Walking with Abel (6 page)

Ousman did not slow at the calf rope. He arrived the way Fulani cowboys usually arrived: a determined and rapid heel strike, then an abrupt full stop within handshaking distance. Now they were striding fast, their hips hinged, their staffs yokewise across their necks, wrists resting on either end—and now they were standing still, one knee bent, foot shucked out of a slipper and propped against the opposite knee, leaning on their staffs as they exchanged extensive and ornate salaams. Now they were striding off again. Fulani men did not slow down except for the cows.

Ousman raised both hands to his chest palms-forward in greeting and from the shrinking shade of the hut his father raised his own two hands in response. Long and narrow palms, cracked from dust, shingled and callused. Miniature maps of the Sahel.

“Peace upon your morning, Papa. Did you have a peaceful night?”

“And upon yours, Ousman. How was your road? Was your night peaceful?”

“Nothing but peaceful. How is your health?”

“Fine. How are the animals?”

“They are well. The bay’s foot has healed. How is Mother?”

“She is well. Did the animals eat well?”

“Yes, plenty. There’s a lot of sweetgrass out there. How are the children?”

“All healthy,
al ham du lillah
. How are the animals of your cousins?”

“All healthy. I saw Sita’s animals west of Doundéré. They are on their way, too. Was your night peaceful, Anna Bâ?”

Mornings dissolved in patient and lengthy salutations, each question asked in order and methodically answered, palms raised in greeting and raised again in response, as if to rebate the kindness of the wellwisher. The newly arrived always greeted the already present, the solo walker always greeted the group, the younger always greeted the older. Each day, each encounter began by reestablishing the immemorial perimeters of tradition, the unspoken boundaries.

Borders give our world the structure we can define and defy, and the Fulani world is riven by them: brittle divides of water rights, marches of pasturage, manmade state partitions, shifting modern frontlines, borders between the primeval and the ultramodern, and, most profoundly, their own internal cadastres of the permissible. For those of us who are settled, the most common borders are the walls of our homes, the doors we shut against the rest of the world. When the physical home is ephemeral, structure begins with the uncompromising and reverential observation of rituals.

Paul Riesman, an American anthropologist who lived with the nomads of Upper Volta, wrote that being Fulani meant not so much belonging to a specific ethnic group as possessing certain traits of behavior considered essential. “The Fulani,” he wrote, “should be: . . . refined, subtle, responsible, cultivated, endowed with a sense of shame, and master of his needs and his emotions.” If you are a woman, never cry over your dead child. If you are a man, never eat where strangers can see you. Never, in public, express discomfort or pain. Never use the milking calabash to store or transport anything other than fresh milk. Never boil the milk. When you drink milk, drink it seated or squatting and hold the calabash with both hands. Shake right hands when you say farewell for a few days. Shake left hands when you say farewell for a long time so that God may grant you another reunion. Never count cattle.

Never count cattle. Yet even without counting everyone knew the devastating boundary that bisected Oumarou’s life into the time before and after the cataclysmic famines of the nineteen seventies and eighties, when more than a million cadaverous people wasted away in the Sahel, folded into unmarked mass graves. Oumarou’s first wife, Hajja, died then. Mummified livestock dropped dead unnumbered. The nomads, who disparaged any labor of the settled peoples, of slaves, learned to dig wells. They sold some cows to buy cattle feed for the others and to pay marabouts for potent leatherbound gris-gris they would hang for protection around the horns and necks of the cows that remained. Not even magic helped. Before the famine Oumarou had more than a thousand head of yellow roan cattle and other herders knew him as Oumarou the Yellow, one of the best and richest herders in the bourgou. Forty years later the nickname remained. But his herd was around fifty head, give or take. Among the four Diakayaté patriarchs who in the dry season pastured their cattle and camped together on a hummock near Doundéré, he was the eldest, and the poorest.

“It was just bad luck,” Afo the
diawando
told me once, and pursed his lips in pity. “After the famine the cattle of all the other people reproduced, and Oumarou’s did not.”

When I asked Oumarou about the famine and about the cyclical droughts that for half a century had been punishing the Sahel, he simply said:

“The cattle suffered a lot and life changed forever. We have less grass now. The milk before and the milk now taste different, and the river doesn’t get as full. The wind is hotter and dries out the water faster. But everything else is normal,
al ham du lillah
. We are here now, we are alive.”

As if he remembered congenitally mankind’s survival of all the droughts that ever had pushed migrants to their feet. The interglacial that may have forced early humans out of Africa a hundred and fifty thousand years ago on one of our earliest migrations, and the dry spell that shoved South American hunter-gatherers off the plateau that would become Chile’s high-altitude Atacama Desert, and the famine that drove the Jews of Canaan into Egypt. The droughts that blew off the Colorado River’s mudbanks the entire civilization of the Ancestral Puebloans in an exodus archaeologists later would call the Great Abandonment. They split carrying their infants and their tongue and the men who came after knew no better than to call them by their Navajo name, the Anasazi: “enemy ancestors.” Droughts punished the Sahel in the fifth century, the fifteenth, the sixteenth, the seventeenth, the eighteenth, the nineteenth. There had been a drought two years before I met Oumarou. After each devastation came a recovery. Oumarou’s chromosomes carried the impressions of both.

With a single impatient flap of a bony wrist the old man waved away into the thin morning air any remorse about his cattle’s past, any concern about its future, and Mama’s anguish that the end of the journey was unknown, unknowable, that it was possible altogether.

“It doesn’t end,” he said. “It only pauses here, at this camp, during the dry season.”

Never show regret. Never display sorrow. Submit to the omnipotence of God. I had been told that such rules of conduct arose from a culture of resignation, of helplessness. But I thought: The Fulani protocols were not born of fatalism. They were born of hope.

Maybe hope comes from our innate memory of the perpetual cycles of relapse and recoupment.

O
usman hitched the calves with handmade rope halters to the calf rope and from among the sundries laid out on the roof of his father’s hut he pulled down some hobbles and lariats and the milking calabash made of black plastic. He untethered a bay yearling and it scampered immediately to its mother. Ousman let it suckle for a few beats, then dragged it off the teat by its hind leg and hamshackled its head to its mother’s knee so she would let down her milk. He hobbled the cow’s hind legs together below the hocks to keep her from kicking and squatted beneath her and squeezed the milk down each of the four rubbery black teats in turn, like the man in the Tassili n’Ajjer painting from thousands of years ago. Like any dairyman, anytime. Warm milk streamed to the long, persuasive nagging of Ousman’s long fingers, foamed in the black calabash.

He dipped his fingers in the milk and moistened the skin of the cow’s teats where it had cracked from the dust and the weather and helped the milk down the ducts again. Then he stood up, balanced the milking calabash in his right hand, and on his way back to the hut with one smooth and seamless motion of his left, like a passing harpist absentmindedly strumming an instrument, he slipped off the cow’s hobbles and unshackled the calf and unhitched another calf from the reata so it, too, could suckle. He poured the milk into a larger calabash Fanta held up with both hands and returned to the cattle, pulled the second calf away from its mother, hobbled that cow, hamshackled the calf, squatted down to milk again. He did not talk to the cows as he milked. He didn’t have to. He had watered and pastured and dewormed them since birth and they knew his touch by heart.

After milking, the cows and the calves stood together in a close sunlit half loop at the calf rope, at the edge of the circle Fanta swept each morning with a handful of twigs. Their grassy sighs and the steam of their manure and the dust they kicked up as they shifted their big haunches crowded in on the encampment, where Oumarou’s family sat close together on mats, quiet and content, waiting for breakfast.

—

Breakfast was sweet tea with milk the Fulani called Lipton, and rice left over from yesterday’s lunch. Fanta prepared them in two identical round-bottomed castiron pots over the portable hearth of three rocks that framed a fire of dry manure. I knew the pots well. I had eaten meals cooked in them in the strafed deserts of Iraq, in the melancholy foothills of Afghanistan, in the industrial abattoir of Chechnya, in the snake-pit dugouts of Azeri refugees. They were first forged in thermonuclear supernovas that exploded ten billion years ago to fling elements into space and seed the Earth with iron. Some of that iron would pulse in our blood, some would become those cauldrons. Imagine: each morning as the dawn’s first light glides westward over the tropic of the dispossessed, from Asia to West Africa to Latin America, women obstinately rise from their sleeping mats and tick mattresses and thin blankets to bend over the same damned star-spawned pot.

The first pot on the fire each morning was to brew Lipton: water, two stringed sachets of Jolly Sun Quality Tea imported from Sri Lanka, a small bowlful of fresh cow or goat milk, and copious sugar. To make sure the sugar was dissolved and to cool down the liquid the women would pour the brew into a tin or plastic bowl and then pour it from that bowl into another and back a dozen times, then slurp loudly, smacking their lips, to taste. There never were enough cups or bowls to drink from, and the family took their Lipton in turns. The first cup, the largest, of scuffed ocher plastic, was always for Oumarou. His youngest grandchildren got the sweet dregs. Lipton was a morning drink only; throughout the day and into the night you drank tiny shotglasses of hot sweet green tea brewed in tiny enamel kettles over wire braziers of wood charcoal, in ceremonies that lasted half an hour or longer. It was as strong as coffee and quenched no thirst.

In the other pot Fanta reheated the rice. She pounded dried fish bones, red pepper, dried onions, and salt into a brown powder in a wooden mortar with a pestle almost as tall as she was and shook that into the pot. She melted a fragrant glob of shea butter in a long-handled iron ladle blackened with ages of soot. She divided the rice between two large and dented aluminum bowls, one for the men, one for the women, and poured the butter on top and the rice sizzled and spat and Fanta clicked her tongue—“Shush!”—and very briefly giggled in satisfaction.

Oumarou Diakayaté had married Fanta Sankari after his first wife had died of some sickness, he did not know which. “We were on the move,” he said, “and she became sick and died.” He needed a woman to rear his two small sons. Fanta was maybe ten years his junior and had just gotten divorced. Oumarou never asked why. He took her and Mama, Fanta’s daughter from the first marriage, and she raised Boucary and Ousman and bore five more children, three sons and two daughters, of whom Hairatou was the youngest. Oumarou and Fanta also were raising Mama’s two youngest children: Amadou, who was five and built herds of gorgeous toy cows out of clay, and his sister Kajita, who was seven and could herd goats on her own. All the children and both grandchildren called Fanta “Mother.”

Oumarou loved her endlessly. His grandnephews joked that when she was away he prayed not east toward Mecca but in whichever direction she had gone. She traveled impulsively and all the time. She would hear of a sick relative several days’ walk away and in the morning she would wrap a change of clothes in a blanket and take off, alone, and would not return or send any word for a week or two. She could walk thirty miles in a day with a load of milk or millet on her head.