like this, tenderly feeling for ticks in the process, and you touched the rhinarium with the inside of your palm to check if her rubbery skin was dry, to check that she wasn’t ill.

The calf liked that. She leaned deeper into Oumarou’s arms with great bovine pleasure and then she stepped onto his mat with all four of her hooves and lastly she lay down on the mat and rolled over to her side and arched her neck.

“Hah! In all of my life I have never seen a cow behave this way, Anna Bâ!”

And the old cowboy and the children and I leaned over her to caress the satin of her dewlap, the long cool crest of her snout beneath which the nasal conchae accumulated the secret recognition of milk and grass and man, the dry leathery nostrils, the bristle on the side of her ears. We felt and squeezed the warm little horns, hard and barely an inch long and storing the day’s heat. We played with the soft fat of her hump and marveled at its curve.

“Amadou, see? When this cow is older and it eats a lot of grass and it likes the taste of that grass it will grow a huge hump. All of us in this camp won’t be able to eat the entire hump of a single bull that’s eating well. We won’t even be able to finish the marrow from one of its legs! When this cow becomes an adult and eats well it will walk and its hump will sway left and right, from side to side, like so.” Oumarou fishtailed his right hand before him for a long time, savoring the sway of it, swimming in that imaginary abundance. Picturing the journeys the cow would take and the tall sweetgrass it would eat to grow such a hump. Probably picturing, too, his own paths following the cow on such journeys and maybe also remembering all the paths his narrow feet had walked already, following other cows with swaying humps and udders full of milk. Then he said: “A cow without a hump is not beautiful.”

The calf then turned onto her back and lifted her left hind leg the way a dog would, begging. Oumarou scratched the coarse hair on her stifle. He rubbed her stomach. He petted her hind flank. The bottom loop of his turban was pulled down to his chin and I could see: the old man was smiling.

After dinner little Amadou stepped with purpose through the dark and entered the circle of cows and approached one and stood next to her. He had spent much of that day playing with toy cattle he had molded out of clay. Horns and humps and all, each cow no larger than a thumb. Clay cow figurines much like Amadou’s smattered the ancient town of Djenné-Djenno, the Iron Age excavations in Daima in northern Nigeria, the settlements of Tilemsi Valley near Gao, where, in the fossil deposits from the Eocene, archaeologists also found the forty-five-hundred-year-old signature of the earliest domesticated pearl millet in the world. Perhaps Stone Age cows, too, trampled Stone Age farmers’ millet. Perhaps their owners petted them as well.

Amadou made his toys mount one another and suckle. He made them slumber together on the corner of his grandfather’s black plastic tarp. Here the cows left the tarp: they went to pasture. Here they were returning, single file. Here they were gone again, but not all—the calves remained on the tarp, so that their mamas could lactate. Amadou was not old enough yet to help Hassan take the cows to pasture, but in a couple of years, after he turned seven, Oumarou would trust him to herd cattle on his own during the Hoping, when the cows are familiar with the daily itinerary and know where to graze and when to return to camp. That was something to look forward to. Oumarou also had promised Amadou that if the boy played with toy cows a lot he would grow up to own a very large herd.

Now Amadou stood next to a real breathing cow, dwarfed by her mammoth body. This was the cow that calved on the day I first met the Diakayatés. Most cows were named after the color of their hide and this one was called Gunel—Murky, Dark—because when she was born her color was unclear. He ran his hands along her jaw. He rose on tiptoes and touched her horns. He flattened his feet again and fondled her dewlap, flapped it like a heavy curtain. He reached up and fiddled with her shrunken hump. He caressed her coarse flanks. He felt up her front leg and found a tick and studied it a moment and flung it away. Then they just stood together, boy and cow, the boy’s nose to the animal’s shoulder, his hands on her dewlap. In the starlight they appeared metallic blue, almost translucent.

A
t the edge of the fen one evening I knelt in the mud and watched a cow the color of burnt sugar lower her nose to the spot where the wetland met the red soil in the thinnest film of water. Without ever lifting her muzzle the cow ripped intently at small blades of hippo grass and quivered with just her skin, which had bald patches where some other cow had nicked her with its horns, and from her black and polypous lips thin silver threads of saliva flew through the setting sun. The air around her smelled of some intrinsic remembering. She exhaled noisily and moistly into the water through her nose so that the water bent in two perfect narrow sprues and I loved being present for her gorgeous and trusting warmth.

Around midnight, before the cattle moved to nightherd, a bull gingerly sidestepped my sleeping mat on his way to the low grass shelter in which Fanta kept her chickens at night and chewed on the roof awhile.

A
t the end of March, Pygmée came to the bush on his beat-up Toyota motorscooter to help me with translation. Before dinner his cellphone rang. He looked at the number and answered in French.

“Oui, mon général!”

He spoke for a minute and hung up and relayed the news to the Diakayatés. Two bandits armed with machine guns had entered the cattle market in Moura, a large village north of the Niger River, and opened fire. A Fulani man was wounded. That’s all he knew.

Cattle raids have been part of Africa’s pastoral life for millennia—long enough for Neolithic artists to paint them on the granite of Jebel Ouenat. But until recently the raiders had used bows and arrows, spears, machetes, or simply stealth. Twenty-first-century rustlers were performing the ancient rite with automatic weapons, an inheritance of modern, mechanized wars. Scores of men often died in such raids.

“Ay, ay, ay,” Fanta said, and licked the back of the ladle to taste if the rice she was cooking had enough salt. “Even the way people steal cattle is new because of the war in the north. We are not used to this.” But Oumarou said: “That’s on the other side of the Niger. Here it is safe. Don’t worry.”

Fanta brought from the fire the dinged aluminum basins with rice and spicy baobab sauce and the men and women bent over the food in two small circles. I thought that a longer conversation about the war in the Sahel would follow but none came. Rinsing her fingers after the meal in the rusty tomato paste can, Fanta said, “It’s strange that in this world it can be night here and day someplace else.”

And Oumarou replied, “The world is very big. It is impossible to understand most of the things in it.”

—

After dinner Ousman squatted before the front wheel of Pygmée’s motorbike and caressed the spokes with gentle fingers. He was lonely because his wife, Bobo, was with her parents in a town a two-day walk away, recuperating from the birth of their second son. The baby’s name was Afo, after Afo Bocoum the
diawando
. Their firstborn was named Hashem, after Oumarou’s father, who had died when Ousman was a small boy. Because Oumarou’s father had made a pilgrimage to Mecca and young Hashem had inherited his name in its entirety and inclusive of all honorifics, the toddler was sometimes called, and responded to, “al Hajj.” Ousman missed his boys, and he missed sex with his pretty wife.

“Can you ride a motorcycle, Anna Bâ?” he asked.

“Only as a passenger. Can you?”

“The same. Can you ride a bicycle?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t. All I know is how to herd cattle.”

“That’s more than I know. Will you teach me?”

I had come to study. Weeks earlier, in Djenné, I had hired an English instructor to teach me Fulfulde. Monsieur Koulibaly was a small, wasted man with insulin-dependent diabetes. The antiquated blood glucose monitor he had bought years earlier on a rare trip to Bamako was unreliable and he was often very sick. He had almost no teeth. He was forty-seven and looked sixty. I met him at a mercantile in front of the Grande Mosquée. His English was immaculate, careful, slow. We held our lessons whenever I came to town. He was a perfect teacher. He spoke only Fulfulde in class, demanded faultless pronunciation, tolerated no mistakes, and admonished me for slacking off on homework. I had middle-school anxiety dreams about flunking out. Monsieur Koulibaly said: “I will be glad to give you the knowledge I have. Amadou Hampâté Bâ—do you know him? A great writer!—he said, ‘Knowledge is the only thing you can give away without losing any.’”

Ousman said he would teach me to herd cattle and to milk cows, and Fanta, who lay on my mat, said: “White people have a lot of knowledge. We Fulani are red people, almost like white people. The Bambara people and the Bozo and the rimaibe are black people. Black people are dirty.”

Where does bigotry come from? The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who worked in Africa for decades, told an audience in Kraków in 2003: “I the Self can exist as a defined being
only in relation to
; in relation to the Other, when he appears on the horizon of my existence, giving me meaning and establishing my role.”

Bisecting the world into the Self and the Other is a primal need, our most rigid Manichaean impulse. At some early point of our history it may have been a matter of survival. We probably needed it to limit our impulse for empathy and compassion to extended family, immediate kin, ourselves. Bigotry may have kept a prehistoric mother from starving her own child at the expense of her neighbor’s. It preempted generosity that would have endangered the giver. It underlay ownership. “Me and my clan against the world; me and my family against my clan; me and my brother against my family; me against my brother,” goes a Somali proverb.

In the twenty-first century bigotry found its ultimate outlet in borders, points of tangency that allowed superstitions to swell to magnitudes of statehood, that bound real or perceived economic hellholes to imagined lands of plenty. Prejudice blossomed on both sides of the partition, took the shape of desire and envy on one, vigilance and pity on the other. Masked militiamen guarded theological divides. Frontlines delineated perimeters of life and death. “Three possibilities,” Kapuscinski said in another lecture, “have always stood before man whenever he has encountered an Other: he could choose war, he could fence himself in behind a wall, or he could start up a dialogue.”

“I’d like to tell a story,” I said, and the Diakayatés sat up to listen.

I said that the first anatomically modern humans appeared around two hundred thousand years ago, in Africa. That these humans were the ancestors of us all—of Fanta and all the Sankaris, of Oumarou and all the Diakayatés, of the Bozo fishermen and of the Frenchmen who flew airplanes, and of me and my parents and my son.

Oumarou nodded.

“Go on.”

I said that between a hundred thousand and sixty thousand years ago some of us stayed in Africa, and others passed through a strait between Africa and Mecca called the Gate of Tears and trekked north and east on journeys that themselves took thousands of years and that took the travelers far to the other side. That our skin pigmentation and hair texture and eye color changed gradually and much later because of those journeys, as some of us had to acclimate to the sunless winters and bracing winds of new lands—that skin tone could change over a hundred generations—but that any two people anywhere in the world, regardless of the shade of their skin, were almost identical in their human makeup and could trace their origins, our beginning as a species, to a tiny group of the same shared ancestors in one single place.