Walking with Abel (31 page)

It happened like this: The young men would be sitting together in a field, surrounded by the night breath of cows, and one of them would say, “Shares!” It meant, “Let’s go get some fresh meat.” Then the boys would stand up and go to the bush to find some goats, though one of the boys would stay behind to mind everyone’s cattle. They would form a semicircle and separate one goat out of the herd and drive it toward water, because a goat would never try to swim away. After God had created the land and the water and the sky and put animals on the ground, He told all the animals to close their eyes so He could bring celestial creatures into the water unseen. All the animals closed their eyes but the goat, an animal of a cunning and deceitful nature. In response to God’s order it cheated and only squinted, and it saw all the things that entered the river from the sky. That’s why a goat is afraid of going in the water: it knows exactly what’s in it.

Once the boys caught the goat they would slit its throat in a way prescribed by Islamic law, uttering the name of God and quickly severing the jugular veins and carotid arteries on both sides of the neck with a sharp blade the animal could not see, but leaving intact the spinal cord. They would skin and dress it and bury the head and the intestines and cut up the meat and hang it on a tree to dry. The next night they would collect the meat and divide it so that each of them, including the boy who had minded their cattle, got his share. Sometimes, the boys would steal a bull instead and sell it and spend the money on a weeks-long binge of meat, tea, and girls. Four years earlier, Allaye and some friends stole a bull from Oumarou’s herd, drove it to Djenné, sold it to a butcher there, and spent an entire month womanizing and feasting in Ballé. Then the money ran out and the boys came back. Oumarou had said nothing to reproach his son. Most cowboys had done the same thing, and most people disparaged a boy who had not stolen an animal by the time he turned twenty: such a boy, they said, was not a real Fulani. Boucary had done it. Ousman had done it. Gano had done it. Even Bamoussa Cissé, the lame and thin old muezzin who barely made his nightly way up the rampart of Djenné’s Grande Mosquée to sing the evening azan, most likely had done it.

But times were changing. Dwindling pastures and sporadic rainy seasons put the herds in jeopardy and cattlemen became more fretful over the animals that remained. At the same time, an unprecedented amount of manufactured knickknacks flooded town markets. Cellphones, Chinese sneakers, knockoff Swiss army knives, handsome shoulder bags donated by charitable citizens of the Global North that tinkers sold from tall and multicolored mounds sorted by value and price—all stimulated greed for ownership, for cash. Young men were stealing goats and cows not for pleasure but for money. “They eat money,” the Fulani said of such boys.

Of course, avarice and prodigality always had existed in the bush.

“Listen,” Oumarou continued. “I once knew a man named Djanji Sankari. When he was young his father died and left him a lot of cows. A very big herd. This Djanji sold the cows and spent all the money on griots and parties. One time he hired griots for a night and spent a million francs! Then after a while he had no money and he had no more cows, and had to hire himself out as a cowherd to people in Côte d’Ivoire. The griots who once sang his praises now curse his name. And whenever he sees someone he knew back when he was rich he runs away in embarrassment. He is ashamed.”

A Fulani without cows was like a woman without jewelry.

“Some sons steal all of their family cows one by one,” said Ousman. “After that the family is poor forever.”

Oumarou himself said he had never stolen anything in his life, not even when he was a teenage boy. “Whenever I needed money I asked my father. If my father didn’t have money I asked him for a cow to sell. He would offer me two cows to choose from and sell at the market. I would use the money to buy meat, to flirt with girls, whatever I needed.”

Ousman and Allaye said nothing. Their father’s and grandfather’s bygone wealth was the stuff of legend, still recounted around campfires in the bourgou. But now, through no fault of his own, Oumarou had no cows to spare.

Hassan said: “Sometimes at night I steal cows. Sometimes they are our cows, but often they are other people’s cows. All I know is that they are in milk. I milk them and drink the milk. Then I let the cows go.”

I pictured the gangling boy folding his praying mantis limbs to suck stolen milk like the two prehistoric children from the painted scarps of Jebel Ouenat. The image made me smile. But the men just nodded. Perhaps they envied him. They had not had enough milk since the cattle left the bourgou for Ballé.

F
anta strode into the camp eight days after she had gone to see her ailing brother. In a calabash on her head she carried smoked fish, a bag of hard Moroccan dates, and a plastic bag of ginger to spice up
boiri
, a viscous kissel of millet flour and tamarind juice, the traditional thirst-quencher for Ramadan meals. Ramadan, the month of fasting, would begin at nightfall.

Oumarou rose to greet his wife.

“How was your road?”

“Exhausting. How are the cows?”

“Hungry, Fanta. How is your brother?”

“He’s still in this life. He has a fever and a cold. Has it rained here?”

“No. Has it rained where you were?”

“No. It has not rained anywhere. Everyone, everyone is worried, everyone.”

Fanta’s arrival gave the camp an impression of busyness. She wove a mat. She peeled all the ginger. She ordered Hairatou to pound five kilos of millet: “Ramadan is coming.” She ordered Kajita and Amadou to stop clinging to her and put on some undergarments: “People are watching.” She cleaned the fish she had brought, laying it out under a tree upon a gunnysack in three separate piles, each requiring its own processing method. Nile perch: keep the head, toss the guts. Killifish: tweeze out the bones, toss the heads. Catfish: check the belly for worms, otherwise keep whole.

She picked a spine out of Kajita’s foot with a sewing needle longer than her forefinger. The little girl cried while Hairatou held her down and Adama, Saadou’s teenage son, incanted stories about the many times he had the same procedure performed on his own feet. Finally the spine was out. It was almost an inch long. Fanta held it out for Kajita to see, the way a medic shows a wounded warrior the bullet extracted from his flesh. The child was so stunned by the size of the thorn that she stopped crying.

“La ilaha il Allah!”
she whispered, wide-eyed, and everybody laughed.

Fanta tweezed dirt and thorns out of the soles of her own feet, looked around for something else to do, saw her grandson Hashem, and grabbed him by the penis.

“What do you think?” she called to Bobo. She pinched the toddler’s foreskin and wielded the needle over it like a sword. “Should we circumcise him now?”

Bobo laughed. Hashem was disobedient and a menace even to his older cousins: quick to grab a stick or an unsheathed broadsword and swing it around, quick to bash Amadou’s head with a fist-size rock. But he was untouchable—to Bobo because he was her firstborn, to Fanta because he was her grandson, to Oumarou because the boy was named after his late father. “He is stubborn and aggressive, and I know he’s not a good child,” Oumarou said of him. “But I cannot accept anyone messing with a child who bears my father’s name.” Hashem wriggled out of Fanta’s grasp, hit her hard on the wrist, and took flight across the plateau. A tiny naked figure, a black fleck waterbrushed against an infinity of gold. In the sky above him hundreds of identical meringue clouds drifted, spotted the savannah. Somewhere to the northwest a storm gathered and dispersed.

Afo, on his newfound legs, roved around Fanta in wobbly circles. He was reaching for the fish she had left in the sun to dry. She kept slapping his hand gently, clicking her tongue: “Don’t do that. Don’t do that.” Flies landed on the fish, explored. Amadou picked the discarded heads off the ground, scooped out whatever was edible with his pinkie, ate. On a mat a few paces apart Allaye lay on his back, legs bent and crossed at the knee, and studied himself in a tiny handheld mirror. The mirror’s pink plastic frame held a faded color photograph of wind-bent palms on a turquoise seashore. Oumarou watched with pleasure his son preen. “The mirror is a person’s second mother,” he said. “When you’re headed somewhere, to a wedding or a party, your mother says: ‘Wait, you have some food stuck to the corner of your mouth,’ or ‘Wait, you have some dirt here.’ When your mother is not around, you use a mirror.”

The old man had been stooped with worry about the weather for days. Also, the family was running out of grain and the prospect of having to travel to Djenné to restock had made Oumarou very nervous. He had never bought rice on his own, only fabric and animals. But fabric and animals were sold by men. Rice was sold by women. “I don’t know,” Oumarou told his brother Saadou, “how to bargain with women.” Fanta’s return brought some relief. No longer did he have to fret by himself, or sleep alone in his new hut. And Fanta could go to the market and buy foodstuffs for the camp.

But Fanta’s return delivered no rain. Angled sunrays lit a hard clay pan the color of eggshell and just as cracked. The nomads wandered between the camps aimlessly, cut for sign the dust that dragged behind the scraggly afternoon herds, clicked their tongues. The talismanic presence of cattle, the animals’ smelly bulk, seemed reduced by the drought. Before sunset, the northwest darkened under heavy cloud and in the distance broad shafts of rain moved slowly south, parallel to the Bani, out of reach. The wind was from the east, from where the sickle moon would rise into a starry sky and Ramadan would bring thirst for all, not just the dead grass on the dry plateau.

E
very Ramadan morning at two o’clock the muezzins and marabouts of Djenné stood upon the city’s adobe crenellations and at the corners of the Grande Mosquée and walked the narrow streets in blue moonlight and sang awake the town’s cooks. They sang awake Pygmée’s servant girl and Gano’s beautiful half-deaf mother. They sang awake Afo Bocoum’s quiet wife and the women in the house of Ali the Griot. They sang awake the Songhai women who grilled spongy rice pancakes and the Bozo riverwomen who smoked catfish and perch. The calls of the clerics did not reach all the homes in the town’s clay warrens, and some women woke to alarm clocks they set the night before. The holy Muslim month was the period of pious subjugation of man’s needs and habits, and that included the Sahelian habit of dominating time, which was usually malleable and irrelevant. It was the month to abide by the very specific temporal restraints prescribed by the Koran: that no food or drink pass the lips of believers between the first and last light of day. In July, the sun in Mali rose just before six in the morning, and set approximately at seven at night.

On the camping ground outside Ballé there were no muezzins to wake the women to their cooking fires, no alarm clocks, no clocks at all. No numerical understanding of a twenty-four-hour day, which dated back to ancient Egypt circa third millennium
BC
. The Fulani women on the plateau used the circadian chronometer that people the world over have used for thousands of years: they roused themselves at first cockcrow, which came two or three hours before dawn. Maybe they also stirred themselves awake by memory of Ramadans past, by their own inconspicuous and steady devotion. Within a few minutes in the deep dark of the hour in all the camps on the plateau small cooking fires burned in expert synchronicity.

Fanta and Bobo cooked rice. They cooked fish sauce with fresh onions, and Lipton. They cooked a fresh batch of
boiri
. They washed a handful of mangoes in water Hairatou had hauled from the river the day before and doled out hard maggoty dates. Bobo had tied baby Afo to her back. They squatted in their lowcut boubous around the fire’s glow, and in that occult red light they looked sacred, holy, sublime.

“Hurry-hurry, dive in, dive in,” said Oumarou when Fanta served the meal almost two hours later. No one was hungry. Everybody wanted to crawl back under their blankets and sleep. “Eat a lot. It’s better to finish quickly. We don’t know when the east will begin to grow light. I don’t want time to come and grab us by the wrist!”