Walking with Abel (35 page)

When Allaye was a toddler, Boucary, then in his late teens, left his father’s camp and his newlywed bride one morning and was gone for two years. It was before anyone had cellphones. Through some relatives Oumarou learned that Boucary was in Koutiala, a hundred and fifty miles south of the bourgou. That was all Oumarou ever had learned about Boucary’s absence. “When he returned he told me nothing and I told him nothing,” he said. “We never spoke about it.” He seemed proud of this not-knowing: to pry would have been to lose his composure, to betray concern.

Never display sorrow. Never show grief. For Oumarou and Fanta to express anguish would have meant to stop being Fulani, and to stop being Fulani was impossible. Neither of them had told Allaye how their hearts had sunk that morning the year before when they had found him gone. Nor had they ever told him how crushed they had been by his seven-month absence.

Now they squinted to watch his raggedy and angled silhouette become smaller in the strange light of an early sky. For a while no one said anything. When they no longer could hear his cellphone song Hairatou said:

“He is a very caring person, Allaye. He would not leave for good knowing that Papa is sick.”

—

That night after iftar we sat watching the Earth’s passage through the night. Scorpio hooked its tail around the hearth and dragged it higher and higher into the turning sky. The air was deep and spongy. Oumarou, who was feeling better,
al ham du lillah
, though still too weak to rise from his mat and very nauseated, told me he could not fathom the wanderlust of his sons.

“Kids these days. They always need to be on the move.”

“They are Fulani,” I said.

“No. There’s movement and then there’s movement. If you are a Fulani you travel with your cows, with your family. Not all by yourself. The Fulani are always moving. But the movement is never arbitrary.”

—

When Allaye returned from his brother’s camp the next day he explained that the goat had not gotten lost at all. A hunter had killed it. The hunter had been stalking the bush around Gagna for several weeks. He had killed three goats that belonged to a Fulani who camped close to Boucary. Twice, the men saw him stuff the animals into his hunting bag and take off on his motorcycle. Once, the hunter dropped the goat he’d shot and split; the Fulani were unsure whether a shot goat was halal to eat and left it there to rot. Finally, three days earlier, the men heard a shot and when they ran toward it they saw bloodsmeared grass and a motorcycle crashing away through the bush, with Boucary’s goat slack and draped over the passenger seat.

“Before it was just kids without guns, and they’d take only one goat. But now it’s the hunters, with guns. If you confront them they might kill you,” said al Hajj Saadou when he heard the story.

“They’ve hunted out all the wildlife, now they come after people’s private animals,” said Oumarou.

Gano said he knew of a hunter in Djenné who hunted people’s livestock and sold it to butchers in the market. No one but the butchers knew who the hunter was, and the butchers weren’t telling.

“But the moment they catch him they will kill him,
wallahi!
”

Allaye said, too, that Sita Louchéré and Isiaka were still in Doundéré, waiting to travel west, and that in the bourgou it had rained plenty. He said he had seen many Fulani carts travel to Hayré. He had seen the wind flap the girls’ skirts as they walked alongside the carts.

All over the bourgou rivers of cattle were moving, too, slow and heavy and grounded against the roiling sky of late July, and cowboys ululated and called
jot jot jot jot
to urge the animals onward, and the rainy-season cattle drive crescendoed through the Sahel.

Oumarou said the family would move to Hayré in a week, after the last day of Ramadan. The families of Sita and Saadou would be coming as well.

THE CROSSING

We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere.
As if traveling

is the way of the clouds. We have buried our loved ones in the
darkness of the clouds, between the roots of the trees.

—M
AHMOUD
D
ARWISH

T
he tablelands of Hayré reached toward the sun in tremendous emptiness. Feldspar shone like shattered meteorites through open swells of untamed grass. Wispy groves of jackalberry and gigilé and dwarf persimmons splotched gargantuan pale horizons. Here and there a baobab loomed. There were few farms. All surface water was seasonal. When it rained the plains turned a rolling nitric green. By the time the dry months began the sun bleached the grass to platinum lace, the igneous bedrock to scrimshaw.

The Fulani built their huts sparsely beneath the rare thickets of low brush, each camp invisible from the next. During the grazing season the highlands became a six-thousand-square-mile Mark Rothko multiform in motion. In the foreground floated columns of women with water buckets on their heads, with calabashes of millet and milk. Farther out, cows migrated to and from pasture and shallow stagnant pools and hand-dug wells. And above, the broad cyan brushstroke of sky beamed down hot daylight that shone equally on men and animals, caressed and punished them in equal measure.

Oral histories told little of Hayré, a shelterless plateau on the periphery of ancient kingdoms, a lesser province of scant interest to the Sahel’s political elite, overrun by one West African empire after another not for its own sake but because it was on the way to somewhere more coveted. Of all the invaders only the Fulani, it seemed, had specific interest in Hayré.

The griots said the Fulani first arrived at the height of the Kingdom of Ségou. At the time, Hayré was a land of Dogon and Bwa farmers. The Dogon were born genderless into a world that had originated from an exploded grain of fonio and possessed the advanced astronomical knowledge of their serpentlike twin ancestors who had descended onto Earth from an egg hatched in space. They husbanded the northern part of the plateau from their cliff dwellings on the sandstone Bandiagara Escarpment. The Bwa farmed farther from the hills, forever trying to atone for upsetting the perfect symmetry between the domestic and the wild, man and nature—the symmetry in which God had created their world and which he then had upended because a woman pounding millet had hit and wounded him with her pestle.

Here the Fulani came with cows and horses and dogs. They fought the Dogon and the Bwa for water rights and land use and they fought Kel Tamashek raiders from the north for livestock. They took slaves from the farming villagers and set up chiefdoms and pastured their cows, and within a hundred years they came to dominate the plain. When Sekou Amadou’s jihad reached Hayré in the early nineteenth century, and functionaries of the Massina Empire were drawing up schedules that explained how farmers and herders would take turns with the fertile riches of the bourgou, they formally included the elevated plains into the annual itinerary of nomadic pastoralists. The jihad found converts almost exclusively among the Fulani. The sedentary people converted later, or not at all.

By then the ancestors of Oumarou Diakayaté were already grazing cattle in Hayré.

—

The Diakayatés made rainy-season camp where they always had, at the edge of a meadow a mile or so south of the Bwa village of Konkorno. The villagers were friendly enough and every Thursday they hired out horsecarts to take the Fulani to the weekly market in Madiama. But they were heathen. They raised pigs. They kept millet in cylindrical elevated granaries with single windows and conical straw roofs, and they brewed millet beer and drank it, often during the day. They ate dog meat. They greeted guests with idolatrous curtsies and handclaps. They played strange music that did not move forward but bounced up and down. The Diakayatés could hear from the camp the pagan throb of their drumbeat.

Although the rainy season arrived late that year, the dry season came early. Green grass lasted a month. By September, instead of gently watering Hayré’s pasturelands and farms, Rijl al Awwa—the Foot of the Barking Dog, Mu Virginis—spread the high blue skies of autumn. In October hundreds of cattle egrets stood stock-still in withered halfgrown millet, and in the evaporating sludge of the few rice paddies white lotuses bloomed. The air smelled like blossoms, like chewed hay. The forage in Hayré was exhausted and the animals were slatribbed once more. People and animals gathered around wells where Fulani girls hung laundry to dry from brittle golden stalks. Cows swished past kaleidoscopic prints flying in soft, honeyed wind, skidded on silent windchiseled rimrock. Their humps listed to the side.

In the bourgou the millet was halfgrown and the rice stood in barely two palms of water. Most grain husks hadn’t had the time to germinate and were translucent, empty. Only hippo grass, the sweetest fodder, stood lush in the still fens, and fish jumped there. Even so, no cattle were allowed in or near the bourgou until the end of the meager harvest.

When Sekou Amadou established the Massina Empire he appointed a handful of loyal Fulani nobles as the ultimate landlords in the bourgou. Their ownership of the land was hereditary and irrevocable and extended to almost all of the Inner Delta. These landlords were called
dioro
and they singlehandedly decided how much to charge for passage and for pasture, how much to tax farmers and fishermen. Efforts by the French colonists and the bankrupt post-independence kleptocracies to reorganize this practice did not take. Two hundred years after Sekou Amadou’s jihad, land use in his former empire still was governed by the preferential feudal system everyone called simply
dina
: Islamic faith.

At the end of each rainy season the
dioro
queried the farmers about their harvest deadlines and then determined the time and the price of transit and grazing for the nomads. Each
dioro
set his price; every year Oumarou paid two
dioro
for the right to pass through their land, and one for dry-season pasturage. Each also established the fines for violators. The fines were steep and escalated swiftly: the price of three goats, of a heifer, of a fullgrown bull—and those did not include the penalties farmers in the bourgou independently charged the Fulani whose cows damaged unharvested fields. At best, the Fulani who failed to pay for passage or trespass ended up in jail for contempt of
dina
. Often, frustrated farmers took matters into their own hands, arming themselves with clubs and broadswords, with handmade muzzle-loaders, with .20-caliber pistols welded out of car parts. Each year upon the ancient earth Cain murdered Abel anew.

This year the
dioro
were telling the herders: not yet. Marooned in the dry highlands the cows and the cowboys ambulated in fatigued twice-daily loops. Hour after hour, still as breath, Oumarou sat in practiced forbearance by the door of the low rainy-season hut Allaye and Ousman had built for him and Fanta. The pulse of Konkorno’s drums counted out the time of thirst and hunger, the time of life and sorrow, the time of waiting until it became time to walk again.