Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  The normal babble of commerce is stilled and though the occasional pirogue slips out across the Bani, white sail raised to catch the breeze, Mopti seems gripped by torpor.

  It’s not difficult to find the Niger ferry boats. They look like floating apartment blocks. Three blue and white, triple-decked, steel-hulled monsters drawn up alongside one another. There’s no way to get to them that doesn’t involve slithering down the effluent-strewn bank of the river, and I have to pick my way over discarded tins, dismembered animals, twisted clothing, motor car parts, a petrified cat with rictus grin and string pulled tight around its neck, and other things I dare not even look at. I reach a wooden gangplank, which leads onto a barge, from which it’s a step over the deck-rail and onto the ferry.

  Silence, broken only by the hollow ring of my footsteps on sheet-steel plates. The Niger ferries seem completely abandoned. Then I become aware that on the next ferry, moored up against this one and sporting the name ‘Tombouctou’, there is a small group of people, lounging in chairs around a charcoal brazier, from which a wisp of smoke rises.

  I make my way across, half expecting to be ordered off, but instead I’m met with smiles and offered a cup of tea by a trimly bearded man in a violent orange and blue floral robe and green headdress. He turns out to be the captain of the Tombouctou. His wife is scrubbing down a whiskered fish, which normally lives in the river mud. It wriggles angrily and appears to continue to do so until, and a little bit after, she slits it down the middle. She slices it deftly and lays the fillets on the fire. Another man sits on a plastic strip chair, one leg drawn up, picking at his toes. There are two others, one in T-shirt and trousers, the other in a bulbous pale blue robe. I ask if they’re passengers. The captain laughs and shakes his head. They’re his brothers come for tea.

  The Tombouctou is clearly not going anywhere. The captain points at the stinking mud banks I’ve just crossed.

  ‘The water is too low.’

  We could wait a day or two. I ask him when he will be operating again.

  ‘July.’

  ‘July?’

  Now that’s another matter. July is over three months away. The fish begins to sizzle nicely and one of the captain’s brothers has made some tea.

  I knock back the first glass and stare out at the river. I’m feeling rather foolish, but the captain could not be more understanding as I explain the purpose of our journey, and he nods with wide-eyed interest when I tell him where we’ve already been. He’s a travelling man. I learn from him that for big ferries like his the Niger is only navigable for six months of the year, and with the river this low our best bet is to try the smaller local boats down in the port.

  Thanking him for his help and his tea I retrace my steps back across the foul-smelling ooze. I’m rewarded by a chance encounter with a man who knows a man who knows a man who has a pinasse, a stouter, bigger version of a pirogue, which, if we make it worth his while, could be encouraged to take us up river. Because of the Tabaski holiday, this would not be for a few days.

  He indicates the boat, a gawky, gaudily painted vessel, drawn up on the mud and leaning slightly to one side. An upper deck and engine house, bearing the words ‘Pagou Manpagu’ and decorated with playing-card symbols and the crescent moon of Islam, have been grafted, ruthlessly, onto a long, curved hull.

  The delay is frustrating. We were all subconsciously prepared for a return to the heart of the Sahara. Decide to apply the boy scout motto ‘adopt, adapt and improve’ and head out to the Bandiagara escarpment to spend the next few days camping amongst the Dogon, a unique tribe, neither Muslim nor Christian, who, for 600 years, have virtually cut themselves off from the rest of the world.

  Late afternoon. It’s becoming abundantly clear that, as far as the Dogon are concerned, their 600 years of privacy are up. A new highway is being built between Mopti and Bandiagara. Graders and rollers are at work and dust clouds hang in the air. Occasionally, a minibus emerges from the haze and rattles past us, carrying an exhausted tour group back from what they call Dogon Country.

  Then the new road curves away to the south and I realise that it’s not a conveyor belt for tourists after all, but the first stage of a trunk road across the border to Ouagadougou, the thriving capital of neighbouring Burkina Faso. This leaves us stuck at a barrier on the outskirts of Bandiagara, arguing with two or three surly men who, with no apparent authority, are demanding 500 CFAs per person and 250 per vehicle before we can proceed.

  Having settled for 250 francs from each vehicle and nothing extra for the occupants, these self-appointed toll collectors roll a red and white striped oil drum out of our path with bad grace. Maybe they put a curse on us. After a mile or so, the springs crack on one of the vehicles.

  We refresh ourselves with slices of mango bought from children on the street, whilst our drivers bind up the fractured leaf springs with an inner tube from a bicycle tyre. This piece of improvisation is immediately and searchingly put to the test as we proceed on progressively stonier, more unstable tracks up onto the escarpment. We seem to go on for ever. Dusk falls. I begin to see things in the half-light. Ghostly figures with enormous gleaming foreheads turn out to be women with aluminium water pots on their heads, and giant likenesses of Edward Scissorhands turn out to be baobab trees racing towards our headlights.

  The road begins to drop down in a series of hairpin bends, bouncing us up and down and side to side at the same time. Despite this, I fall into a brief doze as we reach the valley floor.

  I’m woken by a ferocious revving of engines. Our four-wheel drive is sliding about, out of control, rushing forwards then slipping back. Our driver brakes, reverses, revs up again and charges forward. By the light of our crazily swinging headlights I can see what the problem is. We’re halfway up a sand dune and the wheels are unable to grip.

  A voice shouts out of the darkness. One of the other vehicles has come back to lead us up. This time we make it, up over the rise, and our driver sweeps alongside his colleagues as if he’d just won a Grand Prix rather than nearly killed us.

  In a shallow bowl of sand, ringed with low bushes, stands a semicircle of small tents. To one side, beneath one of the few trees of any size, a fire is burning. I’ve lost count of the hours since we left the banks of the Bani river, but it doesn’t matter now. We’re in Dogon Country, and this is our new home.

  Day Forty-Five

  TlRELLI

  The Sahara is officially said to begin north of latitude 16. The Pays de Dogon (it sounds so much better in French) is around 14 degrees north, but the cool night, which had me scrambling into my sleeping bag around 4 a.m., and the sand that has already found its way into the most private parts of me and my luggage, take me right back to our days in Western Sahara. As if the insidious sand isn’t enough, there is the added refinement of krim-krim, thorny burrs camouflaged in sand, which attach themselves to skin and clothing like fishhooks. Those of us who have already used the bushes as our bathroom have been particularly affected, and in quite sensitive places too.

  There are bonuses of course, one of which is the spectacular sight of the escarpment wall, rising about a mile to the west of the camp, its long straight brow glowing red and gold in the early sunlight.

  Little is known about the first people to inhabit the 125-mile escarpment other than that they were little and were called the Tellem. They fled to safety here 1000 years ago. They were planters and crop growers and no match for the Dogon hunters, originally believed to have come from the Nile Valley, who took over their land 400 years later, in their turn fleeing, this time from the spread of Islam.

  The Tellem built houses in and amongst the caves halfway up the cliff wall, some of which can still be seen. The Dogon use them as burial grounds, often hauling bodies up on the end of ropes.

  I learn all this from Amadou, an urbane English-speaking Dogon, who lives in Bandiagara. There is no shortage of esoteric information about the Dogon. In fact, there is a joke that runs ‘how many people are there in a Dogon famil
y?’, the answer to which is five. Two parents, two children and one French anthropologist.

  With Amadou as my guide, we drive over the ridge and down through scattered trees to Tirelli, one of a string of villages set at intervals into the base of the cliff. At first it’s hard to tell if there’s a village there at all. In the morning shadow its sandy-grey stone buildings merge with the rock in perfect camouflage. The effect is clearly intended.

  The houses that rise steeply up the cliff-side are skilfully integrated with the massive boulders around them. They are built of dry-stone walls, capped with a smooth, chamfered layer of the clay, rice husks and straw mix known as banco. Water spouts project from the corners. Amongst the houses are the eye-catching granaries, with banco walls and pointed, overlapping mops of thatch, like witches’ hats. There are men’s and women’s granaries. The women’s are divided into four compartments: north, east, south and west. A representation of the world. Each one contains a different food: peanuts, millet, beans, rice. But in the middle of all these is a small circular hole, the centre of the world, and it is here that the women keep their most valuable belongings, money, jewellery, precious stones, gold and silver. There are no such fripperies in the men’s granaries, which are used purely as stores for the staple diet of millet.

  We wind our way up to the village, which is crisscrossed by narrow tracks. There is no room for vehicles here, and the heaviest loads, in particular water from the well below, are carried up in calabash gourds on the women’s heads.

  Amadou leads. He’s wearing a Dogon hat, white and pointed, with tassels (to keep the flies off when eating), and a cool, loose, white cotton jacket over a black T-shirt, a combination which occasionally makes him look like a mad vicar. Almost everything he tells me about the Dogon confirms that, though modern influences are creeping in, this ancient inbred way of life bears no relation to any of the other cultures and religions that have shaped this part of Africa. The Dogon world is a one-off.

  He introduces me to the headman of the village, Dogolu Say, a tall, impressive, serious man, in a pointed hat and an indigo robe. (This he casts aside in the heat of the day to reveal a Copacabana Beach T-shirt.) He, in turn, takes me first to see the forgeron, the blacksmith, a formidably powerful man in the Dogon world, taught by God (who they call Ama) how to bring fire up from the earth.

  Progress round the village is slow, partly because of the heat and partly because of the endless greetings. African greeting is fulsome at the best of times, but a Dogon ‘Good Morning’ can last several minutes. Dogolu cannot pass anyone without initiating a ritual of questions and responses, delivered in sing-song rhythm and designed to ascertain the health of not just wife, sons, brothers, sisters, daughters, cousins, in-laws and anyone else you might have met in your life, but also house, onion patch, rice supplies, bicycle, dog, donkey and so on. Try it, with rhythm.

  aga po (How are you?)

  sewa (Fine)

  oumana sewa (How’s the family?)

  sewa (Fine)

  ounou sewa (How are the kids?)

  sewa (Fine)

  yahana go sewa (How’s the wife?)

  sewa (Fine)

  deh sewa (How’s your father?)

  sewa (Fine)

  nah sewa (How’s your mother?)

  sewa (Fine)

  And so on, and on. Once the list is completed the roles are reversed and the whole process starts again. It’s a happy sound, with a style and bounce to it like good rap.

  For the most important man in the Dogon cosmology, the blacksmith looks like any other short, harassed, middle-aged tradesman as he goes about his business in a low-roofed forge built up against the side of a great boulder, whose cracks and crevices provide shelf space for his tools. The fire is kept alive by his daughter, a girl of seven or eight, who sits at the fire busily working a pair of bellows made from goatskin and date-palm wood.

  Apart from making things like clasps and locks for the granaries, the blacksmith makes knives for, and performs, male circumcision. His wife, and presumably one day the apprentice daughter who is working the bellows, performs the female circumcision. The explanation for this procedure in Dogon mythology is that Ama, who created the universe, made Earth to be his mate. Earth had male and female organs, characterised by ant hills and termite mounds. When Ama attempted congress with his beloved Earth, his entry was barred by the termite mound, which he had to remove before copulation could begin. So the termite mound represented the clitoris, and the world could not have been created until it was removed. Which is why, to this day, all the women in Tirelli will be, or have been, circumcised.

  On the way back through the village we come across the hunter, another important figure in Dogon tradition. He’s a slight, nervous man with a fur hat and a flintlock rifle, which may look quaint but is an important status symbol for the Dogon. I ask what there is to hunt in this hot, stony landscape. He talks of wild rats and monkeys, and produces a shrunken monkey head to prove it. The flintlock looks so ancient that I can’t see it being a serious threat to life. We run the camera expectantly, but the first time the hunter fills his rifle with powder and demonstrates, nothing happens. He refills, fires again. Another click. Amadou and others offer advice, and the third time he virtually empties an entire goat-horn full of saltpetre into the breech.

  This time there is a loud report. Ignited powder flies out of the side of the gun and I feel a series of sharp stings across my face. The hunter looks exultant. Amadou and the headman rush up to me. There are specks of blood across my forehead, some only millimetres away from my eyes, and sharp stabs in my forehead.

  A happy side of the whole experience is that the hunter and I become firm friends. I accuse him of trying to kill me and make elaborate hiding movements whenever I see him. Whenever he sees me, he dissolves into helpless laughter.

  By midday we surrender to the ferocious heat burning off the rocks and take a break on the terrace that acts as the village’s reception area. Beneath a palm-thatch roof is a table, benches, a couple of hammocks and an array of carved artefacts. There are single figures, women with prominent eyes, long stylised faces and breasts projecting forward like rockets, and doors and panels with the ancestors kneeling in long rows, interwoven with lizards, tortoises and the most important creature in Dogon tradition, the serpent, credited with leading the Dogon people to the escarpment.

  I’m drowsing fitfully when I become aware of other white faces on the terrace. A tall Dutchman is poking around amongst the carvings. He introduces himself as a former guide now looking for African art to sell to galleries in Europe. He doesn’t think much of the collection here. The problem, he says, is that 95 per cent of the stuff is made for tourists. What he’s looking for is the 5 per cent of original work that makes it all worthwhile.

  He’s friendly and knowledgeable and I find myself nodding sympathetically, but when he’s gone I’m left with a considerable feeling of indignation. Africa is being looted once again, this time by someone of impeccable taste, who should know better. And it’s pretty much defenceless, lacking the resources and the organisation to prevent its treasures ending up, like its animals once did, on rich men’s walls, thousands of miles away.

  Later, back at camp, our resourceful director, Mr Davidson has investigated the culinary situation and decided that the licence-payers’ money is best spent on a freshly roasted goat. We’re also working on a theory that wine can be chilled by burying the bottle in the sand an hour or so before drinking.

  Despite the threat of krim-krim, most of the evening is spent crawling around in the darkness, trying to find where we’ve put it.

  Day Forty-Six

  TlRELLI

  This morning I’m invited to lunch with Dogolu, the headman. He lives, with two wives and thirty dependents, in a labyrinth of buildings surrounding a precipitous, rocky courtyard. Such is the verticality of Tirelli that one side of their house is about 20 feet higher than the other. Dogolu squats on a rock and talks as the women prepare the meal.
Life is not as confined here as it appears to be. Of his nine children, some are studying in Bamako, while others are married and living separately.

  The ingredients for lunch are certainly fresh. Most of them are still running around the yard when we arrive. Calabashes full of water are being brought up from the well and millet is being pounded by three girls working pestles taller than themselves. It can take an hour or more of backbreaking work before the millet grain is sufficiently pulverised and the girls ease the laborious process by working in time to a soft, rhythmic chant.

  Because the shadow cast by the midday sun is so deep, and because my dinner with Dogolu is to be filmed, J-P asks if the meal can be served on the sunny side of the courtyard. The headman looks at us pityingly, and I soon know why.

  What follows is the hottest, and one of the least comfortable, sequences I’ve ever filmed. John Pritchard clocks the temperature in the unshaded overhead sun at 55degC/131degF. Dogolu has managed to coerce an assortment of male relatives to crouch round the communal bowl with me. Fortunately, there’s only one course. It’s a millet porridge, in the centre of which is a bright green sauce made from the baobab leaf, and, mixed in with this, a mutton, aubergine and onion stew. They urge me to eat but every time I pick up a glob of the millet paste it is so hot that I have to release it almost immediately. Desperate not to offend my hosts’ hospitality, I try transferring smaller amounts, but it’s still an ordeal. Passing the food from fingers to lips to tongue to throat is like walking over hot coals.

  Amadou grins broadly at my discomfort and points out that amongst the Dogon the ability to eat hot food is a sign of manly prowess. Giggles from the circle around the pot. I laugh too, slightly hysterically.