Walking with Abel (15 page)

“Where’s that?” asked Ousman.

“Ethiopia.”

“I knew we came from Ethiopia!” said Sita, and Oumarou said: “That’s what I heard as well. Ever since I was very little the elders have been saying the Fulani came from Ethiopia.”

Oumarou didn’t know this, but sixty years earlier, when he was a young teenager, the molecular biologists James D. Watson and Francis Crick had made public their discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA that had allowed men to begin mapping the history of our common journey. Since then, geneticists had pinpointed the origin of the Y chromosome of the Fulani haplogroup—called, under the deceitfully bland nomenclature of science, E-V38—to North or East Africa between twenty-five and thirty thousand years ago. One of the haplogroup’s two basal branches, E-M329, was found almost exclusively in Ethiopia.

Fanta wrapped around her shoulders the strawberry-print pagne she was using as a shawl that evening and said, “Hah! Good story. We should tell Hassan.”

“Yes, yes,” said Oumarou. “Hassan would love this story. He really likes stories about the old times. He likes all the stories from the Koran.” Of all Oumarou’s sons, Hassan was the only one who would not study in a madrassa. Like his father many years earlier, he was too busy herding cattle.

I did not know where in their vast collection of knowledge about the world the Diakayatés shelved my unverified accounts. Did they incorporate them into their own origin myths, along with the ornate allegories of Islam, the griots’ incantatory oral histories? Did they file them into the realm of fairytales, alongside fables of trickster hares, parables that traveled on transatlantic slave ships to the New World to become tales about Br’er Rabbit? Was there, in this birthplace of magic realism, any difference between the two? Did it even matter?

“Before us, our first task is to astonish, / and then, harder by far, to be astonished.” So ends one of Galway Kinnell’s poems. The Diakayatés listened to all stories, mine or any other’s, with an eagerness to be astonished that stilled me. Uncynical, devouring, enthralled. Their universe was at once scrupulously ordered and immeasurable, and it always had room for the unknown.

O
ne day Rabbit crawled into the deep den where Hyena had hidden her newborn cubs. All day for many days Hyena would hunt and scavenge, return to the den, drop the food inside, and go off into the bush to hunt and scavenge some more. Each time, Rabbit would snatch all the food before Hyena’s cubs could get to it.

After a while Hyena decided to see how much her cubs had grown. She came to the den and ordered them to come out. They staggered out skinny as death.

“What happened to you?” Hyena asked.

“There is someone in the den with us,” her children replied. “He eats all the food you bring.”

Hyena was furious.

“Come out, whoever you are!” she barked.

“All right,” said Rabbit. “But, if you don’t mind, can you please help me by taking my sandals first?” And he stuck his long ears out of the den.

Hyena thought the ears were sandals. In her rage she yanked at them with tremendous force and tossed them as far as she could behind her into the bush.

“Thanks for the lift!” called Rabbit, and was gone.

Back when Oumarou was a young man there were a lot of hyena in the bush. There were lion and cheetah. The cowboys had to stay awake all night guarding their cattle. But for decades most large carnivores had been gone, and the only reason to keep an eye on the cows at night was to make sure that they didn’t destroy any farms during the wet season.

As for cattle rustlers, it used to be that broadswords were protection enough, but that no longer was the case. The cowboys were outgunned. Few nomadic families owned firearms, and those who did usually had single-shot muzzle-loaders that bush blacksmiths welded out of car and bicycle parts and sold for twenty or thirty dollars apiece. They fired pebbles, not bullets. No one in the Diakayaté camp had a gun.

T
he Moura cattle rustlers had not been cattle rustlers at all. They were rebel fighters from Mali’s north. There were two of them and they were young and they carried FM 24/29 light machine guns. They didn’t want cows. They wanted cash.

Moura had no police force. The district gendarmerie, which was headquartered on the southern bank of the Niger a dozen miles downstream from Moura, in the compact port town of Kouakourou, led a brief and cursory inquiry into the incident. It concluded that after the French had begun to bomb the Sahara that January the pair had made their way southeast toward the northern bank of the Niger, toward Moura, where a few settled Fulani and two dozen rimaibe families lived in the low houses that knuckled out of the desert in dusty bas-relief.

One of the men got a job herding cows for a villager named Ambari Tiembiti, a father of seven. He lived in the desert with Ambari’s cattle and he introduced himself to Ambari as Allaye. He told some other villagers his name was Samba. Once or twice he came to Moura to dine on rice and fish at Ambari’s house. The Mourari said that he was a Fulani himself. It was possible that he was casing the town’s Sunday cattle market. Rebel groups across the Sahel targeted cattle markets because it was common knowledge that cattlemen came to such markets with wads of cash. Cattle were expensive. In Djenné a healthy bull could fetch between five hundred and a thousand dollars, a year’s wages of an average Malian government worker.

It was possible, too, that Allaye-Samba simply was taking a break from the war and the idea of robbing Fulani livestock traders came later.

No one in the village remembered seeing the other man before the morning of the attack. The cattlemen who saw the pair together in the market—the men who eventually killed them—said they seemed close friends. Neither carried an identity card.

Moura’s cattle market was a large banco corral at the southern edge of the village, where two deep, wide wadis rushed toward each other, toward the Niger. In early spring the wadis rippled with loose sand and gave the horizon an urgently convex feeling, as if the village were its own tiny planet, the Little Prince’s asteroid, as if it were about to slide off.

Six days a week the corral stood empty. On Sundays Fulani men in cowhide hats and indigo turbans filed through its single wooden stock gate and crammed it chockfull of animals, mostly calves and bulls. To cut cattle, cowboys walked through the pen in elegant zigzags and called with peculiar politeness: “excuse me excuse me excuse me excuse me.” Women with coolers full of hibiscus slushies made their timid way around all the men and cows, and boys perched on top of the walls to watch the slow minuet of the traders.

On the last Sunday in March two dozen men and about a hundred cattle had packed into the corral when the two gunmen walked through the gate and closed it behind them. They pointed their weapons at the cowboys and ordered all the men in one corner, all the animals in another. They ordered the men to empty their pockets.

Ambari Tiembiti recognized his new cowherd. He asked the young man to put away the gun and go home, go back to the bush, mind the cows. He told fellow traders to ignore the gunmen. They were just dumb kids, he said. He said he would not budge from where he was standing, smack in the center of the pen. At that point one of the gunmen—no one was sure whether it was the youth who had worked for Ambari or his buddy—raised his machine gun and fired and hit Ambari in the thigh. When Ambari did not fall, he shot him again. Ambari sagged to the dust and the gunmen ran out the gate.

The cowboys gave chase. In the square outside the corral a villager driving a horsecart saw the commotion. He put his horse at a gallop and aimed for the strangers with the guns. By the time the crowd of cowboys caught up with them, the gunmen were lying trampled and bleeding.

Someone telephoned the gendarmerie in Kouakourou. The district prefect, in turn, telephoned his supervisor in Djenné, who told the prefect to send gendarmes to Moura and kill the gunmen. The prefect gave the order, then telephoned Pygmée with news of the attack. By the time his gendarmes arrived in Moura, the mob already had dragged the gunmen’s bodies to the patch of dirt in front of the mayor’s office.

When I came to the village a week later, a Mourari named Amadou Tamboura described the lynching in fast, clipped sentences. “They were on the ground. They couldn’t get away anymore. So the crowd clubbed them. I certainly clubbed them, too. And I had my hunting rifle with me, so I shot one, but by then he was already dead. Then the children stripped off their clothes.”

Boubou Koïta, a young rimaibe villager, showed me a video he had taken with his cellphone after the gendarmes had arrived. Two bodies on two straw mats, brained, faces pulped, one naked from the waist down, crotch and head sprinkled with straw. Civilian men and gendarmes in uniform are standing around. The gendarmes are taking notes without touching the bodies or turning them over. Everyone looks grave.

“The men clubbed them so badly you couldn’t tell where their faces were anymore,” said Boubou’s aunt Kumba. “It was horrible how they killed them.”

In a trice Moura had become a village of murderers. War does such things.

The gendarmes took Ambari Tiembiti, wounded in both thighs, for treatment to a Malian army garrison a two-hour drive away. Before they left they ordered the villagers to bury the gunmen in the desert.

On my way to Moura I had stopped by the Kouakourou office of the district prefect, Sheikh Oumar Coulibaly. The prefecture was a single-story concrete box uphill from the river. Linoleum tablecloths covered two shabby desks, tin shutters shaded a glassless window. A corrugated roof sagged through a ripped-up drywall ceiling. On the unpainted concrete wall behind the prefect’s plastic swivel chair an old brown leak stained the wall. A memory of the last rainy season, or of several rainy seasons past. There was no electricity, the humidity from the Niger clung to the skin, and the prefect was sweating in his Western suit. He called the gunmen rebels.

“This is the problem of the North,” he said. “It’s all the war in the North.”

The prefect was frustrated and overworked. We spoke for about an hour and all the while old men from the bush kept filing into his office, asking for papers, for solutions to land disputes, for money. Some carried their market purchases: smoked fish, new plastic mats, goat and cow skins they would use as prayer rugs. Many were Fulani and spoke no Bambara or French. The prefect spoke no Fulfulde. His backwater appointment exasperated him. He rode his motorcycle to Djenné as often as he could and spent long nights at Pygmée’s bar drinking Castel beer and watching music television.