Walking with Abel (25 page)

B
oucary’s cart was the slowest in the caravan. The donkeys trotted for the first few miles, then tired and slowed to a trudge. I walked beside them. Boucary whipped the animals and called out the names of things he saw on the road and asked me to name them in English. Horse. Field. Hut. Sky. Cow. Like Chatwin’s Aboriginal people we sang the Earth into existence.

By the time the family reached Senossa, the old capital of Sekou Amadou’s caliphate, it was almost noon and the wind had picked up and was driving red laterite dust from the east. Lightning sparkled in the haze. We took shelter in the adobe anteroom of the compound of Kola Cissé, the Diakayaté family marabout, the owner of the large cart Oumarou was using for his journey to Ballé.

Marabout Kola had dedicated his life to the mystical pursuit of proximity to God. Sleep deprivation and constant thought had worn him to a thin shadow. Even his mustache and goatee were thin. His head was shaven. His eyes were deeply sunken and searing. He spent most of his days and nights in prayer and meditation over kabbalistic ciphers and equations that triangulated to Koranic verses the specific concerns and family histories of his clients and loved ones. Fifty years earlier or more he had studied the Koran with Oumarou’s younger brothers, Allaye and Saadou, in a school operated in this very house by his own father, who had lent his spiritual advice to Oumarou’s father and his kin. Now his father was dead and he himself ran the school. He had taught, at different times, three of Oumarou’s sons—first Boucary, then Ousman, then Drissa.

In the Inner Niger Delta memorizing the Koran has been the cornerstone of Islamic learning for centuries. When Ibn Battuta passed through circa 1352 he extolled the locals for making “fetters for their children when they appear on their part to be falling short in their learning of it by heart, and they are not taken off from them till they do.”

Seven hundred years later marabouts no longer manacled their students. A dozen or two young boys flitted in and out of Kola’s house at all hours, and the marabout taught them when he was not in prayer. The children inked Koranic verses with homemade styluses upon long wooden tablets smoothed over with lime. After they could recite from memory what they had written they washed the boards and wrote the next passage of the text. Sura by sura, an average child took seven years to memorize the entire book. A marabout charged his students not per lesson but per volume of text they were able to recite.

None of them comprehended any of what they had learned because none of them spoke or read Arabic. Only after they had committed the Koran to memory would the students be initiated into its language and introduced at last to the complex stratigraphy of the scripture’s expressed substance—by some other marabout, in a different madrassa. That was what Drissa was doing, under the tutelage of one of Marabout Kola’s sons, but few students endured that long. The rest would never understand the words of the Koran, and their own calligraphy would remain forever self-contained, a beautiful and foreign cursive script.

Yet how could anyone say that the quintessence of the sacred text was lost on them? For if the Koran was the dictation the Prophet Mohammed took from Archangel Gabriel, who was said to have relayed to him verbatim, over the course of nearly twenty-three years, messages from God, then the students who declaimed the book by rote were enunciating the exact words as God Himself had shaped them. They may have been unlettered, but they were directly partaking of the divine, and Marabout Kola was granting them access to the inviolate sanctity of language.

—

In Senossa on the day of the move the marabout wanted to talk about journeys.

How far would the Diakayatés travel on that day? And when would the rimaibe boys—his students—return with his cart and donkeys to Senossa? He did not want them to return in the dark. How far had I come to reach the bourgou? What was my religious practice? he asked, using the Sufi term
turuq
—way, path—and upon hearing I had none: Would I like him to guide me?

He led the Diakayatés in midday prayer and then fed them a lunch of rice and dried fish. He gave me a packet of gunpowder tea and some sugar: “For the road.” He gave Oumarou a present of some millet and a mango: “Millet for your dinner, mango for your children.” Then he led Oumarou outside where the gale had died down and humid sun cast sharp shadows under the donkey carts, the donkeys, a pair of doum palms. The marabout stood in front of the old cowboy in that chiaroscuro world and ordered him to extend his upturned palms and took them with his own fingertips and held them like that at chest level. He closed his eyes and stood silent for some time. Then he recited a quick devotion, spat twice onto Oumarou’s hands, and in this way the Diakayatés’ rainy-season transhumance was blessed.

—

By midafternoon Boucary’s donkeys were so tired the younger women had to walk to lighten the team’s load. They walked in the single file that took them out of the Horn of Africa, the same way ancestors of modern humans walked through narrow clearings and trails a million and a half years ago. They never turned their heads, never craned their necks. Their metronomic arms ticked off the unfaltering rhythm of their journeys. “Instead of roads, there were trails, usually shared by people and cattle alike,” Kapuscinski wrote of foot travel in Africa. “This age-old system of paths explains why people here are still in the habit of walking single file, even if they’re traveling along one of today’s wide roads. It explains, too, why a walking group is silent—it is difficult to conduct a conversation single file.” Here Kapuscinski was wrong. Without ever looking at each other the women talked ceaselessly, exchanging news of the latest ailments and births, rumors, stories. They laughed. They clicked their tongues. Abba with an infant daughter drooling down her back, Kajita on her long legs. Whenever they became tired they would step off the road and out of their flipflops and squat barefoot for a few minutes. Then they would slide their flipflops back on and resume their walk.

White stone-hard land, dry gypsum, rare acacias under bent sky. A hoopoe watched from a leafless tree, sang the travelers on: quick-quick-quick, quick-quick-quick! Two boys were stretched out on their stomachs under a mango tree. Salimata gasped from the cart: “
Wallahi
, they are dead!” They were not; one stirred when the cart passed him. Outside the northern wall of Niala, a village of rimaibe millet farmers, Boucary steered around a giant baobab that lay on its side.

A baobab could live longer than a thousand years: the tree outside Niala might have stood there when Ibn Battuta traveled through Mali and wrote, in amazement, of seeing a weaver use a baobab as his loom room. Ibn Battuta might have seen that very tree. It was difficult to rationalize the death of something so substantial, so ancient, like thinking of a lost language.

Oumar Tall, the school principal, said that once upon a time there had lived in Niala a giant strongman named Bris who would kidnap village women and children when they went to the well and then trade his captives at the slave market in Ségou for beer and tobacco. This went on for years. At last the villagers conspired to put a spell on Bris. They paid a marabout to hex the giant so that he would be forever barred from entering Niala. Bris moved to Ségou, and went on to kidnap women and children along the banks of the Niger until a local Bambara fighter named Boucary the Big fought and defeated him. When I asked the principal when all this had taken place, he said: “There are no dates for these events. They could have happened anytime.”

—

Boucary Diakayaté whipped his plodding team past Niala and past the rotund granaries of banco and wattle that rose out of the flat sweep of the land at random, with no apparent owners. Past termite mounds shaped like mushrooms and chimneys and thrones, relics of deserted kingdoms. Past swept clusters of neat villages inhabited and past stumps of villages abandoned—in exoduses or die-offs, fifty years ago or five hundred. There were no dates for such events: they could have happened anytime. Abba and Kajita sidestepped the creeping traps of bindweed tendrils that even livestock did not eat, a pair of dark-blue ripped gym shorts, a dead viper.

“Careful! Very dangerous!” said Amadou Gano, the young man who was working with me as a translator during the rainy season. He toed the snake with his flipflop. “If a viper stings you and you don’t die you’ll become very wise. But if you take that dead viper and grind it up and throw the powder into a well, anyone who drinks from that well will die.”

The young women brought their hands to their mouths in awe.

“La ilaha il Allah!”

“Amen, amen, amen—but! If a woman has mastitis you take a snakeskin, you burn it, you mix the ash with shea butter, and slather that on her breasts,” Gano said. The Diakayaté women clicked their tongues. They were intrigued. They only knew to cauterize infected breasts by pressing redhot broadswords to the areolae, scarring glossy flower patterns into skin.

“Next time try this snakeskin treatment. It worked for my wife. Three babies! Though one is dead.” His second-born, a boy. He would have been ten years old. Gano kept a digital photograph of him in his cellphone. He showed it around. A handsome long-limbed child with his father’s tranquil smile, his responsible and kind eyes.

“What happened?”

“He didn’t have a mosquito net when he slept and he got malaria. It was God’s will.”

He thought a little and offered a clarification.

“We say God did it, Anna Bâ, even though sometimes it’s we who did it.”

Gano had had another child who had died many years earlier, a son also, with another woman, whom he had never married. The child had died in infancy. “An owl took him. I had eaten owl meat for protection when I was young, but my son’s mother had not. She is married to someone else now.”

Gano lived in Djenné with his wife and two surviving young children. He was twenty-eight years old, the son of two settled Fulani: a famous actor and musician who had conducted Djenné’s first orchestra, which had dispersed after his death a decade earlier, and an actress from Moura, a stunning woman who was nearly deaf and who had been his father’s eighth wife. Gano was accommodating, generous, and witty. He had driven his scooter from Doundéré to Niala and now was pushing it, leaning into its weight, walking with us. He liked company. He had strung around his waist a leather cord with three gris-gris sewn into rectangular leather pouches to protect him from penury, the envy of others, the dangers of the road. In his wallet he carried another gris-gris, also in a leather sheath, that could protect from a curse up to five thousand people at once, if they had their hearts open. On the middle finger of his left hand he wore a thin adjustable copper ring his marabout had given him. The marabout had explained that at a time of danger the ring would constrict around his finger, in warning. “I will tell you if it starts constricting, Anna Bâ,” Gano promised, and laughed. “I will cry, ‘Run, Anna Bâ! Run very very fast!’”

He also carried:

A lemon: “It’s my father who told me to keep one with me all the time. It protects you from bad people, bad spirits.”

A crystal of what looked like gum arabic but had no scent: “This is from Mecca. It protects you from the evil eye.”

A snakeskin in a plastic bag: “Good for a woman.”

A ball of resin of African myrrh,
Commiphora africana
, which smelled like burning rubber when you heated it over a flame. “It helps when you have a headache and protects you against being killed by an owl in the night.” The resin also was an aphrodisiac and an insecticide, but Gano either did not know this or did not say it out loud.

A ball of dark blue thread and a large needle: “Protects you from ripped pants. You use this to sew them up.”

A small bag of
jiminta
, a cloying chewy ball of peanut paste, ground chili pepper, and caramel, wrapped in plastic: “Protects you from hunger. When you’re hungry you eat it.”

Batteries: “Protects you from running out of flashlight in the dark.”

Glass prayer beads, to finger while whispering prayers of protection “from all the other things.”

When a wheel came off Boucary’s cart outside the western walls of Ballé, it was Gano who unloaded the cart and hoisted the axle onto a wooden pestle and refitted the wheel while the Diakayatés watched in exhausted impatience. He had in his arsenal no sorcery to assist with such repairs. While he was working, the sun behind the caravan began to melt into the ground. In a rotting marsh, low and black, village children played and white statues of egrets stood in mango groves. It took Gano days to clean his hands of grease.