Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  Later, at siesta, my dreams are a heady mix of fire and flame and vaguely erotic termite mounds.

  In late afternoon, when the day is beginning to cool from its earlier rock-cracking heat, the men of Tirelli assemble on the only flat area in the village for a ceremonial dance that is to herald a week of funeral celebrations. Amadou says that celebrations on this scale only follow animist funerals. Animism, which attributes a living soul to all natural objects - trees, boulders, clouds, thunderstorms - remains the religion of the vast majority of Dogon.

  Before proceedings begin, men with fly-whisks clear children from the dancing ground. Women can watch, but only from a distance. The masked dancers enter. Two drummers start the beat. Then others join in, striking curved hand-bells, and a piper adds the sound of a whistle to set up a persistent, repetitive rhythm. A chorus, of whom Amadou is one, urges on the dancers, who leap into the ring, dressed in raffia headdresses and skirts in bright yellow, pink and orange over baggy Dogon trousers. The most spectacular dance is performed by half a dozen men on painted stilts, wearing girl masks decorated with cowrie shells and false breasts made of baobab fruit. All the other dancers have elaborately decorated headdresses, which vary from horned antelope heads to likenesses of birds and the huge wooden mask called tiu that can be up to 18 feet long.

  It is dazzling in its colour and energy, but I’m frustrated at not being able to comprehend more than the surface of this complex, expressive ritual.

  The end of the dance does not mean the end of celebrations in Tirelli. The dancers are rewarded with a special brew of kojo, millet beer, and things really get going after we’ve gone.

  As I lie in my tent, exhausted, as we all are, by another hot day of hard labour, the sound of partying carries across on the night air and, not for the first time in West Africa, I’m lulled to sleep by the distant sound of people having a much better time than me. And they’re at a funeral.

  Day Forty-Seven

  TlRELLI

  Made my own minor anthropological discovery this morning. I was behind a bush having a pee in the usual way when I noticed two of the Malian cooks also relieving themselves close by. I was standing. They were kneeling, rendering themselves at once less conspicuous and less affected by the brisk morning breeze. Is this just a desert thing, I wonder? Answers on a postcard please.

  Today we strike camp and return to Mopti. Which is probably just as well, as food and water are both running out. I’d been getting quite skilful at washing my entire body in one mug of water, but that’s the trouble with camping. Just as you’re getting used to it, it’s time to go home.

  We drive down to Tirelli for the last time. Life goes on and there seems to be no evidence of a wild night. A man is stripping the bark of a baobab tree and slicing it into strips for binding thatch and tying wood. Others are at work on the onion field, vivid green in this bleached landscape. As the village’s only cash crop, it’s allowed precious supplies of extra water. A small market is set up amongst the trees.

  Above these Thomas Hardyesque scenes rise the red-brown walls of the escarpment, protective and uncompromising at the same time.

  As we clamber up into the village one last time I’m reminded of the severe beauty of the place. The proportions of the houses, the materials that match the surrounding rocks, the harmony of the village with its environment. The cliff is still, as it has been for 1000 years, a sanctuary, lacking cars and satellite dishes and overhead wires and things that seem to be everywhere in the world but here.

  But it’s no use getting sentimental. As we load our gear, women climb slowly past us, carrying the never-ending shuttle of water up to the village. They ignore our awkward smiles. As our car finally pulls away, I reach for the outstretched hand of a boy who rushes up to the window. But he doesn’t want to shake my hand. He just wants a pen or a sweet or a coin.

  We remain us. They remain them. For how long, I’m not sure.

  One of the small pleasures of hard travel is the way basics can be transformed into luxuries. Tonight, back at the Kanaga Hotel in Mopti, the finest champagne in the world would be no match for the forbidden delights of running water.

  The heat and dust of the Pays de Dogon have taken their toll. The plastic cap on my tube of travel wash has melted, my urine is the colour of mustard and it takes so long to strip away the layers of dust that I feel as if my body might have turned to mud.

  Tomorrow we face the Niger, so it’s an early night. Lean over to switch off my light when a power cut kills it for me.

  Day Forty-Eight

  ON THE NIGER

  Mopti is a changed place this morning as we head down to the waterfront in search of our transport to Timbuktu. The river is busy again. Slender pirogues, so weighed down with people that the boats themselves are hardly visible, are punted to and from the network of fuzzy green islands that lie revealed between the Bani and the Niger. The river bank heaves with activity. A group of women in scarves and long saris are bent over vegetable beds hastily planted to take advantage of the newly exposed mud, and nearer the port itself rows of earthenware pots wait to be loaded. Beside them, to my surprise, for I thought such things never existed outside of Bible stories, are tablets of salt. They’re slim, rectangular blocks, like large paving stones, bound with lengths of cloth, their grey crystalline surfaces glittering in the sunlight.

  Salt was once so valuable to the people who lived south of the Sahara that it was traded weight for weight with gold. The forty or fifty tablets stacked here show that the Sahara’s chief export is still in demand. I try to lift one and it’s not easy. I’m told they weigh 40 kilograms each.

  In the midst of all this organised confusion is the brightly coloured hull of our pinasse, but getting to it is not so easy. The market is in full swing and every salesman in Mopti seems determined to give us a send-off. Sunglasses, batteries, water, hats, fruit and fish are pressed on us from one side, and bics, cadeaux, bonbons are demanded on the other. A gauntlet of commerce. Death by a thousand offers. I suppose I should be used to it by now, but, today, the combination of heat, smell, weight of my bags and the scramble through the sewerish sediments is truly nightmarish.

  Throwing my bags ahead of me, I reach for the helping hand of a crew member, who pulls me away from the nightmare and onto the deck of the Pagou Manpagu.

  It takes me only a moment to realise that the Pagou Manpagu has no deck. One moment I’m poised on the side of the hull and the next I’m down in the bilges with everyone else. Squeeze myself into a corner beside one of the bridge supports and take stock. Makeshift bamboo-strip floorboards run along the line of the keel and already most of the space is occupied, mainly by women and children. Fires are being lit and food prepared. There is a shout from a boat alongside and I look up just in time to see a goat suspended in mid-air. It disappears heavenwards to be followed by another three, wriggling and squirming as they’re hauled past me onto the roof.

  A few last arrivals jump aboard as the heat, trapped by the river bank above us, grows from intense to suffocating. Then, with a long, sucking sigh, the hand-hauled anchor pulls free of the mud and we move slowly out into the stream. My feet slip momentarily and I look down to see that I’ve dislodged a floorboard and sent a line of cockroaches scuttling for cover. With flies fussing at my face, cockroaches retreating back to the dark recesses beneath my feet and a small circle of children staring curiously, I realise I’ve stepped out of a nightmare and into some Dantesque punishment.

  And what’s worse, I know it’s going to look so damn picturesque on camera.

  The babble of Mopti slips away on our port side and we make our way gingerly through the maze of small islands, not much more than sandbanks really, which lie at the confluence of the Niger and the Bani. Some are barren, others are covered with a thin frizz of green grass, on which ewes and lambs, goats and cattle graze.

  Navigation is tricky. The pilot stands astride the bows like an Old Testament prophet, his pole rising and falling as he shouts soundings u
p to the helmsman, cross-legged at the wheel on the bridge above me.

  Once out onto the main stream of the Niger, we run into a brisk, refreshing headwind, and, with navigation a little easier, the crew busy themselves with other problems, chief of which is stemming a number of leaks that appear to have sprung in the gnarled cedar timbers of the hull.

  Young boys are despatched to scour the hold for pieces of old rag, which are then prodded into the leaks with sticks and nails. With the wind whipping up sizeable waves, it looks like a losing battle, but the crew seems unfazed, assuring me that now we’re out on the open water the timbers will soon expand and close the gaps.

  Later. I’ve made myself a nest in the bows, found some boxes on which to perch and watch the world go by. Above my head I hear the squeak of the greasy chain cable, which snakes its way, quite unprotected, along the length of the ship, between wheel and rudder. I’ve thought of travelling up on top, but though the upper deck is marginally cleaner, it’s more exposed and, anyway, it’s busy. The covered area is occupied by the crew, who lounge around and drink tea, and the rest of it is occupied by goats.

  In the confusion of departure I’ve failed to register quite where we are. As often happens in the world’s iconic places (viz. North and South Poles) the romantic loses out to the practical. Survival comes before reflection. Here I am on the Niger, a river whose exploration cost so many lives and whose exact course was not known to any European 150 years ago, and all I can worry about is a cockroach or two. I stare out across the choppy grey waters and try to think important thoughts.

  To be honest, the scenery doesn’t help. The river is about a quarter of a mile wide at this point and flows through an arid, sandy landscape, broken by occasional stands of mango and eucalyptus, planted I assume as windbreaks. There is a surprisingly abundant bird life along the riverbank - egrets and herons, waders, kingfishers, even an eagle - but the scattered villages of the Bozo fishermen are dispiriting skylines of low mud huts and flat, strawthatch roofs.

  The one delightful surprise comes as we round one of the few bends in the river. I spy something over on the southern shore which I first take to be a mirage. Indistinct in the dusty haze and rising out of nowhere is the pinnacled outline of a building of shimmering beauty, as if King’s College Chapel at Cambridge had been transported from the banks of the Cam to the banks of the Niger. It’s a mosque to rival that of Djenne, with a pale gold minaret, four-tiered like a pagoda, rising above a cluster of orange-tipped towers. Amongst these drab villages it is sensationally incongruous, as well as light, majestic and timeless.

  It passes out of sight behind a grove of trees and we see nothing like it again.

  Late lunch of couscous and vegetables specially prepared for the film crew. We watch with some envy as the rest of the steerage class passengers prepare themselves a goat stew, flames crackling away on the floor of the hold, only a couple of feet from where people are bailing out water. Soon afterwards, we put in at a small town. Amongst the newly embarking passengers is a white woman. Very white, in fact. The paleness of her skin is emphasised by a simple long black dress with red and gold trim around the neckline. She’s as incongruous as the mosque we’ve just passed. A Viking on the Niger. She does, indeed, turn out to be Norwegian, and though she looks as if she had stepped off the plane from Oslo this morning, she has lived in Mali for six years as a Christian missionary, learning the Fulani language and writing a book on Fulani women. Her name is Kristin.

  We sit and talk up in the bows, making the most of the cooling headwinds.

  To understand Mali, she thinks, you have first to understand the differences between its peoples. There are the Bozos, who are the river people, and the Bobos, who live up in the inland Delta and have dogs and whose villages are not recommended for overnight stays. There are the ungovernable Touareg nomads of the north, who were in open rebellion against Bamako until four years ago and who remain very much a law unto themselves, with less than one per cent of their children in school. At the other extreme are the Bambara, more progressive and urbanised, and the Fulani, who see themselves as the aristocrats of Mali, with a sharply defined moral code which Kristin says is best described by the English word ‘chivalry’.

  I ask her what she makes of the apparent segregation of men and women in almost every area of African social life. Kristin thinks this is all about ways of seeing.

  ‘Publicly they live a very separate life, but in private they’re very attentive to each other.’

  She thinks the image of the marginalised, oppressed African woman is wrong.

  ‘They’re very strong, very proud of who they are.’

  Then how does she account for the continuing practice of female circumcision?

  ‘What is sexual pleasure here and in Europe is quite different. We have a tendency of thinking that sexual pleasure is impossible for a woman that has been circumcised. I don’t share that opinion.’

  The waves are hitting hard now, rocking the boat and slapping at the hull as they ripple beneath us.

  Kristin is adamant that Western solutions cannot be applied to African relationships. ‘What men find attractive in Africa doesn’t necessarily correspond to what is attracting a man in Europe. You know, in Europe a woman should be skinny, but here a woman should be fat. And the women are very concerned how to be attractive and how to attract a man …’

  At this vital moment we’re suddenly thrown forward. With a shuddering rumble the Pagou Manpagu lurches to a halt. We’ve run aground. Kristin seems unperturbed.

  ‘Isn’t it serious?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I travel the river a lot.’

  At that moment the pilot grabs his pole and leaps into the river, which seems a suicidal thing to do, until I see him stride off into the middle of the Niger with the water barely above his knees. He’s joined by others, until the whole river is full of men walking about. After much discussion they assemble at the back and push, but to no avail. The Pagou Manpagu is stuck fast.

  As darkness falls we’re all taken off in a small boat and put ashore on a wide sandy beach not far from the town of Konna. Kristin has had enough by now and decides to carry on by road. The rest of us make camp as best we can and settle down to another night under the stars. The good news is that we don’t have to sleep on board the Pagou Manpagu. The bad news is that after this positively Homeric journey we have advanced precisely thirty-four and a half miles towards Timbuktu.

  Day Forty-Nine

  ON THE NIGER

  Out of the tent just after six. We are in a very bleak spot, a flat coverless expanse of mud and sand with a cordon of local Bozos, or possibly Bobos, already gathered and regarding us with unemotional interest.

  Flat, coverless expanses present problems for the morning toilet. A nonchalant reconnaissance turns into a quarter of a mile hike, before I find anything resembling a dip in the ground.

  Back at the camp I find a bowl of warm water outside the tent and coffee, tea, bread and fruit laid out on a table. Our little knot of spectators - old women, children, a couple of lean and mean dogs and an old man with prayer beads - waits patiently. They are not trying to sell us anything, for they have nothing to sell. They’re waiting for anything we don’t want. Mineral water bottles and film cartons are popular. Nigel donates a pair of his shorts, which, after a day in the bowels of the Pagou Manpagu, look beyond redemption to me, but are eagerly accepted.

  Most of us are now convinced that the boat we were on yesterday was actually for carrying goods rather than people, which would account for the lack of most of the basics, including a deck.

  Our spirits are immeasurably lifted, therefore, by the news that the crew of the Pagou Manpagu are refusing to take their boat any higher up the river, and if we want to get to Timbuktu we shall have to make alternative plans. With a huge sigh of relief we transfer to a local pirogue. It’s 25 feet long, with a curved rattan canopy offering protection from the sun, and an upright rattan screen marked ‘WC’ offering privacy an
d a hole in the stern. The boat is lighter and much more agile than the pinasse and its shallow draught should see us safely over the sandbanks. And it has that rare and almost unimaginable luxury, seats.

  The surface of the river is a mill pond this morning. A stand of tamarind trees is reflected serenely in the water. A line of cows, silhouetted against the eastern horizon, and the occasional sight of low, wood-hulled barges under sail add to the cosy impression that this corner of the Niger could be a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape.

  As the day wears on, the alternation of trees, pasture and small fishing villages on one side of the river and exposed and featureless stretches of sand on the other becomes relentlessly monotonous. Occasionally, there will be something to divert the attention; the plunge of a kingfisher or a shiny orange-eyed hippo head breaking the surface, spluttering indignantly. ‘Dear Sir, I wish to complain in the strongest possible terms …’

  We put ashore every now and then at sad, impoverished little villages, where flies gather round the running noses of little children and their mothers’ eyes look blankly back at us.

  Then the river course widens out into a series of small lakes and there is nothing to see but water and sky. To keep moving is essential, not just to get us there, but also because it is the only way to alleviate the great heat of the day in this vast and shelterless landscape.

  Day Fify-One

  TIMBUKTU

  In 1806, Mungo Park, ten years after becoming the first white man to see the River Niger, was within a whisker of adding to his reputation by reaching the legendary, remote and fabulous city of Timbuktu.

  Unfortunately, the tranquil approach we’re making tonight is markedly different from the conditions in which he came here. Everything had gone wrong for Park on his second visit to Africa, and Sanche de Gramont, in The Strong Brown God, sums up his problem succinctly: ‘He was taking a makeshift boat pieced together from two rotten Bambara canoes down an uncharted river whose banks were occupied by Christian-hating Tuaregs and rapacious blacks.’