Walking with Abel (3 page)

“How will we keep cows in the city?” he asked.

Nomad, vouac,
nomas
: a vagabond for pasture.

—

To enter such a culture. Not an imperiled life or a life enchanted but an altogether different method to life’s meaning, a divergent sense of the world. To tap into a slower knowledge that could come only from taking a very, very long walk with a people who have been walking always. To join a walk that spans seasons, years, a history; to synchronize my own pace with a meter fine-tuned over millennia. For years I had wanted to learn from such immutable movement. In January of 2013—a number meaningless to the nomads, who ignored man-drawn borders and man-defined time—I came to the bourgou to follow a Fulani family on a yearlong cycle of transhumance, to learn from their journey lessons of adaptation and survival.
“Solvitur ambulando,”
Diogenes promised: “It is solved by walking.”

Long walks in open spaces are like ujjayi breath for the mind. Human feet evolved to measure out steady steps on hot, dry, flat land, and the human brain evolved to absorb boundless geology at the speed of three miles an hour. The sheer volume of lucid air fills the mind, the distant skyline paces off a spirit level of peace. The expanse around you unburdens the space within.

T
o join the nomads I needed an introduction, a benediction, consent. I needed advisors. I went looking in the unpaved bezel of Djenné’s market square.

The town’s Sudanic skyline jabbed at the early-evening sky and in the faded air over the three soaring clay minarets of the Grande Mosquée swallows dashed among pale stars. Dust mixed with the potent scent of strong green gunpowder tea that was boiled and reboiled with sugar and sometimes mint and then poured, bubbling and syrupy, from great heights into small shotglasses sticky from hours of tea ceremonies previous. Women floated past in single-file columns and quarreled and chaffed and balanced on their heads trays of fresh Nile perch, calabashes of buttermilk, plastic bags of peanuts, baskets of smoked catfish, lozenges of sugared sesame, baguettes, papayas, hot peppers, laundry, water, the world.

A small boy on a bicycle dragged a donkey on a rope at a gallop. Teenagers strolled importantly between shops carrying redhot birds’ nests of wire braziers with lit coal for tea. Itinerants with goatskin bags and short broadswords in tooled leather scabbards shuffled through hot dust. Two young Fulani men walked arm in arm, their fingers clasped in huge silver rings. The broad brims of their spiked burgundy cowhide-and-canvas hats touched as they gossiped. Rimaibe girls, descendants of the slaves who once grew their Fulani masters’ millet and rice, who grew and spun and wove their cotton, unloaded from their heads tall stacks of firewood for the townswomen to cook the day’s dinner, then stood fanning themselves. They wore cotton pagnes printed with giddy M.C. Escher designs of fish and pineapples and flowers, and nylon soccer jerseys: Mali, Manchester, Liverpool, Barcelona, Brazil. Elders passed in lace boubous of incredible neon hues. The color screamed like some heat-induced delirium in the antique clay monochrome of the town. A three-legged goat pulled on the rope that tethered it to a thorn tree, bleated miserably, pulled again.

It was Sunday. Africa Cup of Nations blared from television sets propped on crates outside shops. South Africa was playing Morocco. Halftime news delivered dispatches of death from Mali’s north, where a latter-day jihad was converting traditional nomadic routes into the newest frontline of the global war on terror. Al Qaeda fanatics were chopping off hands in Gao, blowing up old Islamic shrines in Timbuktu. French troops had arrived in Mali a week earlier and now rumbled in armored personnel vehicles into the Sahara. Half a century after gaining independence from France, Malians gathered roadside to wave at her soldiers with blue-white-and-red tricolors.

—

Afo Bocoum sat under the thatched awning of a shabby mercantile on a long backless wooden bench varnished with years of sweat. Afo’s father had forsaken transhumance to serve as a translator for French colonists, and Afo had grown up in Djenné. A settled Fulani, a homesick Fulani. To satisfy his nomadic yearnings he rode his motorcycle twice daily to the pastures where hired cowboys herded his many hundreds of cows. He would lean the bike against a tree and talk to his cattle and feed them cottonseed by hand.

“Cattle,” he would say, in a mix of English and French, “c’est pas business, c’est l’amour.”

When he was home and there was electricity in the house, he watched nature channels in French. Discovery Channel France, National Geographic, Nat Geo Wild, Planète+. He sought out shows about herders.

“Texas! I’ve seen it on television. They have a lot of cowherds there. They ride horses. And they have hats like the Fulani, only bigger.”

Afo was a
diawando
, a member of a Fulani caste of mediators between the nomads, who despised and feared government in all its incomprehensible forms, and the officialdom, which considered the nomads arrogant, rich, and obsolete, and took advantage of their illiteracy by fleecing them recklessly: in the modern world, God seemed to favor Cain. A
diawando
advised his clients on all matters legal, formal, veterinary, and financial. The relationship was passed down from father to son and the loyalty between a
diawando
and the pastoralists was nonpareil. The Diakayatés were Afo’s clients and they worshipped him.

Afo picked at bad teeth with a match and considered my request.

“In this life you have to feel love for what you do. If you don’t feel love for what you’re doing you won’t do it well.”

He fell silent. Late January heat made everything lazy, moved listlessly through legs, slowed circulation. A small boy slouched by, swallowing hard some insult or injury, tears running down his pouting face. A teenager with wandering eyes came under the awning and drooled and stood fingering his green stone prayer beads. The gloaming softened all color. An old muezzin in a dusty blue boubou limped up to his post at the southeastern corner of the mosque wall, stopped, spat a sizable ball of phlegm over the rampart, put his bony hands to his ears. The mosque loudspeaker crackled like bursts of distant gunfire and the muezzin began his first summons to evening prayer. The quarter tones ricocheted gently off banco walls, spilled into the immense famished horizons beyond.

The French adventurer René Caillié, the first European to return from Timbuktu, stopped in Djenné in 1828. The massive mosque built of daub and wattle in the twelfth or thirteenth century, during Islam’s early and erratic years in the Niger Delta, stood mostly in ruins by then: Sekou Amadou had disapproved of its ostentatiousness and allowed it to fall into disrepair, while he built his own, smaller, simpler mosque a block away. The Grande Mosquée, Caillié wrote, was “rudely constructed, though very large. It is abandoned to thousands of swallows, which build their nests in it.” The modern mosque, the largest mudbrick building in the world, was a replica, built at the order of French colonists in 1907. The swallows remained.

I waited. Swallows chirred. At last Afo pronounced:

“Bon! Your work is good. We’ll go to the bush tomorrow.”

—

On the other end of the square two elders stopped me. Babourou Koïta, a
diawando
like Afo, held court each day next to a pharmacy in a chair made of bamboo and goatskin, while in the secrecy of his compound, cowboys in his employ raised gigantic interbreeds of zebus and Holsteins. In an identical chair next to Babourou sat his best friend, Ali the Griot.

A griot: a bard, an entertainer. An ambulatory madman spewing blessings and augury. An oracle for the powers that shaped the universe, as feared as the blacksmith who transforms the Earth’s elements. A hereditary oral chronicler of the land who alone knows all the secret iniquities and virtues of its gentry.

Griots dumbfounded the fourteenth-century traveler Ibn Battuta. “Each of them has got inside a costume made of feathers to look like a thrush with a wooden head made for it and a red beak as if it were the head of a bird. They stand before the sultan in that ridiculous attire and recite their poetry,” he wrote in the chronicle of his journey through the Malian kingdom. “It was mentioned to me that their poetry is a kind of preaching.” Ibn Battuta didn’t understand: you submitted to the griot and feared his judgment because how he pronounced you to be was how you would be. His words tweaked destiny. He was the keeper and twister of history who castigated and flattered and who from his praise and reprimands molded prophecies and delivered such news and advice as he saw fit so he could stoke or resolve conflicts, forge or disband unions, bestow or retract fame.

“In Africa, when an old man dies, it’s a library burning,” said Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Mali’s most renowned writer. When a griot died, histories of entire families and empires dissolved underfoot. The world lost gravity.

Modern griots no longer dressed in feathers. They were court jesters set loose in a new world, a world without kings. Some cut records and performed in front of African and European and American crowds. Most dispensed wisdoms at weddings, at political rallies, in public squares. They were ronin. Ali was one of those.

Ali had a two-packs-a-day habit and looked like my grandfather who had died when I was a girl. I told him that. He nodded and informed me he was broke. “That makes two of us,” I said. He giggled and nodded again. I told him my grandfather had been an orchestra conductor, an entertainer, and that my grandfather’s name—my name,
badkhen
—meant a fiddler, an irreverent jester-rhymer who ad-libbed at Jewish weddings. I came from a long line of Yiddish griots, I said. That wasn’t good enough. Ali stubbed out a Dunhill in the dust and motioned to Babourou for another and said that to walk in the Sahel I needed a different name, a Fulani name.

He looked at Babourou. Babourou looked at the sky, presumably for instruction.

“Bâ!” he said. “Your name will be Anna Bâ.”

Ali nodded once more. “Good name. Noble name. One of the oldest Fulani names.” And he grabbed my hand and yanked it up in the air and sang me my new ancient family history. It began in no remembered time with the arrival from a faraway desert of four Fulani progenitor families—the spiritual leaders the Diallos, the logisticians the Sows, the largest cattle owners the Bâs, their helpers the Barris—and it ended like this:

“Anna Bâ, Bâ the owner of cattle, Bâ the owner of white cattle, white is the color of milk, Bâ the owner of the color white. First came the Diallos the Sows the Bâs the Barris. Bâ is the owner of many animals, Bâ is the owner of butter, Bâ smells of butter, Bâ the sweetest-smelling Fulani. Bâ. Bâ. Bâ. Bâ.”

He did not let go of my hand the whole time.

The naming ceremony would be held the next day. I was to buy a sacrificial goat. On television screens around the square, South Africa and Morocco tied, two–two.

—

A friend hosted the ceremony at his bar, an eyesore of poured concrete on the outskirts of town. Its courtyard had a bandstand under a leaky cabana. It served Malian beer and lukewarm soft drinks and inside it had low benches upholstered with artificial leather and mirrored disco balls and a small television set tuned to a channel that showed Ivorian and Senegalese dancers in bikinis and hot pants grinding to hiphop. The bar owner was a settled Fulani wheeler-dealer who wore copious perfume, spoke seven or eight languages, including French, Spanish, and English, was afraid of cows, and went by the nickname Pygmée. “Peul moderne,” Afo called him: the modern Fulani. Out of respect for the Muslim sensibilities of my elder guests Pygmée turned off the television. His friend Allaye the Butcher had roasted a goat in town and delivered it to the bar in the evening and carved it in the yard.

My three godfathers, my three magi, arrived on three motorcycles in flowing robes. Afo wore a boubou white as an egret’s wing and had two helpings of roast goat and pronounced it very good. Babourou, in a handwoven mantle of black and turquoise wool embroidered with gold thread, told me that to be one hundred percent Fulani I needed a Fulani man, and that—this was a segue—he and the other elders would assist me in any manner possible. Ali the Griot promised that my new name would protect me from evil.