Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  Obviously others have too, for my night’s sleep at the tourist campement is constantly interrupted by sounds of flushing, washing, coughing, farting and footsteps. This journey has been so far off the beaten track that I’d forgotten about tour groups. These are the first we’ve come across since Marrakesh. One group is British. I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but when I’m asked if I’ve ever been to Stoke-on-Trent all my romantic illusions of desert travel begin to wilt.

  Watch brilliantly coloured geckoes darting about the garden until our guide arrives. He’s an energetic, eloquent, persuasive local man called Amadou Cisse but known to all as Pigmy, because by Malian standards he is compact. I instinctively feel I shall be all right with Pigmy. He’s steeped in local life and has a twitchily restless urge to show me the town. He wears a loose brown robe, one of the wide-brimmed, triangular Fulani hats with a bobble on top that remind me of Moroccan tagines, dark glasses and a big silver Rolex. It’s going to be hot he says (what’s new?), so we should get out early. It’s also market day, so the town will be full, and what’s more, it’s the market day before the festival of Tabaski, so it will be full of sheep. As head of a household he is expected to make a sacrifice and a decent-looking ram is top of his shopping list. We launch into the crowd, most of whom Pigmy seems to know intimately. Barely breaking his stride, he networks his way forward, grabbing hands, kissing cheeks (of men only) and tossing tantalising morsels of information over his shoulder.

  ‘That’s my cousin, he’s crazy! … Her brother knows my sister … He is my friend, he owes me money.’

  There is no sheep shop as such. Pigmy merely pushes through until he finds a man standing on a corner with a few animals around him. He is a lot older than Pigmy with a pinched face, shrewd moustache and white skullcap. After handshakes and banter he indicates his best beast and Pigmy squats down and begins to feel around.

  ‘It should be a really good and complete sheep, you see.’ His voice drifts up from somewhere down by its backside. ‘Not with one eye or one leg.’ He examines its balls closely. ‘Should be like a very nice sheep.’

  Pigmy straightens up and turns to the sheep merchant, pointing out a tiny contusion on its nose. ‘You have some problem here.’ He shakes his head and ostentatiously starts to look elsewhere.

  The sheep seller knows that with less than twenty-four hours to go before Tabaski he may well get left with surplus animals. Numbers are discussed. Pigmy haggles him down from 40,000 to 37,500 francs, about PS37.50. A lot of money, but as Pigmy says it is an important festival and a man in his position is expected to buy the best he can. Two boys are summonsed and sent to deliver the beast to Pigmy’s house. We plough on into the crowd.

  Many of these people are not from Djenne, but from surrounding villages, too small to have markets of their own. The men fish and herd the animals, the women prepare them for market, making yoghurt, smoking fish. He shows me the different sections of the market: the Bambara people with their millet and rice, the Fulani with their milk and butter, and the smoked and cured produce of the Niger fishermen, disconcertingly called Bozos.

  He gives me advice on how to tell Fulani women. Swiftly raking the crowd, he picks out a strikingly tall woman in a dress and headscarf of busy matching patterns.

  ‘She is one.’

  Pigmy points at her face.

  ‘You see the tattooing here, round her mouth and this here,’ he says, indicating a small mark below her right eye. ‘This shows the family she is from.’

  I’m impressed by his diagnosis, until he rather spoils it by adding, ‘I know her. She is my sister’s cousin.’

  After the two of them have exchanged a brief and apparently contentious piece of family gossip, we move on.

  ‘They are the most beautiful women in Africa,’ he enthuses, breaking off to draw my attention to someone who looks more gorgeous than any we’ve seen today.

  ‘She is not Fulani,’ he says dismissively, ‘she is Songhai.’

  He comes up to a girl with a round face, doe-like eyes and large breasts.

  ‘She is Fulani,’ says Pigmy with a big smile. ‘This is Aya. My family wanted me to marry her.’

  I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this. If Pigmy fancies them, they’re Fulani.

  Making the most of the shade, we walk through a low building onto a factory floor of women at sewing machines, maybe forty or fifty of them, every one clacking away at full tilt to satisfy the crowd waiting to collect repaired clothes, re-stitched sheets, finished dresses, robes, headdresses. Then we’re out of this dark and tumultuously noisy room and into a light and tumultuously noisy square, at the far end of which, bathed in dusty sunlight, is the building I feel I know so well, the Grande Mosquee, the largest mud-built structure in Africa.

  ‘In the world,’ Pigmy corrects me.

  To Western steel, glass and concrete tastes, the mud-walled mosque seems to obey none of the normal rules of construction. It’s organic, fairy-tale architecture, the ultimate winner of any beach building competition. Instead of the columns, capitals and cornices we’ve been brought up to think of as architectural basics, it features tall conical shapes reminiscent of termite mounds. Three 40-foot towers, each one crowned with an ostrich egg, face onto the square, linked by a wall of slim, pointed buttresses.

  The mud walls are renewed every year in one great communal enterprise. Women carry the water to mix the mortar, which the men then carry and apply to the walls, using the projecting beams like scaffolding. During the work, anyone who needs refreshment is invited in and given tea by the old ladies of the town, but anyone seen to be avoiding work is hooted at by the women.

  Pigmy waxes lyrical about the hundred pillars inside and the hundred windows in the roof, but when I ask if I can go and see them he is apologetic. Apparently, some Americans recently used the interior for a fashion shoot and so offended local sensibilities that non-Muslims are no longer allowed in.

  We walk back together to Pigmy’s house, through quieter streets, where all the houses seem miniatures of the mosque, walls modelled with plaster laid over mud brick, one organic outer-skin, buttressed and rounded off. Outside one house, a group of children are mixing fresh mortar with their feet, imitating the tradition of the barey, the master masons of Djenne. The mortar looks grey and lifeless until it dries on the walls and soaks up the sunlight and turns a soft brown. At sunrise and sunset it is golden.

  At Pigmy’s house I meet his wife of eight months. She sits in a doorway of the courtyard, having her ankles hennaed for the big day tomorrow. She’s placid and pretty, with an aura of quiet ease that contrasts sharply with Pigmy’s restless energy. I ask how they met. Apparently, she sold milkshakes in the market and Pigmy flirted with her (as I’d seen him do with cousins and sisters of friends that he encountered earlier today). Milkshakes, however, grew into true love. His parents were not keen, because she was a country girl and he was a relatively affluent city boy. Pigmy is strong-willed and insisted on marrying her, even though the price he paid for not having a wife found for him by the family was to forfeit gifts from his parents’ friends.

  He speaks earnestly of her many virtues, but she says nothing, just turns her big brown eyes towards him. The woman who is preparing her feet for the henna is, by contrast, an older woman, with a canniness that reflects a much deeper knowledge of life. Occasionally she will break into Pigmy’s romantic banter with muttered asides that send him into fits of laughter. He turns to me.

  ‘She is like a griot,’ he explains. ‘She is free to say anything she wants.’

  This sounds interesting.

  ‘Can you ask her to tell me the real story, Pigmy?’

  He translates. She replies with a wicked smile. He rocks back with laughter.

  ‘She say, if she were English, she would tell you a lot of things, but she don’t speak English.’

  He throws a sidelong glance at his adoring wife.

  ‘I think it’s good she don’t speak English.’

  Day Fo
rty-Three

  DJENNE

  Tabaski morning in Djenne. The dust is rising in the streets. Pigmy, resplendent in a billowing robe of crisp white cotton trimmed with silver and grey embroidery, is walking with me and many hundreds of others to hear the imam’s address and witness the ritual sacrifice that will be the signal for the day’s festivities to begin. I feel conspicuously dull in my chinos and Gap Oxford, for all around me people are in their traditional finery. Malians dress splendidly anyway, but today they pull the stops out. No two people in this vast throng seem to be dressed alike.

  This celebration of the sparing of Abraham’s son from sacrifice is one of the most important days in the Muslim calendar. It’s not so much the sparing itself they celebrate, but Abraham’s act of obedience, his willingness to sacrifice his own son if that was what his God ordered him to do. Submission to the will of Allah is the cornerstone of Islam. It is what the word Islam means.

  There are so many people expected at these special prayers that the mosque is too small to hold them, so the ceremony takes place in an open area at the edge of town. Getting there is like being in a football crowd on its way to the stadium. We’re swept along by a generally good-natured, expectant, ever-growing tide. It’s going to be a very hot day, and many are carrying prayer mats in one hand and big, colourful umbrellas in the other. At the site, worshippers assemble in long rows, those with the biggest umbrellas and the finest prayer mats in the front and the least privileged in an overspill yard with only strips of paper to kneel on.

  Women are conspicuous by their absence. When I ask where they are Pigmy shifts a little uncomfortably.

  ‘The women will be at the back,’ he says vaguely.

  The truth of which I can’t check, as the back of the crowd is now so far away.

  Pigmy estimates today’s attendance at around 8000. All over the Arab world there will be similar gatherings, and by the end of the day several million sheep will have disappeared off the face of the earth.

  The imam steps up to a microphone set up beneath the sort of garish orange umbrella you might find at a beach bar. A few feet away, tethered in the shade of a neem tree, is the beast he will soon slaughter. It paces about, bleating every now and then and eyeing the growing crowd nervously, like an actor on opening night.

  At half past nine silence falls over this vast congregation and prayers begin. A light breeze stirs the young trees. The long rows of worshippers chant their prayers and kneel and rise, kneel and rise, in unison. I check my thermometer. It’s 35degC/95degF in the shade.

  After the prayers, a collection is taken and the impressive discipline of the worshippers breaks up. Some of the older men are helped away, the younger ones are allowed to move up to get a better view of the proceedings and everyone starts chattering, even though the imam is still delivering benedictions and demanding responses.

  I hear Pigmy mutter ‘Enough benedictions’, but it’s another five minutes before the imam concludes the blessing and two of his assistants move forward and release the sheep from the tree.

  This is accompanied by a great surge forward to the area where the sacrifice will take place, completely obscuring the view of Nigel and Basil, who have been at carefully chosen camera positions for an hour or more. Everyone is turning to each other and shaking hands and exchanging greetings. My hand is pumped as enthusiastically as anyone else’s.

  ‘Sambe, sambe. Amina,’ Pygmy teaches me to say. I presume it’s the equivalent of ‘Happy Tabaski’.

  Somewhere in all this mass of humanity, the first sheep of the day dies in Djenne.

  Pigmy now has to emulate the imam’s sacrifice and he is unusually preoccupied as we trudge back through the winding streets of the town. A cloud of dust raised by the feet of 8000 celebrants hangs thick and unavoidable in the hot and motionless air. By the time we reach his house I feel as if I’ve swallowed a small desert.

  Pigmy makes a traditional round of the neighbours, briskly darting in and out of doorways exchanging greetings.

  ‘Sambe, sambe. Amina.’

  Trickles of blood, running out of waste pipes and into the open drains that run down the centre of the streets, indicate that for some houses, the sacrifices have already begun. At Pigmy’s house, grand by Djenne standards, with upstairs rooms for relatives, we are welcomed by his father, who sits in half-darkness by the door, greeting everyone with a handshake and a broad smile. Through in the courtyard, Pigmy’s wife, together with his mother and aunts, all gorgeously attired, sit on upturned plastic buckets, slicing vegetables.

  They remain profoundly unimpressed, as a knife is put into Pigmy’s quivering hand and he and the PS37.50 sheep make their fateful tryst in a corner of the yard. Pigmy, not yet an expert, is, thankfully, assisted by a butcher, who instructs him in the art of swift throat-cutting. The deed is done in accordance with the ancient law, and the sheep is lifted over a drain. The blood pumps from its neck and runs away beneath the wall and into the street.

  Pigmy looks much relieved as the knife is taken from him. It’s carefully washed by the butchers, who immediately set to work skinning the carcass. With temperatures in Djenne creeping up to 40degC/104degF, their speed and skill is, as they say, of the essence.

  Should you ever have to do this at home, here’s a hot tip from the professionals. Slit the skin around one leg, then blow through the incision until the skin inflates and breaks clear of the flesh beneath. It takes time and considerable lung-power, but if all goes well the hide should slip off like a banana skin.

  Half an hour later the sheep is reduced to the sort of anonymous chunks we Westerners are more comfortable with and Pigmy’s majestic mother is dropping them one by one into the pot. All that remains of yesterday’s purchase is the head and a pile of feet stacked neatly in one corner of the yard.

  Nothing, I’m told, is wasted. The head will be boiled for soup, which Pigmy raves about, and the testicles will be distributed to the young boys of the neighbourhood.

  ‘It helps to make them clever,’ explains Pigmy. A theory which, if proven, could change school dinner menus forever.

  The festive meal, to which I’m invited, is a considerable anticlimax. It’s cooked beautifully but consumed rapidly and in silence, apart from a few laughs when I commit the dreadful faux pas of using my left, or washing, hand to scoop up the food. We squat or sit cross-legged round one large dish, men separate from the women, who eat in the corner where they cook. Family and friends arrive and dig in, as if they’ve been on hunger strike. I could do with a much more leisurely, discursive pace, if only because I still have great trouble rolling rice into balls with three fingers of one hand, then dipping this into the fresh bubbling stew without scalding myself.

  I find my gaze straying over to the women. Pigmy’s mother, dressed in vibrant red like a pillar box, chews away on a huge bone whilst his wife, a freshly hennaed vision in lilac gown and hat, munches contentedly, and doesn’t catch my eye.

  Then all at once it’s over, and the traditional three glasses of powerful mint tea are prepared.

  ‘Always drink after the meal, not before. It is too strong for the taste,’ counsels Pigmy.

  Then fond farewells. They seem genuinely sorry to see us go, but I can’t help feeling there’ll be much more fun when the camera’s gone.

  We work our way back to the campement along streets stained with blood and strewn with sheep’s feet, dodging across the cracked and broken remains of a covered French drainage system. It seems a shame that this attractive and ancient city, older than Timbuktu, once proud possessor of great libraries and over sixty Koranic schools, should have left such a system to rot.

  From my conversations with Pigmy, the decline seems to have set in many years ago. In 1591 to be precise, when the glorious Songhai Empire, which succeeded the equally rich and civilised Mali Empire, unsuccessfully faced an invasion from Morocco. Though numerically superior, the Songhai army’s bows and arrows were of little use against Moroccan muskets. A dark age followed. The Empir
e collapsed, the gold trade passed out of their hands and the Touareg nomads moved in to control the trade routes.

  The French tried to improve public services and more recently UNESCO has raised funds to preserve the old mud buildings, but Djenne, like Chinguetti in Mauritania, remains a casualty of history, a shadow of what it must once have been.

  Still, Tabaski has brought the town to life. No longer confined to courtyards and back-rooms, the women who have prepared the feasts are now out on the streets, meeting, strolling and confidently flaunting their freshly plaited hair and freshly hennaed heels and exultantly extrovert outfits.

  I borrow a mobylette and drive into the centre of town for one last look at the biggest mud building in the world. In front of the mosque, children are prodding charcoal fires on which they will cook the sheep’s head soup. A trio of schoolboys, giggling with delight, show me the ancient art of making whoopee cushions out of sheep’s scrotums.

  We leave Djenne through the brick archway with its pointed oval battlements, down to the ferry where Brahmin cattle graze, seemingly oblivious to the white egrets on their heads. It’s sunset by the time we board the ferry and the flies are out.

  Day Forty-Four

  MOPTI TO DOGON COUNTRY

  Whereas Djenne felt trapped by the river, Mopti, only 65 miles northeast, thrives on it. Its natural advantages are obvious. A hundred yards from the hotel’s Soudan-style mud portals, the Bani flows in close parallel with the wider and grander Niger. These two great rivers come together less than a mile away.

  Not surprisingly, Mopti has become the riverine trading centre Djenne once was, and if we want a boat to take us to Timbuktu this is the place to find it.

  But it’s the day after Tabaski, and this normally busy port seems to be suffering from a hangover. Not an alcohol hangover, obviously; more of a sheep hangover. As they used to be everywhere, in courtyards and on street corners, on lorries and boats and motorbikes, on the tops of buses and the back of pick-up trucks, their disappearance leaves a bit of a gap, physically and perhaps psychologically as well.