I liked Niamey for personal reasons: the police did not threaten me, and the whores left me alone when I asked them to, and I met a few educated Africans, and the trees shaded my eyes from the sun. Niamey gave me a rest from the desert. I enjoyed walking for days through its dusty streets, listening to the mixture of languages and to the music playing from a thousand tape decks. For tranquillity I walked north through the wealthy tree-lined district where diplomats and government ministers live in magnificent compounds behind mud walls with iron gates and Uzi-toting guards. When I grew thirsty, I would head back toward the center to gulp a cold Coke. I picked up a month-old copy of Newsweek, and read it hungrily. I made international phone calls by satellite. Airliners flew overhead directly to and from Europe. I whiled away hours at the museum, at the market, at a sidewalk café. Niamey is the only place in West Africa where strangers recognized me as an American: they walked up and said, “Hello.” Startled, I answered them in French. But their judgment impressed me.
The Westerners I saw were Europeans, mostly French and German technicians of the class that keeps Africa running. Known locally as “coopérants,” they lived with their families by the remnants of colonial privilege, which amounted now mostly to having a few servants.
Sunday evenings they gathered on the terrace of the Grand Hôtel for cocktails and dinner. There was a small playground for the children. The adults talked quietly, laughed a little, and watched life on the river. Niamey ended out beyond the water, and the sun descended over the last views of the open Sahel. The terrace waiters wore soiled white jackets and got the orders wrong. They might have tried harder if their customers had been the African elite. But the coopérants had no real power.
I talked to the Belgian representative for a diesel engine manufacturer. He was a stocky, middle-aged engineer with a wife somewhere in the crowd and a daughter at the university back home. We sat side-by-side at the edge of the terrace and watched the sun go down. He had been three years in Niger and Mali, and before that in Togo, and before that in Chad. His work now took him the length of the Niger River. His attitude was at once wry and suspicious. He judged the world as a technician.
“It’s impossible here,” he said. “There is no solution. These people are like children who are always given new toys. They get tired of them, throw them away, and wait for new ones.”
He seemed profoundly tired. Through half-closed eyes he watched an African in a ragged shirt who lay on his back on the riverbank below us. The African stretched his arms languidly and let them fall. “Impossible,” the Belgian repeated. He looked away. He thought again about his work. “Everything falls apart here. The Africans care nothing about maintenance. They don’t have the slightest concept. And then the spare parts! There is so much different equipment here that it would be impossible to keep all the parts in stock no matter how well organized you are. The inventory would have to be enormous.”
I decided he had been hearing complaints from his customers. He mentioned seeing a shipment of Russian goods in Benin that included a snowplow. His enduring sense of order interested me.
The terrace waiters lit oil lanterns. After dinner a few couples danced. I found myself again with the Belgian. He said he regretted ever coming to Africa. “But once you enter into it you get stuck. That’s where the new offers are, where the money is. It’s practically impossible for me to find work that’s not in Africa.”
His wife came to take him home. She was the trim, tanned, tennis-playing, cuckolding type. I had noticed others like her in Niamey. They drove company Land Cruisers with the ease of long experience, and shared the look of bored practicality that marked their withdrawal from Africa. A group came every morning to the walled-off hotel pool where they disrobed and rubbed lotion onto their brown breasts while the pool attendants looked studiously away. The women had fossilized. They talked incessantly, but had nothing to say. Restlessly, I headed by bus up the river road to Mali and the Sahara again.
24
A CITY
BUILT OF
MUD
BY AFRICAN STANDARDS, the bus trip upstream from Niamey to the ancient river port of Gao, in Mali, was neither slow nor difficult. We covered the 275 miles, including a border crossing, in a mere two days. The road stuck determinedly to the riverbank. It ran paved for the first morning, then turned into rutted track that slowed the overloaded old bus to a crawl. There was no music on this bus, just the unmuffled roar of an engine. The emergency windows flopped open and shut. Dirt danced on the floor.
We ground through fishing villages too sleepy to greet us, and through two larger market towns too busy to care. The country between seemed empty, motionless, nearly dead. It is said that these grasslands were once dangerous because of lions, and that more recently, during French colonial times, the telegraph line was cut regularly by galloping giraffes. The wildlife was exterminated not by drought, but by modern rifles. Nonetheless this may merely have been a matter of timing—of weapons getting to the animals before the dryness did.
We passed rapids in the river. The floodplain was in places shady and deep green. Crocodiles and hippopotami lurked in the water. The savanna undulated in yellow and gray to the horizons, and had a few trees, but dried as we drove north. In the afternoon we passed a few emaciated cows.
By the border with Mali, where we arrived at the end of the day, the trees were desert trees, and the soil was mostly bare gravel, a land good only for goats. The Malian border guards held the bus until dark, then prohibited it from driving on. They said they worried about a Tuareg attack, but the truth was they had found a prosperous market woman on the bus, and wanted to rob her. By the light of kerosene lanterns, they rifled through her stock of colorful cotton bolts and children’s clothing, found nothing of interest, and announced that she had to pay a heavy customs tax.
The market woman was fat, smart, and brash—one of the many such West African businesswomen who manage somehow to succeed amidst so much failure. She came from a village upriver from Gao, and twice a year made the arduous trip to Niamey by boat and bus to purchase her goods. She wanted no sympathy and got none: the passengers on the bus seemed to resent her, and some now took the side of the border guards. But the woman would not be intimidated. She pretended that she had never heard of such outrageous demands. She folded her arms over her ample chest and refused to pay.
The guards locked her goods into a hut, and seized all passports and identity papers. To me they muttered ominously about a spy they had captured the week before, a Dutchman with a camera. I did not worry. From the start their threats had the familiar feel of an old opera. I knew that the guards intended no real harm, and that the market woman was less stubborn than she pretended, and that the passengers were in no hurry to get to Gao anyway. It was all quite comfortable.
A village of adobe and corrugated metal had grown up beside the border post. I walked through it in darkness, chased off a dog, and found a two-room hut where a family served meals to the public. The hut was hot and stuffy, and dimly lit, and had a single plastic-covered table. The proprietor was an uncommunicative old man with a fez and a goatee. He sold me rice with a fish sauce, and a Coke, and rented me a woven sleeping mat. I took the mat outside, spread it in the dirt beyond a pile of construction rubble, and listened to snatches of music floating across the village above the rushing of the river. Mosquitoes whined. The sky was a bright desert sky, but the air smelled of water.
GAO IS THE downstream port for the riverboat that plies the Niger’s Saharan bend. It is an ancient trading center—like Timbuktu to its northwest, a place where the river highway meets a trans-Saharan track. At its height it was the capital of the Songhai empire, which during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries included an area twice the size of modern France. But that is by now a disconnected heritage, and Malians don’t bother to refer to it. One reason is that mud walls crumble and vanish, and if they are to endure, they require frequent rebuilding. As a result, they tend to reflect the immediate circumstances
of people’s lives. There are exceptions, of course—the Sahel’s fantastic mud mosques were maintained for centuries even as religion weakened, and Gao still has a Songhai royal tomb made of adobe. Nonetheless, in ordinary residential and commercial neighborhoods, mud walls force a brutal honesty on architectural expression. Gao today is poor and forgotten, and it looks that way. Archeologists travel there to dig for its greatness, and to remind an astonished world of Africa’s former competence. But the Songhai, who still live in Gao and along the Niger’s bend, are overwhelmed by the present, and reminded of a more immediate decline by the crumbling of their childhood homes. It seems impossible that conditions could get worse, but they do. The Songhai blame Bambara bureaucrats sent from Mali’s distant capital, Bamako, to rule over them. With greater justification they also blame the Tuaregs. The Tuaregs cannot win their uprising, but by closing the desert routes to Algeria and frightening tourists, they can strangle Gao. Their rebellion is still relatively new, but because Gao is built of dried mud, already Gao shows it.
Gao’s streets are built of dried mud, too, and are rutted and dusty and full of trash. Raw sewage cuts channels the length of them. Houses fall into them. The sun beats pitilessly on the people driven to walk about in them by hunger and unemployment. The people are Songhai, Tuareg, Bambara, Bozo, Peul, Dogon, and others. They mix within the town uneasily, creating a harsh little culture that is predominantly Muslim, but suspicious and uncharitable, not the culture of modern Mali, or of any one group, but something unique to Gao, where even the marketplace is poor.
I waited in Gao for the riverboat, which was due to arrive whenever it arrived. I bought a ticket and reserved a berth. The ticket agent was an important fellow. He told me that the boat had left the river port of Mopti, 500 miles upstream, and later had passed by Timbuktu—that much was officially known. The problem with the downstream run was that when the boat ran aground, as inevitably it did, the river’s current held it fast, and the crew had to kedge it off the shoals—a procedure that took hours or days. The Niger’s water level depends not on the local weather but on the seasonal rains at its sources in the faraway tropical highlands. The dry season had come to the highlands, and the river’s water level was dropping fast. The ticket agent told me I was lucky, because the next run upriver from Gao to Mopti might be the last for many months. He predicted that the trip would take five days or longer.
I walked while I waited, wandering throughout the town and out into the butte-studded desert beyond. At night I drank beer in a pleasant outdoor bar. One afternoon I took a pinasse across the Niger to the red dune that rises 300 feet above the river upstream from Gao. The boatman was a dignified gray-haired man with a beard. His pinasse was forty feet long, and was driven by an outboard motor. It carried about twenty people heading home from the market to a string of villages that lay inland from the river, across the dune. They eyed me with frank curiosity. I mentioned that I was waiting for the riverboat, which was not unusual, but which did not explain to them why a white man would travel here alone.
At the base of the dune they began unloading their bulky purchases of local rice and sorghum and American wheat. The boatman promised he would wait for me. I scrambled up the dune and walked along the crest to its summit, where I stood breathing heavily, looking down over the pinasse, the great muddy river, and in the distance the town of Gao, which was faint with dust and smoke and the color of the desert.
Carrying parcels on their heads, the villagers climbed the dune more slowly than I. They crossed the crest in a steady column, trudged down the far side, and made their way across a shimmering sand sheet toward their mud-walled houses beyond.
When I got back to the pinasse, the boatman said in French, “It’s very touristique here.”
He meant, at the dune. We pushed away from the riverbank as the sun was just going down. A breeze ruffled the river’s surface, raising little brown waves across which the pirogue slapped. Birds flitted overhead. A hippopotamus swam languidly along the shore. A fish jumped. Our outboard motor purred.
The boatman spoke from the depths of his experience. “The Niger River is so beautiful. You will enjoy your long trip up the river.”
How could I not agree?
He added, “We would be lucky, all of us, also to be leaving Gao.”
When I drank from a bottle of purified water, then offered it to him, he refused and proudly said, “Here we drink the river water.”
But the river at Gao is a sewer.
At the hotel, the Atlantide, water was brought to the washrooms by the bucket, for bathing. My room was an airless hole with torn mosquito netting over the bed. Every evening an employee with a flit gun helpfully sprayed the room with pesticide. It must have worked, since I never saw a mosquito. He also sprayed the hotel dining room while people ate, which helped to distract the customers from their food.
In the lobby I met a German anthropologist, a specialist on life in a certain river village, who acted surprised to find an American in Gao. He was taller than I, and had a beard, and stood close to me to talk. His English was laced with the exaggerated nasal intonations of a consciously Americanized accent. He was upset about a simulated African river trip he had taken at Disneyland. “The natives run like monkeys from wild animals! They attack the boat with spears! They are chased off by a single shot! It’s incredible!”
I said, “I’ve never been there.”
He was angry with me anyway. “Oh come on, everyone knows that the United States is a racist country.”
I agreed, and indelicately brought up Germany’s reputation. I might have brought up Mali’s, too. One day the town grew excited because an army patrol had skirmished somewhere in the desert with a band of rebels. The mood in the streets turned festive and maybe dangerous, apparently in sympathy with one side or the other, but actually in grateful release from the tedium of slow decay. For a few hours after the fight, the police roared around looking for Tuaregs to arrest. I don’t know if they found them, but I was pleased that during my stay in Gao they executed none publicly.
25
THE
DESERT
NATION
THESE FIGHTS WILL not end. A new Tuareg nation would be like an inversion of Mali, Niger, or Chad—one in which the light-skinned northerners would gain the upper hand and the blacks would rebel to save themselves. The evidence exists already in Mauritania, the nation of Moors that lies north of the Senegal River, and extends from the Sahara’s Atlantic coast deep into the desert. The Moors are not Tuaregs, but they are Berber nomads, and the Tuaregs’ closest cousins. Their nation is wretched and poor. It has few roads, schools, or hospitals. Malnutrition and disease are endemic, and in bad years there is famine. Politics are driven by fear and racial division. The military rules repressively. The towns are in disarray. For all this you can blame the deepening desert.
I once flew to Nouakchott, the capital city, which is hemmed in by enmities to Mauritania’s north and south, and is accessible virtually only by air. The flight, from Casablanca, left me unprepared. I sat comfortably in the airplane watching the sun set against the ocean horizon, drinking strong black coffee. A fog bank lay offshore. To the east, the Sahara stretched in graceful plains. I sampled a pastry. I wiped my hands with perfumed tow-elettes. Then we were on final approach over a coastal desert of sand and gravel. Shacks passed under the wing. We landed, and disembarked by a ramshackle terminal. The dusk was thick with heat, dirt, and humidity. Within minutes my shirt was soaked through.
With some regret, I watched my airplane depart. The remaining daylight seemed gray, and I did not like the looks of the soldiers who loitered on the ramp, eyeing the passengers. I stood in the crowd, fighting mosquitoes and flies. Ahead, the police were carefully checking identities, and bodily searching the men. I wondered what they hoped to find.
The other passengers were fine-featured Moors, returning from the hadj pilgrimage to Mecca. They spoke the Arabic dialect known as Hassaniya. The men wore white Saharan robes;
the women wore full dresses with colorful scarves, and like the Tuaregs did not veil their faces. Though many of the passengers undoubtedly spoke French, none would talk to me. They were reluctant to be seen with a foreigner.
Mauritania was given life by the French in 1960 as a desert nation to be ruled by desert nomads, and that is exactly what it became. Mauritanian society is among the most closed and hierarchical in the world. Below the ruling castes of Moors stands a Haratin class of slaves and ex-slaves, known as Black Moors. Slavery was officially banned in 1980, but in practice it continues today. The reason is that free people die of starvation in Mauritania, and for practical reasons slaves may prefer their servitude. And Haratins in any case do not occupy the lowest level of Mauritanian society. That level is made up of cultivators and herders from the extreme south—black Africans with tribal ties to Senegal and Mali, who have never assimilated into the desert society. They inhabit a narrow strip of savanna and the farmland along the Senegal River, and constitute fully half the population. These people of the savanna are a problem for the ruling Moors, who despise and fear them, and worry that they will rebel. The Moors would like to reduce their numbers. They call their country an Islamic republic—a typical play on words, but one with relevance to the nation. The severe Islamic legal code called the sharia was instituted in 1980. In Mauritania, it now amounts to martial law.
In April 1989 riots broke out for three days, during which 400 of these “foreign” blacks were hunted down and slaughtered. Afterward, Mauritania expelled as many as 170,000 of them, calling them Senegalese. Senegal responded in kind, expelling Moorish shopkeepers. The two nations settled into the state of near-war that exists today. In Mauritania, the persecution continues. Along the Senegal River, the army keeps driving farmers from their land. There are rumors of killings. In the name of national security, the area is closed to outsiders.
Sahara Unveiled Page 21
