Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  The Portuguese-built bastions of what is now a piece of Spanish territory in Africa, the city of Ceuta.

  MALI

  Day Thirty-Eight

  BAMAKO

  As if this second, unscheduled night is not wretched enough, my bowels, so well-disciplined since Western Sahara, suddenly demand attention. It’s as if they know that it’s hot, the train is unstable, there’s no water left in any of the lavatories and there’s someone sleeping in the corridor who I have to step over each time.

  As my internal convulsions match those of the train, I look in vain for any sign of city lights, but it’s not until five o’clock that I hear J-P outside my door.

  ‘Breakfast in Bamako,’ he announces cheerfully.

  Forty-three hours after leaving Dakar, eight hours later than schedule, having covered the distance at an average speed of 28 miles per hour, we creak to a halt at Bamako station at five-forty on a Monday morning. For a moment all is quiet. The first streaks of dawn light pierce the clouds in the eastern sky, the smell of a new day edges out the smell of an over-used train, and though we can see only the darkened outlines of station buildings, there is an air of expectation.

  Then the doors swing open and for the first time I realise just how many people have been aboard the Dakar - Bamako express. And how much they’ve brought with them. The narrow platform is soon submerged beneath people and their stuff. Chairs, sofas, lengths of carpet, great bulging sacks, cooking stoves, lengths of piping. All become weapons in the fight for the exit.

  We are trying our best to film this, which only adds to the chaos. Two men offering us taxis and cheap hotels follow us everywhere. Somewhere further up the platform there are cries and shouts and people fall back as a scuffle begins. A man suspected of stealing has been dragged off the train and is being savagely beaten by his fellow passengers.

  I make a scrawled note in my diary: ‘Bamako Station, fiveforty a.m. The Heart of Darkness’.

  Breakfast in Bamako. Part Two. A couple of hours ago I felt like a piece of litter ready to be swept up and thrown away. Now I’m sitting by the banks of the River Niger with a cup of coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs in front of me. I’m washed and freshly dressed and have just seen a sunrise as beautiful as any since this journey began. Deepest gloom has given way, suspiciously quickly, to pure, uncritical ecstasy, as we sit on this terrace on stilts built out over the river that will lead us to Timbuktu. A golden sun grows in confidence. There is a swimming pool, fresh fruit, and a day off to rest, relax and generally wallow in the delights of not having to move.

  Day Forty

  BAMAKO

  At first light this morning the surface of the River Niger shone like silver, and as I watched, a boy in a dug-out canoe slowly poled himself through the water hyacinth, a slim black silhouette against the lightening sky, as spare and sharp as a character in Chinese calligraphy.

  An hour later the sun is up and the banks of the river are lined with children bathing and men and women washing. This is where the hotel laundry is done and it’s deeply satisfying to watch my travel-worn jeans being pounded against the rock whilst I drink a cup of coffee on the terrace.

  We drive into Bamako. The road surface is like a Mohican haircut. A thin strip of tarmac, worn down to hard-baked earth on either side. Like Nouakchott in Mauritania, Bamako is a city that has grown fast since independence, and for the same reasons - drought and the southward march of the Sahara Desert. Forty years ago, 160,000 people lived here; now there are more than a million, one tenth of the population of this huge country, and enough of them have old, poorly maintained cars to fill the air with a pervasive soup of pollution.

  We pass buildings that date Bamako’s history like rings on a tree trunk. First, and nearest the hotel, the gorgeously named Bobolibougou market, a forest of stalls stretching way back from the roadside and disappearing into Stygian gloom. Their knobbly wood frames and thatched roofs cannot have changed much since Mungo Park came here. Further into town, the road leads us past the heart-sinking bulk of the Hotel l’Amitie, ten storeys of grey concrete with grass sprouting from the cracks. This unlovely landmark is a reminder of the days after independence, when Mali took the hardline socialist route, bankrolled by China and the Soviet Union. A later stage of development is represented by the Saudifinanced road bridge across the Niger, and one later still by the unmissable BCEAO tower, a bank headquarters which looks from a distance like a skyscraper made of mud. This could be said to represent the latest phase of Mali’s development - African capitalism.

  The everyday commercial life of Bamako is not to be found in air-conditioned office blocks, but out in the open, on the hot, busy streets. This is where we find the fetish stalls, stocked with animal skins, shrunken monkey heads, dried ears and hearts, bird’s feet, crocodile parts and all the other charms and potions for the gri-gri - black magic or traditional healing - which is still such a powerful force in the country.

  This is where we find the windowless huts of businesses with names like ‘Coiffure, Harrods style’ and ‘M. Yattara, Boutique’, the latter, consisting of a table, a bench and a kettle, located outside the gates of the station we arrived at two mornings ago. So low were my spirits then that I hardly noticed the station itself, which is another French colonial gem, faced in local red sandstone, roofed in terracotta tiles and dominated by a clock tower with the proud inscription ‘Chemin de Fer de Dakar en Niger’ picked out in gold leaf. Sadly, the original clock has gone missing and been inadequately replaced by one out of somebody’s kitchen. Less grand, but equally purposeful inscriptions adorn the walls of the forecourt, including two ‘Defense d’Uriner‘ signs and a third which warns: ‘Defense Absolut d’Uriner’, under pain of arrest by Special Police. The mind boggles at what sort of highly honed skills these special police must require.

  Order a coffee, which is made in a tall glass with about eight grains of Nescafe and half a tin of evaporated milk. It tastes disgusting. Mr Yatarra is a character though. He speaks good English and eyes us with lofty amusement. When J-P asks him if he is happy for us to film, he pats the side of his voluminous djellaba.

  ‘I am happy in my pocket,’ he says beadily, demonstrating a shrewd feel for First-World guilt.

  ‘This is Africa. You must give me something. We are many.’

  A beggar approaches, holding his tin with the stump of a severed arm. Mr Yatarra ignores him.

  Watching people coming and going, I’m impressed once again by how much in Africa travels by head. A woman strides by, carrying a riot of carrots that seem to sprout from her like orange dreadlocks, another bears two large clay pots, each at least a foot across, one on top of the other and both on top of her head. A very lean, tall man in a ‘Giggs 11’ T-shirt, a pile of sports bags on his head, reluctantly breaks step to avoid an older man, head bent beneath the weight of two double mattresses.

  In an attempt to make sense of such an exhilarating but unfamiliar world, I hope to meet up with Toumani Diabate, one of a group of local poets and musicians which is building a growing following for Malian music in Europe and America, and whose album, Djelika, I’ve been listening to constantly for the last three months.

  Everyone seems to know Toumani. As soon as I mention his name Mr Yatarra nods and points out the way to his house.

  ‘Another coffee?’

  ‘Not right now, thanks.’

  It turns out that Toumani has seven houses and no-one is quite sure which one he’s in. We’re told to await him at the most likely, a tall rambling complex off a baked-earth street. It’s a modest enough area, but lines of broken glass and razor wire on top of the 15-foot walls of the courtyard are a bit of a giveaway. The rock star-style elusiveness and eventual arrival in dazzling white opentopped Mercedes lead me to suspect ego trouble. I could not have been more wrong.

  Toumani is, I would guess, around forty. He wears a wide white robe, like a Pierrot at the circus, and walks awkwardly, the result of childhood polio. But he’s co-operation personified,
happy to climb to the top of his three-storey house, where the light is better for our filming, to give me a masterclass in the kora and an insider’s view of the problems and pleasures of living in Mali.

  He talks softly and seriously. I learn about the griots, the poets and musicians of which he is one, who can trace themselves back to the Malian Empire of the thirteenth century, when they were employed to sing the praises of their leaders and in turn became the keepers of the oral tradition. Which is how he learnt to play the kora, a Mandinke instrument played in Guinea and Benin before being introduced to Mali.

  ‘I come from seventy-one generations of kora players,’ he says matter-of-factly.

  The kora has twenty-one strings and a long neck rising from a cowhide-covered base.

  ‘Is it made by your family?’

  ‘Of course. This is my family history. It’s not like a piano or a guitar that we have to go to the shop to buy.’

  Toumani’s father, Sidiki Diabate, was, he says, king of the kora, but his son took it in a very different direction.

  ‘I was listening to James Brown’s music, to Otis Redding’s, to Jimi Hendrix, to Salif Keita (the most famous of all Malian musicians), to jazz from Guinea. And I said, I have to open a new door for the kora. Everybody can join the kora music now, not only listen to it, but to come and play with the kora.’

  And they have. Toumani mentions Peter Gabriel, Taj Mahal and the Spanish flamenco group Ketama amongst those he has worked with.

  Toumani’s gentle manner disguises a prodigious energy. He travels the world, then comes back to Bamako to teach (there is an American student with him today), write and record new material, both for himself and for the young Malian musicians he encourages. He becomes most animated as he talks about his latest discoveries, two rappers who call themselves called Les Escrocs, The Crooks. Though American in style, Toumani encourages them to write lyrics that are positive rather than aggressive. So, their first single, which he has produced, is an attempt to spread the message that kids should get an education. This is something that weighs heavily on Toumani.

  ‘If you don’t go to school, the poor will always be poor and the rich will always be rich. A country with young people who don’t go to school is like a car without an engine.’

  He is not hopeful of rapid change, but he is proud of his country. Mali, he says, may be one of the poorest countries in the world, but in its culture and the hospitality of its people it’s one of the richest.

  Then he plays the kora for me. It’s set in a frame support in front of him. He plays, legs astride the base, using only the thumb and forefinger of both hands. A magical sound comes out, midway between that of a harp and a lute. A complex of themes so skilfully interwoven that the music seems to be carrying you effortlessly through a labyrinth of stories and memories. It’s soothing and strong at the same time, and hits heart and head with equal power.

  Day Forty-One

  BAMAKO TO DJENNE

  Rested and refreshed beside the banks of the Niger, it’s now time to follow the river up into the Sahara. Rivers and Sahara sound a distinct contradiction in terms and it’s not surprising that the Niger has always fascinated writers and travellers. For a long time it was one of the great geographical riddles. Herodotus and Pliny believed it was joined to the Nile, possibly flowing underground through central Africa. The Romans added little information, as they baulked at crossing the Sahara, and for almost 1500 years the generally accepted authority for the river’s course was the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy, whose map, drawn up in the first century AD, showed the Niger flowing from central Africa westwards into the Atlantic. This was confirmed by a twelfth-century scholar, al-Idrisi, from Ceuta, who called it ‘the Nile of the Negroes’.

  The problem is that neither of these learned gentlemen had ever seen the river. Nor was it easy for travellers from Europe or Islamic North Africa to check their assumptions. The Sahara was a formidable barrier and the Atlantic was much feared. The currents took sailors south, but they had no means of navigating their way back. Cape Bojador, on the coast of what is now Western Sahara, was considered the safe southern sailing limit. Beyond that was terra incognita and a sea full of dragons and sea monsters.

  Arab traders were eventually lured across the forbidding Sahara Desert by the promise of gold in the lands to the south. So successful were they, that by the end of the Middle Ages two-thirds of all the world’s gold came from West Africa. This created an Islamic cultural and commercial hegemony from which Christians were largely excluded. Leo Africanus, an Arab from Fez, who converted to Catholicism and worked for the Pope, became the first to give an eyewitness account of the mysterious River Niger. Published in Italian in 1600, Africanus’ book described sailing the Niger from Timbuktu to Guinea, which makes it scarcely believable that he should have confirmed the conventional error that the river flowed west. But he did. The only one who dared to suggest the Niger flowed east was the man from Tangier, Ibn Battuta. But no-one had listened to him.

  The expedition that finally solved the riddle was inspired not so much by religion or commerce as scientific curiosity. The African Association, founded in London in 1788, charged the young Scotsman Mungo Park with the task of discovering, once and for all, ‘the rise, the course, and the termination of the Niger’.

  Park and his expedition started inland from Gambia in June 1795. After extraordinary misadventures, terrible hardships and considerable dangers, they reached the town of Segou over a year later.

  Mid-afternoon, 204 years later, I’ve reached Segou, after a four-hour drive from Bamako, and I’m standing on a soft sand beach with a copy of Mungo Park’s journal, Travels into the Interior of Africa, open at his entry for 20 July 1796.

  ‘As I was anxiously looking around for the river, one of them called out, geo affili (see the water), and looking forwards, I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission - the long-sought-for, majestic Niger, glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward.’

  With this single observation, Mungo Park saw off 2000 years of error. It was one of the great geographical discoveries. Encouraged, Park set himself the greater task of tracing the course of the entire river. He was brave, but also obtuse and severely inept at man management, and ten years later he died in a hail of spears and arrows as his boat raced through a gorge at Jebba, in what is now Nigeria. He never succeeded in following the river to the sea.

  Looking out now across a broad, placid, unexpectedly blue stream, with kingfishers hovering and sweeping down into the reed-beds, it’s hard to believe that this river could have been the cause of so much pain and grief before the riddle of its course was finally solved, forty years after Mungo Park stood here. We now know it to be the third longest river in Africa, flowing for 2600 miles from the mountain rainforests of Guinea, making a long slow horseshoe bend through the Sahara, then turning south to reach the sea in a wide marshy delta near Port Harcourt in Nigeria.

  Segou is one of a string of towns sustained by the Niger, and despite having busy streets and one or two company headquarters, its mood seems to reflect the pace of the river, calm and pleasantly unruffled. Lorries rumble ponderously up from the riverbank, laden with freshly made mud bricks that have been hardening in the sun. Out on the stream, fishermen in pirogues as slender as driftwood pole themselves in and out of a lazy current, so sluggish that, to be honest, I wouldn’t be able to tell which way it was flowing. A sandy road has become a temporary football pitch and misdirected passes bounce off cars without anybody seeming to care very much.

  Between the high walls of old colonial villas, a track leads through to a riverside street, on which is a haven called L’Auberge. A small terrace with white tables and red chairs leads into a cool dark room with a long polished wood bar, which doubles as reception. The only occupant is a tall, ascetic, white man with an untended beard and a backpack that rises above his head like some portable throne. The walls are decorated with masks,
drums, necklaces of cowrie shells and some richly carved wooden doors, which, I’m told, are made by the Dogon people who live, almost hidden away, in the mountains north and east of the river. The special of the day is chalked up on a board. Rabbit with baked apple. The prospect of anything without chicken in it reduces me to near-slobbering hysteria.

  The owner appears from behind the bar. He’s soft-spoken and welcoming and his name is Abi Haila. He’s Lebanese. His countrymen, he says, are like the Irish, scattered all over the world. His father’s family came here in 1914 on a boat full of emigrants, who got off in Dakar thinking it was Brazil, or so he says. Anyway they stayed and prospered and now run a number of hotels and businesses. This appealing, hospitable, unpretentious place seems a tempting alternative to the drive to Djenne, but it’s fatal to blur the distinction between holiday and filming, and after a couple of chilled Castel beers it’s back to the schedule.

  We eat on the move. Goat roasted at a stall on the outskirts of Segou and served in brown paper. Once past the aromatic taste of the charcoal, it’s a long, long chew. I’m still finding bits of it in my teeth when we turn off the main road and into Djenne five hours later. The overhead lights of a gas station illuminate an enigmatic scene; a donkey and cart drawn up beside a petrol pump.

  Djenne is surrounded by the waters of the Bani river for most of the year, and even now, when the river is low, we have to wait for a ferry to take us across. Alongside us is a pick-up, whose cargo seems to defy all the laws of physics. Boxes, bags, plastic sacks, rolls of carpet and car tyres rise above it, layer perched on swaying layer, and on top of it all are a half dozen trussed sheep.

  Day Forty-Two

  DJENNE

  Of all the cities on the edge of the Sahara Djenne is the one I’m most excited about. Ever since I first saw pictures of the mud-made Great Mosque with its distinctive conical towers, pierced by wooden beams which jut out of the walls as if the building were undergoing acupuncture, I’ve had it marked down as somewhere unique and exotic.