One of them spoke now in Songhoi, the lingua franca of the vicinity. Shamelessly he spoke to them, although none were his women, nor even his tribal kin. None looked at him.
“We seek a single woman, an unwed woman, who would work for pay and learn the new ways.”
They continued their laundry, not looking up, but their chatter dribbled away.
“She must drop the veil,” the man continued clearly, “and give up the haik and wear the new clothes. But she will be well paid, and taught to read and be kept in the best of comfort and health.”
There was a low gasp from several of the younger women, but one of the eldest looked up in distaste. “Wear the clothes of the Rouma!” she said indignantly. “Shameless ones!”
The man’s voice was testy. He himself was dressed in the clothing worn always by the Rouma, when the Rouma had controlled the Niger bend. He said, “These are not the clothes of the Rouma, but the clothes of civilized people everywhere.”
The women’s attention went back to their washing. Two or three of them giggled.
The elderly woman said, “There are none here who will go with you, for whatever shameless purpose you have in your mind.”
But Izubahil, the strange girl come out of the desert from the north, spoke suddenly. “I will,” she said.
There was a gasp, and all looked at her in wide-eyed alarm. She began making her way to the shore, her unfinished washing still in hand.
The stranger said clearly, “And drop the veil, discard the haik for the new clothing, and attend the schools?”
There was another gasp as Izubahil said definitely, “Yes, all these things.” She looked back at the women. “So that I may learn all these new ways.”
The more elderly sniffed and turned their backs in scorn, but the younger stared after her in some amazement and until she disappeared with the two strangers into one of the buildings which had formerly housed the French Administration officers back in the days when the area was known as the French Sudan.
Inside, the boy strangers turned to her and the one who had spoken at the river bank said in English, “How goes it?”
“Heavens to Betsy,” Isobel Cunningham said with a grin, “get me a drink. If I’d known majoring in anthropology was going to wind up with my doing a strip tease with a bunch of natives in the Niger River, I would have taken up Home Economics, like my dear old mother wanted!”
They laughed with her and Jacob Armstrong, the older of the two, went over to a sideboard and mixed her a cognac and soda. “Ice?” he said.
“Brother, you said it,” she told him. “Where can I change out of these rags?”
“On you they look good,” Clifford Jackson told her. He looked surprisingly like the Joe Louis of several decades earlier.
“That’s enough out of you, wise guy,” Isobel told him. “Why doesn’t somebody dream up a role for me where I can be a rich paramount chief’s favorite wife, or something? Be loaded down with gold and jewelry, that sort of thing.”
Jake brought her the drink. “Your clothes are in there,” he told her, motioning with his head to an inner room. “It wouldn’t do the job,” he added. “What we’re giving them is the old Cinderella story.” He looked at his watch. “If we get under way, we can take the jet to Kabara and go into your act there. It’s been nearly six months since Kabara and they’ll be all set for the second act.”
She knocked back the brandy and made her way to the other room, saying over her shoulder, “Be with you in a minute.”
“Not that much of a hurry,” Cliff called. “Take your time, gal, there’s a bath in there. You’ll probably want one after a week of living the way you’ve been.”
“Brother!” she agreed.
Jake was making himself a drink. He said easily to Cliff Jackson, “That’s a fine girl. I’d hate her job. We get the easy deal on this assignment.”
Cliff said, “You said it, Nigger. How about mixing me a drink, too?”
“Nigger!” Jake said in mock indignation. “Look who’s talking.” His voice took on a burlesque of a Southern drawl. “Man when the Good Lawd was handin’ out cullahs, you musta thought he said umbrellahs, and said give me a nice black one.”
Cliff laughed with him and said, “Where do we plant poor Isobel next?”
Jake thought about it. “I don’t know. The kid’s been putting in a lot of time. I think after about a week in Kabara we ought to go on down to Dakar and suggest she be given another assignment for a while. Some of the girls, working out of our AFAA office don’t do anything except drive around in recent model cars, showing off the advantages of emancipation, tossing money around like tourists, and living it up in general.”
* * * *
On the flight up-river to Kabara, Isobel Cunningham went through the notes she’d taken on that town. It was also on the Niger, and the assignment had been almost identical to the Gao one. In fact, she’d gone through the same routine in Ségou, Ké-Macina, Mopti, Gôundam and Bourem, above Gao, and Ansongo, Tillabéri and Niamey below. She was stretching her luck, if you asked her. Sooner or later she was going to run into someone who knew her from a past performance.
Well, let the future take care of the future. She looked over at Cliff Jackson who was piloting the jet and said, “What’re the latest developments? Obviously, I haven’t seen a paper or heard a broadcast for over a week.”
Cliff shrugged his huge shoulders. “Not much. More trouble with the Portuguese down in the south.”
Jake rumbled, “There’s going to be a bloodbath there before it’s over.”
Isobel said thoughtfully, “There’s been some hope that fundamental changes might take place in Lisbon.”
Jake grunted his skepticism. “In that case the bloodbath would take place there instead of in Africa.” He added, “Which is all right with me.”
“What else?” Isobel said.
“Continued complications in the Congo.”
“That’s hardly news.”
“But things are going like clockwork in the west. Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika.” Cliff took his right hand away from the controls long enough to make a circle with its thumb and index finger. “Like clockwork. Fifty new fellows from the University of Chicago came in last week to help with the rural education development and twenty or so men from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore have wrangled a special grant for a new medical school.”
“All…Negroes?”
“What else?”
Jake said suddenly, “Tell her about the Cubans.”
Isobel frowned. “Cubans?”
“Over in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan area. They were supposedly helping introduce modern sugar refining methods—”
“Why supposedly?”
“Why not?”
“All right, go on,” Isobel said.
Cliff Jackson said slowly, “Somebody shot them up. Killed several, wounded most of the others.”
The girl’s eyes went round. “Who…and why?”
The pilot shifted his heavy shoulders again.
Jake said, “Nobody seems to know, but the weapons were modern. Plenty modern.” He twisted in his bucket seat, uncomfortably. “Listen, have you heard anything about some character named El Hassan?”
Isobel turned to face him. “Why, yes. The people there in Gao mentioned him. Who is he?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Jake said. “What did they say?”
“Oh, mostly supposed words of wisdom that El Hassan was alleged to have made with. I get it that he’s some, well you wouldn’t call him a nationalist since he’s international in his appeal, but he’s evidently preaching union of all Africans. I get an undercurrent of anti-Europeanism in general, but not overdone.” Isobel’s expressive face went thoughtful. “As a matter of fact, his program seems to coincide largely with our own, so much so that from time to time when I had occasion to drop a few words of propaganda into a conversation, I’d sometimes credit it to him.”
Cliff looked over at her and chuckled. “That�
��s a coincidence,” he said. “I’ve been doing the same thing. An idea often carries more weight with these people if it’s attributed to somebody with a reputation.”
Jake, the older of the three said: “Well, I can’t find out anything about him. Nobody seems to know if he’s an Egyptian, a Nigerian, a MOR…or an Eskimo, for that matter.”
“Did you check with headquarters?”
“So far they have nothing on him, except for some other inquiries from field workers.”
Below them, the river was widening out to the point where it resembled swampland more than a waterway. There were large numbers of waterbirds, and occasional herds of hippopotami. Isobel didn’t express her thoughts, but a moment of doubt hit her. What would all this be like when the dams were finished, the waters of this third largest of Africa’s rivers, ninth largest of the world’s, under control?
She pointed. “There’s Kabara.” The age-old river port lay below them. Cliff slapped one of his controls with the heel of his hand and the craft began to sink earthward.
* * * *
They took up quarters in the new hotel which adjoined the new elementary school, and Isobel immediately went into her routine.
Dressed and shod immaculately, her head held high in confidence, she spent considerable time mingling with the more backward of the natives and especially the women. Six months ago, she had given a performance similar to that she had just finished in Gao, several hundred miles down river.
Now she renewed old acquaintances, calling them by name—after checking her notes. Invariably, their eyes bugged. Their questions came thick, came fast in the slurring Songhoi and she answered them in detail. They came quickly under her intellectual domination. Her poise, her obvious well being, flabbergasted them.
In all, they spent a week in the little river town, but even the first night Isobel slumped wearily in the most comfortable chair of their small suite’s living room.
She kicked off her shoes, and wiggled weary toes.
“If my mother could see me now,” she complained. “After giving her all to get the apple of her eye through school, her wayward daughter winds up living with two men in the wilds of deepest Africa.” She twisted her mouth puckishly.
Cliff grunted, poking around in a bag for the bottle of cognac he couldn’t remember where he had packed. “Huh!” he said. “The next time you write her you might mention the fact that both of them are continually proposing to you and you brush it all off as a big joke.”
“Huh, indeed!” Isobel answered him. “Proposing, or propositioning? If either of you two Romeos ever rattle the doorknob of my room at night again, you’re apt to get a bullet through it.”
Jake winced. “Wasn’t me. Look at my gray hair, Isobel. I’m old enough to be your daddy.”
“Sugar daddy, I suppose,” she said mockingly.
“Wasn’t me either,” Cliff said, criss-crossing his heart and pointing upward.
“Huh!” said Isobel again, but she was really in no mood for their usual banter. “Listen,” she said, “what’re we accomplishing with all this masquerade?”
Cliff had found the French brandy. He poured three stiff ones and handed drinks to Isobel and Jake.
He knew he wasn’t telling her anything, but he said, “We’re a king-size rumor campaign, that’s what we are. We’re breaking down institutions the sneaky way.” He added reflectively. “A kinder way, though, than some.”
“But this…what did you call it earlier, Jake?… this Cinderella act I go through perpetually. What good does it do, really? I contact only a few hundreds of people at most. And there are millions here in Mali alone.”
“There are other teams, too,” Jake said mildly. “Several hundreds of us doing one thing or another.”
“A drop in the bucket,” Isobel said, her piquant sepian face registering weariness.
Cliff sipped his brandy, shaking his big head even as he did so. “No,” he said. “It’s a king-size rumor campaign and it’s amazing how effective they can be. Remember the original dirty-rumor campaigns back in the States? Suppose two laundry firms were competing. One of them, with a manager on the conscience-less side, would hire two or three professional rumor spreaders. They’d go around dropping into bars, barber shops, pool rooms. Sooner or later, they’d get a chance to drop some line such asdid you hear about them discovering that two lepers worked at the Royal Laundry? You can imagine the barbers, the bartenders, and such professional gossips, passing on the good word.”
Isobel laughed, but unhappily. “I don’t recognize myself in the description.”
Cliff said earnestly, “Sure, only few score women in each town you put on your act, really witness the whole thing. But think how they pass it on. Each one of them tells the story of the miracle. A waif comes out of the desert. Without property, without a husband or family, without kinsfolk. Shy, dirty, unwanted. Then she’s offered a good position if she’ll drop the veil, discard the haik, and attend the new schools. So off she goes—everyone thinking to her disaster. Hocus-pocus, six months later she returns, obviously prosperous, obviously healthy, obviously well adjusted. Fine. The story spreads for miles around. Nothing is so popular as the Cinderella story, and that’s the story you’re putting over. It’s a natural.”
“I hope so,” Isobel said. “Sometimes I think I’m helping put over a gigantic hoax on these people. Promising something that won’t be delivered.”
Jake looked at her unhappily. “I’ve thought the same thing, sometimes, but what are you going to be with people at this stage of development—subtle?”
Isobel dropped it. She held out her glass for more cognac. “I hope there’s something decent to eat in this place. Do you realize what I’ve been putting into my tummy this past week?”
Cliff shuddered.
Isobel patted her abdomen. “At least it keeps my figure in trim.”
“Um-m-m,” Jake pretended to leer heavily.
Isobel chuckled at him in a return to good humor. “Hyena,” she accused.
“Hyena?” Jake said.
“Sure, there aren’t any wolves in these parts,” she explained. “How long are we going to be here?”
The two men looked at each other. Cliff said, “Well, we’d like to finish out the week. Guy named Homer Crawford has been passing around the word to hold a meeting in Timbuktu the end of this week.”
“Crawford?”
“Homer Crawford, some kind of sociologist from the University of Michigan, I understand. He’s connected with the Reunited Nations African Development Project, heads one of their cloak and dagger teams.”
Jake grunted. “Sociologist? I also understand that he put in a hitch with the Marines and spent kind of a shady period of two years fighting with the FLN in Algeria.”
“On what side?” Cliff said interestedly.
“Darn if I know.”
Isobel said, “Well, we have nothing to do with the Reunited Nations.”
Cliff shook his large head negatively. “Of course not, but Crawford seems to think it’d be a good idea if some of us in the field would get together and…well, have sort of a bull session.”
Jake growled, “We don’t have much in the way of co-operation on the higher levels. Everybody seems to head out in all directions on their own. It can get chaotic. Maybe in the field we could give each other a few pointers. For one, I’d like to find out if any of the rest of these jokers know anything about that affair with the Cubans over in the Sudan.”
“I suppose it can’t hurt,” Isobel admitted. “In fact, it might be fun swapping experiences with some of these characters. Frankly, though, the stories I’ve heard about the African Development teams aren’t any too palatable. They seem to be a ruthless bunch.”
Jake looked down into his glass. “It’s a ruthless country,” he murmured.
* * * *
Dolo Anah, as he approached the ten Dogon villages of the Canton de Sangha, was first thought to be a small bird in the sky. As he drew nearer, it was dec
ided, instead, that he was a larger creature of the air, perhaps a vulture, though who had ever seen such a vulture? As he drew nearer still, it was plain that in size he was more nearly an ostrich than vulture, but who had ever heard of a flying ostrich, and besides—
No! It was a man! But who in all the Dogon had ever witnessed such a juju man? One whose flailing limbs enabled him to fly!
The ten villages of the Dogon are perched on the rim of the Falaise de Bandiagara. The cliffs are over three hundred feet high and the villages are similar to Mesa Verde of Colorado, and as unaccessible, as impregnable to attack.
But hardly impregnable to arrival by helio-hopper.
When Dolo Anah landed in the tiny square of the village of Irèli, the first instinct of Amadijuè the village witchman was to send post haste to summon the Kanaga dancers, but then despair overwhelmed him. Against powers such as this, what could prevail? Besides, Amadijuè had not arrived at his position of influence and affluence through other than his own true abilities. Secretly, he rather doubted the efficacy of even the supposedly most potent witchcraft.
But this!
Dolo Anah unstrapped himself from the one man helio-hopper’s small bicyclelike seat, folded the two rotors back over the rest of the craft, and then deposited the seventy-five pound vehicle in a corner, between two adobe houses. He knew perfectly well that the local inhabitants would die a thousand deaths of torture rather than approach, not to speak of touching it.
Looking to neither right nor left, walking arrogantly and carrying only a small bag—undoubtedly housing his gris gris, as Amadijuè could well imagine—Dolo Anah headed for the largest house. Since the whole village was packed, bug-eyed, into the square watching him there were no inhabitants within.
He snapped back over his shoulder, “Summon all the headmen of all the villages, and all of their eldest sons; summon all the Hogons and all the witchmen. Immediately! I would speak with them and issue orders.”
The Mack Reynolds Megapack Page 57
