Walking with Abel (21 page)

In the early twenty-first century, the bourgou and the world that surrounded it were changing once again, this time through the doings of man. A meteorologist showed me a chart: since the nineteen seventies Mali had become twelve percent drier and nearly two degrees Fahrenheit warmer. “Consequences are enormous!” an environmental engineer in Bamako shouted at me. We had met at a bistro; he was rushed and interrupted our meeting twice to take cellphone calls from his wife. I couldn’t tell whether to attribute his terse English pronouncements to his hurry or to the urgency of the subject. “Migrations! Droughts! Deep poverty! For us climate change is not a question of adaptation. It’s a question of survival!”

Nomads in the bush never had heard about climate change but they could describe with scientific precision its symptoms. They talked of how in recent years the wind had grown hotter and stronger and laden with more sand from the Sahara. Of how rainfall, never reliable in the first place, had become more fickle. Of droughts, always to be reckoned with, that now whammed the bush in rapidfire succession. Of seasons once attendant to the stars that now mostly ran off-schedule. During the famine of the nineteen eighties the Diakayatés had had to dig wells to water the cattle for the first time, and they’d had to dig wells again two years before we met.

But if the nomads doubted the stars, they did not show it. Nor did they accept a new identity as people who got water for their cattle from wells. Sita Louchéré’s wife, Hairatou, the mother of Mentou and Moussa, found the very idea to be a great insult.

“Rain—that’s our well!” she said. “If it rains over there tomorrow, we move. If we hear there’s food for our cows in Guinea, we go to Guinea. If we hear there’s food for our cows in Burkina Faso, we go to Burkina Faso. We rarely spend a night in the same place, so what’s a well to us?” But that year she and her husband and children would spend more than seven months in the camp near Doundéré.

—

An almost unbroken pattern of cumuli lidded the Sahel. The rare sunrays fell on the savannah in angled white beams. Oumarou greeted a succession of gritty yellow dawns outside the hut, hands hugging his knees under his tartan fleece blanket, little Amadou cuddled against his shins naked and with the distended stomach of hot-season malnutrition. Each morning the old cowboy would look to the south. He watched the southern horizon for the portent of the monsoon, and he divined the wind-punished land for a sign of how his animals would fare until the rains fell.

One morning Oumarou said:

“It rained somewhere last night.”

“How can you tell?”

“I can tell.”

—

Oumarou saw in the sky a military plane sail north between layers of cloud.

“Haven’t the rebels been finished yet?”

“No, there is still fighting in the desert. Now there are Americans helping the French fight the insurgents.”

“May God protect us!”

“Amen, amen, amen.”

“It had been years since we’d seen a plane and this year they fly over the bourgou almost every day. How big is a plane? Is it as big as a bus? How fast does it go?”

“Some are much bigger. And they are very fast. If you get on a plane in Bamako in the morning you can be on the other side of Mecca by night.”

“
La ilaha il Allah!
I’ve never even been to Bamako. I’ve never been inside a bus.”

“I’ve been on a bus to visit Drissa in San,” said Fanta. “And I’ve seen a boat from Bamako on the Niger River once. It was really long and it went
ji-ku
,
ji-ku
,
ji-ku
,
ji-ku
. Loud! It had a roof. I would be afraid to step onto that kind of a big boat.”

Indeed, boats were very dangerous. A man had told Oumarou once that when a boat entered the sea all people onboard had to prepare to die. He himself believed that people from the bush had no business venturing into the sea. But legends told that in the year 1311, Abu Bakar II, the sultan of Mali who preceded Mansa Moussa—the richest king in the world’s history—sailed across the Atlantic Ocean with a large fleet provisioned with gold and a year’s supply of water and food. Some said he arrived in Yucatán two hundred years before Hernán Cortés and was worshipped by the Aztecs as a god.

Oumarou saw a black kite swoop down for one of Sita’s chickens and make away with it. He shooed Fanta’s chickens into the grass shelter. Not out of care for the birds—he did not eat chicken or chicken eggs, because chickens would eat anything, even human sputum—but out of respect for his wife. Fanta kept them for cash: a good-size chicken would fetch in the market as much as two full calabashes of buttermilk, even more. A different story altogether were guinea eggs with their flinthard shells. Guinea eggs were better for a man’s blood than honey or beef, and almost as good as milk. “
Kural doktooro,
” Oumarou called them: an intravenous drip, a shot in the vein, a prescription drug. But Fanta did not keep guinea hens. They were too much trouble. They laid only when it rained or when you sprinkled water on them with a straw besom and they were very loud and tended to wander far from camp.

That afternoon Ousman returned to the camp from Wono, where he had spent the night drinking tea and gossiping with friends.

“Last night where I was staying there was a tiny bit of rain,” he said.

And his father said, “See? I knew it.”

A week later a massive lightning storm rolled into Bamako from the south, rimmed the capital with darts of electric discharges. Gusts pushed into the city the distinct smell of wet dust and ozone. The storm did not reach the bourgou.

D
ays and weeks progressed in miniature migrations. The morning rounds to greet the Diakayaté relatives. The twice-daily walks to pasture and back. The hikes for water. The walks to sell buttermilk. The walks or cart rides to market.

Mama went to Bamako by oxcart and truck to look for a cure for her migraines. In her stead her younger sister Bomel came for a long visit with Mayrama Skinny Butt, the small and whiny ten-month-old with giant eyes. Ousman sold a goat in Djenné to pay for a vet who arrived one morning by motorcycle and squatted to drink a calabash of fresh milk courteously proffered and vaccinated Oumarou’s herd against rinderpest, foot-and-mouth disease, bovine pleuropneumonia, and anthrax. There were other callers. Afo’s herder Kiso, a hired hand of such storied skill that other cowboys said he’d have to be buried with the cows when he died, limped by to fix his plastic shoe with the help of Fanta’s paring knife and coals heated on a tea brazier. Two young cowboys, one from Somena and another from Senossa, rode through camp on a motorscooter inquiring about the goats they had lost. A distant relative stopped for an afternoon bowl of leftover millet cream on his walk from Kouakourou to a marabout school in San. Within such movement, near and far, passed the month of May.

June delivered low thick blue and brown clouds and clammy cool air and swarms of mosquitoes. It rained to the south, in San and in Ségou and in Bamako. It rained to the north, in Moura and Kouakourou. Strong wind blew moist rumors of the monsoon, and the Diakayatés could feel in the coolness of the breeze rain falling someplace else. The bourgou remained dry. It had not rained there for ten months. Yet hopeful farmers had begun to stake out territory. They hoed neat wrist-deep pits for millet seeds that overwintered in giant straw thimbles and they burned fields to prepare them for rice. At night the pink flares of their fires lit the horizon around the camp; by day uneven patches of soot blistered the yellow savannah. The pasture was dwindling, and the moon grew fuller and rose higher into the sky and then it, too, dwindled once again to naught. The cattle grew thinner each day. There was little milk and Fanta’s trips to Weraka became rare. There was no more grass, only the sharp yellow weeds out of which the women wove mats. Cows had eaten the grass shelter in which Fanta had kept grain and chickens.

The Fulani were leaving the bourgou. In horsecarts, in donkey carts. In wagons pulled by cadaverous bulls. On foot. Astride burros saddled and bareback. They carried calabash pyramids and burlap mounds and cylinders of thatch. They carried babies and fowl and kid goats and newborn lambs. Some of these emigrants rumbled north to the Sahara, some west, to where the Niger’s sandy banks were less farmed, some east, toward the granite highlands on the border with Burkina Faso they called Hayré: the Stones. They fanned out from their singed promised land in caravans and in tandems and in single trundling equipages. They sent ahead of themselves their sons who drove to transhumance skeletal cattle with deflated humps and empty rumens. They did not know whether there was grass where they were headed, only that there was none where they were coming from. Their wake always was faintly perfumed with sour milk.

This was Hassan’s first season to drive cattle all by himself. An ageless coming-of-age rite. The boy was very proud. He had saved up the spending money his father had given him for tea and sweets and used it to pay a marabout for amulets that guaranteed extra protection for the cows and he hung the gris-gris on long woven leather strips from the cows’ necks and horns. At the beginning of the third week of June he told Oumarou it was time to move. The cows, he said, wanted to travel.

There still was no news of rain around Ballé, the village on the Bani River near which the family herd would stop on its way to Hayré. Ballé was a full day’s walk away from Doundéré. The old man ordered Hassan to wait. He waited. He became restless. He wanted to prove that his acumen with cattle and the gris-gris he had bought were sufficient for him to take the herd on the first leg of migration, to know when it was safe to go. On the fourth Monday of the month after the scant morning milking he took the cattle to grassless pasture and then hazed it east and drove it to the riverside grazing lands outside Ballé without his father’s consent. He had seen other men’s teenage sons do the same thing. He left behind a single cow in milk because he knew his father would become very sick if he had no milk at all to drink.

Several hours later, a horsecart carrying passengers from Djenné’s market paused on the northbound ruts outside Doundéré. A tall Fulani man in a brand-new indigo boubou jumped off and strode toward the Diakayatés’ campsite. Lean and lightfooted, he carried a small black faux-leather shoulder bag. It was Oumarou’s long-gone son, Allaye.

T
he greetings were cordial but subdued. There was no celebration. No words of acrimony, no inquiry into Allaye’s betrayal. No interrogation at all of his absence other than the prescribed polite question that the Fulani asked all arrivals: “How was your road?” The nomads were used to long separations. The strictures of their transhumance, its very uncertainty, demanded restraint. Allaye was here now.

He unpacked his shoulder bag in his parents’ hut. A cellphone. A charger. A frosted glass vial of knockoff cologne labeled
BOOS
. Three yards of sequined dark blue fabric for a future boubou. A black plastic bag holding several silver and agate rings. After the boy had stuffed the shoulder bag and its contents behind one of the reed hoops that formed the hut’s skeleton, Oumarou told him to milk the goats. That night he included Allaye in his prayers again.

I once had complained to Oumarou about my teenage son. Alone in Philadelphia he had misbehaved and I was seething for hours. At his indelicacy, at my helplessness. At my guilt for being so far away from him.

“Anna Bâ!” the old man said. “God created children so they may try the patience of their parents. But if we are angry with them for more than a moment we only punish ourselves. So it’s better for you to stop being angry with your son now.”

When a small child did something very wrong—hurt or endangered another child or someone’s animal, or played dangerously with a sword or fire—Fanta would wallop the delinquent once and firmly say, “Don’t!” Then the disciplining would end. There was no endurance to her annoyance, no lingering resentment, no prolonged berating. Maybe because in the bush there always was too much work to be done, and protracting a punishment for any transgression made no sense. Or else she knew how to let go of her anger once she had expressed it into the world, how to step over it the way she stepped over a furrow, or a rock, or a thorn on her path.