I’m taken through an entrance behind the floodlights to meet the man himself. A passageway opens onto a small courtyard, which resembles a scene from my first illustrated Bible. Mor Fadan, a huge man with shaved head and wearing a light blue robe, dominates the space, and around him are gathered, in various attitudes of deference, men, women, children and, of course, sheep. A steady stream of people come in to shake his mighty hand. Someone calls me over and the fawners and grovellers are pushed to one side as I’m led before him.
His sheer bulk could bring out the fawner and groveller in anyone, but it’s the only thing about him that’s intimidating. His handshake is soft as putty and his voice is deep and measured. He answers my damn fool questions with extraordinary patience. Yes, this is his house. Yes, he has two wives, but bashfully adds that he can’t remember how many children, and, yes, he is the African Olympic Wrestling Champion.
He talks of the popularity of the sport, which is second only to football in Senegal, and it’s clear that this man who can fill stadiums is only here tonight to encourage the young local boys. The entourage closes in again, someone finds me a Coke and I escape outside for a breather.
The ringside is filling up and the ring is full of leaping, strutting, chasing and grappling children mimicking their heroes. The nighttime chill reminds me of the desert. It must have been around 35degC/95degF on the streets of Dakar this afternoon. Now it’s cool enough to pull on a sweater.
Mor Fadan asks me to sit beside him during the fights. This is quite a moment for a shy boy from Sheffield, entering the ring and being introduced to the local mafia as Mor’s new bosom buddy, but there’s still no sign of any serious grappling taking place.
The contestants are parading around the ring in a rhythmic dance, all linked together and kicking their feet out in a sort of macho hokey-kokey. Then, one after the other, they approach the thudding drums and dance up against them, rhythm fighting rhythm, as they strut their aggressive poses, kicking the sand like angry elephants. The drummers, stripped to the waist and glistening like contestants themselves, keep up a relentless, brain-scouring beat.
A couple of comperes work the crowd, screaming themselves hoarse, urging, exhorting, praising, joking. It’s after midnight when the local politicians, bigwigs and worthies make their appearance, all anxious to clutch, and be seen to be clutching, the champion’s hand.
By now, the contestants, uniformly lean, wiry and young, are stripped down to single elaborately tied loincloths, like underfed sumo wrestlers, raising the level of excitement amongst the women in the crowd. (There is none of the public segregation we saw in the Arab countries). Their cries and shouts of encouragement merge with the throbbing of the drums and the relentless yelling of the comperes as the bouts, at last, begin.
Starting with a curiously fey stance, like cats on their back legs, the wrestlers flap at each other’s hands, before grasping each other in a shoulder lock. A flick of the legs from this position can send an opponent off balance and onto the floor, and once a shoulder hits the sand the bout is over. Some contests last a few seconds and others can go on for minutes, as bodies freeze in perfect equilibrium, each one waiting for a moment of weakness to send his opponent tumbling. It lacks the theatrical flamboyance of Western wrestling but makes up for it in a fascinating contest of balance, coordination and sheer physical strength.
By one o’clock the crowd has grown to several thousand and I’m told this will last long into the night. Mindful of the fact that we start a thirty-six-hour train journey tomorrow, I’m going to have to go. A discreet exit is not possible. As I get up to leave one of the comperes spars up to me and draws me into the ring, dancing before me and grasping me in mock combat until he releases me with an enormous beam on his face. The crowd laughs and applauds. As we drive out of the dusty run-down suburbs and head for the sea, I’ll not easily forget my night in Pikine.
Day Thirty-Six
DAKAR TO BAMAKO
The railway line that runs for 760 miles from Dakar on the Atlantic Ocean to Bamako on the River Niger was built long before the countries it connects came into being. When work began in Bamako in 1907, Mali was called French Sudan, and when the railway reached Dakar in 1923, Senegal was an anonymous part of French West Africa.
Not surprisingly, the station from which we are due to leave at ten o’clock this morning is a confident example of the colonial style. It consists of three arched bays, framed by red and brown brickwork, with wrought-iron canopies, pilasters supporting decorated tile friezes, separate entrances marked ‘Depart and ‘Arrivee‘ and a big working clock in the central tower. On either side of the central facade are louvered galleries, which look to be occupied. Laundry lines swing in the breeze and I think I can see sheep up there.
We’ve been warned that Dakar is the pickpocket capital of the world, and exploratory arms have already stretched through the minibus windows. An opportunist salesman tries to interest us in a range of ‘Titanic’ sports bags, which, as the volume of our luggage is already proving a problem for the porters, is an act of mindless optimism.
As the Bamako express only runs twice a week, there’s a certain amount of nervous tension as we walk ourselves and our procession of porters through ‘Depart‘ to the platform where our train, twelve coaches and four freight wagons long, sits waiting in the sun. The coaches, old French railway stock painted light and dark green with a red stripe, bear the barely legible name Chemins de Fer de Mali. A General Motors diesel is panting heavily at the front.
We pull out of Dakar twenty-one minutes late and run for a while past red-brick, red-tiled sheds. These soon give way to a depressing run of goat-attended rubbish dumps and people squatting down beneath fading signs that read ‘Defense d’Uriner et Deposer ses Ordures‘ (No Urinating or Dumping of Rubbish).
The train is a huge consumer unit, a small town on wheels, and wherever we stop we attract crowds of suppliers. As we crawl through the suburbs of Dakar it’s like taking a train through the middle of a department store. On both sides of us are piles of handbags, underwear, men’s fashion, ladies’ fashion, shoes, scarves, robes and hats. All within inches of our rumbling steel wheels.
The restaurant car is going to be a vital part of our survival strategy. First signs are encouraging. It’s comfortable enough, with a mural painted at one end, and not too busy, as most of the passengers bring their own food or buy at the window.
An American woman and her companion, a man from Guinea, are at one of the tables. She’s a New Yorker living in Dakar. She has silver earrings and a thick pair of Ray-Bans. I ask her what she misses about Dakar when she goes back to the States.
‘Oh, just about everything,’ she says, drawing out the words with relish. ‘The way people say hello to each other, take time to greet each other.’
Greeting is important in Africa. I’ve noticed that. It’s not something that should ever be hurried.
We fall to talking about countries and boundaries. Her friend Barik regrets the failure of an attempt to set up a West African federation after independence.
‘The countries shouldn’t have been isolated. Historically, there were huge states that covered large portions of the Sahara.’
The Mali Empire and the Ghana Empire were two such states. Rich and sophisticated civilisations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when, according to Barik, people travelled in perfect safety across vast areas. The modern states, he thinks, have created arbitrary and unworkable boundaries. He cites the River Senegal border between Mauritania and Senegal.
‘The same people live on both sides of the river, but they can no longer cross freely.’
We’re now away from the crowded Dakar corridor and passing through flat countryside studded with the curious battleship-grey baobab trees. With their thick metallic trunks and stubby branches, they look like some prehistoric arboreal throw-back, gnarled and twisted like old prize-fighters.
The baobab is not like other trees. It gets smaller as it grows older. It stores c
opious amounts of water in its trunk and can survive for hundreds of years, because it won’t burn. Its bark provides rope and packing material, its sweet-smelling flowers provide food and decoration and a medicine called alo, its pulp is good for blood circulation and its seeds for fertiliser. Scarcely surprising, therefore, that this ugly duckling is a source of considerable superstition, revered in every community and often used as a burial place. Looking at them as they pass by the window, they look friendless and faintly absurd, and it isn’t hard to see why people believe the story that the devil planted them upside down.
In a nearby couchette is an English teacher, an impressive Fulani woman in a pale purple robe and headdress and a striking silver necklace. With her confident English and her forthright, expressive delivery, she seems to epitomise the strength and presence that I’ve seen in many black West African women. Rather disconcertingly, for such an embodiment of the matriarchal virtues, her name is Daddy. Well, that’s how it’s pronounced. It’s spelt D-h-a-d-i.
I ask her about the role of women in West Africa.
‘She is the protector, you know, the keeper of, let’s say, a culture, a civilisation. It’s the role of a woman to take care of children, you know. She can give advice, she retains a lot of secrets.’
When I ask her what sort of secrets, she uses the example of female circumcision, or excision, which is still carried out here when girls are ten or eleven.
‘It is said that a girl must be excised. If she’s not excised she’s like a male.’
I’ve heard this justification for circumcision before. The belief that the foreskin is something female in the male and the clitoris something male in the female.
‘There is a woman who is going to be in charge of their education during that time of excision. She’s going to teach them how to take care of their husband when they get married. She’s going to teach them to be submissive to their in-laws, their husband, for a good wife is the one who is submissive. So, that’s why I was telling you that the woman holds the secret of African society.’
‘Is it changing? I mean all this being taught to be submissive.’
She spreads her hands helplessly.
‘This is something crazy. I’m not going to be submissive to my husband, you know. Maybe to respect my husband, but he’s going to respect me too.’
As for female circumcision, she thinks it will begin to die out. The National Assembly in Senegal has brought in a law against it, but the women who were practising it, the ones who held the secrets, are having to be given financial incentives to end their vested interest in this particular ritual.
Dhadi is a Muslim, but stoutly against the prevailing custom of polygamy.
‘First of all, I’m jealous. I don’t want to share my husband. And then second,’ she wags her finger to formidable effect, ‘in every polygamist house there is trouble. Because co-wives, you know, are jealous. Sometimes one of the wives will go to the marabout …’
‘The marabout?’
‘Well, he’s the kind of priest … he’s a seer. He can see into the future and also he can, you know, make some juju. And for example, if one of the kids fails his exam, she says to the marabout, “It’s my co-wife. She’s a witch. That’s why my kid can’t succeed.”’
She doesn’t hold out much hope that polygamy will go the way of circumcision. She reckons only 3 or 4 per cent of Senegalese feel as she does.
‘These are hard times. I believe it will change, but it will be hard, very hard.’
It’s not just what she says but how she says it that makes Dhadi exceptional. Or maybe not. Maybe African women are by nature more direct, more open, more honest and considerably less submissive than their menfolk expect them to be.
Night falls and we are still some way short of the Malian border. To the bar, where three or four customers are gathered in the gloom, drinking Cokes from the bottle. I’m the only one ordering beer, until the crew finish filming of course. The barman is a big man with a tartan cap and shades. A radio is crackling out. Highlights of a football game. Last night Senegal were playing a vital World Cup qualifying match with Morocco. I ask the result. It was a draw. Senegal are through to the finals.
Chicken for supper. It’s fine, but the bench I sit on collapses.
Day Thirty-Seven
DAKAR TO BAMAKO
After a night of slow jolting progress, during which I dreamt of baobab trees and disorder, we’ve reached Kidira, on the Senegal-Mali border. It’s been daylight for almost an hour and the train has been firmly stationary since then.
This is up-country rural Africa, with none of the shouting and hysteria of the city we left twenty-one hours ago. Because of the great heat, people move slowly, if they move at all. Employees of the railway unload packages without urgency, breaking off at the slightest excuse to slap hands, exchange jovial greetings and embark on long, animated conversations punctuated by inexplicably hysterical laughter.
When we finally depart Kidira at half past nine, we’ve slipped four hours behind schedule. Five minutes later we cross the Faleme, a tributary of the Senegal, cutting north to south with a red earth escarpment rising on its eastern bank. We’re now in Mali. By midday we’re alongside the Senegal itself, flowing strong and substantial, through the arid bush country, known by its French name, la brousse.
A long halt at Kayes, which has the reputation of being the hottest town in Africa, set in a bowl surrounded by hills full of iron-bearing rock. Check my thermometer. It’s 39degC in the shade, 102degF, not bad for February. The barman and restaurant car staff are out on the platform, seeking relief beneath an umbrageous mimosa. Opposite is a big handsome run-down colonial building, an uncommon mix of Franco-Moorish styles, red brick combined with horseshoe arches and elaborate balconies. It appears to be occupied by dozens of families. By the side of the railway track the words ‘Defense d’Uriner, 3000 Fr.’ are fading slowly from the wall.
Just when it seems we might be destined to spend the rest of our lives in Kayes, a shudder runs through the train and we jerk into motion. Our endlessly cheery guard reckons we’ll be in Bamako at ten o’clock tonight and slaps his hand in mine to seal the prediction.
The scenery changes now, as we cross the land of the Malinke people, from whom Mali took its name. This is more like the heat-cracked plateau of Mauritania than the flat bush country of Senegal. Escarpments and weirdly sculpted rocks rise around us. We stop at stations without platforms, surrounded by that-chroofed rondavels and mud huts, where women with charcoal braziers in one hand and corn-cobs in the other ply the train, selling bananas, roast goat, loaves of bread, tea, smoked fish, yams, bags of nuts.
At a place called Mehani we are becalmed again, waiting for a train from Bamako to come through on the single-track line ahead of us.
I feel tired, unwashed and greasy, but I keep my spirits up by reading Sanche de Gramont’s The Strong Brown God, and imagining how immeasurably more awful it was for the British explorer Mungo Park, as he made his way through this same territory in 1796, intent on becoming the first Westerner to set eyes on the fabled River Niger.
Dusk is falling as the Bamako - Kayes train comes in. It pulls up opposite us, each window crammed with faces.
The last sight I remember before night falls is crossing the Senegal for the very last time, at the point where, fed by the Bafing and Bakoye rivers, it is a majestic half-mile wide, its banks turning a deep ruddy brown in the dying light.
It’s ten o’clock and we are still so far from Bamako that I cannot even make light of it with our friendly guard. Faced with the realisation that we shall have to spend another night on the train, the spirit seems to have gone out of everyone. They just want to be home, not on this hot and sticky train, full of people but empty of almost everything else. There is an air of resigned listlessness as we swing once more into the darkness.
Arched doorway at Chefchaouen, Morocco.
GIBRALTAR
On the road in Gibraltar. Left to right: Peter Meakin, Nigel
Meakin, Aaton Super 16 XTR Prod (aka ‘The Baby’), MP, Roger Mills, Gloria Macedo, Natalia Fernandez, John Pritchard.
GIBRALTAR
Africa, seen from O’Hara’s Battery and seagull toilet. The distant peak of Jebel Musa (2761 feet) breaks the clouds on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar.
GIBRALTAR
The Royal Gibraltar Regiment is the Rock’s own army. Here they put on a ceremonial parade in Casemates Square.
MOROCCO
Timbuktu sign, Zagora, Morocco.
MOROCCO
Catching up with the diary in the corner of a cafe in the casbah, Tangier.
Backstage at St Andrew’s Church, Tangier. Mustapha Chergui, sexton for the last thirty-eight years, introduces me to Fatima, his wife of forty years, and their son (framed).
Jonathan and Birdie enjoy a quiet moment.
Man of the mountains in the square at Chefchaouen.
Trio of fine buildings in the Plaza Uta El Hammam, Chefchaouen: (left to right) casbah, medersa (Koranic school) and mosque.
Lounging around in the funduq. Out-of-town traders mull over marketing strategy.
The calm before the storm. On my way to the hammam clutching my new shorts.
Hands up those who’ve had enough. My masseur and I get to grips at the hammam at Chefchaouen.
Street life in Fez. The low-tech medina is an intricate network of small businesses that has remained largely unchanged for the last 1000 years.
Hides on their way to the tannery.
Sahara (2002) Page 12
